Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we discuss California's move to raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour for fast food workers at large chains. We'll discuss policing in America in light of the Sonia Massey shooting, and we'll react to the theory that's been making its rounds around the scientific community that our known universe may just be the inside of a black hole.
Hello.
Welcome to the call like I see it podcast. I'm James Keys, and riding shotgun with me today is a man who is never talking gibberish when he moves his lips toonday or going Lana Tunde, you ready to show the people why they shouldn't forget about tea?
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Yeah, man, you're challenging me here. I gotta speak properly.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: I hold you to a high standard, very high standard.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: For sure, for sure on this show.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: For sure, for sure. Now, before we get started, if you enjoy the show, I ask that you subscribe, hit subscribe, or like on your YouTube or your podcasting app. Doing so really helps the show out. Now, recording this on July 30, 2024, and tune day a few months back, April 1, to be exact, California raised its minimum wage for fast food workers that work at restaurants of chains that have more than 60 locations. And they raised it from $16 to $20 an hour, 16 being the baseline minimum wage, and that these larger chain work for these larger chain workers. It's up to $20 an hour now. And following this announcement, predictably, there was all this doom and gloom about, oh, this is going to be the end of the world, and this is going to ruin the economy and destroy life as we know it and so forth. And now, miraculously, we're a few months in and the world is still spinning. And actually employment in California fast food restaurants is at a record high, which suggests that maybe we need to let these things play out a little bit sometimes and get some more data and not kind of live in the land of speculation, which it seemed like people wanting to short circuit. This just said, hey, this isn't going to work because this theory or that or my belief or whatever. So I want to talk both.
What California did, the mechanics of it, as far as the $20 an hour, and then how it only applies to certain workers. And then also this reaction, you know, your thoughts, you know, on the minimum wage raise, and also the pessimistic reaction, we can address them sequentially, but, you know, what were you thinking when you saw this?
[00:02:35] Speaker B: I think a lot. But the fact you just said that people want to live in a land of speculation threw me off a bit because I was like, wow, that's pretty.
[00:02:43] Speaker A: True with like, well, everybody's 100% sure what's going to happen, you know?
[00:02:50] Speaker B: Well, and it's interesting because in preparing and reading for this house, kind of like in a certain quaint way, I was kind of thinking like, oh, wow, this is what politics used to be like, fighting over like this, the spoils, how the spoils between labor and capital will be split and, you know, organized capital trying to lobby the government and organized labor trying to lobby the government for their goodies. Right.
[00:03:13] Speaker A: And here still is just about that. The now they just don't argue it directly. They argue it through different means and culture and stuff like that. But the argument, the point is still the same.
[00:03:24] Speaker B: No. Now I'm watching the news and it's a speculation of, well, did this guy be running for president? Is he serious that we're not going to have elections after this? Meaning like it's really far off stuff we've gotten to talk about at the national level. So this was a nice reminder that actually, yeah, there's a role for politicians and government and all this stuff in our lives to help sort out these kind of things. So I think you're right that this goes back to kind of a classic fault line in our political discourse about things like wages. And in an era where we've just seen rampant inflation, which everyone acknowledges and no one likes, these are the questions that are fitting right? Like should there be a minimum of how much an employee gets paid when they show up 40 hours a week somewhere? And so, yeah, I think that it's a valid conversation, and I think you're right in reading, just preparing. You know, there was some, some labor, sorry, some business interest groups in California that were making the case that this is going to, you know, cause these massive layoffs and all this. And then to your point, we haven't seen that based on the data so far. And I think one thing that I realized just in my own experience going to fast food restaurants is I think automation is probably a bigger risk to the health of employees than any of this wage argument. But I recognize that the capital side is always going to see an increase in wages as a threat.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the automation argument that was thrown out, you know, some of the arguments that were thrown out, you said were the mass layoffs, closing locations, automation. The automation one is always a trip to me, though, because they make that argument, the people that are saying you shouldn't raise the minimum wage because more automation will come make the argument as if, but for if you don't raise the minimum wage, they won't automate. Like, they won't automate if the automation is there. The automation is coming regardless. And so that's not a reason to not raise the minimum wage. To me, I was really interested in the way they implemented this because saying, okay, so I think the key factor is that it only applies to, for workers at fast food restaurants with more than 60 locations. And so what it's targeting there basically is once you know, if you are a business owner or you're running these locations and you have that many locations, the more locations you have, the more you can take advantage of economies of scale and you can keep costs down in other areas. Normally that money would be pocketed. And so they're saying, okay, well, as you are able to take advantage of more economies of scale, we want you to give more of that work money to your workers. And it seems like that seems like a nice approach because that also helps smaller businesses, businesses that don't have 60 locations have a competitive, you know, that helps them competitively compete. So it actually is anti monopoly as well from the way it operates and that it tries to diffuse, you know, some of the success, you know, or create more hurdles for as you grow larger, which is very normal in terms of the natural world, like in no other area other than with money, do things get easier the more you accumulate? If you are, we're in the Olympics now. As you become a high level sprinter or a high level swimmer, the higher up you go on the rung, the harder it is each incremental improvement becomes. And so money is the only place where that doesn't, where that doesn't apply in kind of the natural world where the more you get, the easier things become. And so I don't think it's a bad approach. And I think you have to weigh the alternative like this doom and gloom and saying, people are saying, oh, well, you know, I did. This is going to be, again, the end of life as we know it. Well, what's happening now isn't all, you know, flowers and sunshine. Like right now, we have a situation where you have the massive working poor people who work for a living and don't make enough money to support their family. Those people then need more state assistance. So the government has to kick in to help people that are working. And so I would say you're weighing consequences against that. This situation where we have massive working poor, we have people who aren't earning enough and then therefore are needing more state assistance. This, we're trying to say, okay, let's make it so the people that are working make enough money to support themselves a living wage, and then they don't need state assistance for the basics of life. And that's. That's what we're really weighing here, is, can we get up a system? Set up a system where working people, the people who are working that are motivated and all that stuff, have enough to live a liveable, have a livable life, you know? And so I think when you weigh it against that, it makes a lot of sense that this, this would be an objective and an approach to try.
