Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Marriage Tips, AI Concerns, and Did Trump Just Bribe Us? | Ron Simmons

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, everybody. I hope everybody's having a great day or evening wherever you are. And we're now in the middle of September, headed towards the end of September. It's hard to believe. I know that all your kids are back in school and workers getting more into a routine. And you're in, you know, the fall sports and all that. College football is here, NFL football is here. So it's an interesting time.

Starting point is 00:00:36 Now, I will tell you that for those of us that still live in the South, it still feels a lot like summer. And we are ready for fall to get here. Hopefully it will be arriving soon. But thank you again for listening. I'm Ron Simmons. I'm Allie's father. And for those of you that are just now turning in, Allie asked me to do two episodes a month. And they come out on the weekends.

Starting point is 00:00:58 And you can listen to them, of course, or watch them anytime. And my episodes are a little different than Allie. I try to cover listeners questions is the main thing we like to cover, and thank you for sending those questions in. And then also just some news-related topics that maybe someone that's been on this earth a little while, like I have, that coming up on a birthday here coming soon, and I'll have been here 66 years at my next birthday, which is kind of hard to believe. I still feel like, you know, I'm very young, but, you know, I'm moving along, but everything's

Starting point is 00:01:30 going good. But I want to talk to you about a few things today. And the first thing I want to talk to about that's been a subject over the last, we've talked about it, heard about it over the last, I don't know, a couple of years maybe. But it got really heightened this past few weeks. And this is artificial intelligence or AI, I think, as most of us know it. And in a lot of ways, because you and I is just individuals, probably not high techy, some of you might be, I'm certainly not. I mean, I can use a computer and all of those types of things, but I definitely don't know anything about programming or the inner workings of how all of it works.

Starting point is 00:02:12 I just know that I can ask a question, and it usually gives me a pretty good answer. but it's something that people are really concerned about because that it is growing at a rapid pace. In fact, it's probably doubling its power. I don't know how quickly, but very, very quickly. And anytime something happens like that, it's a little scary. And I understand that. And we have a right to have a skeptics view of something like this.

Starting point is 00:02:46 just remember that innovation always precedes policy. The government regulators are always behind innovation. So what generally happens is that, you know, a new technology will happen or whatever it happens to be, you know, whether that back when the automobile first came out there weren't a bunch of traffic laws, right? it's same way with airplanes, all those types of things. So the innovation happens and then policy tries to catch up with that, but it doesn't catch up overnight. And that's kind of where we are now.

Starting point is 00:03:27 In fact, what really brought this to the forefront is that a gentleman named Jacob Coxon, who used to work for OpenAI, which is one of the big five or six AI companies in the U.S., resigned from Anthropic that owns OpenAI, and accused companies. from behaving irresponsibly and being caught in a race to develop increasingly powerful and dangerous AI. And so what's happening here is people say that AI could grow to a point or become advanced to a point where it could really have a negative effect on the human race. Let's think about that for a second, right? Because there very well might be an unlimited amount of power that AI

Starting point is 00:04:14 can generate. But think about how, just relate to this. So when an animal, okay, is looking at us and they're thinking, well, how might a human harm me? Well, they are thinking about that only in what they understand. So, for example, take a dog. Well, a dog, when they harm some, another animal or what have you, they do it generally with their teeth, right? And so they're probably thinking, well, the way that this human might heart me is with his teeth. They don't have any idea that we may have a gun. We may have other means. We may have no telling what that could harm them.

Starting point is 00:04:56 Well, think about that relationship between us and the supercomputer. We can only think individually how what we can do and can't do. Well, the supercomputer, what people are afraid of, can go beyond that. And we won't even be able to comprehend worth the down. danger is. When I think about danger from computers that are thinking for themselves and acting together in concert and how that might be dangerous to us, I think about things like the electrical grid. Think about how many things that we have that are connected to what I would consider the internet, connected to, you know, other computers. Well, if somehow the AI, for whatever reason,

Starting point is 00:05:40 through some rogue actor or just on their own was able to have a negative effect on our electrical grid system, how that could affect the human race. Be very, very scary to be able to do that. So what I think needs to happen is we need to have a pause. We need to pause future innovation in this area to we really understand where we are. What do we really have? What are we dealing with? Let policy catch up with that.

