The A&G Replay Friday Hour Three

0:00This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Broadcasting Live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio, the George Washington Broadcast Center. Yeah, Armstrong. He's so gady. I'm strong and gady. And now he is Armstrong and gady. He's gone in. He's in the into an Armstrong and gady replay. Oh, cruise taking a bit of an extended labor day weekend break. Hope you're having a good time and enjoying the Armstrong and gady replay. Galaxy, this is something Bill Gates has issued the occasional messages on how he sees AI and it's development and what it might bring in the future. And his latest is 12-page umdinger by Golly. Gates issued a start warning about AI's risks to employment in the human condition,

1:04saying that companies were barreling ahead with the technology and with no larger plan for the massive upheaval it would cause. Quote, even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history he wrote in a 12-page essay. All right, now we are not preparing for it. I don't see evidence that leaders, experts and communities are confronting the challenges adequately. One of the most turbulent times in human history is a heck of a thing to throw around. He decided to weigh in now apparently because he believes that there is not much time to prepare for the transition. That's what I was wondering when he says that, what's he feel like the horizon is? I don't think he was very, very specific if he has been, I haven't come across it, but I think he's a very, very important person. I don't think he was very, very specific if he has been, I haven't come across it, but I think he's a very important person. I think he's a very important person. I don't think he's a very important person. I don't think he was very, very specific if he has been, I haven't come across it, but he's going to DC like now. He says he wants to talk to lawmakers, quote, you have a chance to act now before unemployment rises sharply, communities are hurting and public trust his eroded.

2:06Eroded further, thanks. That's interesting what he said there about the companies having no plan. That's not really their job or arena. I mean, how could they? I'm trying to think of an example, but like when the car industry came along, you know, there was a, when cars became really popular, there was a very big concern that all of a sudden we had mobile bedrooms. And people were able to make out and have sex in cars. For the first time ever, you got a mobile bedroom, you used to have to either get a hotel or be at home. That was just like swept the nation. I've read a bunch of articles about that from way back ending in 40s and 50s. It's really kind of hilarious and retrospect, but it wasn't the car industry's duty to come up with a plan for that. That was a byproduct of this new invention. Isn't it the same with AI? Yeah, I'm venin in this AI. It's a computer thing. It can learn itself, whatever it like that. What's it going to do to people working?

3:07I don't know you figured out what's going to go right. And boy, this is a, this leads to an incredibly important tangent that I'll try to keep kind of brief. But yeah, let the companies pursue their self-interest because it's when government gets involved and mixes some politicians view opinion on what the public interest is with the private interest that all of a sudden the free market gets completely skewed. Government itself becomes screwed up and you're better off letting the free market function and then government stepping in where government should work. Yeah, I like Bill Gates weighing in on this because I think we've all gotten bamboozled a little bit on this, including myself, like the AI, the people making these things like Altman and Elon and Amode, it's their job to figure out how humanity is going to adjust to it. No, it's not. Right. And the only reason they're spinning it positively is so people will continue to invest and support it.

4:08Right. But they don't need to come up with a plan. A few more specifics because it's good to start today with existential angst. Much of his essay focused on jobs, noting that entry and mid-level jobs are most at risk of being eliminated. He argued that AI will soon also affect blue collar work and the breadth and speed make it different from other workplace transitions. And he states the move from agriculture to office work and that took generations. But that sectors like law, customer service software and manufacturing will feel a eyes impact over the course of a single decade. And when AI can produce error-free work, if ever, it will be able to function on its own without a human checking in on it and companies will have very economic, I'm sorry, every economic incentive to let it need a strong, much stronger safety net. Many points out when factories closed, many locals saw more opioid deaths. Imagine similar pressures on both white collar and blue collar workers nationwide.

5:09And then one more note, both of my kids are going to be living in my house for the rest of my life. That's correct. Get a bigger house. If you're going to afford it, Gates stressed the risk of cyber attacks on the grid, hospitals and banks. Fraud and surveillance will be widespread. AI will also enable governments to use deadly force without a human's input. It's funny. We have a tendency to talk about AI and the Chinese robots in warfare. Then we talk about AI and what it's going to do to the workplace. Then we talk about AI and criminal abilities to hack into everything and act like those all three aren't going to be happening at the same time. It's not like those are separate entities, it's separate errors. They're all going to be happening at the same time. It's not a checklist. It's a flood. Yeah. One more thought on relationships, Gates and I think he's right stressed that AI can be an echo chamber, which could have profound effects on children.

