Normally Podcast: 25 Years After 9/11, Remembering Charlie Kirk & America’s Free Speech Crisis

0:00This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Why are you dealing with listening to Armstrong and getting on demand? We're not boring. Lot of news is boring. And tedious. And depressing. And makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world. How about something about a comedic tone? What? We have a winner? Yes. Listen to Armstrong and Getty on demand on the I Heart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, some weird back. Normally the show with normalish takes for when the news gets weird. I'm Mary Cassam-Ham. I'm Carol Markowitz. And we're going to try to not have a super depressing show today, even though we're going to be talking about the 25-year anniversary of 9-11 and the one-year anniversary of the murder of Charlie Kirk.

1:01But we're going to be hopeful and forward-looking and light as possible. At times. Yes. If we can. I mean, these are serious topics, but I think the way you and I have always approached life and politics and everything is with optimism and with humor. And we have to do that in, I think, all cases. Yep. So 9-11, 25th anniversary. I remember the fifth, by the way. I think I had just moved to the DC area shortly before the 5th anniversary. Thinking back on that. How young that event was at the time. Right. Yeah. And it's interesting because I think that it took years for me personally to get over 9-11, for sure. Like I qualify it as my kind of wake up from 9-11 moment was the 2003 blackout in New York,

2:04which is two years later. It's August 2003. We thought it was another terrorist attack when it wasn't. It was this like giant sigh of relief. But, you know, I avoided crowds. I didn't like going to public events. It was scary. It was a really scary time to be in New York and DC. And I think that a lot of people felt that. Yeah. And I think people felt it all over the United States. And it's hard to explain just as Pearl Harbor would be hard to explain to people other who came after. That the feeling of vulnerability and shock was so great that our formerly impenetrable mainland America. Right. And had been attacked in this horrendous disaster movie monster way. And then we watched it unfold. I think it's hard for those who didn't see it live to understand just how awful that was.

3:08Right. Especially in Pentagon. I remember the days after 9-11. I was best friends with my now husband and he had a TV and I didn't and we were just watching it on loop. And the thing we kept saying was how do they get the Pentagon? I mean, you know, we were young and we didn't know anything and we thought, you know, I don't know, the Pentagon has mistletoe. I don't know. I don't know what we were thinking, but we were like, how is it possible to attack the Pentagon like that? And we were really shook up by it. For any of that, you say that Carol because I think that I also I had a TV, but it did not have cable. So I had nothing. I was at the University of Georgia. I was, you know, but at the time I remember after the newsbrokes, we all thought something's going to fall out of the sky on all of us. Right. Right. Right. You didn't feel safe even if you know retrospectively that you were. But I didn't have a TV either. I went to a friend's house. My halitimes have changed.

4:08The internet. Right. And I would just be. I was refreshing Instapundit. That was my, that was how I was getting the news that day on my computer that I, I think I had just moved into my apartment. I feel like I didn't have a lot of furniture now that I'm thinking about it. I didn't have a desk. I was sitting on my floor, refreshing Instapundit and finding out what had happened. And you know, our comedian that we enjoy Nate Brugazzi has this whole thing about how he was working security at a water treatment facility in Tennessee and like his small town in Tennessee. And he, he, you know, he makes jokes about how everybody was worried that that was going to be a target after 9-11. And he was like, you know, retrospectively, like maybe they weren't going to go for the water treatment facility in the small town in Tennessee. But at the time, we thought anything was possible. Yeah. We didn't, we didn't know any better at the time. And I do think though I have various quibbles along the way with Homeland Security and TSA and what have you.

5:11I think Abe Greenwald is very good about writing regularly that we're very fortunate that work was done to protect us that actually has protected the homeland in a pretty amazing streak. Since that time when we felt that any day something was going to happen again. That's right. And that sensation lasted for years. And I think that the young people now who are like, oh, you guys are so traumatized by 9-11. Like, yeah, we really actually were. It was a, an event that changed the way that we saw the world, the way that we saw our country. It was also, and I've said this in things that I've written, but you know, Americans are so trusting. And that was a moment of, wow, we really just can't trust people. We can't just trust that people mean us no harm because sometimes they do. And even so, the American public, despite the op-waged to claim that America was deeply Islamophobic at the wake of 9-11, it was not.

