August 10, 2022 • 37 mins
Hour 4 of Wednesday's A&G: A sophisticated political discussion, and chicken fornication? The biggest funeral battle royal you've ever heard of. How do you tell your kids that you can't afford things? All this and more.
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
From the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio at the George Washington
Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong and Shoe Getty Armstrong and Jetty show,
I'm watching lates. Let's make a deal. It's on the
TV in the studio. Let's make a deal with Wayne Brady.
And uh, they just they just revealed the package for
(00:32):
this woman. And she's like a forty two year old mom,
you know type of person, and uh, and she's there
and they revealed the package and it's it's a Katim
super Duke, which got my eye just because that's the
motorcycle I ride. But so they show her this super
fast sport bike as her package, and you can, you
can tell me to look on her face, like, what
(00:52):
the hell would I do with that? Sell it? What
the hell am I gonna do with that? Do I
look like somebody who was going to ride that motorcycle?
Coming up? I need to talk about the funeral gone
bad actually happens to be near where I live, but
it's entertaining no matter where it happened. That included a
(01:13):
fight among the family members and the persons falling out
of the casket. So oh, quite quite the little DeLeo.
I also wanted to talk about mister Beast, who I've
just become aware of him the last a couple of days.
My kids have been watching mister Beast forever. He's one
of the top YouTubers in the world, which, if you
know anything about the numbers of YouTube, makes him one
of the top. You could call him a TV personality.
(01:36):
It's one of the biggest TV stars in the freaking world.
And you've probably never heard of him. He's a beast,
yet he's formal enough to call himself mister Beast. What's
his realm? Just so I have something to hang onto
because I've never heard of the guy, I'll explain it. Yeah, okay,
all right, very good. I'll bet I'll bet he's been
around for quite a few years. I don't know long
enough if you, like Decling, your son would have watched
(01:58):
him or not, but like when he was younger, he
would have watched him. Yeah, okay. Interesting. So what's about
to be discussed is a fairly intellectual and open minded,
calm dare I say, sophisticated discussion of our current politics.
(02:18):
It will, however, include people fornicating with chickens. Okay, wow,
that's an interesting So a little something for Everybody's what
I'm saying. Dead chickens by the way, Oh gross, well
is it? Wait a second, I think that's better than
live chickens. Yes, it is better than life chickens. The
more I think about it, better in terms of your
(02:41):
satisfaction or morally or what morally speaking. Oddly enough, that's
kind of what was going on with the chicken blanket. Yeah,
I should be. I don't want to go too far
down this road, but we already have. I should be
more disturbed if I find out my neighbor is doing
that with live chickens and dead chickens. Yeah. So yeah,
I know nothing about chicken sexual response or whether that
(03:03):
would be like painful or what. And I don't want
to talk about it, but I think you're probably right. Anyway,
the significance of the chicken chicken blanket will be discussed.
This is an article that appeared recently by Guy Denton
with the chicken sex thing. The question would be which
came first, Oh, boy, the chicken or the egg? Guy Dent'
(03:28):
the roosters having sex with the hen? Who's the chicken
having sex with? They're all chickens. Perhaps my all time
favorite moment from Seinfeld a show that went off the
air like thirty years ago, which always shocks me. Anyway,
where were we? Guy Dent' wrote this piece. He's interviewing
Jonathan Hight, who's one of my favorite people, one of
(03:50):
my favorite scribes. He wrote the article. It was one
day when Jack was off. I went at length into
this piece why the last ten years of American life
had been uniquely stupid, which was by Jonathan Height. Well,
they mentioned some of the other things he's written. So
I'll just hit this, hit you with parts of this
article and we will discuss He's very depressed about American
(04:12):
society and politics, philosophically, intellectually, I'm depressed. I'm Cassandra. I
see doom coming towards us. He wrote that article for
The Atlantic, Why the past ten years of American life
been uniquely Stupid. He argues that social media has emboldened
illiberal forces while eroding trust in institutions, fostering extreme polarization,
(04:34):
degrading standards of behavior, and stimulating a mental health crisis
among the young. Previously, he explored the rise of adolescent
depressant depression, anxiety and suicide, and the coddling of the
American Mind, written with free speech lawyer Greg Lukianov, who's
another one of my heroes. At the end of the book, though,
the authors identify several green shoots encouraging developments in culture
(04:56):
that could reverse these trends. But four years later, as
America from COVID nineteen, the final months of Trump's presidency, etc.
Things have only gotten worse, massively worse. Height tells me,
we saw these green shoots and none of them have grown.
All the green shoots are dead. Hey, karamba wow. Yeah.
When he began writing a previous piece that they mentioned
(05:18):
in two thousand and ninety, saw American politics is essentially healthy,
populated predominantly by center left Democrats and center right Republicans
who ultimately respected the liberal tradition despite their disagreements. Now
he believes both parties have been consumed by authoritarian forces
that there were largely confined to the fringe in the
nineties and two thousands. What social media did, he says, quote,
(05:39):
is super empower for groups the far right, the far left, trolls,
and Russian agents. The Republicans have always had the John
Birch wing. The left has its woke fringe that's Jacobin,
it's Maoist. So we have these incredibly illiberal wings on
each side that now have so much power over the
two major parties and locals happening in the country. Now,
(06:02):
I will depart from the eggheaded philosophizing to tell you
he went to Yale and study philosophy and psychology. My
brother went to Yale. He robbed a yamba use as
one of my favorite jokes from Saturday Night Life hilarious.
But he went for his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.
(06:23):
He earned his PhD in psychology in ninety two. His
dissertation Moral Judgment, Affect and Culture or Is It Wrong
to Eat Your Dog? It concerned the role of disgust
in moral judgment. In it, he gave interviewees examples of
repulsive yet harmless behavior. For instance, a man goes to
(06:46):
the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken.
The meat count well, he buys a chicken. I don't
write most people well at the supermar but he wanted
to make it clear that the chicken was deceased. From
the garcery store. Did you get some cow? No, did
you get some hamburger or steaks? Again? You're missing the point,
as you so often do. He wanted to make it clear.
(07:09):
It wasn't alive chicken. Okay. So I goes to the
supermarket once a week buys a chicken, but before cooking
the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he
cooks and eats it to test whether the emotion of
disgust would overpower a reason in people's responses. And he
and when you first said it, I was repulsed with
(07:31):
disgust when you first said it. Right, the point was
our moral judgments driven by intuition, gut feelings, or rationality.
That's what he was trying to figure out. Is morality
more driven by intuition or rationality? Which is an interesting question.
But what's even more interesting is that discussed one out
(07:56):
among all the groups except for groups of political liberal
college students, particularly Americans, who overrode their disgust and said
that people have a right to do what they want
as long as they don't hurt anybody else. But that
trend in young Americans is now dead, And he writes
(08:18):
he began to apply his moral theory to political ideology
in an effort to understand the psychology of conservatives. Libertarians
and progressives. This is kind of cool to gain a
fair understanding of conservative beliefs because he was a man
at the left. He read National Review alongside The New
Republic and watched Fox News. Quote. It was really really
interesting to do that. Week after week. I really just
felt my mind growing, like, oh, I never looked at
(08:40):
it that way. And in the righteous mind something you
wrote in twenty twelve, I believe he explored by human
beings diverged so drastically on political and religious questions, describing
three principles of moral psychology that lead people to different
ethical conclusions, etc. Etc. I don't want to get too
far into that because it's it's interesting, but it's kind
of a distraction. And but he points out that as
(09:04):
the real world's become much more tied to the virtual landscape,
illiberalism has grown. For progressives, it manifests in cancel culture,
hostility to free speech, an overriding concern with emotional safety.
