September 19, 2025 • 36 mins
On the Friday, September 19, 2025 edition of The Armstrong & Getty Replay....
- Jack goes to Iowa for a family visit...
- Teens to vote in the UK...
- Save Your Water...
- China's Cyber attack was much worse than we knew.
Stupid Should Hurt: https://www.armstrongandgetty.com/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio the George
Washington Broadcast Center.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Jack Armstrong, Joe Getty, arms Strong and Jettiety and he.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Arms Wrongddy Strong. You have tuned in to a real treasure.
It's an Armstrong and Geddy replay.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Well, let's think about the reality that you don't listen
to the entire twenty hours every week.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
So there's a bunch of stuff. Even though it's not live.
He's never heard it before. I mean, let's be off
and it's pretty good.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
So kick back and enjoy an arms Strong and Getty replay.
So my dad grew up in rural Iowa. He turns
eighty eight tomorrow, eighty eight years old tomorrow. He's one
of seven children in his family that lived on a
farm with no electricity or running water. Then they moved
(01:08):
into town. Using my finger quotes, I don't know what
it was, one hundred people or something like that, also
with no electricity or running water. And we were there
sitting with my with my son. He wanted to see
some of this stuff and meet some family.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
And we were in.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Iowa at my aunt's house. That's my dad's older sister.
She's ninety four and still way more with it than
Joe Biden ever was there at the end, but they
were talking about their childhood and everything like that, and
just I was struck, first of all, how hard it
would have been, Just how much more difficult life would
(01:45):
have been. If you live in an urban area or
on the coasts, you quite possibly are completely unaware that
rural areas, particularly of the Midwest and South, it was
like it was eighteen fifty up until like nineteen seventy,
I mean in a lot of places, and you just
didn't know that. I read a book, Freedom from Fear,
(02:08):
great book won the Poultrer Prize about FDR through the
Great Depression in World War Two. But anyway he sent
it turned out to be Hoover, who ended up being president,
out to canvas the United States and bring him back
a full assessment of how people were doing. This was
during the Great Depression, and he came back and told FDR,
(02:28):
we got lots of people in this country. They don't
have any electricity or running water. It was shocking to
the elite in Washington, d C. And New York and
San Francisco and Chicago who had had electricity since like
eighteen sixty that there were people in nineteen fifty that
or nineteen forty that had an electricity, and so that's
(02:49):
when they started the rural electrification program and the government
attempted to get electric lines all across the country, but
the elite to the country, the big cities, didn't know
everybody who was living. I don't know if you use
the term backward or non modern lives would be a
better way to put it. Non modern lives. And my
dad is one of those people, his seven brothers and sisters.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
It was in the fifties. He graduated high school nineteen
fifty five. They went to school in a wagon drug
buy horses. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
If you live in San Francisco and there were cars
and electricity in the eighteen hundreds, you can't even imagine
that that's true. But anyway, the first half of his
schooling was in a one room schoolhouse where all the
grades were in one room and it was only a
dozen or so kids kindergarten through senior year. And some
of those schools are still out there and their historic artifacts.
(03:42):
There's a sign out front that says Diamond School Iowa
Historic Register. It's out in the field. It's now overgrown
with bushes and trees. You can't even hardly tell it's there.
In fact, we missed it a couple of times driving
down this dirt road that leads to it. It's so
covered up with growth that we couldn't even find it,
even though my dad knew where the school was, so
(04:03):
we stopped.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
We walk over there to it.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
My dad gets out his pocket knife and cuts away
all the vines and stuff near the front door, and
we managed to pull open the front door and actually
go inside. And I got a good picture of him
and my son in there at the chalkboard where my
dad would have learned his letters and math and stuff
like that way back in the day as a little kid.
And there be about the gender bread person, and of
course yeah, about the different genders that you can be.
(04:27):
And there was a pride flag in the corner because
they spent an entire month celebrating all that. My kid,
of course, my son was really fascinated by that, obviously,
as you would be seeing your family heritage, not to
mention just the time machine that that whole thing is.
And it didn't have electricity or plumbing either. The overgrown
(04:47):
little hut over here is behind the bushes. But I
my dad showed that that was the girl's out house
and the one over here was the boys out house.
And if you were there in class and you needed to,
you know, do number one or two, you'd go out
in the dead of winter in Iowa where it might
have been thirty below zero and walk across this little
field and sit there on a wooden plank with a
hole in it and do your business as an eight
(05:08):
year old girl before you go back over to the
school and learn you're reading and writing, I've got frostbite
on my willie. Oh good lord, absolutely amazing, night after night.
And my aunt who's ninety four, talking about even when
they moved to town, it was her job when they
got home from school every day to get several buckets
(05:30):
and go to the town pump and full fill it
up with water to bring water back to the house
that they would use for cooking and doing laundry. And
then they got into the conversation on how much work
laundry was. The women did about it all day long.
It was just it was just it was such a
project just to have clean clothes, obviously, and so what
(05:51):
do you do with that information about how much harder
life was physically anyway, but so much less depression, anxiety,
complaining it seems right, yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Feeling oppressed or you know, we're doing that.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
We've done a couple of studies today, both in the
United States and Great Britain, about people who have so
much anxiety and they feel like their lives will never
get better and they're miserable. Right now, your life is
so much easier than the one I just described. I mean,
it's like it's being a different species.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
It's so much different, right, easier. Well, I think if you.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
Separate yourself and your life and a feeling of being
judged from the conversation, and you just ask the question.
Human beings have always had work, and in certain periods
of history leisure time different people, different amounts, right, And
(06:55):
labor saving devices technology to lessen your work and increase
your leisure time have been you know, worked on and
developed and embraced, just you know, from the dawn of time,
purely abstract discussion.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Is there a point where you go too far? Obviously?
Speaker 4 (07:19):
Well, yeah, to me, the answer is obvious, absolutely obvious.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
If you got up in the morning and they probably
all had to work together, to get some sort of
breakfast together and get dressed and everything like that, and
then get the horses ready and hooked up to the
wagon and all the different things just to get to
school and then school being what it was, and then
get home and then have work immediately as soon as
you got home. You wouldn't have a lot of time
to ponder how happy you were, right none actually, or
(07:48):
to worry about crap, yeah, to worry about brow And
then there's also the just expectations I would imagine, because
he told me he'd never been to Demo until he
was I don't remember how old. You wouldn't have anything
to compare it to. Obviously, without any sort of social
(08:09):
media or every town around you being exactly the same,
and you weren't going anywhere anyway. That's a lot of
where happiness or fulfillment comes from. We've talked about the
studies before, where you know, if somebody gets you might
be perfectly happy with your house, but if somebody builds
a nicer house next to you, your happiness goes down.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
I mean, so it's all just comparing things as opposed
to what you have.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
Well, and studies have shown that if you're making eighty
thousand dollars next to somebody who's making seventy, you're happier
and perceive yourself as better off than if you're making
ninety next to someone who's making one hundred.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Right.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
We even a more stark example of this is we
Henry Saw's first Amish people, which me being around Iowa
a lot, seen that a lot. But we stopped at
a little very rural town gas station and there were
some Amish there and they had their buggy parked with
their horses, uh, live in their Amish lifestyle, and just
like you see in TV in the movies, the big
(09:11):
long beards and everything like that. And they had a
table set up and they were selling stuff, and Henry
bought some sort of like apple pie treat thingy.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
That was delicious, panamic.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
And I was wondering, I'll bet there's not a lot
of depression and anxiety medication going on with those Amish children.
Probably not a lot, and probably not a lot needed. No, No,
will we will we recognize this at some point as
a society and decide to will we be able to
pull back? Will there be any push to pull push
(09:39):
to pull back from any of this to make ourselves happier,
or is that just it just isn't an inevitable head
toward modern convenience, more stuff, faster, until we're so crazy
we all just.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
I don't know, implode that one, the second one, the
second one. I just I don't think.
