December 22, 2025 • 35 mins
Featured in Hour One of the Monday December 22, 2025 edition of The Armstrong & Getty Replay...
- OlderFans, AI stocks & AI Accelerators...
- Corruption in Turkish Soccer...
- Understanding "6-7" & Compliance with Regulations...
- Pot Initiatives!
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 (00:00):
Nice broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio, the
George Washington Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong, Shoe, Katty Armstrong and Jettie.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
And Gee.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Armstrong and Gaudy Strong. Not live from Studio Sea, not live, Senior.
We're in a dimly lit room deep with them, the vials.
Speaker 4 (00:25):
Of the Armstrong and Getty Communications Compound on this Monday,
and we're under the tutelage of our general manager.
Speaker 5 (00:30):
The Christmas season which is well underway. Christmas Day just
a few days away. Ho ho ho ho ho, and
our early gift to you, our leftovers so.
Speaker 4 (00:39):
Delicious, So sit back and enjoy the Armstrong and Getty replay.
Speaker 6 (00:42):
The House voted to release the Epstein files and if
to day couldn't get any.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Worse for Trump.
Speaker 6 (00:47):
Halfway through the vote there was a performance from Bad
Bunny on The final vote was four and a twenty
seven to one. I mean, it just goes the show.
Every has that one weirdo, you know, charming efforts at humor.
Speaker 5 (01:06):
How the narrative has taken shape that this is bad
for Trump to the extent that his young liberal audience
cheered and all Trump is so interesting, mostly through Trump's
you know, resistance to it.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
I guess yeah, because your your your natural reaction is
he doesn't want this to happen.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
There must be something back which may not. He never
offered like a real explanation of why he was against it.
It's a it's a stupid We'll talk more about that
an hour four. We talk to a lot about it
in now or two one end two.
Speaker 4 (01:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
One to talk about. First of all this I got
a text.
Speaker 4 (01:51):
From a friend of mine. I thought this was pretty
damn funny. She is in her mid forties, 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.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Doing that coused it. Oh that's priceless, well done. Yeah
that is really good.
Speaker 5 (02:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
You get on there and you're dressed, you know whatever,
your addressed, sexy, and say today my knee hurts because
yesterday I had to do something and now I was
gardening and my knee hurts.
Speaker 5 (02:26):
I walked up four stairs and I hurt my knee
how I don't know later Faye, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Hanson says he wants to be the first subscriber that's brilliant.
Ten out of ten, My dear well played.
Speaker 4 (02:38):
So if you haven't found in the stock market, it's
had a rough week or so and it's almost all AI,
well allmost 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.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Huge day to day. Why in Vidia, which is a
big chip maker, which.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
The common thing to say in the stock market world
right now is as goes in video goes the stock market.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
That's how big a deal they are.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
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 (03:23):
Where analysts expect.
Speaker 5 (03:25):
To dig this.
Speaker 4 (03:26):
Analysts expect the chip behemoth to show more than a
fifty percent growth in that income and revenue.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
This quarter. Ooh, corner moving up. Yeah, I would say
that will shore up the whole This is a bubble
thing up. There's the stock market. I mean, it still
could be a bubble, but the bubble ain't about.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
It ain't over yet, except as you've pointed out that
whole incestuous thing.
Speaker 5 (03:57):
In Vidia's profits mostly came from you know, an AI,
whose profits mostly came from in video, whose profits mostly
came from cloud services from Amazon.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
I can veal you, right, and this is from Bloomberg.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
So they're expecting in Vidia to announce a fifty percent
growth in both net income in revenue.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
It's fiscal third quarter.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
The reason is straightforward, says here, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet that's Google.
That's that's Google, right, and Meta, which is Facebook and Zuckerberg,
all taken together represent more than forty percent of video's sales.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
So they're buying the chips for AI.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
Yeah, And they're projected to increase their combined AI spending
by thirty four percent over the next year. 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. It's expected Holy crap,
(04:55):
it's a gold Russian. Nobody's sure there's gold. So I
was talking to yesterday about how much I read and
listened to about AI. Joe was asking why. 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.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
It as possible.
Speaker 5 (05:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Sure, boy, I highly recommend.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
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 gotten into now.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
It's really good.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
It gets into the history of all this, which is
what I was going to talk about now. The history
of AI. 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
(05:57):
toward AI in the fifties and it just got stuck
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
(06:20):
months over the last many and many decades, we've gotten
to 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
(06:42):
are the doomers like me that think this is going
to be the end of mankind. It's going to be
the worst thing that ever happened to us. It's coming,
whether we like it or not. How quickly it ends
is I don't know, in my lifetime or not.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
I don't know. We'll find out.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
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 two crowds, the accelerators. I think I mentioned this yesterday.
You've got the this is going to be the greatest
thing for mankind. We're going to cure all the diseases.
We're going to live to be one hundred and fifty,
nobody's going to have to work. It's going to be
the like Heaven on Earth. Everybody is hoped for since
(07:17):
the dawn of time. Half the accelerators believe that. The
other half the accelerators think no, no, no, I think
it's going to be the worst thing that 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
(07:39):
is what's driving the doomers. He was just presenting the
different arguments, 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.
(08:00):
I mean, just all these different things that we do.
We won't let our kids play outside there's a park,
on their own whatever. Yeah, we've got a 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
(08:22):
They didn't put seat belts in cars at all for
a very very very long time, and then they weren't
mandated in this country until what the nineties.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
I don't even know when that happened. It was a
long time.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
And he makes the point that everybody wasn't pushing back
on the automobile. You know, how many people are going
to 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 these different things.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
It's going to destroy these interesting No, we just plowed ahead.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
With this new invention that was super cool and it
was the latest technology, and we just full steam ahead.
For example, on 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 FI
fifty eight thousand deads. With a much smaller population, that'd
be the equivalent of ninety five thousand highway deaths today.
(09:09):
We were willing to put up with in nineteen seventy
because we just thought the technology was important enough, it
changed our lives enough in a positive way.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
We were just plowing forward. That's the way we used
to look at things.
Speaker 5 (09:22):
Yeah, I'm tempted to go off on a tangent about
SAFETYSM and how our acceptance that humans live and then
they die and perhaps there's a better place afterward has
given way too. We've got to prolong our lives as
long as possible, no matter what it costs culturally speaking.
Speaker 4 (09:39):
But back to you, But here 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.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
For a long time. I mean, there were lots of
highway deaths in the fifties and the sixties. We kept
moving forward or faster and more powerful callers, and it wasn't.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
People afraid to get in them. And then, like I said,
what will this do to society blah blah. I mean,
there were those articles, you can find them.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
They're hilarious.
