Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Hello, welcome to the Call It Like I See it podcast.
I'm James Keys, and in this episode of Call It Like I See it, we're going to react to the revelation that President Biden had retained some confidential documents and that an investigation has been open into his handling of them. And consider how he's being treated relative to former President Trump when it was discovered that he had improperly kept confidential documents.
We'll also take a look at the recent job numbers and try to make sense of what's going on with the labor market, which is remaining strong despite the fact that there are several things going on that would seemingly put a dent in it, like high inflation and the rise of interest rates.
Joining me today is a man who has a very full wardrobe as it is, but not completely full. Tunde yoga and Lana Tunde. Will you be inviting the people to see your vest today?
[00:01:14] Speaker A: Yeah, man. All right.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: All right. Now we're recording this on January 16, 2023. And over the past few weeks, we've seen a story develop around the discovery of classified documents from the Obama presidency, time from that era, and the launching of an investigation into whether documents were mishandled or any laws were broken. And this was these documents were found in President Biden's residence or, you know, places like that around in his personal areas.
And of course, because we've seen former President Trump deal with issues surrounding his retention of documents and his, you know, going further than that refusal to return them, recently we've seen a lot of hand wringing over whether there's a double standard at play here or if everyone's being treated fairly. But before we look at it from that perspective, tell me, Tunde, what stood out to you, just in general, about this Biden classified doc discovery and opening of the investigation and the story as far as that flowed from that?
[00:02:16] Speaker A: Well, what stood out to me was that besides being of similar age and American citizens, that Donald Trump and Biden now have something more in common. That's what stood.
[00:02:31] Speaker B: And also being one of 45, so to speak.
[00:02:36] Speaker A: No. Or maybe of being two of 46 presidents in the United States history that have been found to have classified stuff in their house, one in a pool house, one in the garage. So that's, that's what stood out to me. Like, okay, now this is the second time in my life I've heard this.
[00:02:56] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, and we've had it happen twice recently, you know, and so, like, it really, it doubles up, I'd say. For me, though, what stood out the most about this was really the reaction of Biden, how Biden handled it, because we almost were.
We didn't question because we know how former President Trump operates. When this issue was put in front of him, he didn't. Or he immediately became adversarial towards, you know, it was like, oh, you know, this is. I'm going to attack the people that are investigating me. I'm going to attack. You know, the reason I should be able to declassify stuff. I shouldn't be in trouble for this. He went into, you know, immediate defense mode. Whereas what stood out to me here is that it doesn't. This doesn't seem adversarial right now. Like, the adversarial part of this seems to be happening in the media, like double standards and stuff like that. But Biden is just like, all right, here's the stuff. He's instructed as attorneys to cooperate and to give it all. Like, there isn't any issue over Biden's not filing lawsuits saying, oh, I don't have to give this back. So to me, how this wouldn't even really be a blip of a story, but for the fact that we just saw this happen in a different context and people are really looking at, oh, you know, is it gonna be treated unfairly? And so forth. It wouldn't be a story otherwise. So to me, that's what really stood out about it, is just, again, how Biden handled it was. It almost is. And a lot of times you speak like this when we talk, but it almost just kind of reminded me of kind of politics before.
The hyper, hyper partisanship that we're era that we're in right now, where, yeah, things just happen. And, you know, there are scandals, but usually the scandals are much bigger deals than, oh, well, something happened I didn't like. Okay, well, you know, here just, you know, just deal with it versus, oh, something happened I didn't like, all right, I'm going to declare war on the legal system or something like that, which is more in line with the way Trump handled it.
[00:04:57] Speaker A: I don't know. It's interesting as you're saying it, I would disagree that it wouldn't be a big deal. And it's interesting because I hadn't thought about this until you said that.
Meaning, like I said at the beginning, this is the first time in our lifetime and maybe in US History that we've learned that presidents have taken stuff. Right? I mean, this would have been when. Meaning when Biden's case, when he was vice president of The United States. So that's also interesting that it's been seven, eight years since he was vice president. So these documents just been hanging out in the garage in the boxes that long. And prior to him, was Trump as president taking documents? My point is, is that had we learned that by 2017, 2018, that Barack Obama had taken classified documents or that Ronald Reagan In 1992, we learned that he took classified stuff back to his ranch in California or something like that, I'm pretty sure it would have made the news. I think what the difference here is.
[00:05:56] Speaker B: Whether it makes the news or becomes a really big story though, or different things is more.
[00:06:00] Speaker A: No, but I mean, who knows? That's what I mean. We've never seen this before. So it could have just a big story that, hey, this guy, what was he doing with classified material as a former president or even high government level official? I mean, the thing is, it could have been a big story. My point is, is that I think what's interesting is Trump is so polarizing and you're right, the way that he behaves when these incidents comes up, his natural reaction is antagonistic to the system. Yeah. So because of his behavior, now we see, as you pointed out, Biden's contrast, which is, at least on the surface, which is okay, I kind of like, I got busted.
The lawyers are gonna deal with it. I'm just gonna keep moving and not discuss this too much. Whereas with Trump, it's the tweeting, it's the, you know, or whatever, the social media posts, it's the all, you know, everybody's gotta come to my defense. And I'm gonna tell you why whatever you're hearing isn't true. Where with Biden, it's, I don't want to really deal with this directly with you. These people over there handling it, they're going to, you know, we'll tell you what's going on later, whenever this is over, this investigation, whatever.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: Well, and also they're giving all the documents back. Like there's not a contention over, oh well, I can have this stuff. I want, I'm going to keep.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: Or I declassified it with a magic wand because I stood over the box, you know, like, like I was.
