November 19, 2025 • 36 mins
Hour 3 of A&G features...
- 2028 Olympics, affordability & rent control
- Racoons as pets!
- Older Fans, Ai stocks & Ai accelerators
- China & Japan dispute
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, Jack Armstrong and Joe Ketty.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Armstrong and Jettie and He Armstrong and Yetty.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Lebron James and Steph Curry and whether they'll play at
the Olympics in Los Angeles in twenty twenty eight. Lebron James,
who will be forty three by that time, saying he
won't play, Steph Curry, who will be forty, saying it's
unlikely he'll play.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
That ads never say never, So there's a stupid story
for you.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
They teased all throughout the ABC Evening News last night,
and I stuck around to the end.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
It worked on me. The tease.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Lebron James and Steph Curry asked, I will play for
the men's Olympic basketball team.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
You're not gonna like the answer.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
And I thought, well, I assume you said that that
they're gonna say no. But they're old. And I was
thinking of the Olympics if it were this year. I
forget that it's in twenty twenty eight, so it's.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Three years from now. They're already old. What a stupid story.
Who is that for?
Speaker 3 (01:10):
No?
Speaker 2 (01:12):
No basketball?
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Fan who wants America to win the gold medal wants
a forty three year old Lebron and forty year old
Steph Curry on the team. They're big stars.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
Jack so Well, I like the teas where he said,
you're not gonna like the answer, because the answer is
I don't know.
Speaker 5 (01:28):
ID like that anster. No.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
One of the problems with the whole thing is that
the top four players, four of the top five players
in the world are all play for other countries.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
So when you get about.
Speaker 5 (01:39):
That, they've stolen our game. Time to declare war.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
So I mentioned this yesterday essay in the New York
Times over the weekend about the whole affordability thing. The
a word that is going to be sold everywhere until
the next election, affordability, and both both parties want to
try to take the mantle on that and be the
champions of trying to make affordability better. That's what Trump's
(02:04):
working on every single day. This essay in the New
York Time written by some fancy pants professor. Economists hate
this idea. That's kind of funny you're gonna argue about
something that all economists say is a terrible idea. Economists
hate this idea, but it could be a way out
of the affordability crisis. Price controls, oh lord, And it
(02:25):
argues for why that would work.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
Trying for the millionth time to push that fraud on
humanity unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
And they even in the headline put that economists have
decided this doesn't work, but let's try.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
It again anyway, because it kind of sounds good.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Who's with me?
Speaker 4 (02:41):
So I've assembled a handful of stories about price controls,
specifically in terms of real at state and rent. It
was funny. I just found out that our remodel failed inspection.
It's no big deal because they'll fix it and it'll
be fine. But one of the things that the inspector said,
now you got to have this contractor has been doing
this for many, many moons exactly where my house is.
(03:03):
Said I've never heard of that in my life. That
is an example of what it's like to build housing,
you know, writ large. But anyway, just to get this
out of the way, it's funny. This Wall Street Journal
headline hit me how building affordable housing became the hottest
game in LA And what happened was the city decided
we need more affordable housing and so they eliminated a
(03:26):
lot of the BS red tape, but only for quote
unquote affordable housing, which means all units are for tenants
who make no more than eighty percent of the city's
median income, which somebody decided was the proper number. More
places across the US are experimenting with similar policies to
cut red tape for affordable housing and effort to ease
(03:47):
their yawning housing shortages. Well what about unaffordable housing or
nice housing or luxury housing.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Well, let me just jump in as no, somebody knows
nothing about this. Just at first, listen to this story. So,
most regulations are around safety, some sort of you gotta
you know, use this sort of wood or plaster or cement,
and the roof needs to be this high, and blah
(04:15):
blah blah, and all these different sorts of things. You
got all the gazillions of regulations, everything like that. And
you're saying, if it's to build a house for someone
who doesn't have much money, we don't need to meet
this standard, but everybody else does. Well, that leads me
to believe that the standard is not necessary in the
first place.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
Well, or it's the environmental crap and Calrnans are familiar
with how this works. Okay, but environmental reviews don't exist
to protect in the environment. They exist so unions can sue
and demand to share the work and more money.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Yeah, my argument is the same.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
If you're claiming it was for the environment originally when
you pass this regulation, well, obviously it's not that important
if you can waive it for people under a certain income.
Speaker 4 (04:56):
Right, right, So if you want to build like a normal,
regular development, it takes you years, years and years. But
if it's affordable housing, we'll cut all the red tape
and you can go ahead and build it. What possible
sense does that make anyway? Moving on to this great
piece by the editorial board at the Journal, how to
shrink housing supply in Los Angeles the city tightens its
(05:18):
rent control law.
Speaker 5 (05:19):
Good luck finding an apartment.
Speaker 4 (05:22):
Yeah, economic laws supplying demand is simple enough, but LA
is defying it again by tightening rent control laws in
the name of housing affordability. The result will be as
it always, always, always is, fewer apartments and less affordable housing.
City restricts rent increases in properties built before nineteen seventy eight,
which for some reason is the golden year to the
(05:42):
consumer price index, and it can't even be more than
eight percent, even if the price index goes at eight percent,
and the rent caps applied to about three quarters of
the multi family housing units in the city.
Speaker 5 (05:53):
So last week the city Council.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
Wanted to vote to lower the cap to ninety percent
of the consumer price index, with a maximum increase of
four percent, so landlords will no longer be able to
raise rents to cover an increase in electricity charges, for instance.
That means they'll have to eat rising electricity rates caused
by the state's destructive green energy of policies. But the
(06:17):
in effect what happens is they don't eat it because
it's a fairly tight profit margin. And so what happens
is rent control discourages housing investment and reduces supply. And
if landlords can't raise rents to cover their costs, including repairs, insurance,
and utilities.
Speaker 5 (06:34):
They won't maintain them.
Speaker 4 (06:35):
They won't fix the leaky pipes or water heater, forget
about upgrades, forget about new developments.
Speaker 5 (06:40):
It doesn't make economic sense to do it.
Speaker 4 (06:43):
So you restrict a number of new units to zero,
and you make all the units that exist crappier and crappier.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Yeah, there's no.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
I don't have rental property, but there's no way I
would ever decide to do that if I lived in
an area where I don't get to determine the rent
regardless of what market demain is or what you know,
energy costs to become or whatever.
Speaker 5 (07:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
Two more notes that I found really interesting. This one
is about a case. And then, of course, if you
already own the property, why would you try to compete
to be able to raise the rent If you're not
allowed to, you just well let it be crappy, all right.
And if the city says, if you're unforseeable costs in
(07:27):
the future go up ten percent, you can just raise
the rent four percent. Sorry, I'm thinking, no, I got
other places to put my money, because rental property is
risky in several different ways which we won't get into.
Speaker 5 (07:39):
But no, that's just not nearly enough to justify the risk.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
So interestingly, there's a lawsuit going on filed in New
York City by building owners challenging the city's rent stabilization law,
which is similar to what we've been talking about. What
they're saying is that rent fix is an unconstitutional taking
under the Fifth Amendment, because you can't just find me
(08:08):
without me violating the lawn, breaking a specific lawn and
the rest of it. So they're trying to claim that
at making me charge subnormal rent or sub market rent
is an unconstitutional taking. The courts have rejected that on
a number of different occasions. I was corresponding with our
good friend Tim Sanderfer about that, but he says it's
(08:28):
plainly clearly an unconstitutional taking.
Speaker 5 (08:31):
God always has been.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Yeah, I don't know anything about that. That's interesting.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
You shouldn't even have to get there though. Again, like
that headline in the New York Times, economists think it's
a bad idea.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
It's been looked at for years, these ideas.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
I remember the Washington Post several years back said sorry Democrats,
but it's just true.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Rent control doesn't work, And.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
The Washington Post laid out why for their readers it's
just a bad idea. I know you think it's a
good idea, and I don't blame anybody for thinking it's
a good idea.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
I didn't do it. I was young, first time I
ever heard it. But then when somebody explains you why
it isn't well, then you move on.