Speaker 4 (10:06):
But we plowed forward and then a lot of the
naysaying about AI now fits in with our safetyism. 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. But there's no doubt
we have a safetyism problem in the country, and any
(10:27):
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 (10:41):
There's no doubt about it.
Speaker 5 (10:42):
My favorite saying safety, third, innovation, adventure, then safety.
Speaker 4 (10:49):
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 accelerate that think
it's going to bring about the greatest time in human history.
I think those people are nuts, I mean, like crazy crazy,
(11:09):
don't understand human nature at all, nuts so that they
think nobody's gonna have to work is going to lead
up to a positive outcome.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
I couldn't.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
I couldn't disagree with you.
Speaker 5 (11:21):
Not specifically address that concern about human nature and idle
hands and the rest of it, then they need to
go to hell.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
I mean, that's ridiculous.
Speaker 5 (11:29):
It's like rent 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 going
to waste ten seconds listening to you.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
Yeah, they they just don't believe it.
Speaker 4 (11:42):
So it's you've used this example before among like some
of your super smart libertarians. The reason they think they're
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 5 (11:59):
If everybody's like you're motivated, they'll always stay busy and
go get it, because that's how human beings behave.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
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 going to sit around,
get fat and do drugs.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
The Armstrong and Getty Show.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yeah, mar Jahn, your show, podcasts and our hot links.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Well everybody.
Speaker 6 (12:32):
This week, everyone's been sharing their Spotify raft.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
You know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 7 (12:36):
Now.
Speaker 6 (12:37):
That's when Spotify puts together the little recap of your
listening stats for the whole year. But Spotify isn't the
only app that does this.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Oh now, check out what people got in their phones
earlier today. Your calculator raft is ready. You had a
busy year.
Speaker 8 (12:49):
You calculated restaurant tips eighty six times because you can't
do basic mat You accidentally opened the app seventeen times
when you meant to open the one next to it.
You're in the top one percent who typed boobs upside down.
You typed sixty seven and showed your son in a
desperate attempt to connect three times. You accidentally tightened six
thirty when you were drunk and trying to set an
(13:09):
alarm for work. Twice and you calculated how much more
money you need to quit your job forty five, six
hundred and seventy one times. Wow, don't forget to share
with your friends.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
This made me sad for some reason. I'm thankful that
I did not have a job where I every day
calculated how many more days do I have to do this?
Because I've had jobs like that. Oh yeah, it sucks.
I'm glad I wasn't betting on Turkish soccer. This is
fairly corrupt. The bust this week of a massive betting
(13:46):
investigation into Turkish professional soccer. It's the biggest sport in
that country, as it is in most countries around the
world that aren't the United States.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Over one thousand.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
Players have been suspended, including top tier players from the
major clubs.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
How many players are there in this league? One hundred
and forty nine referees? Oh boy.
Speaker 4 (14:08):
Arrest warrants have been issued for dozens of individuals, including
club presidents, referees, and commentators. So you had you had
soccer matches where the president of the club is corrupt,
the players are corrupt, the referees corrupt, and then the.
Speaker 5 (14:26):
Guy announcing the game is corrupt. I'm at a loss
for how they guy announcing the game. Maybe maybe he
just has to be bought off, not to say, you know,
keeper clearly let that ball in. Wait a minute, what
just happened here? Or you want him on the tape that.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Wasn't a foul? What the hell are you talking about?
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Right?
Speaker 2 (14:47):
They just don't want that right to what extent? Was
it real at all?
Speaker 4 (14:52):
If the owner and the player, the ref and the
guy announcing it are all in on the on the fix,
it's really w at that point.
Speaker 5 (15:01):
Yeah, For all I know, the fans are getting ten
bucks apiece to keep their mouths shut, sheer or boo
at the right time, right, yeah, yeah, wow, Wow.
Speaker 4 (15:10):
How long would it take to turn that around and
have anybody believe it's reel and continue to bet.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
But obviously people were betting.
Speaker 4 (15:18):
To the extent that it was worth paying off a
thousand players and owners and referees and announcers and everything
like that. The scandal has caused serious disruption. Lower division
matches have been postponed. There's a growing concern over integrity
in Turkish and European football, broadly just because the owners
of the players, the refs, and the announcers were all
(15:39):
on the take.
Speaker 5 (15:42):
It's guy mowing the field on the up and up right. Yeah, wow,
growing concern.
Speaker 4 (15:48):
Yeah, it ought to be guy out there parking the
cars in the furthest away a lot.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
You You got to back end well, back in he's
on the take.
Speaker 5 (15:57):
If I had the time, I would love to study
Turkish culture and politics more there at the nexus between
the European world and the Muslim world really really interesting
and Airdwan is half a dictator and it's just really
really good stuff. Oh, which reminds me I heard some
really really thought provoking talk about the nature of Islam
(16:22):
in Europe that I'd love to get to next hour.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
If you don't get next hour, you got to go somewhere.
That's fine.
Speaker 5 (16:26):
Subscribe to our podcast Armstrong and Getty on demand. You
can listen to it later.
Speaker 4 (16:30):
Oh man, your leisures you're driving around all weekend shopping
for Christmas and everything like that. Imagine the pleasures you
can enjoy your favorite segments over and over with the
kids in the backseat.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Huh. That's some good stuff Armstrong and Getty. Under that
Jack Armstrong and Joe sty The Armstrong and Getty Show.
Speaker 7 (16:51):
When the phrase six seven exploded online this year. He
was fueled by Generation Alpha kids fifteen and younger who
and forging a dictionary's worth of often baffling vocabulary.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Still it's lingoed that's burst into classrooms.
Speaker 7 (17:07):
Like Amy wargoes, how often are you hearing phrases like
this every day?
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Why do you think that's about having something to actually
bring them together?
Speaker 7 (17:16):
Many younger Gen Alpha kids started school during the isolation
of the pandemic. Wargo says that attachment to the virtual
world remains in a way that differentiates them from Gen
Z previous kids.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
It was fidget spinners and bottle flipping. Now it's anything they.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
Hear on TikTok, a shared experience which we just don't
have anymore.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
So whether it was.
Speaker 4 (17:39):
You know, the pandemic's hurrying it along, it was going
to happen anyway because we just don't have shared experiences anymore.
Speaker 5 (17:46):
Yeah, Yeah, how interesting. Apparently Peter thiel I wrote a
piece recently about how capitalism the free market is failing millennials.
Speaker 4 (18:01):
He's an interesting dude, that Peter Theil. He is PayPal
mafia billionaire duty that has gone out there and do
all different kinds of stuff he's all over the map politically.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Sometimes I agree with him vehemently and sometimes I don't.