[00:07:57] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think one of the things, because as you're saying it, it's like there's. There's always good arguments when you break them down for these things. I'm thinking about, like, you're saying, you know, the article, one of the articles I read on this made a good point because we don't live in California. But it reminded me that California notoriously has one of the highest costs of living in terms of estate in the United States, and that a lot of fast food workers have to take second jobs to make ends meet.
And let's hope they're taking second jobs. Maybe some of them are doing criminal stuff, you know, to make ends meet or doing something else. One thing they're probably not doing if they're taking two jobs, is they're not at home for their kids as much. So, you know, we could have arguments about family values that come along with making sure that people have a sustainable wage. And to your point, if they don't have a sustainable wage, then they're probably gonna become a tax on the system. They're gonna need public assistance. Maybe their kids need assistance with school lunches. All that will come out of the tax base of said municipality or state. Here we're talking California. So.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: So the question becomes, who pays for that stuff?
[00:09:00] Speaker B: Yeah, well, and exactly, because where I'm going is, let's pick on California, specifically here. California is the fifth largest economy in the world. 25% of the nation's agriculture comes out of that state. And what else do they have? Two mega economic engines, one being South California, which is Hollywood, and the whole entertainment sphere. The other in northern California, which is Silicon Valley, where people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg make all their wealth or have made all their wealth, you know, so the idea is that, yeah, you've got this huge economy with this booming capital. Like you said, the money just keeps growing and growing. But yet the people who are doing the menial stuff at the bottom aren't able to make ends meet because of the higher cost of living driven by all of this economic kind of excesses in the state, you know, the cost of real estate and all that going up. So this is another example. Similar, not similar, but in a little bit of a parallel to the great financial crisis where we're seeing a privatization of these profits, but the public has to deal with the socialization of the cost of that. And maybe in the great financial crisis it was. And since then, you know, this zero interest world and low taxes was we as a taxpayer are funding deficits because we're not raising money for the treasury at a national level in a way that we could at a state or local level. What's happening is places like Silicon Valley are printing trillions a year. Hollywood's at hundreds of billions, maybe a trillion a year. But clearly the state with their highest state tax is taxing everybody from the top to the bottom for that. So again, I'm not here to advocate some sort of 70, 80% tax scheme or anything like that. I'm just saying these are actual real conversations that we need to have as.
[00:10:53] Speaker A: A society that what we're doing right now maybe can be improved on. And if you're going to do that, then you have to try different things. You know, the dogma that you see or kind of the orthodoxy that you see that raising the minimum wage hurts businesses, causes closures and all that stuff. I'm sure there's some, like, you can find some isolated examples of that. And I'm sure if you do it in a way that's ham fisted or that isn't targeted can create those kind of outcomes. But it reminds me a lot of, like, in a sports analogy, there's been an orthodoxy. There has been, like in basketball where, oh, a jump shooting team can't win the championship. Or football, you know, like, oh, you got to establish the run. You know, winning teams have to establish the run and stuff. These are things we've seen upended in the last, you know, 1020 years, you know, where, I mean, NBA team has just won the championship, shot more threes than any team ever, you know. And, you know, with football, you know, like, it's quarterbacks that drive everything. It's not, you know, running backs are, you know, kind of considered dime a dozen these days. And so, you know, what you're seeing is that when people are open minded to try stuff, sometimes you see other ways of doing things that can be better can be improvements on what we're doing now and again, if we can acknowledge that the way we're doing things now, like you said, these huge deficits our governments run or our federal government's running, meaning the tax base isn't broad enough and or we're spending too much money, probably both. Like, we can improve upon what we're doing and to just start taking, just with speculation, start taking all these things off the table, like, oh, we can't do this, can't do that, can't raise the minimum wage, can't do that. Because, you know, if we do that, then I'm just sure this, this, this and this will happen. And it's like, well, hold up again, that's the land of speculation. Let's try it. And like California did here, let's try it in a targeted way and say, okay, we don't want to put this burden on somebody who's gonna just go open up a burger shop. Like some, you know, Tunde wants to open a burger shop, you're not gonna, this doesn't apply to you. You know, it's like you're gonna do the normal minimum wage, but for the.
[00:12:47] Speaker B: Person that burgers shop will fail. Cause I'll eat all the burgers. But that's a whole different.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: Get too much on your own supply.
So it seems like, and again, this is the way to do it in a targeted way, saying, okay, well, you of larger than, more than 60 locations, you have other ways that you can save money. So since you do, let's kick some of that money to the workers and let's see what happens here. And so I commend it. Ultimately, I think that it's a good thing. I think that we need more of this and less of shutting these things down on the conceptual level, because certain people, and I mean, this goes back to the whole idea of Warren Buffett saying that there is a class war and my class won because this is another one of those things. It's the monopoly on ideas. And then say, okay, yeah, we're going to, if anytime somebody talks about minimum wage, we're going to trot out all of these people that are just going to say how bad it's going to be and how it's never going to work and so forth with the goal of that people won't even try it, you know, and then, because the worst scenario there would be for people to try it and it works, and then it's like, well, you know, maybe we should.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: Let me jump on that because we we have accepted, it's kind of like the word memes, like in this kind of the Internet and all that is we've accepted these kind of cultural memes.
