Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we react to billionaire investor Ray Dalio's warning that what we have in the US is a civil war that is developing.
Hello, welcome to the Call like I See it podcast. I'm James Keats and joining me today is is a man who, on your journey of discovery can help you ease on down the road. Tunde. Ogonlana Tunde, Are you ready to retell a classic American story today?
Yeah.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: It can be eason down that road.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: All right.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: All right.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: Now before we get started, if you enjoy the show, I ask that you subscribe and like the show on YouTube or your podcast app. Doing so really helps the show out. I'm recording on October 14, 2025. And Tunde, I want to jump right in. Ray Dalio, billionaire investor. Many say he predicted the 2008 financial crisis. He's out here raising alarms again and this time he's warning of civil war. And he's not necessarily talking about bullets, necessarily and guns and all that kind of stuff, but getting to the point where the country has irreconcilable differences amongst factions within it. And he points to a couple things in particular which may not be the first things you would think of in this sense. And that's rising and out of control national debt and massive the massive wealth gap that exists. And it has been and continues to grow. So Tunde, what do you make of Dalio suggesting that. That the US is kind of, you know, in a civil or in kind of a civil war and that the economic factors, you know, are things that can continue to pull the nation apart and make it so that it won't be able to reconcile, won't be able to come together.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: Great question. I think Ray Dalio is a very interesting guy. I would say I have to agree with him on this. And I think that the idea I thought of when reading his piece was that yeah, kind of like a cold civil war, almost like the real cold war we had with the Soviets, let's say for 50 years post World War II, which is high tensions, but we actually didn't ever go to war directly with the Soviets. And there was a few proxy wars over the decades. Right. And I feel like we have that culturally now where we have, we don't have a civil war like the one we had 160 years ago, but we do have this.
It's like a war of rhetoric. I think maybe I'll say this, maybe the benefit of the Internet is that a lot of the emotional energy is allowed to diffuse online and maybe that causes Less of a chance right now of a kinetic violence like we would have seen in the 1960s, I don't know. But I do think that he's onto something. And I do think I would agree with him that the wealth imbalances do exacerbate these things. And then I'll finish here and pass it back, which is.
I'll use a quote. He said he used the term irreconcilable differences.
And it reminded me of, if you remember, James, there were some people in Congress probably about two, three years ago that were saying we need to have a national divorce between, let's say, quote, unquote, the left and the right in America, that the proverbial left and right. And my thing is, is I bring that example to say because the term irreconcilable differences reminds me of the term of divorce. And that's just, to me, kind of sad of where we're at that I guess a lot of Americans don't feel like they can talk to each other.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: Yeah, no.
[00:03:28] Speaker B: I mean, that's separate from the economic.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: Part, but that's the question. And then we'll get to. Ultimately is kind of what's driving that. But I think you integrated an interesting point about the idea of the Cold War and proxy wars, because that's another. That's one of the things we see right now is that so many things that happen, there's the actual issue, but it's always about something else or something greater. And it's like, oh, we're fighting about this thing happened with a police officer, or this thing happened with somebody who did this or somebody who did that. And it's a law enforcement issue. And when people argue about it, or even we may talk about Bad Bunny being selected for the Super Bowl. And when people argue about it, it's not really about.
Their arguments aren't as much about the actual instance. It's about. It's a proxy. It's about some larger issue that they have. And so the idea that you raised the proxy proxy wars, so to speak, was very interesting to me in that. And. But to me, I felt like. Like I went through a journey in looking at this and where I originally started, like, okay, oh, civil war. You know, like, we all have something in our mind about that, but it kind of where I ended up, which putting Ray Dalio as an. As a billionaire kind of, you know, is a difficult thing to align this with. But it seems like more of a civil war. Like, we're thinking left and right. But what if the Civil war is about the feudal lords versus the serfs versus everyone else, you know, and what made me actually really come to this is that like a couple days ago, you know, when we're recording this, like I said in mid October, you have the Salesforce CEO in San Francisco out here saying, hey, yeah, we need, we need the president to send some troops out here. It's like, well, you know what if that's actually what we're seeing here. When you talk about this public debt, the public debt in large part, people think, oh, that's giveaways to the poor. Actually a lot of that is government money in the billions going to billionaires already, you know, through government contracts for this and government, all this other stuff. So we got that stuff maybe being fueled in significant part by billionaires. We wealth inequality obviously is being fueled by billionaires and their insatiable need for more and more and more and more. And so what if the civil war, so to speak, is more about going from a capitalist type of system that we felt like we're in market based and stuff, to more of a feudal system where you got these techno feudalists. We've talked about that book before, but they're trying to recreate the United States that to where they will want troops on the streets because everybody else isn't gonna have anything. They're gonna own everything. And how can you protect it if you own everything and nobody else has anything with troops?
