KXEL Presents: The Jacobsen Group Podcast – April 18, 2026

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Good morning on the Jacobson Group here on KXEL, 1540, 100.5 FM.

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Economics is the study of human choice in the world we live.

Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

By investigating faith in economics, we can learn how they lead to human flourishing.

This is the Faith in Economics podcast.

a presentation of the Gordney Institute at Ottawa University.

Welcome to our show today.

My name is Peter Jacobson.

I'm the Gordney Professor of Economic Education and Research.

Joining us today, we have Dr. Russ Nicola, the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics, and the founder of the Gordney Institute.

And he's going to introduce our special guest.

All right.

So we're excited today to have Dr. Andy Hazuka.

He is with this place called Ottawa University.

So Andy is the Professor of English and Chair of the Humanities Department.

He's a scholar of 18th century British literature, regularly teaches interdisciplinary classes, courses on Ireland and Scotland, Irish literature, Scottish literature.

He's traveled there with students many times, written over a dozen articles on topics like William Wordsworth, Nelson, I'm going to butcher these.

1977 L-Train Crash and Poetry of former Kansas City Royals pitcher Dan Quisenberry.

So, Andy, welcome to the show and we wanted to talk baseball, I think was the topic.

Well, that's one of my favorite topics.

All right.

So fire away, and I'm happy to talk.

So yeah, so Andy has been hosting this baseball and literature conference now.

How long has it been at Ottawa now?

It's been here nine years.

Nine years.

Next year will be year number 10.

Great.

Great.

And so, oh, at some point, it's baseball and literature.

And so it was really unique to me, but it's kind of fun.

I'm not a huge baseball fan, as Andy knows.

But it brings people from all over the nation, and he brings some awesome

guest speakers in and so I twisted his arm said oh what about economics and baseball and he kind of cringed a little bit but he was grateful to throw something together because I have some friends that are have written economics articles so anyway they've come off and on and it's just a really nice event so so any I think maybe start with baseball literature like why you know what what was kind of the um genesis of this

The genesis of the conference was there was a guy who taught English, mostly writing courses.

He was a composition specialist at Indiana State University 30 years ago.

His name was Pete Carino.

And he had gone to the Cooperstown Symposium, which is held in Cooperstown Hall of Fame, New York, where scholars of baseball came every year.

And he realized there wasn't such an event in the Midwest.

So he decided to pitch it to his president at Indiana State.

And the president was a baseball fan and was excited about it.

He said, yeah, let's host this thing.

And so it started out at Terre Haute, Indiana.

And I happened to get a flyer in the mail in the English department where I was teaching.

And I thought, this is right up my alley.

So I'm heading that way.

At the time, I was teaching a novel by Nelson Algren, a Chicago writer.

And he mentions the White Sox.

And I had an idea percolating in my head.

And so I went to that conference in India State.

And then I just went just about every year after that because I

I enjoyed myself so much.

So at some point, it migrated to, after 10 years there, I went to Middle Tennessee State University because Pete was exhausted for doing it for 10 years, kind of like I am now.

They ran it for 10 years and they felt like they had expanded it and done all they could.

You know, the national area offered some opportunities that Tarahoe didn't, but they had sort of tapped it out.

So they approached me at the end of their run and said,

Do you think Ottawa University will be interested in hosting this?

I said, let me talk to our president.

It was a time with Kevin Eichner.

And he was enthusiastic.

The new student center had just been built.

Shendel Conference Center was up.

It's just about ready to open when I talked to Kevin about it.

And he said, next year, this will be the perfect venue.

And so we did it then.

He asked me what the budget was.

I said, I think we can do this for $2,500.

He said, we'll do it.

The budget has grown a bit since then.

Who was your favorite guest that you brought?

I have a couple favorite guests.

One of them was the luncheon speaker this year, who I thought was incredibly nuanced and introspective and intelligent.

I love the way he interacted with the students who were there.

You know, he was a pleasant surprise.

I didn't know too much about him when I booked him all into those that he had played in Japan.

I saw one interview he did over a Zoom interview.

It was on YouTube.

And I thought he seemed pretty articulate, but he surpassed all expectations on my part.

The other favorite speaker I have.

And that was

Tuffy Rhodes.

Tuffy Rhodes.

Carl Tuffy Rhodes, who played.

He had an undistinguished MLB career.

He played six years in Major League Baseball.

Then he went to Japan.

He's played another 13.

where he just dominated and he was one of the best uh the best hitters in Japan for those 13 years.

Yeah and it was neat how he learned how to play there as he as he said and so the Japanese uh regiment for practicing is completely different than the Americans and he went on to say like uh the 200 balls uh pitching to yourself hitting 200 balls

and then go get the 200 balls and hit them back the other direction.

I mean, it was just, that's kind of insane.

But he really felt like he needed that discipline and grew up a lot there.

So yeah, the learning about Japanese baseball, I learned a lot from that.

That was neat.

The way he described it, Japanese baseball is a nine to five job in the off season.

When they're not playing games, they get to the ballpark at nine and they don't leave till five and they're practicing all day long.

And he said, you know, here in the States, they're out golfing after lunch.

you know, practice a little bit in the morning.

Right.

Yeah, and I had no idea that Japanese baseball had been around the time that it had.

