Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Hello, welcome. Call It Like I See it presented by Disruption. Now, I'm James Keys, and in this episode of Call It Like I See it, we're going to look back at the 911 attack as Americans have commemorated the 20th anniversary of the attacks.
And we're going to discuss what we see as some of the effects from the trauma the nation experienced that morning, as well as take a look at how effective the nation's response was in responding to the attack.
And later on, we're going to chew on a recent feature from Scientific American magazine that that looked at why it seems modern people have so much difficulty with their teeth.
Joining me today is a man who like a sprained ankle is nothing to play with. Tunde. Ogonlana tunde. Now, I know we can't all be a part of with all everything you have going on, but are you going to still let us witness it, man?
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Yes, sir.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: All right.
Cool. Cool.
Now we're recording this on September 13, 2021.
And this past weekend marked the 20th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks that saw four airliners get hijacked with two of them crashed into the two towers of the two twin towers of the World Trade center in New York City.
One crashed into the Pentagon right outside of D.C. washington, D.C.
and after this, actually the fourth airliner, passengers on the fourth airliner actually took back control or fought for control of that plane, which resulted in the plane crashing in a field in Pennsylvania. It was believed to be heading back to some other site in a populated area, but it ended up going down in an unpopulated area in the field in Pennsylvania. Now, the towers that got hit ended up crashing down and coming all the way down. And the Pentagon also sustained significant damage. But even More tragically, around 3,000 people died in the immediate aftermath of these attacks.
Attacks. And so this event was something that was just so shocking and tragic that really anyone who saw it would just never forget, you know. And so along those lines, like, how do you think the trauma from this attack from seeing it, either people who witnessed it or people who were there or around there adjacent to it. But again, seeing it also was tried was something that was a trauma because, you know, you remember in the aftermath, you know, people in rural areas were worried about, you know, was there going to be some attack here and so forth. So it wasn't just a big city thing where people were like, hey, you know, we got all these, these areas of, of high import topics or, excuse me, targets or whatever. So seeing the attack, seeing the building Fall, the buildings fall, seeing the death or reading about the death. Like how do you think that trauma affected the nation?
[00:03:07] Speaker B: I think, you know, it's natural for any society to have, you know, a version of collective PTSD after an event like that. So I think that is just what happened. We were traumatized and we had post traumatic stress disorder as a nation.
So that's understandable.
I would say that.
I think what I saw, and this is what I think a lot.
I've seen a lot of discussion about this over this past weekend of the 20th anniversary is kind of, how has our country changed since 9 11? And I think that's what I can remember seeing the beginnings of, not directly after 9 11. I'm not talking the days or weeks or even months after, but I would say within the first couple years after 9 11.
And you alluded to this just now, which is a good segue, when you said it wasn't just a big city fear, that you had small towns of two or three thousand people that were focusing on things like Islamic Jihadist terrorism as their number one threat in these small towns. And I think that's where I remember one day looking out the window of my office and I faced a massive highway here in South Florida, one of the major arteries that probably has, you know, well in excess of 10,000 vehicles a day probably going through it. And I remember thinking to myself, remember what we were told about Al Qaeda, especially at the beginning. These guys were in caves, they were operating out of caves and all this stuff. And I just remember thinking to myself and looking at all this traffic and all this commerce with these Mack trucks going across the highway, like, these guys aren't even a nation state.
They can't bring our country down. And I remember thinking to myself, you know.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: Well, at least not directly.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: Yeah, like the only people that could bring us down is us.
Or if, you know, three or four countries invaded us at once. I mean, obviously at some point we could be overwhelmed, but under a normal circumstance, I was like, okay, if these guys really are in caves and they're terrorists in that way, like they gotta hide out and do all this. Well, now that we know who they are and we got everybody on notice, you know, their financial tractions, transactions are getting hammered by the NSA and the Treasury Department. You got the CIA and the Special Forces in the mountains looking for them. They're disrupted.
I just what saddened me after that was watching the politics of fear really be used not only by politicians, but also by cable news and kind of this.
It was really the start of, I think the line you could draw now, 20 years later, to what was, we can all see now is a revived nativism in the United States. And it became this time, you know, it was the first time, I think I joke with you privately, that I heard about the war on Christmas. So what happened was, I think, the honest fear, and I say that very sincerely, the honest fear that many Americans had, like I said, that was a traumatic event. We got attacked for the first time in that way in our country.
