Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Hello, welcome to Call It Like I See it, presented by Disruption. Now, I'm James Keys, and in this episode of Call It Like I See it, we're going to take a look at the controversy that has been created around the academic and scholarly topic referred to as critical Race theory.
We'll also take a look at some recent research on a technique that appears to be very effective at refreshing your brain when you're fatigued or when your brain is fatigued and you're tired of focusing.
Joining me today is a man who knows what tomorrow brings in this world where everyone's blind. Tunde. Ogonlana Tunde. Are you gonna let the folks know that they're not alone?
[00:01:02] Speaker B: They're never alone if I'm in the room.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: All right.
That's why you're on everyone's favorite podcast platform now. We're recording this on June 28, 2021.
And we've been watching over the past few months as a controversy has been flatly manufactured on the subject of critical race theory.
And it's been quite a manufacturing process because we've gone from pretty much nobody talking about this a few months ago to now it's being censored in, like, 25 states, or about to be censored in, like, 25 states, you know, various levels of legislation or dealing with the education system.
And this is almost the opposite of what we looked at last week when there was an unexpected and overwhelming consensus on Juneteenth, which is another issue that implicates race.
So to get us started, Tunde, I think we should look at what critical race theory is. And this can be relatively brief, but what are the key points to understanding critical race theory, in your view?
[00:02:08] Speaker B: Great question, man, because I appreciate the setup, because most of the time we hear all these things bannered about on cable news and radio and social media and all that, and no one actually asked that direct question like, okay, what is this? Let me just look at it, stare at it, and see what I think about it.
So from my understanding, because I went to this thing called the Google Machine, and it's just, you know, it's easy to get an encyclopedia or dictionary and find just these definitions.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: So.
But it's hard to get reliable information, though.
[00:02:38] Speaker B: Well, I know everybody thinks everything's fake, so let's not go there. But, you know, I went to an encyclopedia, which I think is a pretty general kind of standard way to look at things up. Right. And a quick example, it's a long, you know, several paragraphs, but I'll just Pick out one sentence. Critical race theory examines how the law intersects with issues of race and challenges mainstream liberal approaches to racial justice.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: Well, I mean, to give that a little bit of meat, though, what you're talking about there is that critical race theory and which it is, it's something that is presently and historically over the past few decades, been bantered about in academia and law schools and so forth about, as you pointed out, the intersection between race and law and acknowledging that law and race have intersected since the founding of the country or before the founding of the country.
In the Constitution, we have codified issues of race, whether it be the three fifths clause, whether the fact that it did not deal with slavery and allowed that to continue on. Then you go to, towards the Civil War and all this. So within, you have Reconstruction, constitutional amendments, then you have Jim Crow. Jim Crow was specifically about the law and race and how races would be dealt with, some favored, some disfavored in the law. And so the study of that and how that leads to inequality. And so some of the critique, I say all that to say some of the critique that critical race theory has raised or has posited, so to speak, is, and with the approach of, let's say the civil rights movement or the mainstream approach was just that removing the barriers that had been created won't necessarily address all of the fallout from the existence of those barriers for decades or for centuries. And so again, I think that a lot of this discussion dealing with critical race theory has to come from the understanding that what it is, is challenging status quo, asking questions. It's not something at, at this point that's a fully developed, this is how everything is, this is how everything should be, but it's more so, which is what you would want in academia, people who have time to do this is what professors do sit around and say, oh, what about this? And oh, what about that? But questioning, okay, we see how this has played out over the last 60 years or over the last 400 years.
Have we done things in a way that's going to deliver the result that we think it's going to deliver, or are we doing this in a way that's suboptimal or whatever? And, and so it's asking those questions. It's asking the questions whether or not racism, how much is racism just intertwined with America, Meaning it's just a part of what America is, and it's not the exception, but the norm. And so asking those questions. So I think that if you start just kind of with that understanding Then you can go to a place where you cannot. You still won't understand the manufacturer controversy that we'll talk about here in a second. But you can at least understand why nobody had been talking about this up until now. Like I said, this is why this hasn't been a big deal. Because this is something that was limited and it still is from a practical standpoint. From an like, actually what's happening standpoint, it is limited still to academia.
But it's been, you know, for whatever reason and which we'll get into, it's been now become an issue where everyone has little knowledge about it and very concrete opinions on it.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: Yeah, and another thing to point out, as you mentioned, and I just want to point this out for the audience, right. Like, the facts here about critical race theory are that, like, you're well, alluding into what it's about. Right. It's a theory, an academic theory taught at the university level and probably, I would suggest higher university level, which is why most of us that have been to college, that aren't history majors, I have never seen this. This wasn't a new general classes as a freshman where you're trying to figure it out and all that.
[00:06:38] Speaker A: It's not in elementary schools.
[00:06:40] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's what I was doing. That is right now in the United States, there is no school K through 12, private or public, that teaches critical race theory, nor has it been really proposed at any school at that level. What has happened now, like you're saying since the manufactured crisis, is that school systems have rushed to say, we're not going to teach this, and that's what we'll get into in a minute here. But just to finish off this of kind of defining what it is, is I think there's two examples I just thought of when I was preparing for today. One was the Homestead act of 1862.
And obviously that's a long thing, but in a very succinct way. The Homestead act of 1862 was after the United States had the new territories. And you know, we were not 13 colonies and were 13 states. We were getting to the bigger union. We had the Louisiana purchase in the 1840s. So now a generation later, you had the government promoting a lot of people moving west. And you had this Homestead act where people were allowed to move west to states like Utah and Wyoming and Kansas and Missouri and Ohio and get plots of land. Guess who was excluded from that legally, Legally by the law was blacks. Then another example, I mean, there's a lot of examples.
[00:07:57] Speaker A: So critical Race theory would ask the question of, well, how does that impact the levels of inequality we see today? Or something like that.