Height recalls it in his early years as an academic,
like when he was doing the study, there's none of
this in higher education because the kids, the students were
(09:26):
gen X. They were partying, hooking up, smoking pot, they
were doing things kids do. You can't have cancel culture
without social media or technology. A lot of the ideas
that have been around since the nineties, words or violence,
things like that, But they didn't leave the like progressive
departments of psychology until the walls fell. It took social
media to dissolve the walls between everything. And then he says,
(09:49):
tribalism is very natural and easy, us versus them. They
will trump any moral foundation if it's an existential struggle
between us and the bad guys, the ends justify the means.
And if our side has to break a few eggs,
break a few laws, break a few rules, I would
add terror part the constitution. Look what they're doing. That's fine.
People will gladly throw away any specific moral principles in
(10:12):
service of defeating the enemy. Until recently, the great success
of modern liberal democracy was that it largely kept this
primal impulse at bay. We used to see elections as
a game that we trust and if our side loses, well,
we better work harder to win next time. And of
all of the horrible things Trump did, I think literally
committing to winning an election by any means before the
(10:33):
election even happened is among the most shameful things that
anyone's ever done in American history, and the Republican Party,
to its eternal shame, backed him up and protected him. Now,
if you're pissed off by that because it's against your tribe,
he absolutely whoops the s out of the left, and
they're silencing in their censoring and their cancel culture and
their extremist ideology and the rest of it. But his
(10:55):
point is both sides are doing it. Yeah. I mentioned
this earlier. You go data a few years back they
said that Republicans were more likely than Democrats by a
fair amount years ago to see the other side as
an enemy, but it's now equal for a variety of reasons.
It probably depends on who's president or whatever. But now
(11:16):
both parties because if you if you're given the choice
of choosing, does a Democrat winning? Asking a Republicans, obviously
it'd be the reverse of you do it the other
way run, But so you ask Republicans, does a Democrat
just mean that Democrat win simply means you're not getting
your desired policy or quote. If they win, your life
(11:36):
or your entire way of life may be threatened. And
now it's close to seventy percent on both sides choose
the if they win, my life or entire way of
life may be threatened. And just as you were saying,
if you believe that, well then you can justify anything,
any breaking of norms or tearing down of institutions, or
or doing things unconstitutional. Right, And what one of the
(11:59):
main points of Heights piece for The Atlantic that I
keep referring to was that because of social media, the
forces on quote unquote the other side, or my side
for that matter, who are angry lunatics who are actually dangerous,
they appear to be the entire side. Right, Yeah, exactly. So.
(12:21):
I mean if you'd ask me fifteen years ago if
Democrats threatened my way of life and blah blah blah,
and it said no, they'll cause more government bloat, and
they'll provide disincentives toward innovation and success. But it doesn't
matter because even if they win this election, will win
the next one. So it's a sure thing's gonna be. Okay.
I look at social media, especially right now, we're canceled
(12:41):
culture or people getting hounded out of colleges for daring
to disagree, and I think, no, it's dangerous now, it's
not whole hum. It's dangerous because because Republicans think all
Democrats are the Libs of TikTok, and Democrats think all
Republicans are the people that stormed the Capitol and we're
beating policemen. Yeah. Yeah, And there's different amounts of truth
(13:02):
on either side. I don't want to overgeneralize, but yeah, yeah,
that's it. You know. One more thing that I didn't
have time to get to maybe a little later on
in the hour, was Height talks about the utter horrible
treatment of our kids, primarily coming from the left. If
you hated the stuff he said about Trump, particularly in COVID,
(13:23):
which I think is really interesting. But I'll see if
we can squeeze that in a bunch of good stuff.
On the waystad with Armstrong and the Armstrong and Getty Show.
(13:51):
That happened in Richmond, California, which is not that far
from where I live, but it could have happened anywhere.
It's still a good story, a massive, well to terrible story,
but it's entertaining. A massive brawl broke out between up
to twenty family members during a funeral for an elderly
woman in Richmond, California, a couple days ago. Leading to
one injury, one arrest in twenty thousand dollars in damage.
(14:14):
The Richmond Police Department said it responded to the Rolling
Hills Memorial Park at one thirty pm after several reports
of a chaotic altercation between eight to twenty family members
at the funeral. Some of them were reportedly armed. Eight
to twenty so it was more than seven, by god,
but fewer than twenty one were certain of that. The
(14:34):
sergeant and the police department said it was an instance
of family drama that started between a brother and sister
who were attending their mother's funeral who did not get along.
And it goes back quote many years. I'm sure it does.
Sorry to hear that the brother and sister were talking
and got into an argument when her boyfriend came over
and encouraged her to walk away. The brothers started beating
(14:56):
on the boyfriend, and that's when it escalated and it
became brawl and they started to get police calls, said
the sergeant. So the boyfriend came over and started beating
on her boyfriend. That's awesome. The brother came over Yat
at some point during the physical fight, the brother got
into his vehicle with the intention of driving over his sister,
(15:19):
said the police sergeant, drumming up more business for the
funeral home. That's true, it gets you coming and go.
I'm a capitalists, you know. You know how I'm going
to handle this altercation now that there's been a fight.
Excuse me a minute, where are my keys, I'm gonna
go get my car and run over my sister. I
know what I'll do. What the hell? He attempted to
(15:41):
drive toward his sister in an aggressive way, but instead
he struck another female and said her to the hospital
with non life threatening injuries. Thank goodness in the car, lord,
but still, that could be devastating injuries. If somebody like
blows out your knee, that's non life threatening, it'll change
your life. The brother also damaged the grass there the
cemetery and knocked over and damaged headstones and vases, broke
(16:04):
a water mane and objected a copious amounts of water
and flooded the funeral plot. The driver also reportedly knocked
over the casket, but they say the body did not
fall out. Oh that's good, strapped in there. Good. When
the brother got out of the car, a different family
member hit him in the head with a cane injuring hymn.
They tried to use had it coming. They tried to
(16:26):
use the cane to get him under control. The suspect
was hit a couple of times. The cane came from
someone who was at the funeral. They don't know if
they identified who the came came from. Use my cane.
I can't walk, but here, use my cane to subdue
that young man. We sometimes get family disputes at the
cemetery or at the church, said the police chief. But
this this one was no different. But it was especially large.
(16:49):
But apparently it's not that uncommon to have to go
to some sort of funeral or church family fight. I'm
impressed that granny didn't tumble out, did they? Was like,
is it like when you buy an action figure something,
you get those wire twist ties like around the ankles
and wrists, and how does that work? I don't. I
don't know how they secure the lid on a casket.
(17:10):
I don't think I ever thought that they were secure,
because it's not like you're going to try to climb
out of it, or or you need a new corner. Well,
if I am, then please leave it unsecure. Right, But yeah,
Thank goodness grandma did not come tumbling out onto the
grass as her grandson was trying to run over her granddaughter. Well,
it sounds like the brother needed an ass weep and
(17:32):
doesn't while others of your contemporaries were beating him with
a cane. Oh no, kidding, some funeral. If you miss
an hour, the show grabbed the podcast Armstrong and Getty
on demand art show. Actually, I just want to say
(18:03):
a number zero. Today we received news that our economy
had zero percent inflation in the month of July. Zero percent.
So we've been playing out all morning long and wondering
what the context was. So I dug in to figure
out what the context is, and it's still bad politics.
(18:25):
He's technically correct, which I assumed he was, but he
is um the politics of it are horrible. So he's
just talking about the increase month from month. There was
no increase in inflation from June July to July of
twenty twenty two. As you know, the previous month, for instance,
from May to June it was one point three. From
(18:46):
April to May it was point three. We remember, we
were all over all those numbers at the time. But
the yearly there was an increase in the increase. Yes, yeah, correct,
but the un and so inflation is now eight point
five percent the twelve month inflation. It was nine something
last month, so months to month it was zero. But
(19:08):
the reason that's such dumb politics, I think is obvious.