And it is humiliating to have your towers fall like that. And it's scary. And of course, these people are from another part of the world that is somewhat foreign to us. You know, not many Americans are familiar with Muslims and with Arabs and all that.
And, you know, so in one sense, that's an honest thing. It's okay to be scared of something that's different.
But then what happened, what I saw in the ensuing years was that fear was weaponized by people in politics and in the media space in order for profit. And then I'll finish on this, which is. And then within those ensuing years, we had this acceleration of technology where by 06, you have Facebook, by 2008, you have the first iPhone, where now people have video and their phone directly. So you had this, now this ecosystem where that fear and that paranoia could continually just be pumped, pumped, pumped into the people. And.
Yeah, I mean, 20 years later, we're different as a country.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think that that's an interesting way to look at that trauma in terms of how, like you said, not immediately, like. Cause there was a coming together initially.
[00:07:09] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Bush had a 90% approval rating. You're right.
[00:07:12] Speaker A: Yeah. And then after, like. But it's almost like there was an opportunity that was sensed to exploit that level of fear in different directions. You know, in terms of you can exploit it for money, you can exploit it for political power. And when you say political power, the real way you exploit the fear is you make it so that the other. Whoever you're against, whoever your political opponent is, is. So you demonize them or you make them an object of the fear to the extent that no matter what you do, the other side, the other person isn't an alternative. Because it's like, hey, I can lie, cheat, and steal, but I'm not them. And lying, cheating, and stealing is better than whatever you've cast those other people. So, you know, yeah, it definitely. And that leads to a lack of accountability, you know, like. So there's something there. I think one of the things I think with the trauma, like we tend, we, we seem to relive it for a while. And what, the way I, what I mean by that is that like this wasn't a. Actually a sustained thing which may actually steal a society differently. Like I always, when I think of traumatic moments, one of the things I think about is World War II in London and how like you read about how they were getting bombed by the Germans like every night for super long period of time and. But it ended up happening. The Germans thought that would break the people and like the people just wouldn't be able to operate anymore. But because it was sustained, actually they like continually. If they would have done it once, it would, or done it once a month, it would have affected people differently than doing it every night. Doing it every night. Kind of everybody got steeled to it and was just like, you know, they were able to live their lives even with the threat. With this one, it was once. But then we kept like, we kept flinching every time anything came up because of it was that one time thing. And ultimately, you know, one of the things I think it was overlooked about this is that the nature, the fourth plane illustrated the nature of how important surprise was in this calculation here for something like this. Because once people on the fourth plane, the one that crashed in Pennsylvania, understood what the stakes were, there was no more. I guess, let me back up. But to finish the thought, there was no more just sitting there while your plane gets hijacked. Previously, if you go back before 9, 11 planes had gotten hijacked before, but it was hijacked for ransom and things like that. You go, you fly the plane somewhere and then you get paid off and then that's it. So the people in the plane were conditioned to understand that if they just chilled out, somebody was gonna pay some money and they would go free.
More than likely, that was the kind of scenario it was like this changed that calculation. So the surprise here was very important for this to be successful. Because as I said with the fourth plane, once they were on the phone with people like, oh, there's been planes getting crashed into stuff, they were like, no way. Like, we're gonna take this plane back. We're not gonna just sit here and get blown up. And so I'm not saying it wasn't warranted that we were as afraid and basically lived in this, relived it in terms of everything we did. We were so afraid as a nation, you know, like that, that trauma, because that's natural, but just the nature of the way we relived it and that probably feeds into what you're saying as far as like how it was then weaponized because every little thing that could happen we go right back on a super high end alert and. And so we're constantly in fight or flight for a few years after that.
[00:10:38] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that's what I'm saying is that that permeates then the society and it's interesting because I wanted to say this too. Number one, clearly it was a serious attack.
And I do believe that the way that our country from I'm talking the leaders, let's say especially give credit to George Bush and Dick Cheney and these guys at the beginning, the way that they went about things behind the scenes early on probably ensured we didn't get hit again because it was a fact that there were other plots to do other things in the United States by Al Qaeda specifically. So I want to say that I'm more making a comment about the domestic political discourse as well as the media discourse that those. There's a lot of people that saw the weaponization of fear on Americans as a way of short term gain for themselves.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: Well, but I don't think you can exempt Bush and Cheney from that either. But and I'll say this though.