[00:08:04] Speaker B: And so here's then what I looked at, I thought about it, okay, that's Homestead act, which is, as it says, homestead, right. That's about getting a piece of property, something we value in this country, homeownership place for your family. It also builds wealth, you can transfer to family, so on and so forth.
So then I thought about things like redlining by the Federal Housing Authority, the fha. What is redlining? Redlining literally was described when you had the old days of maps before the Internet. They would put red lines into the segregated black neighborhoods. So remember, this is about again, the law, the law in the United States at one point, segregated blacks from whites and blacks were not allowed to live in the same neighborhoods as whites. Then what happened with the fha, The Federal Housing Authority, they started a process in the early middle 20th century of subsidizing banks that lent out mortgages.
Because lending someone money to buy a home, as a banker is, you know, as a bank is a risky deal. If the person loses their job or something, they can't pay the loan back. So what happens is by the subsidies of the fha, it gave banks the confidence to lend, which then created something called the velocity of money. You know, money started moving around the economy quicker. It also allowed people that own homes to leave them to their next generation. And that would create long standing wealth.
[00:09:31] Speaker A: It's the single greatest wealth accumulation means by most Americans. Correct here, yeah.
[00:09:38] Speaker B: So one group that was excluded from this were black Americans because legally, because they were allowed, legally, it was legal to segregate blacks into certain areas.
Then the concept of redlining meant the banks literally. Sorry, the banks literally put a red line around the black neighborhoods. And they said, we are not going to. The FHA said, as a government, this is the United States government. As the, as the FHA told the banks, we will not subsidize mortgages in these red lined areas in the black neighborhoods. Only if you lend to white households will we subsidize you as a bank.
So that's a whole different ballgame when you look at that level of systemic racism.
[00:10:25] Speaker A: Right?
[00:10:26] Speaker B: It wasn't the banks on their own.
It was the government telling the banks, we will not subsidize you if you lend the blacks, but we will if you lend the whites. So that then created a behavior by banks. And think about what this law that undid this was in 1968. Anyone can look it up. The Fair housing Act of 1968. So think about what we just said. The Homestead act was in 1862. 106 years later, the federal government finally, through legislation was forced to stop allowing banks to discriminate or promoting. I don't say allowing, promoting banks to
[00:11:00] Speaker A: discriminate from setting up the structure. So I mean with that and just because I want to keep us moving, but there's.
[00:11:07] Speaker B: Well, let me just say this. I was going to say that's what critical race. That's what I was just going to finish it up here.
[00:11:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: Critical race theory in reality seeks to study that type of history in the United States and say, okay, we had 106 years where because of the color of your skin, if you walked into a bank or lived in a certain neighborhood, you were denied access to credit to buy.
[00:11:28] Speaker A: This is not even talking about like Jim Crow or anything like that.
[00:11:35] Speaker B: And what is the compounding, what is the compounding effect of 160 years of one group allowed to build wealth through home ownership and another group not? And this is why we've talked in many different discussions that it's important to understand these whys because then when we wake up, like I said before, you and I going to school in the 80s as young kids and 90s, we weren't taught these things. So people look and say, well, how come black people are so lazy and stupid? No one gets taught about this history of exclusion. And so what critical race theory really tries to do is just say, let's look at this part of the American story as well. Because no one seems to talk about this and how did this affect people?
[00:12:17] Speaker A: And that's it really enough. Yeah. And interestingly enough, one of the reasons why people don't talk about that is that sometimes even well meaning is that, oh well, how do you quantify that? You know, that's just, you know, we can see it's messed up. But how do you actually put numbers to that? Well, you know what, that's the kind of thing critical race theory would do, is actually study it. Yeah, you got to research it and study it. So I mean there is information that it can uncover. It's not about, we're trying to indoctrinate people with this or that or. And I say we. I'm not, I'm not teaching critical race theory. But it's not like critical race theory isn't about trying to indoctrinate people. It's trying to get a better understanding. And like I said, it's high level academic stuff. This is not what is intended at this point, at least, there's been no indication intended to give people in elementary school or middle school, high school, because we don't even know what the answers are yet.
And the only way to learn them is for scholars to study them. And so that's what it is. It got a little longer than we wanted. But I do want to ask you, Tunde, if this is mainly an academic pursuit.
That's what it is. That's what the founders talk about. That's what it is. It's an academic pursuit seeking greater understanding of what the fallout from all of these laws and the legal system has been.
Why are we. Why do you think we're hearing so much about this and all these state laws and all this media attention, you know, like, we don't get this on other. They're studying a whole bunch of stuff in grad schools around the country, man.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: To start. What does this remind me of? And I laugh with a smile.
Remember the Sharia law stuff? About a decade ago when that started.
[00:13:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:54] Speaker B: And I read an article that was dated from 2018. So from 2011 to 2018 to the writing of this article, there were 201 pieces of legislation introduced in state legislatures about anti Sharia law. And real quick, Sharia law is Muslim theocratic law. So in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran.
[00:14:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:17] Speaker B: Where they don't have a legal system like ours, their legal systems based on the law of the Quran.
And so there was a fear because Obama was president and half of the Republican electorate polled at least, or 47%, for me to be fair, believed that he was not born here, that he was born in a foreign country and that he was Muslim. So that fear led people to then enact legislation, their states and municipalities for anti Sharia law. And it always kind of perplexed me as an irrational thing, as an emotional shiny object, because we have a First Amendment in the United States Constitution that specifically says that the Congress will not legislate any law for this country. So if you're in a municipality or state, you should be comfortable that the First Amendment of the Constitution makes sure that there's no Sharia law ever going to be here.
[00:15:11] Speaker A: So when I saw that, plus the fact that nobody was arguing for Sharia law. Correct.
This was a backlash to nothing. Yeah. It was like. And that's.
