Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we react to the report that the US national debt is now bigger than the whole US Economy.
Hello, welcome to the Call Like I See it podcast. I'm James Keats, and joining me today is a man whose takes are sharp because he gets to the point asap.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Tunde.
[00:00:31] Speaker A: Ogunlana Tunde. Are you ready to show them why you remain an urban legend even though you're actually suburban now?
[00:00:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Let's just have a show. I don't really respond to that. So,
[00:00:46] Speaker A: no. Before we get started, I have my proud that I got.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: You did. And I got my chocolate lab sleeping at my floor, my feet here, and I'm looking out at my lawn that is already. The grass is getting too long and it's pissing me off. So, yes, I am suburban as they come.
I'm that guy.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Yes. Yes.
Before we get started, if you enjoy the show, I ask that you subscribe and like the show on YouTube or your podcast app. Doing so really helps the show out. We're recording on May 12, 2026, and Tunde. Reports have started coming in that the US national debt now exceeds the size of the US economy and measured as gross domestic product. And this is the first time this has happened since 1946, which is right after World War II.
And now in another life, we used to hear about the national debt and having that was bad and how we needed to care about this stuff. And that was when the debt was a much smaller number and much, much smaller percentage relative to gdp. So was that all bs? Is there a point where the debt, the national debt of the United States actually will matter? Or are we still just playing around with Monopoly money and these milestones are just kind of like, oh, yeah, okay, it's greater than gdp. Okay, let's. How much more money do we want to borrow? You know, just keep going.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: I. Should I clutch my pearls now? Or is that something I should. Or I got to buy some pearls first?
[00:02:09] Speaker A: I was gonna say you should with the pearls.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I thought about that joke as you were talking. I was like, oh, yeah. There was a time like 15 years ago where everybody was clutching their pearls about the debt and the deficit and all these things, and you're right.
And somehow we just keep borrows. Yeah. So I think to answer you directly, it's like a yes and yes. I think it's important. And yeah, I do think there's a
[00:02:31] Speaker A: lot of people that were full of
[00:02:32] Speaker B: BS as related to their concerns over the debt. Now, in fairness, there are a lot of people that weren't full of BS that they still are concerned today. And those people to me would tend to be the ones like it's interesting to see who cares and who doesn't by 2026 compared to let's say 2016 or 2006. Right.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: But look at it. I like where you're going, but let me ask you more, more poignantly or more more specifically, I want to look at something. Was the, the fact that they were raising the concerns when the debt was so much smaller, the debt has grown so much since then. So were they. Were their concerns back then necessarily BS because they were warning about all this stuff and it's 10 times worse now, or not 10 times literally, but maybe twice as worse now and everything's still chugging along.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: I don't really know, man, because I think that some of this is we're building the plane where we're flying from an economic standpoint. And by that I mean. And then I'll hand it back for, for your thoughts is, you know, when what we're basing these assumptions on about national debts and all that are looking at economies from kind of the more of the true industrial age when economies ran on more physical things like processing plants and being able to ship commodities from here to there.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: What I'm seeing now, monetary system that was based on a currency with. It was based on something.
[00:03:53] Speaker B: Right. I was just going to go there like with the advent of crypto, like the show we did just in recent weeks about the poly market. And I was amazed to learn that that's already a $1.1 trillion economy. The fact that data remember, surpassed oil as the number one traded commodity in the world back in like 2018.
So I don't know, maybe we can just keep creating new ways of economic growth and activity that maybe deficits don't matter, I don't know. And I think we're going to find out one way or another in probably the next five to 10 years.
[00:04:25] Speaker A: Well, here's the thing.
I think that it matters, but it doesn't matter in the way that we think. And this is why it's interesting that you brought up the people that were raising the alarm, particularly the people that were trying to score political points with it, is that I think it matters from the standpoint of confidence.
And so.