[00:11:38] Speaker B: No, no, let me push back.
I just want to make sure I'm separating, I'm separating out the execution of kind of the military and clandestine reaction to the attack by Al Qaeda versus the political discourse in this country. I'm just saying that I'm going to recognize that we effectively, you know, our leaders at the time effectively thwarted follow up attacks.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: Well, the leaders themselves probably didn't do it. It was the people who were.
[00:12:08] Speaker B: That's kind of Terry and all that.
[00:12:09] Speaker A: That's where I was going though with the. How important, I think we underestimate how important surprise was with these attacks.
You know, like because we then there were changes that were made politically and administratively in terms of people sharing information that were clearly going to be something that would make a difference. When you do the post mortem of how it happened, part of it was that all these different pieces of the puzzle were on these different places and nobody was able to put them together. But you know, I think, I mean we end up in Iraq in large part because of people taking advantage of and that's a political decision, people taking advantage of the level of fear.
And some of that is the fear that you can drum up about the unknown, so to speak about these others. And then some of it is to your Point before the fear of being called un American or being the one who's not on board with what everybody's saying is what we have to do for the war on terror. And so essentially, the fear. Well, let me say this thought. The fear, basically, it kind of paralyzed our ability to analyze things as a population. This is the democracy, you know, relies on people and informed populace. And that's not. Everybody's not going to be informed, but a critical mass. And then you have a media that has to play a role in actually informing people and not just trying to profit off of. Off of them, but that the fear kind of paralyzed that. It kind of left us in like an arrested development where it all became about either feeding the fear or doing something or saying something to avoid the fear. And we kind of got stuck. And. And then that opens the door for a lot of the things I think that you're talking about.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's what I was gonna say. I mean, I think that a better way for maybe me to put this from the political side is I guess Those years after 911 was the first time in my life as an American I saw our political leaders bend towards an authoritarian streak.
Because I remember specifically the kind of language that was being used. Remember, even George Bush said it, you're either with us or you're against us. And remember all that thing, like, if anyone wanted to criticize just going into Iraq, people that questioned the WMD narrative and all that stuff, it was just, you know, you were just un American. It just, you know, and it's just you are. You are forced to make this choice. And it's interesting because we know now that there was no WMD and that we were lied into that war.
[00:14:33] Speaker A: And so in the. It was actually, it was used. It was the concept of this fear of being cast as weak on terrorism was used on people to say, don't ask any questions, don't. That's how you get away with lying us into a war is because you prevent people from feeling comfortable to ask questions when you say, yeah, this is here, this is there, this is there. So I mean, okay, so we did declare war on terrorism, war on terror, shortly thereafter, which is not necessarily a new concept to kind of declare war on a thing, you know, as opposed to. As opposed to a country or, you know, something like that, but we're just declaring war on a behavior, so to speak. Do you think over the last 20 years that the war on terror has been effective in addressing, you know, the. The what brought 911 to us well.
[00:15:24] Speaker B: I just want to first say that when my older son was in elementary school, he was a terror. And I never thought to go to war on him. Maybe I should have. So this is a whole enlightening moment for me, James.
[00:15:35] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. No, I think war on terror, man.
So here's, here's, here's where I get on that. I think that unfortunately, again, I think these were short term decisions for the moment. And I'm not a big conspiracy guy with the military industrial complex and all that, but I do understand business, and businesses that have good cash flow and want to make money tend to want to find ways to increase that and leverage it. So I could definitely see that.
[00:16:05] Speaker A: A.
[00:16:05] Speaker B: Vague description of what we're doing does definitely benefit a long term sustained spending on military activity. So there's no.
[00:16:14] Speaker A: What you're saying there is that because the war on terror was so vaguely defined that it justifies. It's a blank check. It justifies. So people who are in the business of getting paid for products or services by the military would be in favor of that.
[00:16:31] Speaker B: Correct. So I'll give you an example. I remember Phil Donahue used to have a show on msnbc, a regular daytime show, and I watched it every so often. And I just remember it because I remember he was really railing against going into Iraq. He was one of these people that was very like, you know, I don't see. No one's been able to prove anything. You know, Colin Powell's up there showing pictures and drawings. There's no, sorry, only drawings. We don't even see photographs of these so called, you know, biological weapons labs and all that.
And he basically got canned. He got taken right off the air.
