April 2, 2025 • 36 mins
Hour 2 of A&G features...
- Should human life be optimized through genetic manipulation?
- Judges race in Wisconsin
- Liberation Day & the "gang of 500"
- Another Beatles movie & wife of doctor who tried to kill her speaks out
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):
Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio, the George
Washington Broadcast Center.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty, I'm Strong and Jetty and
now he Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
April second, twenty twenty five will go down is one
of the most important days in modern American history.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
X todent.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
The President will pick one of two pads, a new
flat twenty percent tari funnel imports, or new tariffs that
vary and match the tariffs other countries have in place.
Speaker 4 (00:39):
Right now, you have to trust the President's instincts on
the economy.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
So there you go. It is Liberation Day.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
We've got more on that coming up this hour, some
of the talking points from the administration, some reaction from
economists and that sort of thing, and we'll get into that.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
And some information on how countries evade tariffs. That makes
me wonder if you can ever be successful except with
a blanket tariff.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
So I came across this in the New York Times.
Thought it was dang good. I was expecting one thing,
got another thing. Should human life be Optimized? Was a
headline and an opinion piece about the advances in genetic testing. Yeah, Katie,
you should be thinking about this because this exists, and
I know you and your husband are going to try
to get pregnant. Advances in genetic testing and artificial intelligence
(01:36):
are changing what's possible for those undergoing IVF Are we
ready for the future of fertility? Asking the question how
much of what your baby is going to be like?
Do you want to choose? And the opinion piece is
by a woman who was given the choice of determining
whether she wanted a boy or a girl, and she
and her husband decided, we we got a girl. We'd
(01:58):
kind of like to have a girl, but it just
doesn't feel right to choose that, so they didn't. Yeah,
but then they have. She's done more research on this
found out that we already can We're very soon going
to be able to choose things like taller, smarter, happier
in addition to male or female. And isn't that obviously
(02:21):
a recipe for disaster for hman kind? Yes, yes, it is, Katie.
Any thoughts you want to leap in with now or well?
I think that's horrifying.
Speaker 5 (02:30):
I mean, when I discussed that I was going to
be doing the genetic testing, it's simply to make sure
that my child doesn't have my hereditary disease that is
different primarily for health, all this other stuff that's in
God's hands.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Yeah, and oh my gosh, not it's in the hands
of the polygenic corporation. You know, this was the province
of North Korea and China only a few years ago,
and everybody else reacted, most sane people, with horror.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
But here it is among us as predicted.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
There, you can hold technology back a little bit temporarily,
but it will come a colin.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
All right, it's clearly a bad idea. I mean, I
don't even need to know much about it. It's clearly
a bad idea. But China's gonna do it. They'll probably
do it exclusively. They'll improbably against the law to have
a kid where it's not chosen to be taller, stronger, faster, whatever, smarter. Right,
nobody would choose a kid who was almost certainly hyperactive
(03:30):
and born annoyed because you mentioned happier blah blah blah. No,
you're happy as to bringing to it. I never would
have been born, and I'm I'm fairly fond of me.
You don't become the person you're going to become in
(03:51):
a vacuum. It's the often the most compassionate people are
people who who come from violence.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
I just I don't know. Oh this is terrible. Well,
listen to this, you'll look the oil of this.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Twenty twenty two survey of Americans found that four and
ten said they would use this technology if it would
increase the chances of their child getting into a top college.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
You know, there are days I think limited life span
is a blessing.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
Man. You're gonna muck around with nature.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
With under because of the goal of getting your kid
into a top college whatever.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
The hell that means.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
Yikes, so they can be more thoroughly indoctrinated into Marxism.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
This sounds like a recipe for disaster. Yeah it really,
it really does.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
This person said, for me, selecting sex felt too overwhelming
of a choice and something we shouldn't do, so they didn't.
But quotes of the various studies that lots of people
would choose Oh, this will make my kid more likely
to be happy.
Speaker 4 (04:59):
Yeah, I get that, but it's misplaced.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
But every writer, musician, that's all born out of a
certain level of unhappiness, all of it.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Well, and a lot.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
Of the great civil rights leaders or leaders of overthrowing
monarchies or cruel dictatorships in the name of democracy. They've
been people who were agitated. They're angry, they weren't mellow
as a summer's day.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
The last line of this being, if this is the
future of making babies, perhaps it's one we must confront collectively.
I don't know exactly what they mean by that, but
I would assume means by as a society, we ought
to decide do we want this, do we legally want
this or not? But God, we are the third biggest
country in the world, but we don't have many babies,
so we won't have that much impact on the world
(05:53):
baby in compared to well, China doesn't have babies either,
But will India do it? Probably India, China, Russia, the
North Korea obviously. Two thoughts One from Ed, a twenty
two year listener originally from the Hoe San Jose, now
a proud Oaki.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Live in Oklahoma.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
How about that I heard the segment where you guys
talking about procreation, procreation, the phones are simulating over population.
That may be why populations are dropping, reproductive rates, et cetera.
My only issue is that there are plenty of places
that are overpopulated and to continue to grow Mumbai, for example.
What seems to be more of a correlation is that
it's always lesser developed countries. My theory is that there's
(06:34):
a certain level of boredom required for proper procreation. If
advent of the smartphone is ensured that we are never bored,
there's limitless entertainment. Couple that with the fact that should
you feel amorous, it's effortless now to find more attractive
thing to you at any time instead of your beautiful
girlfriend or wife with no fear of rejection.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Born, He means, yeah, I proudly admit I am.
Speaker 4 (06:57):
I am like many scientists, not that I am one
really really intrigued by the question of why reproductive rates
fall the way they fall, and develop countries and.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Always really sure.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
I think it's a certain level of safety and comfort.
I don't know, if you're bored, but you're not struggling
lack of struggle.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Maybe that's just lack of struggle.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
That might be as a simple as it gets and
as true as it gets. Second thought, was it Mike
Judge who was the creative genius behind idiocracy?
Speaker 2 (07:27):
I think so.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
He of beaves and butt head and King of the
Hill fan. Remember, oh it is Katie Fikes. Yeah a Mike.
We don't know each other, big fan, big fan. Nice job,
you got to do ideocracy but a designer baby version,
or like everybody on earth is tall, good looking and pleasant.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
And exactly the same like you.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Yeah, exactly, And how that just unravels mankind and how
we completely lose the ability to innovate and change and
do the things we need by the prom.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Comes down to, Uh, It's like the other day when
I I might have been taking an antibiotic that I
didn't need, and I said to my doctor friend, well,
and that's you know, that's going to kill off mankind.
People take an antabotics they don't need. It's strengthing. And
he said, yeah, you're the one that's gonna tip the scales.
He said, I would go ahead and finish your antabotic.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Your doctor is far more sarcastic than mine. Well he's
not my doctor.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
He's a bad doctor, or my a friend of mine
who made that recommendation. And I think I could see
how you get that way as a couple. If they say,
you know, all we got to do is tweak this
here and your kid's going to be you know, above
average height and a pleasant demeanor and probably an IQ
of you know, over one ten or something like that,
and I would think, yeah, it's bad for humanity.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
But like China just had five thousand of these babies
in the last hour.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
My one kid isn't going to tip the scales for humanity, right,
And I'd like my kid to be tall, smart, and
good looking. Yeah, so that'd be a tough one to
say no to. Yeah, dang it.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Of course.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
You know if my kids that I'm a half wit troll,
so you know, i'd feel bad about it, be like
giving birth to.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
A ken dollar.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
I actually I'm more concerned about the happy than I
am the height and you know, hair color and sex.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
That the happy, well, what does that even mean?