Well, there's a raw numbers piece that we'll talk about once debt service grows higher and higher and higher. But I'm setting that part aside right now because that's still a single digit kind of thing in terms of percentages. But I think it matters from the psychological standpoint. Do people feel good, whether it be people in the country, people outside of the country, what do they feel like, okay, things are working, things are okay. So actually when it was being used for political points, it mattered at that time because it was being used to undermine a lot of people's faith in their country, in their government and the ability to do stuff. And so it mattered then. It matters less right now relatively, because nobody's out banging the drum. From a policy, a political point standpoint, hey, our platform stands on reducing the debt or the debt is a problem and yada, yada, yada, whether that's something that they hold a true belief or not, because nobody's talking about it a lot, it doesn't really affect the confidence people have in the government, you know, so it can just go up and it's like, well, from an objective standpoint, it looks like this should matter more. But because less people are talking about it and less people are clutching pearls about it, even if they're only clutching pearls for the purpose of, of winning political battles or winning political skirmishes, the fact that they're not doing that anymore makes it more palatable. So to me, that's crazy in that sense. That, and some of that comes back to the idea again, like I kind of threw in when you were talking. If your currency, for example, is standardized to gold, then when you have a certain level of debt, then conceivably that could create a real problem with your ability to manipulate your currency and to utilize your currency. When your currency is based on confidence, which ours is, the US currency is based on confidence, then it's like it matters more if people are talking about it and it matters less if people aren't talking about it. So to me, that's the fascinating thing about this is that basically it's like a self fulfilling thing one way or the other up to a certain point. And I mean, we're going to talk about this because I do want to get to the. And I mentioned it already, like, is there a point when this actually does start to matter? Like for real? For real. Like not just in people's minds.
[00:06:57] Speaker B: Yeah, and I know we'll discuss that. I just want to follow real quick because you make a very good point.
How do people feel internally about the country? And I think there's a symbiotic relationship between this because as we've, like you said, some people, not to make this conversation about politics, but some people in the last 20 years have used this as a political weapon. That has then got us to a point where we have.
We as a nation are behaving in a way. And my concern is this, because you're right, it's about confidence. It's about vibes. I think there's a lot of things that go into this that aren't as much as the things that we think of. Like you're saying about this wonky kind of financial statistics and about. I mean, it's a very good point. You make that. Because our currency is.
[00:07:43] Speaker A: It must have been a really good point because that's the third time you said that. I'm feeling really good over here. Yeah, yeah.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: No, have confidence. This is very good. Yes. It's as if I had made good points when we did this show about. About supplements, because that's not my area of expertise. It's like, you know, this is. Economics is where I'm at. And so you're making some very good points here. And so the point is, is that because the idea of confidence is also like, the street term I would use would be vibes, right? Like, you know, the vibes are good and people feel good. You know, they do stuff where they rock with you. And if the vibes aren't good, people don't want to rock with you. And so my concern also for this conversation is, you know, because who knows how far the United States can go with the GDP of 30 trillion and being the world's largest economy and all that. With that, we probably can go a lot further than maybe nations like Zimbabwe in the 90s or somewhere like Wermar, Germany in the 30s, right. Which is already in a depression state and all that, when. Before Hitler came to power. So I think we are a lot stronger than we tell ourselves. Right. To your point about how people have been manipulated internally to feel negative about their own system and their own country in many different ways, this being one of them. But then I think that now that we are behaving a certain way on the world stage, I mean, think about the last year and a half.
We have told the Prime Minister of Canada that he's the governor. We have threatened multiple times the Europeans to invade and take over Greenland. We have threatened South Africa that they're committing a genocide and they better play ball with us with whatever we want them to do. And so what I'm saying is, is when you have this kind of attitude. And as you know, James, I'm really big on the idea of soft power for the United States. And when you lose the kind of respect and the soft power side of it, you may put yourself in a position that the next time we have a great financial crisis like 08 and we need to do a TARP or the next time we have a pandemic like in 2020 and we need to do a CARES act and we need to now print $7 trillion like we did, worth of money at 0% and we're asking our foreign allies and friends to buy that, the debt so that we can operate. They may not be as willing to do it. And that's my concern as well as buys.
[00:09:53] Speaker A: Bingo.
[00:09:54] Speaker B: You know what I mean?
[00:09:55] Speaker A: That's the point.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: That's it.
[00:09:57] Speaker A: And it matters. And so that's the key piece on this, is that the problem, the underlying problem that we have right now is that we're accumulating all this debt while we're also saying that things are going like, at least, you know, the people watching the stock market and all of that, they're pointing, hey, look at the Dow, all that stuff, they're saying economy is going great. So if the economy is going great, then why are we still, why are we going increasingly, increasingly more and more in the debt? You know, so that's the big problem, because when the economy is going great, we should be reloading for the next crisis. And so when this, this debt, this out of control debt, when that will matter, it's reflective of an underlying problem which we'll touch on in a little bit. But when it will really matter is when we haven't reloaded our systems to be able to absorb another tragedy. You know, when something goes wrong, as long as things are going great, then we can absorb all this stuff. But as soon as something goes wrong, then it will undermine our ability to do that. And when will people start to care? Will people start to care when that starts affecting their day to day? Because the GDP can be whatever it wants. The national debt can be whatever it wants. It's inflation.
