May 24, 2024 • 36 mins
Hour 3 of the Friday May 24, 2024 edition of The Armstrong & Getty Replay features...
- Anti-Work Movement
- Saudi Arabia modernizing its cites
- AI Predictions
- Fake AI Porn, Marijuana Use and Addiction
Stupid Should Hurt: https://www.armstrongandgetty.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
From the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio and the George Washington
Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty Armstrong and Getty Show.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
So I've got some interesting stuff here, kind of on taxes, capitalism, socialism,
possible revolution coming our way.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
I was up lately, Wait a minute, that last one.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
I was having trouble sleeping last night, so I went
to one of my favorite Reddit threads, which is anti work.
It's got millions of followers. We've talked about it over
the years. It's unintentionally hilarious the millions of people who
don't believe in work.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
I'll talk more about that in a second, but first
this tax thing. This is a guy who wrote a
piece about taxes.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I had never heard this before and explained something that
I've wondered about for a long long time.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
His name is Brian Mitrovic.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
With his explanation of the convoluted taxation system that made
the nineteen fifties materialism possible, we continue to hear a
drum beat for higher tax rates, in particular on high
earners and corporations, on the grounds that we used to
have higher rates and we did just fine. An essential
aspect of the fiscal structure of post World War II
(01:26):
prosperity was the high tax rates. And you hear about
that if you're anti if you want to bring the
tax rates down, you hear about all time.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Well you used to have a tax rate much higher
than this. Blah blah blah blah blah. I've always been
kind of ouch.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
You know, I don't have an argument against that. But
that doesn't see, it doesn't fit right somehow, Well it doesn't.
Here's why the federal government objectly declined to collect taxes
at posted rates because of the deduction culture. High tax
rates existed as a holdover of Herbert Hoover FDR and
World War Two. But the public, especially it's rising and
affluent and members, made clear it was not going to
(02:01):
comport with them, and the government obliged and did not
enforce the rates and instead offered massive suites of legal
tax avoidance opportunities.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Everybody went along with this.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
We did not get this halcyon days while in any
material way having.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
High tax rates.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
We got this while not enforcing high tax rates due
to high deductions any of the stuff. Because when I
was young and started paying tax rates, there was all
this tuxa talk about deduct this, deduct that, and I
never could whenever i'd look into it. That was the
older generation who grew up at a time where you could
deduct all this different stuff, And that's what explains those
(02:40):
high tax rates from back today. You could deduct all
kinds of stuff. The car you drove is a business expenseer.
Just all these different things that went away and we
don't have anymore with the current high tax rates.
Speaker 4 (02:52):
Just like this so called rack rate that you sometimes
see on the door of your hotel room that nobody
ever pays. It's a legal maximum, or like the actual
tuition at your state university. Only Chinese nationals actually pay that. Yeah,
nobody paid those rates.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
Right, so I did.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
And that also explains why my whole life, especially from
older people, is always but you got to do that,
And I think I've looked into that. They say no,
and I always had, ama chump, Do I have a
bad tax attorney?
Speaker 4 (03:19):
What? No?
Speaker 2 (03:20):
That was just a previous era where the government is
all about all these different deductions for people to figure
out how to get out of that high tax rate.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
That explains a lot to me.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
The word chump is underappreciated in the modern day. In
my opinion, you'd go fine and non obscene insult.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Yeah, you don't want to be one?
Speaker 4 (03:40):
No, So I believe a couple of months ago I
was advocating for both Chump and Sucker to reappear on
the scene.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
So do I have time here? Yeah? I got a
little time for sure.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
So the anti work reddit thread, which we've talked about before,
has several million people on it. And here's the description
of what it is. It's a subreddit for those who
want to end work. Okay, let's stop right there. The
hell does that mean?
Speaker 3 (04:07):
I love that? What the hell does that mean?
Speaker 2 (04:10):
There are millions of people following a subreddit that's premises
we want to end work.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Anyway, I'm gonna start a Twitter thread that advocates for.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
The end of aches and pains, good luck, or the
inability of people to fly with by flapping their arms.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Yeah. Oh, I had, like for the second or third
time in my life, a dream where I could fly
the other night.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Oh, I used to have those all times, I really had.
They're awesome all there. So did you have really good control?
I was always a little out of control in a
little wall. Did you have good control while you were
flying around.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
No, it was funny.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
I had concern because I thought that I'm not sure
I get the aerodynamics of this, but it seems to
be going pretty well, and I don't need I don't
want to stall out over this river. But it wasn't
like fear. It was just let's see, if I have
to ditch, I'll ditch over there. But then I came
in for a nice soft landing.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Wow, I don't think I've had a pleasant dream in
thirty years. Really yeah, Wow, that can't be good, right.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
No, So anyway, I need to crack your head open
try to figure out what's going on.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Anti work.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
It's a subredit for those who want to end work,
are curious about ending work, want to get the most
out of a work free life, want more information on
anti work ideas, and want personal help with their own
jobs work related struggles. And people bitch about their jobs
and what they're getting paid. And then the comments are
just priceless from all these people who think this is
a thing. But anyway, so here's just one of the
(05:42):
posts and the reactions that I was reading last night.
I'm doing ten times more work at the office than
people in the nineteen eighties. Why in the hell do
I still have to work forty plus hours a week.
Here's the explanation. With computers and emails and Xcel and
word and PDF and Adobe and snipping tool, etc. I'm
doing about ten times or work at the office than
people before computers. If you need a report, instead of
(06:03):
going to the archives searching for numbers, blah blah blah,
I can do it in like twenty minutes with emails
and teams messages.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
I can spam thousands of people with information.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
But instead of working less, I worked the same hours
as people forty years ago, despite getting ten times more
work done.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
We are being exploited.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Either we should be working one tenth the hours or
a page should be ten times higher.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
I have a hilarious argument.
Speaker 4 (06:27):
Wow, I would actually enjoy engaging with this person because
the explanation's pretty ABC one two three, it's easy to understand.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
But right on, well, I'd like to just adopt his
argument and going onto you know, just say hey, back
when they had to do this with a horse, it
would have taken a week. I did it like fifteen minutes.
So either I need to get off work now or
get paid nine hundred times more.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Uh. And then so here's some of the responses.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
And then they have the audacity to tell us that
we're not working enough and have no work ethic. Hey,
mister delusional rich guy, I'm doing ten times amount of
work for nearly the same pay as forty people forty
years ago.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
It's not a wonder. I don't want to work that much.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
And then another response, have you seen the costs involved
in being a rich guy lately? Imagine staying in the
Barcelona Harbor on your thirty million dollar yacht, feeling like
a peasant while the real olive arts casually discuss whether
to buy another island or travel to space.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Wow, this is like a trip to the zoo. I'm
fascinated by these beasts.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Correct, we still spend way too much time in corporate office?
Is enough time and not enough time at homer or
enriching our lives. If you do the slightest amount of research,
you'll find you have way more free time than your parents'
grandparents than their parents did by far, because it doesn't
take you. For instance, speaking of being able to do
more work faster, it doesn't take you seven hours to
do laundry, for instance.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
Yeah, sure, yeah, here's one.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
They haven't shortened it because from the employer's point of view,
why should they. You want to not start to death
or freeze in the streets. Here's what I'm offering. Don't
like it, just dive in essentially, Yeah, thank you. There's
somebody who at least grasps it partly and then and
then tons of these no matter what the topic is
on the anti work is because you haven't organized with
(08:16):
your peers to overthrow the system that exploits you. Yet
they get into capitalism a lot that this is how
they always keep socialism for flourishing the way it should
and lots of revolution. We need a revolution, we need
a revolution, We need a revolution. Who's with me? It's
gonna happen. I'll bet you within ten years. I'll bet
you within five years. I don't know what Briton. This
(08:36):
is all anecdotal, but there are millions of followers on
this thread. It's it's nonsensical in its premise for people
who don't want to have to work. And what percentage
of people think a revolution needs to happen because are
our awful capitalist system?