[00:15:21] Speaker B: You're right. And that's my point about this being a shiny object and emotional. This was a. It was at the time a backlash to Obama's presence.
[00:15:29] Speaker A: Right. I mean, we can say that just Obama's mere presence, then. That's my point. Not anything Obama ever said.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: He never said he wanted to do Sharia law. He never been known.
[00:15:38] Speaker A: In fact, everything he said was exact opposite of that. Yeah, but. Okay, let's.
[00:15:41] Speaker B: Yeah, we don't need to get in all that. So let's Fast forward to 2021.
[00:15:45] Speaker A: Well, but no, I think that's important, though, because in this case, your analogy really stands up, stands tall, because what you're saying is that this is a backlash, again, against nothing. Against. There's no one saying. Like, usually when an argument, you have two people arguing on, one person arguing for A and one person arguing that A is bad. And so one person's for and one person's against. But what we're seeing here, with this manufactured crisis or manufactured controversy with critical race theory, nobody's arguing that it should be taught in elementary schools, but people are arguing that it shouldn't. And so it creates. It's. There's this.
There's a. Basically a disconnect that makes you wonder why. Well, why are you. If no one's saying it should be there, why are you so passionately saying it shouldn't?
[00:16:31] Speaker B: Yeah, no, and I think that goes down to. And that's what I was going to say. It's all about the culture wars and shiny objects. It's all about enraging your base.
It's all about the other side is so evil that no matter what they do, we gotta stop them or whatever they don't do. Well, that's what I mean by the lack of critical thinking. Right. Someone just gets told to not like something and they just don't like it.
[00:16:55] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:56] Speaker B: They don't actually look into it themselves and discover whether it's something that they agree or disagree with. Really, what I believe is certain narratives are starting to break down as facts are coming out.
And there's a political party which encompasses half of our country that's made a decision to follow a certain narrative. One of those narratives is, let's say the election was stolen in 2020.
The Michigan GOP just came out and said that there was no funny business in Michigan.
The Arizona GOP came out and said, this is becoming an embarrassment, this recount thing. And they're talking about finding bamboo and all this stuff in boxes because the boxes came from China.
You know, the former president's attorney who was arguing these cases in court just got his law license suspended.
There seems to be a need for a certain party to make sure that they can control a narrative to their Base, because the other facts that are coming out run the risk of really derailing a lot of narratives. And I think that unfortunately, these type of things are manufactured because they know that they're emotional hot buttons. Remember, like we said, think about the.
[00:18:06] Speaker A: So it's to suck up all the oxygen, basically, out of the.
[00:18:09] Speaker B: To make sure we don't pay attention to this other stuff.
[00:18:11] Speaker A: I wanted to jump in, though, because I think that you're onto something in the sense, like, this is basically how you control people without needing to do it at gunpoint.
You know, like this is like what you do when you have masses of people that you need to control is you figure out what their buttons are and you learn how to push their buttons in ways that distract them or that get them thinking about other stuff. Because one of the things that the culture wars, quote, unquote, seem to be. And I take it that the party you're talking about is the Republican Party, just by the description you gave it. But one of the things, like, they seem to revel in the culture wars, and the thing about that that I've never grasped fully, other than it's a way to avoid accountability, is that culture wars don't pay bills. Culture wars don't advance our country in any way. So what it really seems to me is that if you don't have any workable solutions to the problems that we're all facing, then the approach to power, gaining power, wielding power, just seems to be to divide people and to get people mad at each other. And then if they're so mad at somebody else, they're not looking at what you are or are not doing. Because I just don't understand from a practical standpoint, now I get the psychic benefits that someone might get from these kind of race baiting issues, racial backlash issues, but from a practical standpoint, I don't see what anyone's gaining from these culture wars. These seem like mutually assured destruction. Like, I'm just gonna make some people hate other people and see where that takes us, you know? And so that's the part about it that seems to. There's a dis. It's just disjointed. It's like, okay, well, here's your strategy. But where does this go? You know, you're just gonna own the libs forever. And so with critical race theory, it brings in the most potent thing in America, in American history, throughout American history, to distract, to get people all fired up about something is race. Always. It's always, if you want drugs illegal, you want marijuana Illegal or cocaine illegally, all you gotta do is tie it to race and then you can do that. If anything you want to make happen, so to speak, if you can figure out a way to weave race into it, then you want to do welfare reform, make. Make it a race issue, and you keep up.
[00:20:29] Speaker B: You know, it's a true statement.
[00:20:30] Speaker A: What's that?
[00:20:31] Speaker B: Prostitution used to be legal in this country until I think it was like the 20s or maybe a little bit before. No, but what happened is they started making that whole thing about black men getting wealthy and black men sleeping with white women and that I lauded pretty quick.
[00:20:48] Speaker A: I'm not making this up, man. For every man that like to see
[00:20:51] Speaker B: prostitution legal in the United States, you can thank race.
[00:20:54] Speaker A: That's the reason that if you want any of those things, like when you want to motivate a number of Americans to do anything, if you want to motivate a good number of Americans to cut off their own nose, they'll do it if you can make it about race. And so that part about it, it seems to me, like I said this when we talked about the reconstruction as well, it seems like we're seeing this media ecosystem just play to the greatest hits. We know this will get people fired up. It doesn't matter that nobody's saying that this stuff should be in schools. We should say it's not and our people will love it. And so it's really just playing to the hits. It's unfortunate though, because like I said, this is the fundamental. This is the easiest way to avoid doing anything in government. And if we're going to have a government of the people and by the people and for the people, then we're going to all end up being like, we're just going to all end up fighting each other all the time and never getting anything done.
