The A&G Replay Monday Hour Four

0:00This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. This is an I Heart Podcast.

1:00This is an I Heart Podcast. This is an I Heart Podcast.

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3:00This is an I Heart Podcast. It depends what position you play. Offensive line, bang their head on every play. Practically. That's an exaggeration. Bang heads on a hell of a lot. On a punter. Yeah. Good. Good way to make a living. So a bunch of OSHA officials are quoted. One who's the head of OSHA for a number of years said this is clearly the 25%. This is clearly a minimum. it is the numbers astoundingly high. They don't address his reasoning for that, but another

4:05former OSHA official, the chief scientist Adam Finkel called it apocalypticly high, noting that Russian roulette carries better odds. To him, a risk of one in a hundred would be an epidemic, but 25 percent, we never see things that are this dire, he says. I shot off my mouth on a sports talk show a couple of years back, and I think it's why I never got asked to return saying that based on the data that had come out at that time, I didn't see how youth football was going to continue to last. I think I predicted that it, I can't imagine it in 10 years from now, and that might have been 10 years ago. And it seems to be going strong. I thought lawsuits would kill it. I mean, we live in a world where all kinds of things we get rid of because somebody might get sued. When you got this kind of evidence for the damage that's done by tackle football, I am surprised. And I don't want to eliminate football. I'm not sure I'm not trying to argue to go away. It's just I'm shocked that there haven't been enough lawsuits or threats of lawsuits or worry about lawsuits, I guess, that it hasn't ended youth football. If you're talking

5:07about CTE though, why are you suing? Unless the person is dead, you have no case, because you can't diagnose it. Well, I thought at some point, people would die and go back to and start suing colleges and high schools and that sort of thing. And then I thought it would already have happened. And then that would just be the end of youth sports. Or yeah, football anyway, not track and field or badminton or anything else. But I first of all, for the record, I agree with your premise completely. I'm just thinking through the logistics of it because you've got a this this knowledge is fairly new. I guess the first CTE stuff we heard about was a good decade ago. Wasn't it when we interviewed that doctor been quite a while? Yeah. But the knowledge is definitely in the emerging stage right now. And then you've got the lag between the damage being done and anybody knowing it had been done, which could be decades in most cases. So you've just got the time horizon

6:11problem. And then legally speaking, it's 35 years later, 40 years later, you're suing your hometown youth football league, I guess. So it's just a time span problem at this point. Yeah. But isn't it inevitable? Yes, something like that. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. And even if it's very rare and unlikely that your kid, because your kid is almost certainly almost guaranteed, almost university, you could say nearly 100% of kids who play football are not going to play pass high school. Almost nobody. It's going to be like play pass high school. And so you probably haven't accumulated enough that who knows how much damage you've done by then. But either way, if you start, if people start getting the pants sued off because one kid that did make it to the NFL can trace it back to high school, then that's the end of that. I have a strong

7:11feeling you've kind of previewed where the science is going. You will have to have a massive survey of the brains of people who played football at various levels after they pass and then document, okay, you play a couple of years of high school football. We're not really seeing anything. Yeah. You play all four years. Oh, there's the first inkling on through college, et cetera. You're you're point about the speed and and and violence of the NFL. I wonder how much that plays of the role of the hits just being more forceful, you know, though Isaac Newton, force times mass sort of situation that is much greater at that level than it is in high school to that point. I had a friend I used to work with years ago. He was a big high school football star, like big star state honors, all kinds of sort of stuff. Then he went and played at a smaller college for a while. And then he was good enough. He got moved up to a bigger, way more competitive college. And he was talking about, I was asking him about what that situation

8:13like. And he said, everybody's a star. He said, my whole life, I'd always been like the star or one of the stars. And then I got to that level. Everybody was a star like everybody was great. But he said the hits were so much harder, just like blindingly harder. And so and that was like a mid level college pretty well known program, not top level division one and certainly not the NFL. So I wonder how much that makes a difference. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good question. I don't know. I think that science will probably be emerging as, you know, over the next decade or two. If you're a big fast guy, you probably go through all of high school football, you supply all of the pain and receive very little. Then that starts to change as you go up the ladder. And you started to run other people that are as big as fast as you are. For what it's worth the rate of this brain disease among people who have not played football or who have not sustained repeated

