April 23, 2024 • 36 mins
Hour 2 of A&G features...
- Spending on Homelessness...
- An interesting brain study...
- Did Trump violate a gag order?
Stupid Should Hurt: https://www.armstrongandgetty.com/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
From the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio at the George Washington
Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty Armstrong and Getty Show, Ali, can.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
You please say free Palstine one time? Why did you
kill that lady? You kill that lady and got no
jail time. No jail time, Aleck, no jail time, Alex.
You'll put it innocent people in jail. Alec Baldwin, Free Palestine, Alec,
just one time and I'll leave you alone.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
I'll leave you alone. I swear, just saferee.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Palestine one time, one time, one time, one time.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Alex. You know he is a criminal. He know he's
a criminal. I don't know. That was just a free
palace down recording my thing. That was a fourteen second clip, Uh,
Alec Baldwin being confronted in like a coffee shop by
a nut job and he ended up slapping the phone
out of her hand. So it became one of those
(01:03):
Alec Baldwin's an angry person things, And usually I think
Alec Baldwin's in the wrong. He's definitely in the right
on this. I thought he was. He's in enough trouble
with the whole did I murder that woman? Thing? To
get into it. But he was asking the coffee show.
He asked the coffee shop employee, will you call the police?
Will you do something about this? Will you do something?
(01:24):
He finally just tried to get out of there. Yeah. Yeah,
but I wanted him to say, you know something about Palestine.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
He's half a dozen kinds of jackass, but he doesn't.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Nobody deserves that sort of treatment.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
No, No, So a couple of caveats before I launch
into my disappointment with the Supreme Court hearing yesterday about
the Grant's Pass ruling the infamous horrible. You can't criminalize
homelessness because it's a status. You can't enforce any laws
about bums and junkies because they're poor, homeless people.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
So here are my two caveats.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
Number one, it's difficult to discern from the oral arguments
and the questioning which way the justices are going.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Everybody does it anyway.
Speaker 4 (02:11):
I'm about to do it to some extent, but it's
hard because sometimes they have the opposite point of view
that you're just trying to figure out if there's a
weakness in their argument, so they'll they'll steal man, as
they say, the opposing side to explore it, which is
a cool thing about the Supreme Court. Second thing is
I did not listen to all of it. I'm just
(02:32):
taking excerpts as written. But having said that, Scotis Blog,
which is obviously a blog about the Supreme Court and
hearings and cases and the rest of it and the decisions,
has a whole bunch of different quotes from a whole
bunch of different justices, and they shock me in well
(02:53):
in a way which I'll explain after I give you
some examples. Representing the city, the lawyer told the justices
that grants passed like cities nationwide, relies on camping laws
to protect its public spaces. And the ruling which said
homeless you can't public you can't punish homelessness. That's a status.
You can publish specific acts, but you can't punish homelessness
(03:19):
unless every single person has been offered a bed. There's
a bed for every single quote unquote homeless person. So
before I was tempted to jump into my conclusion. But
but the liberal justices predictively were like, how can you
punish someone for not having a home or sleeping under
a blanket? What if a baby falls asleep Are you
(03:41):
going to write a ticket to the sleeping baby, because
that's the same activity as the.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Person sleeping in the park.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Justice Kavanaugh was at least initially dubious, writes Scotus Blog,
that reversing the Ninth Circuit's decision and allowing the city
to enforce its ordinances would make a difference in addressing
the homelessness problem. How would your rule help, he asked,
if there are not enough beds for people experiencing homelessness.
He returned to this point a few minutes later, asking
the city attorney how sending people to jail for violating
(04:10):
the city's ordinances would help to address the homelessness problem
if there are still no beds available when they get out.
So many of the conservative justices questions were, how would
this help the homeless problem?
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Right? Yeah?
Speaker 5 (04:25):
You?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Oh, no, yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
While you can say that it's difficult to determine from
the questions the way they're going, the fact that he
used the term experiencing homelessness worries me a lot.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
That was a characterization of what he said that was
in Scotus Blog. But no, the angler, I want to
make sure anybody, anybody who says experiencing homelessness.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
You know where they are on this subject. But oh, yeah,
I agree completely.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
Yeah, but I want everybody to be clear on what
I'm trying to tell you. They approach the idea of
Grant's Pass or other cities taking junkie camps off of
school grounds, out of city parks, off of city properties,
and address that not as a civil order question, a
(05:15):
maintaining law in order and quality of living. They think
asking how will this help the homelessness problem?
Speaker 3 (05:22):
Right, it's the same thing I brought up in the
city council meeting in which people yelled at me and
then clicked their fingers. How about we look at the
taxpayer in this situation. Why is I, as a taxpayer
who paid for this park, can't bring my kids to
the park because there's a whole bunch of grown men
that are high sleeping in the park. I mean, so
Justice Kavanaugh or whoever other justices are only thinking about
(05:45):
the homeless person and not the taxpayer who wants walk
down the street or use the park or whatever.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
You can't park, you can't camp rather in the park.
There's no overnight camping in the park, period. Get out
the question. There is not whether that's helping the homelessness situation.
The question is whether that's a legitimate exercise of a
city or a county's power to regulate activity.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Right, or the guy lying on the sidewalk so that
you gotta walk around him or over him to get
into the business. The business owner has a real stake
in that. But if you're only gonna worry about, well,
where is that guy's supposed to go? All right, Well,
then you've got a certain view of things.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Just as Catanji Brown Jackson, who had shred the constitution today,
told the city attorney that Robinson was not a helpful.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Oh that's a different thing.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
But it's in cruel and unusual to punish people for
acts like sleeping. The constitute basic human needs. Are you
going to punish people for breathing in public?
Speaker 3 (06:44):
Next? Wow?
Speaker 4 (06:47):
By contrast, Clarence Thomas emphasized that the law at issue
in the previous decision barred both the use of drugs
and being addiction addicted to drugs. Do the city's ordinances,
Thomas asked, make it a crime to be homeless? They
do not, Evangelist grants pass attorney responded, but other justices
suggested it was more difficult to draw the line between
(07:07):
status and conduct. Chief Justice John Roberts, for example, seem
to suggest that because someone who is homeless can instantly
become not homeless, homelessness is not a status, so that's good.
Justice Samuel Alito indicated that although status is different from conduct,
there are some instances of conduct that are closely tied
to the status. If a homelessness is divined as simply
(07:27):
lacking place to stay in a particular night, they amount
to the same thing.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
So I'm not smart enough to wrap my head around
this whole status thing, I guess. But are they arguing
towards there's a right to housing? That seems like where
it's going that it's a human right of some sort
that the taxpayers are required to fulfill.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Yes, well, yeah, that's definitely something that's in the air.
Justice Amy Cony Barrett asked the uh pro Bums people
whether it would violate the Eighth Amendment for the city
to enforce its laws in other scenarios involving basic human
needs like eating or using the bathroom. Could the city
find arrest people who are homeless for stealing food or
(08:11):
urinating or defecating in public you. Cochrane told Barrett that
stealing food is quote not part of the definition of homelessness,
and it's also not a universal attribute like sleeping or breathing.
She shared Barrett that public urination and defication would not
violate the Eighth Amendment under the challenger's theory. Here is
the problem. This is and anybody who lives in a
blue state that's overrun with these junkie camps knows you.
(08:33):
They can't enforce basic laws because these junkies don't respond
to tickets, they don't show up to court.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
They don't pay fines.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
You can't have giant junkie camps and lawfulness. The two
don't work side by side, partly because the cops and
the prosecutors and the cities are completely flummoxed as to
what they can enforce in what they can't. They are
completely confers used. And I go back to this email
we shared earlier. This guy in the suburban LA got
(09:07):
addicted to meth. He chooses to live on the streets
because he can be high all day without any guilt.
He's not with his family anymore, he doesn't work anymore.
