Speaker 1: Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio, the George
Speaker 1: Washington Broadcast Center, Jack Armstrong and Joe Ketty arm Strong
Speaker 1: and Jack Kid and he.
Speaker 2: Armstrong and Eddy Tonight.
Speaker 3: New questions about Democrats' intentions. The Washington Post reports House
Speaker 3: Delegate Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat from the Virgin Islands, was
Speaker 3: caught texting with Epstein during a twenty nineteen congressional hearing
Speaker 3: in which President Trump's the attorney Michael Cohen was testifying.
Speaker 3: Epstein appeared to feed Plasket information in real time about
Speaker 3: the President's finances and his aid, which she then used
Speaker 3: in her questioning of Cohen.
Speaker 2: Do you all remember that hearing? We took some of
Speaker 2: it live, the fixer of the idiot, Michael Cohen, Trump's
Speaker 2: lawyer on it.
Speaker 4: What pulls all of them?
Speaker 2: Okay, that guy Michael Cohen, when he was being questioned
Speaker 2: by Congress. One of the Democrats was texting with Epstein
Speaker 2: during the hearing, and he was feeding her questions to
Speaker 2: try to get into Trump's finances.
Speaker 5: And if you've seen the captioning of the texts in
Speaker 5: real time with the video of the questioning, which they
Speaker 5: now have, it is it's funny, but it's beyond.
Speaker 4: Doubt exactly what was happening there.
Speaker 5: They were using the House Democrats were using Epstein as
Speaker 5: a how do we bad mouth Trump?
Speaker 4: Uh source in real time?
Speaker 2: You know, now that I think about it, I was
Speaker 2: about to say that the crazy thing about the whole
Speaker 2: Epstein story is there are people of all political stripes
Speaker 2: that were hanging around with him, flying on his plane,
Speaker 2: friends with him.
Speaker 4: Blah blah blah.
Speaker 2: But somehow, like the current mainstream media version of it is,
Speaker 2: it's a Trump thing or a republic thing thing. But
Speaker 2: Trump was a Democrat back in the day. He was
Speaker 2: a Democrat his whole life, basically up to the moment
Speaker 2: he decid I did run for president. So are there
Speaker 2: any Republicans, like big name Republicans that were tied in
Speaker 2: with Epstein A lot? I can't think of any of them.
Speaker 4: That I've come across. Nothing leaves to mind. I'm I'm
Speaker 4: just saying there aren't.
Speaker 2: He was a big player in New York and New
Speaker 2: York's almost entirely Democrats.
Speaker 4: Certainly, he was kind.
Speaker 5: Of a fake Democrat honestly. I mean, he was always
Speaker 5: pro choice. But yeah, hey, just a quick observation here,
Speaker 5: It is a hearing where they're trying to discredit Trump
Speaker 5: with Michael Cohen on the stand getting fed information by
Speaker 5: Jeffrey Epstein himself, And at no point did Epstein say,
Speaker 5: ask Trump about November of twenty oh seven at the
Speaker 5: Island the pool party. He had nothing on him other
Speaker 5: than he didn't like him and he thought he was,
Speaker 5: you know, fast and loose with his finances or whatever.
Speaker 5: He was literally on the line with Democrats when they
Speaker 5: were trying to impugne Trump, and he didn't offer anything up.
Speaker 5: Can we stop talking about that aspect of this now.
Speaker 2: All all the emails and phone calls and everybody to
Speaker 2: know him, there's not one where he makes it like
Speaker 2: even pretty clear that Trump was having sex with underage girls.
Speaker 2: And of the thousand victims out there, not one of
Speaker 2: them have come forward and said, yeah, I had sex
Speaker 2: with Trump in two thousand, blah blah blah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, their references to Trump knew about the girls or whatever,
Speaker 5: but that's not necessarily the underage girls and having a
Speaker 5: notion that you know, I think he made like a
Speaker 5: young girls is different than participating in any way. I'm
Speaker 5: not saying it's right if you know about it, and
Speaker 5: don't say anything, but come on, by.
Speaker 2: The way, as we are live on the radio right now.
Speaker 2: The Senate has sent the bill to the President's desk.
Speaker 2: It is the most bipartisan, fastest piece of legislation, by
Speaker 2: the way, the only piece of legislation that has passed
Speaker 2: in the last sixty days. But it's the most bipartisan,
Speaker 2: fastest piece of legislation outside of a declaration of like
Speaker 2: National Cookie Day, that I can think of in many, many,
Speaker 2: many years. And now it's going to the President's day.
Speaker 4: Every day is National Cookie Day, and.
Speaker 2: They're going to disclose all kinds of different stuff that
Speaker 2: normally doesn't come out from investigations. And that's where I
Speaker 2: get to Mark Alprin's newsletter for today, which I thought
Speaker 2: was really interesting. He writes, I had a realization this
Speaker 2: morning about the Epstein files and Donald Trump.
Speaker 4: If Trump were a normal.