It was

turn of the

century, wasn't it?

Turn of the century, yeah.

Early 1900s.

Early 1900s.

I didn't know.

I knew it got popular when Babe Ruth, you know, in the 30s and 40s, it's most of the 40s, we sent a team of all stars to Japan and Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig around that team.

And I knew that had happened, but you're right.

I didn't know that a couple of decades prior to that.

Facebook was the most popular sport in Japan.

So tell us about your favorite team.

My favorite team, well, I grew up on the Northwest suburbs of Chicago.

And so most of us in that area were Cub fans.

And I was certainly, and I think they had a lot to do with WGN, the Super Station, broadcasting the games every day.

And the games were played during the day.

So I would run home from school and catch the last few innings of the Cubs game to start at one o'clock.

And that was always a thrill to just see what had happened that day and catch the final innings.

They were never very good back in those days.

Well, in 1969, they had a good run and they blew it and the Miracle Mets won.

But they were in first place going into, I think, even September that year.

But then there was a long dry spell for decades.

What's the parameters?

It kind of blew me away with what baseball and literature are like, what are we writing about?

So can you explain to the listeners what people are presenting, what they do, and how it connects to baseball?

Sure.

First of all, there's one word missing.

in the title that you said, it's the conference is called Baseball in Literature and Culture.

But I would say that most of the presentations are on the culture side, not the literature side, and historically they have been to every conference program that I've been involved in.

So we've had people, for instance, I remember the first year we did it, there was a graduate student at the University of Iowa who was in

I mean, it was a cultural studies program, but she was really interested in music.

She gave a fascinating talk on the history of music associated with baseball.

So she unearthed these songs that were composed in the 19th century that were sung at the ballpark.

And one of them was Kill the Empire.

Really?

Yeah.

And so the fans would get rowdy and they would sing these songs.

It kind of reminded me of what Tuffy Rhodes said about the Japanese style of baseball.

so they would sing these songs and they would sometimes encourage their team or to razz the opposing team or to razz the empire.

So that's just one example of cultural studies.

There's a lot of people who've done histories, even non-historians who just find some obscure player who had something interesting about him or someone who

you wouldn't think Play Baseball, but did Play Baseball.

It was famous in some other way.

And then they kind of talk about that angle.

So it really spans the gamut in terms of cultural studies.

And I think that's what's the appeal, because it draws in people from different disciplines and independent scholars who aren't associated with a university.

So this was one of the questions I've had over the years.

It seems like and

Part of what I'm asking is like, is this just I'm experiencing an outsider phenomena or maybe I'm on something?

It seems like more than any other athletic events, baseball has a lot of literature about it.

So every year you're bringing in people who are presenting on the different books they're writing about baseball, whether it's someone who opens, you know, a wax pack of cars and tries to track down everybody and do interviews with them.

or they're writing about their own life and how baseball is a part of it, playing catch with their son, stuff like that.

It seems like there's a lot of literature about baseball.

And to me, again, I'm not really a sports literature person, but from the outside, it seems like baseball more so than most other sports.

and maybe any other sports really.

And so one question I have is, do you think my instinct is right there that that's true?

And then the second question, the more interesting question is, why do you think that is?

What makes baseball such a good media to write about or not media?

A good backdrop for writing?

First of all, your intuitive sense is correct.

That is the case because I teach courses in baseball lit and in sports lit.

And there's a lot more baseball lit.

associated with any other literature, then literature associated with any other sport.

Sure.

Now, the answer to the question is, why is that the case?

And the best I can come up with is, because I thought about this a lot, I think there's quality to baseball that's, it is qualitatively different than other sports in America.

Football, for example, is a fast-paced,

power game.

Baseball, there are no time parameters.

So, you know, soccer, it's over after 90 minutes in football.

It's over after the fourth quarter is over.

But I think there's, there's, when you're at a baseball game, ideally, at least in the old days before you had all the distractions of the scoreboard stuff happening there, there's a contemplative quality to baseball.

And you have this beautiful green field, it's slow paced, and there's time to muse, there's time to have a conversation with the person sitting next to you.

It's not, you know, you don't have to be riveted all the time because the game is not happening that fast.

You know, the only time something happens when the batter hits the ball in play, and then you can concentrate.

But for all that, and then the vast majority of time, a batter is not batting a ball in play.

So there's this downtime, if you want to call it that, or...

I just think it's contemplative.

And it's also very pastoral.

The baseball stadiums seem to be, Sherry Wood talked about this in his paper, this last conference about the agrarian myth in baseball.

A lot of people have written about that, that it kind of harkens back to the American agrarian myth that we have this sort of manifest destiny, right?

An endless amount of beautiful pastoral land.

And let's

Let's inhabit that land and let's let's enjoy it.

So I think I think there's that quality to baseball that maybe is missing in some other sports.

What's interesting is those qualities, as you were talking, also seem like something that's present with golf.

But of course, with golf, you've got, I think, two differentiating aspects.

One is at least for the majority of its history, it was pretty inaccessible sport, right?

It's not like the every man sport.

It's very explicitly the opposite, really.

And then there's no team aspect, either, or at least, you know, typical golf.

There's no team aspect.

So yeah, it seems like baseball threads that need

perfectly of contemplation, accessibility, but then also like community or something like that.