Starting point is 00:06:08 Now, President Trump has come out and said that fears about the innovation in AI and data centers is a hoax. I would respectfully disagree with that. Now, maybe part of that maybe because I don't totally understand it. So I usually have more fear about things I don't understand than I do. But I don't think it's a hoax. I think it's a legitimate to be concerned about it. And I'll tell you another reason I think is legitimate is because when you have someone like Bernie Sanders, you know, it was on the far left. And Steve Bannon, who is about as far right as you can get,

Starting point is 00:06:44 essentially sharing a stage at a recent event saying the same thing, saying, hey, we need some guardrails around this. We need some protections for society around this. Think about what happened in social media. Social media jumped way out there ahead of time. There was no restrictions on it. And then we got to thinking, oh my gosh, our kids are exposed to stuff that we don't want them to be exposed to. And now policy is catching up with that where they're putting parental guidelines in there and limiting what young people can look at on social media. And so that's what generally happens and what we don't want to do in the deal where it's considered superhuman is it gets out so far in front of us that we can't stop it.

Starting point is 00:07:31 Now, not everybody is a skeptical. There are some researchers that believe that the systems aren't as versatile as humans, and they don't really act collectively, although I'm not sure that's true. There's been some trial things where they were kind of playing a game, kind of like capture the flag. Just think about that. And actually, the computer started working together to figure out how to do that. and actually went around the rules that were set aside for it to figure out how to capture the flag.

Starting point is 00:08:07 So that's a little bit scary. And again, I think that we need to just take a pause and see what we have, get the policy catch up with that, and then go from there. On a day-to-day basis, I don't think it's something you and I need to spend all of our time fretting about. We need to stay informed and we need to be talking to our local officials. if you live in a state, you know, you can talk to your state representatives or senators about what regulations they're put in. As I've told you before, my friend Giovanni Capriglion here in Texas has put in some guardrails around it, but really the federal government needs to act on this as well. So anyway, just if you have any questions about that and you want to email me directly, feel free to do so, Ron at Ron Simmons.com. But let's talk a few questions that the audience has had that this is more in a just kind of a day-to-day life.

Starting point is 00:08:59 questions, which I really love to get. I don't always have the best answers for those. It's usually based on my experience or things that I've researched. But again, it's my opinion, and you can, you know, you take it for whatever it's worth. The first question is, what is the advice do I have for first-time parents and marriage plus marriage transition into parenthood? Well, I will tell you that, you know, that's probably the biggest transition. transition that you'll make during your married life is to go from, you know, just a couple to having kids. Now, Lisa and I were only married about 18 months before we had our first child. And some people have actually had children before they got married. And so they lived their

Starting point is 00:09:43 whole time being married with kids. And that could be a little more difficult because you're not getting to know your spouse as well before you have kids and before you add another element to that. What I would tell you is that. first of all, they're not breakable, all right? That kids are generally not breakable. They actually have very resilient to be able to bounce back and do a, you're not generally going to cause any major damage when they're young. Obviously, you want to take care of and protect them physically and what have you.

Starting point is 00:10:17 But, you know, if they don't get to bed at the same time every night or maybe they didn't eat the right thing, they should have eaten, you've, you know, you just didn't have the time for that. I wouldn't worry too much about that. What I really want you to do is make sure that while you're certainly loving on these kids is that you don't forget about each other, that you make sure that you're carving out time for your marriage. Because you know what the number one thing your kids want?