6:11Chatbox or a dictative and can be a source of friction-free companionship unlike humans and can worsen critical thinking. This would be the worst possible time for humans to lose their critical thinking skills. In an era of deep fakes and misinformation that can be tailored to you individually, the ability to tell what is true from what is not becomes an essential life skill. That's easy for you to say he's a super genius. He's called for taxes on AI tokens. Are you familiar with the term token? No. That's a unit of computing power. I've got my little AI company and I pay one of the many companies that is building the data centers for a certain number of tokens so I can do my AI stuff. Bill, upstein Gates, and this money the government gets from these tokens, what are they going to do with this? What's the genius plan for that? Well, these tokens, these taxes could delay companies rush away from human labor and those taxes could also fund the social safety net for restraining people whose jobs won't exist.

7:14So part of it. So part of it is a punishment to slow them down. Nobody's slowing down China. And then the other end is a safety net, which I don't have a lot of optimism on crafting safety nets. So that part I didn't like of the Bill Gates spiel. Yes, I'm not sure what the alternative is and neither does anybody else. It's I don't know why he just hadn't occurred to me before. Maybe I'm the only one, but it's almost funny that the industry, the heavy weights discussing how we're going to handle the problem of AI is with the people that are making it. They didn't need to do that at all. Well, when Bill Gates, when you unfended the internet, I don't remember people putting up big pieces. You putting out a big piece about how the internet was going to destroy people's lives. Maybe you didn't understand that, but it made all kinds of stuff bad and good. But you didn't. Wasn't your job to figure out the bad stuff? Why is it a nice job to figure out the bad stuff? That's an interesting philosophical and governmental question, because if you are putting out a product that is just patently dangerous,

8:21then yes, you need to figure out how to make your product less dangerous. But if it's dangerous because of how productive it is, that's the word into a weird gray area. And again, dislocation and a lot of you I know and I want to tip my cap to your opinion. Thank you, dudes. This is like the steam engine and the cotton gin and everything else. It will create jobs. It will not remove them. I hope you're right. I don't think you are. I am voicing that so they are part of the discussion. I pray they're right. And I always thought I have a pretty good imagination, but maybe I just lack imagination as to how that will look. But friends, here is the rub. Even if you believe that, that in spite of the massive amount of change, we can adjust and reallocate resources and labor in the rest of it. It's the pace of change that will be so mind blowing. And it's the sort of thing governments have never had to deal with.

9:21I mean, hell, slow pace demographic change, they suck at. I mean, a great piece, Holman Jenkins Wall Street Journal today, he's talking his message was essentially, hey, socialists, we've already run out of other people's money to spend. Look at the United States, look at our budget. The budget is the safety net. Everything else is a minor part of the budget with rising interest rates. We've already run out of money for our social safety net tax, the billionaires, the oligarchs, yeah, we know. But anyway, if they're that bad at adjusting to the very slow graying of America, picture of all that S happens in a month and a half. So is all this talk from Elon about we want you money in the future and it'll will have 10 times the economy or 30 times the economy or whatever. And the same thing from the other big leaders, is that all just to try to have some positive news out there about AI because without that, it would be all negative?

10:21Well, to your question specifically, Elon is absolutely brilliant, but he has huge blind spots too. And this might be one of them, the socio economic realities, what he's talking about. One of his big blind spots is everybody ain't like you, dude. We're not all super geniuses who only care about working and getting to Mars. Right, that's what I work really hard on that because as an iconoclast, also known in some quarters as a weirdo, I've tried to understand that, okay, my perception is different than a lot of people's. Wow, I have a completely new perspective of this whole thing now because of that Bill Gates piece and I can't believe that I didn't notice this. It's not the industry's job to figure out the downside. When has it ever been? No, we need to depend on government. We need to depend on us. We're the government, but the idea of taxing them to the point that there's too slow that we can figure it out, that's a terrible idea.