Speaker 3 (08:52):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
And the notion well that I mean we could spend
the next three and a half hours exploding that notion.
But as the free market to capitalism has brought wealth, health,
and longevity to the entire human population, unevenly, certainly.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
But I mean the.
Speaker 4 (09:08):
Idea that greater productivity is somehow a theft from you
is really a head scratcher for me.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Here's one more on like it.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
You go ahead, Your boss can skim ten times the
value out of you. Back in the eighties, boss man
needed to exploit ten people to get his new Porsche.
Now he gets that out of just you, and a
mansion out of the other nine. All of these bosses
have yachts and Porsches and mand islands in islands.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
Yes, Jesus probably would have killed you himself. Yep, I
hear you.
Speaker 4 (09:39):
Wow Wow that Gallagan, Uh wow, that is something. I mean,
I knew that those people still existed, but who don't
get how markets work at all. And again, the idea that, Okay,
I'm going to show up for eight hours a day,
you got a new machine that makes me more productive, Well,
(10:00):
that old level of productivity was obviously God's own level
of productivity, and anything in excess of that is it
left from me.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
I mean it's alert.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Well, now we have that taken care of by a machine.
Now I need to hire somebody to do this. Would
you like to do this for this amount of money
as opposed to that for that amount of money.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
You either do or you don't.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
So when AI comes along and you just show up
for one minute a day to hit the start button,
as if you know that'd be necessary, you need you
deserve a full salary because that's the same productivity as
the nineteen eighties, where you know, forgive me as a
gray headed gentleman. I worked in the nineteen eighties and
(10:42):
we worked plenty hard.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Yeah, that was kind of funny, as I am old
enough to know some of the errors that they're talking about.
I was working myself and it wasn't quite what you
were picturing.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Yeah, yeah, I just I'm sorry. I just find that
so cute. I know, well, yeah, I find it troubling.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Yeah, all the revolution stuff, and I'll read I can
read some more that later on different topics that came up,
But all the revolution stuff is highly troubling. And again
I don't know if that's a half a one percent
of people, you know, because this is a big country.
You can have several million people on one following and
it's still if that's all there is.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
But I don't know.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
And I fitted in with the tax rates because I
think a lot of that, you know, yachts islands, porsches talk,
is what allows taxes to be what they are because
of that ridiculousness going on.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
You know, I keep threatening to write a book. I
might write a book on.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
The the effect the Internet has had on.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
Fertilizing stupidity in.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
That obviously, and we've discussed this on many occasions. You
can have a truly idiotic idea and you kick around
your town bringing up your truly idiotic idea, like some
of those we just heard, for instance, and people.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
Will say, no, Joe, you can't. That's not how it works.
Speaker 4 (11:52):
It's the productivity blah blah blah, the free market blah
blah blah. Oh all right, I'm either talked out of
it or just realized nobody agrees with my student idea.
But now with the Internet, I can find ten thousand
a million people, maybe ten million worldwide, which is a
vanishingly small number of people, but who agree with my stupid,
stupid idea.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
And I start to think my idea is not stupid.
It's a good idea. Look at all these people who
agree with me, right, and we've got to take a break.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
But a lot of the posts that were just nonsensical
between the way they were written in the vocabulary. People
are clearly educated and not bilm So they got this
at college or something. And then I remembered I've got this.
I'll get to more later. Only a third of people
in this poll say, or a third of people in
(12:39):
this poll say they learned nothing at all about finances
in school, sing yeah, well, that's how you end up
with these conversations. I guess what a bunch of numbskulls
arm shrong.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
The Armstrong seven.
Speaker 4 (13:18):
Are you hip to Saudi Arabia's GNEM project? I think
that's how you pronounce it. It's a MSB's insane development
that's going to turn Saudi Arabia not into an oil
desert shake them, but like a modern twenty second century
(13:42):
hub of all sorts of stuff. His idea is a skyscraper,
and I can't remember how high is it supposed to be.
It's taller than the Empire State Building, and it's going
to be one hundred and five miles wide, taller.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Than the Empire State Building, but one hundred and five
miles wide or one hundred and five miles long, if
you would like to describe it like that.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
It's going to house nine million people.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
It's what it's known as the Line, and it's the
flagship of this unimaginably ambitious know him project.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
So I know he's big on as a guy who's
in his early thirties, he's big on the the US
being rich because oil ain't gonna last forever.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
Have you heard of electric cars?
Speaker 2 (14:31):
We got to come up with a new way to
be you know something, or we're going to we're doomed.
So that's pretty smart right right now.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
The first phase by twenty thirty, was supposed to be
ten miles of this Empire State Building.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
How do you get your wall of China thingy? How
do you get your camel in the elevator? Oh? Unfortunate.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
But now they're realizing that the country is spending far
more than it's taking in costs of explode did because
building costs are up like forty percent globally, and so
now they're just gonna build one point five miles of
the structure by twenty thirty, which is I mean, that's,
you know, a sixth of what they were talking about.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
But wait a minute.
Speaker 4 (15:15):
You got a skyscraper a mile and a half long,
and that's the scaled back not as ambitious.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Excuse me, first step. Joe brought us the story last
week of the snowfer.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
That's right. It's not a sneaker, it's not a loafer.
It's a snowfer.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Yeah, I'm looking at the picture of it. I hadn't
seen a picture of it. It's coming out in the spring.
It's from New Balance. I think it's a particularly ugly shoe,
but we'll see if it catches on. It's the foot
The Wall Street Journal did a review of this. It's
the footwear equivalent of a spork, and no one knows
what to make of it. Like the Liger combination lion tiger,
that's right, Napoleon Dynamite's favorite animal.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
It's probably my favorite animal.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Like the Liger, the cronut and the true before it.
What's a cronut is a croissant and a donut. But
what's a chortle?
Speaker 3 (16:05):
A sure anybody know what that is?
Speaker 2 (16:08):
No, this shoe is a confounding hybrid released in August.
Speaker 4 (16:14):
I think it's ugliness is going to be part of
its ironic appeal.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
Why do we need a sneaker loafer combo.
Speaker 4 (16:21):
So you can step out of church and mow your
lawn in the same footwear?
Speaker 3 (16:28):
Yeah, it really is. I don't know, yes, Katie Green. Look,
what can you tell us about the chortle?
Speaker 2 (16:32):
The chortle is the cross between a chuckle and a snort. Well, okay,
so it is actually the the laugh. Oh okay kind
of laugh. But that's way different than liger or cronut.
I would not have included that it's a distraction.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
No bad journalism.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Uh, how's America doing? The Pentagon wanted to find out.
They paid a think tank to come up with the answer.
We've got that for you, coming up from the Rain Corporation,
and it's it's. First of all, you're not going to
disagree with any of their conclusions exactly, it ain't good.
Can we just whistle past the graveyard please and pretend
(17:11):
everything's fine? That might be the best way to approach it.
That might be the best way to That might be
my new attitude on life. What's you know not I
can do about it? Give up is that giving up.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
I don't know. It's a lot like giving the Armstrong
and Getty show.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Yeah, your show podcasts and our Hot Lakes and the
arm Strong and Getty Show.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Toyota has a new patent for a new technology that
would allow drivers.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
To freely change the color of their car.
Speaker 4 (17:54):
It's great if you and your family love wandering the
airport parking lot for days.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
So what, you can change the color of your car. Yeah,
there are a couple of different things happening here. The
one Toyota's working on is the less interesting to me.