Speaker 4 (09:22):
I don't know actually that I would love to hear
somebody explain what that gene is, how does it do it?
Speaker 2 (09:30):
And what do you mean by happy?
Speaker 1 (09:31):
What percentage of like people who have been really successful
in art, business, name the thing?
Speaker 2 (09:38):
We're pleasant? Happy people? My experience not that many. I
read a piece the other day.
Speaker 4 (09:45):
It was a little long and over serious, which makes sense,
I guess. Person talking about the concept of happiness and
what most people mean by that. And we've talked about
this fair amount, but and they said, no, what you're
looking for is to be satisfied. Do work that satisfies you, hard, tiring,
(10:08):
frustrating work that when it's done, gives you a sense
of fulfillment. That's what happiness is, cheerfulness, and the rest
of it is transitory and not worth chasing.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
I don't know, Thrown, I've.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Known some cheerful people that never got off their couch
and did anything. Uh yes, yeah, I don't know. It's
obviously a horrible road for mankind to go down. I
think the New York Times point was, we're going down
it whether we like it or not, similar to AI.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Right, we're going down to whether we like it or not? Right.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
I was gonna say, between that and AI were tombed,
does a human as as a species rather, we're.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
So freaking lily, it's fine.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Do you tune into that radio show where they talk
about the we're all doomed? Yeah, life is going to
hell and our best days are behind is that's a
good radio show.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
You shune in. It's fun.
Speaker 4 (10:56):
The one guy thinks beavers are going to take over
the planet and.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
The other guy gets extremely worked up over valkilmahberh.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Damn Right, Well, I tell you what.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Speaking of risks to mankind friends, how about the damn criminals?
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(11:28):
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guard outdoor protection and no long term contracts or cancellation fees.
About a dollar a day, that's pretty amazing.
Speaker 4 (11:37):
Yeah, read about the active guard protection when you when
you get to the website.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
It's amazing.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
And the fact that monitoring plans start affordably at around
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simply safe. Yeah, we'll get into some of the tariff
(12:06):
assessments from very smart people. Trump really rolling the dice
on this. You know, he's been.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Talking about this.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
We've played the clips going back to Letterman in the eighties.
He's been talking about this whole tariff thing. It's what
he believes, probably maybe more than anything else that you know.
I like hot women and tariffs. Those are the two
main beliefs. And he's gonna get to enact it and
see how it plays out and see if his theories
are correct.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
I guess yeah.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
How it's actually implemented is a big mystery right now,
as we've discussed between carve outs and Trump's unpredictability. But
it will be interesting to watch it unfold.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Say he's calling it Liberation Day. We got more on
that coming up later this hour. A Bible that was
given OJ Simpson by Robert Kardashian Senior recently sold at
auction for more than sixty five thousand dollars, even though
it's apparently missing the Fifth Commandment.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Twenty twenty five. Oh d jokes, Wow, And I'll permit
any shot at OJ, no matter the timing.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
But okay, so that judges race in Wisconsin. The Democrat
won by like ten points a couple of things.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
On that coming up.
Speaker 4 (13:27):
How your brain reacts to buying groceries can reveal your politics,
or you could just ask me no.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
You don't need to look at my grocery card. You
just ask me no.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
How your brain reacts to buying as fascinating stay with us.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Several things that I hate about this I have been
saying for years. One I your way into two into politics.
You follow all these off year elections and act like
they're a big deal to you. I just don't know
what your deal is. And statistically, it's just not true
that these are always indicators of what's going to happen,
and how much you wait two years to see what happens.
(14:06):
There's a referendum on Elon Trump, not Elon Muskin, Trump Musk,
and they're always covered from far away, and you don't
have any idea what the candidates were like. Maybe that
I don't know, But maybe the Republican was a horrible candidate.
Yeah I know that, because you aren't following the race
or watching the ads or listening to his arguments. But
there's also this Robbie suave from Reason, and we used
(14:27):
to have Robbie on a regular basis that libertarian magazine.
He said, My god, the liberal derangement over Elon Musk
is really something. The Wisconsin election was not a referendum
on this man. Republicans have a low propensity voter problem
in off year elections, and all the money in the
world can't buy elections. Democrats are always shocked to learn this. Yeah, yeah,
(14:48):
Republicans don't turn out for these kind of elections. Democrats do,
so Republicans way more likely to lose these elections. Always
just all things being equal, even without you into the
personalities of the candidates. And then this, I just I
can't keep saying this stuff every two years.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
It drives me nuts.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Or over four years, almost like gravity, after one party
wins the presidency, the other party has a great midterm.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Because of Elon Musk.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
So I didn't see that one common folks, I sucker
punched him. Just it just happens, almost always. It's just
part of the way it works for a variety of reasons.
And then acting like it's news or surprising or something.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Is odd, it's a narrative. It's clickbait.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
So I saw the headline about the Supreme Court deal
in Wisconsin and that the Republicans had won both special
elections in Florida for Congress Matt Gates seat and Mike
Waltz's seat.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
Is that Matt Gates and Mike walste but by.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
Slimmer margins then expected, And going up to the election,
the word was those are solid red day districts, but
Republicans and Democrats both agree they are at risk, and
so it was less than expected. It was the one
was a fourteen point win. What was expected? I mean,
(16:14):
if you ever win by fourteen points as a party,
you will not lose for many, many moons to come,
probably generations.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
So and as an off year special election which Republicans
don't show up for which they were not built that way.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
So there you go. This I do think is true.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
And this was true for Barack Obama who was in
a similar situation as Trump. Their unbelievable turnout powers and
culture personality thing doesn't transfer to other elections. They use
talk about that with Obama all the time. If he
was on the ticket, huge turnout, This that he wasn't,
So it wasn't it was him, not his policies more.
And Trump's the same way, right right, The whole coattails dideh.
Speaker 4 (16:54):
All right, well, the media is terrible at their jobs
and that's why they're going away too. So we've got
that wacky brain study about your groceries and your politics.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
It's actually kind of interesting, and some.
Speaker 4 (17:06):
Tariff talk, but not the sort of dry blah blah
blah you've been hearing everywhere else.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
We've got some interesting facts behind the facts.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
And here's my favorite fact of the day I've come
across that Will jam In in this last minute, excellent talk
about the fifties sixties being the golden era of everything
and everything's gone to crap and what are you going
to do to fix it?
Speaker 2 (17:26):
US home ownership.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Is one point off the highest it's ever been in
the fifties. It was well, nineteen fifty it was fifty
two percent, and nineteen sixty it was sixty one percent.
It's now sixty five, which is one point off the
highest it's ever been for US home ownership.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Yeah, and homes are three times the size on average.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
So does that not fit in with a lot of
the prevailing thinking about the world.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
Yeah, Yeah, crisis is the greatest marketing for clicks.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
I'd say, never ending crisis. Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
The tim I like best probably is the liberation of America.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
It's a liberation of this country.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
It's a liberation day. According to Donald Trump. No longer
are we going to be end of a boothil of Canada. Finally,
I am somewhat agnostic on this. I guess I don't
know how it's going to turn out. Here's ABC News
their version of the whole Liberation Day thing.
Speaker 6 (18:34):
The nation and the world bracing for what President Trump
calls Liberation Day. In less than twenty four hours, the
president set to reveal tariffs targeting America's trading partners, which
could upend the global economy.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Very reciprocal, so whatever they charge us, we charge them.
Speaker 6 (18:50):
The scale and targets of Trump's tariffs still unclear, but
economists warn the cost to American consumers could be steep.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Okay, here's CNN's version of the story.