[00:06:07] Speaker B: No. And that's, you know, that's a dystopian view that scares me and should scare everyone because yeah, it's not just the dystopian nature of, you know, you think of every bad, not bad like they're terrible, but meaning sci fi movie that has kind of a bad storyline but that we would feel bad living in. Let me put it that way.
Not you painting that kind of picture of this kind of authoritarian techno feudalist state like you're saying. But I think what we don't think of because science fiction is fantasy. So I don't expect him to get into all these probabilities of what would really happen. But if that were to happen, James, eventually the whole system would collapse. And I would say, I use the term collapse as overdramatic. We would have a system that today, if we heard about that system being implemented in the US we wouldn't like it. Which is a system more like the Russian economy or some others around the world, which is the amount of grift and corruption from those at the top will naturally leave the rest of society with A lot less. And so like you're saying, the need for the authoritarianism will be to stop people from revolting. And also remember the, the, the general population will have a less, a lot less money to consume from those billionaires the longer that that goes on. So over time, they end up hurting each other. Where the systems like Russia, where they benefit is their oligarchs took the money out of Russia and invested it in London and New York and Miami and Saudi Arabia and all over the world and Israel and other countries. So they get to export the money out of their own feudalist system and benefit from the growth from other economies. But now, you know, not to get too far on a tangent in the weeds, but, you know, maybe they've exported other ideas to other politicians around the world. And if everyone behaves like this, it may not like, it may not be as fruitful for, for everyone else, let's put it that way. So I do think that, yeah, you're.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: Asking the question, where would the growth come from? I don't know that they're looking that far into the future, though right now they're in the consolidation phase. They'll figure that part out when they need to, you know, so to speak. Yeah.
[00:08:18] Speaker B: Well, I think, and I want to say this, James, you bring up something interesting because I like the imagination to think of a Cold War in the way you just mentioned. So let me say that I was thinking of a Civil War. Sorry, not a Cold War Civil War. I was thinking of the Civil War more in our own, first of all, being American. I'm thinking of our American Civil War where we had two sides that were very distinct, the north and the South. And both of them had militaries, right. The south, the Confederacy had, it was its own government. And so they lined up on a battlefield like the old days with muskets and they shot at each other. So that's a very.
[00:08:51] Speaker A: Also, though, anything I want to add to you here, just let me add this to point, because it was also more of the conflict that we're kind of accustomed to, in which it's easy to see what we're like now. Like, you have the equality people and then you had the supremacy people, the hierarchy people in the South. And so those kind of battle lines that could be left and that could be right. And so we think it's these cultural and kind of, you know, like the worldview battle for a civil war, so to speak. But that's. Yeah. When I thought about this a little bit more, that's why I Was like, well, hold up. What if. What if what we're actually.
The Civil War, so to speak, that we're seeing is this time, not what if the left and right stuff is a misdirection so that the, The. The. The money people can go and run away with all the money.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: I think you're really onto something, James, because it's funny that, you know, like I say, I like the imagination to see it this way, but I think you're onto something because.