Speaker 4 (09:07):
So the Supreme Court has been edging closer and closer
to being sympathetic to this claim. I certainly hope they
come around. Final example, this one again from New York City.
Matt miller, A writing for The Free Press h why
New York City has fifty thousand, fifty thousand ghost apartments.
(09:29):
Mom Donni's freeze the rent pledge misses the real problem.
The rent that landlords can charge often doesn't cover their costs.
And of course he's got to begin with a particular anecdote. Normally,
it doesn't take too long for landlords like me to
renovate in an empty apartment and list it so that
new people can move in and start the next chapter
of their lives. But since this particular apartment is rent stabilized,
(09:51):
laws that were passed in twenty nineteen essentially prevent me
from doing anything with it except shutting the door and
keeping it empty. Strict limits on rent increase says under
the twenty nineteen laws have left an estimated fifty thousand
apartments like this one vacant across the city because the
restrictions on what landlords can charge for these apartments often
don't even cover the cost of maintaining them. They become
(10:12):
like ghosts. It's like they don't exist at all. And
he goes into how Mumdani is going to make it
even worse, and then he.
Speaker 5 (10:22):
Goes into some of the particulars of it.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
But the point is, if you rent your apartment, you
will be losing significantly more over the longer term than
if you just leave it off the market and hope
that the rents change in two years I'm sorry, and
hope that's the laws change in two years or five
years or whenever. So you have fifty thousand plus empty
(10:47):
apartments because it makes more sense for the owner to
keep them off the market than to rent them thanks
to rent control. It is obscenely idiotic. It just sounds
good to dope be young people who listen to Mom
Donnie and people like him, and it's been true forever.
I mean, as Jack said, it sounds good to young
people who don't understand how markets work, which is another
(11:09):
reason econ one O one should be a required class
in every high school in America, if.
Speaker 5 (11:14):
Not middle school.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
The easy stuff or the simple stuff in economics is
super easy to grasp, and it's as true as anything
has ever been true, but people fall for the scam
over and over again because they think, yeah, I'm voting
for that guy because he's going to stick into those
green landlords and I can get a super cool apartment
for a lot less than they're charging right now.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
It's too damn Everyone should come out of high school
at least having heard the arguments on both sides of
price control, re and control that sort of stuff. But
that's never going to happen in government schools because the
government crowd always thinks this stuff is a good idea.
Speaker 5 (11:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:52):
The greatest illustration of this is and this is a
conversation we had a number of years ago with Tim
Santa Fer from the Goldwater Foundation out to gouging and
how gouging is a good thing, like after a hurricane,
And it's like going to the end of the argument
to make it absolutely clear why rent control's a bad idea,
the idea being all right, after the hurricane Florida, chainsaws
(12:15):
are going for a quadrupled or normal price. If I'm
Joe's Chainsaws in Georgia, I'm loading up a truck with
every chainsaw I can beg, borrow and steal. I'm driving
straight to Florida to get those fabulous prices for my chainsaws,
which floods the market with chainsaws because that's where people
need them the most, and the price drops almost immediately,
(12:37):
and the people who need the chain saws the most
they go ahead and buy them, and the goods flow
to where they're needed. Soon the price is level out
and everybody's fine. You put a price control on chainsaws,
can be no more the Gavin Newsom has done this,
the freakin disingenuous lion idiot. You put a price control
on chainsaws, you can only charge ten percent more than
(12:58):
the usual price. Here, I am Joe's Chainsaws in Georgia.
I'm sitting there in my Georgia chainsaw store and I'm
not moving an inch. Why would I? So the people
in Florida can't get a damn chainsaw chainsaw?
Speaker 5 (13:13):
That's right?
Speaker 4 (13:17):
Uh got the same flim flam gets sold over and
over again.
Speaker 5 (13:21):
It's enough to making insane.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Everybody is waiting for the Nvidia earnings to come out
that could be huge on the whether or not the
AI bubble is bursting or not. After several days in
a row of the stock market kind of having an
AI hit, I've got an interesting AI story and may
have kind of changed my mind as a doomer around
AI based on some stuff I heard yesterday.
Speaker 5 (13:42):
Okay, doomer, get to that later.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
All on the way, stay.
Speaker 6 (13:45):
Here is all the doom saying about AI are safety
ism that has infected our culture to such a stagnating
point job.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
That we all recognize that didn't used to exist when
we were a bold, innovative country.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
You're going to talk about that coming up a little
bit later.
Speaker 4 (14:08):
Oh, I'm a bit of a doomer, but you've hit
me with one of my favorite arguments.
Speaker 5 (14:12):
You know, your judo will.
Speaker 4 (14:15):
I can't wait to hear about that. So this is
this is really interesting. We're talking about the humble raccoon
could be your next pet, the trash panda, if you will.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Is that the one that looks like it's wearn't a mask?
Speaker 5 (14:27):
Yes, Yes, that's the Yes.
Speaker 4 (14:30):
City dwelling raccoons seem to evolve be evolving a shorter snout.
So what you say, it's a telltale feature of our
pets and other domesticated animals. And they go into a
detail about the dexterous, childlike hands and the cheeky masks,
raccoons are North America's ubiquitous backyard bandits.
Speaker 5 (14:50):
They're so comfortable in human environments.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
Now, new study finds that raccoons living in urban areas
are physically changing in response to life around humans that
an early step is domestication.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
I didn't think evolution could happen that fast.
Speaker 4 (15:04):
They explain, they have a pretty good theory why it's happening,
and this was the part that I thought was a
good simple revelation. The study lays out the case that domestication,
is often wrongly thought of, is initiated by humans, with
people capturing in selectively breeding wild animals. But it's not
that at all, the study authors claim, and I think
they're right that the process begins much earlier when animals
(15:25):
become habituated to human environments, says one of the studies
co authors from University of Arkansas. And they ought to
know about raccoons in Arkansas. One thing about us humans
is that wherever we go, we produce a lot of trash,
and piles of human scraps offer a bottomless, buffeted wildlife,
and to access that bounty, animals need to be bold
(15:47):
enough to rummage through human rubbish. But not so bold
as to become a threat to people. He says, quote,
if you have an animal that lives close to humans,
you have to be well behaved enough that selection pressure
is quite intense. I'm sure proto dogs for example. And seriously,
proto dogs is the name of my next band? One
(16:08):
hundred percent? Yeah, yeah, it's mine. You can't steal it.
They would have dug through human trash heaps and cats
attracted de mice gathered around refuge overtime. Individual animals that
had reduced fight or flight responses could feed more successfully
around humans and pass their non reactive behavior onto their offspring. Interestingly,
in decoding the genome, they figured out that the less
(16:29):
fight or flight thing seems to come in a set
of genes that also has been associated with traits such
as shorter a shorter face, smaller head, floppy ears, white
patches on fur, a pattern that Charles Darwin noted back
in the eighteen hundreds that were common among more domesticated animals.
(16:51):
So they think the shortening of the stoutness snout rather
is just kind of coincidental to the I'm aggressive or
bold enough to get near hum, but not so bold
as to want to hurt them or anything says step
toward domestication.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
I like the YouTube videos of raccoons trying to get
into cyber trucks because they think they're trash containers.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Really into videos, really entertaining Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 7 (17:15):
The House voted to release the Epstein files, and if
to day couldn't get any worse for Trump. Halfway through
the vote there was a performance from Bad Bunny and
the final vote was four and a twenty seven to one.
I mean, it just goes to show every office has
that one.
Speaker 4 (17:33):
Weirdo, you know what I'm saying, charming efforts at humor.