[00:07:26] Speaker B: Because I intended to describe declassify. So it did. But see, here's where, I mean, I'm not saying this as a matter of it's an impossibility, like just speculating. Like there have been other situations where government officials have retained documents that they probably should or that they weren't necessarily supposed to Retain. And in many instances, they didn't become a huge issue. It was something that was dealt with if the Justice Department had to get involved and the Justice Department got involved. Otherwise, it was dealt with by the archives. They have a whole setup in place to help people not do that. Biden apparently thought he engaged in that setup properly, and so this was all news to him. So what I'm saying, though, is just that because the last time this happened, it became such a point of contention. And all of these, any argument that he made to say why somebody was justified to do it, that Trump made it, whether or not these were, you know, he was making these arguments genuinely or just trying to get off of it, or just, like you said, trying to be antagonistic, like, say, look, oh, you guys are coming after me. Well, I'm coming after you. And not just, you know, just pushing it to the side. I think it kind of changed our expectation on what type, what, what this kind of thing would look like, and it changed the media's perception on, oh, well, hey, we're going to cover this much more strongly now because for the, like, right now, in the story outside, if you don't put it into context of Trump, there's not much to talk about with the story. We're talking about 10 documents, 15 documents or something like that. Oh, I didn't mean to have them. I didn't know I had them. There's not much to talk about that from a story standpoint. It's just like, okay, yeah, you had them. And then he's not saying he's supposed to have them, or like you said, magic wand stuff. None of that stuff is in play here. So, I mean, to me, it just reveals kind of how this is a news, a bigger news story when someone says, oh, you know, you coming after me for classified documents? Well, you know what? You, I can, I'm allowed to have classified documents. And then it's, then it's a huge deal.
[00:09:26] Speaker A: I mean, look, there's, obviously there's, there's, there's several ways to compartmentalize this. One is the fact that classified information is classified generally for a reason. Because you're thinking there's probably some national security, you know, reason, or it could be a threat to national security if these documents got in the wrong hands, so on and so forth. So that's. That is what it is. Right? So if we look back, going back now the last decade, this first came up, I think, in a huge way during the 2016 campaign with Hillary Clinton, her emails, the fact she had a server in her home with classified information on it, blah, blah, blah. So what happened in there was her opponents used that as a reason why she was not qualified to be President of the United States. At the time.
Her supporters, I think we're looking, not saying it's okay she had classified information, maybe looking for her to have a better explanation than she did. But.
[00:10:26] Speaker B: Well, but this illustrates my point, bro, just real quick, because, for example, one of the things that was talked about then was how Dick Cheney and his people, like, they did that stuff too. Like it wasn't as big of a deal. Pre hyper partisan.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: Yeah, but that's my point. That's what I'm getting at is that like, that's why I said at the beginning there's something called classification of information. We know that and we understand it to be what it is. Now. There's laws about where you can and can't have classified stuff based on the statutes and all that. To your point, there's times in the past when these things had happened, but when one person did them who was running for president, it was seen as an opportunity by her opponents to say, okay, we can weaken her in the public eye with this. Okay, that's politics, right? And I think what a lot of people have a hard time processing is that the same people who go after Hillary Clinton for, unrightfully so, because as a consumer of this stuff just laying around, I can also say, hey man, why does somebody have a private server in their house with classified information on it? That sounds, it's like something that shouldn't happen. As a layman from the outside, meaning me when I hear something like that.
But then when fast forward a few years later, when President Trump has documents at his home that he apparently took himself, that same group of people don't seem to be as alarmed about it. And I think what's interesting is at least there's a few years between those two incidents. What happens is within less than six months, whenever, when the same similar thing happens to Joe Biden, those same people who were, I would say this lenient towards President Trump when he was found with classified documents and wanted to then turn around and point the spotlight on the Justice Department who carried out basically the walkthrough of his home to get the documents back after a grand jury subpoena. So there was a legal process involved. But I know none of that matters. They now are treating Joe Biden different. I think that's, to me, what stands out is just this is another what.
[00:12:46] Speaker B: Hypocrisy is what stands out to you.
[00:12:48] Speaker A: Yeah, well, it's hypocrisy. The what about is. And just things that, like you said, things that used to be boring and not get to the level of, let's say the public now are being used as cannon fodder.
[00:13:01] Speaker B: But that's, I think you, you classify that under hyper partisanship. And that's where I, that's why I started with that. And the reason being is that from a partisanship standpoint, if all you're doing is trying to gain partisan advantage, then it makes sense to use any and everything you can to try to use, to get partisan advantage. Now for. To our benefit and to our. Hopefully this stays this way. Our legal system is supposed to operate separate than that in terms of, okay, well, the legal system isn't supposed to be doing investigations or not doing investigations or trying to pursue criminal reasons to, in order to give someone a partisan advantage or not. And so what I've seen, or the first thing that stood out to me, what I was saying was just that how this kind of a matter now is one that is thought of to be one that will give you, that at least thought of by some people as, hey, this is something we can try to obtain a partisan advantage out of. Because. And the next thing I want to get to actually is whether or not you think this proves that the Trump classified doc, handling of the classified docs, when in Trump's case was trumped up, so to speak, or was if there's been a double standard because people have pointed to, oh, well, he got his Mar A Lago raided and stuff like that. And, you know, like, when I look at it, you have to separate. And I think that it's intentional that a lot of people don't try not to separate the operations from a legal standpoint and the operations from a political standpoint. These political operatives, so to speak, politicians and all of the people that work for them, they, that's their job to use. You know, that's their job if, if they're approaching it from a, you know, like just politics all the time, never, never interest of the country first, so to speak. I say it like that because, you know, just to distinguish. Al Gore was not a politics all the time kind of person or else he would have never conceded the 2000 election. But just to stand on the point, the legal mechanisms, though, are not supposed to be that. So when the Trump issue, you look at that and it's like, okay, well, why did he get raided but Biden didn't get Raided. Well, Biden was the one. His side was the one turning all this stuff over. His side was not indicating that they weren't going to turn stuff over. And so you look at these distinguishing points, but that's the legal side from a political side. Of course, it makes sense to say it's a double standard and to kind of minimize, you know, like, the differences, the very clear differences. But what do you think as far as, from the arguments or claims that inevitably, the comparison that inevitably comes up in all of our minds, like, oh, well, was Trump fairly treated in light of what we're seeing with Biden now? What's your take on that?