If we're always. Or such a large segment of us can always be distracted, can always be get gotten to take their eye off the ball and just given this red meat and they're gonna run off with it. But I mean, that's the backlash world that we live in. And now you literally don't even need anything to create a backlash. You can just make stuff up or just say, hey, we gotta protect people from, like you said, Sharia law. Like, well, who wants to do Sharia law? Well, nobody, but that's not the point. We could protect people from it. And so it's just. Exactly. No, you're right.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: The fact it was brought up means that it's now in some way it's like that whole thing that you know, many of us have heard.
[00:22:23] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:24] Speaker B: Try not to think of a pink elephant.
[00:22:27] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:28] Speaker B: And then all you think about is a pink elephant.
[00:22:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:30] Speaker B: And that's the whole point. It's kind of the genius of their strategy. Let's just put it out there and then people will be talking about and thinking about it and a minute it especially because remember, we're all, all of us as humans, we're all on different edges of spectrums.
[00:22:43] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:44] Speaker B: So if you have 10% of any population, let's say 10% of Democrats and 10% of Republicans skew a little bit more to paranoia or mistrust.
Well, if that 10% hears Sharia law, critical race theory, antifa, this and that, just like people on the left, that here thing, billionaire hedge fund manager, private equity, these are trigger words. And people that already have some sort of fear and are on a little bit more of that paranoia spectrum and all that, they'll latch onto it.
And if there's enough of everyone else that watches them latch onto it and kind of drives it in and then I think we got to appreciate also I think in this conversation the ecosystems. Right. That are, that exist. And we know that.
Let me see, because I don't want to just say Republican and all that make it into like partisan party calling, but let's say the conservative media ecosystem in the United States, let me say it that way. Between cable news, talk radio.
[00:23:41] Speaker A: Well, I mean, but even that's not fair. Like it's really the right wing because the right wing kind of kicked out of that.
[00:23:47] Speaker B: Yeah, so, so, so because yeah, Liz Chain is conservative but she's no longer, you know, considered one of, one of the loyalists. So that's a good point you made. But the point is, yeah, that's a well oiled machine of, of that ecosystem. And so I think when these type of strategies are used within that echo chamber and that ecosystem, they have a lot more saliency and they kind of take off a lot faster. And so. And that's. And kind of the rest.
[00:24:14] Speaker A: Well, and there's also the repetition of it because you can kind of immerse people in it. And if you say something enough in the media, you can make it a reality to the viewer, you know, say it enough. And so I mean just part of the immersive and then fake social media as well, the immersive aspect of the media system.
[00:24:30] Speaker B: And it's also, I think from all angles. Right, because you're right, you turn on the cable news show at Night, you got some human being that, you know, the heroes and villains, he's telling you something.
Then you look on, you got an email from this person's campaign telling you the same thing. Then you go on your Facebook group, you're seeing the same thing circulating. So you're right. This creates realities and bubbles.
And then all of us are living in different realities, but sharing the same space. And that does become dangerous. Like Lincoln said, right? A house divided cannot stand.
[00:24:59] Speaker A: Well, and there's one other point I wanted to make on this before we move on, and that was just that. And we've talked about this actually, you know, offline. But I think there's a level of projection that goes into it as well, where saying that someone wants to use critical race theory to indoctrinate people is more of a realistic threat to someone who is kind of down to indoctrinate people.
I look at the way the backlash to this is similar to the way I would have looked at the Daughters of the Confederacy and how they make this explicit effort to rewrite what the south did, the South's approach to slavery, the South's approach to secession and all those things, and make it the war of Northern aggression as opposed to the south seceding because they would rather die than to give up slavery, which was in their writings. And so I look at that, and I look at that as a legitimate attempt to rewrite history and to indoctrinate people with an alternate reality that fit more a certain narrative that someone like a group like the Daughters of the Confederacy wanted to have, one that continues to permeate, to. Excuse me, to permeate to this day, when people get out in front of people and say that the south is about the Confederate flag, is about heritage and not hate or whatever. Because if you look at what the people who founded the Confederates says, that wasn't about heritage. That was about they will not give up slavery, you know, like they'd rather die without it. So from that standpoint, I think that you'll see a projection. It's not realistic to me to look at some critical race theory taught in academic settings and saying that's indoctrination.
But that's because maybe I'm not looking to indoctrinate people with some alternate reality that didn't exist. I am interested, though, in trying to understand things that did happen and try to get a deeper understanding of what happened and whether that was good or bad. And if we want to change that, how would we go about changing that?
[00:26:58] Speaker B: Yeah, And I think you know, you said something earlier, which I'll. Which I'll bring back up, which is, you know, this idea of governing, you know, people that are serious about governing, making sure that, you know, the trash gets taken on, the lights, work and all that, don't really have time to deal to pedal in these type of areas because they're sitting there working. And I wanted to bring up some before we move, because it shows you where the mentality and the mindset is. And just like we've been talking about these shiny objects, from Sharia law to the caravan to whatever the, you know, tabertheism, you know, this stuff that is pretty irrational and unbelievable, but enough people believe it that we have to deal with it. So, you know, this guy is somebody, right? He's Steve Bannon. I'm gonna quote an article that interviewed him or from an article where he was interviewed, and why say he's just somebody. He was an advisor to the former president, United States, and he's a political operative.
And it doesn't escape me that he's been indicted on a Ponzi scheme of stealing $25 million from people who thought they were sending him money to build a wall.
So it also points to your point about there's a certain class of grifters and of people that aren't really here to help solve the country's problems. They're here to kick dust up and muddy the water so they can make money in the middle of all this. And so what Bannon said is I look at this and say about critical race theory, he says, I look at, quote, I look at this and say, hey, this is how we are going to win. I see 50 House Republican seats in 2022. Keep this up. And this is. Bannon said, I think you're going to see a lot more emphasis from Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on it. People who are serious in 2024 and beyond are going to focus on it. So right there, he's telling us, that's the playbook. It doesn't matter what it is or if it's real or not. We just want to win.