Speaker 7 (19:00):
You have businesses, vendors, and suppliers having conversations about how
to share this tariff. One scenario is that suppliers pick
up the entire tab to try to keep business. The
second scenario is that they split it between the businesses
fifty to fifty, and the third scenario is splitting it
three ways between the supplier, the business, and the consumer,
(19:21):
and ultimately that is what most economists think is going
to happen.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Interesting, I hadn't heard many people say that, yeah, very
good bye, good market by market. So the White House
press spokesman said this from the podium yesterday about all this.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
They will be effective immediately, and the President has been
teasing this for quite some time as they're not going
to be wrong.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
It is going to work.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
And the President has a brilliant team of advisors who
have been studying these issues for decades, and we are
focused on restoring the Golden Age of America and making
America manufacturing superpower.
Speaker 4 (19:56):
I'm all for the Golden Age of America, restoring the
Golden Age of America. I don't particularly like bull crap
from my side either.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Well, that's why I brought up that homeownership thing. I mean,
just like, for instance, during that Golden Age, which is
often referred to as the Golden Age, the fifties, home
ownership was half half of Americans owned a home. Now
it's two thirds. So I mean that's just one statistic,
I realize, but it's not like we're clearly off the
rails right.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
That leads me to this.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
David Harsani, whose rights for The Examiner. He's one of
your conservative writers. He tweeted this out, which I thought
was pretty good.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Love David.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
It's something of a mystery why every modern president, Republican
or Democrat, every modern president feels impelled to remake the
most prosperous and dominant economy in the world.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
And it is true. Every administration comes in.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Taking charge of the most dominant economy for the last
how long we've been the number one economic power since
the nineteen o.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
One lot, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
Every president comes in and takes over the most dominant
economy in the world and thinks.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
We got to change everything.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Yeah, you know, different directions depending on whether you're a
Republican or Democrat.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
It's interesting though.
Speaker 4 (21:10):
Yeah, that's an oversimplification, But if you didn't oversimplify any
aspect of this, it would take six months to just
like lay the groundwork for what we're talking about. You
know what I mean, because I'm thinking about Okay, so
you have an evil communist superpower dumping cheap goods in
your country, putting your people out of work, and closing.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Down your factories. That's China.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
Now, China's not the whole tariff deal, far from it,
but it's a big, big trading partner.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
At the same time, you need.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
To be able to build ships and medicines and the
critical things of war if nothing else. Okay, that's absolutely true.
And there are countries that are they erect huge tariffs,
like Europe's tariffs on US cars and trucks five times
what our tariffs are for theirs until today, and where.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
That goes nobody knows.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
At the same time, as you pointed out, as soon
as you enact a teriff regime, the carve outs begin
and the political favors are granted, and the influential congressman
gets a carve out for the you know, the industry
that depends on you know, a sheet aluminum, you know,
because they got the big washing machine plant in his
(22:26):
district or whatever. And there are hundreds and hundred thousands
of those those carve outs. And then there are stories
about consumer goods that are expensive enough that we don't
want to be more expensive because we need them, that
become more expensive, and it is a tax on imports.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
Tariffs are a tax. So all of those things are true.
Speaker 4 (22:46):
Simultaneously, and every single thing I said was grossly oversimplified,
and that was about a fifth of what I should
have said.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
So it's just it's mind bendingly complicated. Well, I don't
think this is oversimplified. You tell me.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Practically every conservative economist is against tariffs.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Yeah, the vast majority. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Yeah, although there's and that is that has certainly been
the Republican parties platform forever my whole life.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Yes, that is true.
Speaker 4 (23:17):
I think there is a new stripe of conservative that's
emerging from these things, and that is a middle ground.
Not a globalism is great, Let's get a going chamber
of commerce. Whatever raises profits is good. You can you
can get you lose your job at the steel plant,
you can get a job as a computer programmer. You know,
(23:38):
you had that brand of Republicanism for a long time.
And I think there's a big part of conservative America
that's realizing, oh, y'all got crazy rich, and I can
get cheap undershirts from China, but my town has gone away.
So there's there's a new reality emerging. It's the post
post World War or two reality.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
Right. I don't know why I'm not, but for whatever reason,
I'm not concerned about this.
Speaker 4 (24:06):
Well, I think it's practically ungraspable, which I realized makes
us bad talk show hosts. We're supposed to be forcefully
advocating one view or another and saying that people who
don't adhere to it are idiots and communists.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
That is true on many topics.
Speaker 4 (24:21):
This one is just like I said, it is just
mind blowingly complicated. And it's like you're you've got a
machine that's got a thousand different settings, and if you tweak,
say forty one of those settings a little bit, you
get a different outcome than if you hadn't.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
So yikes. So I thought I would just pass this along.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Mark, don't get to my real China stuff. I'll get
to that in a minute, Sorry, Mark Hauprin. In his newsletter,
he always refers to the Gang of five hundred, and
what he's talking about is, I mean, that's a made
up number, but he's talking about just like the the
movers and shakers in DC, who are really they they're
the important people. They're the ones that run the country,
(25:05):
you know, certain house members, certain senators, certain permanent bureocracy,
just you know DC. So he uses that as kind
of like just to catch all of what the gang
of five hundred is thinking about this or that interesting.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
I'd imagine it's giant lobbyists as well, and that right
sort of folks absolutely.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Keeping in mind what you just said, which is certainly
true that a lot of these people really benefited from
all this globalization in a way that your hometown did not.
And they don't care, right but the Gang of five hundred,
the tariff up sides are nowhere near what Trump thinks
they are. They will not, for instance, help produce the
depth or deficit, and the downsides are significantly greater than
(25:46):
the President thinks. We will be lucky to get one
of inflation or recession, but will probably get stagflation. So
we're either going to get inflation or recession, but probably
get stagflation, which we haven't had for many, many years.
This is the greatest act of political and policy suicide,
with stupidity a forethought in modern times. That's what the
permanent sort of powerful government DC crowd things.
Speaker 4 (26:10):
That's definitely the idea I've gotten from, say the Wall
Street Journal editorial board.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Yeah, two things.
Speaker 4 (26:17):
If I felt like my fabulous profits from globalism were
threatened by this move that's exactly what I would say.
I would say it as loud as I could go
hammer Congress with that message. That doesn't mean I know
it to be false.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
Right, Well, it's going to happen, I think, and then
we're going to watch and see how it turned out.
Speaker 4 (26:40):
I retract point number two. Another day, I thought this
was super interesting. I was trying to puzzle out why
exactly Trump who'd blown up NAFTA in favor of the
US Mexico deal, whatever that second one was. I thought
it was odd that he was like saying, how incredibly
unfair that wasn't wanting to blow it up again?
Speaker 6 (27:02):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
And I appreciated one aspect of it, but not nearly enough,
and that is that when the USMCA, that's what I'm
looking for, was signed and Tariff's thrown up against China,
China centrally planned economy, dirty commies. They subsidized an enormous
(27:24):
number of giant Chinese factories in Mexico.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
They just said, all right, we'll move that company into Mexico. Now,
you Chinese commedy Jim, You're going to run the plant.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
And he's like, but I but I, but I but
I And so they just moved these companies to Mexico,
but all the profits are flowing to China.
Speaker 4 (27:44):
So what does it mean to have a tariff against China?
If you can just do the uh, you know, the
geographical jig, throw up a factory And I'm looking at
a video of this industrial park that sprang out out
of nowhere, one hundred miles south of our border, and
the giant plants and shipping what do you call them?
(28:09):
The shipping hubs there where you got five hundred semis
backed up to the bays all Chinese. Oh really, yeah, yeah,
it was essentially built by China, just south in Mexico,
south of the border.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
Wow, our dateline is I would like to see that.
Uh what's the town?