6:18In fact, the pressure was almost universal to voice among public officials. And just in general that Islam is a religion of peace. We don't blame everyone. And almost too much difference. Yes, to a comical degree, George W. Bush, president at the time, went out of his way all the time to say things like Islam means peace. And to say that our quarrel was not with Muslims worldwide, it was just with those who would do us harm. Yeah. I do find it disturbing that 25 years on, you have a general sort of elite opinion bubble that is very inclined to blame any attack on America on the fact that America does bad things. America bad. Therefore, these 19 terrorists who went to all these lengths to indiscriminately kill 3,000 civilians.

7:22You know, they had some concerns. Right. And did you read Ben Laden's letter where he talks about climate change and how we're responsible for it? And if you don't know what I'm talking about, it was last year that Gen Z got very interested in a letter that there's no evidence that Ben Laden actually wrote this letter. And it sort of does not read like in Islamist at all. You know, again, he addresses things like climate change in it. And Gen Z got really into it and was like, wow, I get it. I get why he did it. I get why he wanted to hurt the United States. There's also the in retrospect, changing of what the reasons were at the time, the reasons for the attack that Islamist would give was that the United States had bases in Saudi Arabia. The idea that this had anything to do with, for example, Israel zero. It was never mentioned.

8:24It's only now that it's like, oh, America got attacked because of Israel. Or if you want to get real crazy, America got attacked by Israel. So yeah. Now it's particularly to see people coming into official sometimes federal office who are of the America kind of had it coming. Ilk is disconcerting. There was a dust up this week because the lead council for Zaron Mamdani, Ramzi Kassam, Chief Council. He had at various times represented as a defense lawyer, I'll kind of affiliated people, including the brother of one of the hijabers. And he was at the ceremonial signing of a 9-11 proclamation by Mamdani and was given one of the ceremonial pins. Now there were several pins given to several people. He's not the only one who received a pen. But it does seem that this administration is not at all interested in being as sensitive as they should about this.

9:29And in fact, I would argue he's doing this on purpose to say, we have an outpost here in this administration. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And the conspiracy stuff is definitely concerning the way that it's brushed off and the ironic way that the young talk about it. It worries me about the future. Now I get it. You know, young people have always had that detached irony. And you know, I remember being a punk rocky teenager and feeling all those same kind of like, I don't care about anything, feelings. But it really wasn't that long ago. It's just this is so still fresh in our minds and we're still living with so many repercussions of it. I think that, you know, we had the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan. And were they right or wrong or are the way that they were waged right or wrong. But they were direct results of 9-11.

10:30So right. And again, the thing that I resent is all of these people. Many of them in public office now, many of them in America, who equate the indiscriminate targeting of American civilians with America's desire to wage traditional warfare. To prevent that happening again. It's the same exact thing as you see post October 7th, right? Indiscriminate targeting of civilians by Hamas, at which point you retaliate with more traditional warfare that's much more sparing of civilians and they all flip out. And in the parlance of therapy, speak and abuse of relationships, this is called reactive abuse. When you do something horrendous and then you call out the person on their reaction, right, the horrendous thing you did, that's what that is. And I think you see a lot of that among politicians. And you'll probably see, unfortunately, a lot of it on the 20th anniversary, which I'm bracing for in some of these statements from left-leaning people.

11:32I want to note also that we should engage with like what actually radical Islam does hate about us because Kassam, who's, as I said, Mamdani's lawyer, a couple of days after September 11th, is saying the resentment these terrorists felt towards the United States was rooted in political realities shaped by our country's policies. Our government has supported dictatorial and repressive regimes across the Middle East and elsewhere for years. In total disregard of the aspirations and better interests of the indigenous populations of those regions. Ad hoc nonsense. Yeah, like just not no. Yeah, it's just irrationalization. A father of intellectual radical Islam such that it is an intellectual movement who inspired Al-Qaeda and inspired Osama bin Laden. He hated America because he came and studied in Greeley, Colorado, by the way, a dry county at the time. 1949. So it's like it's not like it was a rocket split. He came and studied there and he found the green lawns distasteful and greedy.