Uh how the narrative has taken shape that this is
bad for Trump to the extent that his young liberal
audience cheered and all kind Trump is so interesting mostly
through Trump's uh you know, resistance to it.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
I guess yeah, because your your your natural reaction is
he doesn't want this to happen. There must be something
which may not need never offered, like a.
Speaker 5 (18:02):
Real explanation of why he was against it. It's a
it's a stupid.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
We'll talk more about that an hour four. We talked
to a lot about it in No how or two
one end two. There's a bunch there, and this might
be our slide into the country being really reality television
if this sets a precedent. But more on that later.
One to talk about first of all this I got
a text from a friend of mine. I thought this
was pretty damn funny. She is in her mid forties,
(18:30):
an attractive woman in her mid forties. She said, I'm
going to create a website called older Fans, and it's
just me telling people what part of my body hurts
today and what minuscule task I was doing that caused it.
Speaker 5 (18:44):
Oh that's priceless. Well done. Yeah that is really good. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
You get on there and you're dressed, you know whatever,
your addressed sexy, and you say, today my knee hurts
because yesterday I had to do something and now I
was gardening and now my knee hurts.
Speaker 4 (19:00):
I walked up four stairs and I hurt my knee.
How I don't know, lolaber faye.
Speaker 5 (19:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:06):
Hansen says he wants to be the first subscriber that's brilliant.
Speaker 5 (19:09):
Ten out of ten, my dear, well played.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
So if you've been.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Found in the stock market, it's had a rough week
or so, and it's almost all Ai will all most
all of the growth in the stock market over the
last couple of years has been AI, and so a
downturn is around AI, and it's concerned that the bubble's
about to burst, and that sort of stuff huge.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Day to day.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Why in Vidia, which is a big chip maker, which
the common thing to say in the stock market world
right now is as goes in Nvidia goes the stock market.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
That's how big a deal they are.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
They're going to announce their earnings at the close of
the bell today, so around four thirty Eastern time, they'll
put out their earnings and this might shore up this
concern that it's a bubble, depending on how well they do.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Where analysts expect to dig this.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Analysts expect the chip behemoth to show more than a
fifty percent growth in net income and revenue this quarter.
Speaker 5 (20:10):
Oo what corner.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Moving up?
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Yeah, I would say that will shore up the whole
This is a bubble thing.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
No, there's the stock market.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
I mean, it still could be a bubble, but the
bubble ain't about inane over yet.
Speaker 4 (20:26):
Except as you've pointed out, that whole incestuous thing in
videos profits mostly came from you know, open AI, whose
profits mostly came from in Video, whose profits mostly came
from cloud services from Amazon.
Speaker 5 (20:38):
I can tell you, right, and.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
This is from Bloomberg.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
So they're expecting in Video to announce a fifty percent
growth in both net income in revenue.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
It's fiscal third quarter.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
The reason is straightforward, says here, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
That's Google.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
That's that's Google, right, and Meta, which is a Facebook
and Zuckerberg all taken together represent more than forty percent
of Nvidio's sales.
Speaker 5 (21:05):
So they're buying the chips for AI.
Speaker 4 (21:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Yeah, And they're projected to increase their combined AI spending by.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Thirty four percent over the next year.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
They've been throwing money at AI like crazy, and those
companies that I all just mentioned are going to increase
it by a third over the next twelve months.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
It's expected.
Speaker 4 (21:28):
Holy crap, it's it's a gold rush, and nobody's sure
there's gold.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
So I was talking to yesterday about how much I
read and listened to about AI.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Joe was asking why.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
For me, it's I think it might be the biggest
thing that's ever happened on planet Earth, so I would
like to know as much about it as possible.
Speaker 4 (21:49):
And the reason I asked was it seems like uncertainty
piled on uncertainty, and it's just at some point you
get okay, we're not sure boy.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
I highly recommend.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Steve Hayes of The Dispatch did an interview with a
podcast guy the other day that broke it down, like
really long conversations into about an hour, so if you're
interested in it. All he had on the guy from
the podcast the Last Invention, which I've.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Gotten into now. It's really good.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
It gets into the history of all this, which is
what I was going to talk about now, the.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
History of AI.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
AI got a really big start in the fifties and
we got to jump on it and had almost all
your sci fi and projections of flying cars and all
that sort of stuff that if you're older you grew
up with all came out of this rush toward AI
in the fifties.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Then it just got like stuck.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
For some reason. And I haven't heard an explanation for that.
I suspect it's just computing power wasn't there. Just plane
didn't have the computing power at the time to pull
off their ideas behind AI. And then with Moore's law
with computer power, computing computing power doubling roughly every eighteen
months over the last many, many decades. We've gotten a
(23:00):
point now that chips are so fast and processing speeds
are so great that they can do the stuff that
they thought about a very long time ago, which is interesting. Now,
I'm a doomer in the three camps that that particular
podcast talks about. The real polar opposites are the doomers
(23:20):
like me that think this is gonna be the end
of mankind. It's gonna be the worst thing that ever
happened to us. It's coming, whether we like it or not.
How quickly it ends as I don't know in my
lifetime or not, I don't know. We'll find out. And
then you got the accelerators he calls them, or the
people that say this is going to be the greatest
thing that ever happened to mankind. Well, it's split between
(23:41):
two crowds. The accelerators. I think I mentioned this yesterday.
You've got the this is gonna be the greatest thing
for mankind. We're gonna cure all the diseases. We're going
to live to be one hundred and fifty. Nobody's gonna
have to work. It's gonna be like Heaven on Earth.
Everybody is hoped for since the dawn of time. Half
the accelerators believe that. The other half the accelerators, No, no, no,
I think it's going to be the worst thing that
(24:02):
ever happened. But better that we get it first rather
than the Chinese. So that's why I'm all for plowing
forward as fast as we can. But as listening to
this podcast guy yesterday from the Last Invention talk about
how safety ism is what's driving the doomers.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
He was just presenting the different arguments.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
And there's no doubt that we have a safetyism problem
in our culture, no doubt whatsoever. The entire Western world. Yeah,
the entire Western world. We don't let kids play tag
at school. We put rubber bumpers on the corner of
our tables when our kids are little. I mean, just
all these different things that we do. We won't let
our kids play outside. There's a gaze as a park
(24:44):
on their own whatever. Yeah, we've got millions of examples
of this. And the guy was talking about how we
didn't used to be like that culturally. When the automobile
was first invented and then started to become mass produced
and going. We didn't get seat belts into what They
didn't put seat belts in cars at all for for
a very very long time, and then they weren't mandated
(25:05):
in this country until what the nineties.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
I don't even know when that happened. It was a
long time.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
And he makes the point that everybody wasn't pushing back
on the automobile. You know, how many people are gonna
die from this? And what about all the jobs that
are going to be lost from people that farm with
horses and this and that and all.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
These different things. It's going to destroy these interesting No,
we just.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Plowed ahead with this new invention that was super cool
and it was the latest technology, and we just full
steam ahead.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
For example, on.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
The danger of it, the peak of highway deads. I
did the research on this yesterday. It was in nineteen seventy.
I think it was about fifty eight thousand deads. With
a much smaller population, that'd be the equivalent of ninety
five thousand highway deaths today. We were willing to put
up with in nineteen seventy because we just thought the
(25:51):
technology was important enough, it changed our lives enough in
a positive way.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
We were just plowing forward. That's the way we used
to look at things.
Speaker 4 (26:00):
Yeah, I'm tempted to go off on a tangent about
safetyism and how our acceptance that humans live and then
they die and perhaps there's a better place afterward has
given way too.
Speaker 5 (26:10):
We've got to prolong.
Speaker 4 (26:11):
Our lives as long as possible, no matter what it
costs culturally speaking.
Speaker 5 (26:16):
But back to you, But here.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Was an invention that was clearly going to kill lots
of people, and the data was there right in front
of us that it was killing lots of people for
a long time. I mean, there were lots of highway
deads in the fifties and the sixties. We kept moving forward.