[00:15:38] Speaker A: It's hard to answer that question specifically. What's my take on it? As just a neutral observer on these things that tends to want to go beyond the headline and read a bit. I recognize that.
I think anyone who wants to learn this has already been able to find the nuances. Right. So the Justice Department had been dealing with Trump, former President Trump, basically, since he left the White House one day, knew that he took these documents.
[00:16:08] Speaker B: Well, no. First, the National Archives.
[00:16:10] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I'm just thinking they got the.
[00:16:12] Speaker B: Justice Department involved after some time, and when they weren't happy with what he was telling, what his people were giving him.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: Yeah. And so. And it just goes back to the nature of Donald Trump not wanting to play by the rules. I mean, in general. Right. We've known this about his life and his personality and all that. So the bottom line is the, you know, went through the legal system, a grand jury was convened, a court signed off on the FBI's ability to go to the home and get the documents, and they did that, period, end of story. And it wasn't a raid. They came in there, you know, already alerting the Mar A Lago people that they were coming, and the doors were open and no one. Busted.
[00:16:55] Speaker B: I shouldn't have used that word. You're right. Like, they told them they were coming.
[00:16:57] Speaker A: What I'm saying is that's how it's been described. Right. And I think with, with, with Joe Biden, the way you've described it seems pretty accurate that somebody found that there was these documents in this place, and then they contacted the Justice Department and the FBI and said, we got these. And here you go. Now, there's questions around the. Apparently the first documents were found in November of 2020, two days before the midterm election. But we've also learned post Jim Comey's press conference in 2016, before that election, that no investigations from the Justice Department normally are disclosed to the public within 60 days of an election. So it doesn't muddy the waters with the public.
And so there's a lot of things here that happened that appear to be just regular old business as usual. But I think that's where we discuss the need for the partisanship because it was treated by politicians very differently. And I think that's where I can see that.
[00:18:05] Speaker B: To me, I think from a broad strokes standpoint, there are similarities. And so it almost sets up the perfect thing for a politician or a politically minded person, a person who's looking for partisan advantage, to try to align the two together and say, yeah, don't look at the nuance, don't look at the detail, just kind of go with the flow here. Like, oh, see, it happened here and then it happened there and so forth. And so. But you'll see how the way the law treats it is going to be. And that's not to say the law is perfect by any means, but the law does endeavor to not be in the political moment or the passion of the moment and try to try to adhere to some standard. It falls short many a times.
But in any event, in something like this, we'll see how the law handles it and that'll show us the similarities or the distinctions because the facts, so to speak, matter in terms of how they're applied to the law. And the other piece I just would touch on in this is how the media is handling it. And I mean, I think the media, that's a, that's even different. We've touched on this in other shows. That's even different from the political calculation or the legal calculation. The media calculation is generally one of eyeballs. And so it's almost like I think the media is giving the Biden story more attention right now because they were able to benefit greatly from all the attention that the Trump, Trump is great for media because him taking adversarial stances towards everything. Media loves a fights bring eyeballs. And so I think the media is taking advantage of the fact that there'll be more attention on this because of what just happened with Trump. Whereas the story, like I said, is very boring. There's not much going on here, like, oh, Biden found, essentially Biden's people found some stuff, turned it over and then they found a couple more things turned it over, like, that's it. And now there's going to be an investigation on whether they did something wrong in keeping it, but that's it. Like, it's not.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: That's interesting.
[00:20:01] Speaker B: I should have this stuff get out of my. You know, get out of my stuff. I'm the president. You know, the law doesn't apply to me. There's none of that. None of that stuff's at play here. When all of that stuff was at play through official court filings, you know, in the previous. When dealing with Trump.
[00:20:15] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it's, you know, that the timeline with the media, like, you know, what would have happened decades ago versus now. I think it's actually interesting the way you discussing it just tells us it's just about leadership. In the end, we had Trump as a type of leader who part of his cachet was developing this kind of aura that he never backs down and he never gives in.
So I think that's what we're seeing is when President Trump. This all came out in the news. Right. Because it's not like the Justice Department was telling us for a year they were trying to get those documents. It was all quiet. And then what happened was once the FBI went into Mar a Lago to get the documents, Trump was able to kind of play that victim, like, oh, this big, bad media. And then what happens is basically the sycophants and the fans of his around him have rewarded and applauded him for sticking it to the system. And it's interesting because he was President, United States, but yet is still somehow rewarded for being seen as this outsider of the system now.
So then what happens is the politicians and the people on tv, you know, they all want to defend him and all that, so they go out and cry foul, and the viewers and the base believe it.
So then what happens is this same issue kind of happens with Biden. Obviously, we've described how the two men have handled it differently, but the idea that both men had something classified on their personal property when they probably shouldn't have was the similarity.
[00:21:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:59] Speaker A: And to your point, the media now is prepared for some sort of antagonistic issue about this.
[00:22:05] Speaker B: Well, you made that point, but let me. Let me add something to that, because what's also interesting about that is that the media is looking for some type of fight here to give this life, so to speak.
