Armstrong & Getty's Official Start, Wednesday February 17, 2021

What this episode is about

The discussion focuses on the challenges faced by the Texas power grid during extreme weather events, particularly a polar vortex. The hosts explore the implications of these outages and the difference in expectations regarding power reliability during severe versus regular weather conditions, highlighting the complexities of energy policy and infrastructure management.

Key takeaways

• In Texas, a century storm tests our modern comfort expectations; infrastructure isn't a genie that grants wishes.
• The polar vortex? A term so dramatic it sounds like a Marvel villain, but really just highlights our weather woes.
• Deregulation in energy: the wild west of profit, where gaming the system is an Olympic sport.
• California's falconers: government employees doing their best while Texans freeze—proving that every state has its quirks.
• Living in the modern era, we forget nature doesn’t charge for the inconvenience of the occasional blizzard.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Jack Armstrong (Host) · 7 min speaking
• Joe Getty (Host) · 5 min speaking
• Michaelangelo (Guest) · 1 min speaking
• Positive Sean (Guest) · 1 min speaking
• Lindsey Graham (Host)

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 3:00: Texas, California
2. 3:00 – 6:00: California, Enron
3. 6:00 – 9:00: Congress
4. 9:00 – 12:00: COVID-19 pandemic, Fecundo Campazzo

Notable quotes from "Armstrong & Getty's Official Start, Wednesday February 17, 2021"

• You deregulate energy somebody figured out how to game the system the infamous enron incident and then the rolling blackouts and great davis recall in california years ago and…

  about Enron · at 3:35

• Mandates a certain number of falconers to deal with the environment okay and so he went out and got his falconer license and got hired by the state and was a government…

  about Texas · at 4:21

• It's just very disappointing i'm not sure our government actually works anymore i listened to a long podcast yesterday about how congress what's wrong with congress has completely abandoned their constitutional role.

  about Congress · at 6:46

• Michael i'm doing okay i'm also disgusted with our government as far as the vaccine roll out not being able to get the shots into people's arms what do you think about this i know people are motivated by money.

  about COVID-19 pandemic · at 9:34

• All five foot ten of this argentinian tasmanian devil he shows up on the court and he's just he's doing all sorts of crazy stuff how did nobody know about this guy before and it took people getting sick and testing positive and getting hurt.

  about Fecundo Campazzo · at 11:22

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Fecundo Campazzo — Person · Referenced athlete (example in sports discussion) · 1 mention · first at 11:15
  Brought up as an unexpected standout player during COVID-era roster disruptions in professional basketball; used to illustrate how bench players got opportunities.

Companies & orgs

• Enron — Company · Case study · 1 mention · first at 3:38
  Mentioned as an example of gaming the system after energy deregulation.

Concepts & topics

• Congress — Concept · Core topic · 4 mentions · first at 6:52
  Discussed in the context of its failure to fulfill its constitutional role and the dysfunction in government.

Places & events

• Texas — Place · Setting · 2 mentions · first at 0:36
  Discussed in the context of power grid failures during extreme weather events.
• California — Place · Setting · 3 mentions · first at 1:22
  Mentioned in comparison to Texas regarding electricity reliability and energy policy.
  Somebody figured out how to game the system the infamous enron incident and then the rolling blackouts and great davis recall in california years ago and texas has a bit of…
• COVID-19 pandemic — Event · Context · 2 mentions · first at 9:44
  Mentioned in passing regarding its impact on professional basketball and vaccine distribution.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:06 that was an extra zesty live that was very good is one of your better i feel like i'm overcompensating for my despondent attitude by trying harder to sound happy and energetic maybe a dimly lit room deeper than the bowels of the armstrong and getting communications compound and hey everyone today we're under the tutelage of our general manager lindsey graham healer in chief lindsey graham's our general manager weird yeah yeah yeah i almost went with the texas power grid that's kind of a big story yeah so i'm a polar vortex the polar vortex is that what that's pretty good is that what they're calling the storm uh yeah i've heard that being blamed wall street journal editorial board bad energy policy led to blackouts in texas to comprehend that entire deal it would probably take a lifetime study and a college degree i lack well i don't i haven't so let me ask the most basic questions and i'll but you

1:08 can answer them then i i i will answer them whether i answer them correctly or not remains to be seen talk radio i don't know if you've noticed but people say all kinds of things it's a good point um so it seems to me as a californian where the electricity goes out all the time in regular weather weather are you calling an eight mile per hour wind regular weather regular weather in that it's windy it's real windy but it's that windy all the time it's that windy many days a year so it's not uncommon weather and they have to turn off the electricity for it uh or forgot what was it too hot or something like that they had to turn off the electricity but not like extraordinarily hot not once in a hundred years hot what's going on in texas is like once in 100 years bad weather and so like without looking into the power grid it just seems to me you give a pass to electricity going off if you got a once in a century sort of

