This is Gary and Shannon and you're listening to kf I A M six forty, the Gary and Shannon Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app.
What's going on in Washington? We find out swamp is horrible, the government doesn't work.
Man, make it like a reality TV show.
Was a bad bos always a pleasure to be anywhere from Washington, DC.
Hey, Joe, a town.
All too clearly built on a swamp and in so many ways still a swamp. I have to watch make.
Boy said, drained the swamp? I said, oh, that's so, you.
Know the thing?
Well.
A lot of talk in Washington about what's going on in Russia where President Vladimir Putin today formerly uh formally excuse me, lowered the threshold for Russia's use of its nuclear weapons.
This doctrine, this nuclear doctrine by Russia was actually announced a couple of weeks ago, so it's not unexpected necessarily, it just looks awful considering the timing of the Biden administration approving long range missiles being used by Ukraine to target into Russia. They said that this is this now makes it possible for a nuclear response by Russia to a conventional strike being long range missiles, for example, formulated broadly to avoid some sort of firm commitment to use
nuclear weapons and to keep the options open. The Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has emphasized that the Ukrainian strike missile strike in Bryansk marked an escalation and urged the United States and other Western allies to study the new nuclear doctrine. One of Putin's former spokespeople had come out and said, yes, you may see nuclear war by Christmas.
Trump US Confirming the deportation strategy, Trump Transition spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt said in a statement that President Trump will marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers in American history. The ACLU says they will fight with legal action.
I don't know.
This is what I don't know.
I understand that this is causing a lot of concern from people who are here illegally. Legal aid centers have received hundreds of inquiries from people wondering what they should do. But when you look to that statement and it's criminals and drug dealers and human traffickers, they're going after the people who have broken the laws in this country, not
just by crossing the border, but by committing crimes. I don't understand why there's such a fervor over getting rid of people who are here illegally when you have a machination to get rid of them, Like if we could get rid of all criminals, Like, wouldn't that be a great thing? You could just get them out of the country. Somebody who goes and kills four people, and if there was a way to just get them out of the country,
wouldn't that be great? And there's a way, there's a way for people who are here illegally once they do stuff that is terrorizing a community, to get them out of the country.
Well, and then in front of those people even before they commit crimes here in the United States, it's the people that have come over that were already convicted of crimes in the country from sure whence they came that would be near the top of this list. I don't understand. I understand the logic of, Hey, these are members of families that you would be breaking up if you had Uncle Bob deported because of the double murder that he committed in Fresno.
Well, you should have thought about that before he killed those people.
Do you want Uncle Bob as part of your family if he's a double murderer.
Yeah, that's not the family that you want to protect.
And you know, it's obviously comes to a head locally because of today's city council decision about sanctuary cities, et cetera.
But we've seen.
Tom Holman the incoming borders are who will not be shying away from that label. He is a former vice director and he has talked about the potential for the use of military assets specifically, and everybody seems to think that that means that somehow a President Trump, the forty seventh soon to be president, would order the one hundred and first Airborne to San Antonio, Texas to wipe out specific neighborhoods. And that's not at all what he's talking about.
They're talking about the potential for large military vehicles think C five transport plane to move people to places around the country, as opposed to paying American Airlines for a charter jet or something like that. I mean, that's the kind of assets that they are discussing. They're not putting army boots on the ground in neighborhoods to go knocking on doors to get people out of there.
Donald Trump was not kidding, turns out, and he said he'd let Robert F. Kennedy go wild on healthcare transition team has accelerated efforts to fill several high profile health jobs. This is a short list of controversial Kennedy allies public health contrarians to lead the FDA, CDC other key elements of the nation's massive health department. You've got Joseph Ladipo, who, as Florida's top health official, questioned the COVID vaccine safety
repeatedly resisted public health recommendations. He is the leading contender for a senior role at the Department of Health and Human Services. Casey Means a former surgeon turned wellness influencer under consideration to service surgeon General.
Wow, that would be significant.
I don't know who Casey Means is.
I would be.
She's a fascinating she's a fascinating interview.
She's a former food industry lobbyist.
Yeah, and I know her brother I think is a former lobbyist. Political reports she is. I think it's her brother is. I think they got that wrong. But Casey and Kelly Means have made have been making the rounds lately in in this space of transforming food supply.