Speaker 2 (28:29):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (28:30):
I don't know Mexican geography anyway, really, but China is.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Certainly a country that if they got to pay cartel
members to make things happen, they don't care.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
We go through our ethics training every year where they
teach us once again, we're not allowed to bribe foreign
port officials. Difficult to imagine the scenario in which I'd
be tempted to do that. By God, I never will
I've been taught repeatedly that that's just wrong. Hafu San,
one of Mexico's new industrial parks, was built on a
(29:01):
former cattle ranch, which is around one hundred and twenty
five miles south of the border. There are more than
twenty Chinese manufacturing firms stretching across land, more than twice
as big as New York Central Park and representing a
combined investment of billion and a half dollars since it
opened in twenty eighteen. Bright red People's Republic of China
flags fly alongside those of the US and Mexico at
(29:24):
entrances to manufacturing plants in the industrial complex.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Wow. I used to travel around Mexico a lot my
car or motorcycle, and years ago, before I had kids,
if I had come across a giant industrial park with
Chinese Communist flags, it would have been uh, You'd have
thought you'd like become dehydrated.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
Were hallucinating and says the chairman, the Mexican chairman of
this giant industrial park. We're expecting the arrival of another
twenty companies within the next two years, with an estimate
of five hundred million dollars invested. The headline by the way,
in the the aforementioned Wall Street journalist, China's tariff dodging
move to Mexico looks doomed. Chinese firms invested billions dollars
(30:08):
in Mexican factories to make products for the American market,
shipping goods tariff free under US trade agreement.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
But it's all now in peril. Interesting.
Speaker 4 (30:16):
So that's one of the reasons Trump has been so
motivated to change our trade relationship, especially with Mexico. I honestly,
I am just so flabbergasted by the complexity of all this.
Maybe a uniform tariff is the way to go if
you're gonna have tariffs at all. Ah, I know, is
(30:38):
Happy Liberation Day to you and yours see you and
your uncle Sam outfit Noah, Oh.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
Yeah, yeah, I probably work'd half the time Taylor in
a while back.
Speaker 4 (30:48):
I'm just saying, the buttons are kind of straining. But anyway, Yeah,
so well, I guess we'll find out. How we'll all
find out together, how it plays out.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
The hat doesn't even fit. My head has gotten fat. Yeah, damn,
we got more in the ways to hear. Two quick
things for you before we get into something newsy How
your brain reacts to buying groceries can reveal your politics. Awesome,
we got this text. I've been listening since twenty ten.
(31:17):
Jack's reaction to the top gun Val Kilmer clip was
the funniest thing I've ever heard. So if you weren't
listening at the beginning of the show, Grabbed the podcast
is an advertisement for the podcast Armstrong Ngetty on demand,
where you can catch things that you didn't hear.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
I just saw an.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
Ad mad your amused trend. Can you imagine working with
a little bit tick like this? It's terrifying that to you.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
I just saw an ad for a new Beatles biopick.
We need that? Yeah, ah biopick.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
There are four of them, each one focused on a
different beetle. What yes, you mean there's gonna be a
Ringo biopick, like a whole movie about Ringo.
Speaker 4 (31:51):
Or a drama or something. I don't it's like a yeah,
it's like the Queen movie. Is that a biopick?
Speaker 2 (31:57):
I guess it is. Yeah. I just wanted my son.
I just watched a Queen movie that was really good.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
It's good movie that was fantastic, very entertain I didn't
know Freddy Mercury pretended not to be gay through that
most of that whole thing. Oh yeah, I thought the
name queen was always like a joke that people didn't
pick up on or whatever kind of we're all gay.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Oh, they weren't all gay. He was the only one,
That's what I thought. One.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Yeah, I was young, and he was married to a
woman and pretending he wasn't gay through all that fame.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
That was amazing.
Speaker 4 (32:27):
Yeah, and he was kind of ambivalent too, sexually, I think. Anyway, Ah,
seem pretty gay. All right, Well we have a final judgment.
There seemed pretty But.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Anyway, there's gonna be four Beatles movies, yes, which is
at least worth than I need.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
Yeah, I yeah, it's fine.
Speaker 4 (32:46):
I'm a Beatles freak, but I don't particularly need that
for our three.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
As Reclined of The New York Times, describes the differences
between the main difference between Republicans and Democrats as a worldview.
And it made my head explode. So we'll get to
that now. As a recline. Yeah, he is a liberal,
snargly well, right, and he was defining their point of view, okay,
of the world.
Speaker 4 (33:11):
I see right, right, Okay, Yeah, I thought he was like,
gonna do both. No, just I have no interest in
Ezra Cline's opinion on conservatism.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
But we've been following the story of the uh, the
doctor who tried to push his wife off the cliff
and she survived, and he was hitting her head with rocks.
Finally she does an interview and when we get to
hear her side of the story. This is from NBC News.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
I don't know what number it is, whatever number that
clip is.
Speaker 8 (33:37):
The Hawaii woman whose doctor husband is accused of attempting
to murder her on a popular Awahu hiking trail, sharing
chilling new details about the terrifying ordeal. In a petition
for a restraining order, Ario Koenig says, well, attempting to
take a selfie with her near the edge of a cliff,
her forty six year old husband, Gerhart, pushed her, trying
to make me fall off, she says, well, fighting back,
Gearhart then grabbed a syringe with an unknown substant and
(34:00):
attempted to inject her with it. The thirty six year
old says she then bit Gerhart before he began repeatedly
hitting her with a rock. She says, Gearhart finally stopped
and ran off after two women witnesses appeared on the
trail and began shouting and calling nine one one. According
to the restraining order petition, Ariel says she learned that
after the altercation, Gerhart, covered in blood, facetimed his adult son,
(34:21):
allegedly telling him I just tried to kill Ari but
she got away, and that he wanted to kill himself
by jumping off a cliff.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
What he faced time their son to say, I just
tried to kill mom or his son.
Speaker 4 (34:35):
His son, Yeah, I don't know what their family structure is,
but that's wild. Well lose his mom unhinged, did something unspeakable,
realized it thought I had to hurl myself off this cliff.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
That would make more sense without the syringe.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
The syringe which we mentioned last week, led me to
believe is completely premeditated. The e fact that he had
a syringe at hand to inject her with something, well, right,
even if you're a doctor and you travel with your
kit in case you come across a medical emergency, you
wouldn't have the syringe all loaded up unless he was
just well, She says, there was an unknown substance trying
to inject her.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
I mean unless he was just jabbiner with needles a karamba.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
And then he facetimes the kid to say, I just
tried to kill her.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Wow, So how are you doing? Yeah? Oof, poor kid
getting that call. Yeah, then he hangs up. Okay, I
guess I'll just go back about my day. Yeah, what
was I gonna do? Honey? Oh that's right, walk the dog?
Oh man?
Speaker 4 (35:40):
Yeah, I karamba. So we got that Ezraklin thing I'm
looking forward to. Also, your brain reacting to buying groceries
study really interesting. It can reveal your political preference and
this is not a joke, and it may make you
slightly more charitable towards folks of a different political stripe.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
Oh cool, they're.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
Still wrong as hell, but be nice about awesome, A
lot of good stuff. An hour three, don't throw them
off a cliff.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
Armstrong and Getty
Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio, the George
Washington Broadcast Center.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty, I'm Strong and Jetty and
now he Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
April second, twenty twenty five will go down is one
of the most important days in modern American history.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
X todent.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
The President will pick one of two pads, a new
flat twenty percent tari funnel imports, or new tariffs that
vary and match the tariffs other countries have in place.
