This is Gary and Shannon and you're listening to KFI AM six forty, the Gary and Shannon Show on demand on the iHeartRadio app. President Trump is in the Middle East and we've got a Joe Biden health update. It's where we kick off swamp Watch.
I'm a politician, which means I'm a cheat and a liar. And when I'm not kissing babies, I'm stealing their lollipops.
Yeah, we got The real problem is that our leaders are done.
The other side never quits what what, I'm not going anywhere.
So that is now you train the squad. I can imagine what can be and be unburdened by what has been.
You know, Americans have always been gone at President, They're not stupid.
A political flunder is when a politician actually tells the truth.
Have the people voted for you? With no swamp Watch, they're all countera well.
The President sat down with Crown Prince Muhammed Ben Solman. They talked about multiple economic and defense agreements between the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia at this investment forum. A little bit after the first meeting, the President said, there's a tremendous honor to be invited back to Saudi Arabia, where he took his first foreign trip. In the first turn back in twenty seventeen, he called
MBS a friend. We didn't talk about the whole you know, ordered murder of a Washington Post journalist in twenty eighteen, but you know, we can't do anything about it because he's has immunity from prosecution. One of the big announcements was not just the six hundred billion dollars Saudi investment deal, but that the United States was going to make an effort to normalize relations with the country of Syria by dropping a bunch of sanctions against that country.
The sanctions were brutal and crippling and served as an important really an important function nevertheless at the time. But now it's their time to shine. It's their time to shine. We're taking them all off, and they're going to have I think they're going to have based on the people and the spirit and everything else that I'm hearing about. So I say, good luck, Seria, show us something very
special like they've done frankly in Saudi Arabia. Okay, they're going to show us something special, very good people.
He's referred to Saudi Arabia there. One of the things, one of the terms that he used was that Saudi Arabia is an example for the Middle East and that it has achieved a modern miracle, the Arabian Way.
So we'll see you.
Did anybody else hear Arabian nights start in their head.
When I said Arabian Way.
Yeah, so that's where the president is. He's got this is a few days worth of travel there in the Middle East before he comes back.
Joe Biden health update.
A small nodule has been found in Biden's prostate after a routine physical exam. This does nesitate nesitate, nessitate necessity, necessary, necessitates, necessity, necessitate a refresher of the English language, necessitate further evaluation.
They say it's too early.
Yeah, if it could be benign an inflammation, something more serious, you just don't know, microplastics.
It could be.
He had a lesion removed from his chest skin cancer a couple of years ago, several non Melanowa non melanoma skin cancers removed by the mose surgery.
Picked all the right stories to use, all the pronunciations you got today, I sure did.
But anyway, there you go.
There was another story, of course that There are some new excerpts that have been published from this upcoming book called Original Sin President Biden's Decline. It's cover up in his disastrous choice to run again. I mean it is a at least the title is pull No Punches Again. This is by Jake Tapper from CNN, teamed up with Alex Thompson from AXE, and.
It seems common sense. We all saw it before our eyes what condition he was in. This is just spilling in some of the details, like they were talking about how he needed a wheelchair, but that they would only bring out the wheelchair if he was re elected.
I'm interested to see.
And I don't know if the book gets into this, but the more of the covering up and who was the inner circle there, how much did Jill Biden have a say in this? It's very Nancy Reagan s Ford the end of Ronald Reagan's second term in terms of the wife covering up a lot of the aging. Frankly, that's what it is. It's not anything nefarious. It's just the covering up of aging, dementia, dilapidation, all of it, cognitive decline.
Well, I'd be curious the concentric circles. That's the innermost circle those people immediately.
That's what I'm saying. Yeah, like who else is in that circle of the covering up?
Well, the second level of that is the leadership and the Democratic Party, I think, and and there I was listening to you. Remember Mark Halprin used to be with ABC News. He's out on his own now and he has a podcast where he was asking these questions about and reference this book like coming out. He knows that it's coming out, and he's talked with both Jake Tapper
and Alex Thompson about it. But what kind of with all of the things the Democratic Party is dealing with, all of the questions about who's going to be the leadership, why didn't they acknowledge Biden's decline? What what do those people now hear when they talk about it? And he used Elizabeth Warren Senator Elizabeth Warren as an example and played a SoundBite from her. She was being interviewed and was asked, why did you say you didn't see any
decline in President Biden when everyone else did? And she said, well, I didn't see any decline, which is a very clinton Esque answer or response to the question what is is it?
What is is?
Or?
I mean just even that's not really getting away from anything. Everyone saw it, and she saw it from across the country.
And she's not acknowledging that it existed. She's just then claiming, you know, she's playing with the wording. There's she's getting out the syntax.