12:34Did he? He found the sock hops and said dry county to be too sexual to the ladies with their kneeling skirts were too much for him. Yeah. In 1949. It is the freedom. It is the freedom to live the life you want to live in America that ticked him off and made him create this destructive force which later in 2001 killed 3000 people. Yeah. And the fact that American freedom and the way that we organize our society is a beacon of hope to others around the world that others want this people want this people want to move towards this. So it's interesting that a lot of the conspiracy theorists now on about all kinds of things, not just 9-11, that one of the things that they go for is saying that America is just not that great because you kind of have to in order to engage in these crazy conspiracy theories.

13:34You have to first say that what we have here and what we've done here and what we're doing here is not amazing and you know groundbreaking and something that everybody wants. You have to first turn it into something bad and that's what our enemies do. Yeah. One quote from Sayyid Koutube just because I find it humorous and lean every time I run across it. They danced to the tunes of the gramophone and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet enticing legs arms wrapped around waste. Because the American girl is well acquainted with her bodies seductive capacity. There is no record that Sayyid Koutube ever had a relationship surprise surprise. So like that. That's what the left in the streets, the rationalization is from this guy. Right. That's the guy. Yeah. Okay. And you and I saw this coming years ago. We've told the story on the show before, but one of the first things that you and I ever did together turns out it was 2007.

14:38We just looked up the video and I thought it was earlier. I thought it was a 2003 where we went to ground zero. We went to the 9-11 site and we counter protested the 9-11 truthers and you want to tell our audience what we did. So we put together flyers that said the truth about 9-11 because even then shortly afterwards the truth or movement had a lot of momentum and you know popular mechanics wrote a whole book debunking all of their ideas. And we did feel like it needed to be confronted. So we made a little flyer and we handed it out at ground zero that said the truth about 9-11. Then when you opened it, it was like 19 Muslim high-deckers. And there's some planes into some buildings and that is the truth about 9-11. Because even then you needed to be clear about that. And by the way, I just want to say that video is like pretty ahead of its time as a format for Internet video. Yeah. Let's roll back. Just walking by here all the time and seeing these crazy truthers. I really felt like we should counter them.

15:38I think very few people believe that stuff, but on the other hand, you have to have people willing to stand up and tell the truth. Put together this pamphlet which basically just told the short story of what happened on 9-11. What is the shocking truth? It was 19 Middle Eastern high-deckers, flew planes into our buildings and blew up 3000 of our people. There was a report in the BBC that came out today. 9-11 demolition theory challenge. So I printed this out at work to hand out to these guys. Oh, very good. Did you get any takers on that? Yeah, I handed it to three of these guys. They're reading it over here right now. Like giving us thumbs up when they realized that we weren't truthers and they were really excited about it. We really had a great reaction. And even like the really, really smelly truthers couldn't get in our way. I just don't think it's right that they're out here today. Yeah. You know, at least be across the street or something. It's a transit hub. It's busy. And you know what? They should have some respect for the site. We look so young. We do.

16:40What about the future? Where are we going? Where do you think the country heads after this 25-year anniversary? Are we hopeful? Well, I think one of the things we still have going for us is that the American military and its members are very clear about the threat and still willing to stand up for us. One of the things that concerns me is my children get a little bit older. I'll actually wonder how you've handled this is how to talk to them about it so that they really understand the stakes and without freaking them out or giving them something they can't handle. But I think there are uplifting stories from that day where you can talk about the heroism and it, you know, with younger children they can hear a little bit about it. The Wells Crowder story, which is the 30 for 30 by ESPN on the man with the red bandana. Yeah. 18 lives, I believe. Some of those stories to me are the ones that I like to start with with my kids because they have, you know, a redemptive part of it.

17:43Right. Right. But I wonder how you've dealt with communicating that to your older children. Yeah. That's been the overall picture that we give also, which is bad things happen. I look around for the good people. So many people helped one of my favorite columns that I've ever written was five years ago on the 20th anniversary of 9-11. I wrote about a, an officer, a police officer who was stationed outside. It was then called the Brooklyn battery tunnel, lifelong the Yarkers will always call it that's called the Hugh Carrey tone now. He was so dead set. I'm looking inside like it just his eyes would pierce every car and he was so just focused and we felt so safe because he existed and I just wrote up this whole thing about all the people that helped not just on the day, but on all the days after that, the people who dug up the rubble and got, you know, terrible illnesses because of it, the people who went to war and defended us all of that.

