Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: 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 going to discuss China's social credit system and the idea that a government would rank its citizens based on their moral conduct, rewarding and or punishing them for things like safe driving or playing too much video games.
And later on, we're going to consider the concern that some are raising about recent and forthcoming breakthroughs in detecting and diagnosing cancer, which would seem to be very promising. But some are concerned that it comes with a risk of creating a society where we're all immersed in a constant state where illness is just around the corner for everyone. You know, we're always. All of us are just about to get sick.
And, you know, psychologically, that would create some challenges.
Joining me today is a man who, you must remember is only offering the truth, nothing more.
Tunde. Ogonlana Tunde, Are you ready to show the folks how deep the rabbit hole goes?
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Only if they take the red pill.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: All right, all right.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: The choice is theirs.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: All right, now we're recording this on December 28, 2021. And over the past few years, we've seen sporadic reports and warnings about this social credit system that's in place in parts of China.
It's more of a patchwork thing right now, but it's been moving towards more of a uniform implementation. And the system basically works to track moral factors that the government has put in place to and punish citizens for doing untrustworthy things or things that the government finds otherwise to be undesirable. It can also reward good things, but less focus has been on that part of it.
Many people have called this just a straight Orwellian authoritarian takeover and that pretends doom.
But others think that may be a little overblown.
So, Tunde, what stood out most to you about this social credit system in China and their effort to rank, morally, rank their citizens?
[00:02:37] Speaker B: Yeah, several things stuck out. Very interesting, because as I was getting into this topic and getting ready to read, I would say this.
What we feel we know of China is it's a Communist. The Chinese Communist Party is the leading authority there. Right.
And it's a large kind of authoritarian state. That's the way we see it. So when I hear about this system they're trying to implement immediately, to me, I felt it was gonna be a very Orwellian type of thing, this big government hand coming down to really just grade all its citizens and all that stuff.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: Let me add one Thing real quick to the authoritarian piece, just the Chinese Communist Party is the only party that has any power or legitimacy in China. Like, so the single party aspect is what really defines that authoritarian aspect that you speak of. So it's when people say Communist Party, everything, they think of the economics a lot of times. But actually what we're speaking out here is this China has single party rule, distinguished from like United States, where there's two parties that are supposed to have some legitimacy and are supposed to, Supposed to. It doesn't happen like this, work together and so forth.
But in China, it's just the Chinese Communist Party. They're the only show in town, basically, as far as governance goes. But go ahead. Yeah.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: So then basically, in reading and all this, it was very interesting, number one, several takeaways. One was that this is China just partially getting organized. Meaning they didn't have, like we have, I mean, part of this they built off of our FICO system, our credit score system. So, you know, they just never had basic things like that in place that we've, I guess, just taken for granted that we have a system like our credit scores and all that in place here.
[00:04:26] Speaker A: So that was us, which ranks us based on our financial worthiness.
[00:04:30] Speaker B: Yeah, correct. Yeah, so. So that was interesting. And then the other thing was really the cultural holdover from the experience they had with the Mao's Cultural Revolution. So I didn't realize this. I knew of this through reading and hearing about China over the years, the level of corruption within China itself at various levels, governmental, corporate, so on and so forth, and the lack of trust.
And really, due to, during the Cultural Revolution, many family, many people were even taught to kind of rat out their family members.
So there was a lot of mistrust within the society, which you often saw in kind of Eastern European, kind of Soviet bloc, quote, unquote, Communist regimes are under that regime as well.
So what happens is a lot of times these authoritarian regimes, it's necessary that they create a distrust within the population in terms of fracturing them so that the state maintains control at all times. So that kind of. What I really took away from this the most is that other, other than the potential to be Orwellian, I'm not going to speak to where this could go.
This really came from. It's really a holdover from the negative effects of the whole Mao revolution on the society. And I thought it's interesting how because they're authoritarian, they're potentially about to do the same thing, which is try and implement a whole way to change the society all at once in a sense, like Mao did. So I just found it interesting that this is, this is created as a reaction to the negative effects culturally in the country from the whole Mao revolution of the early mid 20th century.
[00:06:17] Speaker A: Yeah, by.
Oh, go ahead.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: By a strong hand, authoritarian way of governing the country. And they're trying to solve it by doing the same thing.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: Of course.
[00:06:26] Speaker B: This is interesting.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: You raise a good point in the sense that for an authoritarian type state to stay in power, they have to breed distrust among the fellow citizens because they can't have the citizens uniting against them. And so. But that's hard to maintain and to build a society really over the long haul where you're constantly fomenting mistrust amongst the citizens. You know, societies need to work together to some degree. And so that's an interesting point that you raised, that they're trying to actually counteract that now a little bit by building or finding ways. And this is what stood out to me is it's an age old problem of how to incentivize positive behavior and disincentivize negative behavior. And when I say positive or negative in this context, I'm talking about positive being social behavior. When you're in a group of people, there's social things and then negative behavior being antisocial. So not really a value judgment, but just things that are antisocial versus social. And because when you're in a big group, whether you're in a kindergarten class or a sports team or a neighborhood, there are certain act, certain behaviors that are antisocial, that tear the group apart and so forth, that are negative on the group and others that aren't. But either way, that age old problem societies come up with various ways to deal with it. Some of them are decentralized.