9:16impacts to the head, it's nearly zero. It doesn't really exist except from blows to the head just for the record. Yeah. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. CT was first discovered in Boxers nearly a century ago and turned to dementia, pugilistica. Symptoms can include memory loss, confusion, noncharacteristic mood swings, decreases in executive function, increases in erratic and in pulse of behavior, including addiction. Wow. That's really interesting. I wonder what the NFL is going to do with this. Hmm. Not good. Yeah. There's a lot of money on the line too. Tons. Armstrong and Getty. The Armstrong and Getty show. So you're Katie, both Jim Ratt. So I need your advice. I haven't mentioned this because I just made it to me the other day say I used to be a Jim Rat. And I like, wow, how did that get

10:20started? Right. Yeah. I confessed to for most of my golfing life to being a range rat as the college guys who just really like to make it a connotation. How did they become a positive connotation? You may recall my daughter had a pair of fancy rats as pets there for a while. So rats is much more neutral in my world. That's right, Katie. They were absolutely lovely. There are a number of different varieties of fancy rats and hardly ever gave you a hunt or the plague. They're very intelligent and I have some rats. So I get it. I have you. Excellent. So rats, not just for the plague anymore. But so I haven't mentioned it since Thursday. Thursday and Friday, I could barely do the show. I was in so much pain. And I can still now barely walk as I was working out with my trainer fellow who I've been with quite a while and I like it very much. But and we're doing kettlebell swings. I won't do those by the way. But what is it?

11:22It's it's you take the and it's very important you do this right now. I'm familiar with with dinner bell dinner bells. My thing. That's a go. You may be a redneck. Anyway, so before I before I get into that, I so I had some horrifying back problems and fix them. This will not work for everybody with fitness strengthening the cord and stretching stretching stretching stretching because it was putting pressure on my pelvis and bent my spine. And then I kept going because for my two joint replacements and everything my legs get really weak. So because I loved to play golf and it's important to me, which is stupid. I've been working with a trainer who's a part of the titleist performance institute, working on golfy stuff to make my legs stronger and generate more speed and blah blah blah, even at my advanced age. But anyway, so I'm doing these workouts primarily not just for golf, but quality of life as well and growing old well. But golf is a big priority, right?

12:22I have missed cumulatively probably now seven weeks of golf this year from getting hurt. Working out. And I'm like, what am I doing? I can't play it all. So I'm going to take a look at the advantages or disadvantages. The, you know, the debt versus liability, whatever. So she does not good. Yeah. Regularly in my gym classes, they want us to do kettlebell swings. I won't do them. It's too much of an out of control motion that I don't trust myself to not tweak something. Right. There's other ways to get those muscle groups worked rather than swinging a kettlebell out of control. Right. Well, it's semi-encontrolled, but the way it stretches you and then you apply power and everything. It's just too, too, not good. Interestingly, I played golf over the weekend when I could, well, I didn't play actually. I just rode along with my buddies because I couldn't play.

13:27One of my good friends is a doctor and a good friend of his is an orthopedic doctor. And he was the trained, he was the head doctor for both the Cincinnati Reds and the Bengals. And he says, guys who tended to have tendon problems and muscle pulls, I would, I'm speaking in his voice, I would beg them, stop working out. If you want to do light workouts, fine, light workouts. Do your baseball skills stuff. Keep it very, very limited because you have the tendency genetic or otherwise that your tendons can't take it. So just, yeah, he said go really easy. I'm not getting it. Because he said those guys, I'm sorry, he said it's like three quarters of the guys I've seen the training room, they got hurt working out, not playing baseball. So I'm not getting paid for this, but have you ever used a TRX? Yeah, I'm from the moon. Do you know what that is? I don't know what it is. A TRX, it's actually developed by Navy SEALs and it's like a hanging structure that you can put