Speaker 5 (18:13):
Yeah, he's behind Pallanteer too, which is doing amazing work
and really patriotic anyway. But he was reaching out to
Facebook executives of all people. But he said, when seventy
percent of millennials say they are pro socialist, we need
to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that
they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed. We should try
and understand why, which is absolutely true. Then the free
(18:36):
press is Sean Fisher sat down with Thiel to talk
about what he saw in twenty twenty that made him
write that more recently and just a super quick summary.
Capitalism is not working for young people, Fel said, citing
burdensome student debt regulations putting home ownership out of reach
for many. Quote people assume everything still works, but objectively
(18:57):
it doesn't. If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn't
be surprised if they eventually become communists. Now, I wish
I had more of the piece in front of me.
I don't I could have grabbed it. But what the
free press did was they ran a bunch of reactions
to it from people both you know, people you may
have heard of, and some you didn't. I love this
(19:20):
one from Blake Shole, who's the founder and CEO of
something called Boom Supersonic, which I have no idea what
that means. It might be a dance video platform, it
might be an airplane, it might be a drug or
a social network. Anyway, perhaps Katie could endeavor to figure
out what Boom Supersonic is, just to amuse me if
(19:40):
you don't mind.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
But what he said was really cool, any idea not yet? Okay,
were getting there? Okay, here's what he said.
Speaker 5 (19:51):
If you insert enough socialist elements into a capitalist system,
when the socialist elements inevitably cause problems, people will blame
the capitalism ah and then turn socialist. That's what's happened
in New York City, for example, where Mamdani voters are
motivated by high rents and crippling student debts. Even the
rent control drives up housing prices, and government subsidies for.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Higher education encourage universities.
Speaker 4 (20:17):
To raise tuition, you know, because I can wait, there's
more real quick. Likewise, you insert enough capitalist elements into
a socialist system, the system sort of begins to work,
and people think socialism works.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
That's what happened in China.
Speaker 4 (20:38):
But I can see how I've even done that. I've
talked about this many times over the years. I just
did a few minutes ago. Since we do live in
a welfare state, then I think the government should be
able to do this. I don't justify the uh, you know,
more socialism so much, but the more government control aspect
of it. If you're going to allow if if some
(21:00):
of my money is going to go feed people who
lose all of their money gambling, then I think society
ought to be able to outlaw gambling, which just you know,
just is an argument towards bigger government making more decisions
for us. So, yeah, you inject a little bit of
socialism because I don't care if people just use staying
on this example, I don't care at all if somebody
(21:22):
spends their life savings on gambling and runs out of
money and less at the end of that story, when
you and your kids are hungry, you take my money.
Now all of a sudden, I care. So you've injected
some socialism because we do do that, I said, doodoo,
we feed the hungry so now I'm feeding you with
my money. Now I get to decide whether or not
(21:42):
you gamble, which is kind of an element of big
government socialism.
Speaker 5 (21:46):
And getting back to Blake shol the founder and CEO
of Boomster Personic, which is the largest chain of car
wash centers across America.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Or I don't know what is it, Katie, Have we
figured that out?
Speaker 4 (21:58):
Yeah, it's a company that's aiming to make commercial supersonic
flights more accessible.
Speaker 5 (22:03):
Oh, okay, okay, interesting anyway, so he goes on, At
the root of this, at the root of this terrible
confusion is a failure of our education system and our
media to give the next generation a proper history education.
Today's problems of affordability almost exclusively come from our most
socialist institutions, such as are heavily regulated, subsidized in centrally
(22:23):
planned healthcare and education systems. By contrast, the freer, more
capitalist industries such as electronics and computing have driven enormous
improvements across the board in real world standards of living.
The closer we get to capitalism, the more everyone is
better off in real terms. The closer we get to socialism,
the more death and suffering result, we can't let capitalism
(22:45):
be socialism's fall guy, fall guy. It's on us to
help the next generation separate the capitalist weite from the
socialist chaff so we can all enjoy.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
A freer and more prosperous future. That's my social answer,
the socialist noise from the capitalists, as people like to
say nowadays.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5 (23:04):
Interestingly, a couple of my other favorites were all about
life choices.
Speaker 4 (23:11):
That is really good. So just to do dwell on
that second before you get to the life choices. So
you have a socialist society, you do a little capitalism
like that in China, which helped them make a lot
of money, and you credit socialism.
Speaker 5 (23:26):
Right, And if you insert enough socialist elements into a
capitalist system, when the socialist elements inevitably cause problems, people
blame the capitalism and then turn socialist.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
That's unfortunate. It is good.
Speaker 5 (23:40):
So there's a lot of stuff about personal choice, and
we talked about this earlier.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
It is.
Speaker 5 (23:48):
The eight hundred pound gorilla, you know, in a pet
store full of little kittens.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
In terms of how people's lives turn out, we'll clean
up on out five.
Speaker 5 (24:00):
There is there there are a number of different things
that can affect your life in a material way, from
your your upbringing, to your genetics, to your race, to
a whole bunch of stuff. But the idea that personal choices,
your life choices aren't listed as the king of the hill,
(24:23):
aren't not just not listed as the king of the hill.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
They're not disgusted at all.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
No.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
In fact, it's frowned upon if you look at them.
It's it's that is an excuse.
Speaker 5 (24:32):
That's what I would call governmentalism, the idea that government
should solve all of our problems.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
You're shaming people if you're going to take exactly right.
Speaker 5 (24:41):
Yeah, But I thought it was interesting that so many
really brilliant and persuadis of people wrote about.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
About personal choices. Jim, uh, the gorilla is in the
kit nile. Oh not again, Okay, say no more.
Speaker 5 (25:03):
And the other thing that they talk about is over
regulation and how and oh man, I just came a
craze across a great example of this. And most people
don't know this. I didn't know it until fairly late
in life. A lot of regulations are attempting to stifle competition.
(25:24):
The big guys figure, all right, compliance with these complex
regulations will cost us three percent of our revenue. But
a plucky startup with good ideas that wants to come
and take our market share, that'll be like fifteen percent
of their revenues and they could never afford it. So
(25:45):
we will quash any competition with regulations that sound like
they're protecting the consumer or the environment or whatever, but
they were. They lobbied, the big guys lobbied to regulate
their own industry to crush competition.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Did you know that's a thing. It's a thing, folks.
And finally, this.
Speaker 5 (26:08):
Love Jason Riley Wall Street Journal, and he wrote a
great piece about this incredible school, Pineywood School in Mississippi.
It is again, yet again, the classic educational success story.
A lot of poor kids, a lot of black kids
(26:28):
doing amazing things, achieving, learning, getting into college, the rest
of it. Why, high standards, strictly enforced discipline and high
expectations of the kids, and the kids love it and
they excel like crazy.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Sounds like white supremacy to me, Oh my lord. Jason
Riley with a great piece about that.