Speaker 4 (10:00):
And everybody can form their own opinion of this, obviously,
I think the percentage of the human beast, the humankind,
that actually thinks about this sort of stuff is fairly modest.
I think a lot of people just do what they
see other people doing around them, and they don't ever think.
(10:21):
Mark Zuckerberg isn't trying to make me happy. He's trying
to make more money. His offerings, as shiny and as
directive as they are, are not good for me. I'm
going to reject them. Well, that's not the majority of
people that don't think, Well, how about just for your
own self?
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Then?
Speaker 1 (10:36):
I always use the example of those of us who
ever lived any other way are going to be dead soon.
And then if you were staring at a phone your
entire life, you can't have the memories like Joe and
I have, or anybody over the age of whatever who
can at least look back and say I remember when
I could sit down with a book in the quiet
and read for a couple hours and be perfectly happy.
And I can't do that anymore. But there won't be
(10:57):
anybody that can remember that, yeah, or drive down, go
on a road trip with no podcast Netflix for the
kids in the car, or anything like that, and we
just looked out the window and talked and everybody was
perfectly fine.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
There won't be anybody of them. There won't be anybody
around who can even remember that, right, right, Yeah, I
don't know.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
I don't know as wild though to hear a life
described like that, which I'm sure was really freaking hard,
but yet it sound appealing on some levels like it
did to me.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
It was like, well, sounds kind of nice, right, No, yeah, absolutely,
I know what you mean.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
We probably ought to take a break, but there are
a hell of a lot of people can oh, we
gotta okay, right, I forgot privilege, delighted to bring you
a message from our friends at Trust and will you
need an estate plan?
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Yeah, he's gonna get the buggy and the donkey.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
You don't know, you know, and that you don't have
to have a legal battle over that when you pass away.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Who's going to get the donkey?
Speaker 4 (12:02):
Kids both think they ought to have the donkey and
end up hating each other, and then the government takes
most of the donkey, which is really an unpalatable you
know metaphor any of you think, I don't believe anyone
won here who wants a third of a donkey In
the final analysis, we didn't think this through the.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Armstrong and Getty show show podcasts and our hot links.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
So the story behind the story of the whole Britain
is going to have children vote now is the lefty party.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
The Labor Party thought, hey, this is a great idea
because kids will fall for anything.
Speaker 4 (12:40):
But then a far lefty party emerged and said, yeah, no,
we're even crazier than you, and the kids will flock
to us.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
And according to the police, they're right.
Speaker 4 (12:47):
Probably Yeah, it's because they're selling childlike fantasies of what
the government ought to do.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Yeah, cure.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
If you're a normal Democrat in the United States, you
would not want sixteen year olds to vote because they
would all become Bernie aoc.
Speaker 4 (13:02):
Types, right, right, So I found this very interesting ask
to rate their life satisfaction on a scale of zero
to ten. Girls in Britain nearly twice as likely as
boys to choose an answer between zero and three. What
was the question, rate your life satisfaction on a scale
one zero, between zero and three. Yeah, twice as many
(13:24):
girls as boys. On the other end of the scale,
fifty eight percent of boys rate their life satisfaction as
seven out of ten or higher, compared with only thirty
seven percent of the girls.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Man, if you're.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Saying your life satisfaction between zero and three, you need
a dose of perspective.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (13:40):
According to the poll by the think tank that there's
a gender split in other things too, boys are nearly
twice as likely to support right wing parties as girls.
Keeping in mind, right wing in Britain is fairly moderate,
Some forty five percent of boys age sixteen seventeen would
vote for one of the more conservative parties forty five
(14:00):
to twenty four of the girls the super lefty.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Let's see is well, it's it's the reverse.
Speaker 4 (14:09):
More than a third say they sympathize more with the
Palestinian side and the Gaza war. Nine percent side with Israel.
Almost half.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
That's that's a very British thing to ask.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
Almost a quarter of the sixteen and seventeen year old
say they suffered from anxiety. Thirty four percent among the girls.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
That's probably accurate.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
Nearly three and five said they had stayed home from
school due to anxiety.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Wow, sixty percent of the kids say they stayed home
for anxiety when I was in school. When you're in school,
that would be roughly zero zero people stayed home from
school for anxiety. Sixty nine percent of the girls. Forty
eight percent of the boys more than four and ten
spend more than six hours a day on their phone.
(14:58):
Six spend more than ten hours, says a guy who
probably spends eight hours a day on the spunk that number,
seven out of ten girls have.
Speaker 4 (15:08):
Stayed home from school from anxiety, and just that great
sex divide of girls. Like women in the US, because
we don't like children vote, are way way farther left
than the boys politically speaking.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
So would you guess this is an experiment that will
be done away with letting children vote or I'm leaning
toward this. Once you give that age group the right
to vote, it will never go away. I'll be no
getting rid of it. I don't know, that's a great question.
Speaker 4 (15:42):
I think it might be one of those things that
rectifize itself, rectifies itself over the long term, because it
will be a miserable, miserable failure.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
But it takes so long.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
I mean, it's like, how long did San Francisco take
to come around?
Speaker 2 (15:56):
I just happen to.
Speaker 4 (15:57):
Be reading that they are commercial real Estatesuation has really
turned around now partly because of it, well largely because
of AI. But in the streets of San Francisco much cleaner,
the bum junkie camps far fewer and smaller. San Francisco's
really turned itself around. Credit words due, But how long
did that take? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (16:16):
But I don't stand years and years and years of.
Speaker 4 (16:18):
The failure being just plain everybody could see how miserable
a failure all those policies were.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
But in this particular case, you give the sixteen and
seventeen year olds the right to vote, I don't see
how you'd ever get rid of it. It's going to
change the politics so drastically, so quickly. How would you
ever end up with a majority that wants to do.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Away with it? Oh?
Speaker 4 (16:39):
Wow, that's an interesting point. Yeah, it's a perpetual motion machine. Yeah,
I don't know. My last I think that could be
one of the most disastrous experiments ever conducted.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Yes, I agree, this could be huge unless these sixteen
year olds when they're forty look back on it and
think I should not have been voting to do away
with it. But that could take a long time. Obviously,
you can do the math on that well.
Speaker 4 (17:02):
Right in the new crop of sixteen seventeen year olds
lacking all perspective and wisdom, because that's the way you're
supposed to freaking be as a child.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
There's no avoiding it.
Speaker 4 (17:11):
They will say, oh, yeah, yeah, no, we know what's
right for the world.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Up with whatever as opposed to male white landowners over thirty,
which is what it should be.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
I'm willing to expand the tent a little bit. The
Armstrong and Getty show, Yea or Jah Gorgio podcasts and
our hot links.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
What government does and great thinkers going back to my
hero hl Menkin in the very early twentieth century points
out pointed out government comes up with various hobgoblins or
problems or crises, some reel, some imagined, and they use
them as a pretext to throw zillions of dollars around
because that's how you grow your power in government. Okay,
(17:55):
And So if you can convince people there's an existential threat,
why that gives you permission to throw mind boggling amounts
of money. And I wish we had time for some
of the examples that have come to light in recent days.
Stacy Abrams Foundation that raised a couple of hundred dollars
one year, and the next year, on their way out,
(18:15):
the Biden administration gave them two billion dollars. Wow for
environmental justice initiatives.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Wow. Just to get a sense how it works, all right,
that's number one. Number two.
Speaker 4 (18:29):
I've always thought, yeah, the climate's changing, the climate's always changed,
maybe part of its man made. None of the measures
we're talking about would do any good. Plus who knows
what sort of you know, adjustments the planet makes if
the level of this rises, does that cause a change
in temperature whatever that actually makes up for it or
something I don't know.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Certainly not worth ruining an economy over and throwing a
dash of all be dead before it happens. Anyway, there's that,
you know.