So this answers a question I've been asking myself for a long time, like now for, like, this whole year of 2025 so far, which is, I can see that this administration keeps trying to poke different parts of the public, trying to get reactions that they can then like. To me, it's kind of like that they're looking for these race tag moments, right? They're poking at the immigrants, they're poking at black Americans sometimes when they removing, you know, Jackie Robinson and Colin Powell off. Off of Arlington website and trying to. Trying to mess with, you know, history. They're. They're poking at, you know, the trans community or the LGBT community. And so, and. And I think after the Charlie Kirk assassination, they. They. Again, we saw this, that it's. It's these groups of people, and then it doesn't turn out to be. And part of me wonders, like, well, why people keep talking about a civil war. But there needs to be two sides. And I feel like there's one side that wants to have some sort of fight, and then there's everybody else. But you just made an interesting point, made me realize that I'm looking at it that way. Like, there needs to be these two sides that want to fight each other. But I think you're right. There's one side that's trying to dominate everyone else. Everyone else is kind of looking like, what the hell is going on here? And you're right. It's the divide and conquer attempts of trying to pit the population against each other constantly. And that comes back to your point about the proxy wars. This is why we gotta hear about everything these last few years, from gas stoves all the way to being misdirected on who assassinated who in political unfortunate assassination. So I think you're onto something. I just think that maybe we're not recognizing as the public that someone's trying to have a war with us.
[00:11:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, and that goes back to the Warren Buffett quote. There was a class war in my class one. And he's saying that not as someone who is trying to perpetrate that, you know, necessarily.
[00:11:33] Speaker B: He's just like, yo, I'm realizing this conversation, I'm just waking up to that.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: So, you know, he's looking around at his fellow billionaires like, oh, these guys are going to war with them, with everybody else. And so, I mean, I think that you have to look at this from the standpoint also, like, and to say that the left and right stuff may be a distraction is not to say that it's not to equate. You know, it does seem like there are people who are sensitive to, like, oh, you can make them afraid of immigrants, you can make them afraid of people, different races, you know, dei, oh, be afraid. Oh, like, and that they will then go attack people on behest of this wealth class, you know, and then they will, they will serve as the kind of dupes for the wealth class to always, oh, there's a war on Christmas, there's a war on this. And they're. They, they could get fired up really easily and get, and get their attacks on. You know, you say, like, everybody else allows the status quo to be undermined. You know, and so that, to me, is what's. Is like. So we're saying, who's going to fight these people that are mad about everything all the time? And it's like, well, maybe those people are the people that are being sicked on the rest of society so that, you know, the wealth class, the oligarch class, can run away and enrich themselves. And one of the things you mentioned that I just wanted to touch on a little bit where you can see these signs is the idea, like in Russia, for example, where the government still exists there, but instead of providing for systems and structures in order for the society to grow and a baseline for the population and so forth, to keep people out of the most worst conditions, what the government exists there for is to be a tool for the oligarch class to further enrich themselves. And we see how that kind of strategy is deployed here and so forth. So, yeah, I think that we may, when we see this, we may look at it a certain way and, you know, like. And not really recognize. And I'm not saying that Ray Dalio meant this, but the examples that he used were economic issues. And we'll talk, we can talk about, you know, how he connects the national debt to this as well the wealth disparity. You know, we feel that more, you know, because we see a society that is breaking apart at the seams because you have people who never can get enough Always fighting for more and more and everyone else who wants to just live a decent life just being taken advantage of, which is kind of the story of humanity in the history of the world, you know, so you had one more thing before you move on.
[00:13:57] Speaker B: Basically, you're right. That is the history of humans. And, you know, it's interesting, James, that we got into the discussion. We got. Because I actually didn't think this discussion was even, like I said in our conversation, about new things that I thought of, even how I saw the situation. So. And it's interesting that we talked about this, his comment about that we're in this kind of civil war culturally and our whole conversation yet we haven't even touched on the economic part, which is very interesting. So I think there's a little bit of several things going hand in hand that affect culture.
