Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we consider whether America's most common economic measures may cover up how difficult things are for working people, particularly in light of the Pope's recent criticism of how the wealthy around the world are living in a bubble.
Hello, welcome to the Call Like I See it podcast. I'm James Keys, and joining me today is a man who always has some takes that keep him coming back for the next episode. Tounde Ogonlana Tunde. Are you ready to hit him with something explosive today?
[00:00:43] Speaker B: Yeah, man, just like candy, bro. You gotta come back.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: Keep coming back, actually.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: And I wore my glasses today so I can be smarter because this is a topic about.
[00:00:53] Speaker A: You've gone up 10%, man. Yeah, we're in for a treat.
So 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. We're recording on October 28, 2025. And Tunde, we recently saw some stinging criticism from Pope Leo, Chicago's own, about how wealthy folks are living in a bubble of comfort and luxury. And that's a quote, bubble of comfort and luxury while poor folks continue to be marginalized. And this is looking at this globally.
And he's looking at it also from a religious and like a biblical perspective. And it made us think, though, about how some of the primary indicators that we look at as far as how the economy is doing, like in the United States, for example, like stock market indices, may be giving us an incomplete picture because we hear that and it's like, oh, but the stock market's up X percent year over year or whatever. And it's like, so the economy's booming. And so let's start with the first part though. Tunde, your thoughts on the Pope's recent criticism, know that the. Of the wealthy and the way they're living, you know, from a Christian and.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Biblical perspective, I thought it was exactly what I would expect the leader of one of the largest religious institutions to be focused on helping those then vulnerable positions in the world, you know, and those less fortunate than the rest of us. So I'm not surprised. And it's kind of refreshing in today's, I guess, you know, the way we see everyone having public discourse these days.
And then, you know, in, in looking it up a bit. He. He made the announcement on the date of the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, who was a 13th century mendicant friar who renounced his wealth to live poor among the poor. And so I thought it's Interesting, because the, the, the Pope that was, the one that just passed away, that, you.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: Know, he was very much along these same lines too.
[00:02:52] Speaker B: Yep. And his name was Pope Francis. He named, you know, he chose the name of this specific Pope. So I thought it was a nice nod by Pope Leo. Very kind of classy to, to do this on the day of the feast of St. Francis in honor of the man who just was his predecessor. And apparently this was Pope Francis while he was alive, had started writing kind of a paper about poverty and about the role of the church and all that. And this was all done as a symbolic end to Pope Leo finishing that document. So it's a document that was actually written by both Popes and was presented on this day as well. 100 page document about the Church's role and helping the poor globally.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, to me, my thoughts were like, I would push back on you in the sense that I wouldn't expect religious leaders to, to, to take such positions publicly so forcefully.
You know, in Christian religion, you know, this is Catholic, you know, which is a sect, you know, large, the largest sect in, or I believe it's the largest sect in Christianity.
I would hope that they would. I mean, I've read the Bible and I've, you know, I've been a Christian, you know, like. And so, and that's, that's the religion I grew up in. That's the religion I am now. And when I look at that, you know, I'm looking at the teachings of Jesus. It's, it's so, so much is about social, social justice, economic justice, taking care of people less fortunate than you.
The, the disconnect I've always seen is that the people who wear their religion, you know, the, the loudest in my, where I see it oftentimes don't focus on these issues that much. You know, they're much more worried about telling people how to live their life, you know, and so I mean, from a, you do this, don't do this, you know, they're much more worried about, you know, whether abortion is legal, you know, in my experience. Like, and so I'm, I'm happy to see this because this, this to me is some of, one of the, the strengths of religion and how religion can really positively influence a society. You know, like there is, you know, with any group of people, you know, 100 people, 100,000 people, whatever, there's going to be the ones that are very greedy in that group and they're going to try to pull the resources from everybody else. And one of the counterweights to that, potentially, is religion and spirituality. Like, hey, no, we can't. We're not going to just have all of these people on death's bed and then this other person riding high, you know, like, so that. That those counterweights are needed, you know, and seeing this also, one of the things I noted was that the Pope gets pushed back, and the previous Pope, and then this Pope always gets pushed back. When they do this, a lot of times from American conservatives, and they're like, oh, you know, the Pope is a Marxist and stuff like that, which, you know, in our last show, you. You talked about the people getting called Marxists and stuff, but which struck me, though, because it's like, well, hold up, you know, like the person talking about the guy who said, it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a wealthy man to make it into heaven. Was it Marx?