Well, I didn't say it. I didn't see.
They did not want to admit to it because that would have given the election to Trump. And that's essentially what it did. They didn't want to admit it. They just put their heads in their sand in the sand. But you know, to our question all those months ago of so who's running the country, because it ain't that guy, you know, it's the bolts were coming off, the wheels were falling off of that thing, and it's remarkable they were able to keep it together to cross.
The finish line of the term.
Well, yeah, because remember in August and September there were questions of is he just gonna is he just gonna resign and allow Kamala Harris to be the president. That book, by the way, comes out next Tuesday. Like I said earlier, there will be plenty of excerpts published between now and then to help boost those sales.
Technology a help or a hindrance in the classroom. Has it gone too far? Some teachers are saying, Ea, yes it has.
You're listening to Gary and Shannon on demand from KFI AM six forty.
There is a.
TikTok rant going viral more than a million viewers. Is a twenty six year old high school English teacher that put this together, and she says that her desks are no longer filled with minds eager to learn, but students scrolling TikTok, playing games, copying assignments through chat GPT. Basically, it's about how technology is ruining education.
It's really a damning look at from the teacher's perspective. The technology that exists in these classrooms is not helping.
What I really want to talk about is how technology is ruining education.
So in my county, every student.
In the county, I believe, from sixth grade through twelfth grade gets their own district or county distributed iPad. Every kid gets an iPad for the school year, and they are to turn it back into the end of the school year, and then they get it back in August or whenever we come back I have seen.
A where to even begin.
A lot of what I'm going to talk about is a little bit drawn from other videos I have seen, but it opened my eyes to so many things. And I had been wondering why the technology sucked so much and why I hated it and for a while because I'm an English teacher as of this moment right now, But before I taught English, I was in a computer
lab and I taught digital arts. I taught a class called multimedia, which was to each students how to use like word processing programs, PowerPoint, Microsoft Word and other just online tools that six graders need to know about. And I have taught a little bit of computer science. I'm not really computer science savvy, but it was an introductory course and I could teach them a little bit of coding.
That's not the point.
Point is I thought I.
Hated technology because kids were iPad kids growing up, and they just have too much access to games and entertainment, and they don't want to use technology for education. They want to use it for entertainment. And to a degree that is true. But what I am learning is more than that, and that technology is directly contributing to the
literacy decrease FIRA seeing in this country right now. A lot of these kids don't know how to read because they have had things read to them, or they can click a button and have something read out loud to them.
In seconds.
Their attention spans are weaning because everything is high stimulation. They can just scroll watch less than a minute. They can't sit still for very long.
Okay, I have some problems with her.
She's an English teacher, and she's she's twenty six weaning, but she she says that at the end of this she has quit her job.
By the way, she's quit her job.
She describes at the beginning of the video that this is her last day or two in her classroom before she moves on and does something.
You know, I would like to play Devil's advocate for just a moment. Go for it now, I don't. I've my dad was a teacher. Teachers in the family. My aunt's a teacher. You have teachers in your family. There's always been a problem with keeping kids attention in school, always right, you have to get creative with it.
Part of it.
Part of your job as a teacher is not just teaching reading, writing, arithmetic. What have you it's learning how to break through and connect with kids. And that's what makes teachers so freaking masterful at what they do. It's what makes them. They all have that X factor or you know, ninety percent of them have that X factor where they get kids to pay attention, they get kids to listen, they get them excited, they get them wanting
to learn, or they just get it done. Got You've got to know that that's a huge part of the job. It's not just I get that you want to teach. You want people that are If you've got a class full of as she says, she says, these are her words, the desks are no longer filled with minds eager to learn.
Or that's how it's written up.
If you're a teacher and you get a classroom full of desks with minds that are eager to learn, you've won the freaking teacher lottery.
That is not real life.
But I would say on her behalf that.
You've got to be able to the county or the district or whoever this individual school has to empower the teachers to use the tools available to them, or to be creative and figure out the ways to get as much out of those kids as you possibly can, and that could include chromebooks don't go into the classroom, or iPads or whatever, no technology in the classroom itself, and then reevaluate why do we even have it in the first place, because we don't want kids turning in actual
paperwork anymore like that. That was always a problem I had with my kids when if they did a report of some kind, just the generic book report that later on in their school, whether it was you, it was high school, or whatever, they didn't have a physical copy of the report that they would turn in. That bothered me because if I'm going to help them, if they want me to look at it beforehand, I preferred the paper.
Copy to go through. I know, but I'm saying at the same time that that.
Ship has sailed dealing with what she's referring to, which is the decline in literacy, the decline in attention span, the decline in their ability to literally write their own names. And some of these kids she refers to, they can't read, or they certainly can't read to the grade level that they are, that they're at least been promoted to the.