18:46And I heard that the officer that I wrote about saw the piece and did not want, did not want, you know, any additional praise did not want to be named. And I think that's just so beautiful. Yeah. First responders are a different breed. And you see it illustrated so clearly on that day with hundreds of firefighters running directly into the buildings. Also, I always think of Rick for Scorla, who was the Morgan Stanley employee, who again, the unsexy work of emergency preparedness, he had been doing his fellow employees do drills to get down the stairs. And I'm sure those employees before that, yeah, doing this Rick, right. And on that day, singing, he was, I believe he was British born singing all sorts of diddies to them to keep them rallied as they went downstairs. He got every one of those employees out, but 13 who perished and he was last seen going up to help again.

19:48He had been wary after the original world, face interarming and had prepared for this. And he saved, I believe thousands of lives because they had tons of employees up there. Right. Getting them out of that building. And I just, there are hopeful stories there are amazing things that people did not do black pill, but there is a part of me that, especially after seeing the reaction to a bank of America VP being. Fatally stabbed in Times Square a week and a half ago with a lot of the dark parts of the internet saying, you know, she was a bank of America vice president, which insane, insane take. She hasn't deserve to be murdered by a mentally ill person stabbing her in the middle of the street. Yeah. There's a part of me that fears that if this happened today, much of the conversation would be like, well, how much for those people making on social no five in the North power? Right. Like who they work for. Yeah. Just to be, you know, to end this on a more positive note, I don't mind that kind of stuff getting exposed.

20:52Yes, it's crazy that these people exist and they have these insane opinions, but the majority of Americans are not those people. And the majority of Americans don't even know that people say stuff like that on the internet. I think that's like one of the things we, we always need to remember, I talk about my normie husband a lot. He has no idea what we're talking about 90% of the time on Twitter. Let's just remember that Americans are good and they would be shocked to find out that people say stuff like that. So I think if God forbid anything, anything close to something like this happened ever again, I think we would once again unite and help and be heroes. On that note, let me just quickly plug. If you want to experience a very uplifting and normie commemoration of 9, 11 on this 25th anniversary, I worked for the Travis Manion Foundation on the board. I'm on a sit on the board and we do a 9, 11 heroes run every year with honors, military first responders, people who were there that day, the victims of 9, 11 is a very family friendly way to introduce kids to the notion and to meet all of the first responders and military folks in your room.

22:02And you're not a military folks in your neighborhood who are serving you all the time. So 9, 11 heroes run calm. It is a great time. You will not regret it. I love that. We're going to take a short break and be right back with more on normally. We are back on normally where we have another sad anniversary a year ago today, Charlie Kirk was murdered at Utah Valley University and Tyler Robinson is accused of his murder. He is going to trial. And a year later, the conservative movement is not in a great place. And the Charlie loss is still being felt very much. Yeah, I had hoped that out of that sadness would come a rallying and I think you initially saw it in people's very well-meaning embrace of faith and getting together. At the gigantic memorial service and expressing a lot of that, but it took a turn very quickly quicker than post 9, 11, which was quite patriotic and robust in the American response for the unity lasted for a little bit.

23:14Not so with the Charlie Kirk murder. And to this day, I think I haven't. I was not super close with Charlie, but I knew him and have worked in over the years, particularly when he was younger and coming into the business. And liked him very much. In fact, I like him more after like having had more exposure to his videos and kind of thought, oh, I missed out a little bit while he was here. I don't think I've fully processed how scary it is that speaking on a college campus with ideas that one dude doesn't like can cause this. And then a lot of people won't stick up for you. Right. Not just people, but like your best friends, like a lot of people that you are very close with, people that you have defended, people that you stood up for can easily turn on you. And I think that is at least in part because he let a lot of people in and that's for better or worse, you know, when your circle is big, you're going to have some negatives in it.

24:21And that's where that's where he was. He had he was a force really a force for conservative politics. And that meant that he was growing the tent and letting more people in and some of those people are very clearly bad. Yeah. Of course, as you as you say, we should not over over amplify the jerks online about this. Right. People in various places are referring to it as the Kirk adversary and making awful content about it, including by the way, a professor at UC Irvine, who made reference to Nick Shirley speaking at Harvard and said something to do the fight. Something to do the funniest thing just before the Kirk adversary. And we'll talk about free speech too, but I'm not sure it's a free speech issue anymore. You as a in your capacity as a professor on a campus are advocating for the murder of speakers who disagree with you on politics.