He just lays around and does drugs in his junkie camp. Okay, hey,
Supreme Court Justices, that's a huge percentage of the so
called homeless, a huge percentage.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
What about them?
Speaker 4 (09:30):
What do we have to have junkies in our town squares,
outside our schools, hospitals, whatever? Do we have to have
junkie camps because of your concern that homelessness is a
status and not an act or whatever?
Speaker 3 (09:47):
The hell? Can we get rid of the junkie camps?
Justice Roberts, That's what we're asking, Hey, Katie, what was
that a chant that you brought us during the news
that people were saying outside the courtroom?
Speaker 4 (10:02):
House keys not handcuffs. House keys not handcuffs for what junkies?
What are they gonna do with house keys? Oh, they're
gonna do drugs in a house now until they ruin it.
And even if you're gonna have the most charitable view,
even if it is the what everybody portrays is all homeless,
(10:23):
perfect scenario of it's a hard working family that follows
all the rules and it is just one medical emergency
that caused them to be homeless.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
Even if it's that crowd, which has got to be
like zero point zero zero one percent of the homeless,
even though it's portrayed as everybody even for that crowd. Okay,
house keys not handcuffs. Who's going to provide the house?
Speaker 5 (10:45):
How?
Speaker 4 (10:46):
I mean, how's this gonna happen? So a couple more
questions and answers. I thought we're interesting. Roberts said, Hey,
what if if there's if the town right next door
has a shelter that has many many vacant, is there
still a right to camp in the park in grants Pass?
Speaker 3 (11:03):
What if a police officer offered people who.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
Are homeless in Grants Pass a rise to a shelter
that's thirty miles away, do they still have to permit
junkie camps in the park.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
He didn't phrase it that way.
Speaker 4 (11:12):
He also asked how many police officers would implement such
a rule on a day to day basis. What if
there's a question about whether shelter beds are indeed available,
and if so, how many? What if a shelter won't
allow people who are homeless to bring their dogs or
people with mental health issues? And the attorney who wants
bums and junkie camps to stay said, well, yeah, the
court does face quote line drawing problems.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Line drawing problems. Oh boy, I got a comment about that.
But first we need to tell you about simply Safe.
Maybe you live in one of these cities that's overrun
by drug addicts sleeping in the street. They regularly like
break into homes in your backyard and whatnot. Maybe it'd
be a good idea to have some of these Simply
Safe cameras around twenty four to seven professional monitoring for
less than a dollar a day. You can get fast
(11:53):
emergency response and dispatcher needed at most. But more importantly,
you know you could see what's happening in and around
your property.
Speaker 4 (12:00):
The system blankets your hold home and protection and has
sensors to detect break ins, plus fires, floods, and more
whatever threatens you. Plus a variety of indoor and outdoor
cameras Jack mentioned to keep watch over your property day
and night. No contract, sixty day money back guarantee. Oh
my gosh, no long term contract.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
Yep, that's right. Wow. That to me, that is the
proof that they believe you're gonna like it. No contract,
You're not locked in at all. Like a lot of
these systems.
Speaker 4 (12:24):
Simply Safe has given so many folks peace of mind.
We want you to have a to get twenty percent
off any new simply Safe system when you sign up
for fast protect monitoring. Just visit simplysafe dot com slash Armstrong.
That's simply safe dot com slash Armstrong. There's no safe
like simply Safe. Well, I hope we're misinterpreting the questions
because I found that a little depressing. The questions from
(12:46):
the Supreme Court yesterday. When was the last time a
Supreme Court justice had to deal with bums and junkies?
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Spent forty years I read yesterday, since there was a
serious homeless case before the Supreme Court.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
Yeah, I'll be severely disappointed if this goes the wrong way.
I mean, the trend toward lawlessness is already terrible. Yeah,
I'm holding my breath. I'll do a little more reading
about the testimony. I don't want to leave everybody with
a super pessimistic feel about this, but man, I was disappointed.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
What about this world's first AI beauty pageant? Among other
things we can talk about stay with us.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Armstrong, Andy.
Speaker 4 (13:29):
Look trials are a lot of procedurals and side conferences
and sidebars and.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
What's exhibit thirty seven to two A And you're.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Not out of order.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
This whole card is out of it. Look, the one
person who's had the most normal reaction to the trial
so far is Donald Trump. Donald Trump fell asleep on
multiple days during his criminal trial, as he should. I mean,
he's been up since two am, range tweeting he needs
his anger sleep. Yeah. Trump fell sleep a number of
(14:02):
times yesterday, according to all reporters. So Hm during the
opening arguments. That would surprise me of something that could
land me in jail? Yeah, I think I'd be awake
for that. You get to like month two and they're
getting into some intricacies of law that I don't understand.
Speaker 4 (14:22):
Maybe, but then there's the unfortunately named mister Pecker and
his testimony as well.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
So we had this story earlier about one in five
people get cold feet on their wedding day and consider
backing out. I guess, I guess that's what cold feet is.
So got this text from a front We ask anybody
else did anybody do that? Did anybody? And I wondered,
(14:50):
of the one in five, how many wish they had
backed out but probably didn't. And I got a text
from a friend of mine I was at this wedding.
He said, you know I'm not one in five my
friend drove me to the church and said, we can
just keep going to California, which is where he lived
at the time. Even the priest made a comment to him,
(15:10):
everybody who was telling him it was a mistake to
get married. I remember this. He was living with me
at the time when he got married to this person,
and it was a very short marriage. But he nearly
backed out, but did not. I think because of the momentum.
The momentum of a wedding is a pretty I had
some serious momentum. Oh yeah, especially well for everybody. Yeah,
to stand in front of that glacier and think, you know,
(15:33):
the glacier of everybody traveled here and got dressed in
rented suits and bridesmaid dresses, and you've already got the
honeymoon planned and probably deciding where to live and all this.
You got to stand in front of that glacier and say, nah,
change my mind. WHOA. On the other hand, if it
is a mistake, better then than later. Got this note
(15:53):
from Alnonymous. I was with my uncle waiting for guests
before his wedding. He asked me, does anybody back out
at this point? And I said, really, he uncomfortably replied,
just joking. Divorced six months later. Oh yeah, this this
buddy of mine, and I was at this wedding, like
everybody fought, what is why are you doing this? This
(16:14):
is terrible? He knew it was terrible. Everybody including him
knew it was a terrible idea. But it happened anyway.
The momentum, the momentum exactly. Oh yes, Michael was the
food good at least I don't remember. That's a long
time ago. That's a tough one. Oh what an awful
feeling that must be. Oh I can't imagine. Yeah, yeah, terrible.
(16:37):
You roll your eyes every time I bring up the
AI beauty.
Speaker 4 (16:39):
Pageant, Yes I do, And there I go again, because.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
It's justice, I'd go again. It's clickbait for horny dudes.
That's that's all. It is the world's first artificial intelligence
generated beauty pageant. I guess I could have one today
if I wanted to write, that's well problems.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
Well, yes, real beauty pageants are stupid, So what's an
AI beauty pageant?
Speaker 3 (17:08):
The judges will examine the AI pageants beauty and pick
a winner. The winners will be announced on May tenth
for whose.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
Gratification to accomplish? What's what's gained here? This is idiotic.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
I would say this is idiotic, but I would say
the whole You need a hot woman on the cover
of your I guess I'm gonna say magazine. But that
didn't make sense in the front thing of your website
wearing jeans and a tank top for some reason. Why avogizing?
Why would you ever pay a model a dollar? Right
(17:40):
in the modern world, It's got to be the end
of everybody but your top tier models where you learn
their names. It's got to be the end of all
those other hot women, doesn't it. Man.
Speaker 4 (17:50):
I think it's the end of the top tier as well.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
Okay, maybe all of them, but certainly that bottom ninety
eight percent of models, you know, all the hot women
that travel to LA over the years open, that's got
to be the end of that. Yeah, Because if you
haven't looked at the state of the art and AI
this is photo realistic. They're indistinguishable from real human beings.