Speaker 2: President, one whose motives weren't viewed through a funhouse mirror
Speaker 2: by both fans and foes. It gets to Trump derangement syndrome,
Speaker 2: which Joe is going to talk about later. The reasons
Speaker 2: not to release the Justice Department the materials would be familiar,
Speaker 2: even boring to most people. Presidents have always found virtue
Speaker 2: in withholding information from investigations. The list of reasons any
Speaker 2: irrational president would resist pulling back to curtain is long
Speaker 2: and predictable.
Speaker 4: Starting here, that's getting to the.
Speaker 2: Whole Why would he be fighting it so hard? Well,
Speaker 2: he could be doing it for the right reasons, like
Speaker 2: the impropriety of flinging around FBI three to zero two's.
Speaker 2: Those are the the investigation documents that they use to
Speaker 2: look into people's lives that kind of violate your normal
Speaker 2: constitutional standards, but they get a special uh A three
Speaker 2: to oho two warrant to be able to look into
Speaker 2: your stuff. That stuff's not supposed to come out public,
Speaker 2: especially if you haven't been charged or convicted.
Speaker 5: Of anything, right, right, And then those files can include,
Speaker 5: you know, people saying I saw him, he did it.
Speaker 5: It can include innocent mentions, it can include people who
Speaker 5: later turn out to be liars at what they say
Speaker 5: or all in those those files. That's why they're not
Speaker 5: automatically admissible in court.
Speaker 2: And this sort of stuff is going to be flying
Speaker 2: around here within the next thirty days when the when
Speaker 2: the Justice Department turns this stuff over. So the impropriety
Speaker 2: of flinging FBI three oh two's national security and law
Speaker 2: enforcement documents and grand jury material all into the all
Speaker 2: into the public law to consume the way it will
Speaker 2: helping rites. That's how republics slide toward reality television. Yeah,
Speaker 2: if you start doing this all the time, with every
Speaker 2: big investigation, and you just let everything out there, everybody's names, circumstances,
Speaker 2: quotes that, as Joe said, might be made up. It
Speaker 2: turns out to be someday, but that won't matter for
Speaker 2: the time being. The collateral damage, reputations, civil liberties, livelihoods
Speaker 2: shredded for sport when the mob gets a peak at
Speaker 2: the raw material of the justice sausage making. Absolutely, that's
Speaker 2: where we're headed. And is this going to set a
Speaker 2: new standard for doing it in the future.
Speaker 5: And given the nature of our media right now, it'll
Speaker 5: be substantially one sided too. They will ignore stuff that
Speaker 5: doesn't fit the up with Democrats narrative.
Speaker 4: God, how many times have we been through this?
Speaker 2: Somebody brought up the other day Trump didn't release his
Speaker 2: taxes when he ran for president, and that had been
Speaker 2: the standard for quite some time. He wouldn't release his taxes.
Speaker 2: There's got to be something there. Why would he fight
Speaker 2: so hard to keep his taxes secret, obviously there's something there.
Speaker 4: And then finally.
Speaker 2: Somebody illegally leaked Donald Trump's taxes.
Speaker 4: Nobody's ever paid a price for it.
Speaker 2: I mean, what could be worse than that somebody who
Speaker 2: had his taxes, probably at the IRS, leaked them. I
Speaker 2: think it was to the New York Times, and they
Speaker 2: all came out. Awful, awful crime. Nobody ever prosecuted for it,
Speaker 2: Nobody even talks about it. Anyway, Trump's taxes come out.
Speaker 2: There was nothing there, nothing nothing. Do you remember the story? No,
Speaker 2: you don't, because there was nothing there.
Speaker 5: Well, all there was was a risk guy with good
Speaker 5: tax advice, maximizing his returns and minimizing his liabilities, which
Speaker 5: was then portrayed just ridiculously. But I look at him,
Speaker 5: look at him trying to minimize the amount of tax
Speaker 5: he paid, and he answered back, yeah, that's the same
Speaker 5: thing Hillary does, and everybody else does a get good
Speaker 5: tax advice.
Speaker 4: What are you talking about?
Speaker 2: If you don't like it, change the tax law. But
Speaker 2: there was nothing explosive there that he was hiding. That's
Speaker 2: the point I'm making because the assumption here is that
Speaker 2: he's fighting to keep this Epstein to stuff from coming out.
Speaker 4: It might be just like his taxes. It's just going
Speaker 4: to be I don't know.
Speaker 2: There's also the knowledge that conspiracy theorists, Epstein, hobbyists and
Speaker 2: profiteers will Profiteers is a big part of it. People
Speaker 2: that get money off of clicks for suggesting something.
Speaker 4: Yeah, a lot of the conspiracy theorists are profiteers.