Her brother, Oh, I'm sorry, You're right. I was not reading Kraal because his name is.
Callie, right, it's a confusing name.
It was, You're right, Calli is being discussed as Kennedy's likely chief of staff. And yes, he was the one as a former food industry lobbyists, neither of which have any experience in government.
Which, hey, maybe that's what we right.
So wait, you said she's an interesting interview, Yes, like what's interesting?
I actually heard her interview. I heard both of them. Her she and her brother, doctor Casey Means and Callie Means interviewed on Tucker Carlson. I mean, listen, take the Tucker part out of it. I think he's a he's a whack job in many instances. But it was a fascinating conversation about just the basics of how big companies
and we've said this before. I mean, you mentioned the fact that so many of former tobacco companies now own food supply food companies, and how they engineer food to be as addictive as tobacco and to continue you know, to get customers into the pipeline, and then you get a grip on them.
They can't ever get out of that pipe line.
And drug dealers, it's just it's and it's the simple basic things about the way our bodies work and what our bodies respond to chemically, physiologically, that we're just sucked into it and we're not.
Aware of it.
The apple, eat the apple, eat the clean apple, or wash the apple after you buy it because you don't know what kind of weird stuff.
Is in it.
I mean, I wash my apples.
I sometimes do it.
I'll say it a lot, don't I get close to the apple. I also don't fluss everyone.
I'm not going to walk over to the sink and want apple.
I totally dirty apple. I eat more dirty apples than I do clean. Let's be honest.
There's a doctor that talks about the way that food giants food companies have made us sick, how they use these ultra processed foods to hook us, catch us, and we stuff we don't even think about, stuff like the sound of the food when you pull it off the grocery store shelf. Really, and how we are just big dumb animals and we just stick that stuff in our mouth.
I can't wait to get into that.
So we'll do that at the bottom the album.
Numerous Republican lawmakers told Donald Trump and his team that they believe his pick for attorney general has a little chance of being confirmed. This is according to several Senate Republicans and people around Trump. They're privately hoping Trump doesn't make them walk the plank.
Allegedly, he's been calling individual senators lobbying on behalf of mac Ay. What does that conversation sound like.
Oh, well, you know, we need to shake up the Department of Justice. He'll get in there and you know, and he'll shake it up, and he'll do what we want. He'll protect our friends.
I don't know.
Yeah, I'm curious.
Also is the I'm curious also about why the conspiracy theory behind why choosing Matt Why do you choose Matt Gates if you know he's going to have such an uphill climb and now it looks more and more likely every day that he would not be confirmed as attorney general.
They say, Knowing how toxic a character they're dealing with, Senate Republicans are worried about getting tarnished by the process. They fear that senators up for reelection in twenty six, including Tom Tillis, could face a maga primary challenge if they oppose Gates's nomination, while possibly kissing their seats goodbye in a general election if they back him. Interesting, that's the whole walking the plank thing. Uh, It's not just the politically vulnerable who are fretting.
They say.
There's a fear that Trump is going to waste precious political capital trying to push Gates through when he could instead be working on advancing more feasible nominations, not to mention his governing agenda the.
Way it's written up in The New York Times today, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, they talk about these private conversations that the President elect is supposedly having, and he admits that his choice for Attorney General has less than even odds of being confirmed by the Senate.
But he's made no motion.
Visibly at least of withdrawing the nomination or Gates withdrawing his own name from nomination the way Steve Bannon puts it. By the way, I can't believe we're still quoting Steve Bannon these days, but Donald Trump is a blunt force instrument applying blunt force trauma to the system. We know that Bannon's close with Trump, but he's not part of this transition at all. President Elect Trump's sentencing in the
criminal hush money trial has been paused. The judge overseeing that case is trying to figure out how to move forward after he won election election. I'll say that if Judge wanmershan Is misses the case, it would be a huge win for Trump. But at this point all they're doing is no additional details on the docket. The decision on Trump's request for a new trial is also expected as soon as today. There are a couple of different options.
Most legal pundits say there's really only two. One is you delay sentencing until twenty twenty nine, when Trump is out of office, or you just dismiss the case altogether, because nobody has an appetite to sit.
Around for four years waiting for the term to end.