11:25That's a terrible idea, Bill. Sorry. You think I spent too much time on the island? Oh, that was out of the line. Jack Armstrong and Joe Gettyshow. Jack Armstrong and Joe Gettyshow. As three tigers performed in a Russian circus recently, the ring itself came down and one of the tigers jumped right out into the crowd, frowning around a few people screens. Others tried to shield their children and at least one just kept on filming as a circus worker walked right up to the big cat, Brave Guy. Where was that that happened where the tiger got loose? Russia. A Russian circus. Used to be, you could attend a Russian circus and be a share of high quality, not anymore. That's one thing about living in the United States is sometimes because we go way too far with our safetyism and lawyers and people getting sued.

12:33But you do anything and you can assume it's safe. If I'm in a foreign land, if I'm in Mexico and a circus, I think do they have these tigers under control? You don't know. Well, right. I think anybody's traveled a lot of his had the experience of I've not attended a bullfight and I won't, but I've seen them on a video, a film, whatever. I think it, boy, that fence is low. Fences really low. And sure enough, there'll be a bull charging around goring people 10 minutes later. We'll check in on the war with Iran in the US. We would have a 25 foot fence with razor wire that tilted inward and then a big screen in case the bull, you know, spat or something like that to protect everybody or way the other way. Sorry. Go ahead. Since you just brought up the whole safety is I was reading a piece in the dispatch by somebody who was living in England and come into the United States and how the helicopter we are in this country compared to England even and like the percentage of kids that walk or ride their bike to school is like half an England in the United States.

13:45It's now like 10% whereas it used to be half not that many decades ago, but it's dropped off a cliff because we don't feel like, you know, it's okay for kids to walk down walk to blocks or half a mile or ride their bike or whatever. Like we used to got more probably way more closer to the schools in general now than they were we were decades ago. I mean there. Fewer people. You know, we're more suburban now than we were back then. Yeah, I happen to read that piece and they point out that some of our zoning rules and regs and laws in America have caused a really weird layout of our society. But I thought it was interesting. They made the point that in England at least their perception was nobody would have blinked at leaving your 10 year old at home by themselves for a couple of hours were in the United States. It's seen as literally a crime some places right. So we got this note from Scott who says this sentence is actually grammatically correct.

14:49And some of the buffaloes in the sentence are capitalized. I'm going to clap my hands to indicate when something is capitalized. That's interesting. Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo. He says it's actually grammatically correct. And means the bison from Buffalo that are bullied by other bison from Buffalo also bully bison from Buffalo. And yes, I'm aware of bison is is subtly different than a buffalo. But I have gone over this and gone over this. I am far past the point where you know if you say a word often enough, it just becomes a collection of sounds and doesn't have meaning anymore. And you start to get addict. I'm way down that road. But Scott with all due respect, I have studied this now for 10 minutes as a grammar Nazi. And I don't think it's correct. You need to well, the first I can get to first three words.

15:49Makes sense to me. Yeah, Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo for forward. Yeah, those four words definitely were as a sense. Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo. But to to to write out what you've stated, it means you need number one past tense. And I believe a dash. I'm going to clap my hands again. The first one is capitalized merely because it's the first set word in the sentence, but it does also the proper name of the city in New York. Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo. Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo the city of Bulleed city of Buffalo Buffalo Dash Buffalo Buffalo's because you need

16:51the the the the plural there Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo so while they are while they are victims of Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo's Buffalo they in turn are Buffalo blowing their fellow Buffalo Buffalo right which is really a study of human nature Buffalo nature or something that might be the funniest clip you've ever played Michael Scott thanks for giving me a headache please clap please clap oh Lord oh I need to lie down the Armstrong and Gettyshow yeah or Jack or Joe podcasts and our hot links at Armstrong and getty dot com yeah come strong and Joe getty the Armstrong and getty show the national debt hitting a