People aren't feeling that you can't stand up there and
say zero, okay, zero, good, Well, I'm gonna go to
the grocery. I'm gonna fill up with gas and then
go to the grocery store and I'm sure, I'm sure
I won't feel any effects of inflation because it is
now zero. It's just dumb. It's just it's going to
your doctor with terrible pain and your doctor saying you
don't have any pain, and I don't understand why he's
(19:31):
why he's not understanding the politics of this. Well, yeah,
it's politically idiotic, but it's just factually bizarre and incorrect.
There's been a decrease in the increase, there's still a
historic increase. It still remains near forty year highs and
m and you break it down by various things. We
talked about this. Groceries year to year are up thirteen
(19:53):
and a half percent, and they are high a year ago.
That's so, that's unbelievable. That is unbeliterable. But for him
to get it and tell you, you know, a cow
is a horse, and I hope that you'll just walk off. Well,
I guess he's right. The inflation of zero I feel
very good about that. Why twite try to spin it
that way? That's just dumb politics. I think zero percent.
(20:16):
The Kaiser stole my dentures. Where's Fluffy? Coffe was my
rabbit when I was six? Where's Fluffy? Does the Kaiser
have Fluffy? He's lost it? He's lost it, man, Come on, man.
So getting back to this John Height interview, this article.
(20:37):
He's one of my favorite writers and thinkers. But it
was all about politics, right. We were talking about, you know,
the tribal extremists, we're all angry at each other politics.
But he's at one point in the interview he says,
what I really want to talk about, though, is the
mental state of young Americans because he's crazy passionate on
that topic. And I think he's right. He's always right.
(20:57):
In the Coddling of the American Mind, which he wrote
with Greg lukianof they explored how rates of depression and
anxiety has surged among teenagers since the early twenty tens
and for high Two factors explain this trend. Fragility caused
by a loss of free play in childhood. Kids don't
develop the confidence, the resiliency, the creativity, and just the
(21:20):
boldness that you need to become an adult because all
of the all of the play is structured and uniformed
and the rest of it and a widespread entry into
social media at a young age. I think your generation
has what we might call emotional scurvy. Height told the
young journalist that's a terrible word. By keeping children safe,
we've made them so weak that they are easily frightened,
(21:42):
and they have higher suicide rates. If we take all
of the lives saved because kids don't get kidnapped or
hit by cars, that's probably several dozen. It might be
several hundred, but the number of extra deaths from suicide
dwarfs that with social media. Puberty is when the brain
is changing rapidly. For kids to go through puberty, showing
photos of themselves and letting strangers evaluate them is a
(22:04):
horrible thing. But that's before COVID, and he writes, when
the COVID nineteen pandemic made forced social isolation the norm.
Damn you people who enforced that on kids. Social media
use hugely expanded, and free play became even less common.
Height recalls that despite obvious difficulties, his children made it
through it, made through it. But even so, quote our
(22:27):
kids spend most of COVID on their screens, much less
physical movement, much less in person interaction. So their generation
was already crushed by so many bad things. Then the
overreaction to COVID came along. The right was pathologically motivated
to minimize or deny, leading more Republicans to get killed
by it, and the left was pathologically motivated to amplify
(22:48):
or exaggerate, leading to overly repressive regulations that might have
made sense for the elderly but never made sense for children.
That's some good stuff. I live a block away from
a park that was empty and surrounded by police tape
for months, shocking. I wish i'd I don't know if
(23:12):
I ever took a picture of it or not. I
think I tweeted out pictures, but God, that that might
be the lasting memory I have of COVID when I'm
a ninety year old. Is the police tape around the
playground structure in an empty park, which is weird nisely
where the children should have been. What a weird dystopian?
Is this really happening? Thing? That was? And the fact
(23:40):
that it was not only not necessary, it was the
opposite of necessary, is horribly damaging. Yet our great health
authorities insisted on it. If you're looking for a hopeful note,
there's kind of, sort of, kind of a couple of
hopeful notes here, one which I will squash and the
other which I will let live. So the recent Atlantic
(24:04):
essay Height Road called for ordinary Americans and political leaders
alike to make personal and institutional changes to heal our democracy.
Much of this responsibility will fall to the same members
of Generation Z who have been damaged by social digitalization.
When I ask Height whether he believes this generation will
be strong enough to make such changes, he answers directly, No,
I don't. The young people are not strong and resilient
(24:27):
enough to make the changes. But this is interesting because
in some of you've been listening to this, you've squirmed,
You've screamed, how dare you A and G? I thought
you were conservatives or blah blah blah. A lot of
people were probably uncomfortable with this, So Jack, I'm reading
this part mostly for you. Our waitress brings us the check,
(24:47):
and as we prepare to leave, I persuade Height to
offer a modicum of optimism. Well, he says, the appetite
for reform and change is vast. The great majority of
gen Z hates what's happening to them. The vast majority
of americ Arians are exhausted, They're fed up. And this
was the biggest surprise of my Atlantic essay. Even though
I said very harsh things about the Republican Party and
(25:09):
very harsh things about the cultural left, I expected a
lot of people to attack me for that, and nobody did.
I mean, they were like maybe eight mean tweets. I
put forward prescriptions and they're not trivial things, but nobody
is objected. I think there's the appetite to do some
pretty substantial things. So that's absolutely hopeful. Wow, I'm happy
(25:30):
to hear that. I'm happy. Who went out and said
I'm going to offend everybody when I say this, and
everybody came back and said, you know what, I'm not
really offended. No, I agree, Other than the always offended anger,
constant anger crowd, And I was thinking about this the
(25:50):
other day. I was going through email, which luckily doesn't
bother me much anymore. It used to a little bit.
But the crowd that is all always angry and always
one hundred percent certain that they're right. Can you imagine,
I mean, picture a person like that. They're always bulletproof
(26:11):
in their confidence and always angry. What a sad, unhappy
life that must be. Yeah, and then there's the troll crowd,
which I don't even know what that is. Well, they're
portraying that other group of people for their own amusement,
which is sick and weird. I just don't get it.
I don't get it either, But I have an outlet,
(26:33):
so maybe if I didn't have it. No, I don't
think i'd be a troll. Even if I didn't have
this outlet, I'd be a lovable wag, a gadfly. What's
a wag? I don't know. I would just I would
give people grief, but in a clever way, not like
in a ham handed somebody should rape you way that
so many of your online trolls go with. It's just
(26:55):
ugliness for ugliness sake, and it's stupid. Yeah, it's never
ending parade of stupid fools and trolls, fools controls, Charlie.
She Now, remember when he said that I had I'd
never heard that. I didn't know what the term troll was.
He's the first place, I, first person workplace I ever
heard the term troll. And now and now they infect
(27:15):
my life on a daily basis. Here I'm picturing like
some brutal half human creature living under a bridge, you know,
vexing billy goats gruff. Yeah, there are line trolls trying
to determine where goats are allowed to go or not.
And that's not cool. Perhaps raining blows down upon Harry
Potter and his friends. No, it's a different sort of thing, folk,
(27:36):
these these trolls. We will finish Strong, next Armstrong and
get the Armstrong and Getty show. Yeah, sure, I hope
(28:01):
I see it very much. So I'll do my phones
in my damn car. Did you see the gun? So
(28:22):
that's a drama in real life. So that's a guy
got his car stolen while delivering a pizza. My first
question with lots of these things is who is recording it?
Does everything just get recorded? Now? Who's recording it? A
lot of this is the doorbell cameras. Doorbell cameras, So
as soon as we get to everybody's got a doorbell camera,
and everybody has a car with cameras in it, like
my car has. Everything will be recorded all the time everywhere,
(28:48):
which is going to be a weird way to live.