Right.

And in the early days, in the early 1900s, a lot of baseball players were recent immigrants or funds of recent immigrants.

And so there was that dimension too.

It was that kind of was the promise of America being realized by blue collar laborers who come over here, you know.

So with the when you brought up the

clock, the timing thing, the pitch clock came to mind.

I thought I wanted your opinion.

I've asked you in the past, but now that you've seen it in play now for has it been just two years or something?

Yeah, I think this is a second.

So what are your thoughts on that?

Is that taking away from some of the what you enjoyed before and some of the things you're commenting on or because it really is kind of making the game.

more about the game, I guess, right, or to get people engaged with the game.

Right.

So the pitch clock, I think, is emblematic of our culture at large.

I mean, we've noticed this in educational circles that our students don't have the same attention span they used to have.

Yeah.

And so if you can't sit through a three-hour game, the idea is, well, maybe you can sit through a two-hour game.

I'm not fundamentally opposed to the pitch clock, but I'm opposed to the intrusion, the continual intrusion of technology into a game that doesn't really need the technology.

And I think this latest thing where batters and catchers can appeal a ball and strike call, is we don't expect batters and fielders to be completely errorless, to never make an error the entire season.

Why should we expect umpires to be perfect?

Umpires make mistakes.

And I think that's part of the game.

I mean, the Royals, when they won the World Series in 2015, I had read an article in Sports Illustrated about how well they scouted, not just their opponents, but the umpires.

So they knew every umpire's tendency to game before.

And if they knew that an umpire was calling low and outside pitches, they were ready to swing at those low and outside pitches.

And that's part of the game.

That's part of the strategy that good teams use.

And I just think it's ridiculous.

I mean, if you're going to be able to challenge a call like a ball and a strike, pretty soon it's going to be not just

twice per game, but five times per game, 10 times.

And then you might as well just replace the umpires.

I don't have umpires.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think a similar

thing that I've just recently been made aware of is things like the walk-up music that patrons are sometimes getting now, where it's like the lights are flashing and the corn is playing in the background.

I saw it and I thought, well, that looks kind of interesting, kind of cool.

But then I thought to myself, but it doesn't really look like baseball at all.

And it's kind of a hard needle to thread because you want

Baseball to survive in the current culture, right?

You don't want it to fall into obscurity But at the same time, I think the the cultural desires right now are maybe like suboptimal For what like an event should be because of stuff like the attention span stuff like I would prefer

that we not need like a mini concert every time a new picture takes them out, actually.

But at the same time, if that's what we need for baseball to continue to exist, I mean, it's tricky.

I don't know.

Do you see more thoughts in your end?

Or are you less bothered by the walkup music?

No, I feel the way you do.

I think the pressures of modernity are changing the sport.

And I'm basically a conservative when it comes to baseball.

I would rather have...

played it in the 19th century in 2026.

If I were a professional player, because you wouldn't have all these distractions, you wouldn't have the stuff that is extraneous to the game.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, that looks like a good spot for a break.

When we come back on, I think about AI umpires a little bit more.

And also the differences with the Japanese ball, I think with the fans and the cheering, like Peter was just bringing on, we learned some interesting things there as well.

So we'll be back in just a bit.

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If you're a professor or an advisor of college students and you're interested in your school competing in PPE League this spring, contact Peter, Justin, or Russ today.

By 2030, the Gorton Institute will be known for its alumni, supporters, and participants who incorporate economic understanding with their faith in their careers, vocations, communities, and personal lives.

We have some great programming going on for high school students.

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Okay, so we're back and Andy, you wanted to bring up some more things with Japan and baseball?

Yeah, it struck me as Carl Tuffy Rhodes, our luncheon speaker, was talking about his experiences playing baseball in Japan, that Joe Posnanski had noted something similar about the world baseball classic, in particular how the American players, the American team,

seemed to lack joy compared to the rest of the teams.

You know, the Italians with their doing shots of espresso in the dugouts.

The team from the Dominican Republic in Puerto Rico and Venezuela, they were celebrating their own ways.

They had different ways to sell, but they were having fun.

They were smiling.

They were joking.

They were talking to their opponents.

We, our team, some of our American players refused to talk to the opponents.

We didn't shake their hands.

And it's like, this is our job.

You know, our goal is to, we're here to win it.

We're not here to fraternize.

And they weren't having any fun.

And Joe Pasniewski said, you know, it was, it struck him that they weren't having any fun.

Then some reporter asked Aaron Judge, were you having any fun out there?

He goes, well, we were having fun in our own particular way.

But what Tuffy Rhodes talked about, you know, we saw the images of the Japanese fans were going to see if they're like cheering sections that are organized by like professional cheerers.

They have cheerleaders too, but they have.

People with bullhorns, they got bands playing songs, and they're all waving towels in unison.

But the players themselves are more like the American players.

They don't smile much.

They certainly don't celebrate.

When they hit a home run, they just run around the bases kind of in a business-like fashion.

And so it's a weird, almost contradiction.

The players aren't having fun, but the fans are.

And even the players we learned from Tuffy, they have their own cheer.

Pacific to each player when they come up to bat it.

That's what reminded me when Peter was bringing up the lights or the little you know show.