It's essentially the the coating on the car is affected
by heat and light. So you can go to a
facility and go through this weird tunnel the car can
(18:21):
and and they will manipulate the heat and light in
a way that makes well, that's pretty cool. So much faster,
I'm assuming cheaper than like a rap like I did.
Oh yeah, or getting it repainted or don't have paints anymore.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
It's wraps. All about the wraps. That's excellent, I do
not doubt it. So that's one thing.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
But BMW at the latest Consumer Electronics Show, I'm sorry
it was actually two years ago, unveiled the the BMW
i X Flow featuring e Ink a little lengthy if
you ask me, But it's capable of changing the color
of the car at the click of a button. It's
it's so super high tech and cool. But you can
(19:02):
not only change your car from black to white and
back again, but it has flow mode where it like
has it's you know, to ten, twenty percent of the
car is black, the twenty percent is white, twenty percent
is black, twenty percent of white around that and it flows.
The color flows around the car in motion. Well yeah, yeah,
(19:22):
you can't have bunches of cars with animated crap roll
on because people are wreck all the time.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
Oh that's a cool car crash. Okay, Well, I don't know.
That's a horrible idea. What about car theft? Somebody steals
a blue car, they change the color and lays red.
Speaker 4 (19:41):
All right, yeah the coppers. As if the cops look
for stolen cars, yeah, they'd be looking for the wrong color.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
This.
Speaker 4 (19:48):
There's a great article with some embedded video about this
under yesterday's hot links at Armstrong and geddy dot com.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Interesting.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
I wonder if that's just the future and a lot
of your a lot of cars you just you know,
whatever mood you're in her and to match your outfit,
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (20:09):
I suspect pretty strongly that will be possible. Yeah, awesome,
or patterns maybe fourth of July you have a red
way right right right right, Christmas time you go red
and green.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
Yeah, that sort of thing.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
To throw on a little camo for Veterans Day or
something like that, to tip your cap to our veterans.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
Speaking of the wonderful technological future that can only be good.
More technology, smarter computers can only be good. Ian Bremer,
friend of the Armstrong and Getty Show, is featured on
a PBS special that I think airs tonight that I
would like to watch, called A Brief History of the Future. Anyway,
(20:47):
he's featured on there talking about AI, and here's one
of the quotes from it. We are now at the
beginning of a new globalization in ways that even a
year ago, never mind twenty, seemed inconceivable.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
The fact that globalization through.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
AI is going to happen in a way that was
inconceivable a year ago. I don't even know where to
start with that, so I won't. I will just leave
that alone and recognize I'm not prepared for the future. Yeah,
I've got this piece I read I was talking about
briefly yesterday. I guess it was Jamie Diamond and Elon
Musk both given their opinions on what AI is going
(21:22):
to do, and they both have a very very cautious view,
a concerned view of what's probably.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
Coming down the road. And then they quoted a computer
expert who is much less worried about it. But the
problem with his quote, and I don't have it in front.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Of me, but did he work in is Google or
Microsoft or any of the other companies that are spending
billions of dollars to get this going.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
He may well be involved in some level. I thought
he was an academic. But what he said was essentially,
I don't really see anything coming in the near future
that I'm concerned about. But if you're in the business,
you've got to understand that's the whole point of this thing.
Nobody knows what it's going to look like. Like I was
about to say a year, never mind that in a month.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
God, I think the chances that it's a big nothing
burger are almost zero.
Speaker 4 (22:09):
Well, part of his contention, maybe I had to just
dig up the article, is that it's so glitchy and
prone to making mistakes and so mockably inaccurate. At this point,
people are going to trust it at this point, but.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
For a long time. Two months.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
If Bean Bremner, who does this for a living and
he tries to stay on the cutting edge of everything,
says things are happening that were unimaginable a year ago,
well then you have no idea where we're going to
be a year from now. Anyway, moving on from that,
we knew this was going to happen, But all school
districts are grappling with the challenges and impact of AI
in a couple of different ways. So it started last
(22:47):
year by the sudden popularity of chatbots, chat GPT and
all that sort of stuff. We're schools all across the
United States. We're scrambling to try to figure out how
to contain text generating bots cheating papers that the kids
didn't write. And nobody's gotten their arms around this yet, obviously,
and there may never, may never.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
There just may be.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
No way to stop my kid from saying, hey, chat bot,
write me a paper about the Battle of Gettysburg that
sounds like a sophomore and it does. Yeah, then you
turn it in and there might not be any stopping that.
In fact, I don't think there probably is any stopping that.
But now onto the more alarming thing for now, which
(23:28):
we all knew is coming. AI image generating phenomenon is
shaking schools all across the country, and it's happening at
the same time in all kinds of districts.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
We had a local story here, but it's happening all
over the place.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Boys in several states have used widely available, widely available
neutification apps.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
I like the fact that that's the name of the appttles.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
You let you know right there what it is, right,
neuification apps to pervert real identifiable photos of their clothed
female classmates shown attending events like school proms, into graphic,
convincing looking images of girls. Well, this is one of
my favorite lines from the article. Convincing looking images of
girls with exposed breasts and genitalia.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
Oh you mean naked?
Speaker 2 (24:10):
Oh? Thanks than body parts that would be included in
the nudity.
Speaker 4 (24:16):
For those unfamiliar with the genre, right, oh nude. In
some cases, boys shared the faked images in the school
lunch room, on the school bus, or through group chats.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
Thanks once again for mentioning the lunch room and the.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Bust oh right, different places that where school boys might interact.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
Yes, boy, that is some good writing.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
So first you had to describe to me what nude means,
and then you had to give me a little primer
on where kids hang out in school.
Speaker 4 (24:49):
Settings, students who are described as looking at the images
with their eyes and then talking about them with their mouths.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
Right, But getting away from the hilarity of the writing,
this has exploded at schools all across the country at
the same time. So they haven't even wrapped their heads
around how they're gonna do with cheating and well, a
number of things I've read is papers are just gonna
have to go away. There's gonna have to be a
lot of oral tests to figure out if you if
(25:20):
you know things or do it college style.
Speaker 4 (25:22):
You you got to do me three pages, you have
an hour do it sit down? Right?
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, that kind of test in Yeah, yeah,
almost guaranteed.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
That's what's going to have to be.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
I can't imagine any way around it, which might be
fantastic from a learning standpoint, but so they don't know
how to get their arms around this and this. I
just don't think you can. I think this is just
like the papers. There's no getting around it.
Speaker 4 (25:51):
Yeah, and I have a bunch of stuff including we're
going to feature some of the brand new Jonathan hype
book The Anxious Generation, and it's getting so much attention
next hour, but a bunch of different issues affecting kids,
whether it's the AI nude stuff or what have you.
And I'm just afraid there are going to be adults
(26:14):
who see the the gravity of the issue, and it
is very, very significant, but they're going to like try
to ruin the lives of thirteen year old boys who
behave exactly like thirteen year old boys always have behaved
and always will behave. Is it uncool that they're doing this?
It's extremely uncool. But a lack of judgment is what
(26:35):
children have. Don't treat them like adults. They're not Rvy Weinstein, right.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
They use an example of one high school near Seattle,
but police detectives started investigating fourteen and fifteen year old
boys who had been showing the pictures around and then
grabbing their computers from home and all these different sorts
of things.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
First of all, once.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
This is exploded, and it may have all read I mean,
by the time adults are reading about it in the
New York Times, it's probably so prevalent all over the place.
What are you going to have law enforcement going into
homes and grabbing computers in every town in America over this?
It just seems unrealistic.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
The phenomenon is trading them as if they're child pornographers.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
They're not. There's something fundamentally different.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
The phenomenon has come on very suddenly and maybe catching
a lot of school districts unprepared and unsure what to do. Well,
you can try to get prepared, but I don't know
what it would be, And yeah, there's nothing you can do.
