Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Hello, welcome to Call It Like I See it, presented by Disruption Now, I'm James Keys, and in this episode of Call It Like I See it, we're gonna weigh in on the new COVID variant that's in our lives now, Omicron, and consider whether this new variant may be a cause for alarm or just more of the same in a different toilet, so to speak.
And later on, we're going to take a look at what's been called a baby bust that's ongoing, where people are having less and less babies all around the world, and consider whether there is anything meaningful that we should be taking from this or if it's just something to observe.
Joining me today is a man who, when he pulls up, people know to give him the loot. Tunde. Ogonlana Tunde, are you ready to break out your sicko mode for today's show?
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Where's my money?
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Checks in the mail, man. I guess that doesn't count, though, huh?
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Nah, man. Cash right here. We got problems.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: All right, now we're recording this on December 6, 2021, and I want to start just asking you, Tunde, what's your general reaction to seeing another new variant? This one has a name. You know, there's been a lot of variants, but, you know, another named variant that's gaining attention and is being talked about as being potentially more contagious than Delta. The. The old, new variant that took over this summer and now is. That's now the present lead variant, dominant version around the world. So what's your. What's your reaction to seeing another one pop up?
[00:01:53] Speaker B: Delta is like, so seven months ago.
Just so old.
No, you know, my genuine thought that wouldn't have thought to say until literally five seconds ago while you were teeing it up like that, is fatigue. That's my reaction.
You know, I'm tired of it.
Not in a way.
On a serious note, I respect the virus. I believe in it, that it's real, and I believe that, you know, it does damage because I've been hospitalized twice due to Covid issues.
So I'm not here to say that it's, you know, to disparage anybody that is working hard to help humanity deal with this. But what I am saying, as kind of a consumer of media, let's put it that way, I'm getting tired of everything constantly being a hysteria, breaking news, and, you know, I'm sitting down to eat my leftovers the day after Thanksgiving and to enjoy a little bit of time off. And the Dow Jones is down 900 points on Black Friday because of a headline of Omicron. And, you know, Black Friday on the.
[00:02:56] Speaker A: Day where people are spending money messing up my vacation.
[00:02:59] Speaker B: Now I'm on my phone looking at the market. So no, but, but. And you know, and it had a bad week last week because of all these fears and all. And it's just kind of like, all right, guys, at some point, you know, and we've talked about this on other shows, so this isn't me trying to sound all grandiose right now. There's shows people can listen to from six months, 12 months ago where we have both stated that this is going to be around for years and it'll probably end up being like influenza, where is never going away at this point, if it ever could have. But definitely by now it's not. And, and it'll probably, you know, we'll get that herd immunity at some point for the whole 8 billion people on the world. And it'll probably be like the flu where every year you got to get some kind of shot because it keeps. Like we're talking about these variants. It just mutates.
And so that's why I just say really quick there that the initial feeling was kind of fatigue because at some point I feel like our society has to now accept that this is here. And every time there's a new variant or some new news, it shouldn't be breaking headlines and stopping everyone's day and the market.
[00:04:02] Speaker A: It sounds like your fatigue, and this is another one of the refrains we've had. Your fatigue is actually pointed at the way that this is being discussed in a lot of media systems. Correct.
[00:04:12] Speaker B: And that's a great point. I can't be tired of nature. I get it. It's a virus, it's a pathogen, and it is what it is. Like whether, again, whether you believe it was leaked from Wuhan lab or not, it doesn't even matter at this point. Yeah, it's here.
So at this point, I don't really care about all that. You're right. It's just the way the messaging is the way our society seems to now, you know, just deal with even the vaccination and all that. Like, I'm vaccinated twice and I just got a booster shot and that's fine. I don't have anything to say negative about someone that's not vaccinated at this point. It's been almost two years of this. We all. It's a free country. That's part of being in a free country, that not everyone's going to agree with you and that's it. So yeah, that's kind of how I feel. I'm tired of the whole thing. I guess that's why I go there, go even on the box nations.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: Yeah, that's what I mean.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: I'm just tired of it all.
[00:04:59] Speaker A: No, I get you man.
My reaction actually was in a sense I saw what you were talking about in terms of. But I look at that as a function of. I term it. I mean I'm not the only one that terms it this way. But this is the function of the 24 hour media. Like they have to create excitement in order to get people to watch. So they're constantly trying to stoke demand in their product. Their product being news and if it's oh no, you know, nothing to see here, nothing that big of a deal, you're not going to watch the news if the everything to the news is always the biggest deal ever, the most important thing ever because otherwise you change the channel. So I get you on that. To me I looked at this variant actually and was one as information was coming out that it may be less virulent, that it may send less people to the hospital or something that's going to hurt you less, but it may be more contagious but not something that might hurt you less. I'm looking at the evolution of the whole thing and then just kind of marveling about how like we're watching this in real. This is an intelligent design. You, you know, like this is like we're watching this virus. It started as one thing, it has mutated and some of the mutations work and some of the mutations don't work. Like this is all, this is like a class in evolution and some of the adaptations it's doing and then, and it's doing all these things so it can evade our immune system and all that stuff. And this is like man, this is crazy. And so I look at the same thing. Like I don't have the mindset of this is going to go away one day. Like I think it's going to be, we'll just be living with it. And ideally it doesn't kill people anymore. Like you get s like it's like the common cold or something like that. And like you, you get, you'll get it. It'll be one of those things that you can get and you know, you take, you take some medicine, take you know, some antiviral pill or something like that for it that'll help you out or some other kind of immune. Take your Zinc or your vitamin D, and you'll be all right. And so I. That's what I'm. I'm hoping this goes in that direction, so to speak. Not necessarily Omnicron, because we don't know enough about that, but. But just a direction where it's going to be. It's so contagious. That's the thing about the COVID the whole time, is that it's so contagious, even people who aren't symptomatic spread it. And so you can't really contain something like that. Cause people are out there all the time spreading, don't even know they have it. And so I looked at this as just like, okay, here's another shoe has dropped.