Speaker 2: None of these people will ever be sated by any
Speaker 2: level of disclosure. The appetite for scandal is the one
Speaker 2: that human hunger that grows with the eating, and that
Speaker 2: is certainly true. Right, endless hours are going to be
Speaker 2: spent dealing with the fallout rather than governing for quite
Speaker 2: some time. We're all going to deal with that. And
Speaker 2: then Halpern also brings back presidents in the past that
Speaker 2: have fought all kinds of disclosure on a whole bunch
Speaker 2: of different things. See Barack Obama and his long form
Speaker 2: birth certificate, Think Bill Clinton in Whitewater, Hillary and her emails,
Speaker 2: George W. Bush and the missing IRAQ WMD memos, Reagan
Speaker 2: and Iran contra. It's just a thing presidents do to
Speaker 2: fight to keep all this information coming out on the
Speaker 2: sorts of things because it's just it's a distraction, it's
Speaker 2: a mess, it can be used improperly, et cetera. So
Speaker 2: to me, that answers the whole Why was Trump fighting
Speaker 2: so hard to keep this vote from happening?
Speaker 4: It's just what presidents do. They don't want more information.
Speaker 2: They're not sure how it's going to be used when
Speaker 2: it gets out there, you know, disclosure.
Speaker 5: Right right, right, Well, I've got to admit, now that
Speaker 5: it's happening, I'll be curious to see whether anybody is
Speaker 5: specifically named as violating the law well as opposed to
Speaker 5: hanging around with Epstein or staying in touch with him
Speaker 5: after his first conviction, or you know, just to you know,
Speaker 5: getting drunk on the island or whatever, specifically being sexually
Speaker 5: with underaged girls.
Speaker 2: Right, So there's that, But then there's all how many
Speaker 2: Larry Summers are there going to be. I'll bet there's
Speaker 2: going to be a bunch whose lives are changed. They
Speaker 2: didn't do anything illegal, but their lives are going to
Speaker 2: be changed by their association with Epstein and seeing various connections.
Speaker 2: And wait a second, you told me you weren't. You
Speaker 2: didn't talk to him anymore after two thousand and eight
Speaker 2: or whatever. Yeah, from a wife or a boss or
Speaker 2: all kinds of different situations.
Speaker 5: Now here are your Here are your two reactions to that.
Speaker 5: The first reaction is good, their lives should be changed.
Speaker 5: They're they're they're despicable people. They're amorl people, and we
Speaker 5: ought to know what sort of people they are Larry
Speaker 5: Summers I'm thinking of specifically. And but the second reaction is, beware, friends,
Speaker 5: this is the tempting case where you can rationalize why
Speaker 5: you ought to throw out all investigatory norms and just
Speaker 5: throw out all these the FBI forms you were talking
Speaker 5: about before. It's so tempting and almost justifiable. Let's throw
Speaker 5: out all the norms and everybody who's name, who ever
Speaker 5: came up, no matter how, what, how or what context,
Speaker 5: let's throw that name out into the media. But the
Speaker 5: next case, the next two cases, the next two hundred
Speaker 5: cases that come along, are gonna be much less compelling,
Speaker 5: much less excuse to do that. And what you've done
Speaker 5: is explode the norm that unless the government, and oh
Speaker 5: you have great trust and love for the government, you
Speaker 5: do since when if the government investigates you but decides
Speaker 5: there's nothing we can charge here, So It's nobody's damn
Speaker 5: business what we found out, because this is a private
Speaker 5: citizen and we only looked at them in the context
Speaker 5: of a criminal investigation. We're not in a who's a
Speaker 5: good person who's not investigation, So we can call TMZ.
Speaker 5: That's not what the government's supposed to do. And beware
Speaker 5: encouraging them to start doing that.
Speaker 4: God help us.
Speaker 2: As a republic slides toward reality TV.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: My last thought on the Epstein thing for today anyway,
Speaker 2: uh will be what Mark Alpern was talking about and
Speaker 2: several people have written about in the last couple of days,
Speaker 2: finding out that so many of the rich and powerful
Speaker 2: are perfectly okay having Slee's ball friends. They just don't
Speaker 2: think anybody's gonna.
Speaker 4: Notice or care or catch on or whatever.
Speaker 2: Because I mean a lot of the hanging around Jeffrey Epstein'
Speaker 2: stuff happened after he was convicted once and spent thirteen
Speaker 2: months in jail, and lots of powerful people, Hollywood types,
Speaker 2: political types, you know, the super rich, they were perfectly
Speaker 2: okay having him as a friend and hanging out in
Speaker 2: those circles. What other kinds of human beings are they
Speaker 2: all okay with hanging out with right.
Speaker 5: Uh so it was Bria? What was what was the
Speaker 5: name was Stalin's guy? I can't remember Labyrinth Berea who
Speaker 5: originally said, give me the man and I will find
Speaker 5: the crime. Or show me the man and I'll show
Speaker 5: you the crime. This back to my previous point, and
Speaker 5: then I'll shut up. Show me the man and I'll
Speaker 5: show you the character assassination. Who's that character? Do you
Speaker 5: need to be assassinated? Okay, Jack Armstrong, let me think,
Speaker 5: give me a couple of days. I'll figure out what
Speaker 5: investigation I can come up with that will get close
Speaker 5: enough to him. We can drop his name and darkly
Speaker 5: suggests that he's guilty of something that should give you
Speaker 5: long enough that you'll win the bid on the apartment
Speaker 5: complex or whatever. Yeah, effortless if the government turns toward
Speaker 5: the job of character assassination in a kind of open
Speaker 5: William Hilly way. At the same time, Epstein was a
Speaker 5: perv his rich friends or perves, and it's all sickening,
Speaker 5: but beware, beware the temptation.