Our institutions, so to speak, our churches, our schools, all of those things have systems like this in place now to incentivize social behavior and disincentivize antisocial behavior. What the shocking thing about this is that it's trying to be done on a governmental level, particularly a place where there's over a billion people, which brings its own set of concerns. Because as with any situation like that, you're always going to be concerned about abuse, how it's going to be used. Is it going to be used because somebody is cutting people off in traffic or because they are speaking against the established power and it becomes a political tool then at that point. So beyond that concern though, I do think that you're really onto something in terms of how Almost heavy handed. Basically the responses in China to say, hey, we're having a problem with social fragmentation, with people not feeling like we're all pulling in the same direction. So let's try to incentivize people to do things that build up society more. And yeah, it's like a real heavy handed way, a way that's, that's ripe for potential abuse. And so our antennas go up like, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's, that's, that doesn't seem right. Who's the one that's setting the characteristics or the, the, the things that say what's right and what's wrong and ultimately the potential for abuse. I think for many Americans and at least whether, whether consciously or unconsciously centralizing that much power and authority is going to, they're just going to react negative to negatively to it. And it's actually hard to even see beyond that and see, okay, well what actually are they trying to do here? Is this a good way to do it? Is there anything we can learn from this maybe and do it in our own way? It's hard to even get to that stuff because it's just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what do you mean that the government is going to be setting moral behavior and then rewarding or punishing people based on that?
[00:09:32] Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I'm going to read a quote from sociologist, a Chinese sociologist, his name is Zhang Lifan.
And he explained that, and I quote here, Chinese society today is still deficient in trust.
People often expect to be cheated or to get in trouble even if they are innocent. And he goes on to talk about his belief of how that was founded during the Cultural Revolution. Then it ends in stating the stated purpose of the social credit system is to help Chinese people trust each other again.
So from that standpoint, first of all, when I was reading this stuff, I kind of thought, you know, that's, you know, who are we to sit here and judge how China wants to manage itself, right? Like they've had this history of this distrust and maybe this is a genuine way for them to try and kind of force in a sense.
[00:10:21] Speaker A: And even further back than that, even further back than that, it's probably a good idea to try to help your citizens trust each other.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: That's probably gonna happen. I was gonna get there that, you know, who are we to say how they implement these things, you know, whether it's good or bad.
But I would say, like we've just said, I mean, clearly it does seem like a heavy handed way to just say we're just doing this top down now. One of the things that I read in several different things that I read, they all got on the same theme, that what the Chinese government is doing with this is not implementing many new laws. What they're doing is they're using this social credit system as a way to enforce existing laws. So the way I looked at it is we have, like I was thinking and reading this, like, we're actually not that much better than this. We have a lot of surveillance on us. Like we talked about. Our financial credit is clearly something we all are very aware of, that is constantly monitored.
Then we know that we have, you know, communication monitored, our texts are monitored. Everything's kind of monitored in our country. Right. The thing is, maybe it's not the state, the government itself sitting there coordinating it all for one score. Right.
[00:11:37] Speaker A: That's a big difference, though.
[00:11:38] Speaker B: Yeah, that is the big difference. And so what I got out of this is it's as if, because our existing laws of like, drinking and driving, and if you get an HR issue at work, for example, all those things, we have laws and rules and regulations in place to make sure that we abide by certain norms and rules like that. Right. They're just separate. But what this is is kind of like if you had your driver's license and handed it to somebody and they swiped it and you had all those little things that could be infractions in different parts of your life. Here in the United States, I got pulled over for not wearing a seatbelt. I touched someone's backside at work. So I got an HR infraction. I, you know, I yelled at my kid or something, and, you know, at the school, and they marked me for that. And then, of course, I missed paying my bills or something, which is the financial credit. Let's say that there was a score where all that was melded into one database. I think this is Chinese is doing what we got, but on steroids.
[00:12:37] Speaker A: But it's more than that, though, because, remember, it also would look at, do you buy too many video games or do you play too many video games? Things like that. So it's going beyond just legal.
[00:12:46] Speaker B: It's behavioral. Yeah. Modification tool, which is interesting. So number one is, from that standpoint, obviously, as Americans, that doesn't feel right. Right. Because our culture is.
We don't like that. Right. We have a way that we look at government authority.
So in that sense, it does feel very intrusive to hear those kind of things. And the second thing I would argue is just like Mao tried To do in the opposite way.
Seems like the Chinese government today is fighting historical fact, which is anytime a government has tried to do something large like this, it usually fails over time. You know, the human kind of experience and human nature does push boundaries and push the envelope. And I think it's just interesting. We've talked about this before. Like our system in the United States is naturally kind of messy. And the idea of freedom of speech creates an environment where, you know, like we have in today's world, conspiracy theorists have, have just as much of a microphone as statesmen and scientists. Right.
So that can feel messy and uncomfortable.
And like we talked about earlier to authoritarian regimes like China, that is the biggest fear. So to me, this is also a sign of Chinese insecurity at the top.