If you want to hop blonde chick holding a corps light,
you don't need to hire somebody, No, no, certainly not
(18:15):
put up with their crap. Well, even if there's no
crap to put up with pay or anything else, some
really interesting science on how the brain works.
Speaker 4 (18:23):
Then back into the news of the day, of course,
hope you can hang around Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
Yo yo yo. We got to talk a little bit about.
Speaker 5 (18:42):
Uh Israel Hamas a little bit later. Just looking like
Israel's getting ready for their big invasion of southern Gaza,
which is going to reignite this story, not that it's
not ignited right now with the protest and college campuses
all across the country.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Keep the Musa going, Michael, and for that matter.
Speaker 4 (19:02):
The students who are shouting up with Hamas and October
seventh was glorious. We need to talk about that milicency
on our campuses. But the reason we're coming back with
these jazz stylings, one pad Metheeni, it's because we've got
a couple of really interesting things about the way the
brain works, and one of them.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
Involved a study of jazz guitarists. Not a padam Affeni guy,
I'm a jazz officionado. He's not my cup of team.
I don't know like jazz music. Pretty much between nineteen
fifty seven and nineteen sixty three, anything out of the
side of that little window is not with jazz I
want to hear.
Speaker 4 (19:39):
Ye's another fascinating look into Jack's character Jazz belligerents. Anyway,
so this article is about I'm sorry. The study is
about the idea of flow or being in the zone,
and as allegedly a musician, I get it completely. They
(20:02):
do get into some other fields where you're gonna be
flowing or in the zone. Maybe you're a like expert
executive or business person and the deal's coming together fast
and it's going really great.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Maybe if you're a surgeon.
Speaker 4 (20:19):
I'd imagine in every field you can imagine for yourself
when things are going great, how that feels, and they're
trying to figure out the neuroscience of that.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Wow. So I don't have any of those examples you have,
but I do have. I do get into modes like
I had one over the weekend where I just feel
like I'm on fire with like I'm I'm taking in information,
I'm reading a book, I was practicing the piano. It's
just like my mind is just working so well, and
I think, why can't I hold on to this? And
then it goes back to it's maple syrup usual pace.
(20:52):
But that happens as my as my maple syrup pace.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
I love that, as my buddy Brian the umpire has
said to me more than once breaking necks in cash
and checks.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Yeah, I was in that zone for like, I don't know,
eight hours over the weekend. Then it went away again.
So anyway, this I think it was a couple. But
they're both neuroscientists.
Speaker 4 (21:12):
They designed a study to test the two completing theories
conflicting theories of flow. One theory proposes that flow is
a state of hypertensive intensive hyper.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
Focus, I should say, on a task.
Speaker 4 (21:28):
The other theory hypothesizes that flow involves relaxing ones focus
or conscious control. And again, as an alleged musician, I
could have told you which one was correct right there.
But anyway, they recruited thirty two jazz guitarists from Happy
to Be the Philadelphia area.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
It doesn't matter.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
Their level of experience ranged from novice to veteran, as
qualified with the number of public performances they'd given that
sort of thing. They had some heavy weights and also
some pretty decent you know. Arding jazz guitars, the researchers
place these funny looking electrode caps on their heads.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
There's like shower.
Speaker 4 (22:05):
Caps or the old swimming caps that women wear full
of electrodes to record their EEG brain waves. While they
improvised the chord sequences and rhythms that were provided to them.
They played jazz, they improvised here's the answer, and let
me scroll back up again. In order to achieve flow,
(22:27):
the person must first develop a strong foundation of expertise
in their craft. There it is as the Great Charlie Parker,
the jazz great, is said to have advised, you've got
to learn your instrument.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
Then you practice, practice, practice.
Speaker 4 (22:46):
And then when you finally get up there on the bandstand,
forget all that and just wail. And that's exactly what
the study found. All right, but you have to you
have to focus all that prior to that. So you
have to have they oh yeah, okay. You have to
have the building blocks of whatever it is we're doing here.
If you're ever going to get into the flow, you
(23:07):
can't be faking it. The performance is that the musicians
self rated as high in flow were also judged by
the outside experts as more creative and better. Furthermore, the
most experienced musicians rated themselves as being flow more than
the novices, suggesting that experience is a precondition for flow.
Their brain activity revealed why. And I could get into
(23:28):
the actual neuropsychology of it, that the parts of the
brain that lit up and the rest of it.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
And even for the people that are that good at it,
you know, basketball player, jazz musician, whatever it is we're
talking about here, they have nights where it's better than others,
or days when it's better than others. I wonder what
that's all about too. Maybe you're just better at letting
go and not focusing.
Speaker 4 (23:50):
Yeah, yeah, that's an interesting question.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
I know. Charlie Parker himself would walk on the bandstand
sometimes and say, the sap is flowing tonight. Boys, you
always talking a British accent for some reason, but like
you just the sap is flowing tonight. You just like
the flow was happening.
Speaker 4 (24:04):
I guess, yeah, yeah, interesting. And you know, early in
anybody's radio career, just asn't aside, various companies and bosses
try to bring in consultants to help you do your job.
Jack and I have always maintained that, aside from avoiding
certain pitfalls, if you have the the entertainment gene. If
(24:26):
you're serious about what you're doing, you're gonna be fine.
And if you don't, there's no army of consultants that
can make you interesting. Having said that occasionally, and I
see this through the lens of music again. If you
go to a musician and you say, hey, do whatever
you want, be cool, just don't play any bad notes,
(24:48):
they're ruined. Forget it, it's overright' if you bring it
back to your conscious mind, like Charlie Parker was talking about,
get up there on the bandstand and just wail. If
you go back to you If you have to go
back to your conscious mind when you're trying to create,
you're doomed.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
It'll never work. I wonder. I wonder if that has
anything to do with the number of people that with music,
particularly play high, if that helps them interesting?
Speaker 4 (25:18):
Could be sports psychology is a similar I'm sorry, and
do you want to spend more time getting high? There?
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Uh?
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Charlie Parker. Now I hate to say that because I
don't want to encourage and most of the I read
a lot about a lot of musicians like you do.
But most of your drug addict musicians, if they ever
got sober say they played better sober than they did high.
Almost all of them, I think, Eric, Eric Clapton, TV Ravaughan.
I can think lots of them who said they played
better high. John Coltrane after he kicked heroin. But so,
(25:46):
it's not like the way to get good, but I
could see how it would help you not focus too much.
Speaker 4 (25:51):
Well, yeah, absolutely, It's like saying you can go from
New York to Washington, d C.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
Via Des Moines. It's not a good way to get there,
but you'll get there. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:04):
I had one more point I wanted to make on that.
What the heck was it?
Speaker 3 (26:07):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (26:07):
Sports psychology is very much the same. You practice your
mechanics over and over and over again. Then whether it's
golf for shooting a free throw or throwing a football,
when you're on the field, you forget about mechanics completely
and just focus on target.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
You have to, And I couldn't do that at all.
Speaker 4 (26:24):
Yeah, well you got to practice relentlessly anyway. Second thing
I wanted to bring to your attention neurologically speaking, that
was all interesting and I think we can all appreciate
it in our own fields, but this is actually useful
working with your hands, they found is good for your brain.
And they talk about the complexity of the hand the
more if you think about human hands, they have the
(26:46):
power to kill and the power to cradle a baby,
or the gentleness to cradle a baby. You can play
a musical instrument, you can strip a hard boiled egg
without damaging the egg. Within incredible power and incredible grace
and gentleness and dexterousness in our hands. And experts believe
(27:07):
that our shift away as human beings in the modern
world from complex hand activities is having consequences for how
we think and feel. We're doing a lot less hands
on things than we used to. Everything is made for us,
for instance.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
Well, we've talked a lot about how grip strength has
gone down so much generation by generation.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
Yeah, I wonder if that has a neurological aspect. But
this professor of behavioral neuroscience at the University of Richmond
in Virginia says, when you look at the brain's real estate,
how it's divided up, and where its resources are invested,
a huge portion of it is devoted to movement, and
especially to voluntary movement of the hands. And she says
(27:49):
she's interested in the connection between the effort we put
into something and the reward we get from it. And
she believes working with our hands might be uniquely gratifying
and good for our brains. And they've done some animal studies.