And so with that, actually, the fight isn't going to be Biden and the Biden supporters against the Justice Department because of the way, as you pointed out, the way Biden handled it. So the fight is gonna end up being the adversarial situation is going to be the same people who were adverse to the Justice Department. This Goes to your point. And the Trump issue, the people that were saying the Justice Department was wrong, everything like that, the fight's gonna, they're gonna be involved in this fight too. They're gonna be saying that, oh, this isn't fair. Oh, this isn't. The double standard is gonna be, the argument of the double standard is going to be the fight among or around which the coverage is based. And so essentially the politics of it and the politics of it aren't coming from the right really are going to make both of these a story in different ways. One when it's taken an adversary position against the Justice Department, the other being, okay, well, Biden has not taken an adversarial position against the Justice Department. So there's no real story there. But the people from the Trump side are now saying, oh, well, this proves that we were treated unfairly and so forth. So they're actually generating the, even this one, it's not directly at them politically, so to speak. They're generating this conflict in both instances that give the media life, so to speak, that allow the media to create something that brings eyeballs.
[00:23:41] Speaker A: It's interesting. It gives the media life. And it's a, and it's a potential another death by a thousand cuts to our legal system and to and for the American people. I mean, that's the sad part, is that this is going to be another excuse for the current Congress to, quote, unquote, investigate the investigators.
I understand that the FBI is not perfect and the justice system is not perfect. They've made mistakes and they've done things aggressively that weren't mistakes.
But it's funny, you know, I joked with a friend of mine who was railing against the FBI recently and I reminded him of, you know, a lot of historical facts of how the Justice Department actively went against a lot of Americans in this country.
And, but I said, the interesting thing is when you really uncover and look at the facts, the facts don't support that. They went after people like yourself, you know, conservative Americans on the right leaning spectrum of politics.
Normally, the Justice Department has been used to go against civil rights movement people, people on the left, people that call themselves Democratic communists and things like that. I mean, that's kind of what, you know, the system has infiltrated groups like that domestically.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: Let me ask you this, do you think, I mean, you're kind of walking a line here that's close to this, but I'll just outright ask you, do you think that the fact that something like this popping up from time to time and the Reason I say that it wouldn't get the coverage it would get, it gets now is because there have been occasions in the past where we found out five, ten years after the fact, particularly when the Trump thing was going on, we found out that there were other people that had maintained confidential stuff. They weren't supposed to. Justice Department archives handled it, or Justice Department handled it, and it wasn't some big, huge news story. Now, granted, that wasn't the President of the United States, but it's still government officials and it still involves confidential information. And so it just wasn't the news story, so to speak. That and probably because the news media didn't think that if they talked about it, there's a lot of stuff that happens that they don't think that if they put it on, people won't watch. But do you think that this kind of stuff reflects poorly or well on our legal system and our government that we keep having these, these things pop up with confidential information? It looks messy. It looks like, oh, you know, we don't know what to make of it. And you never know if, when somebody has something like this, is it nefarious or is it just there's thousands or tens of thousands of documents and, you know, things get mixed in. There's the issue, which I don't want to go down, but just over classification, which again, is not directly relevant here because it has classification, has classification. Whether it shouldn't have a classification, we should address that separately. But what do you think? Do you think this is something that makes us look bad? This is like, oh, yeah, see, that's why you shouldn't have open societies. That's why you shouldn't have.
[00:26:38] Speaker A: That's a whole different road to go down about this is why you shouldn't have open societies and democracy. My point is someone who doesn't want, like an authoritarian type, who doesn't want open societies and the people to have power and all that, will use this as a reason, and that's my concern about some in the current Congress, is that, you know, this will be another excuse to investigate the investigators and to investigate those who, I mean, think about it, undermine.
[00:27:08] Speaker B: When you investigate the investigators, a lot of times what you're trying to do is undermine the legitimacy of what the investigators are doing. Yeah. You know, if you don't, if you have reasonable belief, like, okay, we've seen them do crazy stuff, that's one thing. But if it's just like, oh, you're investigating me, well, you know what? I'm going to investigate you that's about legitimacy.
[00:27:26] Speaker A: That's not, I mean, look, and that's why the politics to me has much more of a danger of, of creating a circus and kind of kangaroo court out of this whole thing than the, than the legal system itself.
[00:27:39] Speaker B: Bingo.
[00:27:40] Speaker A: The reason why, the reason why I say that. And again, I don't like to be here calling out names, but I will in this rare instance. And you know, someone by the name of Jim Jordan, who's the new chair of the Congressional Justice Committee, is also someone who was a supporter of the big lie, denying that the election was legitimate in 2020 and who we saw through the hearings, the evidence there, had stuff in writing to the chief of staff, to the president and others where he was supporting the events of January 6th. So my point is, is that we now have people in positions of power within the Congress who have the authority to investigate the justice system, who themselves basically broke the law. Whether they've been prosecuted or caught or not to me is irrelevant because we've seen that their actions went against the United States once we see what they put in writing and their attempts around those events of January 6th and post2020 election. So that's my point of saying, does this affect the justice system itself or does it reflect negatively? To me, no. Like you said, two things happen.
Both have, both presidents Trump and Biden have special counsels now looking at why they had documents. So the law acted the same in both instances. My point is it's just the reaction, correct? It's the reaction of all of us, the media, the politicians, the culture which puts our legal system at risk. That's really my concern with this.