It's a personal cheer and Tuffy saying his which was hilarious in Japan.

He spoke Japanese and so yeah that was kind of neat how the fan is you're an active participant.

Exactly

and

that probably wouldn't go over well in the United States for everybody.

Like you say their downtime is in their phones and then they're looking up when the bat when the pitch is coming.

Right, you're there to cheer, you're there to cheer on your team and you have to know the songs and you have to do them in unison and it's very kind of rule-oriented.

Yeah.

But it's cool that every player, so imagine the entire stadium chanting a song in your name as you approach the plate to go in.

That's pretty cool.

The fun factors there for sure.

Yeah, what do you think explains the difference?

the variation in like how much fun people are having.

Like why is it that the U.S.

players aren't having fun?

Why is it that the Japanese players aren't, but maybe the fans are?

And then why are the players from Dominican Republic or Italy?

What's going on with that, do you think?

I think for the U.S.

team, it's the burden of expectation.

Sure.

They hadn't won in several years and they need to go out and win it.

These are the best ball players in the world, right?

This is the major league.

These are NOB players.

The best that NOB has to offer.

You can't beat Japan.

You can't beat Venezuela.

Come on.

And they couldn't.

So, um, I think that that weighed heavily upon them.

And also there's demands from the various teams, like they wouldn't let, um, like Detroit didn't want Terak's Google to pitch more than one game.

So he's our best pitcher, right?

Best pitcher in baseball.

He pitches one game, dominates, and then he doesn't pitch the rest of the series.

So we don't have him there.

Um, so, and I just think they were stressed out.

Yeah.

For the other teams, they were loose and having fun.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's interesting.

I feel like that is something that is now going kind of across sport with some of these

No, so for the professional athletes who are doing events that are not strictly related to their professional athlete career.

And so you hear this look like the NBA All Star game or whatever it is.

You see the transition in the NFL with their, what is it Russ?

Do you know what it's called?

Or Andy?

The Pro Bowl.

Yeah, the Pro.

Bowl where it's gone from being an actual football game to be like a series of mini events where they're like doing goofy things.

They're playing flag.

Yeah, now

they're doing.

And so, man, it's tricky because on one hand, you understand why an organization would not want, you know, a multimillion dollar investments to go out and pitch more than one game and potentially risk injury and, you know, derail the whole season.

But on the other hand, I mean, that it seems like.

Any event that's not the season, and to some extent not the postseason, depending on the sport, almost feels like it's not being allowed to be as good as it could be by teams.

Increasingly, it's like we're pulling starters during regular season for someone who's postseason.

So I don't know how we balance that.

Is that, Andy, do you think that's because

Athletics is starting to get really optimized.

And so now athletes are playing at such a high level.

Really, they're on the border of injury all the time.

Is that what's going on?

Or is it like a cultural attitude thing?

What's happening there?

Yes, I think there's some truth to that.

players are on the verge of injury.

Even one of the presenters on Friday's conference talked about oblique injuries in baseball and they become an epidemic now that players are concerned about or obsessed with launch angles and so they have wings and upper cuts that puts undue stress on the oblique.

He says in Japan they're just

trained to kind of hit line drives and kind of swing down in the ball rather than uppercut the ball.

And so you don't have those oblique injuries all the time.

It's very rare to have an oblique injury in Japan.

So there's some of that.

And then, you know, with pitchers, there are, you know, optimize your spin rate, optimize your velocity.

So everybody's throwing in the upper 90s, back in the 40s, 50s.

I don't think Babe Ruth was facing 99, not a lot of fat balls a day, maybe 89.

So, yeah, I think that's part of the problem.

And yeah, the metrics and the statistical analysis and the data, it's so data-driven to get the most you can.

It's like getting the most milk out of a cow.

Sure, yeah.

Yeah, it's almost the way out of it.

Almost over eye-opening minds, definitely.

But there's sort of like a prisoner's dilemma going on where you don't want your pitcher to go out there and throw like he's going to lose his arm in two years anyways.

But if every other team's doing it, in order to win, you sort of have to do that.

Right.

Um, is there any fix and you brought in the data too, which I think is a big part of this is like the over engineering or, you know, in football, a lot of times people talk about how, uh, the, the data is pulling like the judgment out of the game.

And so should we go for it on fourth year?

Well, the data says that we'll be 51% likely to win if we go for it here.

So we're going to go for it versus, or, you know, the opposite.

It's like, it really seems like we should go for it, but the data says no, so we're not going to.

So it seems like an optimization kind of going across sports.

both in terms of like athletic ability and data and drawing and attention.

And I see this long term being somewhat deleterious because I agree with you.

I'm also a sports conservative in that I think the kind of environments of, you know, the take me out to the ball game is really where baseball actually consists in and not in launch angles.

Yeah.

So do you think this ever is there like a reverse engineering or a cultural shift that could change this?

I don't want to say fix because that makes me sound like I'm in charge of baseball and like it has to be my way.

But the worrisome part for me is I don't see it moving.

I don't see there being any mechanism by which it moves back to what it was.

I only see us going more and more towards what you were mentioning.

probably a camera umpire to be honest with you like I expect technology will replace umpires eventually when you know we get one bad call in one important game and one team says we're done you know this umpire can't do it you've got to get the camera in I only see us moving that direction do you are you similarly pessimistic or do you do you have hope do you think that maybe fans will wake up and say no we don't need to move into you know this ultra computer driven optimized like we might as well be watching a video game thing

I'm somewhat pessimistic.