2:03 storm versus it's just regular weather i think this is why the show works we are two men each with half a brain but each of our half brains more or less matches the other one you arrived more or less where i did there are there are certainly challenges uh to the texas power grid there are infrastructure issues but if you have a once in a century cataclysm it would be unreasonable to expect that your infrastructure was ready for it because that was taxpayer i would complain about that exactly i mean where did that money come from what uh what suffered from the lack of funding as you built up uh your infrastructure for once in a century cataclysm and and listen i i don't mean to make light of the the people who died or anything like that it's a terrible thing it's tragedy obviously but we in the modern united states have this expert expectation that we will live forever and we will live forever comfortably

3:00 and that nothing bad should ever happen if it does we get to sue somebody and i just don't think that's realistic now if that's what happened then uh that i give a pass now if it is uh as has happened in other states where they just got way too excited about green energy and it doesn't work the way they had been selling it well then you know you got to take a look at that from my understanding texas is like less than 10 green energy it's uh it is however one of the national leaders in green energy but it's complicated they get energy through a variety of different ways there was some uh you know every time you deregulate energy somebody figured out how to game the system the infamous enron incident and then the rolling blackouts and great davis recall in california years ago and texas has a bit of that on the other hand unlike cal unicornia as jack was pointing out it wasn't a mildly windy day it was a

3:53 once in a century cataclysm our former farrier slash falconer moved to to texas a couple of years ago same dude slapped shoes on horses and unleashed uh predatory birds a farrier shoes horses he chewed our horse banjo for several years before he moved to texas he also became a falconer partially because speaking of state governments that on the same business card or the state the state of california mandates a certain number of falconers to deal with the environment okay and so he went out and got his falconer license and got hired by the state and was a government employee and got everything that comes with being a government employee for doing i don't know what as a falconer but anyway my horse's shoes are very my horse's feet are naked and i got pigeons crapping on my windows what do i call who do i call anyway he'd moved to texas and uh my wife saw on facebook that he and his wife and their two little babies

4:55 were living in a place with no electricity and it was 10 degrees outside great scott and there isn't a place with electricity within hundreds of miles like not a hotel you could go to or anything like we heard from yesterday our listeners like couldn't find a hotel with electricity either so where do you go where you're not just actually in danger of freezing death your car you just sit in your car and let the heater run i saw a number of folks on the news that were doing exactly that i would be tempted to have a wood stove in the corner it's a charming like decoration ninety nine point eight percent of the time and have some wood handy if you should need it if you do the car maneuver make sure you crack the garage door or something because there are stories of people who are doing that and it's not sitting your garage with your car running don't doesn't everybody know that i'm not sure

5:42 how much you can help folks like that i mean it's sad it's a common way for people to kill themselves on purpose though is to mark your car in the garage with the door down yes yeah well and every time there's something like this somebody lights a like a uh a barbecue grill in their house and dies of the carbon monoxide it's sad but i i don't know if you can prep somebody like that to avoid an untimely end so to my despondent thing uh i would say i i have grown very weary of partisan politics i just i have so little interest in the uh right versus left r versus d game i just i know it drives a lot of social media i just think it's as pointless as it's ever been but anyway i do care a lot about policy stuff and a story out yesterday about money that's going to schools under the guise of getting them open and getting this kids back into school that is so freaking maddening and such an indication of the failure of

6:39 our uh our current system it just really took the wind out of me last night so we'll talk about that later it's just it's just very disappointing i'm not sure our government actually works anymore i listened to a long podcast yesterday about how congress what's wrong with congress congress has completely abandoned their constitutional role they are the lead um what do you call the three parts yeah they are the lead branch of government they're supposed to be the superior branch the government starts with congress they they they're not co-equal branches they are the most powerful branch only congress can remove people from the executive branch or the the supreme court the other branches can't do that to congress congress is the most powerful branch everything's supposed to start and end with them and they have completely abandoned everything to the courts and to the executive branch and because of that nothing works

7:33 nothing right right right well and part of that uh part of the abandonment of the uh you know the the responsibility of of governing to the executive branch is that the government's grown so incredibly large and complex how can congress write a law that will uh completely administer for instance or or or chart out the administration of the department of defense how could you write that law you can't um and and and it used to be okay saying all right and then we empower the department of defense to make such decisions as are necessary but now all the departments are so incredibly vast and complex and permanent they they are their own congress and i don't know if there's fixing this or if it will collapse of its own weight at some point and evolve into something different i do not know ah that's very good question there's a lot of talk on that podcast about how and we we mentioned this last