25:28I think we've we've exited that area. That's right. It's so outside the realm of normal conversation or thought. And that's the thing. I think that like when people talk about cancel culture, we weren't talking about, you know, the people that were getting canceled in that time period were saying things like kids don't need to be wearing masks. It wasn't I could not quite we weren't nobody was saying you should kill that person. And the rest of us were saying, no, no, don't cancel this person. No, it was right to cancel people who say horrible evil things like that. That's not cancel culture directly pertain to your job by the right. Yeah, we're all the clip of what we said a year ago and see where we are now. A person who could take up his mantle and have us going to say, yeah, Erica Kirk. So Erica Kirk gave a stunning strong, forceful, beautiful tribute to her husband and his work. I'm just days after he was killed. She's fantastic.

26:34She really is. She is clearly she clearly has a fierce faith. It will serve her well as she moves forward. A lot of not low profile, not rando people on the left were coming at her for supporting her husband's vision. In the in the wake of his death and looking a little mad about it. Yeah, she should be mad about it guys. Yeah, she should be mad about it. And if she wants to channel that energy into supporting the thing that her husband died doing, she should do that. Absolutely. That's a perfect way to more actually. Yeah, I thought her speech was incredible. How strong she is. And look, I'm full of anger. I could just imagine where she is. And the fact that she was able to deliver those beautiful words so shortly after his murder. And you know, people are like, oh, we need somebody to unite us. She has been a uniting figure in this terrible, terrible time.

27:34I'm fully supportive of her taking on. Yeah, I'm going to be on his window defense duty for like the next two years for Erica. Like as she may never know who I am, but I'm going to be out here like y'all need to shut up. She's doing a great job. She's fantastic. She's getting it done. Yeah, it's a hard job in front of her. And she's approaching it with with really impressive strength. So did we ever imagine that so much of the attacks on Erica would be coming from, you know, friends of Charlie's people who say that they loved him and care about him. Did we ever think that Candace Owens would implicate Erica in his murder and that she would gain millions and millions of followers because of this. I don't think we ever saw that coming. Yeah, I mean, as we noted before, this is something that should transcend politics period, wherever we want to gather together and say, oh, people should not be killed on college campuses for disagreeing with people.

28:37In the absence of that, you would think at least political allies and friends could rally behind the widow of this man murdered live for people to see who left two young kids and a wife behind. And yet, I think there were some hints on the left originally that that was going to be their tack was going to go after Erica Kirk and then they kind of laid off because they were like, I guess Candace is going to do it for us. Right. That's she's she's going to handle that. And this is the this is the thing that worries me about online culture is that a lot of I think formerly normal people get drawn in. Yeah, it's sort of soap opera true crime. Real people's lives and real people's pain. And it's not good. Friends, a lot of friends fall into that trap. Yeah. Today, fire released their college free speech rankings and it's, you know, interesting because Charlie Kirk was specifically somebody who went to college campuses and made speeches and answered.

29:48Questions and engaged and so many colleges are just not interested in anything like that happening on their campuses. I have to tell you in first place is University of Chicago, which I I see as a very free speech focused university. Overall, great according to fire is B minus. So the first place college across the whole country according to fire has a B minus in free speech. And that's not great. No. Sort of surprised to see Georgia Tech at three. That's yeah. The idea of Vanderbilt representing the SEC and that in that top five glad to see it much of the SEC. I have been very grateful has been really good on the encampment issue and on making sure that Jewish students can live in peace and campuses. Yeah, but like the idea that the top is a B minus. Right.

30:48Well, it's because 29% of students at the University of Chicago, the number one free speech college in the country, say using violence to stop someone from speaking on campus is acceptable. I mean, and it's qualified by at least in rare cases. Like, yeah, I hope it's not every speaker that you think, you know, but that's an astronomical number. And I know that that number only goes up from here. So again, the best school has 29% of students thinking it's okay to use violence. And here we are a year later where, you know, somebody was murdered for their views on a college campus. What are we doing here that college students are not able to accept other viewpoints without thinking that these people should be heard? I mean, it's literally supposed to be the purpose of college to encounter other views. And if you train at it, it becomes part of your life.