We're faster and more powerful cars, and it wasn't people
afraid to get in them.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
And then, like I said, the what will this do
to society? Blah blah.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
I mean, there were those articles, you can find them,
they're hilarious. But we plowed forward, and then a lot
of the nay saying about AI now fits in with
our safety ism. I don't know if I fully buy
this argument, because I think AI is going to doom
us and it'll be the end of society and the
end of mankind and all these different sorts of things.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
But there's no doubt we have a safety asm.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Problem in the country and any modern invention now if
you tried to get the car, for instance, going now,
there'd be so much pushback around the danger and the
changes to our economy and we probably shouldn't. We're more
of a probably shouldn't society now than we were back
in the day.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
There's no doubt about it.
Speaker 4 (27:20):
My favorite saying safety, third, innovation, adventure, then safety. Anyway,
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Speaker 1 (28:38):
I look forward to listening to the episode of the
podcast from the Last Invention where it gets to the accelerators.
Not the ones that think we need to accelerate just
to stay ahead of China, but the accelerators that think
it's gonna bring about the greatest time in human history.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
I think those people are nuts, I mean, like crazy crazy.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Don't understand human nature at all nut so that they
think nobody's gonna have to work is going to lead
up to a positive outcome.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
I couldn't I couldn't disagree with you.
Speaker 4 (29:11):
Not specifically address that concern about human nature and idle
hands and the rest of it, then they need to
go to hell.
Speaker 5 (29:18):
I mean, that's ridiculous. It's like rent.
Speaker 4 (29:19):
Control, which you were talking about earlier, not addressing the
constriction of supply. If you don't If you don't address that,
you're a crackpot. I'm not gonna waste ten seconds listening
to you.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Yeah, they just don't believe it.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
So it's you've used this example before among like some
of your super smart libertarians. The reason they think their
version of government would work is they think everybody's like them.
They think everybody's super smart, motivated to do the right thing,
et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 4 (29:48):
If everybody is like self motivated, they'll always stay busy
and go get it, because that's how human beings behave.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
And I think a lot of the AI accelerators they
have that problem too well. I if I had more
free time, I would learn to play the piano. I
would travel the world, I would write a symphony. I
would do all these different sorts of things. That's not
the average person. Maybe you would if you had lots
of free time. The average person's gonna sit around, get
fat and do drugs.
Speaker 4 (30:13):
Two things to that point coming up next, an argument
about capitalism. The free market ripped from my very life
within the last twenty four hours. And then you mentioned
the Dispatch and it reminded me because they have Trump
derangement syndrome, is or should Trump derangement syndrome now be
(30:35):
a recognized psychological problem.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Wow, that's a good question.
Speaker 5 (30:39):
The answer is clearly yes.
Speaker 4 (30:41):
And I've got this great stuff written by a psychiatrist
about it.
Speaker 5 (30:44):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
That is interesting.
Speaker 5 (30:46):
It's like a real thing.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
I think it's provably Yes. Yeah, okay, stay tuned.
Speaker 5 (30:51):
For all that.
Speaker 8 (30:56):
China and Japan they are locked into this escalating dispute
over Taiwan. It's prompted the Chinese government to warn its
citizens against traveling in Japan. And now what we have
is the governments in Japan and Taiwan are now issuing
warnings of their own. And the trigger all of this was,
of course, those comments by the Japanese Prime Minister to
Parliament earlier this month when she was answering a question
(31:18):
and said that a Chinese invasion in Taiwan would be
an existential threat to Japan and could spark a military
response that infuriated China.
Speaker 4 (31:28):
Well as Stewie you Kin woke up infuriated back to you.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
As Stuie Griffin, a family guy, once said, world keeps spinning.
We can talk about Epstein all we want, but.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
You got that out there. Now, that's reality.
Speaker 5 (31:43):
Two things. Number one, I have a tie into that.
Speaker 4 (31:45):
It occurs to me as I was structuring what we're
going to talk about that I really need more time
than we have in this segment.
Speaker 5 (31:52):
So why don't we do it hour four.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
If you don't get our four, grab it via podcast,
you got to subscribe to Armstrung and getting on demand.
Great unintended consequence of the super secure American security umbrella
for seventy five years is that you've got enormous potential
bulk military, socio economic bulk in Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines,
(32:21):
South Korea, handful of other countries in the Pacific region
that could be a hell of a good counterbalance to China.
But they've been kind of dependent, and that's weirdly a
tying to what I wanted to talk about about the
free market in the I promised you, you know, the
incident rip from my very life in the last twenty
four hours. So we've mentioned we have people working around
(32:44):
our house a lot. We've done this major, major remodel,
practically rebuilt house. One of the guys who's been on
site a lot, who I was fairly friendly with, and
it was a good worker. He started just not showing
up and given bull less excuses to his supervisor, the foreman,
(33:05):
and I was surprised by that. But it got to
be ridiculous this week. And so, I mean it was
one of the classic jackual recog Now everybody will recognized this. Yeah,
what was the first one? Oh, my alarm wasn't set
right and I overslept. Okay, next day, Yeah, my tire
(33:27):
went flat and my phone went dead the same day.
That's the reason I wasn't answering your text or calls.
I don't know what happened. My phone went dead.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
All those can happen, but when they happened multiple days
in a row.
Speaker 4 (33:38):
Yeah, And so his employment was ended and I was
discussing his with his supervisor. The fact that it is
so clearly heading toward a situation where he will be
on the dole, he will be the underprivileged, he will
need social Aid, and I will be told repeatedly that
(34:00):
I should pay my fair share because he is disadvantaged,
having made stupid decision after stupid decision.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
And the ability i'd be gainfully employed.
Speaker 4 (34:13):
When was the last time in a discussion of the
haves and have nots you heard factored in the decisions
you make?
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Never? Never, I bring bring it up all the time.
Drives me nuts.
Speaker 4 (34:26):
Oh oh, it ought to drive you nuts. It's like
they're talking about I don't know, rockets without discussing fuel
or or you know, the engines. It's it's absurd, which
just goes to show you that haves and have nots
thing is politically useful. You can get it to wrench
money out of people that then you spread out to
your cronies, not that there's no need. You know, As
(34:48):
I've said many times, the essence of politics is you
have completely real needs, you have kind of half real needs,
then you have completely fictional needs, and.
Speaker 5 (34:59):
Politicians put all of those in front.
Speaker 4 (35:01):
Of you and explain why that those things mean we
need more tax money, and then we'll spend that money
to solve those needs, fulfill those needs. And that's the
scam because a lot of it's fake.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Now I would be against this as a libertarian, although we.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
If you're gonna live in a with a welfare state,
you got to have this sort of stuff at age
sixty five. There should be an accounting of how you
spent your whole life, and then they determine how much
money you get of other people's money.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
And if it looks like, you know, you bought.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
A new car every two years, didn't like driving used cars, okay, fine,
Like the vacations huh, like floorum.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Dell, a lot of stuff, well, okay, cool, But this
is how much money you get from other tax pamers.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
Oh, you saved your money your whole life, and you
have more money because you you drove your cars longer,
you didn't travel, and maybe.
Speaker 4 (35:47):
Your entire savings were wiped out by some medical catastrophe. Okay,
that's fine, We're not talking about you. You know, in
in like lawsuits, it's called contributory negligence. How much did
you contribute to the situation you are in that need overwhelmingly, Well.
Speaker 5 (36:07):
Then why are you looking at at the taxpayers.
Speaker 4 (36:10):
There's no stupid insurance paid for by taxpayers anyway, a
defensive capitalism, and you've gotten a hint of the shape
it takes. And is Trump arrangement syndrome an actual psychological problem.