Now it's a chicken and egg, which is. Which one did start at it? Did the economic imbalances start maybe affecting some of this stuff or did other things affect the ability to get into an economic imbalance? And I know we're going to continue down that road, but I just want to finish this part of the discussion off with. He mentioned that it reminds him of the period of the late 30s, the 19, kind of 37, 38 period. And, you know, in preparing for this, James, I'll just be quick with this. And we keep moving is I realize that you and I, maybe we have a little bit of a bias of looking at certain parts of American history that have been avoided in conversations. Right. And some of that is cultural and things about African American history and all that. But one thing I realized, James, that we also didn't grow up with, with a great understanding of by the time you and I grew up and went to school, was the idea the history of labor in America, the history of the fights between capital and labor. And I think when he referred back to the 1930s, you know, then I started going down a bit of a rabbit hole, which we don't need to get into today. But I recommend people listening and watching us take a little time to look back at the 1930s and the political discussions going on between labor and capital, because you're at the tail end of the excesses of the Gilded Age. You had the Great Depression, and that's when. And we discussed this in a recent show we did on McCarthyism, actual communists and socialists actually had political parties and were gaining power in the United States. And this country had a lot of different conversations like they're having right now. And it Was this wealth imbalance that created a lot of these domestic tensions. So I just wanted to bring that up, that he brought up 1937 and going to look at that period, it's like, wow, there's a lot of similarities that I think are caused by the same issues, which is the first Gilded Age and now we've been living through the second Gilded Age.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: Yeah, but the difference though is that at that time, I would say a lot of the people recognize that the stakes were about how these economic spoils would be distributed around society. And I think a lot of people right now don't recognize that that's what's happening here, is that that where the society is being reordered in a way. And they think that this is all about who performs at the super bowl, you know, or they think like that's completely misdirected on what this is, what this is about. They're completely misdirected on it. So, you know, I think that that is something maybe it, it, it'd be a good time to wake people up. One is just saying, hey, like the stakes here and with the, the fight that's being had here is, has been for the last 20, 30 years a very one sided fight. But not to Ray Daniel's point. It's been so one sided that the wealth class, the older class, has won so much over the last 20, 30 years. Now you're starting to threaten the ability of the country to stay together. You know, and so now I did want to get directly, I wanted to hit directly on it, you know, just like what we think like is this, what's the cart, what's the horse here? You know, like is, can we not address the problems that we have in front of us as far as just it requires attention of the government when issues come up to be able to address them, to be able to come up with solutions, to be able to again create a framework. Either create a framework where people can have prosperity within that framework, where the system is set up to allow for prosperity for more than just the upper 0.001% or so? Can we not create that framework right now because of all this debt and all this wealth inequality, or have the debt and wealth inequality, are those a result of our inability not to address these issues? And when I look at this for me, for example, I think that what also is not understood, and this goes, if you want to take that longer arc that you were just touching on, at least as far as we know in recorded history. And I mean, I say recorded History, because this might be not known in 50 years, but the far as recorded history, what we know is that one of the few times that the people, the labor, the workers, not the owners, but the workers ever won was in this 1930, 1940, 1950 period, you know, where you had to build the largest middle class in the history of the world by. In order to build a middle class, everyone, some people are going to be paid more than they're quote unquote worth. But it becomes a matter of how much more does the wealth class need? You know, like obviously we want incentives for the capitalists, but how great do those incentives need to be? Do they need to own everything when they win? Do they need to have all the spoils or can those spoils be distributed around? So that time period led to the greatest middle class in history world, a reordering of American society based on in large part that great middle class that was built because of the victories of the labor class and the workers and so forth.
So after that there was the Empire Struck Back, you know, and so you can, you can read about this. You, you talk about a book that you've read and you. I'm going to read Democracy and Chains and the efforts, the deliberate efforts over the last 50, 60, 70 years to undo all of that progress that the workers made to get a more fair shape in society. So to me, I think it's hard to talk about cart and horse necessarily without talking about the fact that this, with all of the society that we look to, where you have a middle class and people that's attainable for people and so forth, so much work was done to undo that. So it does end up seeing that seeming like the cart or the horse in this may be that the wealth inequality comes in. And then once that comes in, people become polarized in a way that the government and easy to manipulate, that the government then gets under control of, you know, just the few, which is kind of the point. That was what they wanted out of that.
[00:20:04] Speaker B: Yes, sir. And you just said a lot.
[00:20:07] Speaker A: I said a lot.
[00:20:08] Speaker B: What stuck out to me was that the Empire struck back.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: So I have to follow and say that the Empire struck back. Oh yeah, you got the Yoda sword art and everything.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: Yeah, no, definitely. But you know what that got me segue into? We are living through the Revenge of the Sith.
That's what happened is it went backwards. The real movie was the Revenge of the Sith first and then A New Hope and then the Jedi struck. I mean, the Empire struck back this time.
You Know, the empire struck back and they actually won. And so now we're back to the living under the sea.
So thank you, sir. Lightning. The load there.
[00:20:49] Speaker A: No.
[00:20:50] Speaker B: So, but let me on a serious note, because I wanted to address this with you is. And that goes back to that point I made earlier. I think it's.