31:51You and I encounter other views all the time, all the time. Yeah. 72% of kids at University of Chicago say shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus is acceptable. Again, at least in rare cases, 72% think shouting down a speaker is sometimes okay. Like, I, you know, I'm thinking what, like, and the in rare cases does nothing because, yeah, what speaker would I think is okay to shout down? There was plenty of speakers this election season, you know, in Florida, we had two pretty much open Nazis running for election. I still don't think it's okay to shout them down. I still don't think that it's okay to kill them or hurt them or physically injure them in any way. So how do we get to where college kids understand that? And we lost a huge voice in that direction in Charlie Kirk. There is just a, unfortunately, a generational lack of understanding about what's good about

32:54the First Amendment, why it's important to offensive speech, why it's important to defend defensive speech because because of the cancel culture, so many of these students having no foundation in the First Amendment and why it's so well, if I stood up for something offensive, like, they're going to cancel me, why would I do? And so it's important to model that for people, but also there needs to be like some remedial work on the first, which I think places like University of Chicago actually do not just do. Yeah, professors, right? Teachers don't know either. Yeah. And look, every time I write about college campuses, I say, you know, University of Chicago is one of my, you know, I don't know what my daughter's going to end up, but it's one of my top choices for her because of the free speech issue. So yeah. Well, good job to those who are fighting the fight. I know it's hard on college campuses. It really is. I go to college campuses and they're like, ooh, this year a little too much. Like at Brown, Guy Benson was considered a security threat.

33:56Like he had to have like a whole evacuation plan at Brown University. So it's, they're really, he can sometimes say some crazy things that Guy Benson, they've got a long way to go is what I'm saying. They need to climb slowly in the correct direction because we are losing ground. I mean, just, just as, as far as intellectual resilience, you're creating people and students and professionals that then populate the workplace who have no ability to work with others who disagree with them and just pound people psychologically for doing so. Yeah. Yeah, we don't want those people around. Well, it's not good. Let's take a short break and be right back with one more segment of normally. All right, we are back on normally with a segment about how to be a human in a relationship with Carolyn M. K. Do we like this? This may be a recurring segment because people are really struggling with this.

34:59Do we like to dull out advice a little bit? Yeah, we're not perfect, but we have some ideas. Should we start with haircut lady? That haircut lady, let's do it. Let's play a little bit. Let's see haircut lady's video. She's gone viral. I don't like to be told what to do. Never have. Never well. Sorry, don't care who you are. Don't tell me what to do. So if you want me to do something, you're going to have to say the opposite and trick me and doing that. Whatever it is you want me to do. But anyway, my husband didn't like my haircut the other day. He didn't say he didn't like it, but in a roundabout way, he did. He said, I got my haircut colored, okay? I come home. He says, hmm. What do you mean? What do you mean? He said. My shorter, huh? You sure did? Obviously. Yeah, I did. Does that mean you don't like it? He said, no, no. It's five. It's five. Shorter. If you say shorter one more time, I will buzz my head. All off clean off. Bye. I would not say shorter again, sir.

36:00I didn't cut it for you. I'm also not going to grow it out for you. I don't do it for you. I do it for me. So. I don't know. Does anybody else like this, sir? Is it just me? I don't know. This is what I'm all about. Okay. Uh, unpopular opinion. I do look. I try to look good for my husband. It is for him. It actually is for him. Like, it's important. I don't even know. Also, can you imagine the reverse, a man like dying his hair blonde and his wife being like, ooh, what would you do? I'm like, say it again and I'm going to die my hair platinum blonde. Yes. Yes. By the way, women edit the way their men look all the time. All the time. Wife effect. There are tons of positive videos about it. First of all, I don't want to pile on her too much because as with all internet things, the pile on is disproportionate to what she has done here. And it's very misogynistic in many corners.

37:01So like, I think her hair looks very good, by the way. However, a couple clarifications. He didn't tell her what to do. At any point. At no point. Yeah. All he did was not effusively praise the change. And we want the truth, right? We don't want our husband lying to us. Like, what do you think? I don't know. Yeah. I think he's very quickly angry and defensive about this. And look, I might do weird. You and I might be weird. My love language is not words of affirmation. I definitely, I cleared this with my husband because one of the tips for having good relationships is not to talk about your spouse in public in negative ways without like having a discussion with them first. I cleared this with Steve, but I colored my hair one time. And you could tell it was not his favorite because he couldn't really hide it.