Speaker Mike Johnson says he's working on a solution to address Republican concerns about transgender women using women's restrooms on the House side of Capitol Hill. This is as representative Alex. Sarah McBride poise to assume office is the first openly transgender lawmaker. In January, Johnson said, this is an issue that Congress has never had to address before, and we're going to do that in a deliberate fashion, and we
will accommodate the needs of every single person. Nancy Mace out of North Carolina, North Carolina, isn't it oh, leader of the effort to bar transgender women from women's bathrooms. She and in her shy both sides need to put down the transgender bathroom thing.
In her statement, Nancy May said Sarah McBride doesn't get a say, I mean, this is a biological man. She said that the lawmaker does not belong in women's spaces, women's bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, period, full stop. She wrote, did Sarah McBride everyday Americans go to work with people who have life journeys different than their own and engage with them respectfully. I hope members of Congress can muster that same kindness. This is going to get down to
the question. Unfortunately for Sarah McBride, it's and the rest of us and the other three hundred and forty million people is what do you what do you?
What do you packing?
What's what's what cargoes in them? Cargo shorts of yours? Because I think for a lot of people, that's the delineating factor in which bathroom you use if.
You have a penis?
Yeah, how is.
That anyone's business?
Well, if you were standing next, I guess you, guys don't stand No, if you were in a bathroom and Sarah McBride whips out or honker.
I wouldn't know. But it's it's not our right to know if she has a penis or not.
Well, that's what I'm saying.
I mean that, that's why, that's why this is an issue that doesn't seem to have any sort of actual conclusion to it, because I don't know if Nancy Mace knows whether or not Sarah McBride I I can heat or not.
I don't know how that sentence escaped my mouth as easily as it did. How do I know if she has a penis or not? I said it with all due seriousness, very serious, very serious. But I don't want to spend any more time talking about women with penis.
It's in a Capitol hill.
We're asking Mike Johnson to come up with an answer on this.
Yeah, Mike Johnson, Am I right, No, that's not.
What I meant.
Oh, you've started the penis talk.
You said, what's in the cargo pants?
Well, that's that's because I think that's what people worry about.
I don't think so.
I've never encountered a penis or otherwise in a bathroom. I've never encountered anybody's genitals in the bathroom. Okay, except for that one time in Philadelphia when I was sitting down peeing and I looked to my right and there were the feet were pointed towards the toilet, which meant that that guy's penis. It was one what's the partition away from my face?
What's the difference between that I'm congresswoman and doing it in the halls of Congress where you're sitting doing your biz right, and Sarah walks up in her high heels, drops trou AND's facing the toilet like a real man.
I don't know.
I don't know if it would bother me less if if the person was in heels, I think I would take some of the sting away. It's one way to put it, because this was like a man. There's like dude shoes, stranger penis right there.
Well that's not a straight that would be also a stranger's Jenna tailor.
Yeah, but she probably doesn't want to use it.
And you think that guy did.
All men want to use it?
Okay, well then how I'm lost? Now I'm lost?
All right, we'll talk about it.
I can't find the trail back. The forest has closed in around me.
Now I know that got away from us.
Man, I want to get right into this story. This is fascinating. There's a new documentary and it's called Irresistible and it's about the tricks of food giants that make us addicted to bad foods. And this sentence hit me like a ton of bricks.
Hit me like a title wave.
Yeah, whoa, that kind of worked its way in my brain. What a dumb animal I am?
Yes, you can say that again, What a.
Dumb animal I am?
If this is the line we need to bury the idea of the obesity crisis as a failure of willpower, that people are just making bad choices, that they're lazy, that it's their fault.
It's not, it's it should be.
That is an eye opening statement right now, it does an excuse whose are bad habits, but it at least points to why it is so difficult to stop.
In the documentary, the scientists who were at the dawn of this billion dollar industry of super processed foods explain the hidden tricks and techniques that have been perfected to get inside our minds and our appetites, not just to make ultra processed food appealing but addictive for most of us.
Yeah, because remember the point of a food company is not to make you healthy.
The point of a food company is to sell food.
So they have more and more.
Yeah, and they have scientists that perfect these recipes, test and perfect them every aspect of every food product to drive maximum consumption.
They go on.
An experimental psychologist called doctor Howard Moskowitz revolutionize the food industry by developing the concept called the bliss point. He was contacted by the bosses at Campbell's Soup to ask if he could help their pasta sauce sell better. Tried forty five different versions of the sauce recipe on consumers, asked them to rate the deliciousnessness. He discovered that by hitting an optimum amount of sugar, fat, or salt, in a dish which is obviously more, but not too much more.