It's like you've said before, And I think you're absolutely right.
People are just going to get used to it and
ignore it, and then I think a lot of the
(27:42):
excitement will go away.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
I think, yeah, you can certainly have regulations within a
school saying, you know, you're not allowed to trade or
view or whatever nude images on school grounds or it's
part of the student code of conduct, but it's got
to be dealt with societally as opposed to through law enforcement.
You know, sixteen year olds giggling over a picture of
(28:05):
a classmate attached to a nude body. Essentially, it's rude,
it's uncool. I get how it hurts the girls, but
we've got to get past it somehow, and like draconian
prison sentences for children is not the way to go.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
Well, I'm not for it, but is it going to
hurt the girls eventually?
Speaker 2 (28:19):
I mean when everybody's doing it with everyone, I mean
the pictures, making the pictures with everyone. Yeah, just okay,
so you got eighteen different fake pictures of the Jenny naked.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
Okay, who cares? It's not real? Right exactly?
Speaker 4 (28:34):
The appeal will go away and the revulsion will go
away to a large extent.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
I think it'll be like you're an idiot. But it's
so effortless from what I understand.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
So all you've got to do is have ap picture
of any classmate and with the neuification app just tell
you know, make your naked ride a horse and there
you got it.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
That's how hard it was.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
This is half a tangent, but got this note from
Marina and San Diego talking about some of your comments,
and then are subsequent follow up on therapy. Really appreciate
the point made about ruminating on the problem. That's never good.
But isn't that what the Dei folks are doing rather
than finding solutions that work that Joe often points out
I try like better education, early childhood, more business mentorship programs.
(29:20):
They harp on the past, which cannot be changed. No
amount of money can erase the stain. They want to
focus on the trauma rather than take steps to heal.
Shortening this up a little bit, but yeah, and that
is one of my major major gripes with whether it's
the Dei stuff, which is neo Marxism anyway, and so
they have every interest in really really throwing fuel on
(29:42):
the fire of grievance as opposed to a solution. But
even like the Me Too movement, a lot of these
modern movements that identify victims and try to get changes
because the victims have been so victimized to exactly what
Jonathan Heighte again and Greg luke Yanoff wrote about in
previous books, and that is that they fixate on the
(30:06):
trauma and they roll it over and over and over again,
and they catastrophize everything to the point of saying a
microaggression is violence and you should treat it like violence,
and the person who the person who is mildly insulted
by somebody who's mildly and sensitive should fall to their
knees weeping.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
Otherwise, you've let the racist patriarchy get away with their sins.
Speaker 4 (30:30):
So they've encouraged catastrophizing the smallest of the slings and
arrows we all deal with in life. And that's, you know,
with all due respect to the humiliation right now of
a teenage girl who all of a sudden there are
pictures kicking around that appear to be of her nude,
I do not minimize that at all. Let's not catastrophize it,
(30:53):
because that's the tendency in modern society, and I don't
think it's healthy.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Especially since there's no stopping it. Right to come to
a way to accept it?
Speaker 4 (31:02):
Yeah, I say, you know, obviously this is is oversimplified,
but hey, this is a talk radio show. We need
a hell of a lot more of you must be
I'm sorry, we need a hell of a lot less
of you must be devastated, and a whole hell of
a lot more of.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
You're gonna be fine. You're strong, you can deal with this.
I'll help you.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
You go to a therapist. Every therapist, not everybody. Eighty
percent of the therapists are gonna tell you your parents were narcissists,
or your ex wife or ex husband was a narcissist,
or your boss is a narcisst. They're gonna tell you
all that's just what they tell you. And you're say,
that's a funny coincidence. I'm a narcissist and you're a
victim of whatever, and just you know, all right, strong.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty the Armstrong and Getty Show.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
So a couple of stories from the world of merit.
Speaker 4 (31:58):
You want to Number one, cheating on the workplace drug
tests has reached an all time high for folks at
Quest Diagnostics.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
Work quite drug tests. They're still drug testing for marijuana.
Speaker 4 (32:11):
Yeah, even though it's legal, and that's all over the place, right,
and the imperfections on all right, are you stoned now
or were you stoned last night?
Speaker 3 (32:20):
Or oh right, you're saying your system for long term? Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
which is one of the other articles we're gonna get to.
Speaker 4 (32:29):
But yeah, people using synthetic urine, other people's urine or
urine that's been treated with drug masking agents.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
But I guess the labs are getting better at better.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
I gotta start selling my urine perfectly drug and alcohol
free urine. You're gonna test positive for donuts, but I
don't think that'll keep you out of work.
Speaker 4 (32:48):
Oh, your urine is like a NAPA cab. I mean
it's the finest charge, one hundred and twenty five bucks
a bottle. Big piece in the Wall Street Journal. What
you aren't hearing about marijuana's health effects. There's more and
more science linking it to psychiatric disorders, permanent brain damage,
and other serious harms. Part of the reason is you
think of the brain as gray matter, right, there's also
(33:10):
white matter. Fat fat insulates your brain. Mine in particular,
I got a fat head. But the TCHC lodges in
that fat and gets released over time into your brain,
and they just we are at the very beginning of
understanding what the strong new mind eracing pot does to
young brains especially.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
I think we may look back on this time.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
There was the way we treat our young people as saying,
oh my god, we were letting kids smoke that powerful
a psychoactive drug.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
Well, this has bothered me for a long time. There
have been some good op eds in the New York
Times about this. We got so enthused with the momentum
of the hippie generation to not treat marijuana like heroin,
which I understand why you shouldn't treat marijuana like heroin,
but it was just all positive. This was fantastic. Everybody
(34:01):
should do it momentum there for so long that you know,
alcohol is not even that way, and everybody shouldn't do it,
and certainly not to excess, and certainly not when you're young. Yeah,
they're talking about this big study. It's Mass General Brigham
McLain hospital. He has had enough names for you hospital anyway.
The addiction potential in marijuana is higher, higher than many
(34:22):
other drugs, especially for young people. About thirty percent of
those who use cannabis have some degree of use disorder.
By comparison, only about thirteen and a half percent of
drinkers are estimated to be dependent on alcohol. Anybody who
tells you marijuana is non addictive as a liar.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
What that's interesting that you say that what percentage.
Speaker 4 (34:38):
Of about thirty percent for cannabis have some degree of
a use disorder? Now that might be you know, I'm
in the habit I smoke it when I probably shouldn't,
or it might be hardcore addiction and psychotic problems.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
So that's a broad range, but that's a lot.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
That's interesting that you say that, because that's always been
the talking point is that it's non addictive.
Speaker 4 (35:00):
It's it's addictive in kind of a different way than
other drugs are. There's huge psychological addiction prime I've.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Known a couple of people like that. I mean, they
were clearly addicted.
Speaker 4 (35:10):
But yeah, yeah, anyway, And this is as always, this
is not some sort of high and mighty kids these
days with their refair. No, I just I don't want
kids to do things that are terrible for the brains
and hurt themselves for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
I've known drug casualties. I know you have too. It's sad,
it's not funny.
Speaker 4 (35:28):
They will never be right, they will never have happy,
productive lives because their brains are messed up. The idea
that hey, I'm gonna mess with my brain chemistry, then
it'll go.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
Back to normal no matter how many times I mess
with it, well, and that doesn't work that way.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
And the pot one is it's different than like the
hard drug casualty, and that I've known a few people
that just they just don't get off their couch and
do anything. Yeah, I mean that's its own kind of
sad life.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (35:56):
So anyway, not here to lecture you, just to make
good decisions, you know, honest with yourself about what you're
doing and how you're doing it.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
I certainly try Armstrong and Getty
From the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio and the George Washington
Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty Armstrong and Getty Show.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
So I've got some interesting stuff here, kind of on taxes, capitalism, socialism,
possible revolution coming our way.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
I was up lately, Wait a minute, that last one.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
I was having trouble sleeping last night, so I went
to one of my favorite Reddit threads, which is anti work.