People will get up. As we know when inflation starts acting up, then people are like, yo, what is going on? You know, so. And that kind of stuff they can, that can influence the inflation. So we're gonna see, at a certain point, like you said, we're gonna find out. And the problem is that these kind of things that can come up are unforeseeable by definition. They're unforeseeable. So, you know, that's what we're gonna end up dealing with.
I say all that though. Like this is still, we're talking about it, but we recognize this isn't actually harming us in a huge way right now. You know, I guess the debt service, debt service, it's a big deal, you know, it's bigger than the military budget, you know, so it's a big deal, but it's not something that people feel on a day to day basis. Do you think there's something too though? Because there's a lot of seems to be slow moving crises around. You know, it's like oh yeah, climate change, oh yeah, plastic pollution, oh yeah. All of these things that it's like, yeah, like we can see that they're there but it don't really. It's not like Covid, where it's like hey man, don't leave the house, you know. So do you think that either our society or just humans in general, like is there something about the idea of a slow moving crisis that just makes us ill equipped, forget our system? Is, are we just ill equipped to deal with slow moving crises or you know, are we, is it really is just about the system we have right now?
[00:12:18] Speaker B: Your last one is, you know, where I'm going to land. It's us humans.
It's, it's empty tune day to day.
Yeah, no, definitely glass half empty. Tunde.
I think we're at a point and this is interesting, I'm going to say some kind of big, you know, for me esotera galaxy brain bs. Which is because I think you're right, James. There's so many things that we've seen that people have said they care about so much and they have become the idea of something like a single issue voter comes to mind and not to get pick on topics, it's just the idea like first of all, for the last few years, remember 2022, 2023, 2024 and we live in Florida and we had a group called Moms for Liberty, right. That was so worried about protecting kids and all this stuff. And then since 2025, 26, Justice Department releases some files about documented, you know, 1200 girls getting hurt by groups of powerful people. And it's interesting that the same people that were hand wringing back then don't seem to be as vocal. I mean some of them are, but a lot of them aren't. Same with the dead, same with climate, same with whatever, right? So I think that we're running up against the reality that as human beings, and this is where I'm going to go with this is why I think we are kind of doomed to probably collapse all this at some point because we have evolved in nature. And so there's certain evolutionary realities that we just have. And that's things like tribalism.
And maybe a large societies of humans with billions of people on the Earth can survive in other type of societies than, let's say, a representative government or if you want to call it a democratic republic or a full democracy. I like the imagination of what those can look like, but I don't know. With our communication networks, the Internet, the inability to have a shared narrative as a society, I think that is very difficult for us. And then I think things I've learned about just how humans are.
One reason why I feel like many of us feel like we're not agreeing is because the way that the Internet is and algorithms have siloed us into different camps, in a sense, different tribes.
And evolutionary biology has taught us that, like the show we did about beliefs recently, beliefs aren't truths. And humans evolved to be part of a group. That is the most important thing, because to be outside of the group in the wild meant you don't survive. So people will do things like deal with cognitive dissonance and things that they see.
[00:14:54] Speaker A: The connection, Mr. San, is that people will adjust their beliefs to fit in with the group that they feel like. Right?
[00:15:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: So what's actually real or true becomes less important than believing what the group says that we're going to believe in.
[00:15:09] Speaker B: Correct. And so what's happening? And I'm not saying that because I'm right. And I'm trying to say people who don't agree with me are wrong. What I'm saying is I don't know who's right and who's wrong, including myself. But what I do know is that
[00:15:18] Speaker A: the fact that's a pretty flimsy way to live.
Well,
[00:15:23] Speaker B: don't look at my everyday life.
You won't find out the result of that attitude.
But no, but I'm thinking about James because I'm old enough now to remember sitting down in front of the news TV and, you know, TV and watching the news with my mom in the 1980s, and it was Peter Jennings and Tom Brooker, and it was still back in the day when 80% of America got the same message again, whether it was true or not. And so we didn't have this type of disruption in our society based on people being triggered by things that they feel are very important.
But then there's another 20% of the society that doesn't even understand what they feel because they're being told something else is totally important.
And so that's why I'm not here to pick on an ideology. I just think I don't know if this can survive with the modern, you know, communication.