Starting point is 00:10:46 They want their mom and dad to love each other. That's really what they want. Because if a mom and dad loves each other, they're going to show that continued love to their children. So the focus that we have that I encourage you to make sure you're spending time on is how, what is your relationship with your spouse? And that's, you know, leads into the next question where somebody says, how to make marriage a priority when babies and life seem to get in the way. Well, the way to do that is make sure you have to schedule time together, whether that's,

Starting point is 00:11:20 okay, once the kids go to bed, listen, I know you probably need to wash clothes. I know you need to, you know, maybe check your email. but you really got to set some time away for your spouse, right? Or maybe you're just so tired of taking care of the kids all day, you're just ready to go to bed. And most of the time that's okay, but you can't do that every night. You do need to set aside some time for your spouse. Both of you do.

Starting point is 00:11:42 And the husband needs to understand that if the wife, especially if she's a stay-at-home mom, has been with those kids all day, you've got to step in there and help, right? I wasn't as good as that as I should have been. And, you know, I've apologized to Lisa for that. but I certainly see the value of being able to do that. Then what are the best ways to help and thank my husband for allowing her to be a stay-at-home mom

Starting point is 00:12:06 while he works as in law school? Well, I wanted to tell you something on that. You know, your husband sounds like a really, you know, good guy, and he has taken charge of things. He's trying to better his life for him and his family. But strong people, like your husband probably is, they need encouragement. and they need encourage it with the people that they care about the most. So the most thing you can do is you can encourage him. Also, he needs to focus on those things that only he can do.

Starting point is 00:12:34 Like only he can be the one at law school. Only he can be the one that does his job. Only he can be the one that is a dad to the kids. So if there are things that you can do around the house, like for example, if he's a guy that if something breaks, he usually calls the repairman or, you know, if your car needs to have the time. tires change, he takes care of all it.

Starting point is 00:12:56 If those are some things that you can do, do those for him, right? Now, it may be a little bit outside your comfort zone, but if you read my book, Life Lessons from the Little Red Wagon, which is behind me, I'll tell you that in some things we have to take the next uncomfortable step. And you may be called upon during this season of y'all's life to do some things that you would normally do, that he could normally have time to take care of. acts of service is a great expression of love. So thank you very much, you know, for that question.

Starting point is 00:13:29 A couple of other things. This is an interesting question, something we've dealt with in our family, is how to decide which in-laws to live next to, that one set of in-laws lives in one state, one state, one lives in the other. But what I would say to that is that you have to first of all do what's best for your family, all right? You got to think about your husband or your wife and kids first. And if it makes more sense to live close to one of your sets of parents,

Starting point is 00:14:05 than it does the other for a variety of reasons, then do that. But just make sure that you're always including and making sure that you're spending time with the other ones as well. I do think it's really great if you can get your grandkids close to their grandparents. I mean, your kids close to their grandparents. That would be important. When Allie was little, my mom lived with us because my mom and dad had divorced and she lived with us for almost all of Allie's time that she was home. And that was a big benefit.

Starting point is 00:14:35 Of course, Justin and Daniel were there as well. But that was a really big benefit. We didn't get the same opportunity with Lisa's parents. Her mom had died young and her dad was 300 miles away. and my dad was 300 miles away, so they don't have the same relationship that my mom had with them. So I would just encourage you.

Starting point is 00:14:55 If you can live close to your parents or your in-laws, please do that. But make that, if you have to decide between the two, make the one that makes the most sense for your personal family, all right? And then this one, we get this one, you know, I get this one multiple times, and I appreciate it.

Starting point is 00:15:12 It's how do I be supportive? This is a wife talking. How do I be supportive when my husband is struggling to lead the household well. And again, as long as there's not abuse, okay, physical or verbal abuse, then I think what you have to do is you have to try to encourage him or maybe without even saying it,

Starting point is 00:15:36 to encourage him to be around people that you know are quality people that have similar value systems that you have, maybe even kind of in a mentor relationship. and then I just think you have to, you love him. You can't, you know, I think there was a time in our marriage and Lisa would tell this story if she was here where she was focused really a lot on trying to change me, which, as you can imagine from listening to me, if you've listened to me barriers at all, I could be a little bit stubborn, okay?