And I guess winning, you know, for the sake of winning is winning. But, you know, I hope that if people do win off this, they actually show up and work and govern. And I want to be clear.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: But that goes against the point you just made, that the people who are. No, I said, I hope, you know, the people who are playing in this don't have time to work, and the people that are working don't have time to play around in this. It actually creates quite a dilemma for our democracy, you know, because we have, like. Because people are emotional. And so there are certain people, this is going to be their trigger. And that's what Bannon's basically saying is like, oh, we can trigger a lot of people with this, and if we keep triggering them, we're going to flip 50 seats. And that's. That's cold. You know, that's just a cold analysis right there.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: That's. I mean, that he's not just.
[00:29:26] Speaker A: He was running Trump's campaign. He chief strategist. You know, once he was in the White House for a while. Like, I mean, this guy. I mean, he had a fallen out, but this guy was like. Was hand in hand with Donald Trump for a while. Yeah.
[00:29:39] Speaker B: And that's my point. Right.
And then he was also caught on the $30 million yacht owned by a Chinese billionaire by the FBI when they caught him on a Ponzi scheme. All of this is irrational, but somehow he's a great American.
And so my point is, is that.
That's why this is just interesting. I think we hit it on the head just now. You're right. I mean, either you're into governing or you're not.
And if you're into governing, you probably don't behave this way. And I wanna be very clear here, too, for the audience in this conversation.
I don't like sounding partisan, but at some point you gotta call out kind of the spade of spade and the facts, what it is. This is coming.
[00:30:16] Speaker A: Okay, based on the title of our show, I think that that's what we're saying we're doing.
[00:30:20] Speaker B: No, I agree. A spade is a spade, but no, the point I'm making really is the Republican Party has clearly gone in this direction of authoritarian and kind of just operating on conspiracy theories in lieu of governing. And it doesn't mean that we're sitting here advocating for Democratic politicians or policies or anything. It's just that Democrats don't behave this way at the national level in their leadership.
[00:30:45] Speaker A: Well, to be clear, actually, we've both said at various points in the podcast that we think our system works best with both sides operating in good faith. Yeah, you need both sides. You need the kind of the pulling, the pull and the push, in a sense. And I break down, we need conservatives
[00:31:02] Speaker B: that actually wanna work in government, not
[00:31:04] Speaker A: wanting to do better and not just win elections, but they want actually the country to do better. They're willing to, even if they don't love an idea. They're willing to give honest critique. Same thing with progressives on the other side. You need people that are willing to critique other people's ideas, not just say, I just don't want, I want you to fail because you're not in my political party. That's the breakdown here. Our system doesn't work. Our system needs two sides. Basically. I look at it from a legal background. We have an adversarial system where you have a lawyer on both sides for a reason.
You actually cannot. Human beings, we, all of us, we cannot see the flaws in our own positions very well. We need someone to, generally speaking, we need someone to be able to point out the flaws in our own position. And so that's why we have two parties is because one side is just not gonna be good at self critique and the other side is not gonna be good at self critique. Right now the Republicans aren't giving us the self or the critique of the fair critique of the Democrats and they're not coming up with anything on their own except the culture wars. So it's a problem with the system that isn't solved by, oh, we just need to have all Democrats. It's solved, but we need to have real Democrats and real Republicans again.
[00:32:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
And you remind me, and for the audience, it isn't easy having a partner on a podcast who's a trial lawyer.
[00:32:21] Speaker A: So
[00:32:25] Speaker B: I don't know how it would be to have a country run by trial lawyers, but I appreciate the hey, well, everybody, I always make a good argument.
[00:32:34] Speaker A: Everybody would practice risk management.
We probably would be too risk averse then, but now we talk about that and I think it was good to kind of just lay out like, yeah, we're not here to just bash someone just for the sake of bashing. Like we do have a vision on what things should look like in a system that would work and we actually, we happen to share a vision in that sense. Even though we, you and I may not agree on all issues across the board, but looking forward, like as far as this issue and just big picture wise, if we're going to move forward in the country, you know, I can address real issues, you know, like how are we going to manage this? Like the culture wars have kind of just gone out of control where it's just, at least with the, in the media ecosystems, it's so effective at keeping people's attention that nobody wants to talk turkey anymore. Everybody just wants to point fingers and rub people's noses in it. So I mean, what are we going to, what's going to happen that's going to make people care about, like, competence and honesty again.
Yeah.
[00:33:34] Speaker B: I mean, I think there's probably a lot of things, and part of it, too, is just going to be generational. I think this is going to be another interesting minimum 10 to 20 years for a country to get through this process. I don't think this is gonna get over and done with, you know, in the next election cycle.
[00:33:49] Speaker A: So we got it with. The millennials have to save us.
[00:33:52] Speaker B: Yeah, they do. Because what's happening is, I've always felt this from the time, like, the 2016 campaign started in 2015, and I saw kind of the landscape and the kind of rhetoric that was being discussed. I always felt like this is the last battleground of the baby boom generation.
This is the 1960s. They're rehashing these battles that they, when they were kids, sitting at their mom and dad's dinner dining room table and listening to their parents argue about things like integration and busing and, you know, Martin Luther King speaking, you know, some dinner tables. I'm sure that was welcome. And they thought that that is progress and, and that he was gonna help a lot of people and other dinner tables just as equally they thought of it as an abomination and that integration was something that was akin to losing the whole country. And so I think what we have are people in their 60s, 70s, and that kind of generation.
Cause if you look at who's the most politically active right now, it's that generation, actually. The baby boom generation.
Think about this. In the government of the United states today, the president, 79.
The speaker of the House is 80.