Speaker 2: Good stuff, Trump derangement syndrome an actual medical thing, among
Speaker 2: other things to talk about. On the waystair, do.
Speaker 4: You wear Armstrong?
Speaker 2: And getty sweatshirts, hat stuff out and about in public.
Speaker 4: Katie, Oh, yeah, all the time you do, Joe.
Speaker 5: Yeah, occasionally the less provocative stuff, because in real life,
Speaker 5: I don't really want to talk politics.
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I feel uncomfortable wearing my own wearing my own swag
Speaker 2: in public.
Speaker 4: But eh, get over it. Some of it's really cool.
Speaker 4: Get over it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I agree that I can't wait to get my
Speaker 5: ruin the entire Country Newsome twenty twenty eight shirt. I
Speaker 5: will wear that everywhere I go. Yeah, available right now.
Speaker 5: Oh and the f Yaolickin Party. I really like that
Speaker 5: one too. I want people to ask that, ask what
Speaker 5: does that mean? F f Yaolickin. It's both parties are
Speaker 5: phonies in it for themselves. I want to start a
Speaker 5: new party.
Speaker 2: I don't know what I think of the salty language.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I hear you. So, I'm not sure we have
Speaker 5: time for this now. But is Trump derangement syndrome real?
Speaker 5: A actual psychiatrist or a psychotherapist whatever he is. As
Speaker 5: writing this article, he says, no serious mental health professional
Speaker 5: would render such a partisan and derogatory diagnosis. Yet I've
Speaker 5: seen it in my own psychotherapy pract You know it's
Speaker 5: funny because we talk about Trump derangement syndrome as it's
Speaker 5: like a weird form of partisanship where you never allow
Speaker 5: that the other side is right about anything, you never
Speaker 5: agree that your side is wrong about anything, and within
Speaker 5: a Republican party, like you're never Trumpers share Trump derangement syndrome.
Speaker 5: It's like they can never admit when he gets something right.
Speaker 5: But this guy's approaching it a little differently. He says
Speaker 5: he's seen it in his own psychotherapy practice. Patients across
Speaker 5: the political spectrum have brought Donald Trump into therapy not
Speaker 5: to discuss policy, but to process obsession, rage, and dread.
Speaker 5: Their distress is symptomatic, not ideological. Clinically, the presentation aligns
Speaker 5: with anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorders, persistent intrusive thoughts, emotional dysregulation,
Speaker 5: and impaired functioning. Patients describe sleepless nights, compulsive news checking,
Speaker 5: in physical adjecation.
Speaker 2: I know a couple people like this that that fits
Speaker 2: perfectly with them.
Speaker 5: Many confess they can't stop thinking about Donald Trump even
Speaker 5: when they try. They interpret us every move is a
Speaker 5: threat to democracy and to their own safety and control.
Speaker 5: Call it a obsessive political PreO preoccupation, an OCD spectrum
Speaker 5: presentation which a political figure becomes the focal port point.
Speaker 5: I'm sorry, I'm hurrying, so I'm getting every third word wrong.
Speaker 5: Idiot becomes the focal point for intrusive thoughts, heightened arousal,
Speaker 5: and compulsive monitoring, and he says, you're a child. I
Speaker 5: initially view this as an ideological reaction, but he says,
Speaker 5: over time, the more I see it, it looks more
Speaker 5: like a fixation that distorts perception and consumes attention. One
Speaker 5: patient said she couldn't enjoy a family vacation because quote,
Speaker 5: it felt wrong to relax while Trump was still out.
Speaker 2: Yes, I know, people like whatever whatever, people like this sleeplessness.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I know people like.
Speaker 2: This that you can't you can't like enjoy your vacation
Speaker 2: because Trump is president.
Speaker 5: Interestingly, as Trump himself is in the pathology, he's the
Speaker 5: trigger for many. He functions as a psychological screen on
Speaker 5: which unresolved fears and insecurities are projected.
Speaker 4: Wow, it'll be so fascinating when he's gone from the scene.
Speaker 2: If this persists and they just attach it to something else.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we need to take another look at this. When
Speaker 4: we have more time art, strong, and getty.
Speaker 6: When the phrase six seven exploded online this year, he
Speaker 6: was fueled by Generation Alpha kids fifteen and younger, who've
Speaker 6: begun forging a dictionary's worth of often baffling vocabulary. Still
Speaker 6: it's lingoed that's burst into classrooms. Like Amy wargoes, how
Speaker 6: often are you hearing phrases like this every day?