It's got millions of followers. We've talked about it over
the years. It's unintentionally hilarious the millions of people who
don't believe in work.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
I'll talk more about that in a second, but first
this tax thing. This is a guy who wrote a
piece about taxes.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
I had never heard this before and explained something that
I've wondered about for a long long time.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
His name is Brian Mitrovic.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
With his explanation of the convoluted taxation system that made
the nineteen fifties materialism possible, we continue to hear a
drum beat for higher tax rates, in particular on high
earners and corporations, on the grounds that we used to
have higher rates and we did just fine. An essential
aspect of the fiscal structure of post World War II
(01:26):
prosperity was the high tax rates. And you hear about
that if you're anti if you want to bring the
tax rates down, you hear about all time.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Well you used to have a tax rate much higher
than this. Blah blah blah blah blah. I've always been
kind of ouch.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
You know, I don't have an argument against that. But
that doesn't see, it doesn't fit right somehow, Well it doesn't.
Here's why the federal government objectly declined to collect taxes
at posted rates because of the deduction culture. High tax
rates existed as a holdover of Herbert Hoover FDR and
World War Two. But the public, especially it's rising and
affluent and members, made clear it was not going to
(02:01):
comport with them, and the government obliged and did not
enforce the rates and instead offered massive suites of legal
tax avoidance opportunities.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Everybody went along with this.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
We did not get this halcyon days while in any
material way having.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
High tax rates.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
We got this while not enforcing high tax rates due
to high deductions any of the stuff. Because when I
was young and started paying tax rates, there was all
this tuxa talk about deduct this, deduct that, and I
never could whenever i'd look into it. That was the
older generation who grew up at a time where you could
deduct all this different stuff, And that's what explains those
(02:40):
high tax rates from back today. You could deduct all
kinds of stuff. The car you drove is a business expenseer.
Just all these different things that went away and we
don't have anymore with the current high tax rates.
Speaker 4 (02:52):
Just like this so called rack rate that you sometimes
see on the door of your hotel room that nobody
ever pays. It's a legal maximum, or like the actual
tuition at your state university. Only Chinese nationals actually pay that. Yeah,
nobody paid those rates.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
Right, so I did.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
And that also explains why my whole life, especially from
older people, is always but you got to do that,
And I think I've looked into that. They say no,
and I always had, ama chump, Do I have a
bad tax attorney?
Speaker 4 (03:19):
What? No?
Speaker 2 (03:20):
That was just a previous era where the government is
all about all these different deductions for people to figure
out how to get out of that high tax rate.
Speaker 3 (03:28):
That explains a lot to me.
Speaker 4 (03:30):
The word chump is underappreciated in the modern day. In
my opinion, you'd go fine and non obscene insult.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Yeah, you don't want to be one?
Speaker 4 (03:40):
No, So I believe a couple of months ago I
was advocating for both Chump and Sucker to reappear on
the scene.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
So do I have time here? Yeah? I got a
little time for sure.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
So the anti work reddit thread, which we've talked about before,
has several million people on it. And here's the description
of what it is. It's a subreddit for those who
want to end work. Okay, let's stop right there. The
hell does that mean?
Speaker 3 (04:07):
I love that? What the hell does that mean?
Speaker 2 (04:10):
There are millions of people following a subreddit that's premises
we want to end work.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
Anyway, I'm gonna start a Twitter thread that advocates for.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
The end of aches and pains, good luck, or the
inability of people to fly with by flapping their arms.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Yeah. Oh, I had, like for the second or third
time in my life, a dream where I could fly
the other night.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Oh, I used to have those all times, I really had.
They're awesome all there. So did you have really good control?
I was always a little out of control in a
little wall. Did you have good control while you were
flying around.
Speaker 3 (04:46):
No, it was funny.
Speaker 4 (04:47):
I had concern because I thought that I'm not sure
I get the aerodynamics of this, but it seems to
be going pretty well, and I don't need I don't
want to stall out over this river. But it wasn't
like fear. It was just let's see, if I have
to ditch, I'll ditch over there. But then I came
in for a nice soft landing.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
Wow, I don't think I've had a pleasant dream in
thirty years. Really yeah, Wow, that can't be good, right.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
No, So anyway, I need to crack your head open
try to figure out what's going on.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
Anti work.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
It's a subredit for those who want to end work,
are curious about ending work, want to get the most
out of a work free life, want more information on
anti work ideas, and want personal help with their own
jobs work related struggles. And people bitch about their jobs
and what they're getting paid. And then the comments are
just priceless from all these people who think this is
a thing. But anyway, so here's just one of the
(05:42):
posts and the reactions that I was reading last night.
I'm doing ten times more work at the office than
people in the nineteen eighties. Why in the hell do
I still have to work forty plus hours a week.
Here's the explanation. With computers and emails and Xcel and
word and PDF and Adobe and snipping tool, etc. I'm
doing about ten times or work at the office than
people before computers. If you need a report, instead of
(06:03):
going to the archives searching for numbers, blah blah blah,
I can do it in like twenty minutes with emails
and teams messages.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
I can spam thousands of people with information.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
But instead of working less, I worked the same hours
as people forty years ago, despite getting ten times more
work done.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
We are being exploited.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Either we should be working one tenth the hours or
a page should be ten times higher.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
I have a hilarious argument.
Speaker 4 (06:27):
Wow, I would actually enjoy engaging with this person because
the explanation's pretty ABC one two three, it's easy to understand.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
But right on, well, I'd like to just adopt his
argument and going onto you know, just say hey, back
when they had to do this with a horse, it
would have taken a week. I did it like fifteen minutes.
So either I need to get off work now or
get paid nine hundred times more.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Uh. And then so here's some of the responses.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
And then they have the audacity to tell us that
we're not working enough and have no work ethic. Hey,
mister delusional rich guy, I'm doing ten times amount of
work for nearly the same pay as forty people forty
years ago.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
It's not a wonder. I don't want to work that much.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
And then another response, have you seen the costs involved
in being a rich guy lately? Imagine staying in the
Barcelona Harbor on your thirty million dollar yacht, feeling like
a peasant while the real olive arts casually discuss whether
to buy another island or travel to space.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Wow, this is like a trip to the zoo. I'm
fascinated by these beasts.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Correct, we still spend way too much time in corporate office?
Is enough time and not enough time at homer or
enriching our lives. If you do the slightest amount of research,
you'll find you have way more free time than your parents'
grandparents than their parents did by far, because it doesn't
take you. For instance, speaking of being able to do
more work faster, it doesn't take you seven hours to
do laundry, for instance.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
Yeah, sure, yeah, here's one.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
They haven't shortened it because from the employer's point of view,
why should they. You want to not start to death
or freeze in the streets. Here's what I'm offering. Don't
like it, just dive in essentially, Yeah, thank you. There's
somebody who at least grasps it partly and then and
then tons of these no matter what the topic is
on the anti work is because you haven't organized with
(08:16):
your peers to overthrow the system that exploits you. Yet
they get into capitalism a lot that this is how
they always keep socialism for flourishing the way it should
and lots of revolution. We need a revolution, we need
a revolution, We need a revolution. Who's with me? It's
gonna happen. I'll bet you within ten years. I'll bet
you within five years. I don't know what Briton. This
(08:36):
is all anecdotal, but there are millions of followers on
this thread. It's it's nonsensical in its premise for people
who don't want to have to work. And what percentage
of people think a revolution needs to happen because are
our awful capitalist system?
Speaker 3 (08:52):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (08:52):
And the notion well that I mean we could spend
the next three and a half hours exploding that notion.