She's seen some similarities and studies on people. Animals with hands,
(28:09):
rats using their paws to dig up food had healthier
stress hormone profiles.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
You hate to have your rats all stressed out, you know,
I'm telling you it's rough out there anyway. Oh.
Speaker 4 (28:26):
She sees similarities and studies on people that have found
a whole range of hands on activities such as knitting, gardening,
even coloring in a coloring book are associated with cognitive
and emotional benefits, including improvements in memory and attention, as
well as reductions and anxiety and depression syndromes I'm sorry, symptoms.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
I wonder if playing video games and everything that's going
on with the hands there is a benefit then interesting example, Huh.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
We'll post this whole thing at armstrong eggetty dot com
under hot. There's more to it. It's pretty interesting. Perhaps
you'd like to read further, but I'm going to keep
that in mind. I'm going to uh to make sure
I spend some time every day doing something with my hands.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
I play guitar every day, so there's that. But I
am working on Box Batch. I call him Batch. Batch
is prelude in C major, which I'm I've got half memorized.
And uh, that has become my obsession, Johnny Batch on
the panano on the piano. Yeah, with any free time.
(29:33):
And uh, I feel like that's doing something for me, help,
that's helping me somehow. I feel like it's like making
me happier somehow. And I don't wire that it's it's
not a particularly difficult piece, but but I really feel
like it's been benefiting me, like in some way, not
just musically. Uh, since I got into it, and I
(29:56):
don't know, I can't even describe.
Speaker 4 (29:57):
It well as a guy who can't play Mary, you
had a little lamb. If you gave me three tries,
it's good enough. Yes, it seems self evident, like you
don't even have to make the case. Of course that
would do your brain good and bring you happy chemical.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Well, like I was practicing it and getting further into
it and more of it memorized and everything like that
over the weekend, and every time I walked by the
piano and I had two minutes i'd sit down and
run through part of it or whatever, and I just
I thought, this, Why is this making me so happy?
Why am I getting so much juice mental juice out
of this? And I don't know, someone got to figure
out there. Maybe I don't know, shuts off your brain
(30:36):
from thinking of other things or the stuff you were
just talking about with your hands. I don't know.
Speaker 4 (30:40):
Yeah, maybe that's why I like trying to hit faraways
and grains and make putts so much, although I rarely do.
All right, as long as you're talking about one more
quick thought. According to this neuroscientist, with depression, people experienced
something called learned helplessness, where they feel like it doesn't
matter what they do, nothing ever works. She believes that
working with one's hands is stimulating the brain. It could
(31:01):
even help counteract this learned helplessness quote. When you put
an effort and you can see the product of that,
like a scarf you needed, I think that builds up
a sense of accomplishment and control.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
Over your world. Maybe that's it, sense of accomplishment and
control over your world. I'm doing something, I'm building something,
I'm accomplishing something very concrete, like really easy to identify. Now,
maybe that's well.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
Plus the enormous amount of brain real estate that's devoted
to your hands, that means something.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
Don't let it just sit there, all right, enough said,
I'll damned three big votes in the Senate probably today,
Ukraine AID. Well, actually four, I guess. But we got
the Ukraine aid, we got the Israel aid, we got
the Taiwan stuff, and we got the TikTok bill, all
going to be voted on, and I hope we know
(31:50):
which direction they're going to go. Well, we'll talk more about
that at some point and other stuff. So stay here.
Speaker 6 (32:01):
Biden may need support wherever he can get it. That
survey also showing interest in the upcoming election is at
its lowest point since twenty twelve, and though Biden has
narrowed Trump's lead from five points to two, he's still
trailing on the issues like inflation by twenty two points.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
That is interesting that interest in the presidential election is
the lowest it's ben since it was Obama Romney, which
was not a hot election to follow. Why just same
candidates worn out by politics, the elections too long, all
those things.
Speaker 4 (32:37):
I just said, I suppose, yes, yes, and yes. The
discouragements over the choices. I mean, if you say, all right,
we can either go to the most elite steakhouse in
the city tonight or the best Chicago style pizza according
to a national poll, I'm excited about dinner if it's
Denny's or Perkins substantially less.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
So we got a question for you, and you almost
went to law school, So this is good news. Did
when you even took tests? When your daughter graduates from
law school, you'll be able to call her up quickly
when we have these questions and then maybe she can
answer them. But because she's gonna actually go to law school.
But so we're talking about so Trump's in court today
(33:19):
and the judge is going to decide whether or not
Trump violated his gag order. And then if you have
either get warned or fined or jailed. They're not going
to jail him. I don't can you find a billionaire
and get anywhere and probably not probably warn him if anything.
But you said it was an interesting constitutional question, and
(33:40):
it violates it's a first Amendment issue, And we got
a text saying, how is this a first amendment? Is
amendment issue? Congress shall make no law, et cetera, et cetera.
In what way is this a First Amendment issue? Telling
Trump he can't talk? Oh my gosh, that's seriously what's
the text?
Speaker 4 (33:56):
Yeah, yeah, No, I'm talking to the writer, not you.
The government silencing a person from expressing their opinion. You're asking,
how is that a First Amendment issue? Perhaps I'm missing
an angle. The problem is, and I don't have the
specific wording in front of me. I wish I did.
(34:17):
The judge has enjoined Trump. That's the sort of word
you use when you almost went to law school. It's
a he's forbidden Trump from talking about himself and he
court personnel, their families, and a couple of other things.
And it's it was too close to me to you
(34:39):
can't say anything about the trial or infer or state
that it is a political political hatchet job. And again
I would have to have this specific wording in front
of me, But it struck me as is way overly broad,
because if you it's our most sacred constitutional right to
declare yourself innocent.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
Right. But like here, just play this short Trump Trump
clip here, Michael, that.
Speaker 4 (35:01):
Jury was picked so fast, Democrats, the area is mostly
all Democrat.
Speaker 5 (35:08):
Do you think of it as just a purely Democrat area.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
It's a very unfair situation. But you gotta admit, and
every trial I've ever heard of you don't have the
accused going on radio shows like he did. They're talking
about how the jury is biased and stacked, the judge
is a crook, etc.
Speaker 4 (35:25):
Etc. Right, Yeah, slip at the top. Your attorney would
have a heart attack. First of all, that clip was
innocent enough. It was edging closer toward impugning the jury
during the trial, which is a big no no.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
Again, it's it's not the.
Speaker 4 (35:44):
Heart of his telling Trump to shut up his gag order.
It's that it's a little broad, especially in the context
of a trial.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
That and I'm not a big Trump fan at all.
Speaker 4 (35:57):
I think is nakedly political, launched for political purposes to
influence the outcome of an election, and political speech is
the most protected speech we have in our society.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
So do you I don't know. This has been a
question since Trump came down the escalator. Is he playing
three dimensional chess or is he just shooting from the hip?
And I think it usually it's the latter, But is
he trying to push this far enough to make it
a constitutional question, and you know all the benefit might
accrue to him.
Speaker 4 (36:30):
Uh well, I was going to say no. I just
don't think he's able to shut up even when he
needs to. But in this case, I don't know. This
is a tough one. He can speak out after the trial,
but if you think you're getting railroaded, you have the
right to say I'm getting railroaded.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
Armstrong and Getty
From the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio at the George Washington
Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty Armstrong and Getty Show, Ali, can.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
You please say free Palstine one time? Why did you
kill that lady? You kill that lady and got no
jail time. No jail time, Aleck, no jail time, Alex.