Speaker 4: What do you think that's about? Having something to actually
Speaker 4: bring them together?
Speaker 6: Many younger Gen Alpha kids started school during the isolation
Speaker 6: of the pandemic. Wargo says that attachment to the virtual
Speaker 6: world remains in a way that differentiates them from Gen.
Speaker 4: Z previous kids.
Speaker 6: It was fidget spinners and bottle flipping.
Speaker 4: Now at anything they hear on.
Speaker 2: TikTok, a shared experience which we just don't have anymore. So,
Speaker 2: whether it was you know, the pandemic's hurrying it along,
Speaker 2: it was going to happen anyway because we just don't
Speaker 2: have shared experiences anymore.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, how interesting. Apparently Peter thiel I wrote a
Speaker 5: piece recently about how capitalism the free market is failing millennials.
Speaker 2: Here's an interesting dude that Peter thele is PayPal mafia
Speaker 2: billionaire duty that has gone out there and do all
Speaker 2: different kinds of stuff. He's all over the map politically.
Speaker 4: Sometimes I agree with him vehemently and sometimes I don't.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he's behind Pallanteer too, which is doing amazing work
Speaker 5: and really patriotic anyway. But he was reaching out to
Speaker 5: Facebook executives of all people. But he said, when seventy
Speaker 5: percent of millennials say they are pro socialist, we need
Speaker 5: to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that
Speaker 5: they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed. Try and understand why,
Speaker 5: which is absolutely true.
Speaker 4: Then the free.
Speaker 5: Press is Sean Fisher sat down with Theel to talk
Speaker 5: about what he saw in twenty twenty that made him
Speaker 5: write that more recently and just a super quick summary.
Speaker 5: Capitalism is not working for young people, Fel said, citing
Speaker 5: burdensome student debt regulations putting home ownership out of reach
Speaker 5: for many. Quote people assume everything still works, but objectively
Speaker 5: it doesn't. If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn't
Speaker 5: be surprised if they eventually become communists. Now I wish
Speaker 5: I had more of the piece in front of me,
Speaker 5: I don't I could have grabbed it. But what the
Speaker 5: free press did was they ran a bunch of reactions
Speaker 5: to it from people both you know, people you may
Speaker 5: have heard of and some you didn't. I love this
Speaker 5: one from Blake Shole, who's the founder and CEO of
Speaker 5: something called Boom Supersonic, which I have no idea what
Speaker 5: that means. It might be a dance video platform, it
Speaker 5: might be an air plane, it might be a drug
Speaker 5: or a social network. Anyway, perhaps Katie could endeavor to
Speaker 5: figure out what Boom Supersonic is, just to amuse me
Speaker 5: if you don't mind.
Speaker 4: But what he said was really cool. Any idea not yet? Okay,
Speaker 4: getting there? Okay, here's what he said.
Speaker 5: If you insert enough socialist elements into a capitalist system,
Speaker 5: when the socialist elements inevitably cause problems, people will blame
Speaker 5: the capitalism ah and then turn socialist. That's what's happened
Speaker 5: in New York City, for example, where Mamdani voters are
Speaker 5: motivated by high rents and crippling student debts. Even the
Speaker 5: rent control drives up housing prices, and government subsidies for
Speaker 5: higher education encourage universities to raise tuition.
Speaker 4: You know, because I can wait, there's more real quick.
Speaker 5: Likewise, you insert enough capitalist elements into a socialist system,
Speaker 5: the system sort of begins to work and people think
Speaker 5: socialist works.
Speaker 4: That's what happened in China. Damn it.
Speaker 2: But I can see how I've even done that. I've
Speaker 2: talked about this many times over the years. I just
Speaker 2: did a few minutes ago. Since we do live in
Speaker 2: a welfare state, then I think the government should be
Speaker 2: able to do this. I don't justify the uh, you know,
Speaker 2: more socialism so much, but the more government control aspect
Speaker 2: of it. If you're going to allow if some of
Speaker 2: my money is going to go feed people who lose
Speaker 2: all their money gambling, then I think society ought to
Speaker 2: be able to outlaw gambling, which just you know, just
Speaker 2: it is an argument towards bigger government making more decisions
Speaker 2: for us.
Speaker 4: So, yeah, you inject a little bit of.
Speaker 2: Socialism because I don't care if people just use staying
Speaker 2: on this example, I don't care at all if somebody
Speaker 2: spends their life savings on gambling and runs out of
Speaker 2: money and less at the end of that story, when
Speaker 2: you and your kids are hungry, you take my money.
Speaker 4: Now all of a sudden, I care.
Speaker 2: So you've injected some socialism because we do do that,
Speaker 2: I said, doodoo.
Speaker 4: We feed the hungry, So now I'm feeding you with
Speaker 4: my money.
Speaker 2: Now I get to decide whether or not you gamble,
Speaker 2: which is kind of an element of big government socialism.