[00:17:00] Speaker A: And well, you know, that was, that was one of the things people said back then was they were like, oh, you know, NBC is all liberal. And they're like, NBC is owned by a military.
[00:17:09] Speaker B: Well, that's what I was going to say that at the time, because at the time they divested, I think in 2014 or 2013, this holding. But at the time, in 2003, 2002, all that, NBC was a subsidiary of General Electric. Yeah, people don't realize General Electric makes the engine for the F16 Fighting Falcon, the Blackhawk helicopter, the Apache, I think they make it also for the Cobra attack helicopter.
They got the F15.
So they, at the time, GE was the 10th largest defense contractor in the world. And that's what I'm saying. It's not about a conspiracy. But if I'm a shareholder of ge, And I'm worrying about putting more, you know, cash flow on the books and getting my dividend. Then I'm gonna want Donahue to shut up, too.
So the point I'm just making is that. Is that this vagueness on the war of terror allowed a lot of other opportunists to creep in. So not just the military industrial complex, but then you had people that might have had more of, let's say, a nativist street in this country or were xenophobic. And so what you had is you began to have this rhetoric of the other.
And you and I are used to seeing that as black Americans, because that used to just be kind of internal in America with whites and blacks. I was going to say this isn't the first time we've seen accusations and hysteria about a group of people in this country, because we remember.
We're young guys, but we're old enough to remember. Remember that case in South Carolina where the lady blamed a black man for kidnapping her kids and turns out she drowned the kids in a car in South Carolina? Or I remember when I was a kid up north in Boston, a dude said a black guy killed his wife, and they. They went and rounded up like, three or 400 black men between, like, 20 and 25, only to found out that the guy actually killed his wife. So you and I are old enough to have seen when this country did this to blacks, this. This. This massive stereotyping and then literally rounding people up.
But what happened is in the last 20 years, the Arabs and the Muslims became the more scary Other for the majority of this country. And so.
[00:19:20] Speaker A: Or at minimum, they just. They became another one of the greatest hits, so to speak, of ways you could rile up people.
[00:19:26] Speaker B: I like that, actually. The greatest hits that start. I'm gonna start using it.
[00:19:28] Speaker A: Well, yeah, no, that's what it is.
Riling up people about black people has always been on.
[00:19:33] Speaker B: Yeah. One of the greatest hits in America now it's Muslims and immigrants. And that's what I was gonna say. Cause you remember then it became the people who had issues with immigration on the border. I remember hearing this. Oh, well, we found a prayer rug in Arizona near the border. You know, starting this fear that somehow these Muslim terrorists are coming up through the border, Southern border, you know, and it's just all that stuff I remember in those early years, after 9, 11, I think.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Let me say this, though, because I think that to your point, vague, defining something vaguely not only allows opportunists. Opportunists to come in and to take advantage of the situation. But. But it also makes it impossible to judge really your results, or at minimum, if you judge the results based on the vague aim, the vague goal, you always lose. Like the war on terror. We talked about this a bit offline. The war on terror sounds a lot like the war on drugs. And if you want to define those things vaguely, then we're losing all those wars. It's not like terrorism is gone. It's not like drugs are gone, know, and so the war on terror, if it was rationally defined as we're going to take apart Al Qaeda, you know, and anybody who rocks with Al Qaeda, we're going to take you out until you take meaning, take you out of power, take you out of influence, until you don't rock with them anymore, then that would be a success. You know, like, we're not hearing about Al Qaeda running operations right now, you know, so that seems like we were able to do that. But defined broadly, war on terror, you know, we got, you know, detours into Iraq and all these other places where, you know, like, we had other agendas going on there. It wasn't about going after Al Qaeda. So that's, I think. And then with the war on drugs, like I said, with the analogy of that, is that, you know, and I think you made this point like, well, if we declare war on drugs in the 80s or 70s, drugs are much more accepted now in the country than they were then. So drugs are beating, kicking our ass in that case, you know, so.
And I don't say that as a joke really, just, you know, because drugs are causing problems. But our decision to deal with that and say we're going to quote, unquote, declare war on it instead of trying to look more surgically as far as, well, what is causing this, let's address the things that are causing this for, like, in same thing with terror, terrorism, we saw terrorism done by Al Qaeda. Let's go after the people that caused that. Let's try to create conditions where they have less influence and so forth. War on terror would be like saying we're going to do a war on mortgage default and, and just go after people who default on mortgages. And it's like, well, that's not gonna help us. Like, why don't we go after the conditions that's creating the defaults, you know, as opposed to just going after the default. So that, to me, you know, like, the vagueness, adding onto your point made it so that, you know, like, we're our scorecard, so to speak, is illegible as far as what we were really what we think we were trying to do versus what we say we're trying to do, and then what we're really doing.