[00:14:09] Speaker A: Well, but I think there's a bias in what you're saying though, because it's not just when large institutions, governments or whatever try to do authoritarian things, do they eventually fail over time? It's anytime any institution tries to do anything, for the most part with human beings, so things rise and fall. That's you, you talk about entropy, all the time. Like that's. So any type of system eventually is going to fall apart. These authoritarian systems oftentimes, if you look back in human history, are more the norm than open societies, free societies, authoritarians bringing order, bringing security as the top level goal oftentimes can, can get you more, more, more keep you in place longer than trying to allow things to be more free flowing. But in this instance though, I think the comparison that you're making to what kind of things that we've already accepted in our society is a really good one because part of what stood out to me in this is beyond the initial shock again, because it's like, oh, you know, like you said things whether they're legal or not, but just kind of behavioral modification, antisocial things, they just don't want you doing too much of where they're trying to control you in that way. Once you get past the shock of that, because even the headline, one of the headlines we saw with this was the government's going to punish you for playing video games or for not stopping fully at a stop sign or something like that and then track that stuff. And it's meant to stoke that kind of outrage. But I don't know that this is much different than credit scores or standardized tests or lots of things that we do. Work evaluations, we unifying it though does have pros and cons. And just for example, like when someone has work evaluations and, you know, like things about what they do, whether it be violations or whether they show up to work or not or whatever, oftentimes when they go to a new job, they get a clean slate, you know, that doesn't follow them around in that sense. Standardized tests, credit scores, that kind of stuff follow you around a little bit more. But it's not necessarily like if you get pulled over by the police, they're not looking at your standardized test scores, they're not looking at your credit score to determine whether or not what they're going to do with you. So unifying it brings in the potential for potentially more data points on people, but also more ability to judge people for things that aren't really relevant at the time. And so that's something that we push against in society. But ultimately we do some of this stuff. I think the decentralization of it, the strength in that is that people can improve themselves, I guess, in a way, like you're not stuck with all your mistakes, but at the same time, on the downside, the negative. And I see this in my profession a lot of times, like the counterfeiters of the world, the cheaters of the world are able to constantly reinvent themselves and they'll cheat over here and then they'll get caught and we'll sue them. And then they're running from us in court and we can't find them. And then, you know, just because they're counterfeiting bags or whatever, they're counterfeiting something and then they pop up somewhere else, counterfeiting something else, and then somebody else sues them and they're trying to track them down and they can't track them down. And then they keep, people keep these same offenders keep popping up over and over again because their records, their, the things that they're doing aren't following them around in a sense. So there are benefits to doing it like this. I would, I would be uncomfortable with it, like I said, because. Mainly because of the potential for abuse, but being able to say, okay, yeah, this person breaks contracts constantly and the next person that they're going to deal with sees that or is able to find that information really, really easily and is not just taking their word on it, it really cuts, it cuts the legs. The con men or the counterfeiters of the world. So, I mean, that's something, you know, like there's, there's a lot to that, but go ahead.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: Yeah, but the, it's interesting because as you're saying, it makes me realize, you know, similar to Our system, it's just not all centralized. Right. Like, they're.
[00:17:56] Speaker A: So it's easier to evade. That's what I'm saying. The decentralization makes us more comfortable, but it makes it easier for the people who want to abuse the process to abuse it. It makes it, you know, easier for them to.
[00:18:05] Speaker B: Well, I would say this. I think the problem that a lot of human beings have is that they see what they want to see. Yeah, there's a lot of signs and ways to check on people. Like, I mean, if you're serious about doing something right in today's world, in the United States, I'm talking about spending some real money. Let's say you want to buy a house and you're going to spend a half million dollars, you can get that. Obviously, you can look at the property appraisers records and make sure the deed is clean and the title is clean. You can get the house inspected to check for termites and other things. There's a lot of ways you can go through things so that whoever's selling you the house, whether they're a con man or not, you can get enough information to at least know in general kind of where what you're getting yourself into. The problem a lot of people have is their emotions get in the way and they start overlooking things and then get pissed off later when they find out things aren't what they thought.
And so that's what I was going to say. Like, like we've even said this looking at certain things just at the national level, you know, there. There are politicians who have been basically caught and reprimanded, you know, through regulations for grifting on donors, and have had to return campaign funds.
So the system's in place, all public record.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: All public record, yeah.
[00:19:20] Speaker B: And to stop all that, just people keep giving, want to give these people money. So I mean, at some point, like, that's what I mean. Like, we have, like, we have a lot of this stuff in place. Just China is just doing it at a more, you know, larger scale. But one of the things I wanted to also mention that I came to my mind as I was reading this, you know, I know that they mentioned that the Chinese also, because, look, China is a big, big nation in terms of land mass, and obviously we know population. They have over a billion people, so they can't do everything exactly the same all over the place, right in their country. So they do have differences in how they're administering this in different provinces. But one thing it reminded me of is the uniqueness of our country as well as relates to states rights. And I started thinking about how we have such different laws in different parts of our country.
So, for example, one that's more well known now that came to light this year was the law in Texas that allows people to report on other people that might be either getting an abortion or administering one and to be able to get a $10,000 award, almost like a bounty.
And so I was thinking like, you know, no matter what one's opinions on that, what that is an example of the state of Texas having the ability to implement a law that puts actual citizens in a position to start kind of squealing on someone else for a financial reward.
That's just interesting because to me that reminded me it sounds a lot like.
[00:20:44] Speaker A: The system that you're talking about with Mao.