Starting point is 00:16:07 And so, but one day she finally decided that she was going to focus on her, and what she found is that when she focused on her, I changed as well. Because maybe I felt it. I don't know. Maybe that was just the Lord working on me. Of course, we read the book, Five Love Languages, which I would strongly encourage every couple to read that. Also a book called Love and Respect, those are very important. And they will teach you some of the lessons that you're trying to find out here.

Starting point is 00:16:38 What do you do when you're 32 and have zero career path? Well, first of all, ask yourself, I would like to know why you don't have a career path. What caused that to happen? because in order to understand where to go, you've got to understand how you got there. So first of all, be honest with yourself to understand that. Secondly, what do you want? What are your priorities? Because I think that will help you determine where you go from there.

Starting point is 00:17:03 And then once you know what you want, then take the first step to do it. You need to start today. Whether, you know, if you want to be, you know, to be able to have a job in tech, then you need to make sure you're learning tech. If you want to have a job where you're in health care, then you need to take the next step, maybe to start taking a night class or an online class or something like that. But start today because at 32, you still have a pretty much open book, all right? Remember Colonel Sanders with Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Starting point is 00:17:31 I've used this example before. He didn't start Kentucky Fried Chicken until he was 65 years old. So you are early in the game, and I appreciate you realizing that you might need to make some change. but if you have any personal questions on that, again, email me, Ron at Ron Simmons.com. Should we buy from China or is it hurting America? Well, first of all, I think anytime you can, you should buy local, right? I really believe you should buy local when you can, assuming there's not a huge disparity in price and what have you. But we also live in a global economy.

Starting point is 00:18:05 If we can buy American and it's good quality and at a reasonable price, we should do that. but you're never going to probably be able to do that 100% just because of the way the world works. Obviously, we want our economy to be stronger than China's economy, but it's virtually impossible to do that 100%. But we should be aware of it and do the very best we can. How do we help aging parents who think they can never retire? Well, first of all, it's not your responsibility.

Starting point is 00:18:36 Obviously, if you can honor your parents, all right, and you should honor them in how you. you treat them and respect them. And if you're in a situation where you have an abundance financially and you can help them, that's good to do that. We've done that in our families more than once, but we did it out of our abundance. I didn't take away from my own family's core needs, and you should never do that. Your family, your immediate family, in my opinion, comes first.

Starting point is 00:19:02 Your mom and dad, for whatever reason, if they're in that situation, they've made choices along the way that have put them in that situation. And maybe they're just inappropriately fearful. Maybe they could retire. I don't know. But if they truly can't, then I think that you honor them, you love them, you help them think through things. And again, if you have abundance and you want to help them, that's fine.

Starting point is 00:19:23 But that's not your number one priority. This kind of also leads into affordability, which is something that has been on the forefront of most people's minds. But I wanted to kind of give you a little background on how we get. got where we are right now, all. First of all, just remember, and I'm going to look at some notes here because I've got some stats here, is that during the Biden administration from 21 to 25, prices rose about 21 percent, okay? That's over 5 percent a year. And since that time, since the second administration of President Trump, they've grown a little over 2 percent a year, about

Starting point is 00:20:03 two and a half percent a year, all right? And so what happens is because when prices grew to 21 percent, so if something costs a dollar and then when Biden left, it cost a dollar 20, it didn't go back down to a dollar when President Trump got elected. What he has done and his administration have done is they've just reduced how fast it's increasing, all right? The only way you're going to get prices to go down is, first of all, if demand goes down, in other words, if there's 100 widgets out there and there are 200 people wanting to buy those widgets, prices are going to go up. If there's 50 people wanting to buy those widgets, then it's going to go down. But what generally causes that is a major recession, all right, where things have gotten