Speaker 4 (18:55):
So anyway, a couple of stories that I found very
enlightening and or entertained. The second one's much more significant.
But this is a great substack. Andy Maisley's this guy.
He writes mostly about the UK and what's going on
over there. But the UK government recently formed a group.
They all made money and they spent money to address
(19:16):
the nation's drought. The group offered some ways everyday people
can save water. How to save water at home.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
This is from.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
The actual manual they distributed. Install a rain barrel to
collect rain water to use in the garden.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Like it sicks eighteen ninety, Well, it's still good for
your plans. Fix a leaking toilet, leaky loose loo, that's
a British ism.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Can waste two hundred and four hundred liters a day.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Yeah, if you hear your toilet running, if you have
pay for your water, it gets really expensive, really fast.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
And it's like a super cheap fix.
Speaker 4 (19:54):
And then they say avoid watering your lawn, brown grass
will grow back healthy. Turn off the tap when brushing
your te blah blah blah. Delete old emails in pictures,
as data centers require vast amounts of water to cool
their systems. What well, and Andrew Wright's honestly, the last
one caught my eye.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Delete your old emails.
Speaker 4 (20:16):
This may seem like a silly one off, mistake, but
it's blowing up and now being recommended as the top
a top way to save water by The Times, The Telegraph,
The Independent and The Metro. Notice that none of these
articles include any specific estimates of how much water deleting
emails and photos saves. They just handwave at the fact
that data centers use water. The group failed to compare
how much water each choice saves. Once you do it,
(20:38):
it becomes clear how ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
This advice is. I did the math. Here are the
results in how I got them.
Speaker 4 (20:44):
Anyway, fixing a leaky toilet can waste two hundred and
four hundred liters a day. To save as much water
in data centers as fixing your toilet would save, you
would need to delete one point five billion photos or
two hundred billion emails. If you took a tenth of
a second and to delete each email, and you delete
them non stop for sixteen hours a day, it would
(21:04):
take you seven hundred and twenty three years to delete
enough emails to save the amount of water in data
centers as you could save if you just jiggled your toilet.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Maybe you should jiggle your toilet.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
I have roughly that many unready emails that I been
meaning to get to, but I'm probably not good to
delete them, And then he goes into a couple of
other ones, like avoid watering a lawn.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Brown grass will grow back healthy.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
If the average British person who waters their law completely stopped,
they would save as much water as they would if
they deleted one hundred and seventy million photos or twenty
five billion emails. A typical lawn needs x amount of
water per square foot to stay healthy.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Blah blah blah. Average blades of grass.
Speaker 4 (21:42):
The average person seems to have about two thousand photos saved.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
Let's assume they're all backed up.
Speaker 4 (21:46):
If someone deleted all of their photos, the water they
could save could support two blades of grass.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
This is similar to the engines that shut off at
stop lights. The math on that is just ridiculous.
Speaker 4 (21:59):
If you could gather a thousand people together and convince
them to delete every last photo they have stored together,
you could save enough water as it takes to maintain
a single square foot of wawn. This stuff, because climate
change is a craze, gets printed and taken it seriously. Anyway,
to the main gist of this, there is a controversial
(22:22):
new climate report out headed up by Stephen Coonan. You
might not know his name. He's a theoretical physicist. He
went from working on climate and energy issues as a
Department of Energy under secretary under Obama to co authoring
last month's report on the agency's current chief that concluded
(22:42):
that the threat from greenhouse gas emissions has been exaggerated.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
What change? That's right?
Speaker 4 (22:47):
Al Gore does not agree. That's Oh no, that's what
you've been perpetrating. Al anyway, Coonan said, when he started
to dig more deeply into climate scientists in twenty fourteen,
he discovered it had a dirty under As a quote,
I started paying attention to the representations of climate science
and the media and political discussions and realized that things
were just not being told straight, he said. And the
(23:11):
one hundred and fifty one page report by the Climate
Working Group signals one hundred and eighty degree shift from
the Biden administration's climate focus. Again, that true focus was
handing out money to Stacy Abrams and her Ilk, opening
the aperture to theories and findings that might send Greta
Tuneberg into a coma. For example, the report said that
the growing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere quote
has the important positive effect of promoting plant growth, and
(23:35):
that much of the debate about the consequences of ocean
ascidification quote has been one sided and exaggerated, and that
US corn yields have not been hurt by rising temperatures
as many studies have claimed. Last week, two environmental groups
assued the Department of Energy over the report, alleging that
Kun and his four co authors sought to manufacture or
reason to deny the root causes of global warring and
(23:55):
were recruited in secret. And this is long, and actually
I'd love to read it in its entirety, but they
point out look, and this will gratify you if the
media drives you crazy like it does us. What does
virtually everybody you studied climate agree on. The first is
that the climate is changing. Yes, it is it one
(24:17):
hundred percent? Is how much is man made? Nobody's really sure,
but yes, it's changing.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
But it's essential to.
Speaker 4 (24:23):
Distinguish between weather, which occurs daily versus climate, which is
the long term, thirty year average of the weather. So
what happens in one year, such as a drought or
a tornado, is not climate, but how many tornadoes over
thirty years. Is it more in these thirty years than
in the last. That's a climate discussion. So the first
is that the climate is changing. The second point I
(24:44):
think everybody will agree on is that carbon dioxide and
other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are increasing, mainly due
to the burning of fossil fuels, with some contribution from
land use.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Again, that is almost certainly true.
Speaker 4 (24:56):
The third thing that everybody will agree on is that
carbon dioxide growing in the app atmosphere exerts a warming
influence on the planet, and other things being equal, it
would cause the Earth to warm.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
I think where people then start to diverge is.
Speaker 4 (25:07):
How much warmer it's going to get and what other
changes we might see in the climate system that would
either be beneficial or deleterious. And probably the last thing
where everybody disagrees is what should we do about all
of this? If you're going to have a sensible conversation
about this, you need to know a good deal about
not only how climate science works, but also about energy.
And there aren't many people who are knowledgeable in both
(25:27):
aspects of that.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
And whenever you say, what are we going to do
about it.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Do you mean we in the United States or do
you mean we the world which really needs to participate
to have any chance?
Speaker 2 (25:36):
And India and China don't care.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
Oh no, China now burns sixty one percent of the
coal burned on Earth China alone, and they're building coal
plants like every day, right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Greta Tunberg is not happy about that. And so we've
stolen our childhood, well right, stole.
Speaker 4 (25:59):
And apparently a single country, even a giant economy like ours,
saying we will sacrifice ourselves. Or Europe, oh my god,
Europe has has taken a poisoned pill. As if the
socialism hasn't crusted their economies enough, they've gone so far
down the we must do something about climate change. They've
(26:21):
crippled their own economies and had zero effect, but it
makes them feel good and enlightened. It's really it's a
mental illness. But as absurd as it is for a
single country like the US to think, yes, we will
sacrifice ourselves on the cross of climate change because it
makes us feel good even though we'll have no effect,
how absurd is it when like an individual state like
(26:42):
California or a dopey little country. Pardon me, like you
know France or Belgium says, yeah, we're gonna hang ourselves
on the cross of climate change and crush our economy.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
But it's the right thing to do.
Speaker 4 (26:55):
You're just you're a moron, especially given the unsettled you know,
many aspects of the science.
Speaker 5 (27:03):
Stupid Euros and their tiny bathing suits. Hey, amen to that,
lum smugglers. Um oh, here's a good one. I'll hit
you with one of the questions from this long interview.
You and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who's doing a great job.
Speaker 4 (27:19):
I have written and spoken about the continuing need for
fossil fuels and how solar and wind are not up
to the task of replacing fossil fuels.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
They're clearly not.
Speaker 4 (27:27):
President Trump leaves your message and has a particular hatred
for wind turbines. Should we move away from solar wind?
And what the scientist says is one aspect of having
participating in this report is that many people believe I'm
a Trumper, that I support everything that the administration is doing.