8:29 week on how incoming congress people and probably for good reason see their role as getting on tv or on those committees and saying something that gets a lot of attention they have more public relations people and pr people than they have the sort of staffers that would help you write law and and deal with what your job is supposed to be it's all about can you become a media star that says things that everybody talks about in twitter today right and and thereby get reelected so you can route money to your cronies as opposed to the other side getting elected and routing money to their cronies and we're talking trillions and trillions of dollars folks sean perhaps you could get mr armstrong a cup of coffee uh nice and strong maybe put a little whiskey in it and and we'll just shout republicans good democrats back for the rest of the show because that is you know that's the style these days

9:23 that'll solve things anyway the the the school money thing is really maddening wait do you hear it well we'll do that later you know it's teamwork that makes the dream work and that's why we introduce obeying the squad there's our board operator part of the team michelangelo hired this morning michael i'm doing okay i'm also disgusted with our government as far as the vaccine roll out not being able to get the shots into people's arms what do you think about this i know people are motivated by money we're still way better in europe by the way but back to you michael what if we gave hospitals and you know doctors or whatever uh a free togo's gift card no i mean wait a minute for every vaccine that's a fine damage for every vaccine you know you get a hundred dollars or whatever an incentive so that they want to find as many people as possible and you know stab him in the arm how about if you fire them if they don't

10:08 i don't you're a carrot guy i enjoy the feel of a nice heavy stick i'm skeptical that the bottleneck is at the doctor level of uh distribution absolutely not and by the way michael you gotta insist that jack calls you the technical director i promoted you that's right it's low self-esteem you know i just i just kind of accept it no i'm just kidding no you're the td not the bo okay i got to remember that actually oh yeah better initials better title yeah exactly all the way around better there's positive sean whose smile lights up the room how are you sean doing quite well uh i i have been really enjoying this uh this season of professional basketball and and it's largely in part to a side effect of the covet era that i was not anticipating because of their uh the the protocols and the way that they're testing oftentimes uh players test positive mere minutes before a game which uh sometimes

11:02 has left teams scrambling to to construct a full roster so you have like these uh teams playing with the minimum number of players eight people and you get weird things like a a player who i had not heard of 48 hours ago an argentinian guy named fecundo capazo cool careful now stepping in all five foot ten of this argentinian tasmanian devil uh he shows up on the court and he's just he's doing all sorts of crazy stuff how did nobody know about this guy before and it took people getting sick and testing positive and getting hurt and it's weird and interesting seeing the end of uh the professional basketball bench and sometimes they come in and do great things it's neat interesting just a point of clarification is that that league that's funding the marxist organization they're dead to me you would have to prepare in a different way as a as a back bencher where there was like zero chance you're going to get in the

11:51 game to where you got to be ready every night i don't even have my sneakers yeah wait a minute you want me to to play in the game in an nba game i'll be damned uh i have time to call my mom what was his name again uh there you go ask for him by name i'm jack armstrong i'd like it extra spicy please he's joe getty on this wednesday february 17th the year 2021 where armstrong and getting we approve of this program let's tip off today's discussions precisely now according to fcc rules and regulations here we go at mark we need student loan forgiveness beyond the potential ten thousand dollars your administration has proposed we need at least a fifty thousand dollar minimum what will you do to make that happen i will not make that happen oh wait a minute hell were they talking about wait a minute that was that was some tough talk for the old geezer we'll have to get into that later because we're running late on time how does mail

12:46 bag look outstanding my friend fantastic yeah there's a lot of numbers to get into today would you like uh crushed pepper on your componzo no yes please yes please uh text line 415295k ftc

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Armstrong & Getty's Official Start, Wednesday February 17, 2021"?

Jack Armstrong (Host), Joe Getty (Host), Michaelangelo (Guest), Positive Sean (Guest), Lindsey Graham (Host).

What is "Armstrong & Getty's Official Start, Wednesday February 17, 2021" about?

The discussion focuses on the challenges faced by the Texas power grid during extreme weather events, particularly a polar vortex. The hosts explore the implications of these outages and the difference in expectations regarding power reliability during severe versus regular weather conditions, highlighting the complexities of energy policy and infrastructure management.

What is mentioned in this Armstrong & Getty episode?

6 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Texas, Congress, California, Enron, COVID-19 pandemic, Fecundo Campazzo. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Armstrong & Getty's Official Start, Wednesday February 17, 2021"?

The episode runs 13 min; the transcript is about 2,466 words in 15 timestamped sections.

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