It's a bit of the chicken or the egg sometimes, with which one created what Right. Did the wealth. Did the wealth disparities create this feeling of imbalance which creates this public kind of susceptibility to the proxy wars and the things we're talking about, or did we as the public break down over time and not hold elected leaders accountable and all that stuff over, you know, 20, 30, 40 years of time? And we, through a democratic means. Right. Representative government, we elected people who kept this imbalance going. And I think, Jamie, it's interesting having this conversation, actually, because I'm having more epiphanies in the middle of this conversation because.
No, because I think the term proxy war is very good. And I think what we as the American public, definitely the last decade, probably much longer, but definitely the last decade have been subject and we've been the marks. We've been the victims targeted for the proxy war for the psyops. Right. And when I say psyop, that sounds a little more conspiratorial. I think that's why the term cultural proxy wars is very good. Because Dalio does cite, and I'll quote from the article, other factors that led into this, such as, quote, geopolitics, technical technological advancement and natural disasters that contributed disorder. And I thought about the natural disaster.
We don't think of this because we think of mudslides and hurricanes and earthquakes as natural disaster. But the 2020 pandemic would be put into that category. Right. That should be.
[00:22:29] Speaker A: I mean, that's. That's.
[00:22:30] Speaker B: Yeah. And even though, you know, we acknowledge there's a lot of evidence that it.
[00:22:34] Speaker A: Came out that it may not have been 100% natural, might not have been.
[00:22:38] Speaker B: A true natural disaster, but a global pandemic.
[00:22:42] Speaker A: But even so, it still would be in the sense that if the hurricane hits and we're like, oh, well, actually it's warmer in the ocean, so it, like. But that's still a natural disaster, you know, like, that's what I'm saying. Our efforts may have made it worse or contributed to it happening.
Correct.
[00:22:57] Speaker B: So think about people, you know, all the galaxy brain smart people that are sitting there trying to figure out where society is going back in, let's say 2015 or 2010 or year 2000. One thing they didn't predict was a global pandemic in 2020, where the entire world shut down for the first time, like you say in recorded history that all commerce just ceased. So what did that cause then? There's some unknowns that came out of that. One was also. We had a time with the Internet.
[00:23:23] Speaker A: We.
[00:23:23] Speaker B: So now you've got 8 billion humans being stuck at home, looking at stuff online that is driving them into more proxy wars and more emotional, you know, corners.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: Right. Manipulating their emotions. Yeah. Like, that stuff is really good at that online. Yeah. That's how the.
[00:23:37] Speaker B: Yeah. Let's say.
And let's say, Jane, we've had this conversation in a prior show, like, what if the same pandemic happened 40 years ago in 1985 would have been a different reaction because people would have been stuck at home, but they would have been watching Tom Brokar, Peter Jennings.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: We.
[00:23:51] Speaker B: 80% of America would have been watching the same thing. So we would all have the same feeling. And so these are things. That's why I wanted to bring it up just with Dalio, that those are things we shouldn't forget, because I think that what we are emotionally in tune to remember are the proxy wars. Right. Like all the emotional stuff, like you said, who's performing at the super bowl and what did the politician I hate say yesterday? And all this stuff. But the reality is some of these things are out of our control. What can change society? Because what was the last thing I'll say about this? The. The remedy from global governments in 2020 was let's print way more money.
Interest rates to zero. Right. And so what happens is you have all this runaway inflation partially because of that. Partially, let's say the war in Ukraine, but then that. That creates a further wealth imbalance. Because when you printed all that money, it wasn't that.
[00:24:46] Speaker A: Needed through the roof.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Remember we had all those stories about the hedge funds, Sonic, Tom Bur Brady's company getting millions of dollars of PPP loans. People that didn't necessarily need it and they didn't give it back. They kept. They went and bought yachts and planes, and that pushed the price of higher assets up and stocks and all that went up and the people that didn't have those assets yet couldn't keep up. And so I just wanted to say that's a great example, the natural disaster of how these things can happen. We're all sitting there having these proxy wars pointing at whose fault it is. But the reality is this was an anomaly that happened. And the way we deal with it.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: Is actually how we dealt with it led to us furthering us down the road, this path that we're already on. And so I think yes, it's hard to untangle cart and horse with these things because they feed on each other. As wealth disparity grows or in the public debt piece, let me just mention what he talks about that is that that chokes off natural growth because so much more of the, the spoils of society have to go towards.