I think it's possible to turn the clock back if some sort of reverse money ball moment happens, where some team comes along with a different model and is successful.

So I was thinking like Milwaukee.

The fun

model.

Yeah, Milwaukee.

The last two years have offered like they play a lot of small ball.

They don't hit home runs.

Sure.

They steal a lot of bases.

They kind of are throwback to, you know, that's the first half of the 20th century where they played baseball.

If that, and then they, you know, they made it pretty far last year.

If they were to win the World Series and continue with that style of play and maybe even have more players who can do that sort of thing, that might be, that might have some GM scratching their heads thinking, huh, maybe all this stuff with launch angle and it's misplaced.

We should think about playing the game the other way.

Yeah, it's interesting that you talk about it that way because I think the exact same hope exists in the sport like football where we just saw Sam Darnold like there's been this over investment quarterback and wide receivers like 2019 everybody was just throwing these like 30 yard passes every play and succeeding with it to the point where you know

over invest in combating that.

And finally, we're kind of getting back to more of like a sustained drive situation, not these long bombs all the time, not all of our money, the quarterback and every other position suffers.

So yeah, maybe there is this sort of like game that's played where if everybody's investing in launch angles, maybe investing in small ball is actually going to be successful.

And that can kind of like unwind some of this new obsession.

All right.

Well, that looks like a good place to wrap.

This has been a production of the Gorton Institute here at Ottawa University.

I'd like to thank you all for listening.

And Dr. Hazooka, thanks for being on.

Thank you for having me.

Alright, well, pass this along to your friends and family if you think they'd like to take the lesson.

Other than that, be fruitful and multiply.

Thanks.

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channel, 50,000 watt blowtorch, caraming across 20 United States and four Canadian provinces on the AM signal alone, plus FM.

And as always, you can listen live.

It is time every week, the midpoint of the program for the Hames Homes interview.

We've, we are so fortunate.

We've got Clint Hames from the great multi-generational family founded by Kurt.

and Norma Hames Hames Homes the Homes people, manufactured homes and Clint is great to have you back on the air.

Hey, we survived tax season.

Now let's go and chase some good interest rates and a percolating economy and let's get into a safe, affordable, beautiful manufactured home.

Yes.

Yeah.

We're, we're looking forward to it.

And we've already seen quite a few people coming in to visit us, bringing in their tax returns and using it for a down payment for a good man.

Yes,

you guys have done it so well for so long and I want you to just talk Clint about your location.

I just believe this is a beautiful location because you're in Southwest Cedar Rapids.

It's almost a pastoral rural setting in the background and yet you're literally

minutes away from all the great retail, whether it's groceries or minards, the airport is close by, the hospitals are close by, you got universities close by, you're really in the cat bird seat.

You're absolutely right, I mean we're really in the center of a lot of important things in our town.

On the southwest side, just off Wiley Boulevard and close to Stony Point Road, so you're gonna hop on Highway 30 and head to Iowa City, or you can stay local and go to Walmart, Target, all the local shopping centers are just nearby here.

And you guys, they've got these wonderful communities, of course.

If you take a browse, I really encourage you to get out there physically like I have done, and look.

at just the tremendous aesthetics there.

Summit View and Grand View.

They're neighbors and they're self-contained communities in their own way with beautiful lights and freshly paved streets, landscaping, amenities like parks.

You've even got, and it's important in this day and age, you've got storm shelters too.

Talk about some of these great amenities at your locations there at Summit View and Grand View.

Oh happily.

I mean we have each each community has two playgrounds.

We've got a dog park here in our Grandview location and then top of mind right now is storm shelters.

Both communities have two storm shelters.

Whenever we even get a sniff of bad weather those storm shelters are unlocked for for folks to use and hopefully we don't need them but but they're here because we live in the Midwest and it's always at risk.

Yes, we're here with Clint Hames.

Clint, what's it like on a personal level?

You've been working with now three generations of family.

You guys take this very seriously as a vocation, really, and you're faith-based people.

You have enjoyed bringing hearth and home.

These are not houses.

These are homes for families.

You're absolutely right.

And the ownership here, our leadership group has led with that.

Making sure people have good, safe place to live.

We do background checks on all adults that are living out here.

We have 24 on call.

on-call service for folks that maybe have some issues going on in the neighborhood if that ever happens.

And then on our pre-owned homes we sell a warranty so we want to get people, people get started on the right foot so we include that with a pre-owned home and new homes have a 12 month warranty from the manufacturer.

So we really want to treat people the right way and that's

That's coming from the top down.

That's what Troy and Barb and Cynthia expect of us, and that's how we operate.

Here with Clint Haymes from Haymes Homes, the Homes people.

Just a sidebar, Clint.

This weekend, I was helping presiding over the Iowa Broadcast News Association annual convention banquet and awards ceremony there in Des Moines.

And we do work with the archiving people, and it's going to be such a joy for us to include.

Hames, Homes, classic TV commercials for future posterity.

They're wonderful ads, and you've got them on that great website, don't you?

Yeah, we do.