[00:13:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: For me and you's whole life because we're in our mid forties, but these are things that have been around pretty much since 19, early eighties, right. And it's trickled down economics. It's this kind of idea that tax cuts create jobs. Correct. And so what I'm getting at. Cause as you're talking reminds me. Yeah, well, we did that in 1980 ish, right? That period where the country was going a certain way ever since, let's say the thirties, right? And the society was convinced, hey, why don't you try this new thing, you know, and this is where I'm saying that there is somewhere in all this a healthy equilibrium that naturally should get revisited every few years. Like talking now for things like inflation, right?
[00:14:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: Maybe in 2009, I think is when the federal government had a $7.25 minimum wage. Maybe back then that was appropriate. Today, I don't think anyone would agree that $7 an hour is sustainable in 2024, after all, especially after the trillions.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: Of dollars they've printed since then.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's what I'm saying. Just the cost of living. So, so it's natural that the business community, the business class should not get hyperbolic and really defensive every few years when these things come up. And then that's what I'm saying. Like it makes me realize. You're saying like, yeah, the society once was when in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was, was being inaugurated, I guess in 81 the top tax rate was 73%.
I'm sure that there was probably a decent argument at that point that, yeah, if you kind of lower that a bit, lower it down to 40 or something, you're going to open up all this capital. Wealthy people will invest their money, they'll make more, blah, blah, blah, pay dividends, people pay taxes on that. There's probably a good argument for that. But now we're at a point for the last 40 years, plus that the top rate's been argued. I mean, we have literally years of arguments between 37 and 39% on the top bracket. So that 2% isn't really probably making a difference. So again, to your point, we need to be creative on how to, how to solve these. And I think you make a great point that, because the way I see it is, yeah, the society gave certain people in leadership in the early eighties an opportunity. Let's try something new.
[00:16:07] Speaker A: Let's try something.
[00:16:09] Speaker B: And we all bought into it and believed it trickled down. Oh, yeah. You cut taxes, growth will happen and all that. And growth did happen in the eighties, but then you have recessions and other things. So they needed to bring in the keynesian economics where government had to spend at certain times. What they forgot to do was the other side of the revenue. And so we've had 40, 45 years of this experiment, and we can look back and poke holes in some of the assumptions that were given to the american people back then. That doesn't mean that we got to go socialist or communist, but it means.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: That we need to be creative, like, and that's kind of, I think you're really onto it. But the thing is, is that we have to be honest about how that worked and how that didn't work. And that's what we're, like.
[00:16:51] Speaker B: We're not positive without being called communists. Right. Like in social. Right.
We got to improve on this.
[00:16:57] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. We're looking for improvement. How can we make this things a little bit better? How can we make the system work a little bit better? How can we make it so that we don't run a huge deficit, so that we can try to maintain, keep inflation under control, like all of these different factors that we're trying to keep under control. Like, we've tried a certain approach for a few decades and we got to be honest about where that's worked and where that hasn't, and then be open to trying other stuff and maybe combining some of the things we've learned over the last 840 years with things we learned in the 40 years before that. And so what we're seeing here, though, is that just a knee jerk resistance to the idea of changing anything. Like, and it's, it shouldn't be lost on people that, yeah, Reagan tried something, and Reagan, from a peacetime standpoint, borrowed more money, ended up running deficits and borrowing more money than any president had before him in peacetime. And so what he was doing was still trying to get something kick started. It wasn't like he just cut these taxes and the economy took off. He had to borrow money to keep the things afloat then and more than presidents had before him. And so there are things we can learn from all this, but again, we got to be honest about it. And this goes to your point that you started with, like, if our politics are all about, you know, trivial stuff, then, you know, maybe we don't even get to these discussions. All you need to do is publish a couple things throwing out trivial arguments about with speculation and stuff like that and you can shoot these things down. It didn't work in California, we have a, I mean, but what's, what we have now is kind of a lab for this in California. So hopefully as this play out, plays out, we can get more data and we can see if this is the kind of thing, whether it's dollar 20 an hour, just whatever the numbers are, that we can apply in other areas and other places, that if this is something that can help and help people who are working not be in poverty, but actually be able to support themselves then and to spend more time with their kids and have more family life and so forth, then that's something that would be beneficial for society at large and we can take that lesson and apply it. So again, my mindset is really on. This is just, I was more so reacting to this knee jerk, oh, this is going to be the end of life as we know it type of thing, when it's like, look, you know, I'm sure this is something that we can learn from. Let's see. And if it doesn't work out, then we learn that. But we can't continue to say that what we're doing now, which we can clearly see the deficits that it has and we're just not going to try to improve it. We're just going to keep doing, we're doing indefinitely because that's not an approach that is going to bring you, you know, that's not going to miraculously turn things around again. We see the trajectory we're on now.
[00:19:21] Speaker B: Yeah, but it feels good.
[00:19:23] Speaker A: Well, feels safe because, you know, you're in something now and it's like, don't change, don't change, don't change. And then obviously the capital is like, yeah, yeah, we get to keep an outsized portion of the spoils. So yeah, keep it definitely the same.
[00:19:35] Speaker B: It's a lot simpler and feels better for me to pay much less taxes, blame deficits on immigrants and dei and all that, and then call you a marxist communist. So that is where I'm gonna stay.
[00:19:48] Speaker A: And it gets the people going, you.
[00:19:48] Speaker B: Want to try all this stuff?
[00:19:49] Speaker A: It gets the people going, I'm gonna.