Speaker 5 (26:51):
But I was going to use that to introduce another
one of my favorite black thinkers, Roland Fryer, who's writing
about the economics of culture, which we were just talking
about life choices. People from cultures that emphasize productive habits
tend to advance.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
The reverse is also true.
Speaker 5 (27:10):
I mean, that's one of the most self evidently obvious
things you could possibly say.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
But man, that is strict for boten on the left
to say that.
Speaker 5 (27:20):
That is why you hear those idiotic things like punctuality
is white supremacy, and trying hard is white supremacy and
exceptionalism or what's the you promote people based on their excellence?
Is white supremacy meritocracy? Meritocracy? Yeah, exactly. But Roland writes,
(27:43):
and you may know, he was the guy who came
out with a carefully constructed study early in his career
that said, no, young black men are not disproportionately shot
and shot dead in America by police. It's not true,
and it was honest, salable research. But the left essentially
made him a propriet. But anyway, he writes, culture is
(28:06):
one of the most underrated ideas in economics. For decades,
economists avoided invoking cultures.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
The shared value you are you are scratching the biggest
itch I've got this. This is Wow. Really, my this
is my thing right here. I'm loving putting aside the
highly troubling metaphor. I'm glad to be doing.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
So.
Speaker 5 (28:27):
For decades, economists avoid invoking culture the shared values, norms, beliefs, preferences,
and behaviors of a group as an explanation for economic outcomes.
It seemed too intangible to measure and too messy to model.
Thomas Sowell, Oh my god. Two of my favorite thinkers
happened to be black men. Quoted in the same thing,
(28:49):
whose legacy was celebrated recently at Stanford's Hoover Institution changed that.
He was among the first economists to treat culture as
an important economic variable. Mister sol has argued that both
human capital and culture drive mobility, more so in his view,
than discrimination or external barriers. Groups that develop productivity enhancing
traits such as skills, an orientation toward education and work,
(29:13):
and thriftiness tend to advance. Those whose cultures don't emphasize
these things tend to fall behind. In mister Sowell's view,
culture is a form of capital, an accumulation of habits
and know how that powerfully influences a group's project progress
could not be truer, and you know, I'd like to
(29:34):
read this whole thing because it is so incredibly important.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
I'll bet he goes into a bunch of different studies.
Speaker 4 (29:40):
Go ahead, I'll bet that the reason it's so recent
that anybody talked about it, wrote about it, is that
we just were all in agreement up until fairly recently
mid ish twentieth century that yeah, of course, being thrifty
and working hard is a good idea and everybody.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Should do it is mostly in agreement.
Speaker 4 (30:01):
It wasn't until we started to well, you know, I
get back to Elvis and the Beatles and the devolving
of our culture.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
I think it all fits together. Actually, so again we're
pressed for time.
Speaker 5 (30:11):
But so he goes into his research in his academic background,
and he talks about cultural differences across racial and ethnic
groups are unmistakable. And then he talks about various shows
and how popular they are among cultures. But for social scientists,
the hardest part of studying culture is trying to find
a way to measure it. And in the early to
mid two thousand, Stephen Levitt and I tried to ease
(30:33):
from the freakonomics guy try to answer that question by
focusing on one small but revealing expression of cultures, the
names parents give their children. Man, it's long and interesting,
but here's the most revealing part of this. They went
into other parts of the world, other countries with cultures
you know nothing about, and you had two groups of
(30:57):
people that look just like this, just the same, similar religions,
et cetera. But over here they valued hard work, savings, education,
et cetera. Over there, they didn't guess what the first
group did way way better than the other ones. And
it wasn't white supremacy because there weren't any damn white people.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
They refer to the fact that and what's the number.
Speaker 5 (31:17):
I wish I could find it that Pakistani Americans.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Earned sixty cents on the dollar to Indian Americans because
of what white racism? Are you kidding me? No cultural norms.
It's like the most important thing in the world, and
nobody wants to talk about it because I chickens, But
I don't care. I'll talk about it. Their chickens armstrong
and getty, Oh strong and.
Speaker 7 (31:46):
Strong and get.
Speaker 5 (31:57):
You know what I hadn't realized un till I came
across an article about today was that high school football
they're highlighting southern California high school football is now full
on the nil money thing, with boosters paying big money
to little kids to come to their high schools.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
Wow to play football. Wow, I know a little bit
about that. Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 5 (32:23):
Well, in this one kid that they highlight, who's now
he's going to be playing in the Big Ten championship
game for Ohio State, a receiver.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
The story opens with him tearfully calling.
Speaker 5 (32:32):
His grandmother begging her to come get him because his
drug addict mother had sold him to a team oh
in southern California to go play receiver there. Unbelievable, speaking
of the evils of modern society. A couple of days ago,
Massachusetts voters took a major step to repeal the legalization
(32:53):
of recreational marijuana in the state. The Coalition for a
Healthy massachusettsmitted more than seventy four thousand signatures required to
put the question on the twenty twenty six state ballot.
Once certified, the measure will go to the state legislature
for consideration. If they declined to pass it, organizers must
collect more signatures to put it to a statewide vote
(33:14):
next year, but Massachusetts is in alone in Idaho, where
marijuana is currently Italy illegal, a measure to block future
voter initiatives the legalize the drug is on the ballot
for twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
So what led them to want to do this?
Speaker 4 (33:29):
What were they thinking was going to happen when it
was legalized that hasn't occurred or the reverse.
Speaker 5 (33:35):
I guess there are a bunch of unforeseen effects. Number One,
it was believed by a lot of people that the
rate of marijuana use wouldn't change much. It would just
be out in the open and could be regulated and
blah blah blah, but freely legal weed and the fact
that it's practically laughable, the idea that the cops would
(33:58):
talk to somebody who has marijuana to make sure it's
legal weed or whatever. And in the legalized states, it's
just it's not happening. So lots and lots of more
people are smoking pot. The promised tax revenues have not materialized.
The black market for pot hasn't gone anywhere, because the
like in California, it's so taxed and regulated, it's it's legal.
(34:18):
Pot is pretty expensive and though plenty of people consume it,
a lot of people just keep going to their neighborhood
dealer they've always gone to.
Speaker 4 (34:25):
But so back to the conversation of you know, well,
and it's really really bad for kids' brains. Eighty to
one hundred thousand people die from drinking every year. So
is pot worse than drinking?
Speaker 2 (34:37):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (34:38):
I think that's probably an unanswerable question. Our drinking just
got grandfathered in and it doesn't need to make sense.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
It's just the thing.
Speaker 4 (34:47):
It's the arm Strong in Getty Show, Armstrong Inetting, Armstrong
and Getty
Nice broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio, the
George Washington Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong, Shoe, Katty Armstrong and Jettie.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
And Gee.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Armstrong and Gaudy Strong. Not live from Studio Sea, not live, Senior.