Speaker 4 (00:39):
Right now, you have to trust the President's instincts on
the economy.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
So there you go. It is Liberation Day.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
We've got more on that coming up this hour, some
of the talking points from the administration, some reaction from
economists and that sort of thing, and we'll get into that.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
And some information on how countries evade tariffs. That makes
me wonder if you can ever be successful except with
a blanket tariff.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
So I came across this in the New York Times.
Thought it was dang good. I was expecting one thing,
got another thing. Should human life be Optimized? Was a
headline and an opinion piece about the advances in genetic testing. Yeah, Katie,
you should be thinking about this because this exists, and
I know you and your husband are going to try
to get pregnant. Advances in genetic testing and artificial intelligence
(01:36):
are changing what's possible for those undergoing IVF Are we
ready for the future of fertility? Asking the question how
much of what your baby is going to be like?
Do you want to choose? And the opinion piece is
by a woman who was given the choice of determining
whether she wanted a boy or a girl, and she
and her husband decided, we we got a girl. We'd
(01:58):
kind of like to have a girl, but it just
doesn't feel right to choose that, so they didn't. Yeah,
but then they have. She's done more research on this
found out that we already can We're very soon going
to be able to choose things like taller, smarter, happier
in addition to male or female. And isn't that obviously
(02:21):
a recipe for disaster for hman kind? Yes, yes, it is, Katie.
Any thoughts you want to leap in with now or well?
I think that's horrifying.
Speaker 5 (02:30):
I mean, when I discussed that I was going to
be doing the genetic testing, it's simply to make sure
that my child doesn't have my hereditary disease that is
different primarily for health, all this other stuff that's in
God's hands.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Yeah, and oh my gosh, not it's in the hands
of the polygenic corporation. You know, this was the province
of North Korea and China only a few years ago,
and everybody else reacted, most sane people, with horror.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
But here it is among us as predicted.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
There, you can hold technology back a little bit temporarily,
but it will come a colin.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
All right, it's clearly a bad idea. I mean, I
don't even need to know much about it. It's clearly
a bad idea. But China's gonna do it. They'll probably
do it exclusively. They'll improbably against the law to have
a kid where it's not chosen to be taller, stronger, faster, whatever, smarter. Right,
nobody would choose a kid who was almost certainly hyperactive
(03:30):
and born annoyed because you mentioned happier blah blah blah. No,
you're happy as to bringing to it. I never would
have been born, and I'm I'm fairly fond of me.
You don't become the person you're going to become in
(03:51):
a vacuum. It's the often the most compassionate people are
people who who come from violence.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
I just I don't know. Oh this is terrible. Well,
listen to this, you'll look the oil of this.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Twenty twenty two survey of Americans found that four and
ten said they would use this technology if it would
increase the chances of their child getting into a top college.
Speaker 4 (04:16):
You know, there are days I think limited life span
is a blessing.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
Man. You're gonna muck around with nature.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
With under because of the goal of getting your kid
into a top college whatever.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
The hell that means.
Speaker 4 (04:34):
Yikes, so they can be more thoroughly indoctrinated into Marxism.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
This sounds like a recipe for disaster. Yeah it really,
it really does.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
This person said, for me, selecting sex felt too overwhelming
of a choice and something we shouldn't do, so they didn't.
But quotes of the various studies that lots of people
would choose Oh, this will make my kid more likely
to be happy.
Speaker 4 (04:59):
Yeah, I get that, but it's misplaced.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
But every writer, musician, that's all born out of a
certain level of unhappiness, all of it.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Well, and a lot.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
Of the great civil rights leaders or leaders of overthrowing
monarchies or cruel dictatorships in the name of democracy. They've
been people who were agitated. They're angry, they weren't mellow
as a summer's day.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
The last line of this being, if this is the
future of making babies, perhaps it's one we must confront collectively.
I don't know exactly what they mean by that, but
I would assume means by as a society, we ought
to decide do we want this, do we legally want
this or not? But God, we are the third biggest
country in the world, but we don't have many babies,
so we won't have that much impact on the world
(05:53):
baby in compared to well, China doesn't have babies either,
But will India do it? Probably India, China, Russia, the
North Korea obviously. Two thoughts One from Ed, a twenty
two year listener originally from the Hoe San Jose, now
a proud Oaki.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
Live in Oklahoma.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
How about that I heard the segment where you guys
talking about procreation, procreation, the phones are simulating over population.
That may be why populations are dropping, reproductive rates, et cetera.
My only issue is that there are plenty of places
that are overpopulated and to continue to grow Mumbai, for example.
What seems to be more of a correlation is that
it's always lesser developed countries. My theory is that there's
(06:34):
a certain level of boredom required for proper procreation. If
advent of the smartphone is ensured that we are never bored,
there's limitless entertainment. Couple that with the fact that should
you feel amorous, it's effortless now to find more attractive
thing to you at any time instead of your beautiful
girlfriend or wife with no fear of rejection.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Born, He means, yeah, I proudly admit I am.
Speaker 4 (06:57):
I am like many scientists, not that I am one
really really intrigued by the question of why reproductive rates
fall the way they fall, and develop countries and.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
Always really sure.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
I think it's a certain level of safety and comfort.
I don't know, if you're bored, but you're not struggling
lack of struggle.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Maybe that's just lack of struggle.
Speaker 4 (07:16):
That might be as a simple as it gets and
as true as it gets. Second thought, was it Mike
Judge who was the creative genius behind idiocracy?
Speaker 2 (07:27):
I think so.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
He of beaves and butt head and King of the
Hill fan. Remember, oh it is Katie Fikes. Yeah a Mike.
We don't know each other, big fan, big fan. Nice job,
you got to do ideocracy but a designer baby version,
or like everybody on earth is tall, good looking and pleasant.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
And exactly the same like you.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Yeah, exactly, And how that just unravels mankind and how
we completely lose the ability to innovate and change and
do the things we need by the prom.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Comes down to, Uh, It's like the other day when
I I might have been taking an antibiotic that I
didn't need, and I said to my doctor friend, well,
and that's you know, that's going to kill off mankind.
People take an antabotics they don't need. It's strengthing. And
he said, yeah, you're the one that's gonna tip the scales.
He said, I would go ahead and finish your antabotic.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Your doctor is far more sarcastic than mine. Well he's
not my doctor.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
He's a bad doctor, or my a friend of mine
who made that recommendation. And I think I could see
how you get that way as a couple. If they say,
you know, all we got to do is tweak this
here and your kid's going to be you know, above
average height and a pleasant demeanor and probably an IQ
of you know, over one ten or something like that,
and I would think, yeah, it's bad for humanity.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
But like China just had five thousand of these babies
in the last hour.
Speaker 1 (08:50):
My one kid isn't going to tip the scales for humanity, right,
And I'd like my kid to be tall, smart, and
good looking. Yeah, so that'd be a tough one to
say no to. Yeah, dang it.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Of course.
Speaker 4 (09:02):
You know if my kids that I'm a half wit troll,
so you know, i'd feel bad about it, be like
giving birth to.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
A ken dollar.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
I actually I'm more concerned about the happy than I
am the height and you know, hair color and sex.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
That the happy, well, what does that even mean?
Speaker 4 (09:22):
I don't know actually that I would love to hear
somebody explain what that gene is, how does it do it?
Speaker 2 (09:30):
And what do you mean by happy?
Speaker 1 (09:31):
What percentage of like people who have been really successful
in art, business, name the thing?
Speaker 2 (09:38):
We're pleasant? Happy people? My experience not that many. I
read a piece the other day.