That was Jesus, you know, so it's like, well, hold up, hold up, hold up. I think you guys got this backwards, but. And then the Pope anticipated this. He's talking about, you know, that you get this pushback from people who actually want to use religion to justify inequality from a financial standpoint, but nonetheless, it's not expected. It's not something we should take for granted. But I definitely am happy to see this message coming from a religious leader of such import. And, you know, I think it's good to see. You know, it's good to see we need more counterweights to the. Again, and I'm not saying this is like some. Something wrong with society, but there's always going to be people that are more on the greedy side, more people that are going to be less on the greedy side. But we need counterweights, though. We need. There's. There's some way that we can work this stuff out where if. If some people are pulling too hard in one way and some people are pulling too hard in another way, then we end up in a place where society can be okay. And this is a big part of that, in my opinion.
[00:06:50] Speaker B: Yeah, it's. It's interesting, man, because I think you're right.
If you think about it, there's. There's always been. We know this, that there's been a tension in the United States between Protestants and Catholics, which stems from the British tension between both sects of Christianity that, that. That came here with. With all the migration.
And so I. James, I just. As you're talking, I find it very interesting because what happened in America was The evolution and morphing of the Christian doctrine into this Christian nationalism, which. Which also entails some of the Manifest Destiny feelings. And I think your point is valid, which is religion in America has been used as an excuse for conquest, right? It was.
God gave us this land so we can sweep all these savages off of it, meaning Native Americans. God gave us this land so we could import these people from Africa and make them work here, because the Bible says that slavery is good. So when I read from Pope Francis, I'm really thinking in my head, wow, this is a real schism in Christianity.
There's this seems to be this version of Christianity that the Pope's talking about, which is what you alluded to the eye of.
You know, the thing about the camel and the needle. I'm screwed up.
Fool me once, you can't get fooled again. Sorry.
But then you've got this American version of Christianity, which some of it. And we did a show on this a year or two ago, right, where some American Christians are saying maybe Jesus was too woke.
[00:08:24] Speaker A: Maybe, you know, this whole empathy, maybe about that. You do have Americans, the Christian.
[00:08:28] Speaker B: Yeah, empathy is a bad thing, right?
[00:08:31] Speaker A: Jesus Christ. They're like, no, that kind of stuff doesn't work anymore.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: So. Exactly. So I think that what the Pope represents and the Americans who push back on this represent is an actual schism in Christianity globally. What is it? Does it represent? What we've read about in the teachings of Jesus about how to deal with the poor in society, he also turned over the tables in the temple, didn't like the rich priests and all that kind of stuff. So are we going to go in that direction or are we going in this different direction, which is this manifest destiny all about conquest and stepping on other people.
[00:09:08] Speaker A: Well, I mean, but some of that, though, is just kind of like religion is used for different things, and it has been throughout history. Like, so the religion being used for conquest, for excuses for conquest, existed well prior to United States, you know, like, so that's something that. Throughout history, and that's not something limited to Christianity, you know, but to me, I think the economic message is the message. Like, if the Pope is saying to us, hey, there's a bubble that the wealthy in the world are living in. And when he's talking worldwide, globally, that may not even be how we look, what we consider wealthy and not wealthy in the United States, because he's looking at a much broader lens. But he's saying there's this bubble that exists and that you have people living in this bubble and then other people are being more on, more and more. So being marginalized and marginalized and marginalized in society.
That really did like when I'm looking at that and I'm like, because we've had shows about this where the stock market, you know, stock market in the last was 15 years has just been off the chart, just going up, you know, just, you know, you had a blip with the pandemic. And I know it's, it's difficult to call that a blip, but if you're looking at a longer term trajectory, it was know from a economic growth standpoint. And if that's happening in the midst of thing of life getting harder and harder and harder for poor people, then it does make you, I think it is, it is a good time to a good thing to look around and say, well, what's going wrong? What, what are we doing here that's making things so. Where there's more economic growth than there ever has been, the rate is, is, is go. It's going really high. The absolute growth itself is actually going very high. And so I ask you, the stock market is still pushing higher even to this day.
But maybe this is something that maybe this indicator misses the mark. So do you think potentially that just again, in the light of what the Pope is saying here, do you think that there's a two Americans thing that we have here in the United States where many people are in a bubble thinking that the economy is just going up and up and up and up and up and everybody else is like, man, I'm struggling to pay my bills.