[00:20:45] Speaker B: That's exactly where I was going, bro. I was gonna say that sounds like Mao when they talk about family members squealing on each other. And you know, it's funny, I think I've shared this before on different discussions. My mom grew up in Soviet occupied Hungary. She was born in 44 and they escaped in 56. And she grew up under Stalin, like for real. And she used to tell me that that's what they were taught in elementary school, to actually like squeal under their parents and their family. She said it was like they would tell you, like, if your mom and dad are talking against father Stalin, Dear leader type of thing, you need to let us know that the teachers would say that.
So it goes back to, and we've talked about this too, authoritarian style of leadership requires that people, it can't allow kind of freedom of thought and dissent.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: Has to turn people and it has.
[00:21:40] Speaker B: To turn people against each other. And I would say, you know, an abortion law in Texas isn't the same as that. Right. But in a way it's similar to saying we, we don't want to accept another way of viewing something. So we're going to in this case, turn citizenry into policing each other.
[00:21:58] Speaker A: Well, it's the same tactic. Yeah. I mean it's, it's an incorrect. Not the same thing, but it's the same, same tactic.
[00:22:02] Speaker B: And that's what I mean by the United States is unique because you got a state like Texas that can do that. And then right near them, the state of California is totally opposite. Right. So that's what just makes the United States kind of unique in that way where it would be difficult for us to have a national uniform thing unless, you know, it's something. And you can't even do it through.
[00:22:21] Speaker A: Interestingly enough, it would be difficult unless a corporation did it. If a corporation did it.
Fair Isaac, for example, don't get me.
[00:22:30] Speaker B: Started on Facebook, because you might get me going Orwellian in a whole different direction.
[00:22:34] Speaker A: Well, no, that was where I was gonna go. Fair Isaac came up with the credit rating system that crosses state lines. And there's very few. There are a few things.
[00:22:42] Speaker B: Yeah. The commerce clause is an interesting play here.
[00:22:45] Speaker A: Well, but there are a few things with the fair. The fair Isaac Co. Corporation is what does the FICO scores. And there's a few distinctions in state laws that they have to do things slightly different in certain states, I believe. But in general, there's a federal law that covers a lot of that as well.
But if a corporation does it, if Facebook does it, creates their social ranking system, which they do to some degree already. They do it, though, based on how much money you can make them, how much engagement you create. They rank you based on that, and then if you're getting a lot of engagement, then they'll put you in front and center on everybody else. One of the things that came up in the social credit system was in social media, I think in dating sites or something like that, people with higher scores got better placement. And that sounded like Facebook, but not based on higher scores of social credit, but just you can generate more engagement. Facebook will put you up higher. You have a higher engagement ranking with Facebook. So, yeah, in the United States here, the concern. And I think the concern would be equally as. As. As.
As big, so to speak, if a corporation does it versus a government, if it's a substantially large corporation, because corporations can take over the government in many instances if they become large enough. And they can through lobbying and so forth. We've seen that where industry writes regulation, you know, the coal companies write the clean air act type of thing.
And so ultimately, again, the thing that really hit me in my gut here was how visceral of a negative reaction I had with this. And then once I read more about it and thought about it a little bit, it was like, man, this is. This is different. But it's not much different than what happens in our case, but it happens in different ways. And, you know, the potential for abuse is still there, but it's a different type of potential for abuse instead of a Facebook's not necessarily coming after us for our political commentary, but they may do things, again, based on their own financial interest, which may or may not be helpful for society or helpful for individuals, you know, just because it's. That's what makes Facebook money or what doesn't.
And so, I mean, it's, it's jarring really to see something like this, though, as with the ambition, I think, is the really thing. What China wants to do. Right now it's fragmented right now. It's kind of. They're trying to implement it, they're trying to build the plane while flying it type of thing, but they want to make this thing uniform and across the board. And that would be something, I think that would, that would require if that goal is what you already would, or what you would look at and say, oh, if you get that, maybe we should look at this a little differently.
[00:25:22] Speaker B: I think the nature of our conversation leads to the conclusion that it's necessary for the survival of the regime. Right. The Chinese Communist Party, that they go hard on this, that they make this. Like we said on other shows, the leadership of Kennedy saying, we're going to the moon. Right. This is where they're saying, yeah, we're going to implement this no matter what.
[00:25:44] Speaker A: Well, because they're identifying lack of trust as a risk factor for their survival.
[00:25:50] Speaker B: I think it's that and I think it's also control. So I think it's. Two things can be true at once. I think there probably is a genuine concern and need to change the culture of mistrust in China because it's true. I mean, you can't have a society of a billion people where you have a massive amount of constant corruption and mistrust.
[00:26:11] Speaker A: Well, you can if you're going to just be. If you can't. And then also have something that grows explosively like they're trying to do as well. Yeah, exactly, Masters.
[00:26:19] Speaker B: I mean, look, you can. You're right. I'm just saying that. And I think in the way that our kind of societies are going. And you're saying, right. With the style of economic growth.
[00:26:27] Speaker A: Yeah, they want to continue economically.
[00:26:29] Speaker B: Yeah, they, they, they know they need to clean that part of it up. Because that's one thing also that attracts. That's been great for the United States and attracted global capital here as, as the investment hub of the world, is that people trust the United States system.
They know that if they buy a piece of property here, they have a bank account here, it's safe. As opposed to, I mean, think about what China's been doing this last year or so with cracking down on, on foreign capital, business interests. And a lot of people wouldn't sit there and just try and put you know, if you were really wealthy, would you open a bank account in China and put $100 million in it today? Probably not.