[00:29:26] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good. Because my thought on that actually was that the. And that's why I said bingo when you said it. The politics part of it is what reflects poorly on our government and our system because it makes us. I mean, it's a human element, though. I mean, so it's not that like this part, this is the messy part of having self governance, so to speak, is that people are petty, you know, but the law is supposed, the law is in place to put in place, to stand above all that, to not react to, to the passions. And I think in this case it actually reflects well on our legal system and our governmental framework because we're supposed to hold things dearly, like no man is above the system or no man is above the law. So the fact that you can have a former president or a current president be investigated for something that they did by the Justice Department I think reflects well on our system. They can't just squash it. Or in Biden's case, he's not even trying to just squash it. He's like, no, investigate it. Fine, whatever. Accepting the rule of law. The danger, though, is the political side of it, where Trump, to compare, he didn't accept that the Justice Department could do this to him. And so he then decides, okay, well, I'm going to try to undermine the legitimacy of the legal system, to your point, which is the threat to the legal system, so to speak, when we're going to turn the politicians, at least the politicians on one side, against the legal system if the legal system does something they don't like. And so that's something that we can't have, that only one side can't be willing to accept. The whole idea of all men are subject to the law, only we need both sides to accept that or all sides to accept that, really. Because I hate to even put everyone who's right leaning in that category where it's like, oh, well, if the law's coming at me, then the law is illegitimate, you know, like, because that's, that's the breakdown of rule loss. That's like, by definition, that's the breakdown.
[00:31:22] Speaker A: That's what I was gonna say is just to follow up real quick. And then, and then we can, you know, we can jump. Is the, that's where the danger is, is, you know, what's, what's. It's almost like what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine. Meaning the. There's a certain mentality that's permeating and unfortunately, like you said, and I don't like to sound partisan here. Right. But it's like, it's permeating the Republic Republican Party more than the Democratic Party in today's politics, which is that the opponent, they're just illegitimate. And so. And this is where it becomes dangerous for the rule of law. Because if you think about it, right under President Trump, he had an attorney general or several attorney generals, but the last one was William Barr.
You know, the Republican politicians weren't spending their time trying to investigate the Justice Department.
Here we are two years later, and this now is a focus not because of the law, but because the law is trying to be applied to situations that when the former president was there, he violated the law in certain ways. And a lot of that has been shown to be factual.
So instead of saying, let's look at maybe what happened and how we let a guy become president in our party who Behave this way. Or maybe let's avoid having someone like this again. They aren't going to do that. They're saying let's because we want to maintain power. And this is such a hyper partisan environment. We are just going to keep pointing at something else. And now the risk of that, something else that's going to get damaged can be our justice system. Because in order to protect the shenanigans of recent years, let's just call it that way. That'll be my blanket catch. All for everything.
It will be. Then let's go ahead and investigate, quote, unquote, investigate the investigators and let's begin.
[00:33:29] Speaker B: To, let's try to delegitimize.
[00:33:31] Speaker A: Yeah, delegitimize it. And that's the sad part, because besides the big shiny objects, like the names like attorney generals and all that, the same people have been working in the FBI for decades. You know, it's not like the whole justice system, you know, the tens of thousands of employees all turned over once we got a new president and this and that. Biden just waved a Wand. I got 10,000 employees that just all voted for him and all love him and that Trump had just all the employees of the justice system were all for him. That's the whole point. And what has made America great, really, if I can say the true maga, right, what's made America great is that our politics have for a large part been separate from the workers at these various agencies. And I think, at least again, for the first time in my lifetime, in recent years, that has looked like it's beginning to change, that you need to be a member of the party to be okay, not be okay.
[00:34:31] Speaker B: Yeah. And the thing is with that is that, that's, you hope that. And this is a leadership issue, you know, like this is the leadership and the Republican Party right now, their chosen leadership has taken that kind of position, you know, and that kind of, kind of approach, because the design is that everybody would recognize that we're all pulling in the same direction. And so therefore it can operate like that, where you can have different parties in power but the same workers, you know, just, you know, doing, because everybody's pulling in the same direction. That's the design of it, you know, and, but right now, you know, it, and I, I, I think it's worth making this analogy. Like I look at, you know, football is, I think is a good analogy to this in the sense that, because it's one of the few sports where very, so such a, a wide diverse skill set, body size, body Type all can be needed and, you know, like, required for certain things. You need the big guys, you need the fast guys, you need the smart guys, you need. You need all different types of stuff. And the way it works, the way a football team would work, is that the people, the big guys, recognize that the fast guys are important and are needed. Hey, you have different skills than me. That's okay. You go do what you do well, I'll do what I do well. I'll push other guys around, you run around them, you know. And so the design for a good football team is everybody realized that they're working together. What we have in this country right now is akin to, you know, the big guys, the linemen, being told by the coach, like, look, you know, we don't rock with the running backs or wide receivers, or we don't rock with the fast guys. The fast guys are illegitimate. Anything that they do is wrong. And it's like, well, hold on. How does. How does the football team work if the part of the team is being told that the other part of the team is not legitimate? And all we need to do, we just need the big guys and that's it. And we're gonna give to the big guys and the big guys, we're gonna. You guys, run around people. And it's like, well, hold on. No, we need different people with different skill sets, different mentalities. And right now, from a leadership standpoint, we're just not getting that across the board. You know, like, we are looking at other parts, other Americans, and saying they should be devalued or they're not legitimate. And that, I think, is the underlying problem that we see for all of this, is that. And like I said, I'm not saying it's equivalent. You know, like, I see this more on one side than I do from the other, but it's still something that we all like. It's an easy. It's an easy slip. It's a slippery slope, I should say, once it starts happening for everyone to kind of go into that kind of phase. But I do want to jump, you know, And I know you had mentioned. It was like five minutes ago, he said, we're going to do that. But the second topic we want to discuss today, and it's normally we have a lighter second topic, but this was just interesting. It's not necessarily lighter, but it's not what we just did. And it's on the recent reports on how strong the labor market has been, and particularly in the fourth quarter of 2022 and just continues to be. And this is in spite of like 2022 was defined by high inflation, you know, inflation that had been high. And high inflation a lot of times will weaken the labor market. It was also defined by interest rates being raised, which is supposed to cool the labor market or is one of the effects that that's going to happen. So we have two things, one that's happening and the other we're causing to happen based on decisions at the Fed that are supposed to slow down the labor market. It's not slowing down. What do you think's happening here, man? As far as with the economy? I know you look at this stuff more closely than a lot of other people. So what do you see here? How is this possible?