[00:11:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I do, I mean, I think so. There's a couple things, man, if you look at history and let's just say stick with the United States, I'm not going to go big galaxy brain here, but if you look at the history of the United States from 1789, the majority of time we've had high poverty and there's been a lot of economic inequality. I mean the New Deal began to change that, but prior to the 1930s, I mean it was the Gilded Age. That's why they called it that they had terms for people, the robber barons. Right.
And so it seems that the period that you and I grew up in, you know, we're both born in the late 70s and a kind of tail end of the New Deal activity that was the anomaly, this kind of 1930s to maybe, you know, 2000, you know, early 2000s period in American history for the common man, for the middle class person, or let's say the Development of a middle class was, was an anomaly to most of human history.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: And I think you can spread that out though. Remember, you know, even in some of the stuff that we've read and we've talked about on the show, like that post war period, you know, there were, there was a drop in inequality in a lot of societies around the world. And yeah, that maybe what we were born into and lived was like a, a the remnants of that, so to speak, that has been continued to be. To be taken apart as we've lived.
[00:12:43] Speaker B: And I think you and I have had some of these conversations personally, you know, in the recent years when the inflation started ramping up and I complained to you that I came home from the grocery store and I can't spend less than $100 every time I go there. And we've talked about the fact that you and I are fortunate enough in today's society that that's a nuisance, but it's not preventing us really from living the lifestyle that we want to live.
[00:13:07] Speaker A: And I think you didn't miss a meal because of that, so to speak. It was.
[00:13:10] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. But what I've been enlightened with in this recent period of time and studying some of these stats is there are people missing meals because of some of this stuff. And I think it's harder for people like you and I. I don't want to speak to you, but I'm saying people in our socioeconomic status, you know, if you're upper middle class or higher, because you drive around all day and you see everyone else, you and even people that, janitors and lunch ladies and stuff, you're just passing other people and they all look okay. So you don't think that there's this whole world that's really suffering. And then I want to read a couple stats and then hand it back for your thoughts. You know, there was a survey by LendingTree this year.
It found that 25% of buy now Pay later user users are funding their grocery purchases with loans.
Like they're literally borrowing money to buy groceries.
[00:13:59] Speaker A: I didn't know that.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: And that's up from 14% in 2024. Something. First of all, that's a big jump in one year.
[00:14:05] Speaker A: In one year.
[00:14:07] Speaker B: And second of all, 14% was big. You know what I mean? Like so. And then the last I'll say is that I hand it back over to you is the survey said 41% of respondents said they made a late payment on a Buy now pay, Pay later loan in the past year. And that's up from 34% last year. So four out of 10 people that are borrowing money to pay groceries have made a late payment in the last year. Yeah, so that's what I'm saying is normally, James, my head would say, wow, that's not going to be good for the market in the next year. The market's a leading indicator.
[00:14:38] Speaker A: We.
[00:14:39] Speaker B: This kind of stuff is the stuff I saw in 2006, 07 leading into the crash in 08, these stats where Americans were hurting delinquencies on credit cards and auto loans going up. So that means we should be entering a recession.
But now, like, we're talking that there might be enough of an imbalance that the money at the top might keep the market going for a while.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: They may just keep investing in AI and all this other stuff.
[00:15:01] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And productivity gains and the S P likes earnings, you know, to show, you know, that, that they're not, you know, the earnings look good because we're not spending on labor, all that.
[00:15:12] Speaker A: So.
[00:15:12] Speaker B: Yeah, man.
[00:15:13] Speaker A: Yeah. So, yeah, I, I share your concern. And those same kind of stats were with. Is when I went and looked for, you know, and to have this conversation and you know, the one where people are borrowing money to pay for groceries and stuff was one of the big ones. It's like, well, hold on, you know, like what?
Some. Something's going wrong here. And what I see though, really is that it's. It's a continual creep.
It's about. And we talk about wealth disparity and people a lot of times talk about that or think about that, and it's like, oh, you're talking about people, you know, with, with that are just poor or people that need assistance and all this other stuff. And that's not what I'm talking about at all. I'm just talking about the design of the system.