14:31over your door and it would hang the tally band or what? No, it's non-believers. What? Right, exactly. But it's just two handles and it relies completely on your judgment and your body weight. Oh, that's plenty of that. Yeah. But what if my judgment started very good? Has it been proven to you? That's a bad judgment. Lots of body weight. All right. All right. You guys just just shot. You know, actually, that was the speaking of the Cincinnati Reds guy. He was like, yeah, use your body weight and traditional exercises and stuff like that. You'll still be a great baseball player. I am so glad this conversation came up. So my doctor has been telling me for a while. I go to the gym every single day and I got no pains. Thank God. And I have never gotten hurt. Early doing anything. But my doctor said he said, just do high reps. Low weight. Don't get sucked into wanting to lift more weight once you're past like 40 or whatever. Yes. And I've done that pretty good. But it's an ego hit.

15:33It's definitely an ego hit to lift this minor amount of weight and just to make sure I don't get hurt. But I've known a lot of I've had tons of friends who got hurt working out, you know, lifting the heavy weight and you pull this and then you're out for like six months before you can get back in. And that amount of time you get so much weight and then you're more likely to blah, blah, blah, blah. You can get into a cycle where you never really work out again. So I'm going to rise it and ego hit to lift less because I'm a dude, I guess. I was at the gym the other day in this guy. No, I mean, there's big guys in the gym and they lift tons of weight and that doesn't bother me. They're younger, bigger than me, everything. But there's this guy. No, who's like in my age group and smaller than me and he was lifting, I've looked him over there on the bench. I thought, is that what it looks like? So I pretended I was just like stretching, going to get a drink and checked out to see what the size is. See what weight he was lifting over there. I thought, how is he lifting that much more than me? That's crazy. I used to be able to lift that up and I still can. And so I was I was I was going up in my way. Well, I maybe I still can,

16:37but maybe you can eight times, but the ninth time, then you're not lifting weights for a long, long time. And it does you, you know, way more harm than good. I'm glad we had this conversation. I'll go back to my let me let me lift in my okay, I was about to say something hurtful. My girl waits. No, wow, misogyny. Yeah, for what is worth Katie, I don't care about that stuff. At all, I worry about other dumb stuff. So I mean, I would rather be able to do 20 reps of a lighter weight than be screaming my way through eight of heavy. I'd like to be able to walk across a room. So that would be super good. So maybe it's time for a change. Oh, I'm going to admit to my weight. This is I hate looking at the bar with my little weights on the end. I can't. Yeah. And I can sick and tired of walking by people and say, is that red bit? I'm just so tired of it.

17:44The arm strong and getting show. Finally, the last planes got ready to leave with the remaining troops. The war was over. And I had to go do a press conference and report that fax. I was focused on the press conference. I'm the person who announced it. The last C17 lifted off from Hammond Karzai International Airport on August 30th this afternoon at 3.29 p.m. East Coast time. So that was five years ago yesterday. Our disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. That was a I think practically criminal failure of our government on every level from military to political tomorrow to our duty to our fighting men and women. It was such a miserable failure. I think I'd let the years go by a little bit and

18:48had let the details get fuzzy. But the Wall Street Journal just put out a damn near one hour documentary on the Afghanistan withdrawal that I watched yesterday and tweeted about and text to Jack. I found it difficult to go through as I was by turns. So angry. It was hard to watch. Then so second. It was hard to watch. Then so sad. It was hard to watch. And then back to angry again. It was at the light full 57 minutes spent. But it is a brilliant documentary. As Wall Street Journal released this so you don't have to be a subscriber to watch it or you have to be a Wall Street Journal subscriber either. I wish everybody would see it. I wish it was airing on I wish it aired on NBC last night or something like that. You know, one of those things where everybody in America tunes in like they did in the old days. And then we talk about it the next day. Absolutely. Well, one of the reasons it we don't do that is because we are where we are with our politics. And then you have to get into criticizing the Biden administration. And it becomes a