Even if you're not paying down the debt, you gotta service it more and more and more servicing that debt. So that chokes off organic growth. And so then you gotta come up with these other ways to produce growth. You gotta, which may produce bubbles, things like that. So it adds to instability. And we got the bigger issue that we have there isn't just the existence of that debt. It's that nobody has any idea or discipline to try to address it. It's like whoever gets in power is just adding more to the debt. It's like, you know, and so, but I think one of the things that we have to acknowledge here, and I do want to move us on, but I just want to say this is that because if we don't know kind of the stakes of the, the, the, the, the battle that's happening, or if we're looking at the wrong battle, then we may be selecting the wrong people to act on our behalf, so to speak. And so if I, and I would say, you know, you can look at a political party or politicians and who may not recognize that hey, what's happening here is a reorganization of society, society from a more market based free enterprise to an oligarchy system where yeah, you can start your own business, but Google already has a business there and they'll choke you out within six months anyway. And that's not to pick on Google, that's just to say some large business is already there. And either if you want to survive in that business, you got to pay them, you know, they're your feudal lord in that. Which goes into the techno feudalism book that we've talked about in the past. So it's a reorganizing of our society in that sense. And until, until more people understand the stakes of that, then it doesn't matter what the cart Norse is because you can't intervene at any point if it's a self perpetuating thing. You have to, regardless of where it started, you have to intervene at a certain point. And if nobody knows that's the battle we're fighting, then there's no not going to be intervening. And so I want to close this up, man. Just the last thought. And I mean, you can go back.
[00:27:34] Speaker B: Can I say something just to finish on your point there before you jump, that it's ironic, James, and I say this with a smile and I hate to say it. The chickens coming home to roost and you're set in your kind of statement there is that America became a land of sharecroppers. Think about that.
[00:27:49] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's kind of right. And we haven't seen anything yet, you know, like, this is. This is the beginning of the trajectory of that. So, I mean, is there. Do you see any way out here? Like, Dalio paints a picture that is pretty, you know, as you said, dystopian, to use your word.
Are there way. Are there places. Are there ways that there can be intervention here?
Are we going to have to just go through this cycle and play it all out and then in a generation or two, maybe try to pick up the pieces or, you know, what do you think? Is there reason for. Is there a new hope or. Or where are we?
[00:28:29] Speaker B: No, I'm glass half empty tune day today. Oh, no, there's no new hope. The Revenge of the Sith is real.
[00:28:36] Speaker A: And at least not yet, is what you're saying.
[00:28:41] Speaker B: Yeah. So I'm sure there will be hope one day. I don't think you and I are going to be alive. And I think it may be longer than two or three generations. I mean, what we've just lived through is as profound as the cultural changes that took place in the 1960s is as profound as the changes that happened in the late 1800s, with a lot of the changes at that time, or as profound as the 1930s with the new Deal. Meaning those changes lasted for decades, like 50 plus years. And so those. I think the changes we are facing today are going to be set in for some time. I think you're right that a lot of people don't realize where it's going, because I think. And we've done different discussions at different points in time about, you know, various subjects that I'm going to shove all into one kind of set of comments here, which is the Internet, the new information spheres, the fact that there's no more gatekeepers on information, whether that's positive or negative, the fact that a shared narrative is important for a society, and the fact that we have a bunch of fractured narratives. And as we've stated in this discussion a bunch of different proxy wars that keep most Americans off of looking at actually who's leading us, how things are going, so on and so forth.
Like I'll give you an example. I'm learning this week that Qatar we built on the US Taxpayer Air Force facility for Qatar and Idaho, that's after Qatar gave our president a $400 million plane that I'm told the US taxpayer, me and you and everyone watching this got to pay $1 billion to retrofit. And this comes on the heel that I learned that the President's business, the Trump Organization is got a green light from the Qataris to build a five and a half billion dol golf course and resort in Qatar on the, on the water. So what I'm saying is while we're having proxy wars about who's performing at the super bowl, that stuff's happening, right? Our tax dollars are going to be spent on, on kind of crony stuff that people that gave our president, his family the opportunity to have a $5 billion golf course, they're getting rewarded on our by us, the taxpayer.