And is the design the system one that will give people more of a fair shake? If you want to put it in Teddy Roosevelt terms, give people a square deal, you know, whereas you work hard, then the society is set up in a way that you work hard, you get, you have a job, you work hard, then you can afford somewhere to live, you can afford something to eat, and you can raise your kids and so forth. Do we have something like that set up, or is the system being set up in a way that's more predatory? You know, where it's like the people who have stuff now are actually setting up the system in a way to prey on the people who don't. And so when you look at payday loan or when you look at borrowing money to pay for groceries, that's like, hey, in order to eat, you're going to have to pay me a vig. You're going to have to pay me interest in order for you to eat. You know, and that's going into the exploitative thing. We've now, we've already seen this, this, this change from a education standpoint, you know, like we saw where if you go back, you know, a number of decades, you know, the idea of that you should be able to get a college education without taking on a bunch of debt was one that prevailed in the United States. That was gotten rid of. And so, and steadily since then, since people started having to take loans to go to school. In other words, you have to pay interest in order to learn. In order to become a more productive member of society, you got to pay some rich guy or some, some collection of people, some collection of money interest. You got to pay them a piece in addition to the money you're paying actually for the education.
So it's basically become like, so, so we saw that in education and we saying it with groceries now, obviously, you know, if you're looking at a big purchase like a house or something like that, that's going to be something different. Even though the government in past years and still does to some degree would supplement that and, and keep the interest rates lower to make it so that it was more attainable for more people.
Basically what we're setting up here and what I'm concerned about is you have this system that is being continually expanded where it's like, in order, if you are a working person, then in order to do anything, you got to pay the wealth class a piece. You got to pay them interest on anything, you know, whether you want to go to school, pay them a piece, you want to eat dinner, pay them a piece, you know, any of that stuff. And so like, to me, that seems like we're allowing ourselves to just be in this exploitative system. And that won't make the stock market go down, you know, that's not gonna be picked up by that, you know, so that we might be looking at the wrong things in order to see how our system is actually getting turned on us.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's. So you made a very good comment, which I wanna stay on, which is the word predatory.
And I think that that's very accurate.
I think that the type of government we had prior to the New Deal also behaved very similar in the late 1890s.
Like you said up until Teddy Roosevelt, that really was about exploiting Americans, exploiting the American worker, exploiting. Think about Smedley Butler. He wrote about his time in the Philippines and the Spanish American War, that he basically said, war is a racket. We were just used as the muscle for these wealthy oligarchs basically who had all these dreams of going around the world and siphoning all these commodities to refine them and sell them back to people. Right? And so I think you're onto something, James, because what you're really talking about is going from a system of a more democratic system that we've had to a more feudal system. And so the. And what does that mean is that means that in the sense in what you're saying in terms of debt, right, and that we gotta kind of pay a vig, so to speak, to be able to live means that basically we have a modern version of indentured servitude in many ways. And I know to me that would have sounded conspiratorial coming out of my own mouth just like 10 years ago, but I've been forced to look at the system in a certain way and say, yeah, this is really how it is. And all you were talking, it made me realize that I'm going to go back to the New Deal. It's what the New Deal offered Americans as something different. And why it created the largest middle class was because it was an example of a public private partnership about this stuff and it was a non predatory way to deal with the population. So for example, the GI Bill is a great example. You serve your country in the military, number one people in World War II, you know, we're going to 10 million GIs came back, got college educations, all that kind of stuff. So by the time you and I are born in the 70s, 30 years after the war, those tens of, you know, over 10 million Americans had degrees that didn't happen before and didn't have an opportunity during the Great Depression and prior. And so what did that mean? We had a more educated country, higher literacy rates, people that were in positions to start businesses, all that. Think about something like section 8 is not just a handout to people under hood. You know, how many multimillionaires since the 1970s were created in the real estate world because guys like me and you that work hard could go buy a single family home or duplex, put somebody in there on Section 8. The government has subsidized it, but it creates an entrepreneurial class, people like us. And so that is what to me, is being taken out of this system. The ability for the public private partnership to allow the average American to move within socioeconomic status from things like that.
[00:21:14] Speaker A: For the ability, it removes the dynamism.
It's not dynamic, you know, because it's like, okay, if you're already a winner, then it's set up for you to keep winning. And if you're. If you're not one of the winners already, then it's actually set to pull more from you.
[00:21:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:28] Speaker A: And that's what I'm saying.
[00:21:28] Speaker B: And it just amazes me how many Americans that are our age, maybe a little bit older, some younger, that don't recognize the benefits of that public private partnership that came from the New Deal and are just wanting to go back to the 1890s, like, that was some sort of great time for everybody. And it wasn't. You go read a rap about the railroad bus. The amount of, you know, it was a very. Three or four years.