We're in a dimly lit room deep with them, the vials.
Speaker 4 (00:25):
Of the Armstrong and Getty Communications Compound on this Monday,
and we're under the tutelage of our general manager.
Speaker 5 (00:30):
The Christmas season which is well underway. Christmas Day just
a few days away. Ho ho ho ho ho, and
our early gift to you, our leftovers so.
Speaker 4 (00:39):
Delicious, So sit back and enjoy the Armstrong and Getty replay.
Speaker 6 (00:42):
The House voted to release the Epstein files and if
to day couldn't get any.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Worse for Trump.
Speaker 6 (00:47):
Halfway through the vote there was a performance from Bad
Bunny on The final vote was four and a twenty
seven to one. I mean, it just goes the show.
Every has that one weirdo, you know, charming efforts at humor.
Speaker 5 (01:06):
How the narrative has taken shape that this is bad
for Trump to the extent that his young liberal audience
cheered and all Trump is so interesting, mostly through Trump's
you know, resistance to it.
Speaker 4 (01:21):
I guess yeah, because your your your natural reaction is
he doesn't want this to happen.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
There must be something back which may not. He never
offered like a real explanation of why he was against it.
It's a it's a stupid We'll talk more about that
an hour four. We talk to a lot about it
in now or two one end two.
Speaker 4 (01:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
One to talk about. First of all this I got
a text.
Speaker 4 (01:51):
From a friend of mine. I thought this was pretty
damn funny. She is in her mid forties, 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.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Doing that coused it. Oh that's priceless, well done. Yeah
that is really good.
Speaker 5 (02:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
You get on there and you're dressed, you know whatever,
your addressed, sexy, and say today my knee hurts because
yesterday I had to do something and now I was
gardening and my knee hurts.
Speaker 5 (02:26):
I walked up four stairs and I hurt my knee
how I don't know later Faye, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Hanson says he wants to be the first subscriber that's brilliant.
Ten out of ten, My dear well played.
Speaker 4 (02:38):
So if you haven't found in the stock market, it's
had a rough week or so and it's almost all AI,
well allmost 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.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Huge day to day. Why in Vidia, which is a
big chip maker, which.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
The common thing to say in the stock market world
right now is as goes in video goes the stock market.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
That's how big a deal they are.
Speaker 4 (03:08):
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 (03:23):
Where analysts expect.
Speaker 5 (03:25):
To dig this.
Speaker 4 (03:26):
Analysts expect the chip behemoth to show more than a
fifty percent growth in that income and revenue.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
This quarter. Ooh, corner moving up. Yeah, I would say
that will shore up the whole This is a bubble
thing up. There's the stock market. I mean, it still
could be a bubble, but the bubble ain't about.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
It ain't over yet, except as you've pointed out that
whole incestuous thing.
Speaker 5 (03:57):
In Vidia's profits mostly came from you know, an AI,
whose profits mostly came from in video, whose profits mostly
came from cloud services from Amazon.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
I can veal you, right, and this is from Bloomberg.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
So they're expecting in Vidia to announce a fifty percent
growth in both net income in revenue.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
It's fiscal third quarter.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
The reason is straightforward, says here, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet that's Google.
That's that's Google, right, and Meta, which is Facebook and Zuckerberg,
all taken together represent more than forty percent of video's sales.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
So they're buying the chips for AI.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (04:33):
Yeah, And they're projected to increase their combined AI spending
by thirty four percent over the next year. 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. It's expected Holy crap,
(04:55):
it's a gold Russian. Nobody's sure there's gold. So I
was talking to yesterday about how much I read and
listened to about AI. Joe was asking why. 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.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
It as possible.
Speaker 5 (05:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
Sure, boy, I highly recommend.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
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 gotten into now.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
It's really good.
Speaker 4 (05:36):
It gets into the history of all this, which is
what I was going to talk about now. The history
of AI. 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
(05:57):
toward AI in the fifties and it just got stuck
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
(06:20):
months over the last many and many decades, we've gotten
to 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
(06:42):
are the doomers like me that think this is going
to be the end of mankind. It's going to be
the worst thing that ever happened to us. It's coming,
whether we like it or not. How quickly it ends
is I don't know, in my lifetime or not.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
I don't know. We'll find out.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
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 two crowds, the accelerators. I think I mentioned this yesterday.
You've got the this is going to be the greatest
thing for mankind. We're going to cure all the diseases.
We're going to live to be one hundred and fifty,
nobody's going to have to work. It's going to be
the like Heaven on Earth. Everybody is hoped for since
(07:17):
the dawn of time. Half the accelerators believe that. The
other half the accelerators think no, no, no, I think
it's going to be the worst thing that 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
(07:39):
is what's driving the doomers. He was just presenting the
different arguments, 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.
(08:00):
I mean, just all these different things that we do.
We won't let our kids play outside there's a park,
on their own whatever. Yeah, we've got a 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
(08:22):
They didn't put seat belts in cars at all for
a very very very long time, and then they weren't
mandated in this country until what the nineties.
Speaker 2 (08:29):
I don't even know when that happened. It was a
long time.
Speaker 4 (08:32):
And he makes the point that everybody wasn't pushing back
on the automobile. You know, how many people are going
to 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 these different things.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
It's going to destroy these interesting No, we just plowed ahead.
Speaker 4 (08:47):
With this new invention that was super cool and it
was the latest technology, and we just full steam ahead.
For example, on 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 FI
fifty eight thousand deads. With a much smaller population, that'd
be the equivalent of ninety five thousand highway deaths today.
(09:09):
We were willing to put up with in nineteen seventy
because we just thought the technology was important enough, it
changed our lives enough in a positive way.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
We were just plowing forward. That's the way we used
to look at things.
Speaker 5 (09:22):
Yeah, I'm tempted to go off on a tangent about
SAFETYSM and how our acceptance that humans live and then
they die and perhaps there's a better place afterward has
given way too. We've got to prolong our lives as
long as possible, no matter what it costs culturally speaking.
Speaker 4 (09:39):
But back to you, But here 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.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
For a long time. I mean, there were lots of
highway deaths in the fifties and the sixties. We kept
moving forward or faster and more powerful callers, and it wasn't.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
People afraid to get in them. And then, like I said,
what will this do to society blah blah. I mean,
there were those articles, you can find them.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
They're hilarious.
Speaker 4 (10:06):
But we plowed forward and then a lot of the
naysaying about AI now fits in with our safetyism. 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. But there's no doubt
we have a safetyism problem in the country, and any
(10:27):
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 (10:41):
There's no doubt about it.