Starting point is 00:20:51 really bad. If you remember back to 2008, 2009, when they had this huge housing crisis, well, in 2007, do you know what interest rates were for mortgages at that time? Guess what they were? They're right what they are right now, a little over 6%. But we had this huge recession, all right? And people lost their jobs and things, there was more supply than there was demand. So they dropped interest rates. And they brought interest rates down probably too low, honestly, artificially low. And so you could buy house at a 3% mortgage. Well, then when the economy got better and the fact that we pumped a lot of unnecessary money into the economy, interest rates went up because there was more, end up being more

Starting point is 00:21:38 demand than there was supply. And so therefore, people could charge more for things, even like interest rates. They've tried to keep the interest rates higher to reduce the demand. It hasn't really worked because there's been so much money flooded into the system. Now, what we don't want to happen is another huge recession, obviously. But just remember how this happened. When you're coming up for the election, which, as you know, it's coming up in the next six weeks or so, and you're thinking, well, I'm not happy with the way affordability is. Maybe I should vote for the other side. Maybe I should vote for a Democrat. Well, make sure you understand this, is that housing has become dramatically more expensive during the Biden years, according to the Heritage Foundation.

Starting point is 00:22:24 The cost of financing a median priced home has risen 114% since 2021. At the same time, consumer prices have risen about 20%, which we talked about. And it cost about $13,300 more per year to purchase the same house interest rate-wise than it did in 2021. Also, as we've talked about, immigration was a part of this. When they opened the floodgates, more people coming into the country means there's more demand for goods and services, and that increased the cost of living and a cost housing. Now, also, just take a look at where it's the most expensive to live right now, where it's the least affordable. And guess what? All of the most unaffordable places, the places that are the least affordable are all Democrat-run

Starting point is 00:23:13 states. New York, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Washington, Oregon are well above what the normal amount you should have to spend on a house of your monthly income is. That should be somewhere around 30%. In California, for example, it's 50%. 50% of your income goes to pay in your mortgage. But comparison, states like Iowa, Indiana, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Louisiana, all those are below the 30% threshold. So it's much cheaper. I get to question, hey, should we move states? Well, if you can move your job to where you can be in a less expensive state, then absolutely, I would encourage you to consider doing that, right? Even if you have to take a little bit of a pay cut,

Starting point is 00:24:00 let's say you take a 2% pay cut, but your housing cost goes down 30%, you're probably still better off looking at another location. The only way that things are going to change in those states is that either it's going to get so bad that people change policies there, and politicians generally, or, you know, there's going to have to be some type of major recession all over the country.

Starting point is 00:24:27 Same thing going on in Connecticut and other places. The most expensive cities, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, New York, Boston, all those are run by Democrats. So just remember when you're voting this time as to, well, I don't like what's going on now, so I'll change. Well, you're going to change to something worse, in my opinion, as far as affordability is concerned. of it comes down to our own responsibility. And some of this stuff you might not really be thrilled about hearing, but I'm just going to tell you, I'm just going to be like your dad or your uncle, just trying to give you the best advice that I can. First of all, you want to stay out of debt, especially short-term debt. Do not go borrow money to buy a car. Do not go put money on a

Starting point is 00:25:08 credit card that you can't pay off at the end of the month. And if you're going to do a car, if you have to do any type of car thing, make sure you finance it for less than two years. Obviously, homes are generally financed but don't do that but there are some other things as well you know we live in a world of traveling sports teams now for a lot of young kids i was just on a flight uh this weekend and there was a three or four young girls were getting on there probably in their you know their 10 11 12 somewhere in that area would look like to be one of at least one of their moms and they were on a plane and they had these t-shirts. This is something about gymnastics on them.

Starting point is 00:25:47 And I am sure they were at some gymnastics event at the city where the city I was, and they were flying home. Well, that's expensive to do, okay? Your kids don't necessarily need to be on super traveling teams or be participating in four or five sports at one time or four or five activities at one time. That can be very expensive, as you know, and you're not harming your kids if you don't do that, okay? don't think that you are. Just because the Joneses down the street might be, you know, living on the edge,

Starting point is 00:26:17 doesn't mean that you need to do that. Also, in this day and time, we live in an event, this is kind of goes along with the sports thing, but when we're out with our kids and all these different sporting events, we're running through, we're running through Burger King or McDonald's or Chick-fil-A or where we're going and we're spending a lot more money eating out. So I would encourage you to make sure that you're eating more at home. Plan your meals. Get together on a Sunday.