19:51you know, do you like Biden or Trump better or whatever. Which is part of why it was the way it was at the time. I mean, we were outraged five years ago when this was going on. There was enough known at the time that it was absolutely depressing and outrageous the way we exited Afghanistan and screwed all those people in Afghanistan who had helped us, screwed our own soldiers. I mean, it's just it's there's so many bad things going on in the story. It's it's unbelievable. Watch in that documentary from the Wall Street Journal. And if you have access it access to it. The path to zero. It's one of the most affecting documentaries I've ever seen in my life on so many different levels. Yeah. So let's let's let's start it this way. Well, I want to throw in is no part of the reason that this is able to be so good and powerful and honest is that a lot of the decision makers have now left the military. So they are no longer bound by the chain of

20:55command. They can't give up anything classified. You got to take that with you to the grave. But they can now say like Frank McKenzie general Frank McKenzie was the sent comm commander. He hated Biden's announcement that we're going to pull everybody out. And we're going to do it from the airport. And we're not going to keep Bogram Air Force base. He hated the decision. And he knew it was a disaster. And he tried to communicate that. But the White House wasn't having it. And then he watched the horror unfold in front of him, you know, even worse than he'd anticipated. And he's just he liked so many of the people, especially the young Marines are just still anguished by what they witnessed. Well, the pullout just in general, leaving behind that Air Force base that they made a good point of in the documentary how strategically important that was to us and could still be today in its proximity to Russia and China and Iran and all the, you know, the important countries we got to keep our eye on.

21:59And the fact that we let that go is just amazing. When the when the entire evacuation could have been done in an orderly fashion at our time table, but Biden was so intent on getting everybody out before the anniversary of September 11th, he said, no, no, no, just abandon the air base and then go to the airport. Even if everybody knew it was a horrible idea. That's a horrifying decision, even if it had been a somewhat orderly withdrawal, but it ended up being, if you remember, one of the most hellish scenes that has existed on planet Earth with all of those people attempting to get to the airfield so they could get on a plane and get out of there crawling across razor wire, hand in their babies across. We remember talking about this at the time are our military who are still alive. It's worth noting. Our military being put in the position of having to reject babies or whatever they were supposed to do. All of a sudden, you're trained to fight

23:00in wars and you're doing some sort of personnel mission at a at a at a a razor wire fence doing crowd control, with getting conflicting instructions every hour. With the tally ban about 20 feet away laughing at you, writing to shoot the people that you don't let in. I mean, it's just as awful as anything could be. Yeah, there was so affecting one young marine spoke of doing an eight hour shift in the middle of the night with an Afghan woman begging him the entire eight hours. Please sir, let me in the tally banter pointing at me. They're going to kill me. I don't have a husband. Please let me in and he couldn't for eight hours. He sat there listening to it and we're going to get into a little bit of what that does to a human being. Um, well, it's difficult to summarize other than saying it was a horrifying disaster and a preventable one on every single level. We should get to some clips through the documentary. Let me just throw this in though. I thought I wonder how the Sunday shows are going to handle the anniversary, the five year anniversary.

24:03NBC didn't talk about it at all. ABC this week in face the nation did, but they did a segment on it. And it was just so tap it compared to this is just, it's just like a nothing really. So disappointed. And again, as you pointed out, nobody's paid a price for this. Like nobody, nobody, certainly nobody went to jail or or was hung the way you should have or resigned or resigned or or even paid a political price for it. Right. Right. Partly because of the aid of the media, although they did report on this at the time, give us 83, 84 back to back, Michael. The way I like to discuss it is the, you know, tacked from tactical perspective is we accomplished the mission that we were given. And those young men and women executed that mission and got 124,000 people off of the runway that otherwise would not have gotten off. But how many of those people were the ones that we were trying to get out? That's the question I think I wrestle with is, is I do think that we've left a