[00:19:51] Speaker B: Stay there, but you wanna try all this stuff. Good luck to you, buddy.
[00:19:54] Speaker A: Well, I mean, it's whether or not you're looking for an economy that works for everybody or that only works at the top, you know, and then, and that everybody else, we're just footing the bill and our kids are footing the bill with these never ending deficits while wealth is growing exponentially. So, but I think we can wrap this topic from there. We appreciate everybody for joining us on this topic. We have a couple more topics coming today. Hopefully you'll join us for those as well, and we'll talk to you soon.
All right. Our second topic today, we wanted to discuss the state of policing and nothing too broadly, but just the, the context of police and accountability in the context of the Sonia Massey Massey killing in Illinois that happened on July 6. And we've seen body cam footage now and so forth. And really the concept of whether or not from a societal standpoint, we're setting ourselves up for failure in the sense of how any accountability, like there's been law, there's lawsuits that are going to be filed about this and everything like that. And, you know, the, the officer himself is, is, you know, being charged with murder and so forth. But the larger apparatus, the apparatus that actually hired him and armed him and so forth, there's very little downside to them. If they bring in someone in this case, you know, like the officer who killed Sonia Massey, there's little downside for the people who hired him, who armed him and so forth. If he goes crazy or if he doesn't, he does something completely out of line and so forth. Sean Grayson, you know, someone discharged from the army, been on police forces and so forth. So it's really about, it's a conversation. Obviously, we'll talk about the shooting, but the shooting conversations been, is being had, but just the conversation of whether or not, like, are we setting ourselves up for failure? Are we setting ourselves up for these outcomes? Because the account, the nature of the accountability is so far removed from the actors who are, who may be performing these and, or the people who are hiring them and empowering them to go out into the communities. So, Tunda, your reaction, you know, brought out, take it to you broadly. You know, your reaction to, you know, the, the shooting, the body cam footage and also the, that this officer was here and, you know, this officer, this particular guy. And, you know, we are in a system where this is not something that we would look at like, oh, man, how in the world could that ever happen? It looks pretty common to see an officer like this at a scene like this. And, you know, the unfortunate result.
[00:22:19] Speaker B: No, it's, I think there's a lot to unpack with stuff like this because you have the realities that we see on cameras, which can be difficult, unfortunately. Like this one was, it looks, I mean, I just call it, what it looks to me is a straight murder. I mean, it's not even police brutality or anything like that. I mean, this guy just looked like he had wanted to kill this lady for at some point after he got into her house. And there's been enough discussion about the actual incident that I don't think we need to go over it play by play type of thing. But the, you know, so, so that's something on its own. But you said something very interesting, which is, you know, kind of like. Like the situation that gets some of these officers that, you know, we would consider bad apples in a situation with. With the public. And I think you're right. We don't. We often get caught into the kind of chum that the media throws us, which is the incident itself, and. And because, you know, the need to get eyeballs and all that. But we're not asking questions. Like you said, this guy was on six different police forces since 2020, and we're in 2024, so that's not even a full four years. Like you said, before being a police officer, he was discharged from the army in an unceremonious way for bad behavior. And then he had two duis. So how does he even become a police officer with that kind of history? So I think that's when we talk about, you know, when serious people talk about taking a look at the justice system, it's not about necessarily just these simplistic ideas of defund the police or all cops are bad. What it is is taking a look at the system itself like this and say, well, how is it that this system seems to be almost unique in allowing people who behave negatively towards the public to continue to get moved around? And I say almost unique because I hate to make this comparison, but the only other one I know of in my lifetime is the archdiocese. And that's a very, you know, I don't want to go down that road as a different conversation. I'm not here to bash catholic religion or catholic people or the faith. I'm here to talk about the institution of the church that's covered up pedophilia. And they keep moving around.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: Somebody's accused or found to have done something, and they're not out. They're just moved to a different place.
[00:24:40] Speaker B: They just moved around, and they go prey on new kids in a new community. And it seems like that's law enforcement is kind of doing the same thing. Bad cops aren't removed. They're just kind of allowed to just move around to different precincts in the country and go hurt other people. And I just think like, you know, we had a private conversation, James, like, you know, you're an attorney, I'm a financial advisor. I mean, imagine if you committed fraud or a Ponzi scheme. And then we look and find out you were at six different law firms in the last four years, and each time you were just let go, you know, and because you did something wrong and no one wanted to talk about it, or I, or imagine me if I was a Bernie Madoff type of guy, and then you find out, I work for eight different banks, and, you know, we have regulators, we have licenses, there's oversight and rules in our industries. And I just. It's interesting, a third one I forgot was Supreme Court, we've learned, don't have ethics either. Controlling, so, sorry, there's three, but that's what I'm saying. So we accept as a society, because of the polarized nature of the way these incidences are shown to us and presented, yeah, that. So we're not able to come together and just look at it for what it is, is okay, why do we have police officers that are allowed to work? Because most cops don't behave like this. And so it's like, it makes the good ones their job harder. The public has distrust and then lastly, not kick it back to you. And then, guess what? This city, where this happened with Miss Massey, unfortunately, the taxpayer is gonna be on the hook because they're gonna pay out millions of dollars to her family and, you know, and for what?
[00:26:11] Speaker A: Right, well, like, meaning that, like, this.
[00:26:13] Speaker B: Didn'T have to happen, like, this guy shouldn't have been on the job, period.