[00:22:24] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think, I mean, there's a lot that goes into. I think part of it is a misunderstanding of cultures. Right? I mean, we as Americans don't really understand the Middle east and kind of Arab culture. And then you add on the Muslim religion and the culture there on top of it, and just like, they don't understand us. It's not a knock on both cultures. It's just the cultures are different and, you know, they haven't spent much time interacting and we're not next to each other in the world.
[00:22:48] Speaker A: But that's true. But see, the terrorism. Terrorism is a political tool.
[00:22:52] Speaker B: No, I get it.
[00:22:53] Speaker A: When, when the Ku Klux Klan is doing crazy stuff, we don't declare war on terror.
[00:22:57] Speaker B: Well, that's what I was going to say is, is. That's what I'm getting at is, you know, so. Because also of, of, you know, I would say supremacy and some people feeling like, you know, their culture is civilized, while others are more kind of savage. Right. Quote, unquote. That means a.
They may not look at dealing with them the same way that they would deal with the Ku Klux Klan. Right. Because a war on terror in the United States just meant like, we got to stop, you know, in the 60s, going into the 70s, let's say we got to stop specific groups like the Ku Klux Klan terrorizing specific victims like black Americans and lynching them. And it's interesting, you went from three lynchings a week on average in the 60s to zero in the 70s.
And why? Because at some point the United States just said, oh, we gotta hold these people accountable.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: But that didn't require a war on terror. I get it.
[00:23:54] Speaker B: But that's what I'm saying is because people look at people who are part of their own group that might be acting rogue like the Ku Klux Klan, and say, okay, I don't need to cast this whole group this way. Right. Because I understand it.
I just need to go after these. Yeah, I just need to go after these people. And so I think that's what the vagueness allowed for. For, or I'd say didn't allow for, in the sense of the war on terror. Like you're saying, instead of an 01 bush, just saying we're going after Al Qaeda, we're going to. Cause. Think about this exit of Afghanistan and everyone complaining. It's also a Result of that vagueness for 20 years. Because the time to go wheels up from Afghanistan was actually May 2, 2011, because we had killed Osama bin Laden on May 1, 2011. So really had we had some clarity in the mission and in 01, it was, we're gonna root out Al Qaeda, we're gonna kill their leadership, and we're gonna make sure that Afghanistan doesn't become a safe haven for terrorists. We would have been out handed place back to the Afghanistan, I mean, sorry, the Taliban 10 years ago with the same conditions. We're talking to them now. Tell them, yeah, if they come back, we'll be back. Exactly. So that's what I think allowed for the additional 10 years and the additional unfortunate deaths both on our side of military and civilians.
[00:25:13] Speaker A: Well, let me tell you something. See, this is what I mean about the trauma and how it changed us as a populace because you're not the only person who recognized that there were other people who knew that that was the time to go or thereabouts was the time to go, but they feared that what would happen to them. Obama kicked this can down the road because he did not want what's happening to Joe Biden right now to happen to him. Because they knew that if we, when we go wheels up, it's going to look messy because anytime you go wheels up somewhere, it looks messy and they're going to get blamed for this. Trump knew this. Trump campaigned on getting out of Afghanistan. He didn't do it because he got in and they were like, hey, if you do this, it's going to look really bad and people are going to blame you for it. Biden, to his credit, was told that and he was like, yo, but we got to go. It's been, it's been too long. We're just there now, you know, like, it's not like anything we're doing is changing the course of anything. And so to his credit, you know, he stuck to his gun, so to speak, and said, I said we got to go, we're going to go now to his benefit. He knew they were going to warn him. He was, he was in the Obama White House. So he knew they were going like, oh, everybody's going to blame you, yada, yada, yada. So he had already kind of in his mind he wasn't scared off by those warnings. So but nonetheless, you know, he, he put it on the table and made the move, you know, so. But go ahead.
[00:26:35] Speaker B: Yeah, no, so the, so but going back to just kind of the war on terror, the Vagueness, I think, allowed for a lot of it and it allowed this. And that's why it's a combination of many things. It allowed for.