[00:27:04] Speaker A: Because you don't know if it'll be there tomorrow.
[00:27:06] Speaker B: Correct. Where you'd be comfortable doing that in the United States, uk, Switzerland. So, you know, reputation like that is important when you, when you want to.
[00:27:14] Speaker A: Grow to that point. That's. China's been. They did that to foreign stuff more recently, but they've been doing that to their own people the whole time.
[00:27:21] Speaker B: Yeah, correct.
[00:27:21] Speaker A: Yeah. And so if you say the wrong thing or if you do the wrong thing, you know, like that stuff, your stuff could vanish. And so, yeah, changing the culture has value for. For where they're trying to go from an economic standpoint.
[00:27:31] Speaker B: Exactly. So that's where I would say, like, the more kind of, okay, holistic. And I could see the positive side of wanting to change kind of the culture of mistrust over time. Right. Okay, good. But then the other thing, that's what I'm saying, the real risk to this I see is where I think we're fortunate, where our country has the freedom of speech written into the Constitution, into the founding document as the First Amendment, that the government cannot restrict your freedom of speech generally. Right. This is where I think that. This is where I say it's necessary for the regime survival. And where I see this as a sign of insecurity for the, you know, by the Chinese regime is that it's the political dissent and the inability. Like, if you speak out against the regime, you're going to get on the blacklist and you're going to lose your social credit standing. So that's where it's kind of like the Russian, you know, the Putin's desire to crush dissent constantly. And that's where I'm just saying, like, clearly, that's the authoritarian part of this.
[00:28:27] Speaker A: You see this. You see through this as having a large part of this still having the ulterior motive, not with their.
[00:28:34] Speaker B: That's what I'm saying. Like, two things could be true at once. I guess they generally do want to change the culture, but also the regime will say, yeah, this is a way for us to maintain power and make.
[00:28:43] Speaker A: Sure that they can stop that from happening. Without social credit system, though. Like, they don't have that now and they haven't. They don't need credit.
[00:28:49] Speaker B: But I agree, that's what I'm saying is the reason they don't have it now is because the need to not have, you know, dissent. Like, that's what I mean allow that. Well they don't allow survival tactic for the regime though. That's what I mean.
[00:29:00] Speaker A: But that's what I'm talking about. But they don't need the social credit system is what I'm saying in order to do that.
[00:29:05] Speaker B: That's right. I agree with you. That's why I say the social credit system is something that is now being implemented which, that's what I mean. It's, I'm sure it has genuine things that are, that are potentially good, like they're wanting to change the culture of corruption. But then there are things that are also going to be inherent to the regime maintaining its power through the system. That's all I'm saying is that.
[00:29:24] Speaker A: Tell me this, do you think that on the first goal, on the whole increasing trust and improving trust amongst the citizenry, amongst the citizenry with the business cause another aspect of this was that this applies to companies as well. Companies, corporations and so forth. This applies to entities.
Do you think it's something that can work and we don't have to belabor this but I mean just looking at, do you think that this type of top down, heavy handed approach, and I don't mean to kind of poo poo it by saying top down heavy handed but just that's what it is, can actually accomplish what at least they're saying they're trying to accomplish?
[00:30:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I mean from an open minded perspective I would say, you know, let's see how it plays out in 10 years. Right. I think, I think that just like our system, at the end of the day a large population, you got to have some systems in place.
So let's take our FICO credit score system like we've talked about generally. Does that allow financial institutions to make assumptions about risk when lending to people? Yeah. Does it hurt some people because they pay higher interest rate because they might have had some hard times and they couldn't pay some bills yet. So that's all I'm saying is that in 10, 20 years we'll see their system will be their system.
Will it work? I think, you know, let's see how that plays out. Now the other side of me though, the kind of human being look inside says in the long run I still think it, I think that our system of having, and we talked about this from the Edmund Burke comments of creative destruction, the United States having this kind of allowing for the freedom of speech, it gets ugly sometimes and painful. But we go through these rises and falls over our generations to me seems to be the Best system that has been designed and tried for at least a decent period of time.
It's ugly and messy, but it allows for, you know, the entropy and regeneration of things. I just think that because the regime is going to use this to try and maintain its power and crush any dissent, it will eventually fail over the long term, could be a hundred years from now.
[00:31:32] Speaker A: But I mean, I think that's still an assumption, though, because like I said, they already. They have the tools.
[00:31:36] Speaker B: It's all an assumption. Like I said, you got to play that.
[00:31:39] Speaker A: I'm saying that part about it that you're adding in. I don't think that, like, it may be true, but they don't need this. They already have dissent crushed. Like this is something different that they're doing now. They may, it may cross pollinate, so to speak, but crushing dissent is not a problem that they're having. And you know, like, they, they do that very effectively.
[00:31:59] Speaker B: I would say this. I mean, I would argue that point only because I would say their behavior in recent years, just like Russia's behavior with Ukraine and all that. What it shows me is I see that when nations act like that, to me it looks like they're acting out of insecurity.
[00:32:13] Speaker A: But you have to understand, though, that you're coming from a place of bias there. Like, you're reading into what you're seeing, because you just said your place of bias is that the system you're in is the best system of all time.