You can look them all up.

We do it from time to time at home.

We show our kids, like, hey, this is what your great grandparents were doing back in the 70s and 80s.

There's Grandpa Troy.

I mean, we love to show them off, and we include them on our Facebook page from time to time, too.

Just kind of bring up that nostalgia and it's fun to see those old style of homes and the commercials.

Boy, Grandpa Troy, he was this little kid like me back in the day around Mary and I over there.

My goodness.

You know, Clint, speaking of that great website, hamshomes.com, they've got some of the listings there.

You've got between, listen, for under $50,000 to up just shy of $80,000, you got three bedroom, two bath homes.

These are phenomenally priced.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean, we've got our most affordable home starting at about $48,000 right now.

And then it's kind of go from there.

But even like that $48,000 home that's been completely reconditioned by our service staff.

So they do a full 90 point check on that.

do an electric plumbing.

We check underneath the home.

This home actually has a brand new furnace and central air.

So again, just trying to get people started off on the right foot.

Here with Clint Hames from Hames Homes, I always harken back, you know, what do the people say?

And that's the most important testimony of all.

Every time I look at your website, there are new quotes coming in from satisfied home owners there on your two little towns.

I call them two little cities there.

Smith, always clean roads and friendly people.

John and Bobby O'Brien, we found all the features we have always wished for in a home plus more.

Carol from Grandview says, Hames cares.

This should be their motto.

And Annie and Ron Harmon say, y'all have great caring hearts.

You are greatly appreciated.

Kay Burr says very clean, well-maintained park.

And PJ Tippi says it's a quiet, friendly village with lots of

and also families with young children.

Mary Stutz says, love living here.

Ben here for 12 years of management is awesome.

Hames really cares.

Clint, you can't do better than that, can you for testimonials?

Well, we're going to try.

We're

going to

keep going.

Good answer.

Good answer, my

man.

We want more.

But yeah, that's just a testament to how we do things.

And I'm glad that homeowners are feeling that and that they feel cared

for.

Clint, I want to just...

finish here by saying, I just encourage everybody to look at this treasure trove of data on this wonderful website as well as Facebook.

It is a treasure trove.

How to finance, how to do insurance, how to resell, all sorts of things about the pricing and the boards and the amenities, the safety precautions that these foals take, the application process.

It's really extraordinary.

Clint, can you tell us how to find you guys?

on the web, on Facebook, by telephone, and again, how they can drive by and see it with their own eyes.

I mean, Edward Scissor's hands could not sculpt some more beautiful landscaping than there is at both Grand View and Summit.

Love it.

You can reach us online at AmesHomes.com.

We have pictures, descriptions of all of our homes.

Tons of information about the communities, our blog, I mean, pretty much anything you can think of.

You can reach us by phone at 319-377-4863 or visit us in person.

The address here is 5410 Wabash Street, Southwest.

That's our main office.

And Grandview and some of you are nearly right next to each other.

So you can start here and kind of go wherever.

Well, I can't wait to do a remote also on some weekday out there with you guys.

That'll be fun.

They'll be fun.

The weather's starting to just really blossom.

Clint, it's always a joy to be on with you.

Give our best to Curtis and Cynthia and Barb.

and Troy and the whole gang, we love you guys.

Well thank you, we most certainly will and we appreciate your time and getting the chance to talk to you.

On the Mighty Blowtorch KXEL, the original 50,000 clear watt broadcast signal in North America right here in Waterloo Cedar Rapids and we'll be back here on the other side.

Economics is the study of human choice in the world we live.

Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

By investigating faith in economics, we can learn how they lead to human flourishing.

This is the Faith in Economics podcast, a presentation of the Gortney Institute at Ottawa University.

Welcome to our show.

This is Russ McCullough.

I am the Wayne Angel chair of economics here at Ottawa University and founder and director of the Gwartney Institute and I'm running solo today without my other buddies Peter and Justin Because my brother is visiting from out of town, so I have a special guest today

And he is an expert in credit repair.

So he has been the owner of Armor Credit Solutions in the Louisville area.

And he started getting into this after being an educator.

He got his bachelor's degree from St.

Cloud State University up in Minnesota in 1999.

He resigned from there and started getting into his own business with credit repair.

He was a veteran of ours, so three years active, seven years reserves in the U.S.

Army.

So thank you for your service, brother.

And so him and his family have been over in the Louisville area for a number of years, and he's built up quite a business there.

And so happy to have you on the show, Chip.

Well, thank you.

Appreciate that.

It's nice to be here talking with my brother.

talking with other folks that like to hear about faith in economics.

And we won't get sidetracked too much on paddlefish, but the real reason he's here, so listeners, if you want to google paddlefish, you'll see an incredible animal that's in kind of Missouri and Kansas, Oklahoma area, so...

That's what brought them here, but now we get to talk about credit repairs.

So what have you been doing for people over the years?

Well, so for the last 20 years people have called me so that they can kind of straighten out the credit, raise their credit scores and buy a house.

That's usually why people call me.

Matter of fact, I work with a lot of, I don't know, many different loan officers and things at banks and mortgage companies and they'll send leads to me where, you know, typically somebody wants to buy a house and we need to kind of work on their credit and straighten up that.

razor scores and then they can buy a house.