But society now has. We're not in the same place we were in two years ago when this first started. We have a lot of tools in place to help us deal with this, you know, like. And a lot of experience in dealing with it. So I look at it as just, okay, hey, you know, like, we dropped something else into the mix, but the mix is still all mixed up anyway. We're still dealing with all this stuff anyway. This is just another component of it, and we'll see how this plays out. So I guess I would say I was in a wait and see mode, but I can imagine somebody in your position, you know, like, you're in your business, you know, wealth management, being like, you gotta be kidding me. You know? Cause, yeah, I was looking at the stocks in my life. I would say, man, the stocks are going crazy. And I'm like, oh, man, Toonday, let's be putting out fires all over the place.
[00:07:55] Speaker B: Yeah. No, I mean, look, at this point, the good thing is I don't know whether it's time and maturity in my own industry or just my own mindset or combination.
I just looked at it as a buying opportunity. Cause the way I look at it is, like you just said, I thought of the same thing.
We've been through this before.
There's dozens of variants now since it started two years ago.
And it's literally been two years. I think they said the first trace of it was November of 19 in China. And now here we are. And I think they said the first cases might have been in December in 2019 in New York in the US the first case.
[00:08:32] Speaker A: And we just don't know yet.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: So we're here December in 2021. So it's been two years.
And it's interesting because, again, I know a lot of people don't like the government and they don't trust it and all that. But some of the greatest sources of information from kind of data and facts come from US Government sources because they have a lot of information and data. So in going to the USAFacts.org website, the CDC website, when you start reading, and I'm going to quote a piece right here from USAFacts.org, designations may change with additional research. There are currently no existing variants of high consequence.
That's the US Government telling us that there are no variants of high consequence right now. Yeah, that includes Omicron. So when I started looking into that, plus what you said about our system now has two years of dealing with this.
So the system knows how to absorb people in the hospital better. They understand. They don't put everyone on a ventilator like they did.
[00:09:33] Speaker A: They know how to treat people. They know things that work, things that don't work much more. So I think part of the problem actually is that in going through this, we all have like a collective memory on the messiness of us getting to where we are now. But we don't take a look at the big picture and saying, hey, actually compared to where we were a year ago or 18 months ago, we have a pretty good hand as a society. We have a pretty good handle on this stuff. It's still not perfect. You're still dealing with an infectious disease, but it's not like they're not out, like, you know, for the most part, hey, if you go into a high risk situation, you can put on a mask and you know what, that'll help you. Or, you know, like the vaccines are available. All that stuff wasn't available a year and a half ago.
[00:10:10] Speaker B: Yeah, it's funny you say that because it reminds me. Well, I guess that's just people, because we've had this conversation on vastly different topics over the years.
And it's like, like we talked about, I think, during the, the, the conversation about Thurgood Marshall, how, you know, there's been a lot of progress in the last hundred, 150 years for black Americans.
But unfortunately there's a lot of black Americans that still in their mind think that we're in the 1880s here and don't look at some of the positive changes. Say, okay, a lot of things good up there.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: Not even. Don't look at them. Don't even acknowledge how far it's come. It's like, well, hold on, you gotta at least acknowledge that, okay, there's still.
[00:10:48] Speaker B: Issues, but look where we're at. And now let's look and move forward and that's kind of a better way. So I agree with you that this virus is no different. And I mean, you know, not to pick on our folks, but every group could say, you know, you could say the same thing, that people kind of just are stuck in the past mentally. And I think you're right, I didn't think of it that way. But yeah, it's a people issue that now every, I guess it comes down to like we've talked about too, this, the, the old saying, the famous saying that, you know, the general that's fighting the last war.
[00:11:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:15] Speaker B: And I think it's a good point because I guess most of us are that way. And I think you're right with, as relates to the virus, I think it's a combination of, I'm sure a large part of it is that, you know, human beings just having the kind of emotional muscle memory in their mind of just saying, wow, this was bad last time, so it's going to be terrible now. But I do think also to your point about the kind of hysteria and the modern media ecosystem that we all have to suffer together no matter what media you watch. It's, you're right, it's.
[00:11:43] Speaker A: Well, that's what drives the eyeballs. If they, if they got up there and said, hey, you know what, we're pretty well equipped to deal with this. We know now about the masks, we have the vaccines here, we're not going to need another lockdown.
Less people would watch than if they say, hey, is there gonna be another lockout? Lockdown? You know, if they start saying all these draconian, like crazy type things, more people will watch to find out because that's drastic stuff. So it's in the media's interest, financial interests to make us think things are a bigger deal than they may actually be. If you look at it with a little bit of perspective.
[00:12:14] Speaker B: Yeah. And so the thing is, is that, that's the thing, like, and that's where I think it is.
Frustrating, confusing and then fatiguing. And why a lot of our society turns off to some of this stuff. Because like obviously this is very important. This is a virus. It's a global pandemic. Just in the US what do we have, 8, 900,000 deaths in the two year period? Globally it's several million. So obviously this is serious. But I find myself as someone, like I said, who's been hospitalized with this, who's vaccinated, who takes it very serious.
Just tired of, I can't Even watch the news anymore because it's like this constant, like just it's always on. And then it's also like, I feel like to the defense of people who are unvaccinated, like, the news would almost make me not want to get vaccinated because it's like they keep telling people they're idiots all the time. And I've always felt like no matter what I think about someone's decision, if I'm trying to get them to see my point, beating them up and calling them an idiot is probably not the way to do it.