Of course not. I think we've all tried as scientists
to portray the fact. If they happen to align with
President's view the president's view, that's great, But our goal
(27:49):
is not to support President Trump.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Our goal is to portray the facts.
Speaker 4 (27:53):
So when you hear woke people, progressive people try to
claim this guy is just some sort of Trump black,
he's absolutely not.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Then he says. Now, onto wind and solar.
Speaker 4 (28:04):
You often hear them touted is the cheapest form of
electricity generation. And that's true if you don't care when
you get your electricity. Of course you need the sun
shining and the wind blowing. If you want a reliable
electrical system, one that produces electricity ninety nine point ninety
nine percent of the time, which is the US standard,
by the way, or down less than a day out
of a decade, then wind and solar can at best
be an ornament.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Wow, you think about Obama's guy. Yeah, and you trust
all scientists who says I'm no trumper.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
The Obama Biden crowd, you know, opening new solar fields
and all the farms and all that different sort of.
Speaker 4 (28:38):
Stuff, and just and subsidizing it right to the trillions
of dollars. Never forget, folks, those trillions of dollars are
the point.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
Yeah, that's why they're doing it.
Speaker 4 (28:50):
They're not the cost of doing the thing. They are
the thing. The climate change is the excuse to do
the thing. The thing is handing out end of lesson. Yes,
that will be on the test work from our friends
at trust and will. Get the peace of mind you
know you want, you know you need to do this,
you just haven't gotten around to it. Get security and
(29:11):
peace of mind by making it a state plan now, yeah,
you can avoid lengthy and expensive legal battles. I've seen
lots of families torn apart over this sort of thing.
You know, Uncle dies, where's this stuff go? He told
me once that I could have the farm.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
You know what wasn't.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Writing trust and will is what you need. So putting
this together. They've got live customer support through chat, phone
or email, have all your important documents in one place
with bank level encryption, and it's state specific for the
laws in your state.
Speaker 4 (29:41):
And compare to the cost that you might think this
would require, you know, going to an attorney or whatever,
you can create and manage your customer state plan starting
at one hundred and ninety nine dollars and trust based
plans starting at four ninety nine, And you can manage
your trust or will online with easy to use website
bank level encryption, Secure your ass. It's protect your loved
ones with trust and will get twenty percent off on
(30:03):
your estate planned documents by visiting trust and will dot
com slash Armstrong.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
That's trust and will dot com slash Armstrong, Jack Armstrong
and Joe Gretty Armstrong and Getty show Jack.
Speaker 4 (30:18):
So, speaking of defending ourselves against well somebody, China, we're
looking at you. The whole Salt typhoon hacking attack that
you may have heard of, it was way bigger and
more significant than was even discussed. I think it was
last year a little before that. Apparently the Chinese may
(30:39):
have stolen data from almost every single one of US Americans,
not to mention the other eighty countries.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Well we're targeted.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
If you just started with TikTok, that would be what
seventy percent of the country. I don't know, a lot
of people have TikTok, and that's yeah, information they steal
just by if you download that app.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Well, right, right, and I know I have saved that article.
Speaker 4 (31:04):
I can't remember who wrote it, but actual oh, I
think it was Michael Pillsbury, wo wrote thee hundred Year Marathon,
which is a great book about China's rise and their intent.
But the Chinese intelligence services talk glowingly of TikTok and
what a valuable asset it is. And if that isn't
enough information for you, I don't know what you need
to hear. But anyway, so, the sweeping cyber attack by
(31:27):
the group known as Salt Typhoon is China's most ambitious
yet targeted more than eighty countries, may have stolen info
from nearly every American. They see it as evidence that
China's capabilities rivaled those of the US and its allies.
It's not clear whether a lot of the stuff was
swept up kind of accidentally, and whether it's being stored
(31:49):
or anything like that. You know, I, personally, knowing a
little bit about China's track record, I suspect that, yeah,
they believe that information is power. Or even if you
don't know how you might use it someday, you just
keep it. And then what the fear is that the
rangey the attack blah blah blah. Security officials warned that
(32:11):
the stolen data could allow Chinese intelligence services to exploit
global communications networks to track targets, including politicians, spies, and activists.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
They have everybody's digital footprint.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
I wonder if they do they actually have the ability
to like coalesce, keep track of somehow, Like they steal
all the information from a twenty two year old and
that person twenty years from now becomes a US senator.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Do they have the ability to keep track of that.
I don't have any on you. I'll bet with Ai
they do now.
Speaker 4 (32:44):
Maybe because you don't have to have some poor analysts,
like you know, pawing through millions of pages of digital
blankety blank or doing Google searches. You just to ask AI, Hey,
Senator Jones, what do we have on him? Here's this
last known addresses blah blah bla. And in a similar
ish story, you remember when the Trump administration's contentious trade
(33:07):
talks with China were going to begin last summer, staffers
on the House committee focused on US competition with China
began to get weird emails from the committee's chairman, John Molinar,
who is a Republican congressman from Michigan. Several trade groups,
law firms, US government agencies had all received the emails
(33:28):
appearing to be from Molinar, asking for input on proposed
sanctions with which the legislators were planning to target Beijing.
Your insights are essential blah blah blah. Turned out to
be the latest in a series of cyber espionage campaigns
linked to Beijing. They were impersonating the guy trying to
(33:49):
pump anybody for information who's willing to give it to them,
and they tied that to when last year I think
it was somebody used AI to imitate Marco Rubio voice
right and had him leaving voicemails to people, to all
sorts of foreign officials.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
That's going to happen a lot. Oh yeah, yeah, I
wonder And just.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Like in everybody's lives, you're going to get a text
that sounds like your wife saying something ridiculous. I mean,
just as just messing with you, isn't it, because it's
so easy?
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Well yeah, apparently.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
Well, not only do you have Marco Rubio being not
you know, I said, I almost said convincingly imitated, but
it's not. It's his actual voice symphasized digitally. It's like,
you know, if you're a guitar player, you know they
have these digital amp what do you call them imitations?
There's a word for it, models that actually take the
(34:47):
audio data from you know, a Marshall amplifier or whatever,
and they can replicate it. You know, the sound waves
are the same, so yeah, it's his voice essentially. But yeah,
you already have grandma's getting calls from their grandsons saying, Hey,
I got arrested, I need two hundred dollars bail, blah
blah blah, send it right away.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
So yeah, I.
Speaker 4 (35:05):
Wonder whether do the Marcos Rubio of the world and
the foreign ministers of Britain or whatever, do they already
have protocols in place where if I see a phone
call coming in it appears to be from you, for instance,
and you say, hey, I need to talk to you
about blah blah blah.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
I've been arrested. Good I need two hundred dollars. Yeah,
good luck, get it yourself. Click. Do they have like
code words and stuff already.
Speaker 4 (35:32):
I don't know, because I've heard that suggested that families
have that have a code really yes, wow?
Speaker 2 (35:39):
Oh yeah wow, and none of that. Huh.
Speaker 4 (35:48):
Yeah. You'd have to be a little naive or inexperienced
in the ways of the world to fall for this stuff. Still,
But that's that's the thing about scumbags, is some of
them are pretty smart and they're good at their jobs. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
I mean, if I got a phone call from my son,
even if it sounded very convincing, Dad at Sam, I'm
in Mexico. I'm in jail. I think, No, you know
you're not. You're at school. There's no way you ended
up in Mexico. Well what about I'm two towns over.
I was ditching school.
Speaker 4 (36:18):
And one of my buddies was shoplifting and I was
with them, so I got arrested. I need four hundred bucks. Yeah,
how about like, uhh, yeah, hang out with better people.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Click.
Speaker 4 (36:31):
I think you would probably see where you're supposed to
send the money. Right, Wait a minute, I'm calling the
cop shop right, yes, yeah, but a lot of.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
People don't because they're they're night.