[00:32:22] Speaker B: And so there's bias there. But what I'm saying is this. Look at the way China is dealing with Hong Kong and Taiwan.
[00:32:28] Speaker A: They're concerned. That's how authoritarians deal.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: That's my point. And so they're concerned because they're seeing that their population is actually through the Internet and seeing things online. The Chinese people In the last 10, 15 years have been seeing the outside world. In a sense, they'd like to do what North Korea does, but they can't go that far. And so these are all, again, measures to try and control people. And all I'm saying is that.
[00:32:50] Speaker A: But those are par for the course, is what I'm saying, what you're seeing. And it's not good. I'm not saying it's good. I'm just saying, like that stuff is. That's the normal reaction. No, I get it.
[00:32:58] Speaker B: I'm just saying it's another new layer of using technology in a way to continue this. And what I'm just saying is that at some point the population will want to express itself In a different way. And we'll see how that plays out that.
[00:33:10] Speaker A: Well, I wanted to, looking at the big picture type of thing, I agree with you also that this is going to do something. I mean, will it work to the extent it's going to work to some degree.
If society incentivizes behaviors or disincentivize certain behaviors through actual mechanisms, it typically works to some degree. I mean, again, and you're talking about the, the, the Bell curve, so to speak, it'll work more so in certain places. It'll work somewhat in other places in a large bulk and then maybe not at all in some places as well. But I think the bigger problem or the concern here would be the unintended consequences. Like so, yes, let's say they're able to increase confidence however you want to measure that or trust or whatever, 20%. But what else happens here? Like how does this system get manipulated? Things like that, like even with like ours credit score, you know, something like that, or standardized test, those things. Having standardized tests does cause people to teach more towards the things that are going to be taught or tested in the standardized test. So school systems work to prepare people for that stuff. Problem, of course, the unintended consequence there, or whether, you know, unintended, if you, if you're generous, it could be intended, depending on how you're looking at it, is that schools don't teach critical thinking anymore because it's like, well, you know, all we need to do now we're trying to. Our behavior has been modified. And so I think it can modify the behavior. It's just whether the unintended consequences will be something that ultimately give you a net positive or whether the unintended consequences end up bringing you either back to the, to where you were or put you in a worse place. So I mean, ultimately, we don't know with that. Like you said, 10 years, 100 years, we'll see.
[00:34:51] Speaker B: But you know, it's like 80th birthday. We'll revisit this podcast and we'll see what happens.
[00:34:57] Speaker A: It's going to do something. And whether that something is what want or whether it ultimately brings them closer to their goal, we'll see. You know, but it's definitely a, it's much bigger than anything that's happening here, much more centralized. So it'll. It rises all or lift all boats or it'll take all the boats down. So our second topic we wanted to take a look at today was we were reading a piece and it was discussing a lot of the potential breakthroughs or either current or forthcoming as far as cancer diagnosis, testing, you know, things like that involving, you know, you can look at people's blood or liquid biopsies that can see whether there's cancer in your body somewhere just based on looking at your blood.
All types of things, you know, different imaging scans, things like that, that can detect this, detect cancer very early. And, you know, cancer is widely considered, you know, the most devastating illness that we. We deal with as human beings. But it's something that occurs in our bodies. You know, it's not like an. It's not a purely external thing. It's something that happens internally and we understand to some degree or not. And so being able to figure it out as early and see it as early as possible has definite benefits in terms of treating it and allowing people to recover versus if you find out too late, a lot of times it becomes very difficult to deal with and there's no guarantees 100% anyway. But again, your odds, your chances, making things better. So the concern was raised though, that diagnosing this too, you know, being able to diagnose it too early could create an obsession almost just where everybody's just constantly thinking about this, constantly worried about this, and the metric of whether or not you have a cancerous cell in your body may or may not be the one that we. That is the most determinative, you know, in that sense. So tunde, are you, you know, on. On balance, I guess, excited about these potential breakthroughs that potentially could save millions of lives, you know, and with these early diagnosis, or do you share the concern that while those benefits could be very helpful, there could be cons, there could be things against it that actually could again, unintended consequences that take us to a place that is not necessarily helpful or productive for either our psyches or our bodies.
[00:37:08] Speaker B: I unfortunately lead towards the second comment that there could be some unintended consequences. I think it is good. The last section, the way you put the term bell curve is interesting because that's a good way to look at some of these things as well when we talk about this healthcare stuff. Because, you know, how can I say that if the research ends up helping human beings find either a cure or a way to deal with cancer in a lot more productive and positive way. As a guy who lost his mother to bone cancer, I couldn't deny that that would be a positive to our society in a certain way.
But I do think, yeah, we gotta look at what are the potential negatives. I mean, unfortunately, to say this, you know, we've done a lot of shows on the environment and pollution. So having a lot more, you know, humans on the earth probably wouldn't. Would be something we'd have to figure out how to continue to deal with in a productive way from an environmental standpoint. But on a more, I would say not such an esoteric comment like that. But on a more granular level, one of the things that would concern me is yes, this last 20 years I think has proven that too much information is not that great for humans.
Forget about our political fighting and all that. I'm just talking from a stress level. We know that things like the social media that we did a show recently on notifications, just all the pings you get on your phone and your Apple Watch and all this, it all creates some level of stress. And I feel like if now I'm going to be told that I have some genetic makeup that in 25 years I may get this cancer or I may get that. And key point is made because it's not a for sure.