So I kind of wish there was a different way.
And then also the polarization, right, Because I know I'm talking. If you put it on certain media outlets, if you put it on certain others, then it's all about why it's a hoax and why it's not real and why you shouldn't worry about it. And both ways of dealing with our population are wrong.
[00:13:33] Speaker A: Well, I mean, that's, I think the big problem there is that it's trying to divide us into two groups and only two groups. And so it's either you, you, you vaccine, everybody should have a vaccine, or it should be the vaccine is, is toxic. And the person who telling you the vaccine is toxic, their employer. Their employer had everybody at that media place get a vaccine. And so like, it's, and it's disingenuous, but again, it's all for entertainment, you know, I'm saying it's all for entertainment in that sense. It's all for engagement, I should say, not entertainment. It's all trying to, to, to, to promote engagement of the viewer. Because creating that dichotomy and it's like a sports game, you know, like we want the two other, the two opposing sides to be trying to win. Like if you're watching a basketball game and the two teams are helping each other out, you'd be like, yo, turn this off. There's no drama here. It's not a compelling story. So. But I don't want to get too down into the media piece. I do want to ask you because I've just been hearing you offline, you've given me some interesting thoughts as far as your reaction when you saw the stock market take a hit. And you know, so from that standpoint, from an economic standpoint, and we've both said many a times, and you know, I rail on this, sometimes the stock market does not reflect the general economy. You know, like the stock market's been going up while people have been leaving jobs or getting fired and all that stuff, you know, laid off. So we can't look at the stock market as a sole thing, but it is an indicator. It is one of the things we can look at in terms of gauging what's going on from an economic standpoint and also the perception of what's going on from an economic standpoint. So with the stock market taking the hit that it had, do you think Omicron, this variant, do you think this is something that. That's a really, really big concern that we should be looking at or is, you know, what's your thought on that.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: As of right now?
[00:15:17] Speaker A: No, from what we know now.
[00:15:19] Speaker B: Yeah, from what I know recording this show, the reason I say that is obviously it appears like from what I read from you, just from the government website, right. That this is not a very. There have been no variants of concern. So clearly I'm. They're including this one. So unless we learn that there's somehow it's killing people faster or something like that, like you said, it appears to be more contagious, but doesn't have much more of a detrimental hit to kind of life expectancy and hospitalization.
[00:15:45] Speaker A: So, by the way, one thing with that real quick, what's interesting to me about that is that because this has been around for two years now, that could be the variant itself is less lethal or. Or it could be just that people have been exposed enough. This is no longer as new to our immune systems, whether it be through vaccines or whether it be just exposure from being around. And so, like you're saying that perspective we have to keep in mind, but go ahead.
[00:16:10] Speaker B: Yeah, and it's sad, you're saying, because the 900,000 deaths in our country may have been those who couldn't deal with the more aggressive strains of the variants. And there's a part of this that is natural selection in the end. And I hate to talk like that because it sounds very cold.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: Well, it's natural selection, but also just that they got it before society got a handle on it, you know, like in all these different options, remember, like when people were getting it initially, they didn't really know what to do, you.
[00:16:34] Speaker B: Know, like, I get that part of it. I'm more so, like, I feel like from my experience, you know, you know me, I'm healthy, I eat right, I exercise, all that. But then I ended up in the hospital with my lungs messed up. I kind of realized that, you know, that has nothing to do with me working out and being in shape, just my body or My immune system or something underlying was affected much more than a lot of other people, let's say, when being exposed to this. And that's life, you know what I mean? And that's kind of the cards I'm dealt.
[00:17:01] Speaker A: Correct. And also that's. It could be which strain you got, because, remember, so many people were asymptomatic, you know, much easier than you. And so some of that. That's when you're dealing with pathogens. It's kind of like that. Yeah.
[00:17:13] Speaker B: And so. And that's where I feel like, you know, going back to your question about, you know, the markets and all this kind of stuff, it's, you know, like the stock market is a. What they call a leading indicator, as opposed to just for the audience, something. What's that is called a lagging indicator. So. So a lagging indicator would be like the unemployment numbers.
[00:17:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: Because they come out once a month, but they're telling you what already happened.
[00:17:38] Speaker A: Yes. So measuring what already happens. Yeah, yeah.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: And so leading indicators are indicators of what may happen in the future. And obviously it's a speculation because we don't know the future yet.
So the idea is that the stock market, because really what the stock market represents is, you know, millions of people, like all of us, that are speculating and trying to get ahead of something else.
So in this case, the market dropped immediately when the headlines came out with the Omicron variant, because, like, we're talking about the muscle memory of our society, of the economy. And then of, of course, Wall street and traders is that, holy crap, if this is really bad, I want to get out of it. I want to be the first one out of the door before the next guy. So it creates like a stampede, like someone yelling fire in the. In the movie theater, and everybody's running for the exit at the same time. And you have more sellers than buyers in the market, which creates the downturn. And, you know, and if the fear is real, like last week, it'll happen for long periods of time. Now what gets a little annoying and hard to deal with sometimes is we have the supercomputers that are really out there that trade on these algorithms and all that. And the technology is good enough. We know, you know, I'm playing virtual reality on my PlayStation 5. So I know if I'm doing that at home on a $500 piece of equipment, the thing that Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan just spent, you know, half a billion dollars, a computer system to try and beat each other at trading by, you know, literally 11 10,000th of a second and you know, the fractions of a penny, that's probably more robust. So what they do is they actually have computers that read the headlines themselves and they'll have algorithms that are programmed into them to read things like new variant or virus or new this, new that. And they're automatically set up to sell when those things happen. So what looks like happened over the last weeks in the market week in the market, I should say, is that the knee jerk reaction happened. The triggering of sales would, can trigger other things like stop orders and then, you know, short sellers come in and drive in. So there's a lot of technical stuff that can happen to keep the market going down a bit for us few days. But then kind of the human beings wake up and kind of by Thursday, Friday last week, you know, I'm sure a lot of the people at those firms at the top were like, hold on, all right, we're getting, you know, they're on the phone with their buddies in Washington, they're talking to the right people and they're saying, okay, this might not be as bad as we all thought. And then the market kind of settles down and people kind of put money back in and all that.