You'll put it innocent people in jail. Alec Baldwin, Free Palestine, Alec,
just one time and I'll leave you alone.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
I'll leave you alone. I swear, just saferee.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Palestine one time, one time, one time, one time.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Alex. You know he is a criminal. He know he's
a criminal. I don't know. That was just a free
palace down recording my thing. That was a fourteen second clip, Uh,
Alec Baldwin being confronted in like a coffee shop by
a nut job and he ended up slapping the phone
out of her hand. So it became one of those
(01:03):
Alec Baldwin's an angry person things, And usually I think
Alec Baldwin's in the wrong. He's definitely in the right
on this. I thought he was. He's in enough trouble
with the whole did I murder that woman? Thing? To
get into it. But he was asking the coffee show.
He asked the coffee shop employee, will you call the police?
Will you do something about this? Will you do something?
(01:24):
He finally just tried to get out of there. Yeah. Yeah,
but I wanted him to say, you know something about Palestine.
Speaker 4 (01:31):
He's half a dozen kinds of jackass, but he doesn't.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Nobody deserves that sort of treatment.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
No, No, So a couple of caveats before I launch
into my disappointment with the Supreme Court hearing yesterday about
the Grant's Pass ruling the infamous horrible. You can't criminalize
homelessness because it's a status. You can't enforce any laws
about bums and junkies because they're poor, homeless people.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
So here are my two caveats.
Speaker 4 (02:02):
Number one, it's difficult to discern from the oral arguments
and the questioning which way the justices are going.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Everybody does it anyway.
Speaker 4 (02:11):
I'm about to do it to some extent, but it's
hard because sometimes they have the opposite point of view
that you're just trying to figure out if there's a
weakness in their argument, so they'll they'll steal man, as
they say, the opposing side to explore it, which is
a cool thing about the Supreme Court. Second thing is
I did not listen to all of it. I'm just
(02:32):
taking excerpts as written. But having said that, Scotis Blog,
which is obviously a blog about the Supreme Court and
hearings and cases and the rest of it and the decisions,
has a whole bunch of different quotes from a whole
bunch of different justices, and they shock me in well
(02:53):
in a way which I'll explain after I give you
some examples. Representing the city, the lawyer told the justices
that grants passed like cities nationwide, relies on camping laws
to protect its public spaces. And the ruling which said
homeless you can't public you can't punish homelessness. That's a status.
You can publish specific acts, but you can't punish homelessness
(03:19):
unless every single person has been offered a bed. There's
a bed for every single quote unquote homeless person. So
before I was tempted to jump into my conclusion. But
but the liberal justices predictively were like, how can you
punish someone for not having a home or sleeping under
a blanket? What if a baby falls asleep Are you
(03:41):
going to write a ticket to the sleeping baby, because
that's the same activity as the.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Person sleeping in the park.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Justice Kavanaugh was at least initially dubious, writes Scotus Blog,
that reversing the Ninth Circuit's decision and allowing the city
to enforce its ordinances would make a difference in addressing
the homelessness problem. How would your rule help, he asked,
if there are not enough beds for people experiencing homelessness.
He returned to this point a few minutes later, asking
the city attorney how sending people to jail for violating
(04:10):
the city's ordinances would help to address the homelessness problem
if there are still no beds available when they get out.
So many of the conservative justices questions were, how would
this help the homeless problem?
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Right? Yeah?
Speaker 5 (04:25):
You?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Oh, no, yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
While you can say that it's difficult to determine from
the questions the way they're going, the fact that he
used the term experiencing homelessness worries me a lot.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
That was a characterization of what he said that was
in Scotus Blog. But no, the angler, I want to
make sure anybody, anybody who says experiencing homelessness.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
You know where they are on this subject. But oh, yeah,
I agree completely.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
Yeah, but I want everybody to be clear on what
I'm trying to tell you. They approach the idea of
Grant's Pass or other cities taking junkie camps off of
school grounds, out of city parks, off of city properties,
and address that not as a civil order question, a
(05:15):
maintaining law in order and quality of living. They think
asking how will this help the homelessness problem?
Speaker 3 (05:22):
Right, it's the same thing I brought up in the
city council meeting in which people yelled at me and
then clicked their fingers. How about we look at the
taxpayer in this situation. Why is I, as a taxpayer
who paid for this park, can't bring my kids to
the park because there's a whole bunch of grown men
that are high sleeping in the park. I mean, so
Justice Kavanaugh or whoever other justices are only thinking about
(05:45):
the homeless person and not the taxpayer who wants walk
down the street or use the park or whatever.
Speaker 4 (05:51):
You can't park, you can't camp rather in the park.
There's no overnight camping in the park, period. Get out
the question. There is not whether that's helping the homelessness situation.
The question is whether that's a legitimate exercise of a
city or a county's power to regulate activity.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Right, or the guy lying on the sidewalk so that
you gotta walk around him or over him to get
into the business. The business owner has a real stake
in that. But if you're only gonna worry about, well,
where is that guy's supposed to go? All right, Well,
then you've got a certain view of things.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Just as Catanji Brown Jackson, who had shred the constitution today,
told the city attorney that Robinson was not a helpful.
Speaker 3 (06:34):
Oh that's a different thing.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
But it's in cruel and unusual to punish people for
acts like sleeping. The constitute basic human needs. Are you
going to punish people for breathing in public?
Speaker 3 (06:44):
Next? Wow?
Speaker 4 (06:47):
By contrast, Clarence Thomas emphasized that the law at issue
in the previous decision barred both the use of drugs
and being addiction addicted to drugs. Do the city's ordinances,
Thomas asked, make it a crime to be homeless? They
do not, Evangelist grants pass attorney responded, but other justices
suggested it was more difficult to draw the line between
(07:07):
status and conduct. Chief Justice John Roberts, for example, seem
to suggest that because someone who is homeless can instantly
become not homeless, homelessness is not a status, so that's good.
Justice Samuel Alito indicated that although status is different from conduct,
there are some instances of conduct that are closely tied
to the status. If a homelessness is divined as simply
(07:27):
lacking place to stay in a particular night, they amount
to the same thing.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
So I'm not smart enough to wrap my head around
this whole status thing, I guess. But are they arguing
towards there's a right to housing? That seems like where
it's going that it's a human right of some sort
that the taxpayers are required to fulfill.
Speaker 4 (07:50):
Yes, well, yeah, that's definitely something that's in the air.
Justice Amy Cony Barrett asked the uh pro Bums people
whether it would violate the Eighth Amendment for the city
to enforce its laws in other scenarios involving basic human
needs like eating or using the bathroom. Could the city
find arrest people who are homeless for stealing food or
(08:11):
urinating or defecating in public you. Cochrane told Barrett that
stealing food is quote not part of the definition of homelessness,
and it's also not a universal attribute like sleeping or breathing.
She shared Barrett that public urination and defication would not
violate the Eighth Amendment under the challenger's theory. Here is
the problem. This is and anybody who lives in a
blue state that's overrun with these junkie camps knows you.
(08:33):
They can't enforce basic laws because these junkies don't respond
to tickets, they don't show up to court.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
They don't pay fines.
Speaker 4 (08:44):
You can't have giant junkie camps and lawfulness. The two
don't work side by side, partly because the cops and
the prosecutors and the cities are completely flummoxed as to
what they can enforce in what they can't. They are
completely confers used. And I go back to this email
we shared earlier. This guy in the suburban LA got
(09:07):
addicted to meth. He chooses to live on the streets
because he can be high all day without any guilt.
He's not with his family anymore, he doesn't work anymore.
He just lays around and does drugs in his junkie camp. Okay, hey,
Supreme Court Justices, that's a huge percentage of the so
called homeless, a huge percentage.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
What about them?