The leader of the Senate is 78. The minority leader in the Senate, 78. The former president that was just replaced is 75. You know, like, there's nobody under 70 in, like, leadership. Like, you're right. And then, and then we're wondering why when Mark Zuckerberg, these tech guys show up for hearings, that they run in
[00:35:25] Speaker A: circles around all these people, you know,
[00:35:28] Speaker B: and then on top of it, besides, literally, besides the former president, everyone I just named has been in their government, you know, D.C. for 25 years at least.
So they also didn't live like the normal life watching the Internet come up and learn how to deal with their phone and all that, like we did. They had some, some, some chief of staff program their phone and hand it to them. So they don't, they don't know how a lot of this stuff works. So I agree with you. But I think part of the other outcomes of how do we deal with this going forward? I think definitely through these new normals or new norms of technology, we're gonna have to figure out how to just deal with guardrails. I really think the First Amendment is sacrosanct. So I'm not here to try and start saying we need to start limiting speech, but I do think you mean
[00:36:11] Speaker A: you're not here to say that you're not here in support of censorship.
[00:36:14] Speaker B: Basically what I'm getting at is
[00:36:18] Speaker A: we
[00:36:18] Speaker B: need to be able to have mature conversations.
But just like it was legislated, that yelling fire in a crowded theater if there's no fire, of course, is not free speech, or hate speech is not free speech. So somewhere along the line we've got to figure out how to deal with getting new guardrails for our society as it relates to media and technology.
[00:36:38] Speaker A: I mean, I think that actually all of this shows is the need for participation in our system. I am one that does not think the people who are all lathered up about critical race theory, I don't think there's anything that's going to change as far as that goes. I think that that has been, that's existed in America the whole time. People getting riled up over issues that aren't particularly pertinent to their day to day life.
It's theoretical. It could like, hey, nobody's proposing that we put this in schools, but you know, they could, so let's ban it now. You know, we'll get all worked up about it and we'll take over school board meetings and all this other stuff. Like, I think those people are there all the time, but what we need is participation amongst everyone to balance those people out. Like, if the only people who are participating or if the people who understand it's not that serious sit out because they're like, it's not that serious, then they just further empower the people who think every, or think all these issues are that serious. And so we need balance to come from people who understand that these issues are not like, you guys are wilding out, you know, like, and so we need that balance. And so I think that that's the biggest, the biggest thing we have. Like, the, the people on the fringes are going to be on the fringes. That's where they live, that's what they do. And when they have too much power, I think it's because the people who are more measured or more busy to really get like, I'm doing stuff, I don't have time to sit around and watch News Nate News Network all day and get all angry and stuff like that. I got stuff to do. Those people need to participate and vote at least, and just vote. And don't vote for crazy people because you're like, oh, I'm not crazy. I'm not gonna vote for a crazy person. And I think that's what's needed. I mean, it'd be great if we could figure out some way to regulate social media or require people to tell the truth more, but honestly, I'm not very hopeful for that. That's not been the way human society has unfolded for the past 6,000 years of recorded history. It's all been about spin and persuasion and fudging the truth and so forth. The beauty of our system is that you can't fool everyone all the time.
It's a saying. And you can pull all of the people some of the time, some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time. And so that, to me, is the answer is more participation. People need to know when they see the crazies. That doesn't mean to pull back. That means we need you to vote because if you don't vote, you're giving the crazies more power. Yep.
[00:39:06] Speaker B: It always stands out to me that America has two narratives.
And there's a narrative that people like you and I might have been exposed to, which is, I would think, the more realistic narrative that the country's not perfect. We love our country. I love my wife. She's not perfect. She loves me. I'm not perfect. But we can love each other dearly.
[00:39:25] Speaker A: Yeah. Perfection was a standard. We all be in trouble.
[00:39:27] Speaker B: Yeah, we would. And that's the point. Like, I love this country. Like, one thing I always talk about. I didn't talk about it here, but it was appropriate to talk about, was George Washington's farewell address. I love George Washington. He owns slaves. I gotta deal with that. I can figure out in my head how to deal with that. But because I say he owns slaves doesn't mean I hate him. Because he owns slaves may or may not make him a bad person. I don't know. But he founded the country and he was the first president. He did a great job. So I can't take that away. So it's an example of how people like you and I have been forced to do mental jumping jacks on how to deal with this country's history for a whole life.
[00:40:01] Speaker A: Well, it's just complexity, man. And obviously people.
But let me. But no, I was Gonna say a lot of people, most people, I would say, try to avoid complexity in their mind. It's cognitive dissonance. I mean, it's something that we try to avoid. We want to see things. Something is all good or all bad. But being able to acknowledge the complexity, what it is, basically what you just described is the difference between patriotism and nationalism. You know, patriotism, you can acknowledge something as flawed and actually as a patriot, work to make it better. A nationalist can't. Any admission of, of a fault to a nationalist is anti that country or anti that nation. And so what we. That that's. It's kind of the battle that we're in or that we see, so to speak, is patriotism versus nationalism. Does the country have to be presented as perfect for you to support it? Or can the country be presented as imperfect and you support it and actually try to work to make it better? Cause if it's perfect, are you just saying that you shouldn't have to do anything to try to make it better? Is that. What is that the point of trying to say it's perfect already?
I mean, I don't know, because like I said, or like you said, I look at it as from a patriotic standpoint. I'm okay with the fact that it's flawed, and I can recognize the fact that it's flawed, and I'll do what I can within my own means to try to make it better, and I'm okay with that. And in the same way, the marriage example kind of worried me, man.
If my wife required me to be perfect, I'd be in trouble, man, and for her to love me.
So either way, it was a good example, but I think we should move on now.
And it's. It's no easy transition. But the second topic we want to talk about, and we touched on a similar topic a few months back, and it is talking about how our attention works and our ability to focus and so forth. And previously one of the. We looked at some studies and research going into how what you're doing, how you feel about what you're doing, impacts your willpower and your ability to focus on it and so forth.