Speaker 4 (36:43):
It's no nice okay,
Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio the George
Washington Broadcast Center.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
Jack Armstrong, Joe Getty, arms Strong and Jettiety and he.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Arms Wrongddy Strong. You have tuned in to a real treasure.
It's an Armstrong and Geddy replay.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Well, let's think about the reality that you don't listen
to the entire twenty hours every week.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
So there's a bunch of stuff. Even though it's not live.
He's never heard it before. I mean, let's be off
and it's pretty good.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
So kick back and enjoy an arms Strong and Getty replay.
So my dad grew up in rural Iowa. He turns
eighty eight tomorrow, eighty eight years old tomorrow. He's one
of seven children in his family that lived on a
farm with no electricity or running water. Then they moved
(01:08):
into town. Using my finger quotes, I don't know what
it was, one hundred people or something like that, also
with no electricity or running water. And we were there
sitting with my with my son. He wanted to see
some of this stuff and meet some family.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
And we were in.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Iowa at my aunt's house. That's my dad's older sister.
She's ninety four and still way more with it than
Joe Biden ever was there at the end, but they
were talking about their childhood and everything like that, and
just I was struck, first of all, how hard it
would have been, Just how much more difficult life would
(01:45):
have been. If you live in an urban area or
on the coasts, you quite possibly are completely unaware that
rural areas, particularly of the Midwest and South, it was
like it was eighteen fifty up until like nineteen seventy,
I mean in a lot of places, and you just
didn't know that. I read a book, Freedom from Fear,
(02:08):
great book won the Poultrer Prize about FDR through the
Great Depression in World War Two. But anyway he sent
it turned out to be Hoover, who ended up being president,
out to canvas the United States and bring him back
a full assessment of how people were doing. This was
during the Great Depression, and he came back and told FDR,
(02:28):
we got lots of people in this country. They don't
have any electricity or running water. It was shocking to
the elite in Washington, d C. And New York and
San Francisco and Chicago who had had electricity since like
eighteen sixty that there were people in nineteen fifty that
or nineteen forty that had an electricity, and so that's
(02:49):
when they started the rural electrification program and the government
attempted to get electric lines all across the country, but
the elite to the country, the big cities, didn't know
everybody who was living. I don't know if you use
the term backward or non modern lives would be a
better way to put it. Non modern lives. And my
dad is one of those people, his seven brothers and sisters.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
It was in the fifties. He graduated high school nineteen
fifty five. They went to school in a wagon drug
buy horses. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
If you live in San Francisco and there were cars
and electricity in the eighteen hundreds, you can't even imagine
that that's true. But anyway, the first half of his
schooling was in a one room schoolhouse where all the
grades were in one room and it was only a
dozen or so kids kindergarten through senior year. And some
of those schools are still out there and their historic artifacts.
(03:42):
There's a sign out front that says Diamond School Iowa
Historic Register. It's out in the field. It's now overgrown
with bushes and trees. You can't even hardly tell it's there.
In fact, we missed it a couple of times driving
down this dirt road that leads to it. It's so
covered up with growth that we couldn't even find it,
even though my dad knew where the school was, so
(04:03):
we stopped.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
We walk over there to it.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
My dad gets out his pocket knife and cuts away
all the vines and stuff near the front door, and
we managed to pull open the front door and actually
go inside. And I got a good picture of him
and my son in there at the chalkboard where my
dad would have learned his letters and math and stuff
like that way back in the day as a little kid.
And there be about the gender bread person, and of
course yeah, about the different genders that you can be.
(04:27):
And there was a pride flag in the corner because
they spent an entire month celebrating all that. My kid,
of course, my son was really fascinated by that, obviously,
as you would be seeing your family heritage, not to
mention just the time machine that that whole thing is.
And it didn't have electricity or plumbing either. The overgrown
(04:47):
little hut over here is behind the bushes. But I
my dad showed that that was the girl's out house
and the one over here was the boys out house.
And if you were there in class and you needed to,
you know, do number one or two, you'd go out
in the dead of winter in Iowa where it might
have been thirty below zero and walk across this little
field and sit there on a wooden plank with a
hole in it and do your business as an eight
(05:08):
year old girl before you go back over to the
school and learn you're reading and writing, I've got frostbite
on my willie. Oh good lord, absolutely amazing, night after night.
And my aunt who's ninety four, talking about even when
they moved to town, it was her job when they
got home from school every day to get several buckets
(05:30):
and go to the town pump and full fill it
up with water to bring water back to the house
that they would use for cooking and doing laundry. And
then they got into the conversation on how much work
laundry was. The women did about it all day long.
It was just it was just it was such a
project just to have clean clothes, obviously, and so what
(05:51):
do you do with that information about how much harder
life was physically anyway, but so much less depression, anxiety,
complaining it seems right, yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
Feeling oppressed or you know, we're doing that.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
We've done a couple of studies today, both in the
United States and Great Britain, about people who have so
much anxiety and they feel like their lives will never
get better and they're miserable. Right now, your life is
so much easier than the one I just described. I mean,
it's like it's being a different species.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
It's so much different, right, easier. Well, I think if you.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
Separate yourself and your life and a feeling of being
judged from the conversation, and you just ask the question.
Human beings have always had work, and in certain periods
of history leisure time different people, different amounts, right, And
(06:55):
labor saving devices technology to lessen your work and increase
your leisure time have been you know, worked on and
developed and embraced, just you know, from the dawn of time,
purely abstract discussion.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Is there a point where you go too far? Obviously?
Speaker 4 (07:19):
Well, yeah, to me, the answer is obvious, absolutely obvious.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
If you got up in the morning and they probably
all had to work together, to get some sort of
breakfast together and get dressed and everything like that, and
then get the horses ready and hooked up to the
wagon and all the different things just to get to
school and then school being what it was, and then
get home and then have work immediately as soon as
you got home. You wouldn't have a lot of time
to ponder how happy you were, right none actually, or
(07:48):
to worry about crap, yeah, to worry about brow And
then there's also the just expectations I would imagine, because
he told me he'd never been to Demo until he
was I don't remember how old. You wouldn't have anything
to compare it to. Obviously, without any sort of social
(08:09):
media or every town around you being exactly the same,
and you weren't going anywhere anyway. That's a lot of
where happiness or fulfillment comes from. We've talked about the
studies before, where you know, if somebody gets you might
be perfectly happy with your house, but if somebody builds
a nicer house next to you, your happiness goes down.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
I mean, so it's all just comparing things as opposed
to what you have.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
Well, and studies have shown that if you're making eighty
thousand dollars next to somebody who's making seventy, you're happier
and perceive yourself as better off than if you're making
ninety next to someone who's making one hundred.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Right.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
We even a more stark example of this is we
Henry Saw's first Amish people, which me being around Iowa
a lot, seen that a lot. But we stopped at
a little very rural town gas station and there were
some Amish there and they had their buggy parked with
their horses, uh, live in their Amish lifestyle, and just
like you see in TV in the movies, the big
(09:11):
long beards and everything like that. And they had a
table set up and they were selling stuff, and Henry
bought some sort of like apple pie treat thingy.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
That was delicious, panamic.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
And I was wondering, I'll bet there's not a lot
of depression and anxiety medication going on with those Amish children.
Probably not a lot, and probably not a lot needed. No, No,
will we will we recognize this at some point as
a society and decide to will we be able to
pull back? Will there be any push to pull push
(09:39):
to pull back from any of this to make ourselves happier,
or is that just it just isn't an inevitable head
toward modern convenience, more stuff, faster, until we're so crazy
we all just.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
I don't know, implode that one, the second one, the
second one. I just I don't think.
Speaker 4 (10:00):
And everybody can form their own opinion of this, obviously,
I think the percentage of the human beast, the humankind,
that actually thinks about this sort of stuff is fairly modest.
I think a lot of people just do what they
see other people doing around them, and they don't ever think.