[00:26:15] Speaker A: Well, then that's the problem is where you just said it, though. It's because the taxpayers are going to be on the hook for this, not the person who hired him or the department that had him in there like it. You could. Anytime you see situations like this where the same problem keeps cropping up over and over again, there's usually a problem with the incentive structure. And so in this instance, the accountability for a bad action doesn't fall on people who are making the decisions that enabled or that led to the bad action. And so because of that, they are completely insulated. Like, there is no, the incentive structure isn't for a hiring person in a police department to say, hey, I better not hire somebody who needs, who has issues with high stress decision making, which, you know, this guy had, that this was in his file that he had, you know, needed to take a high stress decision making class. You know, like, so if I know that that's going to potentially put my retirement or my pay or my, the budget that I'm working with in jeopardy, then there's no way I would hire that person. But if that, if all of that stuff is separate, I don't have to worry about any of that stuff. Then if I hire this guy, if he just, if he does something bad, we'll fire him. This taxpayer also be on the hook. No big deal, no sweat off my back. Then that's how you end up in the situation. So I think it's pretty clear how we end up in situation. You brought up how these things always presented in a polarized way or in a way that will lead to polarization. And I do think that's part of the problem. Part of that is just the media presents things in ways that are going to draw eyeballs. You know, like if we took this show and made it about all cops are bad or people should just listen to the cops, then I'm sure we get more eyeballs on it because those taking those extremes tend to draw more attention to it. But it's really just not that simple. And I look at it like you raise the other scenarios where people look at these and people are in these scenarios where the accountability, like we're the church and so forth. But I think that this, you mentioned that I want to make this point. I want to emphasize this point. This is the kinds of thing or the kind of thing that puts police in a bad light. You know, like in the sense that, you know, like I remember there was a right wing guy not too long ago that without, without any real basis said that, oh, well, you know, I don't want to look at a black pilot and wonder is he qualified or this and that. But, you know, that's just because people talk about Dei. I mean, that's what's going to make me think about it. And if you think about that comment, you know, that guy's saying that, oh, well, just the mention of the fact that they are trying to diversify employment is going to make him wonder if everybody's qualified or if everybody is suitable for the job that they're in. Now, dimension of DDI doesn't necessarily mean that you're taking people that aren't qualified. That just means you're looking in more places. But setting that part aside, you're looking at something like this. And why wouldn't the public wonder when they see, if they see that the police officers are willing to hire people who have issues with high stress decision making? Wouldn't the public then turn around and say, well, hold on. You see a cop and it's like, well, hold on. Is this one of the cops that is, that is, you know, like, well adjusted and handles an admittedly high stress job very well? Or is this one of the guys that's been bouncing around and had, you know, this department, that department and everything like that and has a problem with high stress decision making? It undermines the public's confidence, or at least part of the public, the public that's willing to open their eyes and look at it in the police. And so it hurts everybody. The police are there to protect and serve, and we haven't. They're hiring people who have problems with high stress decision making. Like, that's crazy to me. But again, it's because of the incentive structure that this is happening. It's not to say that every hiring officer is a bad person. It's that the incentives aren't aligned in a way that allow them to do things that put the public interest first. And, yeah, that's the unfortunate part of it.
[00:30:02] Speaker B: Well, and you're right. And I want to speak to some of that because I think this situation kind of like the George Floyd murder, they're unique in the sense that these cops themselves just seem like really bad guys. They were in a situation and they decided to kill someone without any need to do that. Not self defense, not anything like that, not even a fog of war thing where they might have thought something different was going on.
But that's, that's maybe different than some of the other cases we've seen, like a Breonna Taylor or what happened in Ferguson with Michael Brown. And I'm saying they're different. I'm not taking one away or saying one is superior or inferior to another. What I mean by different is that that's where I kind of see your point even more so where the way the system works in those municipalities put the law enforcement officer and the civilian in the public at a certain place at a certain time where at some point enough of these encounters happen and it's going to lead to some unfortunate events.
[00:31:02] Speaker A: So you build mutual mistrust over periods of time, basically, yeah.
[00:31:06] Speaker B: So the thing like with Breonna Taylor was the concept of a no knock warrant, right? I mean, you know, when cops are allowed to just bust into somebody's house, you know, unfortunately, that night, it seems like they busted into the wrong house. So unfortunately, they busted into the guy's house. He started shooting, they shot back because, you know, that's what happens when you shoot at cops and they hit Breonna Taylor so that both the cop and the civilian were in a position where they were scared for their own safety. But that's not necessarily their fall on the ground at that moment. That's the system that created that situation by allowing cops to do no knock warrants in certain neighborhoods, because they don't do no knock warrants in other neighborhoods, you know, that gets into a whole other conversation, but not warrant is the.
[00:31:54] Speaker A: Type of situation, or creates kind of situation where that kind of thing can happen, you know, like my point. So that's why it's not something you would want to do, you know, in normal situations. And so, yeah, let's not go too far away.
[00:32:07] Speaker B: And the thing with Ferguson was that in 20 1525, almost a quarter of the budget for the city came from. Specifically, this was found by the Justice Department preying on the black community in Ferguson for revenue. So they have fines and traffic tickets and all that. So apparently there's 90,000. Sorry, there's 21,000, or there was at the time, 21,000 residents of Ferguson, but between a two year period, there are 90,000 citations handed out. So again, when you're preying on one portion of the society for Revenue for the city, and you're forcing your cops to make all these stops, they're just that heightened amount of stop, 90,000 stops, probably there's going to be a few incidents that don't end up well. So I think that's it. Something that needs to be discussed as well is, yes, there's some bad apple cops, like these two guys, that no matter what this. I included Derek Chauvin with this guy from, who killed Sonia Massey. But people like that, that no matter what the system is doing, they'll probably hurt somebody. But I think a lot of the stuff we see, too, going back to the system, this is where, again, people, when they say we should look at the justice system, and like we said on the prior discussion about wages, let's be creative.