What we wanted to talk about today is, takes a little bit different of approach, I would say complementary in a sense, but more so operating in parallel.
And this talks about that once you've been focusing or the concept of attention fatigue. I've been trying to write a paper for five hours, or I've been reading something on the Internet or reading a book for so long, and the Concept of attention fatigue that just when your brain feels tired, burned out from all that focus.
And the way that it's possible to refresh it, though, and what they called it was more like, instead of specific focus, they termed it in more of terms of, like a general focus. And I'll give the example and then let you cut you loose on it. Tunde. The example they gave with specific focus is if you're in a dark room and you hold a flashlight and you're right against the wall, right. A couple inches from the wall, and you have this focus, you can see that spot very clearly, but you can't see anything else. You know, everything else is dark, but that's. That spot is very focused, very bright, everything. And that's your specific focus. That's when you're reading something. That's when you're trying to write a paper. That's when you're playing a video game. Even, you know, most video games, like, where you're. You're actually locked in and you're constantly thinking about it.
The more general, the broader focus is more like if you step all the way back and you just have a diffuse light on the whole wall and you can't really. Nothing is extra clear, but everything you can kind of see. And so, like, what was your thoughts on this? Because obviously, for professionals like you and I, that kind of work with our brains, the ability to refresh our brain could be valuable information. So what was your take on this, Tunde?
[00:43:24] Speaker B: Yeah, it was great. It was fascinating because I think I've tried a lot of these things in my mind in terms of hacking my own brain. Like, when I'm tired or energetic, I'm trying to be conscious of, okay, so why do I feel like this? Or how can I maybe let me try something different next time? So, you know, it continues to go on this theme of things that we've discussed on other programs and more things that I've just read on my own about continuing to learn about our brains, our emotional state. And this kind of. Again, you know, I use this term a lot with different things, but this kind of ecosystem that we have within ourselves. And I mean, I would even. This is off the direct topic here, but even learning about things that we've discussed recently this year is like a microbiome within our gut.
[00:44:10] Speaker A: Yeah, No, I think that this as well, like, just understanding what's going on. Yeah, yeah.
[00:44:15] Speaker B: Like learning that our digestive system has a big role to play in our emotional state because of the way the bacteria, what we eat and all like, we didn't know that 10, 20, 30 years, you know, I mean, like humanity didn't have the ideas that this is all really, really connected. And kind of, like I mentioned, I think on a recent discussion we have like this about the way that they're learning how trees communicate through the networks on the ground that we don't see. So just that's why I find it fascinating, just more of this kind of self awareness research coming out. Which also to me, I'd say this lends better to my personality too, because I tend to get a lot of anxiety about not doing enough as a kind of just an entrepreneur and a business person and kind of the quote, unquote, you know, alpha male guy that's a dad and a husband and gotta go bring home the bacon type of thing, you know. And sometimes because of the way we're conditioned in corporate America, if you started, I mean, I know you started young at a law firm and it probably made you crank out, you know, two, three thousand hours a year and blah, blah, blah. And I was young at a big Fortune 500 company. And, you know, you get kind of conditioned when you started those environments that if you're not literally working 100 hours a week and always on that you're somehow deficient and somehow a loser.
You're not gonna like, keep up with the Joneses and all that.
[00:45:29] Speaker A: And like that that's the right way to be. And something's wrong with you if you're not doing it that way.
[00:45:35] Speaker B: If you're not doing it that way.
[00:45:36] Speaker A: And then.
[00:45:36] Speaker B: And I think, and I'm kind of glad that we're at the point we're at too, in terms of our age. Cause I think we were able to come up at a time when some of this stuff was already being discussed as opposed to like, you know, had we been born 20, 30 years earlier. And so I realized at that younger age, like when I was around 30, that I saw older people in my offices and when I was a corporate doing things. Oh, sorry. Starting to have outcomes that were detrimental for their personal life. Guys having midlife crisis, you know, having affairs and, you know, doing this. And I'm not trying to get into everyone's individual situation, but part of me understood that a lot of this seemed to be an offshoot of the stress that they had internalized from trying to always be on and perform.
[00:46:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:21] Speaker B: And so this kind of thing is great because it tells us, like, it confirms some of those feelings that I had. Like, it is true, like relaxing is Part of being healthy.
[00:46:32] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, you know what? I look at it like it's similar in the sense that when we're younger and you're exercising, I'm sure you were a high level athlete, but we didn't internalize to the extent that they know now with high level athletes how much rest is a factor of.
And like, you know, it was like you push yourself until you can't push yourself anymore. 2A days and all this other stuff when I'm in high school or whatever. And I'm sure like you guys were burning the candle as well and now they're like, no, no, actually for you to perform well, we need you to, you know, like you got to build rest and all that. Yeah, like that's part of the performance plan. That's not you taking a break because you're tired. That's like, no, no, no, we need you to do this. You. And so with this, the example they gave, they said that the easiest way to do this and this is actually the reason I sent it to you. The reason or they say the easiest way to get this kind of generalized, this non focused time time when you're not focusing is taking a walk in nature. And I thought about oh yeah, Tunde walking his dog all the time.
That's literally that it's just outdoors. And so what that does, what they explain, what that does basically is that when you're, even if you're trying to relax, if you're doing something that requires your focus, it doesn't actually let your brain power down and refresh and regenerate itself to be able to attack something new. In a sense, this reminded me of sleep as well. That's what sleep and during sleep and maybe dreams and all this stuff, your brain is just playing around having fun and then you wake up refreshed if you have a decent amount of sleep. So all of these things, how they interact, relate with your brain. And yes, I'm very interested in how to, how to get extra good results out of my brain. How to get the most I can get out of my brain, but while also not pushing myself to go crazy. Because yeah, as you pointed out, we've all seen, you know, like results that we don't want. You mentioned a few. Drug abuse was another that you know, that have been rampant. As far as professionals I know in my field with attorneys, like that's something
[00:48:27] Speaker B: that is like, you guys are the worst.