(10:21):
Mark Zuckerberg isn't trying to make me happy. He's trying
to make more money. His offerings, as shiny and as
directive as they are, are not good for me. I'm
going to reject them. Well, that's not the majority of
people that don't think, Well, how about just for your
own self?
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Then?
Speaker 1 (10:36):
I always use the example of those of us who
ever lived any other way are going to be dead soon.
And then if you were staring at a phone your
entire life, you can't have the memories like Joe and
I have, or anybody over the age of whatever who
can at least look back and say I remember when
I could sit down with a book in the quiet
and read for a couple hours and be perfectly happy.
And I can't do that anymore. But there won't be
(10:57):
anybody that can remember that, yeah, or drive down, go
on a road trip with no podcast Netflix for the
kids in the car, or anything like that, and we
just looked out the window and talked and everybody was
perfectly fine.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
There won't be anybody of them. There won't be anybody
around who can even remember that, right, right, Yeah, I
don't know.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
I don't know as wild though to hear a life
described like that, which I'm sure was really freaking hard,
but yet it sound appealing on some levels like it
did to me.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
It was like, well, sounds kind of nice, right, No, yeah, absolutely,
I know what you mean.
Speaker 4 (11:40):
We probably ought to take a break, but there are
a hell of a lot of people can oh, we
gotta okay, right, I forgot privilege, delighted to bring you
a message from our friends at Trust and will you
need an estate plan?
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Yeah, he's gonna get the buggy and the donkey.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
You don't know, you know, and that you don't have
to have a legal battle over that when you pass away.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Who's going to get the donkey?
Speaker 4 (12:02):
Kids both think they ought to have the donkey and
end up hating each other, and then the government takes
most of the donkey, which is really an unpalatable you
know metaphor any of you think, I don't believe anyone
won here who wants a third of a donkey In
the final analysis, we didn't think this through the.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Armstrong and Getty show show podcasts and our hot links.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
So the story behind the story of the whole Britain
is going to have children vote now is the lefty party.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
The Labor Party thought, hey, this is a great idea
because kids will fall for anything.
Speaker 4 (12:40):
But then a far lefty party emerged and said, yeah, no,
we're even crazier than you, and the kids will flock
to us.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
And according to the police, they're right.
Speaker 4 (12:47):
Probably Yeah, it's because they're selling childlike fantasies of what
the government ought to do.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Yeah, cure.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
If you're a normal Democrat in the United States, you
would not want sixteen year olds to vote because they
would all become Bernie aoc.
Speaker 4 (13:02):
Types, right, right, So I found this very interesting ask
to rate their life satisfaction on a scale of zero
to ten. Girls in Britain nearly twice as likely as
boys to choose an answer between zero and three. What
was the question, rate your life satisfaction on a scale
one zero, between zero and three. Yeah, twice as many
(13:24):
girls as boys. On the other end of the scale,
fifty eight percent of boys rate their life satisfaction as
seven out of ten or higher, compared with only thirty
seven percent of the girls.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Man, if you're.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
Saying your life satisfaction between zero and three, you need
a dose of perspective.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (13:40):
According to the poll by the think tank that there's
a gender split in other things too, boys are nearly
twice as likely to support right wing parties as girls.
Keeping in mind, right wing in Britain is fairly moderate,
Some forty five percent of boys age sixteen seventeen would
vote for one of the more conservative parties forty five
(14:00):
to twenty four of the girls the super lefty.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Let's see is well, it's it's the reverse.
Speaker 4 (14:09):
More than a third say they sympathize more with the
Palestinian side and the Gaza war. Nine percent side with Israel.
Almost half.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
That's that's a very British thing to ask.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
Almost a quarter of the sixteen and seventeen year old
say they suffered from anxiety. Thirty four percent among the girls.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
That's probably accurate.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
Nearly three and five said they had stayed home from
school due to anxiety.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Wow, sixty percent of the kids say they stayed home
for anxiety when I was in school. When you're in school,
that would be roughly zero zero people stayed home from
school for anxiety. Sixty nine percent of the girls. Forty
eight percent of the boys more than four and ten
spend more than six hours a day on their phone.
(14:58):
Six spend more than ten hours, says a guy who
probably spends eight hours a day on the spunk that number,
seven out of ten girls have.
Speaker 4 (15:08):
Stayed home from school from anxiety, and just that great
sex divide of girls. Like women in the US, because
we don't like children vote, are way way farther left
than the boys politically speaking.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
So would you guess this is an experiment that will
be done away with letting children vote or I'm leaning
toward this. Once you give that age group the right
to vote, it will never go away. I'll be no
getting rid of it. I don't know, that's a great question.
Speaker 4 (15:42):
I think it might be one of those things that
rectifize itself, rectifies itself over the long term, because it
will be a miserable, miserable failure.
Speaker 2 (15:51):
But it takes so long.
Speaker 4 (15:52):
I mean, it's like, how long did San Francisco take
to come around?
Speaker 2 (15:56):
I just happen to.
Speaker 4 (15:57):
Be reading that they are commercial real Estatesuation has really
turned around now partly because of it, well largely because
of AI. But in the streets of San Francisco much cleaner,
the bum junkie camps far fewer and smaller. San Francisco's
really turned itself around. Credit words due, But how long
did that take? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (16:16):
But I don't stand years and years and years of.
Speaker 4 (16:18):
The failure being just plain everybody could see how miserable
a failure all those policies were.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
But in this particular case, you give the sixteen and
seventeen year olds the right to vote, I don't see
how you'd ever get rid of it. It's going to
change the politics so drastically, so quickly. How would you
ever end up with a majority that wants to do.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Away with it? Oh?
Speaker 4 (16:39):
Wow, that's an interesting point. Yeah, it's a perpetual motion machine. Yeah,
I don't know. My last I think that could be
one of the most disastrous experiments ever conducted.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Yes, I agree, this could be huge unless these sixteen
year olds when they're forty look back on it and
think I should not have been voting to do away
with it. But that could take a long time. Obviously,
you can do the math on that well.
Speaker 4 (17:02):
Right in the new crop of sixteen seventeen year olds
lacking all perspective and wisdom, because that's the way you're
supposed to freaking be as a child.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
There's no avoiding it.
Speaker 4 (17:11):
They will say, oh, yeah, yeah, no, we know what's
right for the world.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Up with whatever as opposed to male white landowners over thirty,
which is what it should be.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
I'm willing to expand the tent a little bit. The
Armstrong and Getty show, Yea or Jah Gorgio podcasts and
our hot links.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
What government does and great thinkers going back to my
hero hl Menkin in the very early twentieth century points
out pointed out government comes up with various hobgoblins or
problems or crises, some reel, some imagined, and they use
them as a pretext to throw zillions of dollars around
because that's how you grow your power in government. Okay,
(17:55):
And So if you can convince people there's an existential threat,
why that gives you permission to throw mind boggling amounts
of money. And I wish we had time for some
of the examples that have come to light in recent days.
Stacy Abrams Foundation that raised a couple of hundred dollars
one year, and the next year, on their way out,
(18:15):
the Biden administration gave them two billion dollars. Wow for
environmental justice initiatives.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Wow. Just to get a sense how it works, all right,
that's number one. Number two.
Speaker 4 (18:29):
I've always thought, yeah, the climate's changing, the climate's always changed,
maybe part of its man made. None of the measures
we're talking about would do any good. Plus who knows
what sort of you know, adjustments the planet makes if
the level of this rises, does that cause a change
in temperature whatever that actually makes up for it or
something I don't know.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Certainly not worth ruining an economy over and throwing a
dash of all be dead before it happens. Anyway, there's that,
you know.
Speaker 4 (18:55):
So anyway, a couple of stories that I found very
enlightening and or entertained. The second one's much more significant.
But this is a great substack. Andy Maisley's this guy.
He writes mostly about the UK and what's going on
over there. But the UK government recently formed a group.