So

you're kind of the go-to person there.

You developed a network of relationships with lenders, especially they get new clients in and

the

credits messed up.

You need to talk to Chad.

That's right.

So, yeah, no, I've built a nice business over the years.

And to me, it's all about relationships, you know?

So if you do people right and help people straighten up their credit, help the loan officers, turn deals and things too, I mean, that's really what it's all about.

You gotta help people and you gotta do what you're saying and not overpromise the world too is important too.

So, you know, after 20 years of doing what I do, I still enjoy.

What do I do?

I

can

tell I overhear his conversations with people.

He's animated kind of like I am in the classroom teaching economics.

So I still love to analyze credit reports and I don't know, I guess every credit report's like a snowflake or something.

They're all unique, you know, and you can't just do the same things to help people improve scores across the board.

You have to kind of pick out what's happening on a credit report.

Maybe we need to work through the credit bureaus and help.

then out, remove, update, correct some of the negative information that's on the report.

So what we'll do is dispute and contest some of that negative information depending, you know, what we think is erroneous or duplicated or incomplete or unverifiable or whatever it may be.

So because according to the FCRA, you can't have that sort of net, you know, information on a credit report.

Everything's got to be 100% perfect.

And of course,

It's not a lot of times.

So that's how we're able to help remove some of it and increase scores.

And what's interesting is people can do this all on their own, right?

But similar to other professionals, you can just do it a lot quicker.

You're an expert, you know, the ins and outs and the details.

And like you said, it's almost like, I think I thought a financial consulting or financial planning, as far as everybody's unique, depending on if you're 64, if you're 30 or kids, no kids, blah, blah, blah.

But it's kind of a reverse thing of helping them repair bad stuff in the past.

You're kind of coaching them through there.

And the stuff you do is just part of your level of expertise that you bring to the table.

They can hire you for around five, six, seven hundred dollars.

Isn't it somewhere in that range?

Just to throw out a number so your listeners kind of have an idea.

and literally if you go do this on your own you will spend hours and hours and hours just getting to first base yeah and so that's why you hire professionals as to you guys can do it quicker and help but it's not a lot different than i mean i guess you can represent yourself in court too but a lot

of people call an attorney

right you know right but i used to change my own oil i don't like to do that i don't want to deal with the oil in the garage and let it sit there and then i got it

you know

i

go over to the little oil chains joint, you know, so it's no different than

that.

And

economics, it's comparative advantage, right?

So Chad has a comparative advantage in credit repair and it helps a lot of people out for that.

You know, and you brought up something where...

It could take you a long long time to figure it out and really you kind of have one good chance to fix your credit right and what I mean by this is I don't know Let's just say somebody's got a handful of collections or something that need to be dealt with and you know Sometimes you do want to deal with them.

Sometimes you need to settle them.

Sometimes you need a payment full You always want to try and get them off the credit report, which is not always possible But you might still want to do it and there's some dogs better off laying around still, you know, you really don't want to

Wake them up.

You don't want to start the hornet's nest.

So you kind of want to leave that one alone and deal with this because it's collecting dust for like five years or something.

It's going to fall off.

Well, okay.

Well, you hit the nail on the head.

So as far as five years ago, there's a date on the report.

It's the DLA.

It's the date of last activity.

And that is the key date.

of when something's going to fall off your credit report.

So if you have a collection or a late that happened five years ago, well, it's got two more years to fall off your credit report if you're weighing.

Okay.

So, but, you know, sometimes we'll get after that.

I will tell you this, there is no law stating that it must.

stay on there for seven years and that's a little where I come in and you know some of our angles that we may take on certain derogatory information on reports and but so you got to be careful with what you're doing with certain collections and some of them need to be settled and so I started settling that three years ago which I it's kind of fun some people think

I'm a little nuts for doing it because it seems you're just wheeling and dealing with attorneys and, you know, other firms collecting on money.

And so before we even get into that, talk about the change in policy from the Biden administration that caused you to have to move

maybe a

different direction.

I had to pivot for sure.

So I was at that time that was, I don't know, five years ago or so.

So it's just normal part of a credit repair company like I have, you know, part of it is you see medical.

collections on people's report.

There's a lot of them out there, you know.

I'm sure a lot of our listeners have medical.

Oh, sure.

Of course.

And it happens.

And sometimes they're on people's reports for maybe didn't pay it for one thing, possibly.

But number two, maybe it was paid or covered.

Late and it should have been retracted from collections with

the

whole mess of insurance covering it or I'm covering it.

Yeah

all the little messy and messy and muddy sometimes so anyways I'll deal with that but here's where the big change came in five years ago is that Biden had I guess to help people increase their credit scores they removed

all the paid medical collections, so those went away, and that was low-hanging fruit for a guy like me.

I could get those off the credit report easy, okay, which would help thrive.

So there was a previous collection, it shows as paid, but it's still on the report.

Still on the report.

So then somebody eyeballs that.

Yeah.

So it would count against your score.

It definitely counts against your score.

And then they changed.

It was a small collection, but it was paid.

And then they changed something else where they had a, if you had a medical collection under...

$500, it cannot be under credit report, period.

People think we don't have free healthcare, but you're saying if it's under $500, we can't have

$500.