But that's why these moments can be very gyrating in the markets because everyone's trying to figure out what's around the curve.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: Everybody's trying to predict the future.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: Yeah. At the same time.
[00:20:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:22] Speaker B: So you have this big tug of war between buyers and sellers. And then also what adds to it now literally in December is you've got a lot of tax loss selling and then you've got people selling gains because they're worried about a rise in capital gains next year. So this could be a recipe for a very choppy market for the next few weeks as we finish the year. That's all.
[00:20:39] Speaker A: And. But as you point out, everybody be ready. Yeah. As you point out though, like, we can't look at that because I saw a lot of people, what they did is they saw that happening with the Omnicron hitting, hitting the news and then being like, oh, this is, you know, like basically extrapolating from there that we have more to worry about. Whereas I think now, and obviously for the purposes of this discussion, we have to simplify when you start talking about these supercomputers algorithms.
[00:21:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:06] Speaker A: You know, they're looking at things like frequency of usage, you know, they're looking like they're looking at a bunch of stuff. You know, it's not just new variants in the Headline.
It's not like a one to one type of thing like that. If this, then that. But there's a. There's a bunch of permutations. But, you know, I think it's interesting though that you bring that out in the sense that even though the stock market can be a leading indicator, it can't. It doesn't always necessarily tell you exactly what's about to happen. And so the idea that, okay, there's. There was some selling it doesn't mean that doesn't make Omicron worse. That just means that people may have been trying to get out. People or machines might have been trying to get out in front of it. And then it may have. It may all been for nothing, you know, because that's just, that's the way it works sometimes.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: I'm going to say this with a big fat smile.
That's why I like being a human being, not a computer.
Because when I'm looking at that and then I'm reading what I'm reading from like our own government, that there's no variant of consequence after the Omnicron came out, or Omicron, that's when it turns into a buying opportunity for the right, of course, when you look at the right stuff. So if you're paying attention in moments like this, I guess that's what I'm getting at, that you can set yourself up for the long term. And that's.
[00:22:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:16] Speaker B: So.
[00:22:17] Speaker A: Well, no, I mean. And. Well, tell me this. And that's. You talk about the long term and you know, I didn't want to spend too much time on the. On the economic aspect, but I did just want to.
[00:22:25] Speaker B: You got me on a tangent, so sorry.
[00:22:27] Speaker A: Well, I put you in.
[00:22:28] Speaker B: You got me on my topic. Yeah, I got you into your wheelhouse.
[00:22:32] Speaker A: So I'm lucky it's not eight hours.
[00:22:34] Speaker B: I'll bring up a court trial or something and we'll get you going.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: But I do want to get your thoughts though, on.
Over the long haul. And again, not limited economics, but just in general from a societal standpoint. What should our mindset be? As you pointed out before, we've been saying for a long time that, hey, we should not be looking at this thing like, okay, salvation is just around the corner. All we got to do is get here and then everything will be okay.
And that is kind of what we're dealing with now. So, like right now, seeing where we are now, what kind of mindset do you see is going to be the way we need to be looking at this as A society and as individuals.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: Well, as I mentioned, my appreciation of living in a quote unquote free country is that I gotta accept that there's gonna be a lot of people that disagree with me and I gotta be okay with that to a certain extent. So I don't expect everyone to behave like I'm behaving. But you know that. So I'll just talk about the way I look at it, like we've talked about, right, that this ain't going away. We'll be dealing with this at least another two, three years, if not longer, in terms of this. This kind of semi hysteria potential. Right.
[00:23:43] Speaker A: That new variant every time something pops up.
[00:23:45] Speaker B: Yeah. And something, you know, then like I said, forever. Covid will probably be here, this COVID 19 strain in some variant or fashion. But, you know, I think we'll still have a few years left of this, you know, figuring out, you know, how the world deals with it. Obviously, it's been taking a lot longer for vaccine distribution worldwide than it has, let's say, domestically in our country. So I think it's another example where we as Americans don't really appreciate how fortunate we are as much as we complain about our country and about everything being, you know, bad and all this.
You know, we at least have the choice to take vaccines, which I have friends in other first world countries and they don't have enough vaccine. You only got 5 to 10% of the population in countries like Australia vaccinated right now. And it's not because they don't want it, they just don't have enough supply. And then you have other countries, I got friends in Central and Eastern Europe where it's more of the kind of authoritarian regime there to tell me they have vaccines. But literally, if you're not part of the right political party or you don't pay to play, you don't get it.
So, you know, we're lucky that we don't have that stuff here. It's free for all of us.
You know, I know it's government subsidized, but, you know, Pfizer's not charging us. And, you know, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, you get the virus and it's not at that level. And I don't think we appreciate what it's like to live in countries like that.
So I do think that, you know, we make a lot of things hysterical over the topics you and I have discussed already and this discussion over media and many others we've had on various shows.