38:02And I was like, you know, you have a point. I think it's weird too. Right. And I think, as you said about the truth, I think there's a lot to be said for a man who doesn't lie to you even when it would benefit him to do so. Yes. Yes. Right. I don't want to hear flowery truth untruths. I want to hear the actual truth. I want to hear the truth about how I look. I want to hear the truth about, you know, did you like this dish I made? Why would I want lies? Like think about that. You cook something and your husband's like, this is amazing. And then you keep cooking it because you think he likes it. And it's like, why would I do that? Why would he live like this? Well, and there's something to be said for being nice and or not being needlessly mean. Right. But he didn't seem to be needlessly mean. He just was like, oh, it's shorter because he's trying to do the thing. And she mentions in another video because people have deep, deep dived on this that her husband's an engineer. So I guess what that would be that his personality type tends to lean toward not being able to do the effusive fake thing as an engineer.

39:13And like, don't take this to the public. It's not serving you. Exactly. There's another story that we were here to talk about where I mean, basically young people don't know how to meet each other. They don't know how to connect. And the story was from the times of London. Why my Gen Z mates don't have boyfriends. And this part still gout to me as a 27 year old lawyer friend with excellent cheekbones and a history of being happily boyfriend free said. You're asking for a date to compete with St. Barry's basics, the quality of my sheets, the depth of conversations I could have with my friends and the new face mask I bought. He is losing to the face mask every time. Man, this sounds like a kid say, cope. It sounds like hope. It sounds like I don't even need a man. I have my face mask like doc protest a bit too much. Yeah, I found this section surprising.

40:13So this is from the writer who now says she has a boyfriend her first ever boyfriend. She's circled back to it is like she says weirdly traditionalist as a 28 year old. She just wants to get married. Right. But this is how she reacted on a date earlier in the year. Last year last year I went on a date with a gorgeous man who ticked all my boxes. Funny clever, close with his family. Capable of asking a follow up question and unusually for a dating app exactly is advertised. Wow, seems like you should stick with that for a bit. After a fantastic date, I watched him select the wrong currency at an ATM and felt all interest evaporate on the spot. By the next tube station, I had remembered it and probably early start the next morning in flood. Not my finest moment. I just what I don't even know what does that mean the wrong currency. Like he even know what that means. $50 bet of my $1 I guess pounds in this case like I maybe so. Is it a person thing when she mad that he picked like British currency, but. The tyranny of the Ick yeah ladies like you can't there's this whole thing where it's like oh it gave me the Ick and it will be for the tiniest thing.

41:21Yes, right and it's like okay. That seems really uncharitable in the way that lady things were. Yeah, yeah. What if her husband got the Ick from her haircut would that be acceptable would be be like oh I'm. Got the Ick understandable you wanted a lady with longer hair and this is what what happened here no we'd be like that dude is the worst and we hate him and yeah women are allowed to get the Ick over anything. Anything and also I would I would submit to you that soldiering through the Ick on the currency at the ATM might be worth it for a gorgeous man who is funny and clever and ask follow. Follow up questions I'm glad she's with her current boyfriend. It seems like it's for her however ladies and then the men of course are not terribly motivated to jump into this pool either and one man who's 25 described having given up on dating completely I'm supposed to be successful but not work obsessed confident but vulnerable and masculine but not too masculine I spend most dates trying not to accidentally become a red flag and I.

42:30I understand that and then women are like where do they go where are they I don't know where they went off these young people I don't know I hope this insanity like skips a generation you know just get to get it gets it gets it out in this generation and then our kids get to be normal and and have normal relationships of normal people and we'll be here telling you guys about it like 15 years I know I think you need practice with real people in real life don't close yourself off from them. Sold yourself a little bit build some resilience and then don't put all your problems online. That's it. Thanks for joining us on normally normally airs Tuesdays and Thursdays and you can subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts get in touch with us at normally the pod at gmail.com. Thanks for listening and when things get weird act normally. Why do you listen to Armstrong getting on demand we're not boring lot of news is boring and tedious and pressing and makes you angry you don't want to live your life like that.

43:32Hey I'm Jack Armstrong he's Joe getting we're Armstrong and getting we try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world about something about a comedic tone. We have a winner. Listen Armstrong you get a on demand on the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.