Speaker 4 (09:30):
What do we have to have junkies in our town squares,
outside our schools, hospitals, whatever? Do we have to have
junkie camps because of your concern that homelessness is a
status and not an act or whatever?
Speaker 3 (09:47):
The hell? Can we get rid of the junkie camps?
Justice Roberts, That's what we're asking, Hey, Katie, what was
that a chant that you brought us during the news
that people were saying outside the courtroom?
Speaker 4 (10:02):
House keys not handcuffs. House keys not handcuffs for what junkies?
What are they gonna do with house keys? Oh, they're
gonna do drugs in a house now until they ruin it.
And even if you're gonna have the most charitable view,
even if it is the what everybody portrays is all homeless,
(10:23):
perfect scenario of it's a hard working family that follows
all the rules and it is just one medical emergency
that caused them to be homeless.
Speaker 3 (10:33):
Even if it's that crowd, which has got to be
like zero point zero zero one percent of the homeless,
even though it's portrayed as everybody even for that crowd. Okay,
house keys not handcuffs. Who's going to provide the house?
Speaker 5 (10:45):
How?
Speaker 4 (10:46):
I mean, how's this gonna happen? So a couple more
questions and answers. I thought we're interesting. Roberts said, Hey,
what if if there's if the town right next door
has a shelter that has many many vacant, is there
still a right to camp in the park in grants Pass?
Speaker 3 (11:03):
What if a police officer offered people who.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
Are homeless in Grants Pass a rise to a shelter
that's thirty miles away, do they still have to permit
junkie camps in the park.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
He didn't phrase it that way.
Speaker 4 (11:12):
He also asked how many police officers would implement such
a rule on a day to day basis. What if
there's a question about whether shelter beds are indeed available,
and if so, how many? What if a shelter won't
allow people who are homeless to bring their dogs or
people with mental health issues? And the attorney who wants
bums and junkie camps to stay said, well, yeah, the
court does face quote line drawing problems.
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Line drawing problems. Oh boy, I got a comment about that.
But first we need to tell you about simply Safe.
Maybe you live in one of these cities that's overrun
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break into homes in your backyard and whatnot. Maybe it'd
be a good idea to have some of these Simply
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less than a dollar a day. You can get fast
(11:53):
emergency response and dispatcher needed at most. But more importantly,
you know you could see what's happening in and around
your property.
Speaker 4 (12:00):
The system blankets your hold home and protection and has
sensors to detect break ins, plus fires, floods, and more
whatever threatens you. Plus a variety of indoor and outdoor
cameras Jack mentioned to keep watch over your property day
and night. No contract, sixty day money back guarantee. Oh
my gosh, no long term contract.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
Yep, that's right. Wow. That to me, that is the
proof that they believe you're gonna like it. No contract,
You're not locked in at all. Like a lot of
these systems.
Speaker 4 (12:24):
Simply Safe has given so many folks peace of mind.
We want you to have a to get twenty percent
off any new simply Safe system when you sign up
for fast protect monitoring. Just visit simplysafe dot com slash Armstrong.
That's simply safe dot com slash Armstrong. There's no safe
like simply Safe. Well, I hope we're misinterpreting the questions
because I found that a little depressing. The questions from
(12:46):
the Supreme Court yesterday. When was the last time a
Supreme Court justice had to deal with bums and junkies?
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Spent forty years I read yesterday, since there was a
serious homeless case before the Supreme Court.
Speaker 4 (13:00):
Yeah, I'll be severely disappointed if this goes the wrong way.
I mean, the trend toward lawlessness is already terrible. Yeah,
I'm holding my breath. I'll do a little more reading
about the testimony. I don't want to leave everybody with
a super pessimistic feel about this, but man, I was disappointed.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
What about this world's first AI beauty pageant? Among other
things we can talk about stay with us.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Armstrong, Andy.
Speaker 4 (13:29):
Look trials are a lot of procedurals and side conferences
and sidebars and.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
What's exhibit thirty seven to two A And you're.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
Not out of order.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
This whole card is out of it. Look, the one
person who's had the most normal reaction to the trial
so far is Donald Trump. Donald Trump fell asleep on
multiple days during his criminal trial, as he should. I mean,
he's been up since two am, range tweeting he needs
his anger sleep. Yeah. Trump fell sleep a number of
(14:02):
times yesterday, according to all reporters. So Hm during the
opening arguments. That would surprise me of something that could
land me in jail? Yeah, I think I'd be awake
for that. You get to like month two and they're
getting into some intricacies of law that I don't understand.
Speaker 4 (14:22):
Maybe, but then there's the unfortunately named mister Pecker and
his testimony as well.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
So we had this story earlier about one in five
people get cold feet on their wedding day and consider
backing out. I guess, I guess that's what cold feet is.
So got this text from a front We ask anybody
else did anybody do that? Did anybody? And I wondered,
(14:50):
of the one in five, how many wish they had
backed out but probably didn't. And I got a text
from a friend of mine I was at this wedding.
He said, you know I'm not one in five my
friend drove me to the church and said, we can
just keep going to California, which is where he lived
at the time. Even the priest made a comment to him,
(15:10):
everybody who was telling him it was a mistake to
get married. I remember this. He was living with me
at the time when he got married to this person,
and it was a very short marriage. But he nearly
backed out, but did not. I think because of the momentum.
The momentum of a wedding is a pretty I had
some serious momentum. Oh yeah, especially well for everybody. Yeah,
to stand in front of that glacier and think, you know,
(15:33):
the glacier of everybody traveled here and got dressed in
rented suits and bridesmaid dresses, and you've already got the
honeymoon planned and probably deciding where to live and all this.
You got to stand in front of that glacier and say, nah,
change my mind. WHOA. On the other hand, if it
is a mistake, better then than later. Got this note
(15:53):
from Alnonymous. I was with my uncle waiting for guests
before his wedding. He asked me, does anybody back out
at this point? And I said, really, he uncomfortably replied,
just joking. Divorced six months later. Oh yeah, this this
buddy of mine, and I was at this wedding, like
everybody fought, what is why are you doing this? This
(16:14):
is terrible? He knew it was terrible. Everybody including him
knew it was a terrible idea. But it happened anyway.
The momentum, the momentum exactly. Oh yes, Michael was the
food good at least I don't remember. That's a long
time ago. That's a tough one. Oh what an awful
feeling that must be. Oh I can't imagine. Yeah, yeah, terrible.
(16:37):
You roll your eyes every time I bring up the
AI beauty.
Speaker 4 (16:39):
Pageant, Yes I do, And there I go again, because.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
It's justice, I'd go again. It's clickbait for horny dudes.
That's that's all. It is the world's first artificial intelligence
generated beauty pageant. I guess I could have one today
if I wanted to write, that's well problems.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
Well, yes, real beauty pageants are stupid, So what's an
AI beauty pageant?
Speaker 3 (17:08):
The judges will examine the AI pageants beauty and pick
a winner. The winners will be announced on May tenth
for whose.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
Gratification to accomplish? What's what's gained here? This is idiotic.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
I would say this is idiotic, but I would say
the whole You need a hot woman on the cover
of your I guess I'm gonna say magazine. But that
didn't make sense in the front thing of your website
wearing jeans and a tank top for some reason. Why avogizing?
Why would you ever pay a model a dollar? Right
(17:40):
in the modern world, It's got to be the end
of everybody but your top tier models where you learn
their names. It's got to be the end of all
those other hot women, doesn't it. Man.
Speaker 4 (17:50):
I think it's the end of the top tier as well.
Speaker 3 (17:53):
Okay, maybe all of them, but certainly that bottom ninety
eight percent of models, you know, all the hot women
that travel to LA over the years open, that's got
to be the end of that. Yeah, Because if you
haven't looked at the state of the art and AI
this is photo realistic. They're indistinguishable from real human beings.