Speaker 5 (36:21):
We'll have that next hour
Speaker 4 (36:24):
Armstrong and Getty
Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio, the George
Washington Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong and Joe Ketty.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Armstrong and Jettie and He Armstrong and Yetty.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Lebron James and Steph Curry and whether they'll play at
the Olympics in Los Angeles in twenty twenty eight. Lebron James,
who will be forty three by that time, saying he
won't play, Steph Curry, who will be forty, saying it's
unlikely he'll play.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
That ads never say never, So there's a stupid story
for you.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
They teased all throughout the ABC Evening News last night,
and I stuck around to the end.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
It worked on me. The tease.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Lebron James and Steph Curry asked, I will play for
the men's Olympic basketball team.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
You're not gonna like the answer.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
And I thought, well, I assume you said that that
they're gonna say no. But they're old. And I was
thinking of the Olympics if it were this year. I
forget that it's in twenty twenty eight, so it's.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Three years from now. They're already old. What a stupid story.
Who is that for?
Speaker 3 (01:10):
No?
Speaker 2 (01:12):
No basketball?
Speaker 1 (01:13):
Fan who wants America to win the gold medal wants
a forty three year old Lebron and forty year old
Steph Curry on the team. They're big stars.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
Jack so Well, I like the teas where he said,
you're not gonna like the answer, because the answer is
I don't know.
Speaker 5 (01:28):
ID like that anster. No.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
One of the problems with the whole thing is that
the top four players, four of the top five players
in the world are all play for other countries.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
So when you get about.
Speaker 5 (01:39):
That, they've stolen our game. Time to declare war.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
So I mentioned this yesterday essay in the New York
Times over the weekend about the whole affordability thing. The
a word that is going to be sold everywhere until
the next election, affordability, and both both parties want to
try to take the mantle on that and be the
champions of trying to make affordability better. That's what Trump's
(02:04):
working on every single day. This essay in the New
York Time written by some fancy pants professor. Economists hate
this idea. That's kind of funny you're gonna argue about
something that all economists say is a terrible idea. Economists
hate this idea, but it could be a way out
of the affordability crisis. Price controls, oh lord, And it
(02:25):
argues for why that would work.
Speaker 4 (02:28):
Trying for the millionth time to push that fraud on
humanity unbelievable.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
And they even in the headline put that economists have
decided this doesn't work, but let's try.
Speaker 4 (02:37):
It again anyway, because it kind of sounds good.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Who's with me?
Speaker 4 (02:41):
So I've assembled a handful of stories about price controls,
specifically in terms of real at state and rent. It
was funny. I just found out that our remodel failed inspection.
It's no big deal because they'll fix it and it'll
be fine. But one of the things that the inspector said,
now you got to have this contractor has been doing
this for many, many moons exactly where my house is.
(03:03):
Said I've never heard of that in my life. That
is an example of what it's like to build housing,
you know, writ large. But anyway, just to get this
out of the way, it's funny. This Wall Street Journal
headline hit me how building affordable housing became the hottest
game in LA And what happened was the city decided
we need more affordable housing and so they eliminated a
(03:26):
lot of the BS red tape, but only for quote
unquote affordable housing, which means all units are for tenants
who make no more than eighty percent of the city's
median income, which somebody decided was the proper number. More
places across the US are experimenting with similar policies to
cut red tape for affordable housing and effort to ease
(03:47):
their yawning housing shortages. Well what about unaffordable housing or
nice housing or luxury housing.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Well, let me just jump in as no, somebody knows
nothing about this. Just at first, listen to this story. So,
most regulations are around safety, some sort of you gotta
you know, use this sort of wood or plaster or cement,
and the roof needs to be this high, and blah
(04:15):
blah blah, and all these different sorts of things. You
got all the gazillions of regulations, everything like that. And
you're saying, if it's to build a house for someone
who doesn't have much money, we don't need to meet
this standard, but everybody else does. Well, that leads me
to believe that the standard is not necessary in the
first place.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
Well, or it's the environmental crap and Calrnans are familiar
with how this works. Okay, but environmental reviews don't exist
to protect in the environment. They exist so unions can sue
and demand to share the work and more money.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Yeah, my argument is the same.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
If you're claiming it was for the environment originally when
you pass this regulation, well, obviously it's not that important
if you can waive it for people under a certain income.
Speaker 4 (04:56):
Right, right, So if you want to build like a normal,
regular development, it takes you years, years and years. But
if it's affordable housing, we'll cut all the red tape
and you can go ahead and build it. What possible
sense does that make anyway? Moving on to this great
piece by the editorial board at the Journal, how to
shrink housing supply in Los Angeles the city tightens its
(05:18):
rent control law.
Speaker 5 (05:19):
Good luck finding an apartment.
Speaker 4 (05:22):
Yeah, economic laws supplying demand is simple enough, but LA
is defying it again by tightening rent control laws in
the name of housing affordability. The result will be as
it always, always, always is, fewer apartments and less affordable housing.
City restricts rent increases in properties built before nineteen seventy eight,
which for some reason is the golden year to the
(05:42):
consumer price index, and it can't even be more than
eight percent, even if the price index goes at eight percent,
and the rent caps applied to about three quarters of
the multi family housing units in the city.
Speaker 5 (05:53):
So last week the city Council.
Speaker 4 (05:55):
Wanted to vote to lower the cap to ninety percent
of the consumer price index, with a maximum increase of
four percent, so landlords will no longer be able to
raise rents to cover an increase in electricity charges, for instance.
That means they'll have to eat rising electricity rates caused
by the state's destructive green energy of policies. But the
(06:17):
in effect what happens is they don't eat it because
it's a fairly tight profit margin. And so what happens
is rent control discourages housing investment and reduces supply. And
if landlords can't raise rents to cover their costs, including repairs, insurance,
and utilities.
Speaker 5 (06:34):
They won't maintain them.
Speaker 4 (06:35):
They won't fix the leaky pipes or water heater, forget
about upgrades, forget about new developments.
Speaker 5 (06:40):
It doesn't make economic sense to do it.
Speaker 4 (06:43):
So you restrict a number of new units to zero,
and you make all the units that exist crappier and crappier.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Yeah, there's no.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
I don't have rental property, but there's no way I
would ever decide to do that if I lived in
an area where I don't get to determine the rent
regardless of what market demain is or what you know,
energy costs to become or whatever.
Speaker 5 (07:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
Two more notes that I found really interesting. This one
is about a case. And then, of course, if you
already own the property, why would you try to compete
to be able to raise the rent If you're not
allowed to, you just well let it be crappy, all right.
And if the city says, if you're unforseeable costs in
(07:27):
the future go up ten percent, you can just raise
the rent four percent. Sorry, I'm thinking, no, I got
other places to put my money, because rental property is
risky in several different ways which we won't get into.
Speaker 5 (07:39):
But no, that's just not nearly enough to justify the risk.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
So interestingly, there's a lawsuit going on filed in New
York City by building owners challenging the city's rent stabilization law,
which is similar to what we've been talking about. What
they're saying is that rent fix is an unconstitutional taking
under the Fifth Amendment, because you can't just find me
(08:08):
without me violating the lawn, breaking a specific lawn and
the rest of it. So they're trying to claim that
at making me charge subnormal rent or sub market rent
is an unconstitutional taking. The courts have rejected that on
a number of different occasions. I was corresponding with our
good friend Tim Sanderfer about that, but he says it's
(08:28):
plainly clearly an unconstitutional taking.
Speaker 5 (08:31):
God always has been.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Yeah, I don't know anything about that. That's interesting.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
You shouldn't even have to get there though. Again, like
that headline in the New York Times, economists think it's
a bad idea.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
It's been looked at for years, these ideas.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
I remember the Washington Post several years back said sorry Democrats,
but it's just true.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Rent control doesn't work, And.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
The Washington Post laid out why for their readers it's
just a bad idea. I know you think it's a
good idea, and I don't blame anybody for thinking it's
a good idea.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
I didn't do it. I was young, first time I
ever heard it. But then when somebody explains you why
it isn't well, then you move on.