[00:16:06] Speaker A: I don't think it's our humanity at all. Like I think that this is about societal values and so our society. And when I say this United States, you know, it's a society. Like I'll say, for example, capitalism. You know, capitalism has benefits to it. Capitalism has drawbacks to it as well. Capitalism, capitalism focuses on prioritize short term gains over long term benefit, period. That's what it does because you know that that's the way it works. You got the capital requires that short term gain till you even make it to the long term. There is no long term if there's no short term when you want long term projects. Historically, when we want to do a space race, it was the government working on that, it wasn't private companies working on that. Because they can't say in 1960, hey, we'll deliver the outcome in 1969. They wouldn't make it till 1969. So capitalism is something that underlines a lot of our values and that's internalized profits, externalized costs, short term versus long term. Those are ethos within the capitalist kind of values mindset that when it comes to building a huge corporation or establishing great technological innovation, those things can be very helpful. But when it comes to, if those values exit out of kind of that sandbox and go into a more of a worldview sandbox, then that creates a situation where it's like, well, hey, I don't care if things are going to fall apart in 10 years, I got to maximize my profit this next quarter or this next year. And so I think it's actually our societal values. Longer term societies approach situations and longer term culture, you know, views cultural views, view things different, you know, differently. I know when I was young now this was overstated I believe, but people thought, oh yeah, the Japanese culture in terms of saving money, different things like that. Things that were like when I learned about it, I was like, oh wow, that's completely foreign to me. So I think, and remember this actually does go back to sapiens when we talked about this, is that one of humans greatest advantage over animals generally, you know, non human animals is our ability for cultural evolution. Like we don't need biological evolution to adjust how large numbers of people operate. All we need is for cultural evolution which can happen quickly and can take in a lot of different directions. So our culture has evolved in a way I believe that does not allow us to address things from a long term standpoint because so much of the winning has been done by the short term thinkers. And so therefore those short term thinkers have taken over basically in terms of how we're going to operate totally as a society, which is understandable because our cultural values have made it so they've been the big winners, generally speaking.
[00:18:49] Speaker B: No, it's like. I agree with your last point, which is why I think I'm glass half empty. Because I just think that.
Because I just think that these guys, the people that wanted to dismantle things like the New Deal and the system that gave this country the largest middle class and a great economy post 1965, once it became a full democracy and everyone could participate, including women. Right.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: But remember, they saw that, those people saw that as chaos. They looked at.
[00:19:22] Speaker B: I know, that's what I mean. So the fact that they, yeah, they have won and they have reascended their acolytes into power. And I don't mean this just with the administration, I mean in the Supreme Court, states legislatures, all that, that we have a very undemocratic ethos now in our political leadership means that it's going to be very difficult for the people who want to see the United States be where it was from let's say 19, mid-1930s to let's say the 1990s or something. Whatever people feel like are the golden era for the middle class.
That's going to be a lot of heavy lifting like people did in the 60s. And it's going to take violence. And I don't even want to talk about the 60s. We've talked about also the history of labor rights in this country and the fact that mercenaries were hired by the gilded class in the 1910s and 1920s to go put down people that just wanted to unionize in coal mines or people that didn't want their 8 year old kid being forced to go work in a mine and they wanted that kid to go to school and have a public school in their town. Like these are things that didn't just organically spring up after the Declaration of Independence was announced. These are things that Americans fought and died for for 100 years, from the early settling of the country to the early 20th century. And I think we just have basically given that all away in the last decade or two. And we're gonna find out, hey, we're
[00:20:42] Speaker A: giving it all away to cheers. Even I know that.
[00:20:47] Speaker B: Are we going to quote my famous friend Padme Liberri.
[00:20:51] Speaker A: I know I can Always get you.
[00:20:52] Speaker B: If I throw a spot from Revenge of the Sith and Star wars that we have elected, we have lost the Republic to thunderous applause, electing,
[00:21:02] Speaker A: I can get you going.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: The supreme chancellor who becomes an emperor.
[00:21:06] Speaker A: Yeah, of course. Well, let me, but let me throw one more thing at you, and this is actually one of your lines. Leadership is important. And you mentioned earlier single issue voters. And so I want to tell you like, that single issue voters are another one of the problems, so to speak, that we have. Because what we end up a single issue voter, what they're doing, what they're saying basically is that I value blank over anything, which. And that anything can be integrity, can be honesty, can be just being a decent person, you know, So a single issue voter conceivably will vote for the devil if the devil promises them, I will do blank for you, you know, which is kind of how deals with the devil work, you know. So some of this is the move away from, and I don't know if this is that little knowledge is dangerous kind of thing, but the move away from, hey, let's try to find the most quality people that we can have. Let's try to find people with integrity. Let's try to find someone like a George Washington, you know, who can voluntarily walk away from power that people are trying to throw to him. You know, let's try to find someone like a Lincoln, you know, let's try to find someone like an FDR who is born to the wealth class and doesn't need any of that, but is like, okay, hey, let's, let's. I'm going to save the wealthy people from themselves. Like, it's, I don't know that we're even looking for people like that anymore because we have a lot of people, look, a single issue, like, hey, just give me this one thing. I don't care if you're the devil, I will do a deal with the devil in order to get this one issue that I feel so strongly about to the forefront. And so I think, and again, that may be the idea of little knowledge. You have a little knowledge being dangerous. It's like, okay, I think that everything in the country will be okay if we can just do this one thing. Or it may be the thing of being able to be fixated on one issue. I don't know what that is, but I do know that as Tunde Ogunlana says, leadership is important. And if we've gotten bad at selecting leaders because we got too many people selecting leaders based on deals with the devil. Then I think that also will undermine our ability to address big picture problems. Because it's like, well, you know, if you don't have people of integrity, of vision in office, if they're just in there cause they made a bunch of deals with people, then it's like, well, hey, they're just gonna take care of themselves. That's kind of the person you wanted in the office is somebody. Just take care of themselves.