Speaker 5 (10:42):
My favorite saying safety, third, innovation, adventure, then safety.
Speaker 4 (10:49):
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 accelerate that think
it's going to bring about the greatest time in human history.
I think those people are nuts, I mean, like crazy crazy,
(11:09):
don't understand human nature at all, nuts so that they
think nobody's gonna have to work is going to lead
up to a positive outcome.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
I couldn't.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
I couldn't disagree with you.
Speaker 5 (11:21):
Not specifically address that concern about human nature and idle
hands and the rest of it, then they need to
go to hell.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
I mean, that's ridiculous.
Speaker 5 (11:29):
It's like rent 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 going
to waste ten seconds listening to you.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
Yeah, they they just don't believe it.
Speaker 4 (11:42):
So it's you've used this example before among like some
of your super smart libertarians. The reason they think they're
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 5 (11:59):
If everybody's like you're motivated, they'll always stay busy and
go get it, because that's how human beings behave.
Speaker 4 (12:05):
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 going to sit around,
get fat and do drugs.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
The Armstrong and Getty Show.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yeah, mar Jahn, your show, podcasts and our hot links.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Well everybody.
Speaker 6 (12:32):
This week, everyone's been sharing their Spotify raft.
Speaker 2 (12:35):
You know what I'm talking about.
Speaker 7 (12:36):
Now.
Speaker 6 (12:37):
That's when Spotify puts together the little recap of your
listening stats for the whole year. But Spotify isn't the
only app that does this.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Oh now, check out what people got in their phones
earlier today. Your calculator raft is ready. You had a
busy year.
Speaker 8 (12:49):
You calculated restaurant tips eighty six times because you can't
do basic mat You accidentally opened the app seventeen times
when you meant to open the one next to it.
You're in the top one percent who typed boobs upside down.
You typed sixty seven and showed your son in a
desperate attempt to connect three times. You accidentally tightened six
thirty when you were drunk and trying to set an
(13:09):
alarm for work. Twice and you calculated how much more
money you need to quit your job forty five, six
hundred and seventy one times. Wow, don't forget to share
with your friends.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (13:24):
This made me sad for some reason. I'm thankful that
I did not have a job where I every day
calculated how many more days do I have to do this?
Because I've had jobs like that. Oh yeah, it sucks.
I'm glad I wasn't betting on Turkish soccer. This is
fairly corrupt. The bust this week of a massive betting
(13:46):
investigation into Turkish professional soccer. It's the biggest sport in
that country, as it is in most countries around the
world that aren't the United States.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
Over one thousand.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
Players have been suspended, including top tier players from the
major clubs.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
How many players are there in this league? One hundred
and forty nine referees? Oh boy.
Speaker 4 (14:08):
Arrest warrants have been issued for dozens of individuals, including
club presidents, referees, and commentators. So you had you had
soccer matches where the president of the club is corrupt,
the players are corrupt, the referees corrupt, and then the.
Speaker 5 (14:26):
Guy announcing the game is corrupt. I'm at a loss
for how they guy announcing the game. Maybe maybe he
just has to be bought off, not to say, you know,
keeper clearly let that ball in. Wait a minute, what
just happened here? Or you want him on the tape that.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Wasn't a foul? What the hell are you talking about?
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Right?
Speaker 2 (14:47):
They just don't want that right to what extent? Was
it real at all?
Speaker 4 (14:52):
If the owner and the player, the ref and the
guy announcing it are all in on the on the fix,
it's really w at that point.
Speaker 5 (15:01):
Yeah, For all I know, the fans are getting ten
bucks apiece to keep their mouths shut, sheer or boo
at the right time, right, yeah, yeah, wow, Wow.
Speaker 4 (15:10):
How long would it take to turn that around and
have anybody believe it's reel and continue to bet.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
But obviously people were betting.
Speaker 4 (15:18):
To the extent that it was worth paying off a
thousand players and owners and referees and announcers and everything
like that. The scandal has caused serious disruption. Lower division
matches have been postponed. There's a growing concern over integrity
in Turkish and European football, broadly just because the owners
of the players, the refs, and the announcers were all
(15:39):
on the take.
Speaker 5 (15:42):
It's guy mowing the field on the up and up right. Yeah, wow,
growing concern.
Speaker 4 (15:48):
Yeah, it ought to be guy out there parking the
cars in the furthest away a lot.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
You You got to back end well, back in he's
on the take.
Speaker 5 (15:57):
If I had the time, I would love to study
Turkish culture and politics more there at the nexus between
the European world and the Muslim world really really interesting
and Airdwan is half a dictator and it's just really
really good stuff. Oh, which reminds me I heard some
really really thought provoking talk about the nature of Islam
(16:22):
in Europe that I'd love to get to next hour.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
If you don't get next hour, you got to go somewhere.
That's fine.
Speaker 5 (16:26):
Subscribe to our podcast Armstrong and Getty on demand. You
can listen to it later.
Speaker 4 (16:30):
Oh man, your leisures you're driving around all weekend shopping
for Christmas and everything like that. Imagine the pleasures you
can enjoy your favorite segments over and over with the
kids in the backseat.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Huh. That's some good stuff Armstrong and Getty. Under that
Jack Armstrong and Joe sty The Armstrong and Getty Show.
Speaker 7 (16:51):
When the phrase six seven exploded online this year. He
was fueled by Generation Alpha kids fifteen and younger who
and forging a dictionary's worth of often baffling vocabulary.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Still it's lingoed that's burst into classrooms.
Speaker 7 (17:07):
Like Amy wargoes, how often are you hearing phrases like
this every day?
Speaker 2 (17:11):
Why do you think that's about having something to actually
bring them together?
Speaker 7 (17:16):
Many younger Gen Alpha kids started school during the isolation
of the pandemic. Wargo says that attachment to the virtual
world remains in a way that differentiates them from Gen
Z previous kids.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
It was fidget spinners and bottle flipping. Now it's anything they.
Speaker 4 (17:31):
Hear on TikTok, a shared experience which we just don't
have anymore.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
So whether it was.
Speaker 4 (17:39):
You know, the pandemic's hurrying it along, it was going
to happen anyway because we just don't have shared experiences anymore.
Speaker 5 (17:46):
Yeah, Yeah, how interesting. Apparently Peter thiel I wrote a
piece recently about how capitalism the free market is failing millennials.
Speaker 4 (18:01):
He's an interesting dude, that Peter Theil. He is PayPal
mafia billionaire duty that has gone out there and do
all different kinds of stuff he's all over the map politically.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Sometimes I agree with him vehemently and sometimes I don't.