Speaker 5: And getting back to Blake Sholl, the founder and CEO
Speaker 5: of boomster Personic, which is the largest chain of car
Speaker 5: wash centers across America.
Speaker 4: Or I don't know what is it, Katie, Have we
Speaker 4: figured that out?
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's a company that's aiming to make commercial supersonic
Speaker 7: flights more accessible.
Speaker 5: Oh, okay, okay, interesting anyway, So he goes on, at
Speaker 5: the root of this, at the root of this terrible
Speaker 5: confusion is a failure of our education system and our
Speaker 5: media to give the next generation a proper history education.
Speaker 5: Today's problems of affordability almost exclusively come from our most
Speaker 5: socialist institutions, such as are heavily regulated, subsidized, in centrally
Speaker 5: planned healthcare and education systems. By contrast, the free or
Speaker 5: more capitalist industries such as electronics and computers have driven
Speaker 5: enormous improvements across the board in real world standards of living.
Speaker 5: The closer we get to capitalism, the more everyone is
Speaker 5: better off.
Speaker 4: In real terms.
Speaker 5: The closer we get to socialism, the more death and
Speaker 5: suffering result. We can't let capitalism be socialism's fall guy,
Speaker 5: fall guy. It's almost to help the next generation separate
Speaker 5: the capitalist wee from the socialist chaff so we can
Speaker 5: all enjoy a freer and more prosperous future.
Speaker 2: That's my social answer, the socialist noise from the capitalist signal,
Speaker 2: as people like to say nowadays.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, Interestingly, a couple of my other favorites, we're
Speaker 5: all about life choices.
Speaker 2: That is really good. So just to do dwell on
Speaker 2: that second before you get to the life choices. So
Speaker 2: you have a socialist society, you do a little capitalism
Speaker 2: like that in China, which helped them make a lot
Speaker 2: of money, and you credit socialism.
Speaker 5: Right, And if you insert enough socialist elements into a
Speaker 5: capitalist system, when the socialist elements inevitably cause problems, people
Speaker 5: blame the capitalism and then turn socialist.
Speaker 2: That's unfortunate.
Speaker 4: It is good.
Speaker 5: So there's a lot of stuff about personal choice, and
Speaker 5: we talked about this earlier. It is the eight hundred
Speaker 5: pound gorilla you know in a pet store full of
Speaker 5: little kittens. In terms of how people's lives turn out.
Speaker 2: Well, clean up on out five there is.
Speaker 5: There are a number of different things that can affect
Speaker 5: your life in a material way, from your upbringing, to
Speaker 5: your genetics, to your race, to a whole bunch of stuff.
Speaker 5: But the idea that personal choices, your life choices aren't
Speaker 5: listed as the king of the hill. Are not just
Speaker 5: not listed as the king of the hill. They're not
Speaker 5: discussed at all.
Speaker 7: No.
Speaker 2: In fact, it's frowned upon if you look at them.
Speaker 5: It's that what is an excuse what I would call governmentalism,
Speaker 5: the idea that government should solve all of our problems.
Speaker 2: You're shop if you're gonna take it exactly right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, But I thought it was interesting that so many
Speaker 5: really brilliant and persuade of people wrote about about personal choices.
Speaker 2: Jim, uh, the gorilla is in the kit nile.
Speaker 4: Oh boy, not again, Okay, say no more.
Speaker 5: And the other thing that they talk about is over
Speaker 5: regulation and how and oh man, I just came a
Speaker 5: crate across a great example of this. And and most
Speaker 5: people don't know this. I didn't know it until fairly
Speaker 5: late in life. A lot of regulations are attempting to
Speaker 5: stifle competition. The big guys figure all right, compliance with
Speaker 5: these complex regulations will cost us three percent of our revenue.
Speaker 5: But a plucky startup with good ideas that wants to
Speaker 5: come and take our market share, that'll be like fifteen
Speaker 5: percent of their revenues and they could never afford it.
Speaker 4: So we will.
Speaker 5: Quash any competition with regulations that sound like they're protecting
Speaker 5: the consumer or the environment or whatever. But they lobbied,
Speaker 5: the big guys lobbied to regulate their own industry to
Speaker 5: crush competition. Did you know that's a thing. It's a thing, folks.
Speaker 5: And finally, this love Jason Riley Wall Street Journal, and
Speaker 5: he wrote a great piece about this incredible school, Pineywood
Speaker 5: School in Mississippi. It is again, yet again, the classic
Speaker 5: educational success story. A lot of poor kids, a lot
Speaker 5: of black kids doing amazing things, achieve learning, getting into college,
Speaker 5: the rest of it. Why, high standards, strictly enforced discipline,
Speaker 5: and high expectations of the kids, and the kids love
Speaker 5: it and.
Speaker 4: They excel like crazy.
Speaker 2: Sounds like white supremacy to me.
Speaker 4: Oh my lord.