But as the free market to capitalism has brought wealth, health,
and longevity to the entire human population, unevenly, certainly.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
But I mean the.
Speaker 4 (09:08):
Idea that greater productivity is somehow a theft from you
is really a head scratcher for me.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Here's one more on like it.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
You go ahead, Your boss can skim ten times the
value out of you. Back in the eighties, boss man
needed to exploit ten people to get his new Porsche.
Now he gets that out of just you, and a
mansion out of the other nine. All of these bosses
have yachts and Porsches and mand islands in islands.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
Yes, Jesus probably would have killed you himself. Yep, I
hear you.
Speaker 4 (09:39):
Wow Wow that Gallagan, Uh wow, that is something. I mean,
I knew that those people still existed, but who don't
get how markets work at all. And again, the idea that, Okay,
I'm going to show up for eight hours a day,
you got a new machine that makes me more productive, Well,
(10:00):
that old level of productivity was obviously God's own level
of productivity, and anything in excess of that is it
left from me.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
I mean it's alert.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Well, now we have that taken care of by a machine.
Now I need to hire somebody to do this. Would
you like to do this for this amount of money
as opposed to that for that amount of money.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
You either do or you don't.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
So when AI comes along and you just show up
for one minute a day to hit the start button,
as if you know that'd be necessary, you need you
deserve a full salary because that's the same productivity as
the nineteen eighties, where you know, forgive me as a
gray headed gentleman. I worked in the nineteen eighties and
(10:42):
we worked plenty hard.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Yeah, that was kind of funny, as I am old
enough to know some of the errors that they're talking about.
I was working myself and it wasn't quite what you
were picturing.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Yeah, yeah, I just I'm sorry. I just find that
so cute. I know, well, yeah, I find it troubling.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Yeah, all the revolution stuff, and I'll read I can
read some more that later on different topics that came up,
But all the revolution stuff is highly troubling. And again
I don't know if that's a half a one percent
of people, you know, because this is a big country.
You can have several million people on one following and
it's still if that's all there is.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
But I don't know.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
And I fitted in with the tax rates because I
think a lot of that, you know, yachts islands, porsches talk,
is what allows taxes to be what they are because
of that ridiculousness going on.
Speaker 3 (11:26):
You know, I keep threatening to write a book. I
might write a book on.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
The the effect the Internet has had on.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
Fertilizing stupidity in.
Speaker 4 (11:39):
That obviously, and we've discussed this on many occasions. You
can have a truly idiotic idea and you kick around
your town bringing up your truly idiotic idea, like some
of those we just heard, for instance, and people.
Speaker 3 (11:50):
Will say, no, Joe, you can't. That's not how it works.
Speaker 4 (11:52):
It's the productivity blah blah blah, the free market blah
blah blah. Oh all right, I'm either talked out of
it or just realized nobody agrees with my student idea.
But now with the Internet, I can find ten thousand
a million people, maybe ten million worldwide, which is a
vanishingly small number of people, but who agree with my stupid,
stupid idea.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
And I start to think my idea is not stupid.
It's a good idea. Look at all these people who
agree with me, right, and we've got to take a break.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
But a lot of the posts that were just nonsensical
between the way they were written in the vocabulary. People
are clearly educated and not bilm So they got this
at college or something. And then I remembered I've got this.
I'll get to more later. Only a third of people
in this poll say, or a third of people in
(12:39):
this poll say they learned nothing at all about finances
in school, sing yeah, well, that's how you end up
with these conversations. I guess what a bunch of numbskulls
arm shrong.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
The Armstrong seven.
Speaker 4 (13:18):
Are you hip to Saudi Arabia's GNEM project? I think
that's how you pronounce it. It's a MSB's insane development
that's going to turn Saudi Arabia not into an oil
desert shake them, but like a modern twenty second century
(13:42):
hub of all sorts of stuff. His idea is a skyscraper,
and I can't remember how high is it supposed to be.
It's taller than the Empire State Building, and it's going
to be one hundred and five miles wide, taller.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Than the Empire State Building, but one hundred and five
miles wide or one hundred and five miles long, if
you would like to describe it like that.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
It's going to house nine million people.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
It's what it's known as the Line, and it's the
flagship of this unimaginably ambitious know him project.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
So I know he's big on as a guy who's
in his early thirties, he's big on the the US
being rich because oil ain't gonna last forever.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
Have you heard of electric cars?
Speaker 2 (14:31):
We got to come up with a new way to
be you know something, or we're going to we're doomed.
So that's pretty smart right right now.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
The first phase by twenty thirty, was supposed to be
ten miles of this Empire State Building.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
How do you get your wall of China thingy? How
do you get your camel in the elevator? Oh? Unfortunate.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
But now they're realizing that the country is spending far
more than it's taking in costs of explode did because
building costs are up like forty percent globally, and so
now they're just gonna build one point five miles of
the structure by twenty thirty, which is I mean, that's,
you know, a sixth of what they were talking about.
Speaker 3 (15:13):
But wait a minute.
Speaker 4 (15:15):
You got a skyscraper a mile and a half long,
and that's the scaled back not as ambitious.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Excuse me, first step. Joe brought us the story last
week of the snowfer.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
That's right. It's not a sneaker, it's not a loafer.
It's a snowfer.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Yeah, I'm looking at the picture of it. I hadn't
seen a picture of it. It's coming out in the spring.
It's from New Balance. I think it's a particularly ugly shoe,
but we'll see if it catches on. It's the foot
The Wall Street Journal did a review of this. It's
the footwear equivalent of a spork, and no one knows
what to make of it. Like the Liger combination lion tiger,
that's right, Napoleon Dynamite's favorite animal.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
It's probably my favorite animal.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Like the Liger, the cronut and the true before it.
What's a cronut is a croissant and a donut. But
what's a chortle?
Speaker 3 (16:05):
A sure anybody know what that is?
Speaker 2 (16:08):
No, this shoe is a confounding hybrid released in August.
Speaker 4 (16:14):
I think it's ugliness is going to be part of
its ironic appeal.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
Why do we need a sneaker loafer combo.
Speaker 4 (16:21):
So you can step out of church and mow your
lawn in the same footwear?
Speaker 3 (16:28):
Yeah, it really is. I don't know, yes, Katie Green. Look,
what can you tell us about the chortle?
Speaker 2 (16:32):
The chortle is the cross between a chuckle and a snort. Well, okay,
so it is actually the the laugh. Oh okay kind
of laugh. But that's way different than liger or cronut.
I would not have included that it's a distraction.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
No bad journalism.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Uh, how's America doing? The Pentagon wanted to find out.
They paid a think tank to come up with the answer.
We've got that for you, coming up from the Rain Corporation,
and it's it's. First of all, you're not going to
disagree with any of their conclusions exactly, it ain't good.
Can we just whistle past the graveyard please and pretend
(17:11):
everything's fine? That might be the best way to approach it.
That might be the best way to That might be
my new attitude on life. What's you know not I
can do about it? Give up is that giving up.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
I don't know. It's a lot like giving the Armstrong
and Getty show.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
Yeah, your show podcasts and our Hot Lakes and the
arm Strong and Getty Show.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Toyota has a new patent for a new technology that
would allow drivers.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
To freely change the color of their car.
Speaker 4 (17:54):
It's great if you and your family love wandering the
airport parking lot for days.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
So what, you can change the color of your car. Yeah,
there are a couple of different things happening here. The
one Toyota's working on is the less interesting to me.
It's essentially the the coating on the car is affected
by heat and light. So you can go to a
facility and go through this weird tunnel the car can
(18:21):
and and they will manipulate the heat and light in
a way that makes well, that's pretty cool. So much faster,
I'm assuming cheaper than like a rap like I did.