[00:30:54] Speaker A: So and I mean, and that's not.
[00:30:57] Speaker B: The way that I grew up thinking that the America should be run, but that's the way it's being run.
[00:31:01] Speaker A: Well and the issue that we have is that there are then the president can do that and then take people that are in his camp and dangle something else at them so they won't even look at this.
They'd be like, oh, it's okay, he can do all this corruption stuff because he's fighting this other battle for us. And so as long as he's able to capture a portion of the population and have them permanently distract them about whatever like so it makes it difficult to come to some narrative and say, hey, we prefer not to as the American people generally we prefer not to have you doing corrupt stuff. And it's like, well no, you got a group of people that are willing to excuse all that because they get some red meat somewhere else. And so that, that does create a different I don't know if that embodies irreconcilable differences.
But that's the kind of thing that the lack of inability to come to consensus that we're talking about here is that blatant and out public corruption can be excused by a large amount of people in the country because they're so wrapped up in some other distracting issue that they feel really strongly about. And I mean being able to be manipulated like that very easily is a concern. It does prevent a consensus to be able to come. But I will say this. I think that I don't look at it as dire issue. I think things change fast in modern society. And if people do figure out kind of the game that's being played soon enough, more people figure out the game that's being played soon enough and get to work as far as being creative and sharing that with the rest of society and other, you know, our other fellow citizens and so forth, that the game is being, hey, you're being, you're being duped here, yada yada yada, like however you can reach people, you're not gonna be able to reach them on your terms. You have to reach them on their terms. But to figure out ways to unite around some common themes about, hey, we're against corruption, we're against, you know, like the self, you know, enriching yourself at the expense of the American public, all those kinds of things, then I think it's possible because things do change fast. And that is, you know, with the technological environment that we have. I wouldn't say though that there are no gatekeepers. The issue is that we don't have human gatekeepers anymore. Our gatekeepers are algorithms. Our gatekeepers are AI agents that can, or bots, excuse me, that can. They can, you know, blanket the Internet with certain sentiments and people don't even know that they're being influenced by these things. So that gives me, that worries me because if we, at a certain point, it's conceivable that information won't be able to be controlled outside of the tools of the oligarchy. I mean, and we see this, you know, we see, you know, X, Twitter going into the oligarchy and people who. A person who will directly act in favor of his financial interests. We see it happening with TikTok now in the United States where it's like, okay, yeah, we're going to put that under another oligarch, you know, then he's going to own that. And so there may come a point where we won't be able to utilize the technological tools that are around in order to create an enact fast change. But right now it seems like that's not the case yet. It doesn't seem like.
[00:33:53] Speaker B: So as long as George Soros doesn't get to buy, then the world will be okay.
[00:33:59] Speaker A: That's who they're all worried about, right? Yeah.
[00:34:01] Speaker B: The other billionaires are actually nice people. Only George Soros is the one we need to worry about.
[00:34:06] Speaker A: Their billionaires can own all that stuff and do all the funny business, but Zorros is the one they got to watch out. Yeah.
[00:34:12] Speaker B: Remember, the other billionaires believe in freedom and all that stuff, so, you know, they'll be fine.
[00:34:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:17] Speaker B: So we shouldn't even have elections, James. We should just let them run the world. What about that?
[00:34:21] Speaker A: I mean, I think that's their plan. I think that's the oligarch plan right there. Or elections are just for show like we see in some other countries. You know, like we're win 95% of the vote and it's like, yeah, that's 95% of people don't agree on anything. That the sun rises in the East. People don't. 95% of people don't believe on that. So. But yeah, I think we can wrap from there. But I think it's a. It's a worthwhile conversation because it can help expand kind of how you. How a person views what's happening now. Because it's so difficult to get perspective in a world where so many. So many messages and so much information is coming at you all the time that, you know, to actually be able to get some perspective and see kind of a bigger arc is just very difficult. So. But we appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call. Like I see it. Subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it, tell us what you think. Send it to a friend. Till next time. I'm James Keys.
[00:35:05] Speaker B: I'm Tunde.
[00:35:07] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk soon.