But although I'll tell you this, I can't tell you how many $501 collections I see on people's credit reports now.

Oh yeah, they kind of got smart with that, do I think?

$520, $501.

But, you know, so if they go and pay a medical bill, it has to come off your credit report period.

So anyways, this is, I'm explaining this because I had to pivot.

and so I was seeing a lot less leads because you can imagine with all of these medical bills medical collections not on a credit report the people had scores maybe good enough to buy house let's say 620 or something where some of these other ones are driving scores down into 500s where a loan officer would send that lead over to me and then I'd try to go to work on it right so but now I was getting less leads and I'm like whoa all right I gotta figure this out

And I noticed the credit reports that I was analyzing had a lot of collections with credit cards.

And it might be a $600 collection.

It could be $1,200.

It could be, you know, a couple grand, whatever it may be.

But I've known over my career that if we can help remove these, settle them for them and remove them, it's a big deal.

You know, believe it or not, there's lots of people that don't want to pick up the telephone and do this themselves.

Right.

So it actually became a nice value add for my business with this, that I'll do it for them for a fee or whatever.

And so you were able to see, because you look at so many credit reports daily, just this pattern of an opportunity to help people out and when they

part of the negotiations, and I'm kind of asking this, of course, because I'm not sure, is you say, they owe you $800, we'll send you $200 to settle it, and you remove it from their credit report, without the key thing of it being removed from the credit report,

right?

That's part of the negotiation.

That's right.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

I mean, that's the reason somebody's coming and calling us is that they want to improve their score.

Yeah.

And I just know that.

we have to get that collection off the credit report.

And listen, not every collection company is willing to do that, but several of them are, and that can also help negotiate that in sometimes

if

they're willing to

do that.

And

that immediately jumps their score because a thing that's a pretty big negative, there's no lingering effect is what I'm trying to say.

Once you get it removed, it's like it was never there.

It's like it was never there.

Yeah.

You could be a hundred point raise probably, or whatever.

Well, it's funny you bring up the number 100, because I don't know if people know this out there, but one collection, I don't care if it's paid or unpaid.

It doesn't matter if it's $300 from an AT&T bill you didn't pay or if it's a $4,000 Kohl's charge-off credit card.

That whole thing is worth about 110 points.

If you're used to perfect credit and you're used to 780-800 credit scores and you somehow get a collection somehow, I don't know, you didn't pay your last water bill at your last house you just moved from, it's worth 110 points.

It's enormous.

So

all of these collections together and all of the other stored collections is that.

You owed some money to Kohl's and then they turned it over to a collection agency?

Or can it be a collection agency within Kohl's, like a department of theirs?

When you use the word collections when it shows up on a report that way.

Well, it starts with the inside collections with Kohl's.

Yeah.

And so that

counts against you, the 110.

Oh yeah, because it

labeled as a charged off account.

Ah,

okay.

So they just have, they may or may not have their own department.

They do have their own department, for

sure.

And they try and collect on it.

And when they get tired of trying to collect on it, then they'll sell it to ABC Collection Company and or...

They don't always sell it but sometimes they do and other times they just contract with them for to try and collect that debt And then that's the company I might call and try and negotiate a settlement with and I always tell I always tell people my clients just expect like half or less I don't try and promise.

Hey, this is gonna settle for pennies on the dollar and all of this because that doesn't happen a lot, you know

So anyways, the people most of my clients are thrilled that I'm doing this forum and they know I'm looking out for the credit scores all at the same time.

So it's fun.

I've probably settled $850,000 of bad credit cards and repos and whatever else in the last three years.

$600 here,

$1,500 here, $10,000 here.

What's the highest one you've ever sold?

Oh, probably $40,000.

So

I have a credit card.

So

$850,000 and $40,000 is the biggest and that's pretty rare.

Right.

So it's a high volume of making

this

settlement.

So I had one couple, MetaHack two couples, but

They got into some credit card debt.

They had about $65,000 worth of charged off credit cards, which means it's in collections and all of this and I've analyzed your credit reports and so they got

a little upside down in their finances, clearly.

So what they did is they had a house.

They sold the house.

They moved in with mom and dad for a hot minute with the kids or something.

And they, with the proceeds of the house that they just sold, they called me and I settled at $65,000 for, I don't know, half or less, you know, like I always say.

But then I got the stuff off the credit report, which is important.

And then about five or six weeks later, their scores were high enough to buy the next house.

Wow.

So...

And they were thrilled about it.

They're the kind of people I didn't want to pick up the phone and mess around and negotiate things.

And so they were just really happy that I could just do that for them and they could trust somebody that's a professional.

Right.

All right.

Well, this has been a production of the Gorton Institute here at Ottawa University.

I'd like to thank you all for listening.

Five Star Reading helps other people find us.

Otherwise, pass this along to friends and family that might like to take a listen.

Other than that, be fruitful and multiply.

Thanks.

you

Thanks again, guys.

Tell your friends about the podcast, kxel.com slash Jacobson, J-A-C-O-B-S-E-N.

In the meantime, listen to all the wisdom of Jeff Stein during his weekday news and commentary.

And folks, always remember and never forget to be safe, be smart, be good, be strong.

love Jesus Christ, and God blesses everyone.

Till we meet again, have a great weekend and bye-bye!