Speaker 4 (09:45):
It was a little long and over serious, which makes sense,
I guess. Person talking about the concept of happiness and
what most people mean by that. And we've talked about
this fair amount, but and they said, no, what you're
looking for is to be satisfied. Do work that satisfies you, hard, tiring,
(10:08):
frustrating work that when it's done, gives you a sense
of fulfillment. That's what happiness is, cheerfulness, and the rest
of it is transitory and not worth chasing.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
I don't know, Thrown, I've.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Known some cheerful people that never got off their couch
and did anything. Uh yes, yeah, I don't know. It's
obviously a horrible road for mankind to go down. I
think the New York Times point was, we're going down
it whether we like it or not, similar to AI.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Right, we're going down to whether we like it or not? Right.
Speaker 4 (10:39):
I was gonna say, between that and AI were tombed,
does a human as as a species rather, we're.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
So freaking lily, it's fine.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Do you tune into that radio show where they talk
about the we're all doomed? Yeah, life is going to
hell and our best days are behind is that's a
good radio show.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
You shune in. It's fun.
Speaker 4 (10:56):
The one guy thinks beavers are going to take over
the planet and.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
The other guy gets extremely worked up over valkilmahberh.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
Damn Right, Well, I tell you what.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
Speaking of risks to mankind friends, how about the damn criminals?
Simply save home security is peace o mind. FBI crime
data shows break ins are more likely during daylight hours
than under the cloak and night when you go to work,
when you bring your kids to school, protect your stuff,
protect your home shared be nice fan Doc Holiday standing
out there willing to get into a gunfight with the
(11:28):
bad guys, but you don't. So you need the active
guard outdoor protection and no long term contracts or cancellation fees.
About a dollar a day, that's pretty amazing.
Speaker 4 (11:37):
Yeah, read about the active guard protection when you when
you get to the website.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
It's amazing.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
And the fact that monitoring plans start affordably at around
a dollar a day, so much better than old system,
so much better. Visit simply safe dot com slash armstrong
to claim fifty percent off a new system with a
professional monitoring plan. Get your first month free again. That's
simply safe dot com slash armstrong. There's no safe likes
simply safe. Yeah, we'll get into some of the tariff
(12:06):
assessments from very smart people. Trump really rolling the dice
on this. You know, he's been.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Talking about this.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
We've played the clips going back to Letterman in the eighties.
He's been talking about this whole tariff thing. It's what
he believes, probably maybe more than anything else that you know.
I like hot women and tariffs. Those are the two
main beliefs. And he's gonna get to enact it and
see how it plays out and see if his theories
are correct.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
I guess yeah.
Speaker 4 (12:33):
How it's actually implemented is a big mystery right now,
as we've discussed between carve outs and Trump's unpredictability. But
it will be interesting to watch it unfold.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Say he's calling it Liberation Day. We got more on
that coming up later this hour. A Bible that was
given OJ Simpson by Robert Kardashian Senior recently sold at
auction for more than sixty five thousand dollars, even though
it's apparently missing the Fifth Commandment.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
Twenty twenty five. Oh d jokes, Wow, And I'll permit
any shot at OJ, no matter the timing.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
But okay, so that judges race in Wisconsin. The Democrat
won by like ten points a couple of things.
Speaker 2 (13:26):
On that coming up.
Speaker 4 (13:27):
How your brain reacts to buying groceries can reveal your politics,
or you could just ask me no.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
You don't need to look at my grocery card. You
just ask me no.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
How your brain reacts to buying as fascinating stay with us.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Several things that I hate about this I have been
saying for years. One I your way into two into politics.
You follow all these off year elections and act like
they're a big deal to you. I just don't know
what your deal is. And statistically, it's just not true
that these are always indicators of what's going to happen,
and how much you wait two years to see what happens.
(14:06):
There's a referendum on Elon Trump, not Elon Muskin, Trump Musk,
and they're always covered from far away, and you don't
have any idea what the candidates were like. Maybe that
I don't know, But maybe the Republican was a horrible candidate.
Yeah I know that, because you aren't following the race
or watching the ads or listening to his arguments. But
there's also this Robbie suave from Reason, and we used
(14:27):
to have Robbie on a regular basis that libertarian magazine.
He said, My god, the liberal derangement over Elon Musk
is really something. The Wisconsin election was not a referendum
on this man. Republicans have a low propensity voter problem
in off year elections, and all the money in the
world can't buy elections. Democrats are always shocked to learn this. Yeah, yeah,
(14:48):
Republicans don't turn out for these kind of elections. Democrats do,
so Republicans way more likely to lose these elections. Always
just all things being equal, even without you into the
personalities of the candidates. And then this, I just I
can't keep saying this stuff every two years.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
It drives me nuts.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Or over four years, almost like gravity, after one party
wins the presidency, the other party has a great midterm.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Because of Elon Musk.
Speaker 1 (15:19):
So I didn't see that one common folks, I sucker
punched him. Just it just happens, almost always. It's just
part of the way it works for a variety of reasons.
And then acting like it's news or surprising or something.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Is odd, it's a narrative. It's clickbait.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
So I saw the headline about the Supreme Court deal
in Wisconsin and that the Republicans had won both special
elections in Florida for Congress Matt Gates seat and Mike
Waltz's seat.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
Is that Matt Gates and Mike walste but by.
Speaker 4 (15:54):
Slimmer margins then expected, And going up to the election,
the word was those are solid red day districts, but
Republicans and Democrats both agree they are at risk, and
so it was less than expected. It was the one
was a fourteen point win. What was expected? I mean,
(16:14):
if you ever win by fourteen points as a party,
you will not lose for many, many moons to come,
probably generations.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
So and as an off year special election which Republicans
don't show up for which they were not built that way.
Speaker 2 (16:27):
So there you go. This I do think is true.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
And this was true for Barack Obama who was in
a similar situation as Trump. Their unbelievable turnout powers and
culture personality thing doesn't transfer to other elections. They use
talk about that with Obama all the time. If he
was on the ticket, huge turnout, This that he wasn't,
So it wasn't it was him, not his policies more.
And Trump's the same way, right right, The whole coattails dideh.
Speaker 4 (16:54):
All right, well, the media is terrible at their jobs
and that's why they're going away too. So we've got
that wacky brain study about your groceries and your politics.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
It's actually kind of interesting, and some.
Speaker 4 (17:06):
Tariff talk, but not the sort of dry blah blah
blah you've been hearing everywhere else.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
We've got some interesting facts behind the facts.
Speaker 1 (17:14):
And here's my favorite fact of the day I've come
across that Will jam In in this last minute, excellent talk
about the fifties sixties being the golden era of everything
and everything's gone to crap and what are you going
to do to fix it?
Speaker 2 (17:26):
US home ownership.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Is one point off the highest it's ever been in
the fifties. It was well, nineteen fifty it was fifty
two percent, and nineteen sixty it was sixty one percent.
It's now sixty five, which is one point off the
highest it's ever been for US home ownership.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Yeah, and homes are three times the size on average.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
So does that not fit in with a lot of
the prevailing thinking about the world.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
Yeah, Yeah, crisis is the greatest marketing for clicks.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
I'd say, never ending crisis. Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
The tim I like best probably is the liberation of America.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
It's a liberation of this country.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
It's a liberation day. According to Donald Trump. No longer
are we going to be end of a boothil of Canada. Finally,
I am somewhat agnostic on this. I guess I don't
know how it's going to turn out. Here's ABC News
their version of the whole Liberation Day thing.
Speaker 6 (18:34):
The nation and the world bracing for what President Trump
calls Liberation Day. In less than twenty four hours, the
president set to reveal tariffs targeting America's trading partners, which
could upend the global economy.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Very reciprocal, so whatever they charge us, we charge them.
Speaker 6 (18:50):
The scale and targets of Trump's tariffs still unclear, but
economists warn the cost to American consumers could be steep.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Okay, here's CNN's version of the story.