[00:38:14] Speaker A: I don't know. We created.
[00:38:16] Speaker B: We've created an honest man.
[00:38:18] Speaker A: Yeah, we've created a good enough system that can withstand a lot of blows and we still aren't happy with it and need to complain. That's kind of my first honest feeling.
No, I think there's a lot to unpack with that and clearly we're going to have our own blind spots in this conversation. I don't think anyone can really answer all this because accurately in one shot because there's just so much information and data out there. You got 330 million Americans, of which 280 million or so are adults in the labor force. So there's a lot of speculation as to why part of it is, number one, that technology is changing a lot of things. And there's actually been some questioning things. I was reading, even in preparation for this discussion, that the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which traditionally counts as stuff, also is not able to keep track that well of some of the new gig economy type of stuff going on. Because remember, they still use data from payroll providers like paychecks and adp. They still do old school things like just calling companies that have over a certain amount of employees and asking them every month have they had any layoffs, have they had any hires, certain things like that.
And I also think that again, as much as people don't want to hear this, there's still a lot of imbalances in the system that need to be shaken off from the pandemic and the way that companies make decisions on hiring and firing.
And then there's still a lot of money in the system too. So from the CARES act and all that. So I think, you know, there's just a combination of it that, you know, just makes it puzzling as to how we can have this very, very Strong labor market and a time when everyone feels pessimistic. That's kind of what I find fascinating about this too, that everyone's so negative, but the numbers of the economy just keep looking so robust.
[00:40:34] Speaker B: It's just like it's not. Yeah, that to me stands out as well. Just that, I mean, I've been seeing, I flip on, you know, news aggregator, you know, Apple or Google or whatever. And we get to the economy side, there's always an article about, oh, the recession's coming, the recession's going, like for the last year we've been seeing that. And I'm not saying it may. If you keep saying that, eventually it will be true, you know, but it's just interesting, the level of pessimism. Now. I think that it should be said that we have a strong labor market, as you pointed out, by the metrics that we're tracking. And those are the metrics that. It's not like we've switched the metrics in the past six months. So those are the metrics we've been using. It gives us an idea. It's not granular to a certain extent, but nonetheless it's not felt by everyone in the same.
The employment areas may be more clustered and areas where there isn't a lot of opportunity may be more clustered, but nonetheless, what it shows to me is that there is still a lot of demand. Now, where that demand comes from, my concern always is that it comes a lot from middle class borrowing. And that has picked up, but nonetheless, there's money being spent. And as long as there's money being spent by a lot of different people, then our economy, in my view, is going to be okay because demand is the driver. You got to have the demand. And so if there's demand, then that's why people hire people. You know, I've always thought the term job creator was misleading because it's like, well, people don't create jobs out of the goodness of their heart. People create jobs when it's like, okay, I can sell more goods or services, so therefore I need more people to offer the goods and services. So it's the demand that drives it all. So the fact that we still have this demand out there, the reasons could be some of the things you mentioned as far as, you know, like the, the free money that's been floating in the system for the past couple of years and other things. But it's encouraging to me that there's still demand. It shows the resilience, but yet the resilience of the system and the resilience of our economic just kind of engine that we have. But it seems like we are because so much effort is being made to slow it down. What it feels like to me we're heading for is like, I think eventually this stuff will pay off. It's just not paying off. There's a lag basically that we're living in. A lag where, okay, all of this stuff is happening and it's going to hit us at some point. We just haven't got to that point yet. That's my concern at least. And that's not even to be pessimistic. That's just because what I'm saying is that the things that are being done or that are happening to us, whether it be inflation or the interest rates, I think eventually that stuff is going to put a dent in the labor market. I should say this put a dent in demand and then that demand dent is going to be felt in the labor market. I just don't think it's happened yet. I think there was a lot of, and you, I think you said this to me much more eloquently offline. Just that there's a lot of built in slack basically and we're eating up the slack right now. All that slack that was put in intentionally, we got to eat that up. And honestly that may be by design.
[00:43:35] Speaker A: Yeah. And I mean there's, it's interesting because there's already been a lot of capital destruction in the past year. Here we are in January of 2023. So if you look at, you know, just from let's say stock market metrics, The S&P5, the kind of broad measure of the US stock market hit its all time high on January 2nd of 2022 and then started falling from there. So we're a year out from kind of the start of the quote unquote bear market. And over that time it's very interesting because you have a lot of kind of the stay at home stocks from the pandemic, like the Pelotons and the Teladocs and the Docusigns and all those kind of companies and Gamestop and all that, they've gotten absolutely crushed over the past year. Some down between 70 and 90% in a year.
And what you see happen with that is a lot of again, wealth destruction. I mean, let's take some of the bigger names we know of. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg's net worth went down $100 billion in 2022. Elon Musk saw his net worth more than or Roughly cut in half from about 300 billion to down to about 120 billion now. And so certain things have worked to bring down the fast pace of growth that was happening. And inflationary pressures due to a lot of things. Some of the demand, sorry, supply chain issues caused by the pandemic created low supply, even though demand was the same or higher. So that goes your classic economic conundrum. When supply is low and demand is high, prices go up. Yeah, so we saw that with some consumer things like, you know, because of, because of the lack of access to raw materials when the world was shut down in 2020, then you have certain factors that are just out of everyone's control. I mean, I was in preparation for today. I saw how eggs have gone up 60% in the last year. And a lot of that was due to avian flu. You had tens of millions of hens that lay eggs die. And so again, you still had the same demand for eggs. Human beings want to eat them, you just had a lot less of them. So the price went up.
[00:45:53] Speaker B: Still got a lot of human beings.