They all made money and they spent money to address
(19:16):
the nation's drought. The group offered some ways everyday people
can save water. How to save water at home.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
This is from.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
The actual manual they distributed. Install a rain barrel to
collect rain water to use in the garden.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Like it sicks eighteen ninety, Well, it's still good for
your plans. Fix a leaking toilet, leaky loose loo, that's
a British ism.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Can waste two hundred and four hundred liters a day.
Speaker 1 (19:44):
Yeah, if you hear your toilet running, if you have
pay for your water, it gets really expensive, really fast.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
And it's like a super cheap fix.
Speaker 4 (19:54):
And then they say avoid watering your lawn, brown grass
will grow back healthy. Turn off the tap when brushing
your te blah blah blah. Delete old emails in pictures,
as data centers require vast amounts of water to cool
their systems. What well, and Andrew Wright's honestly, the last
one caught my eye.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Delete your old emails.
Speaker 4 (20:16):
This may seem like a silly one off, mistake, but
it's blowing up and now being recommended as the top
a top way to save water by The Times, The Telegraph,
The Independent and The Metro. Notice that none of these
articles include any specific estimates of how much water deleting
emails and photos saves. They just handwave at the fact
that data centers use water. The group failed to compare
how much water each choice saves. Once you do it,
(20:38):
it becomes clear how ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
This advice is. I did the math. Here are the
results in how I got them.
Speaker 4 (20:44):
Anyway, fixing a leaky toilet can waste two hundred and
four hundred liters a day. To save as much water
in data centers as fixing your toilet would save, you
would need to delete one point five billion photos or
two hundred billion emails. If you took a tenth of
a second and to delete each email, and you delete
them non stop for sixteen hours a day, it would
(21:04):
take you seven hundred and twenty three years to delete
enough emails to save the amount of water in data
centers as you could save if you just jiggled your toilet.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Maybe you should jiggle your toilet.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
I have roughly that many unready emails that I been
meaning to get to, but I'm probably not good to
delete them, And then he goes into a couple of
other ones, like avoid watering a lawn.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Brown grass will grow back healthy.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
If the average British person who waters their law completely stopped,
they would save as much water as they would if
they deleted one hundred and seventy million photos or twenty
five billion emails. A typical lawn needs x amount of
water per square foot to stay healthy.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Blah blah blah. Average blades of grass.
Speaker 4 (21:42):
The average person seems to have about two thousand photos saved.
Speaker 2 (21:45):
Let's assume they're all backed up.
Speaker 4 (21:46):
If someone deleted all of their photos, the water they
could save could support two blades of grass.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
This is similar to the engines that shut off at
stop lights. The math on that is just ridiculous.
Speaker 4 (21:59):
If you could gather a thousand people together and convince
them to delete every last photo they have stored together,
you could save enough water as it takes to maintain
a single square foot of wawn. This stuff, because climate
change is a craze, gets printed and taken it seriously. Anyway,
to the main gist of this, there is a controversial
(22:22):
new climate report out headed up by Stephen Coonan. You
might not know his name. He's a theoretical physicist. He
went from working on climate and energy issues as a
Department of Energy under secretary under Obama to co authoring
last month's report on the agency's current chief that concluded
(22:42):
that the threat from greenhouse gas emissions has been exaggerated.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
What change? That's right?
Speaker 4 (22:47):
Al Gore does not agree. That's Oh no, that's what
you've been perpetrating. Al anyway, Coonan said, when he started
to dig more deeply into climate scientists in twenty fourteen,
he discovered it had a dirty under As a quote,
I started paying attention to the representations of climate science
and the media and political discussions and realized that things
were just not being told straight, he said. And the
(23:11):
one hundred and fifty one page report by the Climate
Working Group signals one hundred and eighty degree shift from
the Biden administration's climate focus. Again, that true focus was
handing out money to Stacy Abrams and her Ilk, opening
the aperture to theories and findings that might send Greta
Tuneberg into a coma. For example, the report said that
the growing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere quote
has the important positive effect of promoting plant growth, and
(23:35):
that much of the debate about the consequences of ocean
ascidification quote has been one sided and exaggerated, and that
US corn yields have not been hurt by rising temperatures
as many studies have claimed. Last week, two environmental groups
assued the Department of Energy over the report, alleging that
Kun and his four co authors sought to manufacture or
reason to deny the root causes of global warring and
(23:55):
were recruited in secret. And this is long, and actually
I'd love to read it in its entirety, but they
point out look, and this will gratify you if the
media drives you crazy like it does us. What does
virtually everybody you studied climate agree on. The first is
that the climate is changing. Yes, it is it one
(24:17):
hundred percent? Is how much is man made? Nobody's really sure,
but yes, it's changing.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
But it's essential to.
Speaker 4 (24:23):
Distinguish between weather, which occurs daily versus climate, which is
the long term, thirty year average of the weather. So
what happens in one year, such as a drought or
a tornado, is not climate, but how many tornadoes over
thirty years. Is it more in these thirty years than
in the last. That's a climate discussion. So the first
is that the climate is changing. The second point I
(24:44):
think everybody will agree on is that carbon dioxide and
other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are increasing, mainly due
to the burning of fossil fuels, with some contribution from
land use.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Again, that is almost certainly true.
Speaker 4 (24:56):
The third thing that everybody will agree on is that
carbon dioxide growing in the app atmosphere exerts a warming
influence on the planet, and other things being equal, it
would cause the Earth to warm.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
I think where people then start to diverge is.
Speaker 4 (25:07):
How much warmer it's going to get and what other
changes we might see in the climate system that would
either be beneficial or deleterious. And probably the last thing
where everybody disagrees is what should we do about all
of this? If you're going to have a sensible conversation
about this, you need to know a good deal about
not only how climate science works, but also about energy.
And there aren't many people who are knowledgeable in both
(25:27):
aspects of that.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
And whenever you say, what are we going to do
about it.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Do you mean we in the United States or do
you mean we the world which really needs to participate
to have any chance?
Speaker 2 (25:36):
And India and China don't care.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
Oh no, China now burns sixty one percent of the
coal burned on Earth China alone, and they're building coal
plants like every day, right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Greta Tunberg is not happy about that. And so we've
stolen our childhood, well right, stole.
Speaker 4 (25:59):
And apparently a single country, even a giant economy like ours,
saying we will sacrifice ourselves. Or Europe, oh my god,
Europe has has taken a poisoned pill. As if the
socialism hasn't crusted their economies enough, they've gone so far
down the we must do something about climate change. They've
(26:21):
crippled their own economies and had zero effect, but it
makes them feel good and enlightened. It's really it's a
mental illness. But as absurd as it is for a
single country like the US to think, yes, we will
sacrifice ourselves on the cross of climate change because it
makes us feel good even though we'll have no effect,
how absurd is it when like an individual state like
(26:42):
California or a dopey little country. Pardon me, like you
know France or Belgium says, yeah, we're gonna hang ourselves
on the cross of climate change and crush our economy.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
But it's the right thing to do.
Speaker 4 (26:55):
You're just you're a moron, especially given the unsettled you know,
many aspects of the science.
Speaker 5 (27:03):
Stupid Euros and their tiny bathing suits. Hey, amen to that,
lum smugglers. Um oh, here's a good one. I'll hit
you with one of the questions from this long interview.
You and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who's doing a great job.
Speaker 4 (27:19):
I have written and spoken about the continuing need for
fossil fuels and how solar and wind are not up
to the task of replacing fossil fuels.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
They're clearly not.
Speaker 4 (27:27):
President Trump leaves your message and has a particular hatred
for wind turbines. Should we move away from solar wind?
And what the scientist says is one aspect of having
participating in this report is that many people believe I'm
a Trumper, that I support everything that the administration is doing.
Of course not. I think we've all tried as scientists
to portray the fact. If they happen to align with
President's view the president's view, that's great, But our goal
(27:49):
is not to support President Trump.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Our goal is to portray the facts.