He could make the people think that the entire recipe was better overall.
He yeah, that's what he came up, that bliss point.
He did it with doctor Pepper, he did it with tropicana, he did it with spam. And they said that this has been sort of the the or was the beginning of this ultra processed food plan.
Basically perfect combination between salt and sugar and fat because it's hitten all the thing, right, sweet and savory.
Oh fat.
Okay, but that's just one of the tricks, and that's the one that was probably going to be the easiest to come up with. Here's another thing. There's a neuroscientist who worked for Unilever. First of all, what a neuroscientist working for a giant food company like that? Yes, introducing MRI brain MRI brain scanning to dig deeper into your preferences. So what he and his team did was they put volunteers into brain scanners and then feed him ice cream
and see what happens to your brain. They said that their brains orbitofrontal cortex reward system was glowing like a furnace, which is why when you have two spoonfuls of ice cream you cannot put that thing back.
In the freezer. Oh my gosh, how about this one. There's another one.
Soft food short circuits your brain's satiety mechanism, so that you eat much more of the soft food than you would of crunchy food. Think of it a carrot. You eat a carrot, you got to spend some time on it. You gotta work it, You gotta break that thing down.
You eat a piece of cheese.
With the work that you too to break down the carrot tells your brain you should be full by the time that hits your belly. But if you do it with soft food, it short circuits that. And they even point to things like cheesy orange puffs because yes they're crunchy, but they so immediately lose that and you can squish them around with your tongue.
Wait, there's more.
How often you eat is now being dictated by the way that they market these foods. Breakfast snack is a breakfast shake. Don't sit down, don't chew on it, don't do anything like that. It would make your body tell you that it's full. Just have a shake to go, Just have a little protein bar after your gym workout, mid afternoon, snack like a veggie straw, and then in the evening others sharing snacks. Maybe you rip out a bag of chips for you and the loved ones.
The veggie straws crack me up because it's like, I know what you're doing.
You're trying to.
Make me feel like I'm snacking on vegetables by making them look like vegetable colors, but I'm really eating cheetos.
Right, how about this one? Noises that make you eat more? The noise made when you pick up a food packet has been carefully manufactured to make the food sound irresistible.
Like a bag of Doritos.
Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah.
The crinkly noises from the packaging carefully tuned to make you think, oh, this must be really fresh.
It's gonna crunch when I bite into this.
There are sound engineers that work for food companies.
It's called sonic branding. For example, when you pull open the ring on a can of fizzy soda, you've got two noises, the click and the tear, and that is sonic branding. How satisfying is that click and tear?
Well, Kellogg's for example. Kellogg's is one of those companies that uses sonic branding most people will remember as children lifting a bowl to their ear. I love the sound crackle and Rice Christ remember how they made that a thing? Yeah, I mean they name their characters after the sonic branding that it takes place when you put puffed corn in milk.
Right, all of these things right now are triggering the parts of my brain that want them.
I want to eat.
You just got to keep telling yourself it's just your brain. That's that's wire that they've been able to, you know, manipulate, screw with the wiring of it.
You don't really want this. They just want you to think you want it.
So there was another story as well Ai.
There was a reporter in the Washington Post who let Ai make decisions for her for an entire week, everything from what to eat, what to work out, what to text her husband.
Wow.
A hacker Lool has reportedly gained access to testimony investigations into former Congressman Matt Gates. He's been accused of sexual misconduct and never criminally charged.
She's denied everything.
Reports say that someone got into two dozen exhibits, including testimony from a woman who claims Gates had sex with her when she was seventeen. The file included sealed files from the Health Ethics Committee. The Ethics Committee is expected to me tomorrow to decide whether or not to release its report on Gates.
Something happened yesterday at the football stadium in Dallas at and T Stadium in Arlington. The pieces of metal were falling off of the roof before the game.
Nobody was hurt.
I guess there were some production people on the field at the time, and it was a large metal piece. Looked like it was about maybe six feet by two feet. The large metal piece fell shortly after the stadium had opened the roof, but that they closed it. I don't know what's going on with that stadium, but they have not played in that stadium in an open roof situation for two years now. I don't know if that just by chance or if there's something wrong with the stadium that they're It.