25:05lot of people behind including my brother's interpreter. They never made it out. And he should be here in the States. And we left them. It's hard to think about these people that that we left behind. So you had a rush toward the airfield, toward the gates to try to get in of families. And what ended up happening is young strong men were able to push their way to the front and have a shot at maybe getting into the gate while women, children and old people were left behind. That's pretty awful. And so that's why sometimes when you look at those big, giant planes full of people, it's like all 20 something dudes because they knocked over kids and women to get to the front of the line to get out. And the Marines who are tasked with figuring out who to get in, who to get out, all the paperwork was faked. Again, they were getting conflicting instructions and had no idea what to do as tens of thousands of people who were dying in the streets,

26:09literally dying in front of them, including little children. In their own feces, they were begging to be let in. And these poor Marines were having to deal with this with terrible, terrible support from above is from the White House and the State Department on down. I want to get into this part. This is the narrator with a retired Marine who now to his credit heads up a nonprofit that deals with soldiers who suffer from moral injury, which they do a good job of explaining some of you may be familiar with the term. It's different from PTSD. It can be related, but it's when you have to either do something or watch something that is so repugnant to your own morals, you can never let it go. Bricks you. It does break you, including when the gates got crashed and there were tens of thousands of people in the airport. You may recall this. They

27:11couldn't fly anything in or out. The evacuation came to a standstill and the US didn't have the people and policies to do what it took. So they called in these zero units. Their CIA sponsored intelligence units of the Afghan army or Afghan military that literally ran people over in trucks and shot him till everybody was so panicked they left the airport. That's how they cleared the tarmacs and the Marines watched this happening. And then the higher ups throughout the documentary say we didn't get any official reports of that happening. And the narrators like all these Marines told me it happened. Well, I'm I will not tell you their line. But it just kind of got lost the way something too horrific doesn't make its way up the chain. Anyway, I'll shut up now. Start with 86, please Michael. For the Marines who manned the gates, those days honked them. They suffer from moral injury, which is very different than PTSD.

28:13Moral injury is when you bear witness to where you're the perpetrator of actions that go against your moral compass or code of values. Throughout each guy, these guys were just stuck in a moral dilemma the entire time. You know, playing God to people's lives, choosing whether or not they got that that they got rescued or that they take them to the exit and potentially be harmed by the Taliban. There was a lot to to weigh on these guys. Next clip, Michael. And what can you do about moral injury? I mean, what how can you deal with that? The biggest biggest key to it though is that our leadership, they need to answer to these things. They need to be held accountable for it. And if not, moral injury just persists and it can be a tacitize into mental illnesses or disorders. And it's just something that we deserve. We deserve to have

29:18our leaders address or talk to us, just simply talk to us about what happened. And maybe if it's within them to seek forgiveness through us. And I think that we would be more more than receptive as a community to go down that path with them. I didn't know that much about that. I thought that was really interesting moral injury. I think we've all we all know we've all felt that at some level on various things. Anytime there's just like that's completely unjust and nothing is being done about it. There's a there's a there's a specific feeling that that is. And apparently when you have it at the level that they dealt with it, it can really break you. And one of the keys to lessening the pain of it is. And again, I think we've all felt this a little bit. Is there being some correction to it? Some price, somebody paid a price for the fact that that bad thing happened. Or something is being put in place so that bad thing can't happen again. And one of the reasons that these guys are struggling so much is nobody paid a price for that. And there's no indication that that couldn't happen again. In short, justice, a balancing of the scales they need justice.

30:23Next clip, Michael. It doesn't seem like that's actually happening. That does it. It does not. It does not. It seems like they turned their back to us. They've lived their life. They're living on while we're still here living with what we have to do on their behalf, on their mistakes. Then I know we're running late, but can we squeeze in general, Mackenzie? Let me be clear. All of this happened because we did not make a decision in April to bring out our embassy, our citizens and our at risk Afghans. Let's be very clear. We're blame lies for this. It doesn't lie with the joint force. It doesn't lie with the military people who are executing this operation. It lies with the political leadership that chose to turn a blind eye to situation in Afghanistan and allow this to boil to appoint in August when it became out of control and was beyond control of any reasonable military capability to impose order on it. I wish you'd just be clear on this. The Sunday talk shows did not touch on the political aspect of this at all. As you heard