[00:38:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:49] Speaker B: Then it's another thing for me as a human being in this society to just add to more stress because as you said, the word obsession that stuck out to me just now because I hadn't thought of that word. But that's a good word because again, we've talked about both you and I, what we do for, you know, our real living, not this podcast, but our professional life. And you know me as a wealth management guy.
I would say that it remind when you said that word, it immediately brought me to a lot of my clients in my practice where I would say they obsess about money, they obsess about their financial health and life, they obsess about the markets and anything that is said on the TV or news articles.
[00:39:30] Speaker A: And what you're saying, by the way, is not obsessed, like, am I going to be able to eat tomorrow? But like about much more remote.
[00:39:36] Speaker B: Yeah. Like, and abstract things like, yeah, are we going to have a 50% crash in a year? Like, who the hell knows? And why are we worried about that? Right. Like meaning like and I don't mean to be flippant about it. Right. It's not about to belittle anyone. It's more like I feel I've learned as we've done even these shows together and I've learned more about human psychology. I'm almost, I'm saddened by how the way that our society has developed and our culture and the way our media ecosystem and everything is like money creates so much stress for People when it doesn't need to. Like you're saying about, you know, I don't have poor clients, you know, you got people, you know, seven, eight figure balances that are all stressed out constantly about their money. And so you would think that when, most of us would think that when people get to a certain level, they're not going to stress and it gets worse. That's my concern here, getting off the financial stuff, but here with the, this medical stuff is that with more information, human beings, man, that all we're gonna do is have more stress about it. And so there's a certain part of.
[00:40:37] Speaker A: That show about the American money woes and it talked about how below 50,000 and above 200 or 250,000, those are the people that worry the most about money. Correct.
That's interesting that you bring that analogy because that's kind of what it is, is that we would go from poor knowledge poor basically about this stuff, not to some place in the middle where we would just have a reasonable amount of knowledge and you know, like. But we'd go to knowledge rich. And then if the financial type of worrying is any in any template, then we would be, we'd be then worried about it all the time because we knew too much. And I mean it would end up.
[00:41:18] Speaker B: Killing us, killing us with the stress.
[00:41:20] Speaker A: That's actually to me, that's what jumps out to me as well is like the body has cancerous cells in it all the time from what the science says, but just our bodies know how to deal with them. Like most of 99 plus percent of the time the body knows how to identify them, get rid of them, you know, all those things.
If it didn't then, you know, this stuff, things would just go poorly all the time if our bodies didn't know how to deal with that stuff. And so we're talking about the, the times, the few times where our body, you know, it doesn't happen to everybody obviously, but where our bodies don't know how to deal with it or it didn't weren't able to take care of it, nip it in the bud, so to speak.
And the thing is, is that as you point out, more information brings a consequence of what to do with all the additional information, what to how to contextualize all the additional information. And so if we are just out there providing more information and another piece was that it provides more information, the new methods are providing genetic information as well. And you're susceptibility to these things if you provide more information without A way to contextualize that information and process that information for people. Then, yeah, you're just gonna send people off the deep end. Not everyone, obviously, but you'll send a lot of people off the deep end in terms of what to do with this. It's just become something that you worry about all the time.
[00:42:37] Speaker B: Correct. And that's. Well, I was just gonna actually just really lean into what you just said, because you said it perfectly. Cause as you're talking, I'm thinking about COVID and I'm thinking about the last two years or so. It's been almost two years now, I think. What have we had an excess of? We've had excessive information.
Right. We've had an information overload all over the place. And what's it done? Doesn't really done much. I mean, it's done good for about half the population that took that information and took it in one way. Right. I'd say you and I maybe fall into this category. We kind of took it serious. Okay. You know, we're getting told by the authorities that, you know, there's a serious thing going on, not take everything, or let's take it with a grain of salt that information's coming out, it might change. Da, da, da. You know, but then you had another half of this country, which is a lot of people, and that's why it's not a small group that looked at it purely with suspicion. And when information changed, it was another reason to distrust it. And so that's what I mean is that when you just put information out there, more information doesn't lead to a better cohesive results for the system society. And I think that's where things like just bas. You know, we've talked about this on other programs, not to get into it in detail, but, you know, this is a whole different conversation of we need to have a different way that we educate Americans from the ground up, you know, elementary, high school and all that. And, you know, maybe with a different, you know, in a generation or two, with a different way that we are taught to absorb information and critically think about it, you know, we could handle more of it better. But I think in our modern society, just, you know, and again, that statement I stand by. But then also I'll add to it, as we talked about, with the information on data from. And how it's manipulated from social media companies, imagine getting now healthcare data like this, also something that can be bought and sold behind the scenes as a commodity. It would disrupt our kind of narrative and how we get manipulated by all this stuff.
[00:44:43] Speaker A: Even worse, another thing with this that supports kind of the skeptical eye, the grain of salt. I mean, ultimately, I think Tunde, one thing you and I both do is take everything with a grain of salt. I mean we kind of look at it, try not to have too many preconceived notions going in and just saying, okay, well how does this thing kind of play out in a likely scenarios, unlikely scenarios and all that. But what this reminds me of also is, and this was a change that happened in our lifetime was the prescription drug boom, so to speak. And what that was basically, I think it was in the 90s where the laws changed that allowed drug companies to advertise directly to consumers as far as touting their, their drugs and so forth. Many people may not know this, but before the 90s you didn't see prescription drug advertisements on television.