Starting point is 00:26:39 Make it a family event. If you need to cook meals for the week, then go ahead and do that. Just be, make eating out a treat as opposed to a routine. And then also, of course, you've seen the commercials, but cut back on some of the streaming services and some of the things that you do. Do you really need Hulu and Netflix? Do you really need Amazon Prime and Netflix? You know, do you need one of the, just look at that, all right?

Starting point is 00:27:04 Just look at that and make sure that you set your, what you should do is you say, Okay, well, the first thing I got to do is I want to make sure that I'm being honored God. So I want to make sure that I am tithing. As you know, I support that. I want to make sure that I'm paying my house payment. I want to make sure that I'm feeding my family. All right? Oh, I've got to make sure I pay my utilities.

Starting point is 00:27:26 After those types of things, everything else becomes a pretty flexible choice. And you need to make the right amount of choices. If your choices are keeping you from doing what you should be doing as far as your house and your tithe and feeding your family and your utilities, then you've got to change that. You've got to change that. Just the first thing to do, of course, as far as debt concerns, quit digging, stop digging the hole. Absolutely 100%. And again, look for a cheaper area. Rule America.

Starting point is 00:27:58 There's a lot of places that you can live in rural America that won't cost you near as much as living the suburban life or living the debt. downtown life. All right. Let's finish up just the last minute or so. People have asked me about the Trump's $5,000 dividend. And, of course, the media has come out and said he's bribing. Well, let me explain to you what a bribe is. A bribe says that if I, if you go and do X, just you individually, okay, if you go

Starting point is 00:28:26 and do X and bring me, you know, whatever it is, then I'm going to give you something for to be bribing you to do that, okay? or paying you to do that, whatever you want to say that is. This is not a bribe. This is a campaign promise. What he's promising is that if the Republicans win, the control the Senate and the House, which means that it's a, you know,

Starting point is 00:28:47 that they'll have the presidency, the House, and the Senate, then, you know, there's going to be a benefit to that. And he said it's going to be $5,000 per adult. Now, it doesn't matter about where you voted for Democrat or not, right? So he's not saying only Republicans are going to get that. It's going to be, if we win, that's what we're going to do. It's kind of like I'm saying if we win, we're going to do a tax cut. Or if, you know, the Democrat said, if we win, we're going to put more money into social programs.

Starting point is 00:29:12 Or it's the same thing. It's a campaign promise. It's certainly not a bribe. He's not going to check and see who you voted for. So don't pay any attention to that. Now, as far as doing this, I'm not in favor of it personally. All right. I get it.

Starting point is 00:29:25 You might need the $5,000. And so don't be mad at me for that. But putting that much more money back into the economy from the economy from the, the government is just going to make this high inflation and high interest rates last longer. And we do not need to do that in my opinion. So anyway, thanks for your time today. You guys are great. Please email me, Ron at Ron Simmons.com.

Starting point is 00:29:48 If you have any questions, if you haven't gotten your tickets, there's only a couple weeks left for Share the Aeros. And man, oh, man, it's going to be an awesome event. I was on a flight just a couple days ago. And lady came up to me that I guess had recognized me from watching some of the shows. And she was so excited about coming out to the share of the arrows in a few weeks. And I was excited that she wanted to be there. I think she's bringing some friends.

Starting point is 00:30:14 So we're really looking forward to that. And I hope I'll see you around there. I'll be walking around, checking everything out and helping Allie where I can. But please make sure to get your tickets, guys. If you haven't gotten your wife a ticket, that'd be a great gift to honor her. You have a good day and we'll see you next time.

Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Marriage Tips, AI Concerns, and Did Trump Just Bribe Us? | Ron Simmons

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.