Speaker 5 (18:13):
Yeah, he's behind Pallanteer too, which is doing amazing work
and really patriotic anyway. But he was reaching out to
Facebook executives of all people. But he said, when seventy
percent of millennials say they are pro socialist, we need
to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that
they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed. We should try
and understand why, which is absolutely true. Then the free
(18:36):
press is Sean Fisher sat down with Thiel to talk
about what he saw in twenty twenty that made him
write that more recently and just a super quick summary.
Capitalism is not working for young people, Fel said, citing
burdensome student debt regulations putting home ownership out of reach
for many. Quote people assume everything still works, but objectively
(18:57):
it doesn't. If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn't
be surprised if they eventually become communists. Now, I wish
I had more of the piece in front of me.
I don't I could have grabbed it. But what the
free press did was they ran a bunch of reactions
to it from people both you know, people you may
have heard of, and some you didn't. I love this
(19:20):
one from Blake Shole, who's the founder and CEO of
something called Boom Supersonic, which I have no idea what
that means. It might be a dance video platform, it
might be an airplane, it might be a drug or
a social network. Anyway, perhaps Katie could endeavor to figure
out what Boom Supersonic is, just to amuse me if
(19:40):
you don't mind.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
But what he said was really cool, any idea not yet? Okay,
were getting there? Okay, here's what he said.
Speaker 5 (19:51):
If you insert enough socialist elements into a capitalist system,
when the socialist elements inevitably cause problems, people will blame
the capitalism ah and then turn socialist. That's what's happened
in New York City, for example, where Mamdani voters are
motivated by high rents and crippling student debts. Even the
rent control drives up housing prices, and government subsidies for.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
Higher education encourage universities.
Speaker 4 (20:17):
To raise tuition, you know, because I can wait, there's
more real quick. Likewise, you insert enough capitalist elements into
a socialist system, the system sort of begins to work,
and people think socialism works.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
That's what happened in China.
Speaker 4 (20:38):
But I can see how I've even done that. I've
talked about this many times over the years. I just
did a few minutes ago. Since we do live in
a welfare state, then I think the government should be
able to do this. I don't justify the uh, you know,
more socialism so much, but the more government control aspect
of it. If you're going to allow if if some
(21:00):
of my money is going to go feed people who
lose all of their money gambling, then I think society
ought to be able to outlaw gambling, which just you know,
just is an argument towards bigger government making more decisions
for us. So, yeah, you inject a little bit of
socialism because I don't care if people just use staying
on this example, I don't care at all if somebody
(21:22):
spends their life savings on gambling and runs out of
money and less at the end of that story, when
you and your kids are hungry, you take my money.
Now all of a sudden, I care. So you've injected
some socialism because we do do that, I said, doodoo,
we feed the hungry so now I'm feeding you with
my money. Now I get to decide whether or not
(21:42):
you gamble, which is kind of an element of big
government socialism.
Speaker 5 (21:46):
And getting back to Blake shol the founder and CEO
of Boomster Personic, which is the largest chain of car
wash centers across America.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Or I don't know what is it, Katie, Have we
figured that out?
Speaker 4 (21:58):
Yeah, it's a company that's aiming to make commercial supersonic
flights more accessible.
Speaker 5 (22:03):
Oh, okay, okay, interesting anyway, so he goes on, At
the root of this, at the root of this terrible
confusion is a failure of our education system and our
media to give the next generation a proper history education.
Today's problems of affordability almost exclusively come from our most
socialist institutions, such as are heavily regulated, subsidized in centrally
(22:23):
planned healthcare and education systems. By contrast, the freer, more
capitalist industries such as electronics and computing have driven enormous
improvements across the board in real world standards of living.
The closer we get to capitalism, the more everyone is
better off in real terms. The closer we get to socialism,
the more death and suffering result, we can't let capitalism
(22:45):
be socialism's fall guy, fall guy. It's on us to
help the next generation separate the capitalist weite from the
socialist chaff so we can all enjoy.
Speaker 4 (22:53):
A freer and more prosperous future. That's my social answer,
the socialist noise from the capitalists, as people like to
say nowadays.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5 (23:04):
Interestingly, a couple of my other favorites were all about
life choices.
Speaker 4 (23:11):
That is really good. So just to do dwell on
that second before you get to the life choices. So
you have a socialist society, you do a little capitalism
like that in China, which helped them make a lot
of money, and you credit socialism.
Speaker 5 (23:26):
Right, And if you insert enough socialist elements into a
capitalist system, when the socialist elements inevitably cause problems, people
blame the capitalism and then turn socialist.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
That's unfortunate. It is good.
Speaker 5 (23:40):
So there's a lot of stuff about personal choice, and
we talked about this earlier.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
It is.
Speaker 5 (23:48):
The eight hundred pound gorilla, you know, in a pet
store full of little kittens.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
In terms of how people's lives turn out, we'll clean
up on out five.
Speaker 5 (24:00):
There is there there are a number of different things
that can affect your life in a material way, from
your your upbringing, to your genetics, to your race, to
a whole bunch of stuff. But the idea that personal choices,
your life choices aren't listed as the king of the hill,
(24:23):
aren't not just not listed as the king of the hill.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
They're not disgusted at all.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
No.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
In fact, it's frowned upon if you look at them.
It's it's that is an excuse.
Speaker 5 (24:32):
That's what I would call governmentalism, the idea that government
should solve all of our problems.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
You're shaming people if you're going to take exactly right.
Speaker 5 (24:41):
Yeah, But I thought it was interesting that so many
really brilliant and persuadis of people wrote about.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
About personal choices. Jim, uh, the gorilla is in the
kit nile. Oh not again, Okay, say no more.
Speaker 5 (25:03):
And the other thing that they talk about is over
regulation and how and oh man, I just came a
craze across a great example of this. And most people
don't know this. I didn't know it until fairly late
in life. A lot of regulations are attempting to stifle competition.
(25:24):
The big guys figure, all right, compliance with these complex
regulations will cost us three percent of our revenue. But
a plucky startup with good ideas that wants to come
and take our market share, that'll be like fifteen percent
of their revenues and they could never afford it. So
(25:45):
we will quash any competition with regulations that sound like
they're protecting the consumer or the environment or whatever, but
they were. They lobbied, the big guys lobbied to regulate
their own industry to crush competition.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Did you know that's a thing. It's a thing, folks.
And finally, this.
Speaker 5 (26:08):
Love Jason Riley Wall Street Journal, and he wrote a
great piece about this incredible school, Pineywood School in Mississippi.
It is again, yet again, the classic educational success story.
A lot of poor kids, a lot of black kids
(26:28):
doing amazing things, achieving, learning, getting into college, the rest
of it. Why, high standards, strictly enforced discipline and high
expectations of the kids, and the kids love it and
they excel like crazy.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Sounds like white supremacy to me, Oh my lord. Jason
Riley with a great piece about that.