And this was a change. And the reason prior to that, conceivably at least, that you didn't see this is because it was understood that if you start telling people about all this stuff all the time, it will make them think they have it or make them think they want to get it or whatever. And so the drug companies had been wanting to advertise for a long time and the regulators were like, eh, that's probably not the best idea. We know how this will play out. And it played out how you would expect once the once, once companies were able to advertise their prescription drugs, people all of a sudden started having more illnesses that needed to be treated with the prescription drugs. So it's, it's one of those things, it's our, it's human psychology and people that, that make money on selling things oftentimes and this isn't to demonize them, but they, that's one of the tools in their bag is to figure out, well, how can I get people to do things that I want to get them to do? And the way our minds work, there are some clear answers to that. You put something in front of people more and more and more, it's going to become something that's a bigger part of their life. Bigger, bigger, bigger. So advertising, do you have this, this, this, this and this? Somebody who may have never thought of that stuff or, you know, it may have never occurred to them, starts thinking about it. Do I have this? Do I have this? Do I have this? And then some people, whether, you know, again, the way our minds work, placebo effects and all this other stuff, start having it, so to speak, and then want the drugs and so forth. And and so it really led to just advertising prescription drugs on television, led to a boom in sales of prescription drugs. And now anything that comes out, anything. But lots of things that come out, they go straight to television saying, hey, we got this, we got this, we got this. Problems that, I mean, people used to joke about it, problems that they didn't know that were problems, you know, and they.
[00:47:14] Speaker B: Now they can treat it like restless leg syndrome. Remember that?
[00:47:17] Speaker A: That was the one I saw that.
[00:47:19] Speaker B: I was like, hold on. They're now making up some stuff for us to think that's wrong with us. My leg shakes at night that I need a pill for this. The other thing that was great. I remember this is like two, three years ago that I saw a pharmaceutical commercial for a pill for constipation caused by other pills, like opioid pills, that prescription drugs. So I go, hold on. So now they invented a whole new drug to deal with the side effects.
[00:47:45] Speaker A: Of the industry, which is hilarious. No, start taking one. Then something else goes, I know you.
[00:47:52] Speaker B: Got to have another one and you.
[00:47:53] Speaker A: Got to have another.
[00:47:54] Speaker B: Yeah, so it's like the whole. It's amazing because it's like this whole section of our economy, like they're talking about like health care is like one fifth of our economy or something. Well, a lot of it is this stuff, you know, this kind of BS of money moving around and all these places which most of it, most of these issues can be cured by some plant that's already been figured out by some grandma in the mountains in some country somewhere.
[00:48:13] Speaker A: Yeah, but she can't patent that.
[00:48:15] Speaker B: I know she can't patent it and.
[00:48:16] Speaker A: She can't patent that. So nobody's going to go to bat for it. I mean, so. Yeah, so I like that concern, I think in terms of real world, like, that's the concern basically in a real world example where if you once this not to say that we should suppress the information, that we shouldn't go down this path, but we have to be aware that going down this path will bring other unintended consequences, that if we don't have a plan to how to deal with them, then things may not get better on the net. Like, and I mean, Facebook's an example of this as well. You connect all these people, if you don't have a plan on how to deal with a political fallout or the different types of fallout from having all these people connected and having this free exchange of ideas which are not vetted at all for sincerity, not vetted at all for any type of truthfulness. Or whatever, the way our minds work, that's going to throw a grenade into a room. And if you don't have any way to deal with that, then it could make things more difficult to deal with, not less difficult to deal with.
[00:49:20] Speaker B: I would say this, that I think the big risk like we're talking about here would be the mental health side. Just another thing for people to have stress, worry, and that. Like, we talk about the. Just like Facebook's a great example, the information given to us could be manipulated. So, yeah, that's where I just feel like, you know, it's another example of, you know, we did the show recently, in the last few months on the book the Power of Now, and this idea of living in the present. And I feel like all this type of technology and this information overload will cause us to, again, move more and more away as a collective society from just being able to be in the present. Because people are going to be constantly worried about, in 20 years, I'm going to have this issue in 30 years. In five years, I potentially will have this or that. Just like they're worried about am I going to retire in 20 years, or is this going to happen? Or if this party wins the next election, the world is over. Everything is constantly about this fear of what if, what if, what if? And no one's really present. And it's a noble thing to try and cure cancer. That's why I'm not against it. I'm just saying my concern we're talking about the negative side is people will then just. Their mind will focus, just like they focus on politics and about money and all this stuff about the future and how it's all going to be so negative.
Nick, you know, this is just bringing your own personal health into that same quagmire of human thought, that's all.
[00:50:46] Speaker A: No, no, I. I get you, man. I get you. But I think I'm done.
I think we can wrap it up from there. You know, we appreciate everybody for joining us on this episodic episode of Call It Like I See it. And you can get us wherever you get your podcast. Subscribe to the podcast, rate us, review us, tell us what you think. And until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:51:08] Speaker B: I'm never going to die, apparently, from this show.
[00:51:15] Speaker A: All right, and we'll talk to you next time.