17:54staggering milestone topping 40 trillion dollars for the first time a big portion of the spending is coming from rising defense costs including the war in Iran in addition to safety net programs like social security and Medicare interest on the deficit and President Trump's tax cuts yeah the exploding debt is already hitting Americans with higher borrowing costs and raising the cost of living nice job ABC is that ABC nice job ABC I expect that to MS NBC yeah the 40 trillion dollar debt is because of the war in Iran and Trump's tax cuts she could have been reading aloud from the New York Times account and I quote uh uh uh uh uh uh uh on track to borrow more than blah blah blah including spending on the war in Iran and sweeping tax cuts that Republicans enacted in 2025 oh my god that is so landish here's your lead America's gross national debt top 40 trillion dollars for the first time on Wednesday on ominous milestone for an economy that sits on a shaky fiscal foundation after decades

18:55of borrowing to pay for the rising costs of the military is the first thing all of them mentioned right social safety net programs and President Trump's tax cuts just a point of interest national defense is 13% of the budget Social Security plus Medicare plus quote unquote health is 40% 40% then you add income security and veterans benefits and services which we are in favor of certainly so you're looking at like 50% of the budget to 13 is social safety net programs but all the media lists defense first and actually is dead and of course the war with Iran is adding to our debt but it's such it's to call it a drop in a bucket would be overstating it in terms of book the cause of the fact that we're at a 40 trillion dollar debt and it being unsustainable is one

19:57of the many reasons why we're never going to deal with this until we collapse get the rest of a report because this is an interesting point she made. This didn't happen overnight under both Republicans and Democrats the government has been spending more than it makes in taxes for 26 years on everything from health care to stimulus benefits to tax cuts and spending and just like those credit card bills the longer you ignore it the worse it gets the tougher the choices. I remember we used to talk about March signs book America alone a lot back when it came out but there's a great chart in there making the point at whether it's a Republican whether it's a Democrat whether it's good times whether it's bad times why no matter what divided government yes one party government doesn't matter what's going on we spend more than we take in and then to infer news sources to like to put it on Trump is just

20:58hilarious especially when the big driver of the whole thing is is the welfare state. Sure. Sure. Is Trump guilty of the same thing all the rest of our of course he is but he's not more guilty than Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, all the presidents have added to this over the years. Yeah. And not dealt with or that you really should put it on the Congress more than the president. Congress doesn't deal with it. They should suck it up and bite the bullet and all come together and risk getting boot of out of office to deal with these things like a long long time ago. Wow courage and morality that's cute. Yeah our debt to GDP is unprecedented except in a world war. And we're essentially at peace certainly by the standards of world wars and our economy is roaring and there's absolutely no excuse for this one final but net I would like to pick the idea that tax cuts

21:59were our responsible for this is obscenely twisting the truth. Now as a budgetary analysis I get that but I think those of us who are a lovers of liberty and limited government and be sane understand the lover of my own money staying in my pocket. Yeah that's true. You've got to look at government in terms of zero-based budgeting. A tax cut is not an expenditure and to suggest that it is is again twisting the truth you know standing the truth on its head. It's just a question of spending. Yeah sure works politically though. Now if you want to talk about balancing a budget and say well we've got to have a certain level of taxation okay fine but if my taxes are cut that doesn't have money go out of the treasury. They never had that money. So anyway I think everybody gets the point but just you know it's funny I'm feeling

22:59very discouraged today because our politics is utterly uninterested in doing the right thing and our media is utterly uninterested in a honesty and be doing the right thing. I feel like I'm guilty of calling everything the biggest story in the world but this is truly the biggest story America should be. It's the biggest one we ignore certainly. Yeah and for several reasons tip of the cap to Rush Limbaugh what year was it that he made so much got so much attention for saying nobody cares about the national deficit or the debt. And he got a fair amount of pushback but he was right. He got pushback from fiscal conservatives and you can't say that the Republican platform is we care about the debt. No it's not it's it's kind of like the the saying we really like about your priorities are what you do not what you say they are. Look at the end of the day what did you spend your time on that was your priority whether you call it your priority or not.