Way it's been.
I mean, my dad had kids in fourth and fifth grade, sixth grade that couldn't read, you know, and that was in the eighties, that was in the seventies. So, I mean, part of being a teacher is is and it's I could never do it. I couldn't do it for ten minutes. But that's part of it. Technology, yes, And I mean you could probably have people argue that technology has been helpful.
I would be frustrated with the fact that, I mean, based on what she says, and it's a whole it's a whole nine minute video. Yeah, these there are the distractions, but there's also like you got to have the you got to have the backup of your individual school right that the principle gives you the freedom to do that.
You're di gives you the freedom to do that.
Yeah, but you've also got to have the buy in from the parents, which again, like to your point, you know that going into the profession, that's going to be an uphill climb.
Sometimes parents aren't around.
They're not around, they don't they're certainly not going to care. They don't think that it's a big issue. My Johnny needs to learn how to, you know, interact with computers.
He'll take the kids side every day and twice on Sunday. Okay, coming up next, We've got wellness, We've got psychopath news, weight loss news, and spitting.
All of it in one story. No no, not true, no no.
You're listening to Gary and Shannon on demand from KFI AM six forty.
It's time for our wellness update on fl terrible fil He spends most of his day at the office city in the nation, include a variety of activities, preferably some exercise late in the afternoon. I never exercised a day of my life.
We've just got to sit here and wait to die.
Every morning, I smoke cigarette and for lunch, I eat a bacon sandwich and I usually drink my dinner.
It's time for Gary and Shannon's periodic guide for wellness and personal improvement for your.
Health well Obesity is connected to cancer. It causes every problem, It causes many many of the problems.
Yeah, weight loss injections will cut the risk of cancer by half, according to new research.
Not a gigantic surprise, but definitely one that adds to the credence, adds to the ongoing chorus of the obesity epidemic in this country. Is going to continue to cost us billions until we can figure out what's going on.
This is specifically a study that was done in Israel with patients from the UK, and it said one in two people in the UK are forced to get cancer in their lifetimes, about forty percent of those cases are linked to and that excess weight could cause more than thirty different types of cancer.
From the water is Wet file, a new study says that we base a stranger's trust worthiness on facial appearance alone. How often has that led us astray? All those girls that got in the car with Ted Bundy. Psychopaths are more attractive, That is just the case.
So weird psychopathy characterized, they say, by a lack of empathy and impulsivity, might seem like it would repel the trust, but in practice, anybody who's a psychopath with this trait can be very charming. Very socially strategic is the term that they use.
So Ted Bundy was a handsome guy.
Yeah, I can't picture a picture. I can't come up with a mental image of you can't Ted Bundy.
Not this one where he's looking over his shoulder at trial. Good bones, easy tiger saliva structure. Saliva is a great way to detect disease. Where is Elizabeth Holmes. Yeah, give for your saliva. She'll tell you about cancer. Er uh, I heard about this baby. Daddy is the one who's putting together a new blood test, which is essentially the same thing. Yeah, and looking for investors.
They said that easily, unlike a blood test or a biopsy, saliva is super easy to collect, spit into the jar. It's painless, it's inexpensive. Saliva based testing really gain speed during COVID because a lot of people use that. A lot of different countries use that for rapid screening. In the nineteen eighties, researchers were using saliva to detect hormones
and drug use. By the nineties, it was used as a way to detect HIV and they said that it can have fragments of DNA, RNA proteins, and fats, and in that you be able to detect changes linked to diabetes, Parkinson's, heart disease, and even some cancers, even even distinguishing between healthy people and those that might have mild cognitive impairment like which can be a possible early sign of Alzheimer's.
Well, the NFL schedule will be released tomorrow. Some of it has leaked out and everybody is highly anticipating the NFL schedule.
Release because you play.
If you're an NFL fan, most of you like me, you like to travel, go see a couple games. You want to plan which home games you're going to go to, who's coming to town, what rivalries will be highlighted this time around. Have you ever heard of a guy by the name of Howard Kats. Well, Howard Katz makes all the decisions about who plays who, where and when. He is the man behind the NFL schedule. Will introduce you to who the hell is Howard Katz when we come back.
You're listening to Gary and Shannon on demand from KFI AM six forty.
Howard Kats is a guy who always considered sports a part of his life. He was sports editor of the school newspaper, sports director at a local radio station. He graduated from Colgate University and he got a job as a PA, a production assistant at ABC Sports. And he is the man behind the NFL schedule. He is the one who makes the league's schedule and he was involved when it was just small potatoes. For two decades, he has been at the center of each year's NFL schedule.