I mean it's already getting weird, but anything that happens
anywhere is being recorded. Wow, that's a weird world. No
kidding came across this story. I haven't actually read it.
But how do I tell my child I can't afford
what they want? Say we can't afford that. It seems
(29:11):
pretty simple to me. It's the way my parents handled it.
They said that's too expensive, or or I, as I
often tell my kids, no I can afford it. You know,
it's it's it's not the money thing. I just don't
want you to have that. I don't want you to
have that now. Or you've got enough of this that
sort of thing, right or the famous I have money,
(29:33):
you don't have money right right now. You might want
me to spend my money on that, but I don't
want to. I you know, I regularly break out my
inflation calculator. I have an inflation calculator app on my phone,
and man, it comes in handy a lot, i'll tell you,
but I break it out regularly when I'm trying to
(29:54):
determine whether or not my kids should have like this
much money or buy something that costs this much, because
I still have in my head the amounts from when
I was a kid, and so if I put it
in the inflation calculator and see what ten dollars was
in nineteen seventy five, now, a lot of times I think, Okay,
my parents would have made a big deal out of that,
so I shouldn't make a big deal out of this
because I'm still thinking about I haven't I haven't adjusted
(30:17):
five and adjusted for today. And sometimes I'm just way
off track. I'm way too stingy. My youngest to the
ten year old, he's on a recent bent of wanting
to spend all his money. I want to have all
my money gone. I want to he say. He says,
by the time I get out of high school, I
don't want to have any money. I don't know, he's
on this weird kick. I want. I want to start
(30:39):
completely clean on my own and earn my own money.
Oh yeah, well so I like the impulse all right,
but I'm just not sure the method makes that much sense. No,
I did betrays perhaps a ten year old's view of finance.
But that's healthy. You're normal. Yeah, you should have that
as a ten year older something in that range. That's
why there are are comparatively few preteen financial advisors. For instance,
(31:07):
I was talking to mine who's a full grown up
yesterday financial advisor, not a preteen, and he was talking about,
you know, getting everything all the ducks in a row
for the coming wave of audits that he thinks is
going to happen with hiring the eighty seven thousand new
IRS agents. Got I open. Oh wow, I gotta make
a call myself. God, I'm overcome with pap doing some
(31:27):
stuff that's all stretching it. I'm overcome with paperwork and crap. Now.
I can't imagine audit falling down upon my head. I
suppose it just be a you call your tax person
or tax or tax people. He might need multiple people
in this one. Say do it and tell me how
much it costs me. At the end, I don't want
to freaking hear another word about it. Yeah, boys, you
(31:50):
know I've been staging well, it's an all cash business.
I've been staging panda fights and then laundering the money
through my taco truck. And I don't even know how
to make kata all in cryptocurrency though, right, so it's
all yeah, oh yeah, yeah, there's a cover charts to
get into the panda fights. Then obviously you bet on
(32:11):
the fights, but in crypto, in crypto, and I get
the VG in crypto and then launder it through a
taco truck. So yeah, I probably ought to get in
touch with my accountant. What are you We probably don't
have time for this because it came up earlier in
the show and I almost jumped into the tangent. What
are our feelings about food trucks? I have mixed feelings
(32:31):
about food trucks. On one hand, er deliches and there's
one right there and I can eat from it and
it's so easy. But on the other hand, I always
look around at the nearby restaurants and think, man, you
are getting screwed. You bought that building, or pay the
rent and all the insurance and everything that goes with it,
and this guy just pulled up on the street and
it's selling food. Some of your customers are going there
(32:52):
just because it's so freaking convenient. I just think it's
an innovation, and usually an innovation leaves somebody behind, and
that the brick and mortar restaurant owners are probably pushing
pretty hard for there the weight of regulation and fees
and permits and the rest of it to be lightened
so that they can compete. And I hope they get
their wish or will we move toward a world where
(33:13):
restaurants can't make it? Don't make it? Just like Amazon
came along, brick and mortar stores went away, bookstores went
away because you buy an Amazon. That's not fair either,
But that's what happened. Is every street just there's just
food trucks everywhere, and it kind of rotates with the
whims of what people are into eating this time of
year or what's popular now, and uh, and restaurants kind
(33:34):
of go away more empty retail space. But there's I
came by and went by one the other way and
there's no weight he's like permitted or anything like that.
It was just parked in like this alley of a
street selling hand pies, oh, hand by hand by What
are you saying? And uh, what what's what's a handpie?
That's a hot hot new thing is hands Because an
apple pie is filled with apple, a cherry pie is
(33:58):
filled with cherries. I can only assume a handpie it's
gruzis the disembodied hands of this guy's victim. It is
groucome when you have to have a you know, a
flavor for flesh to enjoy it. But no, hand pies
are just they're just pies, obviously, and they're crafted in
such a way that they're basically like what McDonald's has
been selling hot apple pies. Caution, filling may be hot
(34:20):
for many mony years. It's pie in a form that
you can kind of hold it in your hand. Oh okay,
usually shaped different. But hand pies have become popular right now,
they haven't started. I love the idea. There's a hand
pie truck and he just pulled up on the alley
and he had people standing in line selling hand pies,
and I thought, man, the bakery over there has got
to be loving it, you know. Judy and I think
we've bought a hand pie the other day, but we
just called it a little pie because we're not a
(34:42):
hip handbone handbone? What do you say, chick kiss? Time stop,
Jack and Joe. They've got to go, and if they
don't canned, they'll be bats. So you cause your hand
by a little pie. Yeah that's fine. Why don't we
(35:05):
get one of the little pies because there's the little
pies and the big pies. Here's your host for final thoughts,
Joe Getty. All right, let's get a final thought from
everybody on the crew to wrap things up through the day.
How about leading off? Are technical director Michaelangelo? Michael, Yeah,
when my wife and I planned our wedding, we made
sure we had guests that got along. Nobody fought, nobody
tried to run each other over with the car, so
(35:25):
it was a good day. Yeah. Here here, young Alex
are behind the scenes producer. As a final thought, Alex, Yeah,
that funeral story was so interesting. All I was waiting
for was stonecold Steve Bosson to come out with this
chair just start swinging it at people. Yeah, boy, there
should be no ass beatons at funerals. None. Jack. A
final thought for us back to this article, how do
(35:47):
I tell my child I can't afford what they want?
I'm always amused by these these sorts of things. Who
are you parents that on these just kind of mundane
questions turned to someone else, Like you don't have the
confidence in your own ideas for these things that you'll
just handle it on your own. I'm always amazed by that.
Or you were never brought up yourself and you can't
(36:07):
just refer to how your parents had. Yeah's interesting. My
final thought. Maybe you heard how Metallica's Master of Puppets
was featured in the final episode of Stranger Things on
Netflix and Metallica surged among younger viewers. Well, now they're
being scrutinized by many of those younger fans after a
TikToker alleged their problematic behavior made them unacceptable for the
(36:31):
new general You're young, okay, you're inexperienced, You're stupid. You
just need to shut up. Kids, Just shut up and
listen for a while. Stop telling the world how it
ought to function. You're too young to know harsh words
from your old uncle Joe. I know, but it's true.
Shut your hand, pie hole. Are you strong and Getty
(36:54):
wrapping up out of their grueling four our work day?
So many people who think so little time go to
Armstrong and Getty dot com. Many lights await you there,
see tomorrow. God bless America. I'm strong and getty, I
tell you what, overall cheerful and uplifting. If don't do
what they do, which is kind of cool, I really
like that. Explain. Oh, yeah, what do you? I can't
(37:18):
speak for everybody else, but you're a freaking moron. I'm
not a cat, says what, what do you expect? Right?