Oh yeah, or getting it repainted or don't have paints anymore.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
It's wraps. All about the wraps. That's excellent, I do
not doubt it. So that's one thing.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
But BMW at the latest Consumer Electronics Show, I'm sorry
it was actually two years ago, unveiled the the BMW
i X Flow featuring e Ink a little lengthy if
you ask me, But it's capable of changing the color
of the car at the click of a button. It's
it's so super high tech and cool. But you can
(19:02):
not only change your car from black to white and
back again, but it has flow mode where it like
has it's you know, to ten, twenty percent of the
car is black, the twenty percent is white, twenty percent
is black, twenty percent of white around that and it flows.
The color flows around the car in motion. Well yeah, yeah,
(19:22):
you can't have bunches of cars with animated crap roll
on because people are wreck all the time.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
Oh that's a cool car crash. Okay, Well, I don't know.
That's a horrible idea. What about car theft? Somebody steals
a blue car, they change the color and lays red.
Speaker 4 (19:41):
All right, yeah the coppers. As if the cops look
for stolen cars, yeah, they'd be looking for the wrong color.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
This.
Speaker 4 (19:48):
There's a great article with some embedded video about this
under yesterday's hot links at Armstrong and geddy dot com.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Interesting.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
I wonder if that's just the future and a lot
of your a lot of cars you just you know,
whatever mood you're in her and to match your outfit,
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (20:09):
I suspect pretty strongly that will be possible. Yeah, awesome,
or patterns maybe fourth of July you have a red
way right right right right, Christmas time you go red
and green.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
Yeah, that sort of thing.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
To throw on a little camo for Veterans Day or
something like that, to tip your cap to our veterans.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
Speaking of the wonderful technological future that can only be good.
More technology, smarter computers can only be good. Ian Bremer,
friend of the Armstrong and Getty Show, is featured on
a PBS special that I think airs tonight that I
would like to watch, called A Brief History of the Future. Anyway,
(20:47):
he's featured on there talking about AI, and here's one
of the quotes from it. We are now at the
beginning of a new globalization in ways that even a
year ago, never mind twenty, seemed inconceivable.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
The fact that globalization through.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
AI is going to happen in a way that was
inconceivable a year ago. I don't even know where to
start with that, so I won't. I will just leave
that alone and recognize I'm not prepared for the future. Yeah,
I've got this piece I read I was talking about
briefly yesterday. I guess it was Jamie Diamond and Elon
Musk both given their opinions on what AI is going
(21:22):
to do, and they both have a very very cautious view,
a concerned view of what's probably.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
Coming down the road. And then they quoted a computer
expert who is much less worried about it. But the
problem with his quote, and I don't have it in front.
Speaker 2 (21:35):
Of me, but did he work in is Google or
Microsoft or any of the other companies that are spending
billions of dollars to get this going.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
He may well be involved in some level. I thought
he was an academic. But what he said was essentially,
I don't really see anything coming in the near future
that I'm concerned about. But if you're in the business,
you've got to understand that's the whole point of this thing.
Nobody knows what it's going to look like. Like I was
about to say a year, never mind that in a month.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
God, I think the chances that it's a big nothing
burger are almost zero.
Speaker 4 (22:09):
Well, part of his contention, maybe I had to just
dig up the article, is that it's so glitchy and
prone to making mistakes and so mockably inaccurate. At this point,
people are going to trust it at this point, but.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
For a long time. Two months.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
If Bean Bremner, who does this for a living and
he tries to stay on the cutting edge of everything,
says things are happening that were unimaginable a year ago,
well then you have no idea where we're going to
be a year from now. Anyway, moving on from that,
we knew this was going to happen, But all school
districts are grappling with the challenges and impact of AI
in a couple of different ways. So it started last
(22:47):
year by the sudden popularity of chatbots, chat GPT and
all that sort of stuff. We're schools all across the
United States. We're scrambling to try to figure out how
to contain text generating bots cheating papers that the kids
didn't write. And nobody's gotten their arms around this yet, obviously,
and there may never, may never.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
There just may be.
Speaker 2 (23:07):
No way to stop my kid from saying, hey, chat bot,
write me a paper about the Battle of Gettysburg that
sounds like a sophomore and it does. Yeah, then you
turn it in and there might not be any stopping that.
In fact, I don't think there probably is any stopping that.
But now onto the more alarming thing for now, which
(23:28):
we all knew is coming. AI image generating phenomenon is
shaking schools all across the country, and it's happening at
the same time in all kinds of districts.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
We had a local story here, but it's happening all
over the place.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Boys in several states have used widely available, widely available
neutification apps.
Speaker 3 (23:45):
I like the fact that that's the name of the appttles.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
You let you know right there what it is, right,
neuification apps to pervert real identifiable photos of their clothed
female classmates shown attending events like school proms, into graphic,
convincing looking images of girls. Well, this is one of
my favorite lines from the article. Convincing looking images of
girls with exposed breasts and genitalia.
Speaker 3 (24:08):
Oh you mean naked?
Speaker 2 (24:10):
Oh? Thanks than body parts that would be included in
the nudity.
Speaker 4 (24:16):
For those unfamiliar with the genre, right, oh nude. In
some cases, boys shared the faked images in the school
lunch room, on the school bus, or through group chats.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
Thanks once again for mentioning the lunch room and the.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Bust oh right, different places that where school boys might interact.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
Yes, boy, that is some good writing.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
So first you had to describe to me what nude means,
and then you had to give me a little primer
on where kids hang out in school.
Speaker 4 (24:49):
Settings, students who are described as looking at the images
with their eyes and then talking about them with their mouths.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
Right, But getting away from the hilarity of the writing,
this has exploded at schools all across the country at
the same time. So they haven't even wrapped their heads
around how they're gonna do with cheating and well, a
number of things I've read is papers are just gonna
have to go away. There's gonna have to be a
lot of oral tests to figure out if you if
(25:20):
you know things or do it college style.
Speaker 4 (25:22):
You you got to do me three pages, you have
an hour do it sit down? Right?
Speaker 2 (25:27):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, that kind of test in Yeah, yeah,
almost guaranteed.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
That's what's going to have to be.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
I can't imagine any way around it, which might be
fantastic from a learning standpoint, but so they don't know
how to get their arms around this and this. I
just don't think you can. I think this is just
like the papers. There's no getting around it.
Speaker 4 (25:51):
Yeah, and I have a bunch of stuff including we're
going to feature some of the brand new Jonathan hype
book The Anxious Generation, and it's getting so much attention
next hour, but a bunch of different issues affecting kids,
whether it's the AI nude stuff or what have you.
And I'm just afraid there are going to be adults
(26:14):
who see the the gravity of the issue, and it
is very, very significant, but they're going to like try
to ruin the lives of thirteen year old boys who
behave exactly like thirteen year old boys always have behaved
and always will behave. Is it uncool that they're doing this?
It's extremely uncool. But a lack of judgment is what
(26:35):
children have. Don't treat them like adults. They're not Rvy Weinstein, right.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
They use an example of one high school near Seattle,
but police detectives started investigating fourteen and fifteen year old
boys who had been showing the pictures around and then
grabbing their computers from home and all these different sorts
of things.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
First of all, once.
Speaker 2 (26:57):
This is exploded, and it may have all read I mean,
by the time adults are reading about it in the
New York Times, it's probably so prevalent all over the place.
What are you going to have law enforcement going into
homes and grabbing computers in every town in America over this?
It just seems unrealistic.
Speaker 4 (27:16):
The phenomenon is trading them as if they're child pornographers.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
They're not. There's something fundamentally different.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
The phenomenon has come on very suddenly and maybe catching
a lot of school districts unprepared and unsure what to do. Well,
you can try to get prepared, but I don't know
what it would be, And yeah, there's nothing you can do.