Speaker 7 (19:00):
You have businesses, vendors, and suppliers having conversations about how
to share this tariff. One scenario is that suppliers pick
up the entire tab to try to keep business. The
second scenario is that they split it between the businesses
fifty to fifty, and the third scenario is splitting it
three ways between the supplier, the business, and the consumer,
(19:21):
and ultimately that is what most economists think is going
to happen.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Interesting, I hadn't heard many people say that, yeah, very
good bye, good market by market. So the White House
press spokesman said this from the podium yesterday about all this.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
They will be effective immediately, and the President has been
teasing this for quite some time as they're not going
to be wrong.
Speaker 2 (19:43):
It is going to work.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
And the President has a brilliant team of advisors who
have been studying these issues for decades, and we are
focused on restoring the Golden Age of America and making
America manufacturing superpower.
Speaker 4 (19:56):
I'm all for the Golden Age of America, restoring the
Golden Age of America. I don't particularly like bull crap
from my side either.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
Well, that's why I brought up that homeownership thing. I mean,
just like, for instance, during that Golden Age, which is
often referred to as the Golden Age, the fifties, home
ownership was half half of Americans owned a home. Now
it's two thirds. So I mean that's just one statistic,
I realize, but it's not like we're clearly off the
rails right.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
That leads me to this.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
David Harsani, whose rights for The Examiner. He's one of
your conservative writers. He tweeted this out, which I thought
was pretty good.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Love David.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
It's something of a mystery why every modern president, Republican
or Democrat, every modern president feels impelled to remake the
most prosperous and dominant economy in the world.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
And it is true. Every administration comes in.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Taking charge of the most dominant economy for the last
how long we've been the number one economic power since
the nineteen o.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
One lot, I don't know.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
Every president comes in and takes over the most dominant
economy in the world and thinks.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
We got to change everything.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Yeah, you know, different directions depending on whether you're a
Republican or Democrat.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
It's interesting though.
Speaker 4 (21:10):
Yeah, that's an oversimplification, But if you didn't oversimplify any
aspect of this, it would take six months to just
like lay the groundwork for what we're talking about. You
know what I mean, because I'm thinking about Okay, so
you have an evil communist superpower dumping cheap goods in
your country, putting your people out of work, and closing.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Down your factories. That's China.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
Now, China's not the whole tariff deal, far from it,
but it's a big, big trading partner.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
At the same time, you need.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
To be able to build ships and medicines and the
critical things of war if nothing else. Okay, that's absolutely true.
And there are countries that are they erect huge tariffs,
like Europe's tariffs on US cars and trucks five times
what our tariffs are for theirs until today, and where.
Speaker 2 (22:04):
That goes nobody knows.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
At the same time, as you pointed out, as soon
as you enact a teriff regime, the carve outs begin
and the political favors are granted, and the influential congressman
gets a carve out for the you know, the industry
that depends on you know, a sheet aluminum, you know,
because they got the big washing machine plant in his
(22:26):
district or whatever. And there are hundreds and hundred thousands
of those those carve outs. And then there are stories
about consumer goods that are expensive enough that we don't
want to be more expensive because we need them, that
become more expensive, and it is a tax on imports.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
Tariffs are a tax. So all of those things are true.
Speaker 4 (22:46):
Simultaneously, and every single thing I said was grossly oversimplified,
and that was about a fifth of what I should
have said.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
So it's just it's mind bendingly complicated. Well, I don't
think this is oversimplified. You tell me.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Practically every conservative economist is against tariffs.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Yeah, the vast majority. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Yeah, although there's and that is that has certainly been
the Republican parties platform forever my whole life.
Speaker 2 (23:16):
Yes, that is true.
Speaker 4 (23:17):
I think there is a new stripe of conservative that's
emerging from these things, and that is a middle ground.
Not a globalism is great, Let's get a going chamber
of commerce. Whatever raises profits is good. You can you
can get you lose your job at the steel plant,
you can get a job as a computer programmer. You know,
(23:38):
you had that brand of Republicanism for a long time.
And I think there's a big part of conservative America
that's realizing, oh, y'all got crazy rich, and I can
get cheap undershirts from China, but my town has gone away.
So there's there's a new reality emerging. It's the post
post World War or two reality.
Speaker 2 (24:01):
Right. I don't know why I'm not, but for whatever reason,
I'm not concerned about this.
Speaker 4 (24:06):
Well, I think it's practically ungraspable, which I realized makes
us bad talk show hosts. We're supposed to be forcefully
advocating one view or another and saying that people who
don't adhere to it are idiots and communists.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
That is true on many topics.
Speaker 4 (24:21):
This one is just like I said, it is just
mind blowingly complicated. And it's like you're you've got a
machine that's got a thousand different settings, and if you tweak,
say forty one of those settings a little bit, you
get a different outcome than if you hadn't.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
So yikes. So I thought I would just pass this along.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Mark, don't get to my real China stuff. I'll get
to that in a minute, Sorry, Mark Hauprin. In his newsletter,
he always refers to the Gang of five hundred, and
what he's talking about is, I mean, that's a made
up number, but he's talking about just like the the
movers and shakers in DC, who are really they they're
the important people. They're the ones that run the country,
(25:05):
you know, certain house members, certain senators, certain permanent bureocracy,
just you know DC. So he uses that as kind
of like just to catch all of what the gang
of five hundred is thinking about this or that interesting.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
I'd imagine it's giant lobbyists as well, and that right
sort of folks absolutely.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Keeping in mind what you just said, which is certainly
true that a lot of these people really benefited from
all this globalization in a way that your hometown did not.
And they don't care, right but the Gang of five hundred,
the tariff up sides are nowhere near what Trump thinks
they are. They will not, for instance, help produce the
depth or deficit, and the downsides are significantly greater than
(25:46):
the President thinks. We will be lucky to get one
of inflation or recession, but will probably get stagflation. So
we're either going to get inflation or recession, but probably
get stagflation, which we haven't had for many, many years.
This is the greatest act of political and policy suicide,
with stupidity a forethought in modern times. That's what the
permanent sort of powerful government DC crowd things.
Speaker 4 (26:10):
That's definitely the idea I've gotten from, say the Wall
Street Journal editorial board.
Speaker 2 (26:14):
Yeah, two things.
Speaker 4 (26:17):
If I felt like my fabulous profits from globalism were
threatened by this move that's exactly what I would say.
I would say it as loud as I could go
hammer Congress with that message. That doesn't mean I know
it to be false.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
Right, Well, it's going to happen, I think, and then
we're going to watch and see how it turned out.
Speaker 4 (26:40):
I retract point number two. Another day, I thought this
was super interesting. I was trying to puzzle out why
exactly Trump who'd blown up NAFTA in favor of the
US Mexico deal, whatever that second one was. I thought
it was odd that he was like saying, how incredibly
unfair that wasn't wanting to blow it up again?
Speaker 6 (27:02):
Uh.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
And I appreciated one aspect of it, but not nearly enough,
and that is that when the USMCA, that's what I'm
looking for, was signed and Tariff's thrown up against China,
China centrally planned economy, dirty commies. They subsidized an enormous
(27:24):
number of giant Chinese factories in Mexico.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
They just said, all right, we'll move that company into Mexico. Now,
you Chinese commedy Jim, You're going to run the plant.
Speaker 1 (27:37):
And he's like, but I but I, but I but
I And so they just moved these companies to Mexico,
but all the profits are flowing to China.
Speaker 4 (27:44):
So what does it mean to have a tariff against China?
If you can just do the uh, you know, the
geographical jig, throw up a factory And I'm looking at
a video of this industrial park that sprang out out
of nowhere, one hundred miles south of our border, and
the giant plants and shipping what do you call them?