And it's kind of sad to me that, you know, this will probably be how we continue. And you know, I just think, stay the course, everybody, like, whatever, like we've talked about, we've learned how to deal with this. We're gonna have continued supply chains issues for a while. You know, other parts of the world are shut down if they don't have the vaccine and they get a bad outbreak and that's life.
[00:25:37] Speaker A: So, yeah, yeah, I mean, to me, I think that from a big picture standpoint, I think that part of dealing with this is kind of acknowledging that this just is now, you know, like, and not waiting for something around the corner that's going to save the day. Like, even with the vaccines, we saw much fanfare with the vaccines and the vaccines came out and 93% or 95% or whatever, at least with the MRNA ones, and then delta hits and then the vaccines are like, oh yeah, you could still, you can still pass it on. You can still, you might, you won't get it as severe. You know, it changed the calculation basically from what the calculation before. And so, and you pointed out something when we did the show a few weeks ago on smell and the odors that people give off. And one of the things that women were drawn to apparently by studies is men who had strong immune systems. And that was. And you were like, you know, and the point you made at that time was that through most of human history, as in all times, basically until the last 100 years or so, pathogen, threat of pathogen was the number one concern for everyone all the time. And so it really seems like basically because we've all come up in time, that that wasn't the case, that science had gotten ahead of it, really from a pathogen standpoint, then we're just not accustomed to that. But this actually may be more normal. Dealing with some pathogen potentially around the corner that could do you real harm. Dealing with that is just part of life that we haven't had to deal with. And maybe we're heading back to a time where we are, you know, where something like this is going to be. I still, I've been, I've been saying this for a long time. I still think more or less we, we should, we should do what we can do, do what we can control. And from that standpoint, whether whatever, you know, whatever you've got, an individual has gotten into, whatever routine, they're getting into this, getting them from point A to point B right now, you know, you stick with that. Basically, we got to hope if we want this to have less of an effect on what's going on. We got to hope that the thing continues to. The COVID continues to mutate, to be less virulent. It's in the virus. It's in the virus's best interest to be to not kill people.
Ebola doesn't have huge outbreaks like this because people die too quickly, and then they get real sick, and they can't move around. Covid, you can get it and carry it asymptomatically. So if it becomes something that even viruses. Now that there are viruses that are out there now, the Epstein Barr and all these things that like, 60, 70, 80% of people carry and. But it doesn't really cause much symptoms in the vast majority where it's going.
[00:28:11] Speaker B: Man, like we talked about that. That this will. This will. Because, like you said, is a good point. You mentioned when you said it mutates. And we're kind of watching it evolve, like, evolution in real time. And that's what it's trying to do. Right? It's trying to evolve to the point where we probably don't notice it as much. Just like the influenza virus and others, where we're not going to attack it either. Right. Like, we'll just get sick.
It'll.
[00:28:38] Speaker A: It'll run its course.
[00:28:39] Speaker B: Yeah, it'll run its course.
[00:28:40] Speaker A: That's what we say when people get viruses. Now, like, not Covid, but like, the advice from your doctor, most of the time when you get a virus is the virus has to run its course. Take your vitamin C, take your zinc, and, you know, like, just. And so, yeah, I'm hopeful that we get to that place with COVID Cause it's pretty clear that this isn't just gonna magically vanish at some point or we're gonna get enough people vaccinated that it won't be able to spread anymore. Like, that kind of stuff, you know, like, as it continued to mutate, clearly Covid had other ideas. Forget the fact that everybody didn't get vaccinated. That was kind of unreasonable already, because it wasn't like everybody in the world was gonna be vaccinated. And so it was still gonna be circulating somewhere. So hopefully. And again, I say that as somebody who is vaccinated, I don't have a problem with the vaccine. I think the vaccine's a good idea. But there's been plenty of good ideas that everybody doesn't do. So, I mean, that's the way of the world, so to speak. So right now, yeah, in the words of Wu Tang, protect your neck. You know, like, you just Gotta make sure that you're doing, you know, from your standpoint, your family standpoint, whatever it is you can, because the threat of this is gonna be around for a while and ideally the threat will become less and less.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: So I got a patent attorney quoting the Wu Tang Clan. Hey, of course, that's pretty much why I do this show.
That's all I gotta say. Oh, man, it's all good.
[00:29:55] Speaker A: Of course, of course. Hey, you gotta find the wisdom where it is, man, wherever it is.
[00:30:00] Speaker B: So I'm just laughing that we're middle aged.
[00:30:03] Speaker A: Of course, of course. Yeah, I'm quoting something.
[00:30:05] Speaker B: Wu Tang's officially old. That's what I'm laughing at.
[00:30:07] Speaker A: I'm like 93.
[00:30:08] Speaker B: The Wu Tang Clan is no longer cool. It's the parents, it's our kids parents group that we.
[00:30:14] Speaker A: But I quoted, you know, something more contemporary in the very beginning. So, you know, it was all good. But let's move on to the next topic. It's actually, you know, there's kind of tie ins in this.
Not directly, but if you look a little deeper, the baby bust. You sent me something a few days back about how the numbers, if you actually look at them, are very shocking. They're striking. As far as how few kids people are having on average compared to recent times, whether it be 20, 30 years ago or 100 years ago, then it's really shocking.
So is this cause for concern? Like, what do you make of the fact that everybody's having less kids?
[00:30:56] Speaker B: Well, it's interesting. I mean, I think we've been conditioned to believe there's a big concern in that that is somehow going to screw up your economy or something like that. But after reading and preparing for the show, I realized it's neither a good or bad thing, it's just neutral.