And on that possibly nightmare inducing no to m armstrong
and
From the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio at the George Washington
Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong and Shoe Getty Armstrong and Jetty show,
I'm watching lates. Let's make a deal. It's on the
TV in the studio. Let's make a deal with Wayne Brady.
And uh, they just they just revealed the package for
(00:32):
this woman. And she's like a forty two year old mom,
you know type of person, and uh, and she's there
and they revealed the package and it's it's a Katim
super Duke, which got my eye just because that's the
motorcycle I ride. But so they show her this super
fast sport bike as her package, and you can, you
can tell me to look on her face, like, what
(00:52):
the hell would I do with that? Sell it? What
the hell am I gonna do with that? Do I
look like somebody who was going to ride that motorcycle?
Coming up? I need to talk about the funeral gone
bad actually happens to be near where I live, but
it's entertaining no matter where it happened. That included a
(01:13):
fight among the family members and the persons falling out
of the casket. So oh, quite quite the little DeLeo.
I also wanted to talk about mister Beast, who I've
just become aware of him the last a couple of days.
My kids have been watching mister Beast forever. He's one
of the top YouTubers in the world, which, if you
know anything about the numbers of YouTube, makes him one
of the top. You could call him a TV personality.
(01:36):
It's one of the biggest TV stars in the freaking world.
And you've probably never heard of him. He's a beast,
yet he's formal enough to call himself mister Beast. What's
his realm? Just so I have something to hang onto
because I've never heard of the guy, I'll explain it. Yeah, okay,
all right, very good. I'll bet I'll bet he's been
around for quite a few years. I don't know long
enough if you, like Decling, your son would have watched
(01:58):
him or not, but like when he was younger, he
would have watched him. Yeah, okay. Interesting. So what's about
to be discussed is a fairly intellectual and open minded,
calm dare I say, sophisticated discussion of our current politics.
(02:18):
It will, however, include people fornicating with chickens. Okay, wow,
that's an interesting So a little something for Everybody's what
I'm saying. Dead chickens by the way, Oh gross, well
is it? Wait a second, I think that's better than
live chickens. Yes, it is better than life chickens. The
more I think about it, better in terms of your
(02:41):
satisfaction or morally or what morally speaking. Oddly enough, that's
kind of what was going on with the chicken blanket. Yeah,
I should be. I don't want to go too far
down this road, but we already have. I should be
more disturbed if I find out my neighbor is doing
that with live chickens and dead chickens. Yeah. So yeah,
I know nothing about chicken sexual response or whether that
(03:03):
would be like painful or what. And I don't want
to talk about it, but I think you're probably right. Anyway,
the significance of the chicken chicken blanket will be discussed.
This is an article that appeared recently by Guy Denton
with the chicken sex thing. The question would be which
came first, Oh, boy, the chicken or the egg? Guy Dent'
(03:28):
the roosters having sex with the hen? Who's the chicken
having sex with? They're all chickens. Perhaps my all time
favorite moment from Seinfeld a show that went off the
air like thirty years ago, which always shocks me. Anyway,
where were we? Guy Dent' wrote this piece. He's interviewing
Jonathan Hight, who's one of my favorite people, one of
(03:50):
my favorite scribes. He wrote the article. It was one
day when Jack was off. I went at length into
this piece why the last ten years of American life
had been uniquely stupid, which was by Jonathan Height. Well,
they mentioned some of the other things he's written. So
I'll just hit this, hit you with parts of this
article and we will discuss He's very depressed about American
(04:12):
society and politics, philosophically, intellectually, I'm depressed. I'm Cassandra. I
see doom coming towards us. He wrote that article for
The Atlantic, Why the past ten years of American life
been uniquely Stupid. He argues that social media has emboldened
illiberal forces while eroding trust in institutions, fostering extreme polarization,
(04:34):
degrading standards of behavior, and stimulating a mental health crisis
among the young. Previously, he explored the rise of adolescent
depressant depression, anxiety and suicide, and the coddling of the
American Mind, written with free speech lawyer Greg Lukianov, who's
another one of my heroes. At the end of the book, though,
the authors identify several green shoots encouraging developments in culture
(04:56):
that could reverse these trends. But four years later, as
America from COVID nineteen, the final months of Trump's presidency, etc.
Things have only gotten worse, massively worse. Height tells me,
we saw these green shoots and none of them have grown.
All the green shoots are dead. Hey, karamba wow. Yeah.
When he began writing a previous piece that they mentioned
(05:18):
in two thousand and ninety, saw American politics is essentially healthy,
populated predominantly by center left Democrats and center right Republicans
who ultimately respected the liberal tradition despite their disagreements. Now
he believes both parties have been consumed by authoritarian forces
that there were largely confined to the fringe in the
nineties and two thousands. What social media did, he says, quote,
(05:39):
is super empower for groups the far right, the far left, trolls,
and Russian agents. The Republicans have always had the John
Birch wing. The left has its woke fringe that's Jacobin,
it's Maoist. So we have these incredibly illiberal wings on
each side that now have so much power over the
two major parties and locals happening in the country. Now,
(06:02):
I will depart from the eggheaded philosophizing to tell you
he went to Yale and study philosophy and psychology. My
brother went to Yale. He robbed a yamba use as
one of my favorite jokes from Saturday Night Life hilarious.
But he went for his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.
(06:23):
He earned his PhD in psychology in ninety two. His
dissertation Moral Judgment, Affect and Culture or Is It Wrong
to Eat Your Dog? It concerned the role of disgust
in moral judgment. In it, he gave interviewees examples of
repulsive yet harmless behavior. For instance, a man goes to
(06:46):
the supermarket once a week and buys a dead chicken.
The meat count well, he buys a chicken. I don't
write most people well at the supermar but he wanted
to make it clear that the chicken was deceased. From
the garcery store. Did you get some cow? No, did
you get some hamburger or steaks? Again? You're missing the point,
as you so often do. He wanted to make it clear.
(07:09):
It wasn't alive chicken. Okay. So I goes to the
supermarket once a week buys a chicken, but before cooking
the chicken, he has sexual intercourse with it. Then he
cooks and eats it to test whether the emotion of
disgust would overpower a reason in people's responses. And he
and when you first said it, I was repulsed with
(07:31):
disgust when you first said it. Right, the point was
our moral judgments driven by intuition, gut feelings, or rationality.
That's what he was trying to figure out. Is morality
more driven by intuition or rationality? Which is an interesting question.
But what's even more interesting is that discussed one out
(07:56):
among all the groups except for groups of political liberal
college students, particularly Americans, who overrode their disgust and said
that people have a right to do what they want
as long as they don't hurt anybody else. But that
trend in young Americans is now dead, And he writes
(08:18):
he began to apply his moral theory to political ideology
in an effort to understand the psychology of conservatives. Libertarians
and progressives. This is kind of cool to gain a
fair understanding of conservative beliefs because he was a man
at the left. He read National Review alongside The New
Republic and watched Fox News. Quote. It was really really
interesting to do that. Week after week. I really just
felt my mind growing, like, oh, I never looked at
(08:40):
it that way. And in the righteous mind something you
wrote in twenty twelve, I believe he explored by human
beings diverged so drastically on political and religious questions, describing
three principles of moral psychology that lead people to different
ethical conclusions, etc. Etc. I don't want to get too
far into that because it's it's interesting, but it's kind
of a distraction. And but he points out that as
(09:04):
the real world's become much more tied to the virtual landscape,
illiberalism has grown. For progressives, it manifests in cancel culture,
hostility to free speech, an overriding concern with emotional safety.