[00:21:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:52] Speaker B: It's just. It was a very difficult time for America, which is why all these things were created. The Square Deal all the way to the New Deal. Right. Like, yeah, we're just going to go back and find out the hard way again.
[00:22:01] Speaker A: Well, it does. That's the concern really is just that we're going to have to go through this cycle again in order to make the mistakes or in order to make those mistakes, have the people feel the pain and then recognize that we need to solve these problems again. Because right now. Yeah. The concern being is that there is no as of right now, coming from the bulk of society, which is where the check on people who want to take their. Who want to be forever winners. Like, hey, I started something, it worked. Then I should be able to compound on that forever and continue to continue to accelerate from there.
The people who want to be forever winners.
The pushback has to come from the middle. It's not going to come from the poorest people. It has to come from the people that. The class that would be an entrepreneur class or the class that would like to have an economy that has that. That's dynamic to some degree. Like, hey, you can get in, you can make things happen. More people. And a lot of times, like, you touched on this. But I want to actually make the point. You know, when you talk about with the, like with the GI Bill or these other programs that the government had, those were considered, those were investments. Like, the government got more out of that stuff than what the government put in, you know. And so one of the big benefits of Investing in people that want to work hard, investing in your society, that is the hard working aspects of your society, trying to enable them to do more and do more and do more is that you create all of this growth, this the real growth, not bubble growth, no, not growth of speculation, but growth from a productivity, from an innovation standpoint in the society. And so, and that's the piece that I actually, or my worry obviously I'm concerned that imbalance, imbalance when you have wealth, imbalance leads to conflict, leads to a lot of bad things. But I'm more concerned about what we also saw this post New Deal period bring was all this technological innovation, all of this other stuff that it brought with it. Some people, it brought more social justice and I guess some people weren't happy about that. But nonetheless, that's the stuff that I'm worried we're going to miss out on now is that the ability for society to solve problems or to think of things that nobody had ever thought of and actually put it into practice because you have all of these people that are very capable, that are very hardworking that the country has invested into.
And as opposed to, again right now it's just like, all right, you got a bunch of money, then we'll figure out ways to use the government to give you more money. Like that's it, like that that doesn't compound growth in society.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: Sounds like a good way of investing.
[00:24:28] Speaker A: In the masses of the people would.
[00:24:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I said that sounds like a good deal for somebody. I just don't know if it's a good deal for everybody.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: Probably, you know, like, yeah, that's a good deal for some people.
[00:24:38] Speaker B: And I mean you can see it's no, and here's the thing too, I want to give an olive branch to the people that might be listening or watching us and cussing us out. Oh, and you know, all this is all antiquated and all old and you know, this is all a bunch of bloated government, fat balance sheet and we got all this debt and we can't do that.
Okay, My point is I'm not here to say that the New Deal should look exactly like it did in the 1930s, just like you and I have had the conversation.
You know, there's no argument with things like affirmative action being re looked at in general that it doesn't need to behave the same way necessarily did in the 70s, right. But the idea of just taking literally a magic wand and saying we're going to do away with all this stuff in one fell swoop Is probably also not the way to have a productive, you know, going for the country in the future. Because some of the things that would.
[00:25:33] Speaker A: Be enough real quick.
The country that did that a couple years ago, we did a show on it, you know that country, right? They said, hey, we're just gonna get rid of all this.
[00:25:40] Speaker B: They're getting a $40 billion bailout of our tax.
[00:25:42] Speaker A: Argentina did that.
[00:25:44] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:25:44] Speaker A: A couple years ago.
[00:25:45] Speaker B: So, yeah, who's gonna give us the bailout, though? When it's our turn, we wave the.
[00:25:51] Speaker A: Wand and just make all this stuff.
[00:25:53] Speaker B: Hey, it ain't gonna be 40 billion, man. It's gonna be like 4, 40 trillion.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: Don't want to think about it. But I think you're right again, the point being made here is not that we need to do all the things that were done before.
Actually, the issue that I have is that, and this may be the fault of people who support the idea of using government to invest in the people.
