Welcome to today's podcast, sponsored by Hillsdale College, all things Hillsdale at

Hillsdale.edu. I encourage you to take advantage of the many free online courses there.

And, of course, I'll listen to the Hillsdale Dialogues, all of them at Hugh for Hillsdale.com

or just Google Apple, iTunes, and Hillsdale. Welcome back, America. I'm Hugh Hewitt.

Richard Goldberg is a senior advisor at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy. He's one of those people actually knows what he's talking about on Iran. Richard, I want to start with this story from Iran International. Iran's central bank warns economy may take 12 years to rebuild after the war. How much credibility did you give this report?

Well, it probably has a good deal of credibility. I mean, I think our own back of the envelope

has been in the hundreds of billions of dollars of damage done to the economy already on our side.

Now, obviously, the Iranians for their own propaganda might want to try to put out a

big number because they've supposedly asked for some sort of reparation payments and negotiations.

But at the same time, Iran International usually gets a hold of some pretty good information, some good

intel leaks. And so I think if you match that with what they had also reported a few weeks ago

of President

Peschke and sending almost a memo to these IRGC officials who've taken charge of the country

saying we can't hold out much longer. The whole economy is on the verge of collapse. It does

paint a much more dire picture of what's going on inside the country for this Rump regime

than what they would lead

us to believe through their cognitive warfare.

Now, Richard, the one thing that makes me uneasy is I used to have friends who knew about

the South African regime before it gave way, and they could have gone to the mattresses.

They could have kept their nukes.

They could have kept their bank accounts.

The Iranian regime has got a lot of money stowed away overseas in shadow accounts and in banking, even in the UAE and Dubai.

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