The problem is, for political reasons, certain people in this country and leaders find it advantageous to try and say that if you stop, do anything that stops the police ability to harm people, then those people, like savages, are going to be coming over, you know, your gates and your walls and attacking you. And it's a very potent message, unfortunately, in our society.
[00:33:50] Speaker A: Well, there's that, but then there's the flip side, where you get messages like defund the police, which is not helpful in terms of addressing these either you know, like, and interestingly enough to me, like, I look at, you know, instead of defunding police, like, we need to find a way to connect the, you know, when you have these damage awards to something that is related to, that needs to go connect to police funding in some way, you know, if you want to. Because again, when you have situations where, like, yeah, you went beyond the. The incentives or the lack of accountability and the incentive structure for hiring into actual practices and how that creates these situations to set us up for failure, I'm looking still narrowly at, you know, with, with why chauvin is employed there or why, you know, the guy who killed Sonia Massey is still employed there. And, you know, to me, that's where we, we have to figure out a way where, and again, this isn't to punish police departments. This is ideally looking forward, where it's okay if we hire and or retain people that are loose cannons or that don't, that don't deal well with high stress situations and this admittedly high stress job, then we as a police department are taking a risk with our funding or with the money that we have. Like, there has to be or some other way to attach. There has to be some way to attach accountability. Human beings aren't, you know, human beings are complicated, but the way we make decisions a lot of times isn't that complicated. If there is a downside to something, then people think a little bit more on it versus if there's no downside. If there's only, you know, if there's no downside to something, then you're obviously, you're going to spend less time worrying about or be less, be less careful with the decision versus whether there's a downside. So to me, that's the biggest opportunity here. It's not like, again, the conversation of defund the police itself or that slogan, I don't think is helpful, but the idea of looking at police funding and saying, okay, well, if we're going to hire loose cannons and we're going to continue to employ them, that may affect our funding or that may come out of our funding. If we got to do these settlements or we got to pay for insurance for things like this, then I think that will lead to a lot more care in terms of the kinds of people that are being armed with guns and badges by the state and that are allowed to go around on a mission to protect and serve, which in situations like this, end up going with, you know, going awry and end up in a tragic situation where a lady's die, that is shot and killed after. She's the one that called the police because somebody worried somebody was snooping around her house. You know, so, you know, how can we not set ourselves up for failure is the question I'm asking. And again, yeah, I know that this is going to, you know, these types of things can be presented in ways that are, that are intended to polarize. But if we want to address the problem, which I don't, I'm not sure everybody wants to address the problem, but I think enough people want to address the problem, then we have to, that we have to get to the heart of these types of things.
[00:36:34] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's a good point, that not everybody wants to address the problem. One of the things that, as you're talking, I'm just thinking, like, one example to, you could say just to address certain things and update the system would be maybe let's look at cops that are in, like, patrolmen that are in high stressful areas, like in inner cities where there's a lot of crime and stuff. You know what? Maybe we should rotate them to different, you know, do a better job rotating people after a year or two to other parts of the community that are calmer so that, you know, someone isn't in this certain type of emotional and mental place every time they.
[00:37:05] Speaker A: War zone mentality, like.
[00:37:06] Speaker B: Yeah, for like three to five years, ten years, and they might, you know, so there's little things. But I, one of the things, as you said, about how everybody sees this thing, I wanted to bring up before we close this out, you know, we live in a state, and this is where I think the reality meets, meets kind of rhetoric sometimes because a lot of this kind of bluster and this tough guy attitude from some politicians lands well on certain parts of the public. But when you start scratching under the surface, you know, again, this stuff is kind of weird. Like, like that people want this. And I don't think most people, when they see it, would really want it. But I'm saying weird from the people that always telling us weird must be.
[00:37:44] Speaker A: The word of the week.
[00:37:46] Speaker B: Yes. So DeSantis, our governor, Ron DeSantis, who's currently the governor of Florida, in the last few years, starting in 2021, invited police officers who are unhappy in other parts of the country to come to Florida, which is fine on the surface. Now it says, I'm reading an article that'll be in the show notes DeSantis $13.5 million police program lures officers, officers with violent records to Florida. And he's on purpose invited officers that have a history of either violence or accused issues. You know, just bad conduct. Let's say that way to come to Florida because he wants to seem like mister law and order, mister tough guy in terms of how he runs the state. So I'm going to quote a little bit from the article, however, among 600 officers who moved to Florida and received the bonus or were recruited in the state are a sizable number who either arrived with a range of complaints against them or have since accrued criminal charges. They give an example of a guy who was part of $160,000 settlement by the NYPD. He moved down to Florida from New York as a police officer. And it says a Palm beach police spokesperson told the Daily Dot that Melbourne, that was the officer's name who had complaints against him, including abuse of authority and sexually propositioning. A teenager had disclosed his background during the hiring process.
So that's what I mean, like when he scratched under the service. Hold on. This guy disclosed his background when being hired by a Florida precinct, that he tried to solicit sex from a teenager. And we got this guy in the street in Florida after he said invited him a bonus.
[00:39:25] Speaker A: We invited.
[00:39:26] Speaker B: Yeah, that's what I mean. So our governor is actively inviting people who practice, who have been busted already in other states for things like pedophilia, you know, I'll say if he's trying to bang a teenager, you know, and. But these are the people that are going to give us moms for liberty and all this other.
[00:39:42] Speaker A: So, and this is, it's not just inviting them in general, it's inviting them and then saying, hey, let's, let me give you a gun and a badge and you go around in the community and, you know, someone who was found to abuse authority and hey, go around and wield your authority, you know, with a bonus, you know, so it's.