These things do need to be refreshed from time to time in terms of the approach. But the problem is if you have someone who, who has a disdain for it, who doesn't want it to exist, that's not the person who's best suited to make it better to say, hey, we gotta get rid of some of the fat, we gotta target this thing a little better. The people who actually support it need to constantly be able to maintain these things. And maintaining them means making them more efficient, making them more targeted where needs be, and so forth. And so if you're just gonna sit there and say, all right, this is in place, we're just gonna let this run forever, then, yes, the people who are saying, when you get rid of it are gonna start making more and more sense. Because it's like, well, it's not gonna work well over time. If you treated your car like that, then, yeah, you wouldn't have a car after five years. Like, yeah, I'm not going to do anything maintenance wise. I'm just going to keep driving it. And then the person saying, you need to get rid of your car because it keeps costing you all this money is going to be right eventually, you know, so. And as far as debt, yes, we have a big problem with the debt in the country, in this country. Something you and I talked about a lot. But the issue is, it's not about. It's not like the country's not going into. The country's going into more debt now than it ever has, you know, so it's not like getting rid of These things, these programs to invest in the society, invest in the workers of society is really what I want to emphasize, too.
Programs that bring people from nothing to livable. That's something you do. I think if you, if you believe your society should have a certain baseline like that, people shouldn't drop below. I believe that. I think that's something people can debate. But the question we all should be able to agree on is whether or not society should invest in the working people so that the working people can get closer and closer to their potential, which pushes the country higher and higher and higher. So any last thoughts before we close this up? Man?
[00:27:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I think this is where I just feel like it's. Unfortunately, we're going to have to go through this kind of pain as a nation and as a society for people to have the opportunity to see if they still even want these things anymore. And my point is, and the sad thing for me, James, is that we got here, I think, through a lot of misdirection.
You know, even friends of mine I talked to are misguided with what they think. And I think more people are seeing this. Meaning I've seen stats. First of all, it's all over X now. It's been trending for a few months that, for example, black Americans make up 13% of the US but receive 50% of all welfare benefits. So a lot of people think are being, are being radicalized to think that, oh, it's all like, again, it's about tribalism. This group of people here is the one sucking on the system. So if we just cut this off, we can, I don't care if we hurt those people, but we're going to save the system and all that. And as people are finding out, as more of these SNAP benefits are getting cut off, the ACA being unfunded, the farmers are already finding out this, unfortunately, that most of the recipients of government benefits in the United States are white Americans. And that's okay. They're obviously the majority group in the country, so it makes sense. What I'm saying, though, is a lot of people got misdirected into believing that they were maybe voting for outcomes that are not going to happen. And when the outcomes begin to happen, everybody's going to hurt. And so I think that, you know, we just got to be prepared that this is probably going to take another few years to really play out. But when it plays out, we're going to have to decide, do we want to rebuild Humpty Dumpty? Is he going to be put back Together again or not.
[00:29:41] Speaker A: Or just understanding, having objectives and deciding, okay, we have these objectives, how, knowing what we know now, how do we try to accomplish these objectives? Which I think is a much healthier way to look at it, as opposed to saying, what did we do before? Let's do that again. It's like, well, no, what were our objectives before?
What are our objectives now? And then, what can we do now to meet those objectives? Another thing that I'll say is that I think the priorities. And this is kind of. This is separate, you know, like, this is just kind of the priorities of society are always reflected in these kinds of things. And so right now, we're living in a society where the priorities are not people wanting to make sure that they get a fair shake economically. The priorities of certain people is to make sure that the money keeps flowing to them, and the priorities of other people are something else. And so as long as that's the case, I just think that there's going to be this disconnect that we can watch this, watch the Titanic sink and everybody look around like, well, should we do something to stop the ship from sinking? And they're like, yeah, maybe, maybe not. You know, like, we got to just watch that happen. Because it's like our priority is something else right now, you know, and it's just what. That's. That's unfortunately how what's being reflected by this a lot.
[00:30:52] Speaker B: It's interesting, man.
[00:30:53] Speaker A: While our main indicators might not.
Might. Might not reflect the disconnect, you can find the information. One and two, people are telling you that times are hard, and if you listen to them, you know, you, You. You can learn that. So, but we got to wrap this up, man. We've been going.
[00:31:11] Speaker B: I just think your illusion of the Titanic is that we're on the soma, the Brave New World.
[00:31:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's. That's the SOMA on the Brave New World. So, for sure, like, all right, so.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but we appreciate. 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.
[00:31:30] Speaker B: I'm Tudor Romana.
[00:31:32] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk soon.