Height recalls it in his early years as an academic,
like when he was doing the study, there's none of
this in higher education because the kids, the students were
(09:26):
gen X. They were partying, hooking up, smoking pot, they
were doing things kids do. You can't have cancel culture
without social media or technology. A lot of the ideas
that have been around since the nineties, words or violence,
things like that, But they didn't leave the like progressive
departments of psychology until the walls fell. It took social
media to dissolve the walls between everything. And then he says,
(09:49):
tribalism is very natural and easy, us versus them. They
will trump any moral foundation if it's an existential struggle
between us and the bad guys, the ends justify the means.
And if our side has to break a few eggs,
break a few laws, break a few rules, I would
add terror part the constitution. Look what they're doing. That's fine.
People will gladly throw away any specific moral principles in
(10:12):
service of defeating the enemy. Until recently, the great success
of modern liberal democracy was that it largely kept this
primal impulse at bay. We used to see elections as
a game that we trust and if our side loses, well,
we better work harder to win next time. And of
all of the horrible things Trump did, I think literally
committing to winning an election by any means before the
(10:33):
election even happened is among the most shameful things that
anyone's ever done in American history, and the Republican Party,
to its eternal shame, backed him up and protected him. Now,
if you're pissed off by that because it's against your tribe,
he absolutely whoops the s out of the left, and
they're silencing in their censoring and their cancel culture and
their extremist ideology and the rest of it. But his
(10:55):
point is both sides are doing it. Yeah. I mentioned
this earlier. You go data a few years back they
said that Republicans were more likely than Democrats by a
fair amount years ago to see the other side as
an enemy, but it's now equal for a variety of reasons.
It probably depends on who's president or whatever. But now
(11:16):
both parties because if you if you're given the choice
of choosing, does a Democrat winning? Asking a Republicans, obviously
it'd be the reverse of you do it the other
way run, But so you ask Republicans, does a Democrat
just mean that Democrat win simply means you're not getting
your desired policy or quote. If they win, your life
(11:36):
or your entire way of life may be threatened. And
now it's close to seventy percent on both sides choose
the if they win, my life or entire way of
life may be threatened. And just as you were saying,
if you believe that, well then you can justify anything,
any breaking of norms or tearing down of institutions, or
or doing things unconstitutional. Right, And what one of the
(11:59):
main points of Heights piece for The Atlantic that I
keep referring to was that because of social media, the
forces on quote unquote the other side, or my side
for that matter, who are angry lunatics who are actually dangerous,
they appear to be the entire side. Right, Yeah, exactly. So.
(12:21):
I mean if you'd ask me fifteen years ago if
Democrats threatened my way of life and blah blah blah,
and it said no, they'll cause more government bloat, and
they'll provide disincentives toward innovation and success. But it doesn't
matter because even if they win this election, will win
the next one. So it's a sure thing's gonna be. Okay.
I look at social media, especially right now, we're canceled
(12:41):
culture or people getting hounded out of colleges for daring
to disagree, and I think, no, it's dangerous now, it's
not whole hum. It's dangerous because because Republicans think all
Democrats are the Libs of TikTok, and Democrats think all
Republicans are the people that stormed the Capitol and we're
beating policemen. Yeah. Yeah, And there's different amounts of truth
(13:02):
on either side. I don't want to overgeneralize, but yeah, yeah,
that's it. You know. One more thing that I didn't
have time to get to maybe a little later on
in the hour, was Height talks about the utter horrible
treatment of our kids, primarily coming from the left. If
you hated the stuff he said about Trump, particularly in COVID,
(13:23):
which I think is really interesting. But I'll see if
we can squeeze that in a bunch of good stuff.
On the waystad with Armstrong and the Armstrong and Getty Show.
(13:51):
That happened in Richmond, California, which is not that far
from where I live, but it could have happened anywhere.
It's still a good story, a massive, well to terrible story,
but it's entertaining. A massive brawl broke out between up
to twenty family members during a funeral for an elderly
woman in Richmond, California, a couple days ago. Leading to
one injury, one arrest in twenty thousand dollars in damage.
(14:14):
The Richmond Police Department said it responded to the Rolling
Hills Memorial Park at one thirty pm after several reports
of a chaotic altercation between eight to twenty family members
at the funeral. Some of them were reportedly armed. Eight
to twenty so it was more than seven, by god,
but fewer than twenty one were certain of that. The
(14:34):
sergeant and the police department said it was an instance
of family drama that started between a brother and sister
who were attending their mother's funeral who did not get along.
And it goes back quote many years. I'm sure it does.
Sorry to hear that the brother and sister were talking
and got into an argument when her boyfriend came over
and encouraged her to walk away. The brothers started beating
(14:56):
on the boyfriend, and that's when it escalated and it
became brawl and they started to get police calls, said
the sergeant. So the boyfriend came over and started beating
on her boyfriend. That's awesome. The brother came over Yat
at some point during the physical fight, the brother got
into his vehicle with the intention of driving over his sister,
(15:19):
said the police sergeant, drumming up more business for the
funeral home. That's true, it gets you coming and go.
I'm a capitalists, you know. You know how I'm going
to handle this altercation now that there's been a fight.
Excuse me a minute, where are my keys, I'm gonna
go get my car and run over my sister. I
know what I'll do. What the hell? He attempted to
(15:41):
drive toward his sister in an aggressive way, but instead
he struck another female and said her to the hospital
with non life threatening injuries. Thank goodness in the car, lord,
but still, that could be devastating injuries. If somebody like
blows out your knee, that's non life threatening, it'll change
your life. The brother also damaged the grass there the
cemetery and knocked over and damaged headstones and vases, broke
(16:04):
a water mane and objected a copious amounts of water
and flooded the funeral plot. The driver also reportedly knocked
over the casket, but they say the body did not
fall out. Oh that's good, strapped in there. Good. When
the brother got out of the car, a different family
member hit him in the head with a cane injuring hymn.
They tried to use had it coming. They tried to
(16:26):
use the cane to get him under control. The suspect
was hit a couple of times. The cane came from
someone who was at the funeral. They don't know if
they identified who the came came from. Use my cane.
I can't walk, but here, use my cane to subdue
that young man. We sometimes get family disputes at the
cemetery or at the church, said the police chief. But
this this one was no different. But it was especially large.
(16:49):
But apparently it's not that uncommon to have to go
to some sort of funeral or church family fight. I'm
impressed that granny didn't tumble out, did they? Was like,
is it like when you buy an action figure something,
you get those wire twist ties like around the ankles
and wrists, and how does that work? I don't. I
don't know how they secure the lid on a casket.
(17:10):
I don't think I ever thought that they were secure,
because it's not like you're going to try to climb
out of it, or or you need a new corner. Well,
if I am, then please leave it unsecure. Right, But yeah,
Thank goodness grandma did not come tumbling out onto the
grass as her grandson was trying to run over her granddaughter. Well,
it sounds like the brother needed an ass weep and
(17:32):
doesn't while others of your contemporaries were beating him with
a cane. Oh no, kidding, some funeral. If you miss
an hour, the show grabbed the podcast Armstrong and Getty
on demand art show. Actually, I just want to say
(18:03):
a number zero. Today we received news that our economy
had zero percent inflation in the month of July. Zero percent.
So we've been playing out all morning long and wondering
what the context was. So I dug in to figure
out what the context is, and it's still bad politics.
(18:25):
He's technically correct, which I assumed he was, but he
is um the politics of it are horrible. So he's
just talking about the increase month from month. There was
no increase in inflation from June July to July of
twenty twenty two. As you know, the previous month, for instance,
from May to June it was one point three. From
(18:46):
April to May it was point three. We remember, we
were all over all those numbers at the time. But
the yearly there was an increase in the increase. Yes, yeah, correct,
but the un and so inflation is now eight point
five percent the twelve month inflation. It was nine something
last month, so months to month it was zero. But
(19:08):
the reason that's such dumb politics, I think is obvious.