[00:45:54] Speaker A: Yeah. And so if you take that and multiply it by thousands of different products, there's different reasons why we have different inflationary pressures. And just to finish up, and then I hand it back is, so when I talk about things like the capital destruction, let's say in the technology space, we've already seen in 2023, there were 210,000 layoffs within the tech sector. So that was, you know, Amazon, Facebook or Meta, Google, big, big firms like that.
[00:46:24] Speaker B: And that's happening in the context of a growing labor market.
[00:46:27] Speaker A: Correct. And that's what I was saying, like, but 210,000 is a drop in a bucket when you're talking, like I said earlier, you know, almost 300 million workers in the United States. So that's, you know, that's why it's just complex.
[00:46:38] Speaker B: Yeah, well, in it, but. And that's where you talk about, like, it's not all these metrics that we use give us a snapshot. But it's not granular. Like, because those tech jobs, for example, are considered to be better paying, so to speak, than some of the jobs. And like industries that are doing very well, like service industry hospitality, for example, is, you know, like those aren't jobs, that those aren't replacement jobs for some, you know, software engineer at Microsoft. You know, like, it's not a one to one thing in terms of what's happening there. You one of the thing about the cat, one interesting thing to me about the, what you call the capital destruction is. You've hammered this point repeatedly in the show. I can hear this in my sleep about how the stock market is a leading indicator. So when I look at like what's happening and we see the reports, you know, it's out there, you know, Elon Musk, you know, like you just gave the numbers as far as how much his net worth has dropped. But when so much of that is tied up in stock holdings, it really seems to me to be less of. Because the stock market is a leading indicator. Like that money wasn't real money, all of it anyway, at the time, because that was what that was based on what they thought the trajectory was of his holdings. Because it's a leading indicator. It's saying, hey, we're putting money here because where we think this is going. And so it seems to be more of a kind of rejiggering of the trajectory. Like the trajectory for a lot of these things has just been flattened a little bit. And not that it's going up, you know, at a 89 degree angle, you know, but it's like it's maybe just more flat or a little less so, a little going, going up a little less steep. And so to me, that's interesting, but nonetheless, it's luckily for us, or not luckily, but just fortunately in terms of how our economy plays out, everybody's not taking a 60% cut when their net worth. It's happening in areas where, but everybody didn't get the same growth over the previous five or 10 years that someone like a Musk or Zuckerberg did. In terms of, because of how people saw the trajectory of our economy and the winners and the tech and so forth, that trajectory had them growing up so high. So that's flattened out a little bit, but it hasn't been felt by everyone. Ultimately, though. Well, let me just say ultimately though, like, even with the inflation, what I think the Fed, and also, I mean, and this is where we're. The Fed is responsive. The Fed is paying attention, paying attention and doing stuff where we're hamstrung or where we have one hand tied behind our back is with Congress and Congress. It doesn't look like Congress is going to get anything done over the next two years either because it's a split Congress now. But we need to, what we're going to need is some, it can't just be the Fed. There's going to be some level of stewardship that we need to keep our economy, keep the system set up in a way where we're going to be able to still have people to have money to spend, ideally not just through stimulus, but through more systemic things that make sure we have workers have money, people work, people get paid. Sounds like the Square Deal, sounds like the New Deal, but that's needed. You need people to spend money on people, the masses to spend money to drive this economy. Economy. We have that right now, but it's not forever. Like I said, we eaten up that slack. I just hope that what we're going to have through Congress, Congressional action, because it can't just be the Fed, is thoughts that will allow us to continue demand, to continue to exist in the economy.
[00:50:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I think. Well, the beautiful thing, I think with the way our economy is, is demand. It's interesting, and that's what I'm learning as I'm getting older with all this, is a lot of these things, things happen organically that we can't predict. Remember, the great financial crisis was very scary. And we all thought that, you know, that this. I remember reading reports back in 2010 that the next 10 years of the stock market was going to be disaster. And the market might average 2% a year if we're lucky. Well, between 2010 and 2020, the market probably averaged around 17% return a year, one of the best periods of its history. So we can't predict where things will come from five, ten years from now. But the system itself, as long as it's healthy, I think will deliver those. And that's the beauty of human creativity and where, when capitalism works well, it's.
[00:51:01] Speaker B: Also the beauty of easy money and printing money by the choice.
[00:51:07] Speaker A: Well, I was going to get to that because that's what got us out of the hole of 08 through 2010. And that's what built the ability of people like Elon Musk and many others to have such outsized returns on their shares. Because when interest rates are low, you know, again, what the Fed did in a way worked, which is give people a reason to let loose these animal spirits of, of, of, of kind of the capital. And so when rates are low, money's flying around. And that's partly what happened after a decade of that, plus then the unexpected need to do the CARES act and all that. During the 2020 pandemic, you had so much money in the system at such low interest rates that what happened for about 18 months after that was really where it got crazy, where things like, you know, it was almost like the tulip mania stuff with crypto going nuts and all this. That's when it's becomes what they call frothy. Now what you have happening now, which we've discussed at other points during the show, is the federal meeting on our podcast, not today, but in recent months, is that the Federal Reserve has been raising interest rates in order to cool off a lot of that exuberance.
[00:52:25] Speaker B: In a sense, just real quick, I'll let you back in. But in a sense they're reloading the gun. Basically like they're reloading it so that if they need to do that again in the future, they can do it. And it won't just be, oh, we're just keeping things as it is. We can actually change the circumstances to make money easier.
[00:52:43] Speaker A: Yeah. And the point. So that's a great way to put it. So what they're doing now is they're slowing down the ease of which money can be borrowed and accessed and putting a higher price tag to borrowing money, which is raising interest rates. And so.