[00:48:29] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like a thing like it's like, oh my goodness. So I like I. And that doesn't mean I can't wait till I'm 45.
[00:48:34] Speaker B: That's all the terms you put other people in jail for.
[00:48:38] Speaker A: I can't wait till I'm 45 or 50 or 55 to start thinking about these things. I gotta figure out how to, how to keep my mind on a pretty even keel as early as possible. So seeing something like this is one, it's good information and two, just kind of how it interrelates to various things as far as that we've already talked about and then also just our bodies in general. Understanding our bodies as their own ecosystem and how to work with them is just a good way to deliver results and sustainable results for yourself as well and not just burn out.
[00:49:08] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's because it's interesting. I'm going to read real quick from the research that was done at Exeter Medical School in the uk, says the ability to focus your attention is finite. Just as an overworked muscle grows weak, overworking your attention seems to wear it out. So like you said about athletics, right, like we didn't used to hear that about the mind. It was all about, you know, you got to keep focus, focus, study hard, you know, work, da, da. Or you're some kind of loser.
[00:49:35] Speaker A: Didn't the next line after that though, or did you already read that say that it depends on what you're doing, particularly if something is boring?
[00:49:43] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that was before. Oh, that was one of the things I was going to mention is because
[00:49:47] Speaker A: that was the tie in, I thought, to our, the previous one we did that was related to this talking about when you're doing boring stuff, how much harder it is, how much more willpower it takes in order to do it. And yes, like, so it does matter what you're doing and how you feel about what you're doing. But also, yeah, the actual ability to focus attention fatigue is a thing. And doing a lot of the things that we do that are most popular things to do, whether it's scrolling on the Internet, reading stuff or whatever, that's the playing video games that can contribute to attention fatigue because it's not downtime, it's not allowing your body just to your brain to just see things and not focus on them in that type of sense.
[00:50:25] Speaker B: Well, I think in the end this all leads out to stuff we've always heard this is not new, living a balanced life.
[00:50:32] Speaker A: You know,
[00:50:35] Speaker B: as far back as, you know, even in the Bible, you know, the idea of rest, even though like the seven days and Sunday was the day of rest and you know, different religions might have Sabbath on different days. Christians rest on Sunday, Jews rest on Friday night and Saturday, for example. But it's even at that level of religion where it's like, all right, you got to take one day and chill out. Like, you can't just.
[00:50:57] Speaker A: Interestingly enough though, interestingly enough, I would suggest that I think religious practices a lot of times were more in tune with the inner workings of the body now, not biological, but in terms of how you feel and managing those things, because that was, they were what was tasked in large part with figuring that stuff out for thousands of years. You know, like that'd be something they could conquer. Some concrete they could offer is, hey, we can make your life more enjoyable. So I mean, if you look at a lot of religious practices, there's meditation built in with religious practices. That's something we know is very good for well being. And you know, like there's all types of practices. There's cleanliness, you've talked about this before. Cleanliness practices built into religion. So a lot of things that good ways to be have been figured out by various religious practices. Yeah. Thousands of years ago and passed down that way and others. The significance of this stuff is more so that they're testing these things. You know what they're coming up with theories they're figuring out. They're like asking this question, so what happens if we do this? Or why does this happen? And then they try to come up with theories and then they test the theories. This is how information, this is how understanding advances, you know, and so there you go, you tie it all together with that, man.
[00:52:14] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's interesting. And then just to wrap it up here, because they call it soft fascination, this thing about like being in nature. They say, and I quote the article, unlike soft fascination, hard fascination precludes thinking about anything else, thus making it less restorative. And when you talked about me walking my dog, this is what comes to mind when you make that comment, which is when I'm walking my dog, it's a soft kind of thing. So I'm able to kind of. My mind's able to think about other things and kind of put things in order. Like you said, maybe sleeping is like this too. You kind of put things in order in your mind and start solving problems while you're walking and all this stuff. But if I'm looking at my phone and I'm answering emails and I'm talking to you at the same time and all that, that's just more stuff piling onto whatever might actually be going on in my subconscious anyway, and it creates stress.
[00:53:02] Speaker A: So.
[00:53:02] Speaker B: And I was thinking about it too, because I started thinking reading this article that is like, I'll say this for me, because I can't get inside of other people. It's like nature does relax me, and I find that the older I get, the more relaxed I actually am. Like, I'm much more relaxed just taking a through, you know, wooded area with some trees or being out on the water now in my 40s than I would have been in my 20s. And I think that's part of it, too, is as we get older and we have more stress piled up, you kind of appreciate those moments where your mind can have this soft fascination and
[00:53:32] Speaker A: just, Well, I think look at things that.
[00:53:35] Speaker B: Like a squirrel on the tree is like, okay, wow, that's cool.
[00:53:37] Speaker A: You know? Yeah. I mean, I think the stress affects you, man. Like, most things, you know, as you get older, your body, your resistance, your ability to deal with things decreases. Just like with going back to the athletic example, you know, like you, You. You do. You go out and run 10 games of full court. Right now, you probably won't get out of bed for a week, you know, whereas you do that when you're 20 and you're all good, you know. So I think as you get older, you just. You have to do more to. More maintenance to keep the performance up.
[00:54:04] Speaker B: So you're assuming I'd make it 10 games?
Let's just say I made it through the first one and we stopped during the second day, and I still can't get out of bed for a week.
[00:54:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Still. Yeah, it takes it out of you. So I think we can close it up then from there. But, you know, we appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call It Like I See It. And until next time, I'm James Keys. I'm Tim.
[00:54:26] Speaker B: Derrick. Alana.
[00:54:27] Speaker A: All right, subscribe, rate, review, and we'll talk to you next time.
I.