Speaker 4 (09:07):
So the Supreme Court has been edging closer and closer
to being sympathetic to this claim. I certainly hope they
come around. Final example, this one again from New York City.
Matt miller, A writing for The Free Press h why
New York City has fifty thousand, fifty thousand ghost apartments.
(09:29):
Mom Donni's freeze the rent pledge misses the real problem.
The rent that landlords can charge often doesn't cover their costs.
And of course he's got to begin with a particular anecdote. Normally,
it doesn't take too long for landlords like me to
renovate in an empty apartment and list it so that
new people can move in and start the next chapter
of their lives. But since this particular apartment is rent stabilized,
(09:51):
laws that were passed in twenty nineteen essentially prevent me
from doing anything with it except shutting the door and
keeping it empty. Strict limits on rent increase says under
the twenty nineteen laws have left an estimated fifty thousand
apartments like this one vacant across the city because the
restrictions on what landlords can charge for these apartments often
don't even cover the cost of maintaining them. They become
(10:12):
like ghosts. It's like they don't exist at all. And
he goes into how Mumdani is going to make it
even worse, and then he.
Speaker 5 (10:22):
Goes into some of the particulars of it.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
But the point is, if you rent your apartment, you
will be losing significantly more over the longer term than
if you just leave it off the market and hope
that the rents change in two years I'm sorry, and
hope that's the laws change in two years or five
years or whenever. So you have fifty thousand plus empty
(10:47):
apartments because it makes more sense for the owner to
keep them off the market than to rent them thanks
to rent control. It is obscenely idiotic. It just sounds
good to dope be young people who listen to Mom
Donnie and people like him, and it's been true forever.
I mean, as Jack said, it sounds good to young
people who don't understand how markets work, which is another
(11:09):
reason econ one O one should be a required class
in every high school in America, if.
Speaker 5 (11:14):
Not middle school.
Speaker 4 (11:14):
The easy stuff or the simple stuff in economics is
super easy to grasp, and it's as true as anything
has ever been true, but people fall for the scam
over and over again because they think, yeah, I'm voting
for that guy because he's going to stick into those
green landlords and I can get a super cool apartment
for a lot less than they're charging right now.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
It's too damn Everyone should come out of high school
at least having heard the arguments on both sides of
price control, re and control that sort of stuff. But
that's never going to happen in government schools because the
government crowd always thinks this stuff is a good idea.
Speaker 5 (11:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:52):
The greatest illustration of this is and this is a
conversation we had a number of years ago with Tim
Santa Fer from the Goldwater Foundation out to gouging and
how gouging is a good thing, like after a hurricane,
And it's like going to the end of the argument
to make it absolutely clear why rent control's a bad idea,
the idea being all right, after the hurricane Florida, chainsaws
(12:15):
are going for a quadrupled or normal price. If I'm
Joe's Chainsaws in Georgia, I'm loading up a truck with
every chainsaw I can beg, borrow and steal. I'm driving
straight to Florida to get those fabulous prices for my chainsaws,
which floods the market with chainsaws because that's where people
need them the most, and the price drops almost immediately,
(12:37):
and the people who need the chain saws the most
they go ahead and buy them, and the goods flow
to where they're needed. Soon the price is level out
and everybody's fine. You put a price control on chainsaws,
can be no more the Gavin Newsom has done this,
the freakin disingenuous lion idiot. You put a price control
on chainsaws, you can only charge ten percent more than
(12:58):
the usual price. Here, I am Joe's Chainsaws in Georgia.
I'm sitting there in my Georgia chainsaw store and I'm
not moving an inch. Why would I? So the people
in Florida can't get a damn chainsaw chainsaw?
Speaker 5 (13:13):
That's right?
Speaker 4 (13:17):
Uh got the same flim flam gets sold over and
over again.
Speaker 5 (13:21):
It's enough to making insane.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Everybody is waiting for the Nvidia earnings to come out
that could be huge on the whether or not the
AI bubble is bursting or not. After several days in
a row of the stock market kind of having an
AI hit, I've got an interesting AI story and may
have kind of changed my mind as a doomer around
AI based on some stuff I heard yesterday.
Speaker 5 (13:42):
Okay, doomer, get to that later.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
All on the way, stay.
Speaker 6 (13:45):
Here is all the doom saying about AI are safety
ism that has infected our culture to such a stagnating
point job.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
That we all recognize that didn't used to exist when
we were a bold, innovative country.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
You're going to talk about that coming up a little
bit later.
Speaker 4 (14:08):
Oh, I'm a bit of a doomer, but you've hit
me with one of my favorite arguments.
Speaker 5 (14:12):
You know, your judo will.
Speaker 4 (14:15):
I can't wait to hear about that. So this is
this is really interesting. We're talking about the humble raccoon
could be your next pet, the trash panda, if you will.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
Is that the one that looks like it's wearn't a mask?
Speaker 5 (14:27):
Yes, Yes, that's the Yes.
Speaker 4 (14:30):
City dwelling raccoons seem to evolve be evolving a shorter snout.
So what you say, it's a telltale feature of our
pets and other domesticated animals. And they go into a
detail about the dexterous, childlike hands and the cheeky masks,
raccoons are North America's ubiquitous backyard bandits.
Speaker 5 (14:50):
They're so comfortable in human environments.
Speaker 4 (14:52):
Now, new study finds that raccoons living in urban areas
are physically changing in response to life around humans that
an early step is domestication.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
I didn't think evolution could happen that fast.
Speaker 4 (15:04):
They explain, they have a pretty good theory why it's happening,
and this was the part that I thought was a
good simple revelation. The study lays out the case that domestication,
is often wrongly thought of, is initiated by humans, with
people capturing in selectively breeding wild animals. But it's not
that at all, the study authors claim, and I think
they're right that the process begins much earlier when animals
(15:25):
become habituated to human environments, says one of the studies
co authors from University of Arkansas. And they ought to
know about raccoons in Arkansas. One thing about us humans
is that wherever we go, we produce a lot of trash,
and piles of human scraps offer a bottomless, buffeted wildlife,
and to access that bounty, animals need to be bold
(15:47):
enough to rummage through human rubbish. But not so bold
as to become a threat to people. He says, quote,
if you have an animal that lives close to humans,
you have to be well behaved enough that selection pressure
is quite intense. I'm sure proto dogs for example. And seriously,
proto dogs is the name of my next band? One
(16:08):
hundred percent? Yeah, yeah, it's mine. You can't steal it.
They would have dug through human trash heaps and cats
attracted de mice gathered around refuge overtime. Individual animals that
had reduced fight or flight responses could feed more successfully
around humans and pass their non reactive behavior onto their offspring. Interestingly,
in decoding the genome, they figured out that the less
(16:29):
fight or flight thing seems to come in a set
of genes that also has been associated with traits such
as shorter a shorter face, smaller head, floppy ears, white
patches on fur, a pattern that Charles Darwin noted back
in the eighteen hundreds that were common among more domesticated animals.
(16:51):
So they think the shortening of the stoutness snout rather
is just kind of coincidental to the I'm aggressive or
bold enough to get near hum, but not so bold
as to want to hurt them or anything says step
toward domestication.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
I like the YouTube videos of raccoons trying to get
into cyber trucks because they think they're trash containers.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Really into videos, really entertaining Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 7 (17:15):
The House voted to release the Epstein files, and if
to day couldn't get any worse for Trump. Halfway through
the vote there was a performance from Bad Bunny and
the final vote was four and a twenty seven to one.
I mean, it just goes to show every office has
that one.
Speaker 4 (17:33):
Weirdo, you know what I'm saying, charming efforts at humor.
Uh how the narrative has taken shape that this is
bad for Trump to the extent that his young liberal
audience cheered and all kind Trump is so interesting mostly
through Trump's uh you know, resistance to it.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
I guess yeah, because your your your natural reaction is
he doesn't want this to happen. There must be something
which may not need never offered, like a.