Coaches and networks lobby him.
Howard Katz gets a lot of slaps on the back and other things.
They lobby him for perks.
They complain about grievances, road schedules, time of year, primetime games, all of that. He's the unknown planner behind every NFL fans fall Sundays. The schedule making process spans from January to May, refining endless possibilities in an infinite pattern of give and take. This is what we do for months, he says. Howard, by the way, is seventy five. He's going to retire after this season. This will be his last schedule that is unveiled tomorrow.
Kind of surprised that there is still a human being who does this.
Well to some extent.
Now, when he started, he and his team, Howard, they used one or two computers to help the scheduling process. Now they use anywhere between two hundred and three hundred computers. Because there's a lot of probabilities, and there's a lot of teams and directions and which coast is. Everybody on the team trains the computers to think the way that they do, kind of like AI in putting rules to reflect the team's wants. For example, the team of people
Howard has working under him, not the football team. For example, they put a rule in the computer system to avoid three game road trips. That's too much if a team is on the road for three weeks back to back
to back, and the computers and formulate the schedules. Each morning, Howard evaluates the computer suggestions, highlights the positives, inputs new rules to correct the negatives, and begins the process again, constantly retraining the computers to get it to the right place where the schedule's copasthetic with everybody.
But ultimately the buck stops with him. He's the last one to put eyes on that thing for the human touch. Basically right.
Schedule making begins in earnest after the Super Bowl, but trades, big trades, selections in the draft can result in last minute adjustments. If there's a big quarterback in the draft, for example, that's supposed to go to Cincinnati ends up going to Miami, you're going to probably want to see the guy everyone's been talking about in prime time rather than whoever they picked up in the first city I mentioned, So that would play a role. They do get personal requests.
I was wondering about this, So teams do ask the league, Howard like to your point that the buck stops with him to schedule around weddings, bar mitzvah's previously planned vacations. So like, if an owner's daughter is getting married on September fifth, they don't want to have a game on September fifth. Maybe they get a Monday night game that day, or maybe they get a Thursday night game that week, something like that.
So it's not individual players that are making these personal requests.
No, it's the ownership groups, all right, there are situational well and also maybe for people like Tom Brady, if he's if his daughter's getting married, maybe that goes up through the ownership to the NFL.
Right, if it's somebody big enough of a deal like that.
What I would say is, in that context, what football affiliated person would plan it for the season.
You have a daughter, do you think she gives a rats ass when you want her wedding to be? No?
But if my job was between August and January every year, and I was tell listen, I'm either on the road.
Do you think your wife who's pissed off that you've had that job for twenty five years and are never home.
Do you think she cares? She wants her little girl to have a fall wedding.
The princess gets what the princess want.
But you know what I mean, Like it's not all that yeah, especially when this is your life for decades.
I think one of the interesting aspects of it as well is the way, I mean, football's been a moneymaker for a long time, but the amount of money now compared to even ten or fifteen years ago, where you've got the media agreement this two years ago they signed the agreement with Amazon Prime, ESPN, NBC, Fox, and CBS, which totaled one hundred and ten billion, which is twice as large as any of the previous contracts. And then
you've got Netflix for a Christmas Day game. Peacock, Google's YouTube has come in and will probably stream the first NFL game on opening Week, which would be a Friday night game. The amount of that scheduling is pretty ridiculous, and they don't and late in the season now they do. They have for a few years now. They've done flex games. The ones that are going to be more important or going to draw more eyes, they'll put them in prime time.
I find this to be very interesting if you're a football fan. This is the guy who kind of was the creator of the DNA of the schedule change. Like he was the one who felt really strongly about putting more division games late in the season, and the league began drawing up only divisional games in the final week of the regular season back in twenty ten. He said
that was a central moment in the scheduling process. Once we did it, we said we should never go back because so much rests on your divisional record and the divisional rivalries. You know, look at the Chargers having to win or tie that game against the Raiders to get into the playoffs. You know, when your season counts on the last game and it's a division rivalry, I mean, you're gonna fill those seats, whether those games matter or not.
Brilliant.
Really, they also have to do things like in twenty fifteen, avoid having an Eagles home game on the same weekend the Pope visited Philadelphia's there's.
That too, All right, Big twelve o'clock hours coming up next. You miss any part of the show, please, right after this show is over, we post the podcast so you can go back and listen to any part of it on the iHeartRadio app. Just type in Gary and Shannon. Not only do you want to listen to it, you're gonna want to subscribe and leave a comment and rate the show at all that sort of share it too, Share it with other people, because you know, joy is felt stronger when.
You share it with others.
That was beautiful.
It's made up. I know 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 any time on demand on the iHeartRadio app