Speaker 5: And Jason Riley with a great piece about that. But
Speaker 5: I was going to use that to introduce another one
Speaker 5: of my favorite black thinkers, Roland Fryar, who's writing about
Speaker 5: the economics of culture, which we were just talking.
Speaker 4: About life choices.
Speaker 5: People from cultures that emphasize productive habits tend to advance.
Speaker 4: The reverse is also true.
Speaker 5: I mean, that's one of the most self evidently obvious
Speaker 5: things you could possibly say. But man, that is strict
Speaker 5: for boten on the left to say that. That is
Speaker 5: why you hear those idiotic things like punctuality is white supremacy,
Speaker 5: and trying hard is white supremacy and exceptionalism, or what's
Speaker 5: the the you promote people based on their excellence? Is
Speaker 5: white supremacy meritocracy? Meritocracy? Yeah, exactly. But Roland writes, and
Speaker 5: you may know, he was the guy who came out
Speaker 5: with a carefully constructed study early in his career that said, no,
Speaker 5: young black men are not disproportionately shot and shot dead
Speaker 5: in America by police. It's not true, and it was
Speaker 5: unassailable research. But the left essentially made him a propriate.
Speaker 5: But anyway, he writes, culture is one of the most
Speaker 5: underrated ideas in economics. For decades, economists avoided invoking cultures.
Speaker 2: The shue you are, you are scratching the biggest itch
Speaker 2: I've got this. This is wow. Really my this is
Speaker 2: my thing right.
Speaker 5: Here, Putting aside the highly troubling metaphor, I'm glad to
Speaker 5: be doing so. For decades, economists avoid invoking culture the
Speaker 5: share values, norms, beliefs, preferences, and behaviors of a group
Speaker 5: as an explanation for economic outcomes. It seemed too intangible
Speaker 5: to measure and too messy to model. Thomas Sowell, Oh
Speaker 5: my god. Two of my favorite thinkers happened to be
Speaker 5: black men. Quoted in the same thing, whose legacy was
Speaker 5: celebrated recently at Stanford's Hoover Institution changed that. He was
Speaker 5: among the first economists to treat culture as an important
Speaker 5: economic variable. Mister Soel has argued that both human capital
Speaker 5: and culture drive mobility, more so in his view, than
Speaker 5: discrimination or external barriers. Groups that develop productivity enhancing traits
Speaker 5: such as skills, an orientation toward education and work, and
Speaker 5: thriftiness tend to advance. Those whose cultures don't emphasize these
Speaker 5: things tend to fall behind. In mister Sowell's view, culture
Speaker 5: is a form of capital, an accumulation of habits and
Speaker 5: know how that powerfully influences a group's project. Progress could
Speaker 5: not be Brewer, and you know, I'd like to read
Speaker 5: this whole thing because it is so incredibly important. I'll
Speaker 5: bet he goes into a bunch of different studies.
Speaker 2: Go ahead, I'll bet that the reason it's so recent
Speaker 2: that anybody talked about it, wrote about it, is that
Speaker 2: we just were all in agreement up until fairly recently,
Speaker 2: midsh twentieth century that yeah, of course, being thrifty and
Speaker 2: working hard is a good idea and everybody should do
Speaker 2: it. It was mostly in agreement. It wasn't until we started
Speaker 2: to well, I get back to Elvis and the Beatles
Speaker 2: and the devolving of our culture.
Speaker 4: I think it all fits together. Actually, So again we're
Speaker 4: pressed for time.
Speaker 5: But so he goes into his research in his academic background,
Speaker 5: and he talks about cultural differences across racial and ethnic
Speaker 5: groups are unmistakable. And then he talks about various shows
Speaker 5: and how popular they are among cultures. But for social scientists,
Speaker 5: the hardest part of studying culture is trying to find
Speaker 5: a way to measure it. And in the early to
Speaker 5: mid two thousand, Stephen Levitt and I tried to ease
Speaker 5: from the free economics guy tried to answer that question
Speaker 5: by focusing on one small but revealing expression of cultures
Speaker 5: the names parents give their children. Man, it's long and interesting,
Speaker 5: but here's here's the most revealing part of this. They
Speaker 5: went into other parts of the world, other countries with
Speaker 5: cultures you know nothing about, and you had two groups
Speaker 5: of people that looked just like this, just the same,
Speaker 5: similar religions, et cetera. But over here they valued hard work, savings, education,
Speaker 5: et cetera. Over there, they didn't guess what the first
Speaker 5: group did way way better than the other ones. And
Speaker 5: it wasn't white supremacy because there weren't any damn white people.
Speaker 5: They refer to the fact that and what's the number
Speaker 5: I wish I could find it that Pakistani Americans earned
Speaker 5: sixty cents on the dollar to Indian Americans because of
Speaker 5: what white racism?
Speaker 4: Are you kidding me?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 4: Cultural dorms.
Speaker 5: It's like the most important thing in the world, and
Speaker 5: nobody wants to talk about.
Speaker 4: It because I chickens. But I don't care. I'll talk about.