Speaker 5 (18:02):
Real explanation of why he was against it. It's a
it's a stupid.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
We'll talk more about that an hour four. We talked
to a lot about it in No how or two
one end two. There's a bunch there, and this might
be our slide into the country being really reality television
if this sets a precedent. But more on that later.
One to talk about first of all this I got
a text from a friend of mine. I thought this
was pretty damn funny. She is in her mid forties,
(18:30):
an attractive woman in her mid forties. She said, I'm
going to create a website called older Fans, and it's
just me telling people what part of my body hurts
today and what minuscule task I was doing that caused it.
Speaker 5 (18:44):
Oh that's priceless. Well done. Yeah that is really good. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
You get on there and you're dressed, you know whatever,
your addressed sexy, and you say, today my knee hurts
because yesterday I had to do something and now I
was gardening and now my knee hurts.
Speaker 4 (19:00):
I walked up four stairs and I hurt my knee.
How I don't know, lolaber faye.
Speaker 5 (19:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (19:06):
Hansen says he wants to be the first subscriber that's brilliant.
Speaker 5 (19:09):
Ten out of ten, my dear, well played.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
So if you've been.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Found in the stock market, it's had a rough week
or so, and it's almost all Ai will all most
all of the growth in the stock market over the
last couple of years has been AI, and so a
downturn is around AI, and it's concerned that the bubble's
about to burst, and that sort of stuff huge.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Day to day.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Why in Vidia, which is a big chip maker, which
the common thing to say in the stock market world
right now is as goes in Nvidia goes the stock market.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
That's how big a deal they are.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
They're going to announce their earnings at the close of
the bell today, so around four thirty Eastern time, they'll
put out their earnings and this might shore up this
concern that it's a bubble, depending on how well they do.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Where analysts expect to dig this.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Analysts expect the chip behemoth to show more than a
fifty percent growth in net income and revenue this quarter.
Speaker 5 (20:10):
Oo what corner.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Moving up?
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Yeah, I would say that will shore up the whole
This is a bubble thing.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
No, there's the stock market.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
I mean, it still could be a bubble, but the
bubble ain't about inane over yet.
Speaker 4 (20:26):
Except as you've pointed out, that whole incestuous thing in
videos profits mostly came from you know, open AI, whose
profits mostly came from in Video, whose profits mostly came
from cloud services from Amazon.
Speaker 5 (20:38):
I can tell you, right, and.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
This is from Bloomberg.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
So they're expecting in Video to announce a fifty percent
growth in both net income in revenue.
Speaker 2 (20:46):
It's fiscal third quarter.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
The reason is straightforward, says here, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
That's Google.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
That's that's Google, right, and Meta, which is a Facebook
and Zuckerberg all taken together represent more than forty percent
of Nvidio's sales.
Speaker 5 (21:05):
So they're buying the chips for AI.
Speaker 4 (21:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Yeah, And they're projected to increase their combined AI spending by.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Thirty four percent over the next year.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
They've been throwing money at AI like crazy, and those
companies that I all just mentioned are going to increase
it by a third over the next twelve months.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
It's expected.
Speaker 4 (21:28):
Holy crap, it's it's a gold rush, and nobody's sure
there's gold.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
So I was talking to yesterday about how much I
read and listened to about AI.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Joe was asking why.
Speaker 1 (21:43):
For me, it's I think it might be the biggest
thing that's ever happened on planet Earth, so I would
like to know as much about it as possible.
Speaker 4 (21:49):
And the reason I asked was it seems like uncertainty
piled on uncertainty, and it's just at some point you
get okay, we're not sure boy.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
I highly recommend.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Steve Hayes of The Dispatch did an interview with a
podcast guy the other day that broke it down, like
really long conversations into about an hour, so if you're
interested in it. All he had on the guy from
the podcast the Last Invention, which I've.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Gotten into now. It's really good.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
It gets into the history of all this, which is
what I was going to talk about now, the.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
History of AI.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
AI got a really big start in the fifties and
we got to jump on it and had almost all
your sci fi and projections of flying cars and all
that sort of stuff that if you're older you grew
up with all came out of this rush toward AI
in the fifties.
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Then it just got like stuck.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
For some reason. And I haven't heard an explanation for that.
I suspect it's just computing power wasn't there. Just plane
didn't have the computing power at the time to pull
off their ideas behind AI. And then with Moore's law
with computer power, computing computing power doubling roughly every eighteen
months over the last many, many decades. We've gotten a
(23:00):
point now that chips are so fast and processing speeds
are so great that they can do the stuff that
they thought about a very long time ago, which is interesting. Now,
I'm a doomer in the three camps that that particular
podcast talks about. The real polar opposites are the doomers
(23:20):
like me that think this is gonna be the end
of mankind. It's gonna be the worst thing that ever
happened to us. It's coming, whether we like it or not.
How quickly it ends as I don't know in my
lifetime or not, I don't know. We'll find out. And
then you got the accelerators he calls them, or the
people that say this is going to be the greatest
thing that ever happened to mankind. Well, it's split between
(23:41):
two crowds. The accelerators. I think I mentioned this yesterday.
You've got the this is gonna be the greatest thing
for mankind. We're gonna cure all the diseases. We're going
to live to be one hundred and fifty. Nobody's gonna
have to work. It's gonna be like Heaven on Earth.
Everybody is hoped for since the dawn of time. Half
the accelerators believe that. The other half the accelerators, No, no, no,
I think it's going to be the worst thing that
(24:02):
ever happened. But better that we get it first rather
than the Chinese. So that's why I'm all for plowing
forward as fast as we can. But as listening to
this podcast guy yesterday from the Last Invention talk about
how safety ism is what's driving the doomers.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
He was just presenting the different arguments.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
And there's no doubt that we have a safetyism problem
in our culture, no doubt whatsoever. The entire Western world. Yeah,
the entire Western world. We don't let kids play tag
at school. We put rubber bumpers on the corner of
our tables when our kids are little. I mean, just
all these different things that we do. We won't let
our kids play outside. There's a gaze as a park
(24:44):
on their own whatever. Yeah, we've got millions of examples
of this. And the guy was talking about how we
didn't used to be like that culturally. When the automobile
was first invented and then started to become mass produced
and going. We didn't get seat belts into what They
didn't put seat belts in cars at all for for
a very very long time, and then they weren't mandated
(25:05):
in this country until what the nineties.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
I don't even know when that happened. It was a
long time.
Speaker 1 (25:10):
And he makes the point that everybody wasn't pushing back
on the automobile. You know, how many people are gonna
die from this? And what about all the jobs that
are going to be lost from people that farm with
horses and this and that and all.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
These different things. It's going to destroy these interesting No,
we just.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
Plowed ahead with this new invention that was super cool
and it was the latest technology, and we just full
steam ahead.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
For example, on.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
The danger of it, the peak of highway deads. I
did the research on this yesterday. It was in nineteen seventy.
I think it was about fifty eight thousand deads. With
a much smaller population, that'd be the equivalent of ninety
five thousand highway deaths today. We were willing to put
up with in nineteen seventy because we just thought the
(25:51):
technology was important enough, it changed our lives enough in
a positive way.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
We were just plowing forward. That's the way we used
to look at things.
Speaker 4 (26:00):
Yeah, I'm tempted to go off on a tangent about
safetyism and how our acceptance that humans live and then
they die and perhaps there's a better place afterward has
given way too.
Speaker 5 (26:10):
We've got to prolong.
Speaker 4 (26:11):
Our lives as long as possible, no matter what it
costs culturally speaking.
Speaker 5 (26:16):
But back to you, But here.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Was an invention that was clearly going to kill lots
of people, and the data was there right in front
of us that it was killing lots of people for
a long time. I mean, there were lots of highway
deads in the fifties and the sixties. We kept moving forward.