If you want to hop blonde chick holding a corps light,
you don't need to hire somebody, No, no, certainly not
(18:15):
put up with their crap. Well, even if there's no
crap to put up with pay or anything else, some
really interesting science on how the brain works.
Speaker 4 (18:23):
Then back into the news of the day, of course,
hope you can hang around Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
Yo yo yo. We got to talk a little bit about.
Speaker 5 (18:42):
Uh Israel Hamas a little bit later. Just looking like
Israel's getting ready for their big invasion of southern Gaza,
which is going to reignite this story, not that it's
not ignited right now with the protest and college campuses
all across the country.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Keep the Musa going, Michael, and for that matter.
Speaker 4 (19:02):
The students who are shouting up with Hamas and October
seventh was glorious. We need to talk about that milicency
on our campuses. But the reason we're coming back with
these jazz stylings, one pad Metheeni, it's because we've got
a couple of really interesting things about the way the
brain works, and one of them.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
Involved a study of jazz guitarists. Not a padam Affeni guy,
I'm a jazz officionado. He's not my cup of team.
I don't know like jazz music. Pretty much between nineteen
fifty seven and nineteen sixty three, anything out of the
side of that little window is not with jazz I
want to hear.
Speaker 4 (19:39):
Ye's another fascinating look into Jack's character Jazz belligerents. Anyway,
so this article is about I'm sorry. The study is
about the idea of flow or being in the zone,
and as allegedly a musician, I get it completely. They
(20:02):
do get into some other fields where you're gonna be
flowing or in the zone. Maybe you're a like expert
executive or business person and the deal's coming together fast
and it's going really great.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Maybe if you're a surgeon.
Speaker 4 (20:19):
I'd imagine in every field you can imagine for yourself
when things are going great, how that feels, and they're
trying to figure out the neuroscience of that.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Wow. So I don't have any of those examples you have,
but I do have. I do get into modes like
I had one over the weekend where I just feel
like I'm on fire with like I'm I'm taking in information,
I'm reading a book, I was practicing the piano. It's
just like my mind is just working so well, and
I think, why can't I hold on to this? And
then it goes back to it's maple syrup usual pace.
(20:52):
But that happens as my as my maple syrup pace.
Speaker 4 (20:56):
I love that, as my buddy Brian the umpire has
said to me more than once breaking necks in cash
and checks.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Yeah, I was in that zone for like, I don't know,
eight hours over the weekend. Then it went away again.
So anyway, this I think it was a couple. But
they're both neuroscientists.
Speaker 4 (21:12):
They designed a study to test the two completing theories
conflicting theories of flow. One theory proposes that flow is
a state of hypertensive intensive hyper.
Speaker 3 (21:25):
Focus, I should say, on a task.
Speaker 4 (21:28):
The other theory hypothesizes that flow involves relaxing ones focus
or conscious control. And again, as an alleged musician, I
could have told you which one was correct right there.
But anyway, they recruited thirty two jazz guitarists from Happy
to Be the Philadelphia area.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
It doesn't matter.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
Their level of experience ranged from novice to veteran, as
qualified with the number of public performances they'd given that
sort of thing. They had some heavy weights and also
some pretty decent you know. Arding jazz guitars, the researchers
place these funny looking electrode caps on their heads.
Speaker 3 (22:04):
There's like shower.
Speaker 4 (22:05):
Caps or the old swimming caps that women wear full
of electrodes to record their EEG brain waves. While they
improvised the chord sequences and rhythms that were provided to them.
They played jazz, they improvised here's the answer, and let
me scroll back up again. In order to achieve flow,
(22:27):
the person must first develop a strong foundation of expertise
in their craft. There it is as the Great Charlie Parker,
the jazz great, is said to have advised, you've got
to learn your instrument.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
Then you practice, practice, practice.
Speaker 4 (22:46):
And then when you finally get up there on the bandstand,
forget all that and just wail. And that's exactly what
the study found. All right, but you have to you
have to focus all that prior to that. So you
have to have they oh yeah, okay. You have to
have the building blocks of whatever it is we're doing here.
If you're ever going to get into the flow, you
(23:07):
can't be faking it. The performance is that the musicians
self rated as high in flow were also judged by
the outside experts as more creative and better. Furthermore, the
most experienced musicians rated themselves as being flow more than
the novices, suggesting that experience is a precondition for flow.
Their brain activity revealed why. And I could get into
(23:28):
the actual neuropsychology of it, that the parts of the
brain that lit up and the rest of it.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
And even for the people that are that good at it,
you know, basketball player, jazz musician, whatever it is we're
talking about here, they have nights where it's better than others,
or days when it's better than others. I wonder what
that's all about too. Maybe you're just better at letting
go and not focusing.
Speaker 4 (23:50):
Yeah, yeah, that's an interesting question.
Speaker 3 (23:52):
I know. Charlie Parker himself would walk on the bandstand
sometimes and say, the sap is flowing tonight. Boys, you
always talking a British accent for some reason, but like
you just the sap is flowing tonight. You just like
the flow was happening.
Speaker 4 (24:04):
I guess, yeah, yeah, interesting. And you know, early in
anybody's radio career, just asn't aside, various companies and bosses
try to bring in consultants to help you do your job.
Jack and I have always maintained that, aside from avoiding
certain pitfalls, if you have the the entertainment gene. If
(24:26):
you're serious about what you're doing, you're gonna be fine.
And if you don't, there's no army of consultants that
can make you interesting. Having said that occasionally, and I
see this through the lens of music again. If you
go to a musician and you say, hey, do whatever
you want, be cool, just don't play any bad notes,
(24:48):
they're ruined. Forget it, it's overright' if you bring it
back to your conscious mind, like Charlie Parker was talking about,
get up there on the bandstand and just wail. If
you go back to you If you have to go
back to your conscious mind when you're trying to create,
you're doomed.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
It'll never work. I wonder. I wonder if that has
anything to do with the number of people that with music,
particularly play high, if that helps them interesting?
Speaker 4 (25:18):
Could be sports psychology is a similar I'm sorry, and
do you want to spend more time getting high? There?
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Uh?
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Charlie Parker. Now I hate to say that because I
don't want to encourage and most of the I read
a lot about a lot of musicians like you do.
But most of your drug addict musicians, if they ever
got sober say they played better sober than they did high.
Almost all of them, I think, Eric, Eric Clapton, TV Ravaughan.
I can think lots of them who said they played
better high. John Coltrane after he kicked heroin. But so,
(25:46):
it's not like the way to get good, but I
could see how it would help you not focus too much.
Speaker 4 (25:51):
Well, yeah, absolutely, It's like saying you can go from
New York to Washington, d C.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
Via Des Moines. It's not a good way to get there,
but you'll get there. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:04):
I had one more point I wanted to make on that.
What the heck was it?
Speaker 3 (26:07):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (26:07):
Sports psychology is very much the same. You practice your
mechanics over and over and over again. Then whether it's
golf for shooting a free throw or throwing a football,
when you're on the field, you forget about mechanics completely
and just focus on target.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
You have to, And I couldn't do that at all.
Speaker 4 (26:24):
Yeah, well you got to practice relentlessly anyway. Second thing
I wanted to bring to your attention neurologically speaking, that
was all interesting and I think we can all appreciate
it in our own fields, but this is actually useful
working with your hands, they found is good for your brain.
And they talk about the complexity of the hand the
more if you think about human hands, they have the
(26:46):
power to kill and the power to cradle a baby,
or the gentleness to cradle a baby. You can play
a musical instrument, you can strip a hard boiled egg
without damaging the egg. Within incredible power and incredible grace
and gentleness and dexterousness in our hands. And experts believe
(27:07):
that our shift away as human beings in the modern
world from complex hand activities is having consequences for how
we think and feel. We're doing a lot less hands
on things than we used to. Everything is made for us,
for instance.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
Well, we've talked a lot about how grip strength has
gone down so much generation by generation.