[00:23:18] Speaker B: I'll say this, wrap us up. Yeah, yeah. And in fairness, just to finish on two direct things you said in fairness to the American voters, many of them. There was a man who at least rhetorically behaved a bit like FDR in 2016, who ran for President because he said, I'm a billionaire and I don't need these people's money. Now, he ended up being a confidence man who misdirected a lot of people that supported him. But what I'm saying is I don't blame those voters back then.
People that showed up in 24 still supporting him, I can maybe look different. But in 16, that was a message that a lot of Americans actually genuinely believed. But clearly it didn't play out that way.
But we're getting back to the bigger issue of the single issue voter. Cause I thought of this actually in preparation. That's why I just want to finish my thoughts on this.
[00:24:02] Speaker A: Hey, man, you claiming credit for my take?
Yes.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: So it was already in my head. You just allowed me to get it out there. So yes, I'll claim credit.
Let me steal it from you in front of everybody listening, man. Let me just. It's mine. Let's go. So no, but no cause so here's what I thought. James, in America, in our culture, I'm sure other cultures have their single issue equivalent voters on different topics, but ours seems to be in our lifetime, me and you is second amendment right, guns and abortion right. Pro life people, they always will say, that's all I care about a guy. And that's what we're seeing, right?
In exchange for the Dobbs decision in 2022.
A lot of people don't care that a president got a plane from an Arab country, right? Like that funded Hamas and all these cognitive dissonance, again, things that people will have to square in their head. And so what I'm waiting for is because again, this is where the people don't recognize the power they have. What if every American voter, instead of worrying about left versus right and Democrat or Republican, most people seem to say a simple topic they don't like Congress having the ability to trade stocks on inside knowledge.
Somehow we as American people don't put it on ourselves to say I'm a single issue voter for that.
I want to test everybody running for Congress in this midterm. When you get in office, are you going to vote against insider trading and some of this corruption we see internally in our government? Cuz if you don't, you could don't get my vote. I don't care.
[00:25:29] Speaker A: But here's the problem with that and I know we got to get out of here.
[00:25:31] Speaker B: I'm just saying if we did hold our politicians to that type of thing, like some people hold them for abortion and guns, we might have a change in some of the stuff.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: Well, but what I'm saying though is that this is where to your earlier point, we have a system systemic problem. Because with only two parties, what you're talking about is an issue that both parties tolerate or embrace once they're in office. Like you can't say I'm going to vote for this party because of this or I'm going to vote for that party because of this. Because both of them do it and both of them are in cahoots to not stop doing it. So that's where the people can't be represented in that context. Because it's like, yeah, if you're not voting for anybody who does that, you just may not be voting. Because that is an issue right now. That the people in this is where again, we get into this public servant thing. The people who are drawn to government right now aren't the people who are interested in public service in large part, not all the time. There are some that are there for public service, but they kind of stand out. You know, these are the Bernie Sanders of the world. It's like he looks like a crazy person half the time because he's so much different than all these other guys that are stuff in their pockets, you know? So it's also.
[00:26:34] Speaker B: He also never met a comb. That's why he looks crazy.
That's part of it.
[00:26:44] Speaker A: We can wrap, we can wrap this.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: He looks like a curmudgeon, man. He needs to. He needs some PR help.
[00:26:49] Speaker A: Hey, hey.
[00:26:50] Speaker B: I'm gonna turn your mic off, man. You can end it in an elephant way if you want, but we could end it too. Like this.
[00:26:56] Speaker A: Yeah, we're ending it like that. We appreciate
[00:27:00] Speaker B: it.
[00:27:00] Speaker A: Subscribe to the podcast. Rate it, review it, tell us what you think. Send it to a friend. Friend. Till next time.
[00:27:05] Speaker B: I'm James Keys. I'm Tunde up a lot.
[00:27:07] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk soon.