We're faster and more powerful cars, and it wasn't people
afraid to get in them.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
And then, like I said, the what will this do
to society? Blah blah.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
I mean, there were those articles, you can find them,
they're hilarious. But we plowed forward, and then a lot
of the nay saying about AI now fits in with
our safety ism. I don't know if I fully buy
this argument, because I think AI is going to doom
us and it'll be the end of society and the
end of mankind and all these different sorts of things.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
But there's no doubt we have a safety asm.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
Problem in the country and any modern invention now if
you tried to get the car, for instance, going now,
there'd be so much pushback around the danger and the
changes to our economy and we probably shouldn't. We're more
of a probably shouldn't society now than we were back
in the day.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
There's no doubt about it.
Speaker 4 (27:20):
My favorite saying safety, third, innovation, adventure, then safety. Anyway,
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Speaker 1 (28:38):
I look forward to listening to the episode of the
podcast from the Last Invention where it gets to the accelerators.
Not the ones that think we need to accelerate just
to stay ahead of China, but the accelerators that think
it's gonna bring about the greatest time in human history.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
I think those people are nuts, I mean, like crazy crazy.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Don't understand human nature at all nut so that they
think nobody's gonna have to work is going to lead
up to a positive outcome.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
I couldn't I couldn't disagree with you.
Speaker 4 (29:11):
Not specifically address that concern about human nature and idle
hands and the rest of it, then they need to
go to hell.
Speaker 5 (29:18):
I mean, that's ridiculous. It's like rent.
Speaker 4 (29:19):
Control, which you were talking about earlier, not addressing the
constriction of supply. If you don't If you don't address that,
you're a crackpot. I'm not gonna waste ten seconds listening
to you.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Yeah, they just don't believe it.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
So it's you've used this example before among like some
of your super smart libertarians. The reason they think their
version of government would work is they think everybody's like them.
They think everybody's super smart, motivated to do the right thing,
et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 4 (29:48):
If everybody is like self motivated, they'll always stay busy
and go get it, because that's how human beings behave.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
And I think a lot of the AI accelerators they
have that problem too well. I if I had more
free time, I would learn to play the piano. I
would travel the world, I would write a symphony. I
would do all these different sorts of things. That's not
the average person. Maybe you would if you had lots
of free time. The average person's gonna sit around, get
fat and do drugs.
Speaker 4 (30:13):
Two things to that point coming up next, an argument
about capitalism. The free market ripped from my very life
within the last twenty four hours. And then you mentioned
the Dispatch and it reminded me because they have Trump
derangement syndrome, is or should Trump derangement syndrome now be
(30:35):
a recognized psychological problem.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
Wow, that's a good question.
Speaker 5 (30:39):
The answer is clearly yes.
Speaker 4 (30:41):
And I've got this great stuff written by a psychiatrist
about it.
Speaker 5 (30:44):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
That is interesting.
Speaker 5 (30:46):
It's like a real thing.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
I think it's provably Yes. Yeah, okay, stay tuned.
Speaker 5 (30:51):
For all that.
Speaker 8 (30:56):
China and Japan they are locked into this escalating dispute
over Taiwan. It's prompted the Chinese government to warn its
citizens against traveling in Japan. And now what we have
is the governments in Japan and Taiwan are now issuing
warnings of their own. And the trigger all of this was,
of course, those comments by the Japanese Prime Minister to
Parliament earlier this month when she was answering a question
(31:18):
and said that a Chinese invasion in Taiwan would be
an existential threat to Japan and could spark a military
response that infuriated China.
Speaker 4 (31:28):
Well as Stewie you Kin woke up infuriated back to you.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
As Stuie Griffin, a family guy, once said, world keeps spinning.
We can talk about Epstein all we want, but.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
You got that out there. Now, that's reality.
Speaker 5 (31:43):
Two things. Number one, I have a tie into that.
Speaker 4 (31:45):
It occurs to me as I was structuring what we're
going to talk about that I really need more time
than we have in this segment.
Speaker 5 (31:52):
So why don't we do it hour four.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
If you don't get our four, grab it via podcast,
you got to subscribe to Armstrung and getting on demand.
Great unintended consequence of the super secure American security umbrella
for seventy five years is that you've got enormous potential
bulk military, socio economic bulk in Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines,
(32:21):
South Korea, handful of other countries in the Pacific region
that could be a hell of a good counterbalance to China.
But they've been kind of dependent, and that's weirdly a
tying to what I wanted to talk about about the
free market in the I promised you, you know, the
incident rip from my very life in the last twenty
four hours. So we've mentioned we have people working around
(32:44):
our house a lot. We've done this major, major remodel,
practically rebuilt house. One of the guys who's been on
site a lot, who I was fairly friendly with, and
it was a good worker. He started just not showing
up and given bull less excuses to his supervisor, the foreman,
(33:05):
and I was surprised by that. But it got to
be ridiculous this week. And so, I mean it was
one of the classic jackual recog Now everybody will recognized this. Yeah,
what was the first one? Oh, my alarm wasn't set
right and I overslept. Okay, next day, Yeah, my tire
(33:27):
went flat and my phone went dead the same day.
That's the reason I wasn't answering your text or calls.
I don't know what happened. My phone went dead.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
All those can happen, but when they happened multiple days
in a row.
Speaker 4 (33:38):
Yeah, And so his employment was ended and I was
discussing his with his supervisor. The fact that it is
so clearly heading toward a situation where he will be
on the dole, he will be the underprivileged, he will
need social Aid, and I will be told repeatedly that
(34:00):
I should pay my fair share because he is disadvantaged,
having made stupid decision after stupid decision.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
And the ability i'd be gainfully employed.
Speaker 4 (34:13):
When was the last time in a discussion of the
haves and have nots you heard factored in the decisions
you make?
Speaker 2 (34:23):
Never? Never, I bring bring it up all the time.
Drives me nuts.
Speaker 4 (34:26):
Oh oh, it ought to drive you nuts. It's like
they're talking about I don't know, rockets without discussing fuel
or or you know, the engines. It's it's absurd, which
just goes to show you that haves and have nots
thing is politically useful. You can get it to wrench
money out of people that then you spread out to
your cronies, not that there's no need. You know, As
(34:48):
I've said many times, the essence of politics is you
have completely real needs, you have kind of half real needs,
then you have completely fictional needs, and.
Speaker 5 (34:59):
Politicians put all of those in front.
Speaker 4 (35:01):
Of you and explain why that those things mean we
need more tax money, and then we'll spend that money
to solve those needs, fulfill those needs. And that's the
scam because a lot of it's fake.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Now I would be against this as a libertarian, although we.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
If you're gonna live in a with a welfare state,
you got to have this sort of stuff at age
sixty five. There should be an accounting of how you
spent your whole life, and then they determine how much
money you get of other people's money.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
And if it looks like, you know, you bought.
Speaker 1 (35:29):
A new car every two years, didn't like driving used cars, okay, fine,
Like the vacations huh, like floorum.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
Dell, a lot of stuff, well, okay, cool, But this
is how much money you get from other tax pamers.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
Oh, you saved your money your whole life, and you
have more money because you you drove your cars longer,
you didn't travel, and maybe.
Speaker 4 (35:47):
Your entire savings were wiped out by some medical catastrophe. Okay,
that's fine, We're not talking about you. You know, in
in like lawsuits, it's called contributory negligence. How much did
you contribute to the situation you are in that need overwhelmingly, Well.
Speaker 5 (36:07):
Then why are you looking at at the taxpayers.
Speaker 4 (36:10):
There's no stupid insurance paid for by taxpayers anyway, a
defensive capitalism, and you've gotten a hint of the shape
it takes. And is Trump arrangement syndrome an actual psychological problem.
Speaker 5 (36:21):
We'll have that next hour
Speaker 4 (36:24):
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