Speaker 4 (27:53):
So when you hear woke people, progressive people try to
claim this guy is just some sort of Trump black,
he's absolutely not.
Speaker 2 (28:02):
Then he says. Now, onto wind and solar.
Speaker 4 (28:04):
You often hear them touted is the cheapest form of
electricity generation. And that's true if you don't care when
you get your electricity. Of course you need the sun
shining and the wind blowing. If you want a reliable
electrical system, one that produces electricity ninety nine point ninety
nine percent of the time, which is the US standard,
by the way, or down less than a day out
of a decade, then wind and solar can at best
be an ornament.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Wow, you think about Obama's guy. Yeah, and you trust
all scientists who says I'm no trumper.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
The Obama Biden crowd, you know, opening new solar fields
and all the farms and all that different sort of.
Speaker 4 (28:38):
Stuff, and just and subsidizing it right to the trillions
of dollars. Never forget, folks, those trillions of dollars are
the point.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
Yeah, that's why they're doing it.
Speaker 4 (28:50):
They're not the cost of doing the thing. They are
the thing. The climate change is the excuse to do
the thing. The thing is handing out end of lesson. Yes,
that will be on the test work from our friends
at trust and will. Get the peace of mind you
know you want, you know you need to do this,
you just haven't gotten around to it. Get security and
(29:11):
peace of mind by making it a state plan now, yeah,
you can avoid lengthy and expensive legal battles. I've seen
lots of families torn apart over this sort of thing.
You know, Uncle dies, where's this stuff go? He told
me once that I could have the farm.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
You know what wasn't.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Writing trust and will is what you need. So putting
this together. They've got live customer support through chat, phone
or email, have all your important documents in one place
with bank level encryption, and it's state specific for the
laws in your state.
Speaker 4 (29:41):
And compare to the cost that you might think this
would require, you know, going to an attorney or whatever,
you can create and manage your customer state plan starting
at one hundred and ninety nine dollars and trust based
plans starting at four ninety nine, And you can manage
your trust or will online with easy to use website
bank level encryption, Secure your ass. It's protect your loved
ones with trust and will get twenty percent off on
(30:03):
your estate planned documents by visiting trust and will dot
com slash Armstrong.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
That's trust and will dot com slash Armstrong, Jack Armstrong
and Joe Gretty Armstrong and Getty show Jack.
Speaker 4 (30:18):
So, speaking of defending ourselves against well somebody, China, we're
looking at you. The whole Salt typhoon hacking attack that
you may have heard of, it was way bigger and
more significant than was even discussed. I think it was
last year a little before that. Apparently the Chinese may
(30:39):
have stolen data from almost every single one of US Americans,
not to mention the other eighty countries.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Well we're targeted.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
If you just started with TikTok, that would be what
seventy percent of the country. I don't know, a lot
of people have TikTok, and that's yeah, information they steal
just by if you download that app.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Well, right, right, and I know I have saved that article.
Speaker 4 (31:04):
I can't remember who wrote it, but actual oh, I
think it was Michael Pillsbury, wo wrote thee hundred Year Marathon,
which is a great book about China's rise and their intent.
But the Chinese intelligence services talk glowingly of TikTok and
what a valuable asset it is. And if that isn't
enough information for you, I don't know what you need
to hear. But anyway, so, the sweeping cyber attack by
(31:27):
the group known as Salt Typhoon is China's most ambitious
yet targeted more than eighty countries, may have stolen info
from nearly every American. They see it as evidence that
China's capabilities rivaled those of the US and its allies.
It's not clear whether a lot of the stuff was
swept up kind of accidentally, and whether it's being stored
(31:49):
or anything like that. You know, I, personally, knowing a
little bit about China's track record, I suspect that, yeah,
they believe that information is power. Or even if you
don't know how you might use it someday, you just
keep it. And then what the fear is that the
rangey the attack blah blah blah. Security officials warned that
(32:11):
the stolen data could allow Chinese intelligence services to exploit
global communications networks to track targets, including politicians, spies, and activists.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
They have everybody's digital footprint.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
I wonder if they do they actually have the ability
to like coalesce, keep track of somehow, Like they steal
all the information from a twenty two year old and
that person twenty years from now becomes a US senator.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Do they have the ability to keep track of that.
I don't have any on you. I'll bet with Ai
they do now.
Speaker 4 (32:44):
Maybe because you don't have to have some poor analysts,
like you know, pawing through millions of pages of digital
blankety blank or doing Google searches. You just to ask AI, Hey,
Senator Jones, what do we have on him? Here's this
last known addresses blah blah bla. And in a similar
ish story, you remember when the Trump administration's contentious trade
(33:07):
talks with China were going to begin last summer, staffers
on the House committee focused on US competition with China
began to get weird emails from the committee's chairman, John Molinar,
who is a Republican congressman from Michigan. Several trade groups,
law firms, US government agencies had all received the emails
(33:28):
appearing to be from Molinar, asking for input on proposed
sanctions with which the legislators were planning to target Beijing.
Your insights are essential blah blah blah. Turned out to
be the latest in a series of cyber espionage campaigns
linked to Beijing. They were impersonating the guy trying to
(33:49):
pump anybody for information who's willing to give it to them,
and they tied that to when last year I think
it was somebody used AI to imitate Marco Rubio voice
right and had him leaving voicemails to people, to all
sorts of foreign officials.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
That's going to happen a lot. Oh yeah, yeah, I
wonder And just.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Like in everybody's lives, you're going to get a text
that sounds like your wife saying something ridiculous. I mean,
just as just messing with you, isn't it, because it's
so easy?
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Well yeah, apparently.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
Well, not only do you have Marco Rubio being not
you know, I said, I almost said convincingly imitated, but
it's not. It's his actual voice symphasized digitally. It's like,
you know, if you're a guitar player, you know they
have these digital amp what do you call them imitations?
There's a word for it, models that actually take the
(34:47):
audio data from you know, a Marshall amplifier or whatever,
and they can replicate it. You know, the sound waves
are the same, so yeah, it's his voice essentially. But yeah,
you already have grandma's getting calls from their grandsons saying, Hey,
I got arrested, I need two hundred dollars bail, blah
blah blah, send it right away.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
So yeah, I.
Speaker 4 (35:05):
Wonder whether do the Marcos Rubio of the world and
the foreign ministers of Britain or whatever, do they already
have protocols in place where if I see a phone
call coming in it appears to be from you, for instance,
and you say, hey, I need to talk to you
about blah blah blah.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
I've been arrested. Good I need two hundred dollars. Yeah,
good luck, get it yourself. Click. Do they have like
code words and stuff already.
Speaker 4 (35:32):
I don't know, because I've heard that suggested that families
have that have a code really yes, wow?
Speaker 2 (35:39):
Oh yeah wow, and none of that. Huh.
Speaker 4 (35:48):
Yeah. You'd have to be a little naive or inexperienced
in the ways of the world to fall for this stuff. Still,
But that's that's the thing about scumbags, is some of
them are pretty smart and they're good at their jobs. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
I mean, if I got a phone call from my son,
even if it sounded very convincing, Dad at Sam, I'm
in Mexico. I'm in jail. I think, No, you know
you're not. You're at school. There's no way you ended
up in Mexico. Well what about I'm two towns over.
I was ditching school.
Speaker 4 (36:18):
And one of my buddies was shoplifting and I was
with them, so I got arrested. I need four hundred bucks. Yeah,
how about like, uhh, yeah, hang out with better people.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Click.
Speaker 4 (36:31):
I think you would probably see where you're supposed to
send the money. Right, Wait a minute, I'm calling the
cop shop right, yes, yeah, but a lot of.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
People don't because they're they're night.
Speaker 4 (36:43):
It's no nice okay,
Hosts And Creators
Joe Getty
Jack Armstrong
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.