Speaker 5 (26:51):
But I was going to use that to introduce another
one of my favorite black thinkers, Roland Fryer, who's writing
about the economics of culture, which we were just talking
about life choices. People from cultures that emphasize productive habits
tend to advance.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
The reverse is also true.
Speaker 5 (27:10):
I mean, that's one of the most self evidently obvious
things you could possibly say.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
But man, that is strict for boten on the left
to say that.
Speaker 5 (27:20):
That is why you hear those idiotic things like punctuality
is white supremacy, and trying hard is white supremacy and
exceptionalism or what's the you promote people based on their excellence?
Is white supremacy meritocracy? Meritocracy? Yeah, exactly. But Roland writes,
(27:43):
and you may know, he was the guy who came
out with a carefully constructed study early in his career
that said, no, young black men are not disproportionately shot
and shot dead in America by police. It's not true,
and it was honest, salable research. But the left essentially
made him a propriet. But anyway, he writes, culture is
(28:06):
one of the most underrated ideas in economics. For decades,
economists avoided invoking cultures.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
The shared value you are you are scratching the biggest
itch I've got this. This is Wow. Really, my this
is my thing right here. I'm loving putting aside the
highly troubling metaphor. I'm glad to be doing.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
So.
Speaker 5 (28:27):
For decades, economists avoid invoking culture the shared values, norms, beliefs, preferences,
and behaviors of a group as an explanation for economic outcomes.
It seemed too intangible to measure and too messy to model.
Thomas Sowell, Oh my god. Two of my favorite thinkers
happened to be black men. Quoted in the same thing,
(28:49):
whose legacy was celebrated recently at Stanford's Hoover Institution changed that.
He was among the first economists to treat culture as
an important economic variable. Mister sol has argued that both
human capital and culture drive mobility, more so in his view,
than discrimination or external barriers. Groups that develop productivity enhancing
traits such as skills, an orientation toward education and work,
(29:13):
and thriftiness tend to advance. Those whose cultures don't emphasize
these things tend to fall behind. In mister Sowell's view,
culture is a form of capital, an accumulation of habits
and know how that powerfully influences a group's project progress
could not be truer, and you know, I'd like to
(29:34):
read this whole thing because it is so incredibly important.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
I'll bet he goes into a bunch of different studies.
Speaker 4 (29:40):
Go ahead, I'll bet that the reason it's so recent
that anybody talked about it, wrote about it, is that
we just were all in agreement up until fairly recently
mid ish twentieth century that yeah, of course, being thrifty
and working hard is a good idea and everybody.
Speaker 2 (29:59):
Should do it is mostly in agreement.
Speaker 4 (30:01):
It wasn't until we started to well, you know, I
get back to Elvis and the Beatles and the devolving
of our culture.
Speaker 2 (30:07):
I think it all fits together. Actually, so again we're
pressed for time.
Speaker 5 (30:11):
But so he goes into his research in his academic background,
and he talks about cultural differences across racial and ethnic
groups are unmistakable. And then he talks about various shows
and how popular they are among cultures. But for social scientists,
the hardest part of studying culture is trying to find
a way to measure it. And in the early to
mid two thousand, Stephen Levitt and I tried to ease
(30:33):
from the freakonomics guy try to answer that question by
focusing on one small but revealing expression of cultures, the
names parents give their children. Man, it's long and interesting,
but here's the most revealing part of this. They went
into other parts of the world, other countries with cultures
you know nothing about, and you had two groups of
(30:57):
people that look just like this, just the same, similar religions,
et cetera. But over here they valued hard work, savings, education,
et cetera. Over there, they didn't guess what the first
group did way way better than the other ones. And
it wasn't white supremacy because there weren't any damn white people.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
They refer to the fact that and what's the number.
Speaker 5 (31:17):
I wish I could find it that Pakistani Americans.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Earned sixty cents on the dollar to Indian Americans because
of what white racism? Are you kidding me? No cultural norms.
It's like the most important thing in the world, and
nobody wants to talk about it because I chickens, But
I don't care. I'll talk about it. Their chickens armstrong
and getty, Oh strong and.
Speaker 7 (31:46):
Strong and get.
Speaker 5 (31:57):
You know what I hadn't realized un till I came
across an article about today was that high school football
they're highlighting southern California high school football is now full
on the nil money thing, with boosters paying big money
to little kids to come to their high schools.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
Wow to play football. Wow, I know a little bit
about that. Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 5 (32:23):
Well, in this one kid that they highlight, who's now
he's going to be playing in the Big Ten championship
game for Ohio State, a receiver.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
The story opens with him tearfully calling.
Speaker 5 (32:32):
His grandmother begging her to come get him because his
drug addict mother had sold him to a team oh
in southern California to go play receiver there. Unbelievable, speaking
of the evils of modern society. A couple of days ago,
Massachusetts voters took a major step to repeal the legalization
(32:53):
of recreational marijuana in the state. The Coalition for a
Healthy massachusettsmitted more than seventy four thousand signatures required to
put the question on the twenty twenty six state ballot.
Once certified, the measure will go to the state legislature
for consideration. If they declined to pass it, organizers must
collect more signatures to put it to a statewide vote
(33:14):
next year, but Massachusetts is in alone in Idaho, where
marijuana is currently Italy illegal, a measure to block future
voter initiatives the legalize the drug is on the ballot
for twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
So what led them to want to do this?
Speaker 4 (33:29):
What were they thinking was going to happen when it
was legalized that hasn't occurred or the reverse.
Speaker 5 (33:35):
I guess there are a bunch of unforeseen effects. Number One,
it was believed by a lot of people that the
rate of marijuana use wouldn't change much. It would just
be out in the open and could be regulated and
blah blah blah, but freely legal weed and the fact
that it's practically laughable, the idea that the cops would
(33:58):
talk to somebody who has marijuana to make sure it's
legal weed or whatever. And in the legalized states, it's
just it's not happening. So lots and lots of more
people are smoking pot. The promised tax revenues have not materialized.
The black market for pot hasn't gone anywhere, because the
like in California, it's so taxed and regulated, it's it's legal.
(34:18):
Pot is pretty expensive and though plenty of people consume it,
a lot of people just keep going to their neighborhood
dealer they've always gone to.
Speaker 4 (34:25):
But so back to the conversation of you know, well,
and it's really really bad for kids' brains. Eighty to
one hundred thousand people die from drinking every year. So
is pot worse than drinking?
Speaker 2 (34:37):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (34:38):
I think that's probably an unanswerable question. Our drinking just
got grandfathered in and it doesn't need to make sense.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
It's just the thing.
Speaker 4 (34:47):
It's the arm Strong in Getty Show, Armstrong Inetting, Armstrong
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