24:00If you spent more time scrolling your phone than you did talking to your kid then your priority is scrolling your phone that's just a fact. But if you are a party who doesn't do anything about the debt you can't claim it's your priority. No it's a pose. Yeah so good on Rush Limbaugh when he finally just announced nobody cares about it. And understand he wasn't saying that nobody should care about it. No he's just saying that no there's no constituency for this we're over we've gone around the bend. Nobody cares. And again take today since we hit $40 trillion to say some of the things have said before that I know our downers are not fun. But my favorite analysis of this I've ever heard a year so ago was you've all 11 who's one of the smartest people out there talking about those likely thing that's going to happen with this debt. And this is depressing. It's not some day where we all wake up and oh my god the sky is falling

25:01and this and that no it's just we're going to slowly over time become a less dynamic country where it's much less likely that you can start a business and move up the the socio economic ladder and have more than your parent had and all that sort of thing will just become like France and Great Britain and it's not going to be all of a sudden and a headline and what do we do about this it's going to gradually just change us into something much much worse and remember in a system like that you get much less liberty because the government needs everybody to follow the million and six rules so we will become very much like Britain and France and it's just it's incredibly different. Taxes will be higher, services will be less and not just like regular income taxes going to be everything every kind of fee you can possibly imagine will be attached to everything to try to just stay a float all the time. Right right yeah um so I find myself

26:02discouraged about the the very topic I was tempted on leash my brilliant screed about inflation now in cities it is but nobody cares nobody cares I got a question though so I'm always complaining about financial statistics that don't include inflation when they announce that spider man is the biggest opening in movie history and a quick look at inflation calculator will tell you that's not even the biggest opening in the last 10 years let alone in in history because of inflation and all that sort of stuff same with like you know this major league baseball player the highest paid player ever well no here's somebody in 1998 who actually is making more money on inflation but you get that how does that factor into the 40 trillion dollar debt how do you how do you adjust for inflation on that? That's that's an excellent question I was talking about the other side of that coin earlier where one of the strategies politicians use and and and central banks use um to survive in honest debt is you inflate your currency

27:03you pump more and more your currency into the market so that that million dollars you owed um is much less significant today than it was when you borrowed it five years ago because a million dollars isn't worth what it used to be so you can inflate your way out of debt the problem is folks I think you're probably way ahead of me that's an insidious tax they've taxed your income they've taxed your savings they've reduced the value of everything you've busted your ass to get together in your life so they can continue to overspend to buy votes and to pay off their cronies so and I'm sorry so oh so how do you look at debt with that uh a perspective so forty trillion dollars similar to the spider-man opening not as big as it sounds adjusted for inflation just six years ago or is it yes well yes and that's why it's such a great question yes except that our ability to pay it off has also been

28:04right weekend like debt precisely the same rate uh now okay so all right we got forty trillion dollars in debt good news general motor's just sold it just paid you know a billion dollars in taxes well okay so that forty trillion eight what it used to be neither is that billion dollars yeah that's a good point because those those go change at the same rate like I don't have to pay a bill for the spider-man movie uh the fact that it went up if I did then you know my money right went up what right yeah yeah uh yeah and and and just so you know and ninety percent I really love to talk to like top political consultants and I kind of asked Karl Rowe this question when we're hanging out with him at the RNC a couple of years ago um but what percentage of politics is aimed at people who have no idea what they're talking about we have asked that question is so many smart people and they never answered honest no no never they never even come close to say look we

29:05know a political scientist behind the scenes know that whatever the number is and it might be shockingly high twenty eight percent of people don't have any idea what they're talking about none I think you mean seventy eight and Charles Krauthammer hinted at that um in his the things that matter he said look politics is stupid and grubby but if you win at that then you get to do the things that matter so I think those pros would tell you well yeah the vast majority of people have no idea what they're talking about their eyes glazed over one fifth of the way through your little explanation of inflating your way out of debt and so all your efforts are wasted I appreciate the effort it's super cute they pat me on the head and say but I gotta go get votes and I get it but what what I was starting to say was trust me the uh the politicians in the central banks of the world they haven't heard my screen about inflating your way out of debt and said oh my god no they're like yes that's what we do of course that's what we do you silly fool but no voters understand it wow