And so that's kind of my first learning from it, just kind of as I research this. And the second thing, going back to what we talked about just before, about viruses, pathogens, and reading and preparing for this segment, one of the greatest reasons why people had a lot of kids was because it was so difficult to make sure that your kids survived.
I think their numbers were pretty kind of shocking. Actually. What I read was 50%, sorry, 25% of infants under one year old would die prior to 1900. Just generally around the world.
[00:31:52] Speaker A: Yeah, it was 50% before 18, right?
[00:31:55] Speaker B: Yeah, correct. 50% before adulthood. So the idea was that you needed to, like a woman needed to have four to five children during her lifetime in order for two to survive on average.
[00:32:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:32:07] Speaker B: And that made me think of a lot of other things that, again, we don't appreciate because we didn't live in those times.
But, you know, we have children, you and I.
How painful would it be to lose one of your kids just from random. Imagine like a virus or just they're.
[00:32:21] Speaker A: Sick and that would have been the.
[00:32:22] Speaker B: Norm, you know, I mean, yeah, that made me realize a lot of. And appreciate a lot of things. Like, I can appreciate how people are probably much more religious back then. Like the need to have an answer for something that you can't answer yourself because forget about. They didn't know about maybe viruses and medical. All the technology we have to be able to uncover what's killing people right. Right now, but just the idea that they also had less knowledge about what we know about viruses, pathogens, things like that. So you also didn't know why your kid was dying necessarily, or something like that. And then I thought about my own story, which I shared about my son, which I've shared on the show many times, who has type 1 diabetes.
It reminded me that I have a friend of mine who's older that was a surgeon when he was working and he's retired. And he had told me when he was in Medical School in 1970 and learned about juvenile. And they studied juvenile diabetes in medical school that someone diagnosed at my son's age, when he was diagnosed he was 5, had a life expectancy of 16 years old.
And now my son has a life expectancy for regular life expectancy as long as he monitors it when he's older. So it just made me really brought me home. I was like, man, what if I raise this kid and I've put all this emotional love and support into him and he died at 16 just because he was born with a pancreas that doesn't produce insulin. And imagine if this was, you know, hundred or a thousand years ago or 10,000, I would have had no knowledge why he died. He would have just gotten sicker and sicker over time and died. And so it's just interesting to learn these things that. And to have the perspective about, again, how lucky we are to live with all this abundance of knowledge, you know, kind of technology, science and understanding what goes wrong with us.
And going back to the first thing that in a record, in less than a year, we had a fully functional vaccine that seems to work so at.
[00:34:17] Speaker A: Least to keep people alive.
You might get sick, you might pass it on, but you're not going to be prime candidate to die from the pathogen that's Amazing if you look at it from a historical standpoint.
[00:34:30] Speaker B: Yeah. And so that's why going into kind of just not to make this about the first topic, but to why people are having less kids.
Just a segue from the first topic. It just kind of, that was one of the big issues that I was reading about in preparing for this part of the discussion, which was people just had more children back in the day because they needed to, because kids died.
[00:34:51] Speaker A: There's another piece, let me add another piece on that because also I think going from an agrarian society and this would be around the world to more industrial or city based societies, in agrarian societies, children increase your family's productivity.
Whereas, you know, like one of the things we looked at was talking about the cost of children now. So now children having children, having lots of children doesn't make your family, it doesn't increase its earning potential while you're still working. I mean, decreases, it makes, it makes you have to spend more time, more money and things like that. And that's, yeah, it's all well and good when you're a parent, you're happy to make those sacrifices. But the calculation basically is flipped. Instead of saying, hey, let's have a bunch of kids, then I can till more land and I can sell more corn because my kids, once they're, once they're eight, they'll be out there helping me, you know, or whatever it is. Then now it's like, okay, well I got to have these kids if I want to make sure that they have, you know, like if I can set them up for life in the way that I want to. As far as education opportunities, as far as extracurriculars, whatever, just give them a well rounded experience instead of looking at them as increasing my potential. It's like, okay, now I need to make sure I take time away from whatever I'm doing to put time into them and to put resources then. So it's like a reverse. And from that standpoint, in terms of what they are, the other thing or. Well, actually I just to finish on that point, I should say so from that I think it makes sense. And like you said, it's not whether it's good or bad, just, you know, I think there's just insight just from looking at things like you don't always have to take a position on something and saying, oh, this is the worst thing in the world, this is the best thing in the world. A lot of times you can just look at it, maybe you can learn something from it, maybe you can get ahead of a curve or something like that. And so to me, that's what I look at. I'm just like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. From a certain perspective, I can see some of the risks, which, you know, I'll jump back in here after you get a chance to respond on some of the risks or some of the things that could be positive from it. But it's not something I think you should take as being all one thing or all another. All good or all bad.
[00:36:50] Speaker B: Yeah, well, most things in life aren't like that, but we're conditioned to believe they are. Right. That are absolutely. One way or another.
[00:36:58] Speaker A: So.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: But, but you're right. I mean, that's another thing that, that's part of it is that we, we kind of don't need as many children as we may have in humanity's past just to actually get through the day. Right. And, and, and to make sure that whatever you've built up as an individual and, and with your, you know, between us, right. Like with our wives, you know, the husband and wife unit, if we had a little farm behind our house like most people used to have, and all that kind of stuff that you want to make sure that you got enough kids to go make sure it's working as you age.
Now we retire from our jobs and have either savings or pension or Social Security or a combination thereof. So children are less or even if.
[00:37:37] Speaker A: You don't have any of that, at least in the US we have Social Security, which was set up specifically to address the issue when you had old people just dying in the street and they were like, we can't. So there have been arrangements made again, as society has become more complex and developed, there have been arrangements made to try to limit the need for that. And again, that's not to say whether that's good or bad. It's just something to say that is.