(28:09):
The shipping hubs there where you got five hundred semis
backed up to the bays all Chinese. Oh really, yeah, yeah,
it was essentially built by China, just south in Mexico,
south of the border.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
Wow, our dateline is I would like to see that.
Uh what's the town?
Speaker 2 (28:29):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (28:30):
I don't know Mexican geography anyway, really, but China is.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Certainly a country that if they got to pay cartel
members to make things happen, they don't care.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (28:40):
We go through our ethics training every year where they
teach us once again, we're not allowed to bribe foreign
port officials. Difficult to imagine the scenario in which I'd
be tempted to do that. By God, I never will
I've been taught repeatedly that that's just wrong. Hafu San,
one of Mexico's new industrial parks, was built on a
(29:01):
former cattle ranch, which is around one hundred and twenty
five miles south of the border. There are more than
twenty Chinese manufacturing firms stretching across land, more than twice
as big as New York Central Park and representing a
combined investment of billion and a half dollars since it
opened in twenty eighteen. Bright red People's Republic of China
flags fly alongside those of the US and Mexico at
(29:24):
entrances to manufacturing plants in the industrial complex.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Wow. I used to travel around Mexico a lot my
car or motorcycle, and years ago, before I had kids,
if I had come across a giant industrial park with
Chinese Communist flags, it would have been uh, You'd have
thought you'd like become dehydrated.
Speaker 4 (29:43):
Were hallucinating and says the chairman, the Mexican chairman of
this giant industrial park. We're expecting the arrival of another
twenty companies within the next two years, with an estimate
of five hundred million dollars invested. The headline by the way,
in the the aforementioned Wall Street journalist, China's tariff dodging
move to Mexico looks doomed. Chinese firms invested billions dollars
(30:08):
in Mexican factories to make products for the American market,
shipping goods tariff free under US trade agreement.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
But it's all now in peril. Interesting.
Speaker 4 (30:16):
So that's one of the reasons Trump has been so
motivated to change our trade relationship, especially with Mexico. I honestly,
I am just so flabbergasted by the complexity of all this.
Maybe a uniform tariff is the way to go if
you're gonna have tariffs at all. Ah, I know, is
(30:38):
Happy Liberation Day to you and yours see you and
your uncle Sam outfit Noah, Oh.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
Yeah, yeah, I probably work'd half the time Taylor in
a while back.
Speaker 4 (30:48):
I'm just saying, the buttons are kind of straining. But anyway, Yeah,
so well, I guess we'll find out. How we'll all
find out together, how it plays out.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
The hat doesn't even fit. My head has gotten fat. Yeah, damn,
we got more in the ways to hear. Two quick
things for you before we get into something newsy How
your brain reacts to buying groceries can reveal your politics. Awesome,
we got this text. I've been listening since twenty ten.
(31:17):
Jack's reaction to the top gun Val Kilmer clip was
the funniest thing I've ever heard. So if you weren't
listening at the beginning of the show, Grabbed the podcast
is an advertisement for the podcast Armstrong Ngetty on demand,
where you can catch things that you didn't hear.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
I just saw an.
Speaker 4 (31:31):
Ad mad your amused trend. Can you imagine working with
a little bit tick like this? It's terrifying that to you.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
I just saw an ad for a new Beatles biopick.
We need that? Yeah, ah biopick.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
There are four of them, each one focused on a
different beetle. What yes, you mean there's gonna be a
Ringo biopick, like a whole movie about Ringo.
Speaker 4 (31:51):
Or a drama or something. I don't it's like a yeah,
it's like the Queen movie. Is that a biopick?
Speaker 2 (31:57):
I guess it is. Yeah. I just wanted my son.
I just watched a Queen movie that was really good.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
It's good movie that was fantastic, very entertain I didn't
know Freddy Mercury pretended not to be gay through that
most of that whole thing. Oh yeah, I thought the
name queen was always like a joke that people didn't
pick up on or whatever kind of we're all gay.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Oh, they weren't all gay. He was the only one,
That's what I thought. One.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Yeah, I was young, and he was married to a
woman and pretending he wasn't gay through all that fame.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
That was amazing.
Speaker 4 (32:27):
Yeah, and he was kind of ambivalent too, sexually, I think. Anyway, Ah,
seem pretty gay. All right, Well we have a final judgment.
There seemed pretty But.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
Anyway, there's gonna be four Beatles movies, yes, which is
at least worth than I need.
Speaker 2 (32:44):
Yeah, I yeah, it's fine.
Speaker 4 (32:46):
I'm a Beatles freak, but I don't particularly need that
for our three.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
As Reclined of The New York Times, describes the differences
between the main difference between Republicans and Democrats as a worldview.
And it made my head explode. So we'll get to
that now. As a recline. Yeah, he is a liberal,
snargly well, right, and he was defining their point of view, okay,
of the world.
Speaker 4 (33:11):
I see right, right, Okay, Yeah, I thought he was like,
gonna do both. No, just I have no interest in
Ezra Cline's opinion on conservatism.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
But we've been following the story of the uh, the
doctor who tried to push his wife off the cliff
and she survived, and he was hitting her head with rocks.
Finally she does an interview and when we get to
hear her side of the story. This is from NBC News.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
I don't know what number it is, whatever number that
clip is.
Speaker 8 (33:37):
The Hawaii woman whose doctor husband is accused of attempting
to murder her on a popular Awahu hiking trail, sharing
chilling new details about the terrifying ordeal. In a petition
for a restraining order, Ario Koenig says, well, attempting to
take a selfie with her near the edge of a cliff,
her forty six year old husband, Gerhart, pushed her, trying
to make me fall off, she says, well, fighting back,
Gearhart then grabbed a syringe with an unknown substant and
(34:00):
attempted to inject her with it. The thirty six year
old says she then bit Gerhart before he began repeatedly
hitting her with a rock. She says, Gearhart finally stopped
and ran off after two women witnesses appeared on the
trail and began shouting and calling nine one one. According
to the restraining order petition, Ariel says she learned that
after the altercation, Gerhart, covered in blood, facetimed his adult son,
(34:21):
allegedly telling him I just tried to kill Ari but
she got away, and that he wanted to kill himself
by jumping off a cliff.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
What he faced time their son to say, I just
tried to kill mom or his son.
Speaker 4 (34:35):
His son, Yeah, I don't know what their family structure is,
but that's wild. Well lose his mom unhinged, did something unspeakable,
realized it thought I had to hurl myself off this cliff.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
That would make more sense without the syringe.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
The syringe which we mentioned last week, led me to
believe is completely premeditated. The e fact that he had
a syringe at hand to inject her with something, well, right,
even if you're a doctor and you travel with your
kit in case you come across a medical emergency, you
wouldn't have the syringe all loaded up unless he was
just well, She says, there was an unknown substance trying
to inject her.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
I mean unless he was just jabbiner with needles a karamba.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
And then he facetimes the kid to say, I just
tried to kill her.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Wow, So how are you doing? Yeah? Oof, poor kid
getting that call. Yeah, then he hangs up. Okay, I
guess I'll just go back about my day. Yeah, what
was I gonna do? Honey? Oh that's right, walk the dog?
Oh man?
Speaker 4 (35:40):
Yeah, I karamba. So we got that Ezraklin thing I'm
looking forward to. Also, your brain reacting to buying groceries
study really interesting. It can reveal your political preference and
this is not a joke, and it may make you
slightly more charitable towards folks of a different political stripe.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
Oh cool, they're.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
Still wrong as hell, but be nice about awesome, A
lot of good stuff. An hour three, don't throw them
off a cliff.
Speaker 2 (36:10):
Armstrong and Getty
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Jack Armstrong
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