30:07Japanese robots take me now Chinese but what Chinese robots take me now I'm sorry I was looking at the television I just saw race racist if you've seen the race where they got the robots running and they they run faster than you've seen both but one of them runs up the track and straight into a wall no but I wish I'd seen it I think I have seen that yeah it's really good anyway we've got all this stuff all the way stay here I'm strong and getty show I'm strong and getty show I'm strong and getty the book to read on this topic is called Joseph Anton I read it a couple of years ago by Salman Rushdie that's the name he lived under not a pseudonym he wrote under because he wanted to have a cool pen name no it's the name he hid from murderous Islamic thugs he had to live under that name

31:08for many many years away from his kids and wife and all of his friends for fear of being killed by Islamists because of a book he wrote right Jonathan Rosen wrote a brilliant piece for the free press that really made an impression on me and he he talks about the very things Jack mentioned and he remembers hearing about the fatwa he had recently dropped out a graduate school he was a writer himself and he said it seemed absurd that a best-selling novel is born in India living in London famous around the world might be murdered because the octogenarian ruler of an Islamist the ocracy thousands of miles away had called for his head like the red queen shouting off with her hands in Alice in Wonderland and then he said and though the Iatola died four months later it soon became apparent that Rushdie's novel was no match for a few sentences read over the radio calling on quote all valiant Muslims wherever they may be to kill the author of the satanic verses and anyone else who helped bring his blasphemous book

32:09into the world and there's a lot more to this and I touch on it as time allows but the takeaway for me was the calling card the announcement by the Iatola on behalf of fundamentalist Islam is that if you offend us we will kill you and everyone you work with wherever you are on earth till the end of time see we have that right see the bombing last weekend in New York City all right right right which goes on and he makes the point among others that Rushdie was persuaded to make a public apology in the early days of his death sentence his forever global death sentence and the dying Iatola fired back quote even if Salman Rushdie becomes the most pious man of all time it is incumbent on every Muslim to employ everything he has his life

33:10in his wealth to send him to hell that's fundamentalist Islam folks there it is there it is well and what Rushdie couldn't believe well first of all he got stabbed what now a couple of years ago he got attacked on a stage by a Muslim lunatic almost died lost his eye and I haven't read knife where he describes that whole thing because it sounds to gruesome for me but back in the time of the the fatwa Rushdie was so amazed at how many governments including his own where he lived in Great Britain made statements of we shouldn't be offending Muslims and that's we stand on the side of you know those respect yes exactly that's right now they didn't take the side of free speech they took the side of let's not offend the radical Muslims wow I just to ask you to you know get some of the garbage off you're lawn and you're going to murder me now I don't think the sin was asking hey any chance

34:10you'll clean that up but you know I haven't come up with much to Liz who worth listening to in the past 30 years I know but one thing I I used to say about Portland is they think they can passive their way out of this and a lot of the western world thought and some still think although like in Britain and France that are waking up in hurry in Germany and Sweden and other places they think they can passive their way out of fundamentalist Islam it's a terrible terrible mistake but let me read just a little more Rosen's piece the question remains urgent even after the joint American and Israeli strikes on the early morning of feb 28 to mark a new phase in the long war waged by the Islamic Republic of Iran which came into the world chanting death to America and death to Israel I've been thinking a great deal about the fatwa now that the murderous regime the Ayatollah founded in 1979 is teetering on the bloody brink because it may yet be that all of the proxies nurtured over the years by the Islamic Republic for its apocalyptic showdown with the Jewish

35:10state and the west after all the billion spent on Islamist militias ballistic missiles and global terrorism plus half a trillion on its nuclear weapons program and pursuit of its endlessly repeated aim of quote wiping Israel off the map it is a few sentences read aloud on radio toron mere breath that will remain its most successful method of exploring exporting the Islamist revolution even after the murderous regime it created goes down the arms strong and getty show yeah more jack more show podcasts and our hot links at our strong and getty dot com the fantastic podcast that you gotta listen to every day it's got jack and Joe Katie and Michael Angelo is called on strong and getty on demand subscribe now wherever you download your podcasts on strong and getty on demand one more time strong and getty on demand