[00:39:58] Speaker B: Yeah, and let's, let's ban books at the same time. And that's my point. Like, it's all about this kind of punitive way to look at a society. And this is one example where let's bring in law enforcement officers, they're just going to crack people over the head and we won't care about it. And again, then things like, unfortunately, what happened to Miss Massey happened in some of these communities. So, you know, this is, this is why leadership.
[00:40:19] Speaker A: And so that's the, you know, that's the answer to the question, like, well, why are we doing this? And I mean, so political reasons, clearly, you know, and then other would be the lack of accountability. Because again, if this guy does something, it's not like Ron DeSantis is going to have, it's not, he's going to have to come out of pocket. It's going to be the taxpayers. It's going to be me and you, you know, it's going to be the taxpayers in Florida got to come out of pocket for that. It's not going to be the hiring, you know, officer who hired the guy. You know, in fact, they're all getting bonuses, you know, while the taxpayers got to pick up the bill if, and so that disconnect is something that I think creates or at least exacerbates this problem. So, but it's one that, again, there are going to be people who don't want to solve the problem. I just think that in this instance, this is a situation where we can outvote them and we have to outvote them because they're going to want to maintain the status quo as it is. And, but I don't think there's enough of them. There's enough people that are just decent people that don't believe in abuse of power and so forth that we did. In this, in a system like ours, we have to outvote those people despite all of their efforts to make us afraid of this and make us afraid of that because that's basically how they fight against that is, oh, be very afraid of, be afraid of this, be afraid of that. And so, but we got to rise above that. Can't be driven by fear, man. So, but now I think we can close up this topic from here. Our second topic, thank you for joining us for this. Check out our first topic as well, if you haven't already. And then check out our third topic coming up here short.
All right. Our third topic today we saw a recent, recent article discussing the theory that, you know, it's been circulating a little bit more. It's not necessarily brand new, but, you know, just, it's been circulating recently. Just the theory that our known universe, you know, the universe that everything that we can see as far as we can see and everything like that may just be the inside of a black hole. And, you know, conceivably that being the case, there's some bigger universe or multiverse outside of this black hole that we're in. And there could be other stuff going on there and other stuff, whether it's going on in black holes or outside of, you know, whatever. But just that, you know, again, what we're living in and what we see is, is one of these structures that we can, that we can't see when we look out into space, but that we can see the gravity and so forth that comes from it. So, tunde, I know you're a big science fiction guy, and as we know, you know, when you're looking at the cutting edge of science, a lot of times in any given time, it does look and feel and sound a lot like science fiction. So there's no more cutting edge science than, hey, we all live in a black hole. So where does your Sci-Fi well, one, you know, just your thoughts in general on the idea, and then two, where does your Sci-Fi mind go from here?
[00:42:48] Speaker B: Yeah, this is. It's fascinating, I mean, to contemplate what they're saying because, you know, I'll quote from the article just for the audience. It says, perhaps the most notable one is that if we calculate the size of a black hole with mass and energy equal to the mass and energy we can see in the universe, we get a surprising result. The mo. It's almost the same size as the observable universe. So the idea that. And this is where I'm a little bit confused with the article, because we have, you know, lots of black holes in our universe. So are we saying that each one is the size of this universe or.
[00:43:25] Speaker A: Is or basically everything that we can see based on the size that would. That proportionality is the same of what we estimate would be inside of a black hole as well. So it's. It's really interesting. And then also, the idea that we. There's a point we can't see beyond is also consistent with the idea of an event horizon in a black hole, where once something crosses that threshold, nothing can get back out again. So there are a couple of things of analogous kind of features that are observed from a physic astrophysics standpoint that would be. That would be analogous to a black hole. And so that's. That's really the. Where they're coming up with this. And so it's, like I said, it's interesting. It's something that we can never prove, or at least with. With any. Anything close to our close approximation of science. Now, we can never prove, like, the only way you can really prove this is to go outside of the black hole and observe it.
[00:44:15] Speaker B: So I'll let you know. I'm working on that.
I'm gonna be the first human to go into one. I'll let you know what I see.
[00:44:21] Speaker A: Hey, there you go.
[00:44:22] Speaker B: But but, um, no, it's interesting because I used to I've thought of that as, over the years, you know, as you learn stuff and all because I used to think like, okay, well, number one, what if. What if, in what if a black hole at the other side comes out of a bit like a big bang? Because if you think about the idea of a singularity, if that based on which is already being questioned by the James Webb telescope because of its kind of upended the Hubble constant, this idea that everything, at the same time, you know, kind of expanded the web being.
[00:44:56] Speaker A: The newer version that can see a lot more than Hubble telescope. These are space telescopes. They can see a lot more than the old Hubble test telescope can.
[00:45:03] Speaker B: So, yeah, so it's. It's like, you know, but. But if that were to be real, it's like, all right, well, where'd that stuff come from? Well, maybe it was matter that was, you know, accumulated from some other universe and spit out and became, you know, the big bang, right? Like, whatever the system of black holes and matter is. So who knows? That's why this is all fun and fascinating stuff. And I think the point of the James Webb, you're just describing it as good because I think one of the things that we as human beings sometimes either don't have patience for, or when we get new discoveries we don't want to believe it, is we can only know things that we can observe. So as technology continues to improve and we have a better way to observe these things, we're going to continue to learn more and more. So, you know, maybe by the time you and I are elderly men, we'll have some of this stuff figured out. Maybe we won't. But it's.