Speaker 4 (27:29):
Yeah, I wonder if that has a neurological aspect. But
this professor of behavioral neuroscience at the University of Richmond
in Virginia says, when you look at the brain's real estate,
how it's divided up, and where its resources are invested,
a huge portion of it is devoted to movement, and
especially to voluntary movement of the hands. And she says
(27:49):
she's interested in the connection between the effort we put
into something and the reward we get from it. And
she believes working with our hands might be uniquely gratifying
and good for our brains. And they've done some animal studies.
She's seen some similarities and studies on people. Animals with hands,
(28:09):
rats using their paws to dig up food had healthier
stress hormone profiles.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
You hate to have your rats all stressed out, you know,
I'm telling you it's rough out there anyway. Oh.
Speaker 4 (28:26):
She sees similarities and studies on people that have found
a whole range of hands on activities such as knitting, gardening,
even coloring in a coloring book are associated with cognitive
and emotional benefits, including improvements in memory and attention, as
well as reductions and anxiety and depression syndromes I'm sorry, symptoms.
Speaker 3 (28:45):
I wonder if playing video games and everything that's going
on with the hands there is a benefit then interesting example, Huh.
Speaker 4 (28:56):
We'll post this whole thing at armstrong eggetty dot com
under hot. There's more to it. It's pretty interesting. Perhaps
you'd like to read further, but I'm going to keep
that in mind. I'm going to uh to make sure
I spend some time every day doing something with my hands.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
I play guitar every day, so there's that. But I
am working on Box Batch. I call him Batch. Batch
is prelude in C major, which I'm I've got half memorized.
And uh, that has become my obsession, Johnny Batch on
the panano on the piano. Yeah, with any free time.
(29:33):
And uh, I feel like that's doing something for me, help,
that's helping me somehow. I feel like it's like making
me happier somehow. And I don't wire that it's it's
not a particularly difficult piece, but but I really feel
like it's been benefiting me, like in some way, not
just musically. Uh, since I got into it, and I
(29:56):
don't know, I can't even describe.
Speaker 4 (29:57):
It well as a guy who can't play Mary, you
had a little lamb. If you gave me three tries,
it's good enough. Yes, it seems self evident, like you
don't even have to make the case. Of course that
would do your brain good and bring you happy chemical.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Well, like I was practicing it and getting further into
it and more of it memorized and everything like that
over the weekend, and every time I walked by the
piano and I had two minutes i'd sit down and
run through part of it or whatever, and I just
I thought, this, Why is this making me so happy?
Why am I getting so much juice mental juice out
of this? And I don't know, someone got to figure
out there. Maybe I don't know, shuts off your brain
(30:36):
from thinking of other things or the stuff you were
just talking about with your hands. I don't know.
Speaker 4 (30:40):
Yeah, maybe that's why I like trying to hit faraways
and grains and make putts so much, although I rarely do.
All right, as long as you're talking about one more
quick thought. According to this neuroscientist, with depression, people experienced
something called learned helplessness, where they feel like it doesn't
matter what they do, nothing ever works. She believes that
working with one's hands is stimulating the brain. It could
(31:01):
even help counteract this learned helplessness quote. When you put
an effort and you can see the product of that,
like a scarf you needed, I think that builds up
a sense of accomplishment and control.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
Over your world. Maybe that's it, sense of accomplishment and
control over your world. I'm doing something, I'm building something,
I'm accomplishing something very concrete, like really easy to identify. Now,
maybe that's well.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
Plus the enormous amount of brain real estate that's devoted
to your hands, that means something.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
Don't let it just sit there, all right, enough said,
I'll damned three big votes in the Senate probably today,
Ukraine AID. Well, actually four, I guess. But we got
the Ukraine aid, we got the Israel aid, we got
the Taiwan stuff, and we got the TikTok bill, all
going to be voted on, and I hope we know
(31:50):
which direction they're going to go. Well, we'll talk more about
that at some point and other stuff. So stay here.
Speaker 6 (32:01):
Biden may need support wherever he can get it. That
survey also showing interest in the upcoming election is at
its lowest point since twenty twelve, and though Biden has
narrowed Trump's lead from five points to two, he's still
trailing on the issues like inflation by twenty two points.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
That is interesting that interest in the presidential election is
the lowest it's ben since it was Obama Romney, which
was not a hot election to follow. Why just same
candidates worn out by politics, the elections too long, all
those things.
Speaker 4 (32:37):
I just said, I suppose, yes, yes, and yes. The
discouragements over the choices. I mean, if you say, all right,
we can either go to the most elite steakhouse in
the city tonight or the best Chicago style pizza according
to a national poll, I'm excited about dinner if it's
Denny's or Perkins substantially less.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
So we got a question for you, and you almost
went to law school, So this is good news. Did
when you even took tests? When your daughter graduates from
law school, you'll be able to call her up quickly
when we have these questions and then maybe she can
answer them. But because she's gonna actually go to law school.
But so we're talking about so Trump's in court today
(33:19):
and the judge is going to decide whether or not
Trump violated his gag order. And then if you have
either get warned or fined or jailed. They're not going
to jail him. I don't can you find a billionaire
and get anywhere and probably not probably warn him if anything.
But you said it was an interesting constitutional question, and
(33:40):
it violates it's a first Amendment issue, And we got
a text saying, how is this a first amendment? Is
amendment issue? Congress shall make no law, et cetera, et cetera.
In what way is this a First Amendment issue? Telling
Trump he can't talk? Oh my gosh, that's seriously what's
the text?
Speaker 4 (33:56):
Yeah, yeah, No, I'm talking to the writer, not you.
The government silencing a person from expressing their opinion. You're asking,
how is that a First Amendment issue? Perhaps I'm missing
an angle. The problem is, and I don't have the
specific wording in front of me. I wish I did.
(34:17):
The judge has enjoined Trump. That's the sort of word
you use when you almost went to law school. It's
a he's forbidden Trump from talking about himself and he
court personnel, their families, and a couple of other things.
And it's it was too close to me to you
(34:39):
can't say anything about the trial or infer or state
that it is a political political hatchet job. And again
I would have to have this specific wording in front
of me, But it struck me as is way overly broad,
because if you it's our most sacred constitutional right to
declare yourself innocent.
Speaker 3 (34:57):
Right. But like here, just play this short Trump Trump
clip here, Michael, that.
Speaker 4 (35:01):
Jury was picked so fast, Democrats, the area is mostly
all Democrat.
Speaker 5 (35:08):
Do you think of it as just a purely Democrat area.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
It's a very unfair situation. But you gotta admit, and
every trial I've ever heard of you don't have the
accused going on radio shows like he did. They're talking
about how the jury is biased and stacked, the judge
is a crook, etc.
Speaker 4 (35:25):
Etc. Right, Yeah, slip at the top. Your attorney would
have a heart attack. First of all, that clip was
innocent enough. It was edging closer toward impugning the jury
during the trial, which is a big no no.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
Again, it's it's not the.
Speaker 4 (35:44):
Heart of his telling Trump to shut up his gag order.
It's that it's a little broad, especially in the context
of a trial.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
That and I'm not a big Trump fan at all.
Speaker 4 (35:57):
I think is nakedly political, launched for political purposes to
influence the outcome of an election, and political speech is
the most protected speech we have in our society.
Speaker 3 (36:09):
So do you I don't know. This has been a
question since Trump came down the escalator. Is he playing
three dimensional chess or is he just shooting from the hip?
And I think it usually it's the latter, But is
he trying to push this far enough to make it
a constitutional question, and you know all the benefit might
accrue to him.
Speaker 4 (36:30):
Uh well, I was going to say no. I just
don't think he's able to shut up even when he
needs to. But in this case, I don't know. This
is a tough one. He can speak out after the trial,
but if you think you're getting railroaded, you have the
right to say I'm getting railroaded.
Speaker 1 (36:49):
Armstrong and Getty
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