It's like you've said before, And I think you're absolutely right.
People are just going to get used to it and
ignore it, and then I think a lot of the
(27:42):
excitement will go away.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
I think, yeah, you can certainly have regulations within a
school saying, you know, you're not allowed to trade or
view or whatever nude images on school grounds or it's
part of the student code of conduct, but it's got
to be dealt with societally as opposed to through law enforcement.
You know, sixteen year olds giggling over a picture of
(28:05):
a classmate attached to a nude body. Essentially, it's rude,
it's uncool. I get how it hurts the girls, but
we've got to get past it somehow, and like draconian
prison sentences for children is not the way to go.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
Well, I'm not for it, but is it going to
hurt the girls eventually?
Speaker 2 (28:19):
I mean when everybody's doing it with everyone, I mean
the pictures, making the pictures with everyone. Yeah, just okay,
so you got eighteen different fake pictures of the Jenny naked.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
Okay, who cares? It's not real? Right exactly?
Speaker 4 (28:34):
The appeal will go away and the revulsion will go
away to a large extent.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
I think it'll be like you're an idiot. But it's
so effortless from what I understand.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
So all you've got to do is have ap picture
of any classmate and with the neuification app just tell
you know, make your naked ride a horse and there
you got it.
Speaker 3 (28:55):
That's how hard it was.
Speaker 4 (28:57):
This is half a tangent, but got this note from
Marina and San Diego talking about some of your comments,
and then are subsequent follow up on therapy. Really appreciate
the point made about ruminating on the problem. That's never good.
But isn't that what the Dei folks are doing rather
than finding solutions that work that Joe often points out
I try like better education, early childhood, more business mentorship programs.
(29:20):
They harp on the past, which cannot be changed. No
amount of money can erase the stain. They want to
focus on the trauma rather than take steps to heal.
Shortening this up a little bit, but yeah, and that
is one of my major major gripes with whether it's
the Dei stuff, which is neo Marxism anyway, and so
they have every interest in really really throwing fuel on
(29:42):
the fire of grievance as opposed to a solution. But
even like the Me Too movement, a lot of these
modern movements that identify victims and try to get changes
because the victims have been so victimized to exactly what
Jonathan Heighte again and Greg luke Yanoff wrote about in
previous books, and that is that they fixate on the
(30:06):
trauma and they roll it over and over and over again,
and they catastrophize everything to the point of saying a
microaggression is violence and you should treat it like violence,
and the person who the person who is mildly insulted
by somebody who's mildly and sensitive should fall to their
knees weeping.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
Otherwise, you've let the racist patriarchy get away with their sins.
Speaker 4 (30:30):
So they've encouraged catastrophizing the smallest of the slings and
arrows we all deal with in life. And that's, you know,
with all due respect to the humiliation right now of
a teenage girl who all of a sudden there are
pictures kicking around that appear to be of her nude,
I do not minimize that at all. Let's not catastrophize it,
(30:53):
because that's the tendency in modern society, and I don't
think it's healthy.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Especially since there's no stopping it. Right to come to
a way to accept it?
Speaker 4 (31:02):
Yeah, I say, you know, obviously this is is oversimplified,
but hey, this is a talk radio show. We need
a hell of a lot more of you must be
I'm sorry, we need a hell of a lot less
of you must be devastated, and a whole hell of
a lot more of.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
You're gonna be fine. You're strong, you can deal with this.
I'll help you.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
You go to a therapist. Every therapist, not everybody. Eighty
percent of the therapists are gonna tell you your parents were narcissists,
or your ex wife or ex husband was a narcissist,
or your boss is a narcisst. They're gonna tell you
all that's just what they tell you. And you're say,
that's a funny coincidence. I'm a narcissist and you're a
victim of whatever, and just you know, all right, strong.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty the Armstrong and Getty Show.
Speaker 3 (31:55):
So a couple of stories from the world of merit.
Speaker 4 (31:58):
You want to Number one, cheating on the workplace drug
tests has reached an all time high for folks at
Quest Diagnostics.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
Work quite drug tests. They're still drug testing for marijuana.
Speaker 4 (32:11):
Yeah, even though it's legal, and that's all over the place, right,
and the imperfections on all right, are you stoned now
or were you stoned last night?
Speaker 3 (32:20):
Or oh right, you're saying your system for long term? Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
which is one of the other articles we're gonna get to.
Speaker 4 (32:29):
But yeah, people using synthetic urine, other people's urine or
urine that's been treated with drug masking agents.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
But I guess the labs are getting better at better.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
I gotta start selling my urine perfectly drug and alcohol
free urine. You're gonna test positive for donuts, but I
don't think that'll keep you out of work.
Speaker 4 (32:48):
Oh, your urine is like a NAPA cab. I mean
it's the finest charge, one hundred and twenty five bucks
a bottle. Big piece in the Wall Street Journal. What
you aren't hearing about marijuana's health effects. There's more and
more science linking it to psychiatric disorders, permanent brain damage,
and other serious harms. Part of the reason is you
think of the brain as gray matter, right, there's also
(33:10):
white matter. Fat fat insulates your brain. Mine in particular,
I got a fat head. But the TCHC lodges in
that fat and gets released over time into your brain,
and they just we are at the very beginning of
understanding what the strong new mind eracing pot does to
young brains especially.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
I think we may look back on this time.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
There was the way we treat our young people as saying,
oh my god, we were letting kids smoke that powerful
a psychoactive drug.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
Well, this has bothered me for a long time. There
have been some good op eds in the New York
Times about this. We got so enthused with the momentum
of the hippie generation to not treat marijuana like heroin,
which I understand why you shouldn't treat marijuana like heroin,
but it was just all positive. This was fantastic. Everybody
(34:01):
should do it momentum there for so long that you know,
alcohol is not even that way, and everybody shouldn't do it,
and certainly not to excess, and certainly not when you're young. Yeah,
they're talking about this big study. It's Mass General Brigham
McLain hospital. He has had enough names for you hospital anyway.
The addiction potential in marijuana is higher, higher than many
(34:22):
other drugs, especially for young people. About thirty percent of
those who use cannabis have some degree of use disorder.
By comparison, only about thirteen and a half percent of
drinkers are estimated to be dependent on alcohol. Anybody who
tells you marijuana is non addictive as a liar.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
What that's interesting that you say that what percentage.
Speaker 4 (34:38):
Of about thirty percent for cannabis have some degree of
a use disorder? Now that might be you know, I'm
in the habit I smoke it when I probably shouldn't,
or it might be hardcore addiction and psychotic problems.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
So that's a broad range, but that's a lot.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
That's interesting that you say that, because that's always been
the talking point is that it's non addictive.
Speaker 4 (35:00):
It's it's addictive in kind of a different way than
other drugs are. There's huge psychological addiction prime I've.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Known a couple of people like that. I mean, they
were clearly addicted.
Speaker 4 (35:10):
But yeah, yeah, anyway, And this is as always, this
is not some sort of high and mighty kids these
days with their refair. No, I just I don't want
kids to do things that are terrible for the brains
and hurt themselves for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
I've known drug casualties. I know you have too. It's sad,
it's not funny.
Speaker 4 (35:28):
They will never be right, they will never have happy,
productive lives because their brains are messed up. The idea
that hey, I'm gonna mess with my brain chemistry, then
it'll go.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
Back to normal no matter how many times I mess
with it, well, and that doesn't work that way.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
And the pot one is it's different than like the
hard drug casualty, and that I've known a few people
that just they just don't get off their couch and
do anything. Yeah, I mean that's its own kind of
sad life.
Speaker 3 (35:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (35:56):
So anyway, not here to lecture you, just to make
good decisions, you know, honest with yourself about what you're
doing and how you're doing it.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
I certainly try Armstrong and Getty
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