People aren't feeling that you can't stand up there and
say zero, okay, zero, good, Well, I'm gonna go to
the grocery. I'm gonna fill up with gas and then
go to the grocery store and I'm sure, I'm sure
I won't feel any effects of inflation because it is
now zero. It's just dumb. It's just it's going to
your doctor with terrible pain and your doctor saying you
don't have any pain, and I don't understand why he's
(19:31):
why he's not understanding the politics of this. Well, yeah,
it's politically idiotic, but it's just factually bizarre and incorrect.
There's been a decrease in the increase, there's still a
historic increase. It still remains near forty year highs and
m and you break it down by various things. We
talked about this. Groceries year to year are up thirteen
(19:53):
and a half percent, and they are high a year ago.
That's so, that's unbelievable. That is unbeliterable. But for him
to get it and tell you, you know, a cow
is a horse, and I hope that you'll just walk off. Well,
I guess he's right. The inflation of zero I feel
very good about that. Why twite try to spin it
that way? That's just dumb politics. I think zero percent.
(20:16):
The Kaiser stole my dentures. Where's Fluffy? Coffe was my
rabbit when I was six? Where's Fluffy? Does the Kaiser
have Fluffy? He's lost it? He's lost it, man, Come on, man.
So getting back to this John Height interview, this article.
(20:37):
He's one of my favorite writers and thinkers. But it
was all about politics, right. We were talking about, you know,
the tribal extremists, we're all angry at each other politics.
But he's at one point in the interview he says,
what I really want to talk about, though, is the
mental state of young Americans because he's crazy passionate on
that topic. And I think he's right. He's always right.
(20:57):
In the Coddling of the American Mind, which he wrote
with Greg lukianof they explored how rates of depression and
anxiety has surged among teenagers since the early twenty tens
and for high Two factors explain this trend. Fragility caused
by a loss of free play in childhood. Kids don't
develop the confidence, the resiliency, the creativity, and just the
(21:20):
boldness that you need to become an adult because all
of the all of the play is structured and uniformed
and the rest of it and a widespread entry into
social media at a young age. I think your generation
has what we might call emotional scurvy. Height told the
young journalist that's a terrible word. By keeping children safe,
we've made them so weak that they are easily frightened,
(21:42):
and they have higher suicide rates. If we take all
of the lives saved because kids don't get kidnapped or
hit by cars, that's probably several dozen. It might be
several hundred, but the number of extra deaths from suicide
dwarfs that with social media. Puberty is when the brain
is changing rapidly. For kids to go through puberty, showing
photos of themselves and letting strangers evaluate them is a
(22:04):
horrible thing. But that's before COVID, and he writes, when
the COVID nineteen pandemic made forced social isolation the norm.
Damn you people who enforced that on kids. Social media
use hugely expanded, and free play became even less common.
Height recalls that despite obvious difficulties, his children made it
through it, made through it. But even so, quote our
(22:27):
kids spend most of COVID on their screens, much less
physical movement, much less in person interaction. So their generation
was already crushed by so many bad things. Then the
overreaction to COVID came along. The right was pathologically motivated
to minimize or deny, leading more Republicans to get killed
by it, and the left was pathologically motivated to amplify
(22:48):
or exaggerate, leading to overly repressive regulations that might have
made sense for the elderly but never made sense for children.
That's some good stuff. I live a block away from
a park that was empty and surrounded by police tape
for months, shocking. I wish i'd I don't know if
(23:12):
I ever took a picture of it or not. I
think I tweeted out pictures, but God, that that might
be the lasting memory I have of COVID when I'm
a ninety year old. Is the police tape around the
playground structure in an empty park, which is weird nisely
where the children should have been. What a weird dystopian?
Is this really happening? Thing? That was? And the fact
(23:40):
that it was not only not necessary, it was the
opposite of necessary, is horribly damaging. Yet our great health
authorities insisted on it. If you're looking for a hopeful note,
there's kind of, sort of, kind of a couple of
hopeful notes here, one which I will squash and the
other which I will let live. So the recent Atlantic
(24:04):
essay Height Road called for ordinary Americans and political leaders
alike to make personal and institutional changes to heal our democracy.
Much of this responsibility will fall to the same members
of Generation Z who have been damaged by social digitalization.
When I ask Height whether he believes this generation will
be strong enough to make such changes, he answers directly, No,
I don't. The young people are not strong and resilient
(24:27):
enough to make the changes. But this is interesting because
in some of you've been listening to this, you've squirmed,
You've screamed, how dare you A and G? I thought
you were conservatives or blah blah blah. A lot of
people were probably uncomfortable with this, So Jack, I'm reading
this part mostly for you. Our waitress brings us the check,
(24:47):
and as we prepare to leave, I persuade Height to
offer a modicum of optimism. Well, he says, the appetite
for reform and change is vast. The great majority of
gen Z hates what's happening to them. The vast majority
of americ Arians are exhausted, They're fed up. And this
was the biggest surprise of my Atlantic essay. Even though
I said very harsh things about the Republican Party and
(25:09):
very harsh things about the cultural left, I expected a
lot of people to attack me for that, and nobody did.
I mean, they were like maybe eight mean tweets. I
put forward prescriptions and they're not trivial things, but nobody
is objected. I think there's the appetite to do some
pretty substantial things. So that's absolutely hopeful. Wow, I'm happy
(25:30):
to hear that. I'm happy. Who went out and said
I'm going to offend everybody when I say this, and
everybody came back and said, you know what, I'm not
really offended. No, I agree, Other than the always offended anger,
constant anger crowd, And I was thinking about this the
(25:50):
other day. I was going through email, which luckily doesn't
bother me much anymore. It used to a little bit.
But the crowd that is all always angry and always
one hundred percent certain that they're right. Can you imagine,
I mean, picture a person like that. They're always bulletproof
(26:11):
in their confidence and always angry. What a sad, unhappy
life that must be. Yeah, and then there's the troll crowd,
which I don't even know what that is. Well, they're
portraying that other group of people for their own amusement,
which is sick and weird. I just don't get it.
I don't get it either, But I have an outlet,
(26:33):
so maybe if I didn't have it. No, I don't
think i'd be a troll. Even if I didn't have
this outlet, I'd be a lovable wag, a gadfly. What's
a wag? I don't know. I would just I would
give people grief, but in a clever way, not like
in a ham handed somebody should rape you way that
so many of your online trolls go with. It's just
(26:55):
ugliness for ugliness sake, and it's stupid. Yeah, it's never
ending parade of stupid fools and trolls, fools controls, Charlie.
She Now, remember when he said that I had I'd
never heard that. I didn't know what the term troll was.
He's the first place, I, first person workplace I ever
heard the term troll. And now and now they infect
(27:15):
my life on a daily basis. Here I'm picturing like
some brutal half human creature living under a bridge, you know,
vexing billy goats gruff. Yeah, there are line trolls trying
to determine where goats are allowed to go or not.
And that's not cool. Perhaps raining blows down upon Harry
Potter and his friends. No, it's a different sort of thing, folk,
(27:36):
these these trolls. We will finish Strong, next Armstrong and
get the Armstrong and Getty show. Yeah, sure, I hope
(28:01):
I see it very much. So I'll do my phones
in my damn car. Did you see the gun? So
(28:22):
that's a drama in real life. So that's a guy
got his car stolen while delivering a pizza. My first
question with lots of these things is who is recording it?
Does everything just get recorded? Now? Who's recording it? A
lot of this is the doorbell cameras. Doorbell cameras, So
as soon as we get to everybody's got a doorbell camera,
and everybody has a car with cameras in it, like
my car has. Everything will be recorded all the time everywhere,
(28:48):
which is going to be a weird way to live.