Was like the first of the massive stadiums to open. It's beautiful. It is a gorgeous stadium. But yeah, obviously some problems there on and off the field above the field. All over Dallas there was an article in the New York York Times written by Kashmir Hill, and he writes, generative artificial intelligence took over my life for one week. It told me what to eat, what to wear, what to do with my kids. It chose my haircut, what color to paint my office.
And this is my favorite part.
It told my husband that it was okay to go golfing in a lovey dovey text that he immediately knew I had not written. So Kashmir writes this thing up and says she used two dozen generative AI tools for daily tasks and about one hundred decisions over the course of the week. Among the helpers were the chatbots with every big tech company released after chat GPT, and she goes through and lists a bunch of them. Said, I
told the chatbots what I was doing. I was a journalist conducting an experiment that I had a family, but not much more of that. AI's first task was to plan our meals and then generate a shopping list for the week, and within seconds it's done. She describes that give and take, which is what should I get? Make the list ordered by section, starting with produce. Chat GPT throws out a list reads it line by line. She
then types in did we forget anything? After sending in a picture of her grocery cart and chat GPT says, based on the image, it looks like you have most of the key items from your list, including produced dairy and some pantry essentials. However, I can't see everything in the cart, so here are a few things to double check, and then listed a bunch of stuff to make sure that she had it.
My daughters, she writes, were enchanted by the disembodied voice with infinite patience for their questions. There are nine voices to choose from. I went with an upbeat mail one. They decided it should have a name.
Yeah, the girls, she said's funny because they had scatological names because they're four and seven years old. But they came up with the name Spark eventually, so they said. The only junk food on Spark's grocery list was a bar of dark chocolate. The daily plans also involved an hour of exercise, stretch breaks during work hours, and then cooking elaborate meals three times a day.
I thought it was funny.
She said that it saved her time, alleviated the burden of making choices, but it seemed to have an agenda turn me into a basic bee.
Yeah, because there's no creativity.
There's very little creativity. She did say.
It did plan family games in the evening, including past the story in which we and Spark took turns telling a tale the chatbot started about a towering tree deep in an enchanted forest.
She said it felt like a week.
The AI optimized week felt like a wellness retreat.
I would be careful to expose my kids four and seven to this. Yes, that I think would be there for a whole week, because their life experience is so small, you'd think they'd make a bigger deal out of this.
You know, if it lasted for a whole that's like a year.
Right in forty year old as she had the chat gpt pick a paint color for her office, she had pictures of her wardrobe that she uploaded to style DNA and then based a scan of my face, it had determined my style an optimal color palette. Most of what I owned, including some of my favorite items, were not a good match, according to the AI stylist, so they picked on a couple of garments that she would bring on.
Said at J crwe.
I took mirror selfies as I tried on each of the items, and it rejected most of what I selected, but it gave a one hundred match to an all of nit tank top and high waisted gene trousers. I uploaded the AI proved a tire to a chat with some of my stylish colleagues and it got roasted. Humans told her, if I saw you walking down the street, I would think, sure that is a person who got the mannequin set.
The other one chimed in mannequin core. There was one part of my life. AI failed a being me. Cloning my voice was disturbingly easy to do. I also created a video avatar of myself by reading a short script onto my lam into my laptop camera. I wanted it to post to social media send video messages on my behalf, but when it digested one of my articles for a TikTok video, the script was wooden. Some of my movements
were exaggerated in a creepy way. When I used my avatar to send a loving AI composed message to my mom, she was horrified. She said, you seem so phony. I thought you were mad at me. Mothers always know.
Uh, so it's not where it needs to be.
That frees me out.
That whole article like that, you would let it into your life for a week in front of your children. It's too much journalism for me.
And by the way, good on mom and good on the husband.
Yeah, for knowing that she was crazy, right, I mean not that she was crazy, but that the computer tried to be her and painted her as crazy.
That just wasn't who she was. You can go through the motions, but you are what makes you you.
Thanks Grandma, I mean Grandma. Just sounds like something Grandma would say, Dixie. She wouldn't have put it like that, she would not have, but.
She'd stop thinking about you and get out into the yard and do some work.
Yeah, you've been listening to the Gary and Shannon Show. You can always hear us live on KFI AM six forty nine am to one pm every Monday through Friday, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio AP