31:28there from the general, but that is the whole ball of wax. More to say about this coming up. Yeah, just one final note that this proceeding segment goes out to Nicole G's family. One of the Marines lost there at the gate of virtual neighbor of ours at the radio ranch and everybody lost folks there and is dealing with the paint. Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty. The Armstrong and Getty show. Here's your freedom loving quote of the day. C. S. Lewis, I love this. I'm going to get this tattooed on my chest. Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you were on the wrong road, progress means doing it about turn and walking back to the right road. And in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

32:29Wow, that's really good. Absolutely. Love that, especially for those of you who are sleepy headed or not paying attention using the term progressive at the end. Yeah, so-called progressives are taking us away from where we want to go. Well, from where they want to go often, that's what I don't get. Well, let's say the nature of cults, they don't serve your best interest. You've lost your capacity to think rationally. Mailbag. Drops it out. Mailbag at Armstrong Gidey.com. Here's a nice note from Jan with some advice about your constipation, Jack. What have we become? Is that what the show is now? What have we become? If you do, it was so young and handsome. It's probably more common now because GLP ones cause that problem and lots and lots of people are on that road. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Indeed. Mike, the lawyer from Chicago writes on the topic of the cell phone ban in school. So middle school where I met with told the adults at the party that the students don't care. They're bringing dummy phones to school

33:31to hand in first periods. So the school thinks all the students are handing in their phones. That's one of those things the Wall Street Journal mentioned. And then he says, as a law school lecturer, ideal with students on their phones, I simply tell them, hey, law schools have choice. It's an investment. You're ruining your own investment. I like mentions. We are screwed at that level. I love that. Hey, you're paying for this class. And you're going to go to the world and try to make a living. If you want to screw that up, go ahead. We are screwed. Screwed and doomed. Let's see. We'll save that one for later. How about this from Al Nahnemous? After becoming a jilted member of the terrible breakup club, I took Jack's advice as an experiment went to the chat box for advice and therapy found that Chatsy PT constantly regurgitated what I told it and came back with the same self-affirming snowflakey message every time. Followed up by questions about whether or not I was planning on hurting myself. So I told Grock that Chatsy PT sucked at therapy and could it do better? Grock was much more clinical and less emotional. You know, it's funny. I don't use Grock anymore because it keeps paywall

34:32in me. I find quad to be the best of those for that sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah. But they do vary a great deal. Keep up the flight, fight against snowflaker. And the BS that happens when people use AI to affirm their emotions instead of reality. Grock paywall to you. Well, I like ask it something very simple. Then I try to follow up and it says you've reached the limit. Hang for the advanced something or other, which is probably stupid. All right. Brian writes, he mentions Ted Cruz wrote a book about Clarence Thomas and did a two-hour two-part podcast. Clarence Thomas attention. Yeah. Good. And it should. Clarence Thomas finally getting the attention and plot at C deserves. Near the end part, Justice Thomas tells a story about Justice Breyer in a fond way. He was a liberal. When gathered among a group of colleagues, Breyer was telling a story about how he had been robbed. Well, at his vacation home, it went something like this. Clarence, imagine you're on your porch with your wife and another couple playing bridge and a man walks up to you and demand your wallet. What would you do? Thomas responds, well, I wouldn't be playing

35:35bridge. Breyer says, okay, okay, okay. What if you're on your porch with your buddies playing poker and a man walks up and demand your wallet? What would you do? Thomas replies, well, I wouldn't be playing poker. Breyer replies, okay, if you were on your porch, what would you be doing? Thomas replies, I'd probably be cleaning my guns. I'm looking forward to hearing that. I think I will, although, wait, I'm informed, there are no other podcasts. This is the only one. He's the bogeyman at a left, you know, Clarence Thomas. He's the scary justice. Oh, yeah, I know. They got to have one. The Jack Armstrong and Joe Freddy. The Armstrong and Getty Show.