[00:46:00] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I mean, if you think of how much. If you think of how much has been figured out, you know, in the last 60 years or whatever, you know, it lends to the idea that there were a lot of this stuff. More. More stuff will be figured out. But the idea, the singularity, to me, also creates just an interesting analogy because you think about black holes, and they come from super massive, you know, stars previously that ran out of fuel, collapsed on themselves, supernova, big bang. Supernova. And then goes to a point of singularity, and it's like, well, that. Then that's where the black hole become, you know, starts from. And so it's like, well, man, that sounds a lot like the big bang. So conceivably it's like you end up with this kind of nesting kind of situation where there are all of these what you could consider multiverses that black holes basically are all multiverses. Like, they're they're a one of them. They're in the ones we can see, and they're nested in our black hole, conceivably. And then there's conceivably we're a black hole that's nested in some other multiverse, the larger one, ours. And we're just a single black hole in that. And then there's there are some in this, you know, universe or what our known universe that, you know, could spawn others. So it creates this nesting. It potentially creates this nesting effect that, you know, kind of a lot of this stuff when you deal with astrophysics tests your own, like, ability to conceive things. Because even when we're talking about distance and they're like, oh, yeah, this is like, you know, 300 light years away. And it's like that kind of, it's easy to say that, but that kind of distance doesn't really make any sense to us, you know, like, in terms of how far it really is. You know, it takes light, you know, billions, a million years to get there and so forth. So I think with a lot of these, we really just have to appreciate it for what it is, is just scientific theory. And until we really have a use for the knowledge, so to speak, like, and that's, we might and that may be some great improvement. You know, like, the discovery of the atom, you know, was all well and good, but it wasn't really that helpful for anybody beyond either theoretical physicists or, you know, or people that are actually working to develop stuff until you start coming up with nuclear power or nuclear weapons and so forth. Then the Adam was like, oh, well, now we're cooking with fire. But the whole thing of, like, with this type of stuff, like, it's good for people to theorize about this and study this and so forth. But it doesn't really mean anything for us in general, I guess, beyond the good stuff for science fiction until we can do something with it. And so to me, it's just fun to kind of see, oh, what are they talking about now? Kind of play it out in your mind, or like I said, you know, you can kind of play it out in a science fiction way like that. That's, I'd like to see somebody do something with this in a movie now. You know, like, well, let's see what happens, you know, like, if you play this kind of idea out, well, apparently.
[00:48:47] Speaker B: In a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there were people thinking about this stuff.
So I'm just. That's why I said, I'm going to go through a black hole and figure it out. And I'll. I'll tell Chewbacca and Darth Vader you said hi.
[00:49:05] Speaker A: Nah, that's.
[00:49:06] Speaker B: Well, I mean, I'll go find. And I'm gonna get a couple of those Infinity stones. They look pretty cool.
I'm not gonna put them on my notebook.
[00:49:13] Speaker A: From black hole to black hole.
[00:49:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm gonna, like, wear a bracelet. It'll be like a kabbalah bracelet so that people can start the conspiracy theories. I mean, this is gonna be. I'm gonna create a galactic qanon, bro. Watch out.
[00:49:27] Speaker A: But now that, I guess that's the next thing we need, you know, that'll drive more interest is if people can come up with some conspiracy theories on, you know, like, our black hole versus other black holes and so forth. A movie that did try more recently. I know that the deal with a lot of this was the interstellar movie, but even still, like, it's how that did. Took science fiction in terms of aging and different things like that with the. The different things going on in space.
For me, I generally wonder, and I mean, the idea, like, what would be the way if this is being the case? You know, like, what would be the way? Or would there be a way to. Would this allow for easier travel between galaxies within our known universe? Or even, again, what's outside? Is there a way to get outside of that? And if you get outside, could you get back in and so forth? Like, to me, there are a lot of questions that this brings up, which should be the realm of science fiction for a couple hundred years before it becomes, you know, anything reality. But it's. I mean, at minimum, it's very interesting. And as we continue to learn more stuff, I mean, that's really what we're dealing with, is just, like, interesting stuff and stuff for our imaginations.
[00:50:30] Speaker B: Well, the other thing, because this is how we got to drop the mic because this will create a lot of speculation, just like the double split experiment.
Our ability to observe this stuff as it improves, will it actually change the way it functions? So will we ever really be able to know? You know what I mean? That's. That's gonna be.
[00:50:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, like, I guess if we could get outside of this purported black hole that we're already known universe is in, would that change it? You know, it like, that's right. Because now you can harmonize quantum physics with regular physics first. You know, we still haven't done that, you know, so we like that. That that's. That's a whole nother project we got to work on, so I guess it's endless.
[00:51:09] Speaker B: Well, we got a lot of work to do, but that seems like a lot of work. So I might go smoke a joint, because that seems a lot, you know, go watch some YouTube videos about this stuff, because that seems a little easier.
I let someone else solve it and then watch the nice graphical, you know, documentary.
[00:51:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:26] Speaker B: So, so.
[00:51:26] Speaker A: Well, no, I mean, yeah, there's no. There's no grand answer that, you know, for this, but it's really just to kind of talk about something that seems pretty, you know, like, remarkable on its surface to think about. And, you know, again, the more you think about it, the more, like, this whole nesting thing just ends up being, you know, like, it's an endless conversation. So we'll cut it off from there and, you know, like, we'll put the show notes in as far as just the information on that, so. But, no, we appreciate everybody, for joining us on this episode of call. Like, I see it, subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it, tell us what you think. Send it to a friend. Until next time. I'm James Keys.
[00:51:58] Speaker B: I am Tunde Ogun. Lana.
[00:51:59] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk to you next time.