I mean it's already getting weird, but anything that happens
anywhere is being recorded. Wow, that's a weird world. No
kidding came across this story. I haven't actually read it.
But how do I tell my child I can't afford
what they want? Say we can't afford that. It seems
(29:11):
pretty simple to me. It's the way my parents handled it.
They said that's too expensive, or or I, as I
often tell my kids, no I can afford it. You know,
it's it's it's not the money thing. I just don't
want you to have that. I don't want you to
have that now. Or you've got enough of this that
sort of thing, right or the famous I have money,
(29:33):
you don't have money right right now. You might want
me to spend my money on that, but I don't
want to. I you know, I regularly break out my
inflation calculator. I have an inflation calculator app on my phone,
and man, it comes in handy a lot, i'll tell you,
but I break it out regularly when I'm trying to
(29:54):
determine whether or not my kids should have like this
much money or buy something that costs this much, because
I still have in my head the amounts from when
I was a kid, and so if I put it
in the inflation calculator and see what ten dollars was
in nineteen seventy five, now, a lot of times I think, Okay,
my parents would have made a big deal out of that,
so I shouldn't make a big deal out of this
because I'm still thinking about I haven't I haven't adjusted
(30:17):
five and adjusted for today. And sometimes I'm just way
off track. I'm way too stingy. My youngest to the
ten year old, he's on a recent bent of wanting
to spend all his money. I want to have all
my money gone. I want to he say. He says,
by the time I get out of high school, I
don't want to have any money. I don't know, he's
on this weird kick. I want. I want to start
(30:39):
completely clean on my own and earn my own money.
Oh yeah, well so I like the impulse all right,
but I'm just not sure the method makes that much sense. No,
I did betrays perhaps a ten year old's view of finance.
But that's healthy. You're normal. Yeah, you should have that
as a ten year older something in that range. That's
why there are are comparatively few preteen financial advisors. For instance,
(31:07):
I was talking to mine who's a full grown up
yesterday financial advisor, not a preteen, and he was talking about,
you know, getting everything all the ducks in a row
for the coming wave of audits that he thinks is
going to happen with hiring the eighty seven thousand new
IRS agents. Got I open. Oh wow, I gotta make
a call myself. God, I'm overcome with pap doing some
(31:27):
stuff that's all stretching it. I'm overcome with paperwork and crap. Now.
I can't imagine audit falling down upon my head. I
suppose it just be a you call your tax person
or tax or tax people. He might need multiple people
in this one. Say do it and tell me how
much it costs me. At the end, I don't want
to freaking hear another word about it. Yeah, boys, you
(31:50):
know I've been staging well, it's an all cash business.
I've been staging panda fights and then laundering the money
through my taco truck. And I don't even know how
to make kata all in cryptocurrency though, right, so it's
all yeah, oh yeah, yeah, there's a cover charts to
get into the panda fights. Then obviously you bet on
(32:11):
the fights, but in crypto, in crypto, and I get
the VG in crypto and then launder it through a
taco truck. So yeah, I probably ought to get in
touch with my accountant. What are you We probably don't
have time for this because it came up earlier in
the show and I almost jumped into the tangent. What
are our feelings about food trucks? I have mixed feelings
(32:31):
about food trucks. On one hand, er deliches and there's
one right there and I can eat from it and
it's so easy. But on the other hand, I always
look around at the nearby restaurants and think, man, you
are getting screwed. You bought that building, or pay the
rent and all the insurance and everything that goes with it,
and this guy just pulled up on the street and
it's selling food. Some of your customers are going there
(32:52):
just because it's so freaking convenient. I just think it's
an innovation, and usually an innovation leaves somebody behind, and
that the brick and mortar restaurant owners are probably pushing
pretty hard for there the weight of regulation and fees
and permits and the rest of it to be lightened
so that they can compete. And I hope they get
their wish or will we move toward a world where
(33:13):
restaurants can't make it? Don't make it? Just like Amazon
came along, brick and mortar stores went away, bookstores went
away because you buy an Amazon. That's not fair either,
But that's what happened. Is every street just there's just
food trucks everywhere, and it kind of rotates with the
whims of what people are into eating this time of
year or what's popular now, and uh, and restaurants kind
(33:34):
of go away more empty retail space. But there's I
came by and went by one the other way and
there's no weight he's like permitted or anything like that.
It was just parked in like this alley of a
street selling hand pies, oh, hand by hand by What
are you saying? And uh, what what's what's a handpie?
That's a hot hot new thing is hands Because an
apple pie is filled with apple, a cherry pie is
(33:58):
filled with cherries. I can only assume a handpie it's
gruzis the disembodied hands of this guy's victim. It is
groucome when you have to have a you know, a
flavor for flesh to enjoy it. But no, hand pies
are just they're just pies, obviously, and they're crafted in
such a way that they're basically like what McDonald's has
been selling hot apple pies. Caution, filling may be hot
(34:20):
for many mony years. It's pie in a form that
you can kind of hold it in your hand. Oh okay,
usually shaped different. But hand pies have become popular right now,
they haven't started. I love the idea. There's a hand
pie truck and he just pulled up on the alley
and he had people standing in line selling hand pies,
and I thought, man, the bakery over there has got
to be loving it, you know. Judy and I think
we've bought a hand pie the other day, but we
just called it a little pie because we're not a
(34:42):
hip handbone handbone? What do you say, chick kiss? Time stop,
Jack and Joe. They've got to go, and if they
don't canned, they'll be bats. So you cause your hand
by a little pie. Yeah that's fine. Why don't we
(35:05):
get one of the little pies because there's the little
pies and the big pies. Here's your host for final thoughts,
Joe Getty. All right, let's get a final thought from
everybody on the crew to wrap things up through the day.
How about leading off? Are technical director Michaelangelo? Michael, Yeah,
when my wife and I planned our wedding, we made
sure we had guests that got along. Nobody fought, nobody
tried to run each other over with the car, so
(35:25):
it was a good day. Yeah. Here here, young Alex
are behind the scenes producer. As a final thought, Alex, Yeah,
that funeral story was so interesting. All I was waiting
for was stonecold Steve Bosson to come out with this
chair just start swinging it at people. Yeah, boy, there
should be no ass beatons at funerals. None. Jack. A
final thought for us back to this article, how do
(35:47):
I tell my child I can't afford what they want?
I'm always amused by these these sorts of things. Who
are you parents that on these just kind of mundane
questions turned to someone else, Like you don't have the
confidence in your own ideas for these things that you'll
just handle it on your own. I'm always amazed by that.
Or you were never brought up yourself and you can't
(36:07):
just refer to how your parents had. Yeah's interesting. My
final thought. Maybe you heard how Metallica's Master of Puppets
was featured in the final episode of Stranger Things on
Netflix and Metallica surged among younger viewers. Well, now they're
being scrutinized by many of those younger fans after a
TikToker alleged their problematic behavior made them unacceptable for the
(36:31):
new general You're young, okay, you're inexperienced, You're stupid. You
just need to shut up. Kids, Just shut up and
listen for a while. Stop telling the world how it
ought to function. You're too young to know harsh words
from your old uncle Joe. I know, but it's true.
Shut your hand, pie hole. Are you strong and Getty
(36:54):
wrapping up out of their grueling four our work day?
So many people who think so little time go to
Armstrong and Getty dot com. Many lights await you there,
see tomorrow. God bless America. I'm strong and getty, I
tell you what, overall cheerful and uplifting. If don't do
what they do, which is kind of cool, I really
like that. Explain. Oh, yeah, what do you? I can't
(37:18):
speak for everybody else, but you're a freaking moron. I'm
not a cat, says what, what do you expect? Right?
And on that possibly nightmare inducing no to m armstrong
and
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