And that's one of their mandates. And so what they're hoping to do is slow down the economy at the same time that could increase unemployment. And so far the labor market has been very stubborn in not coming down. And it's a very difficult position the Fed is in. Because what is evident if you look at it as this lasts longer and longer is really what the Fed is trying to do is raise the unemployment rate in this country. So they're trying to get it to 5 to 7% from the roughly 3.6 or so it's at. And they can't really say that. Right. Like you can't be in a leader in this country as a central head of the central bank and say I'm just trying to hurt about 20 million Americans and then we'll be okay.
[00:53:43] Speaker B: Trying to put you out of work.
I'm trying to put you out of work for the great. For what I believe for the greater.
[00:53:49] Speaker A: Good of the economy so that we don't have other problems like Venezuelan style inflation where a loaf of bread costs $30 a year from now. And this goes back to a little bit of what we just discussed with the justice system in part one. This is why I'm glad that the Federal Reserve and the Federal Reserve chair are not subject to the whims of day to day politics and that they're not elected.
[00:54:09] Speaker B: Well, that's the design of it. That's why they're not.
[00:54:11] Speaker A: Because otherwise they would make decisions and not worry about being reelected or anything. And this might be the best thing for us.
[00:54:18] Speaker B: Then if you wanna look back to the previous section also. It's also nice to have a leader in place who doesn't take it personal what the Federal Reserve is trying to do, because that's the other thing. And I think you, and I mentioned that just offline was just like, well, if Powell was doing this while Trump was President, Trump would be railing against Powell like he would be.
He'd be trying to turn all his people against the Federal Reserve saying, oh, they're doing this to ruin me. It's all about me, and so forth.
[00:54:45] Speaker A: So the fact that, hold on, the Congress would be then investigating the Fed for trying to make the President look bad, that have been interesting.
[00:54:51] Speaker B: Yes, that's what I'm saying. It would all, it would all become economics. The media would be eaten. The media would love it, you know, because the media just wants eyeballs.
[00:54:59] Speaker A: You know what, real quick as you say that, then it's no wonder countries like Venezuela, Zimbabwe and these countries end up like that because they're led by.
[00:55:07] Speaker B: People making everything about it. Yeah.
[00:55:09] Speaker A: They're led by people who make everything's about the politics and about me.
[00:55:12] Speaker B: Yeah. And so, you know, like, you see that. But yeah, I mean I, I would piggyback on what you're saying in terms of like the, that's why I was saying we needed Congress. We, that's why we need a Congress, because the Fed piece is only a piece of it. The Fed, their tools are, you know, they don't have fine tuning tools, so to speak. You know, so we need, it's a, there's several actors that need to do things in order for this to happen. But ultimately I think the Fed has been vindicated. I'll say this before we get out of here in the sense that I did remember hearing about the rates being raised too fast and so forth, but the fact that the labor market that we're still eating into this slack that we have in terms of how much money is out there floating around and driving up the demand, which again, demand is good. But these things have to be in balance or else things spiral out of control.
That means that they could go up that high. And now they seem to be slowing down now, which, you know, again, at least the Fed, like there are parts of our government, particularly the Congress, that aren't working. The Fed is working, they're paying attention and they're doing things based on what they see. So that's helpful to us. We don't have. The Fed was a political body. Right now we might be in more trouble for not just the reasons you mentioned, but they've been vindicated in this sense. But it will be interesting to see what happens over the next year, because the Fed and I think Powell's complained about this, like, hey, it's not my job to make policies. You know, like, there are other people that are supposed to be making policy on this and they are, you know, asleep at the switch or they're too busy with political games to do anything constructive or do a lot of things constructive.
But ultimately, we'll see over the next year in terms of how the Fed tries to balance this in terms of with one hand tied behind their back and, you know, keep things moving in a trajectory that's not catastrophic, you know, while still trying to bring things in a way to get the inflation under control, which they think they need, like you said, to increase employ unemployment by a couple of percent or a percent and a half in order to do that, which is going to be painful, which it's a whole bunch of cascading effects. So we'll see. But right now, the Fed has been vindicated on how they were approaching, I believe you can say, but we're not out of the woods yet.
You get us halfway in, but can you get us home? It's kind of the question. And then you're getting us home without the help of the legislative body in the country.
[00:57:36] Speaker A: Well, one thing I just want to reach back. People forget Alan Greenspan was the first one to lower the rates in 2003 to this historic level. It's now 2023. Rates started going up at a faster pace in 2022. So we've had a generation of low rates. And what we're going back to are what were considered normal rates, let's say in the 90s, when a money market was paying you 5%, 6%.
[00:58:03] Speaker B: Well, but in the context there, those were considered good rates coming out.
[00:58:06] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:58:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:58:07] Speaker A: Because from the 80s, yeah, money markets were paying 20%, but then you also had a 20% mortgage in 1982. So what I'm saying is it all kind of evens out in a certain sense. It just sometimes, I've learned it just depends on where we are in our lifespan. Because I would say this, I bought my first property in 2001, so I benefited from the lowering of rates when I sold it in 04.
That doesn't mean I'm not smarter or dumber than somebody who bought a house 10 years for the first time, 10 years before, 10 years after me. We were just in two different economic environments, and I was I benefited from mine so.
[00:58:43] Speaker B: Well, yeah. And that's, that's the interestingness or interesting thing about, you know, like our lifespan, so to speak, is like there is some and people don't like to acknowledge that we talk about this all the time. Like people don't acknowledge the, the idea of timing and luck in their own success or not success. But that's how it plays out. Like where you come in into the system where systems in its, its cycle is something that, you know, it determines a lot in terms of what your strategies are going to be or what you can do and so forth. So. But I think we can wrap from there.
Yeah. We appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call. Like I see it. Subscribe to the podcast, Rate it. Review us. Tell us what you think. Share with a friend. Till next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:59:22] Speaker A: I'm Tunde.
[00:59:23] Speaker B: All right, we'll talk to you next time.