[00:38:00] Speaker B: Well, part of it too, is just a function of the last kind of generation of what's gone on. So you had. Some of the stuff I was reading was interesting. I didn't think of it, but then when I read it, I was like, okay, this makes sense. One of it was talking about the millennial generation, specifically, they had the bad fortune of kind of coming of age during the 08 crisis, you know, that they were, that's when they kind of were what the. Historically, other parts of humanity were in the child rearing age, you know, early to mid-20s. Yeah, you're getting that, you're getting that out of your parents, you know, home. You're Starting your life, getting married, wanting to have a family.
And that generation en masse was met with a recession and worrying more about their job and their future.
[00:38:41] Speaker A: And like you said to say something a little more explosive than it needs to be. They were the generation that came of age after the baby boomers had fully pulled the bridge up behind them.
[00:38:51] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well, that's all, that's a whole show.
Yeah, but, but, but no, and so, and so I can, like, I was thinking of reading that. I was like, yeah, I can appreciate that because like you said, I mean, I'll read some of the stats here. In 2015, not 2008, but in 2015, the USDA estimated the average American family would spend $233,610 raising a child to age 17.
So that doesn't include going to college.
[00:39:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:17] Speaker B: And so then another one for the average 26 year old American woman in 2014, taking five years off to raise children will cost $467,000 in lost wages.
[00:39:29] Speaker A: A half a million dollars.
[00:39:31] Speaker B: Yeah. So the calculation, I think that's what a lot of the older generation doesn't appreciate is the calculation for younger people is different when they're talking about having families and all that. Because I can see a lot of young women after going to college, getting a degree thinking, okay, well I just did all this work and now I got to have kids and take all this time off. And then that conversation goes back to what we had recently in another show about things like childcare. Is that part of our country's human infrastructure or not? And these are all conversations that may seem silly to some, but when you, when you realize that A woman taking five years out of the labor force is $467,000 in lost wages, I'm thinking about the economic cost and the velocity of money that's not flying around if we have millions of women doing that. So maybe to subsidize child care.
[00:40:22] Speaker A: Hold on. And the fact she's not getting those wages for nothing, like, and the productivity that's lost in our society because of that as well.
[00:40:29] Speaker B: So it's just a different, like you said, it's not absolute. But that seeing that made me think of man, maybe childcare, if that can be subsidized at a much lower cost than 467,000 over five, five years, which I'm sure it could be half a million dollars. Yeah.
It's something that should be considered and looked at more deeply. I mean, not to say it's right or wrong.
[00:40:46] Speaker A: They look at the Two numbers you just put side by side, you know, you put the 200 and what to say, 230, $240,000. That's to raise the kid till 18. If we can just help the woman out to some degree and not cost half a million dollars in wages and a lot more than that worth wise in productivity. That is a boost to the society, to the economy as a large. That's boosting everybody.
[00:41:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:09] Speaker A: And I mean I'll say this, the one piece and I'm glad you bring up workers and I mentioned productivity, but that's the other thing that this reminded me of is the. One of the few times, if you look back in history, at least the history that we have access to, you know, readily have access to as far as records and so forth, that workers really started to see gains in their, in their prospects, as far as their employment, as far as their wages, things like that, their conditions.
You had the unions and the New Deal and stuff. That was one of the few times. The other one of the few times it's notable is following the play in Europe and the reason for that is that labor became such high end demand because a lot of people didn't make it basically that workers generally speaking, just were able to live better lives than workers a generation or two generations before that. And so potentially, while there's a concern to say, okay, well who's going to. As people age, you know, you have in different industries as people age, who's going to be there to take care of. There are going to be enough people to take care of them, enough people to keep the economy growing and so forth. There's that concern.
With that concern, I'm a little less concerned because it seems like fewer people are able to be more productive now than ever. And that seems to be trending that way. Like you see, you need less people to have high productivity than ever, it seems like.
But it seems like workers conceivably in the future could get a fairer shake if there's less, if there's less people out there. And then just the last thing I'll say is it also would seemingly help in other ways too, particularly from the environment if there's less. You've talked about this on many shows.
Yeah, on many shows you've talked about how it was so few people. What was the. You estimated or you said the article, you had told me offline, the article said 170 million people 2,000 years ago. Yeah, still less than a billion or. Go ahead, I'll let you go ahead.
[00:43:07] Speaker B: Yeah, no, then it was by 1800 there were 900. It was still less than a billion estimated. Yeah. And so, and so now we have 8 billion. And I think you're right, that's the one area that the Earth would probably be happy if there was less of us. We're the pathogen for the Earth.
But yeah, no, one of the things.
[00:43:27] Speaker A: I want is coming to get us all.
[00:43:30] Speaker B: You don't want to deal with that. My wife got to deal with that every day. That's not easy, dude. You don't want to deal with that variant. That's tough.
[00:43:38] Speaker A: But ultimately, I mean, as you know, like everybody hears this, nothing is constant. Change is the only constant, basically. So things are not going to be what they are now.
In 20 years things will be different and then there'll be new challenges. There'll be different things. And so we have to be flexible and adjust to that. And the birth rate is just another component of that. And there'll be some things that will be made easier conceivably in society because of it if it continues along this trend. And there'll be some things that'll be harder because of it. But you know what, it'd be the same thing, but just different things. Obviously harder and easier if the birth weight was growing or there'd be different things if the birth rate was steady. Like it's, there's just always going to be this evolution of circumstances, you know, that, that and there's all these, like, we can never look at it and find one thing that is this or one thing is that because there's all these different inputs that produce and the output we get is reality. Bas basically. And so, you know, here we go now.