Speaker 2: It, sir, chickens. We'll finish strong next time.
Speaker 8: Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman shared some dating advice
Speaker 8: every the week on AX and said that he would
Speaker 8: ask may I meet you before engaging further in a conversation,
Speaker 8: and claimed he quote almost never got to know. However,
Speaker 8: he did get a lot of six digit phone numbers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was his opening line. He'd walk up to
Speaker 2: women and say, may I meet you? And he said
Speaker 2: it worked a lot. Guess what, he's a pretty good
Speaker 2: looking guy. See, that's the thing with everything when it
Speaker 2: comes to dating. That opening line works if you look
Speaker 2: like him. Practically, any opening line would work if you
Speaker 2: look like him, Almost none would work if you don't.
Speaker 2: And it's the same with just all kinds of different days.
Speaker 2: That Colonne smells good on.
Speaker 4: You because you're attractive.
Speaker 2: It's making it just all kinds of different things like that.
Speaker 2: It's just I've always had.
Speaker 5: Study that came out that good looking guys are almost
Speaker 5: never cited for a sexual harassment, whereas the plain looking
Speaker 5: sort are all the time for precisely the same thing.
Speaker 2: Chris Rock has a routine where he talks about the
Speaker 2: guy who gets the most girls sets the fashion sense
Speaker 2: for your friend group when you're young. And I was
Speaker 2: looking back on my life and that's very, very true.
Speaker 2: And he said, like, you know, there's a group of
Speaker 2: four or five dudes are all friends. The guy who
Speaker 2: girls like the most. You look at his outfit and you think, yeah,
Speaker 2: those are pretty cool shoes. I need some shoes like that.
Speaker 2: You think that that's like the key and it's and
Speaker 2: it's not rich. The most expensive piece of modern art
Speaker 2: sold yesterday sought to be sold this painting from nineteen fourteen.
Speaker 2: This is really early modern art. I don't mind early
Speaker 2: modern art because it actually looks like art. But it's
Speaker 2: sold for two hundred and thirty six million dollars in salteds.
Speaker 4: This one particular painting, Clint. It's in my family room.
Speaker 4: Looks great over the sofa. Cool Yeah, nice.
Speaker 9: Down Strong, down strong, Ready, Katy Strong.
Speaker 2: Here's your host for final thoughts, Joe Geddy.
Speaker 5: Let's get a final thought from everybody on the crew
Speaker 5: to wrap things up for the day. There is our
Speaker 5: technical director, Michael Langelow. Michael, final thought.
Speaker 7: You are so correct about life being all about choices
Speaker 7: you make.
Speaker 5: I think back, and I think if I'd made that choice,
Speaker 5: that my life would be different.
Speaker 4: But I'm pretty happy with the way things worked out.
Speaker 4: I'm good for you.
Speaker 5: There you go, Katie Greener Esteemed Newswoman As a final thought, Katie.
Speaker 7: We were calling raccoon's trash pandas my two other favorites,
Speaker 7: gators are murder logs and peacocks are disco chickens murder.
Speaker 4: They're both great. Jack of final thought.
Speaker 2: Just a justify us talking about it a lot today.
Speaker 2: Latest poll eighty percent of Americans wanted the Epstein files
Speaker 2: to come out, including two.
Speaker 4: Thirds of Republicans.
Speaker 2: Lots of people agreed with that.
Speaker 5: My final thought is also raccoon related. I'm fascinated by
Speaker 5: this article from Scientific American talking about how raccoons are
Speaker 5: doing exactly what dogs did way way way back in
Speaker 5: the day, hanging around kind of at the edge of
Speaker 5: our campsite, picking at the garbage, and the more friendly
Speaker 5: ones and the less aggressive ones are getting closer and closer.
Speaker 4: Soon somebody's gonna pet one.
Speaker 5: You know, they may get their hand chewed off, but
Speaker 5: maybe not hat raccoons in.
Speaker 4: Thirty years, one hundred years, we don't know.
Speaker 2: We're going to talk about that more in the One
Speaker 2: More Thing podcast?
Speaker 5: Are we not?
Speaker 2: I thought we were?
Speaker 4: I don't remember when I would not. Armstrong Inghetti wrapping
Speaker 4: up another grueling.
Speaker 2: Four hour workday.
Speaker 5: You gotta go to armstrong Ayetti dot com check out
Speaker 5: the Armstrong a Getty Swag store.
Speaker 4: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 5: Pickup a T shirt, a hat for yourself or your
Speaker 5: favorit at Angie Fan.
Speaker 2: We'll see you tomorrow. God bless America.
Speaker 9: I'm Strong and Getchy. There's a fantastic podcast that you
Speaker 9: gotta listen to every day. It's got Jack and Joe,
Speaker 9: Katie and Michaelangelo.
Speaker 4: It's called I'm Strong and Geddy on them End.
Speaker 5: Subscribe now wherever you download your podcast.
Speaker 4: Ar'm Strong and Geddy On the End Armstrong and Getty