[00:44:36] Speaker B: Well, one of the things I wanted to add here is because one of the remedies they mentioned was immigration and, and that's where it becomes interesting because what they said is one of the reasons why the United States has not had the issues in a lot of Western European economies of a, you know, these fears of a, of a, of.
[00:44:56] Speaker A: A low birth generation, aging, work and.
[00:44:59] Speaker B: Correct. And the same with the, you're right. Aging population. And I shouldn't say Western Europe because also Japan has that issue. Even China is getting concerned because remember China, most of our lifetime, especially when we were kids in the 80s and 90s, China had a one child policy because their population was too big.
[00:45:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:45:17] Speaker B: Now I'm learning that they, they're now allowing up to three babies because they're worried about the same thing.
[00:45:23] Speaker A: And we have just to be clear what that is basically, is what if, as you have an aging population, they require more resources to take care of because medicine and stuff keeps people alive much longer than they did a hundred years ago. And then you so, and then you need, because you need more resources. You need more people of working age to produce, to be productive, and you need more people of working age that can actually take care of the older people too. So it creates a lot of pressures if the, as the age, the median age of a society increases and there's more and more people of a certain age. And so. But go ahead.
[00:45:55] Speaker B: Yeah, no, and that's exactly it. Right. Those of us on the younger side of the generation, through taxes, are paying for the benefits of the older, whether it be Social Security or even pensions. You know, there's a lot of old retirees and state pensions, you know, firefighters, cops. It's the young firefighters and the young cops now working that are helping to, you know, with the contributions being made to them are being, are the ones paying the actual, the pensioners right now.
[00:46:20] Speaker A: So that's been the people, but also, and the people that work in long term care facilities or, you know, other nursing facilities, those are not people. Those are not old people that work there. Those are younger people that work there. So there's pressures all across the board, but go ahead.
[00:46:33] Speaker B: Correct. And that's my point is that it's interesting that the United States has not had to worry about that because we've had a robust immigration just coming in forever. The country's 250 years old. I mean, you've got all the different historic waves of different immigrants from Europe, South America, Asia, wherever, Africa, you name it. And so the, and I'll say I'll differentiate slaves from African immigrants that came voluntarily, like my father.
That's definitely a difference. I'll want to point that out there. But on a serious note, that's where we run a risk too right now, because the immigration makes enough of our country, people in our country nervous. And it promotes a lot of nativism. And you have these immigrants, these then fears that come up, like the replacement theory and all this kind of stuff. And the reality is, is that if we don't want to have the same concerns that they have in Japan and certain European countries and all that, we should be promoting healthy immigration. I'm not just saying letting people just come over the border because they feel like it, but still promoting the type of immigration that we've done, like the one visa type of stuff, like getting skilled laborers, like some of the people don't know this.
The most dominant immigrant class from wage earners are African immigrants since the 1970s.
And it's because they have a lot of high skills, you know, and that's why a lot of them become doctors and engineers and things like that. So if you're looking at those type of immigrants and continuing to promote that. Because what do they say? Immigrants are usually younger people.
You know, most people aren't immigrating to a new country when they're in their 70s.
[00:48:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:11] Speaker B: Unless it's out of necessity.
[00:48:12] Speaker A: They're motivated, they're, you know, like they're coming to take advantage of the system.
[00:48:17] Speaker B: And then they have children. So I think for a lot of Americans that are living in kind of, I was going to say a fantasy land, but that's a lot ruder than what I, what I really want to say because I don't try and be rude or try and put anyone down, but it is a bit of a fantasy to believe that somehow we can sustain this great economic engine that we've had for the last 200 plus years without continuing to bring people into this country and allow people to.
That's what I mean, not open border, but.
[00:48:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, but that's the best way that's been shown in the world to have a constantly growing economy is to keep bringing in young and motivated people to your economy, keep bringing more and more people in. And so, yeah, I mean, I'm with you 100% on that. That's how I always looked at the immigration. It was just like, oh, well, so you're telling me that a bunch of people who, you know, want to work really hard, want to come here. Well, yeah, bring them in like that. That's. We need, that's, that's an advantage. You know, all the highly motivated people from other places come here like, oh, great, you know, so I would agree with you on that.
[00:49:21] Speaker B: It's funny. But now you got to convince everybody that every single immigrant is not Ms. 13. And that's the sad part that again, these topics become such political footballs that.
[00:49:29] Speaker A: Well, but the thing is, and that's where you get into the absolute thing. Because every single nothing, every single immigrant or every single anything isn't one thing, you know, like. But the numbers show the vast majority of immigrants come here and enrich the country. They come here and put in work, you know, and so that's. But we, you know, you tell me.
[00:49:46] Speaker B: All black people aren't criminals.
You kidding me?
[00:49:51] Speaker A: I can tell you this.
[00:49:52] Speaker B: You're not savages. Who rape white women all the time.
[00:49:54] Speaker A: Yo, I can only say this.
All people are human beings, too.
[00:50:02] Speaker B: Only sometimes. Remember that. Only sometimes.
[00:50:06] Speaker A: But we can wrap it up from there. And that's an old, old one.
[00:50:08] Speaker B: That might have to be the new drinking game one.
[00:50:10] Speaker A: We'll bring out that.
Yeah, but that's an old one. Newer listeners won't know it.
That's a Toonday classic from Sometimes People Are Human Beings Too. So we'll wrap it from there. We appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call It Like I Said, See it and you'll subscribe to the podcast. You can get us anywhere you get your podcast, rate us, review us. And until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:50:34] Speaker B: I guess I'm a human being, too.
[00:50:37] Speaker A: All right. All right. And we'll talk to you next time.