Because remember, like I said, the nativism stuff, that's that, that create that, that allowed then things like the border to become a bigger deal. I mean, you know, because remember, facts don't matter, so no one cares that statistically we had the lowest immigration across the border, let's say, five or six years ago.
But when you're being told that the other is coming in, you know, the facts don't matter. Your emotional state takes over and you've been scared now for 10, 15 years and you keep getting told that these others, these barbarians are coming to get you. And then the other thing, I would say, because I made that analogy or that case about the technology.
So let's say we got the first iPhone in 08.
So then people now have the ability to have videos and everything else pumped straight into their brain. And then we've all learned about the manipulation of social media and all that and the way the algorithms get you and YouTube and all these other things. That's why it's not just one platform, it's all of them.
And then we had our media meaning the CNNs, the foxes, the MSNBC's news media news now having to keep up with shows on Netflix and, you know, get our attention. So everything got more sensationalized over the last decade. And so that's just the, the vagueness of it. And then just let me add one.
[00:28:00] Speaker A: Thing to the vagueness piece. You know what, we did a show maybe last year talking about how we were in this period where. And this, you know, is probably, I'm surely not something that's new, but it's emphasized right now where people openly and overtly judge actors and not their actions. And so when somebody does something, it's not what did they do, it is who it, who are they? Tell me about the person and then I'll judge whatever happened based on who the person who did it is, as opposed to what it is that they did. And the vagueness basically sets the stage for that because that's one of those things that, where your, your human nature, your, your, the way your brain works can be turned against you, you know, in terms of all the biases and so forth.
We do our brains, our natural reaction, particularly our emotional reactions, a lot of time don't are not rule of law or not investigate the facts, find out what's going on, weigh all the different sources of information and Then make a decision. That's not how human beings operate, by and large. We can train ourselves to do that, we can make an attempt to do that, but that's difficult. And so the vagueness of it allowed everyone to kind of fill in the blank on who is the terror, the terror that we're going after. And a lot of times that became we're just going after Islam, we're just going after Muslims, you know, or whatever. And so the 9, 9, 11 led to a culture of fear, basically, where everybody got to, you know, everybody got to define who they were afraid of. And that opens the door, basically. And what we've seen, I think now this is actually, in fact what we've seen is a deterioration of us as a nation, even trying to make an effort to be about rule of law and to be about what the law says and what actually happened and more openly now. It's just people are fanboys. They just root for somebody and want them to come out on top no matter what. And if they don't come out on top, make up some reason why they should have come out on top or maybe they actually did and so forth. And so we used to. America has not always lived up to it, but. Or has not really lived up to it, but that we did aspire to be a nation of rule, law, and to set a standard, set to be a beacon of light. You know, we did aspire to that. We talked about it. We tried to be that even if we weren't, we were still human, we're still flawed, you know, and we made progress throughout our history. Now it's not always linear, but we've made progress. And so right now we're in a. An ebb where it doesn't seem like we're even trying in a lot of those cases. Now, if the law is not doing what it wants, what I want it to do, then people are saying, hey, we'll get rid of the law.
And that's concerning.
[00:30:43] Speaker B: Well, cause part of what I mean, there's a lot just going on at once, right? And I think in this moment, culturally, emotionally, in this country, I mean, one of the things you alluded to makes me think of the last decade, let's say, right? Dylann Roof in 2015, was shot, killed 15 people in a church. And the cops took him to Burger King after, you know, before they took him to jail.
The guy just. Less than a year ago, remember Christmas morning, and I think it was Nashville, one of the city, bigger cities in Tennessee. The gentleman had a truck bomb it just blew up and ruined the whole street.
Then we have the insurrection.
[00:31:16] Speaker A: 5G tower.
[00:31:18] Speaker B: Yeah, and then we have the insurrection. Right.
And clearly that was a terrorist attack on our capital by people. Right. And so my point, that's what I'm getting at is, you know, we have a majority group in this country that, I mean, imagine if the guy who set that truck bomb off, his last name was Mohammed and he was Arab. What a different reaction so many people in this country would have. And so that's something that we've seen.
And I think it's a good thing we see it because there's a lot of us watching that can spot the hypocrisy in that. And that's why it's just an interesting time how this is all playing out. And so one of the things, though, before we move on, I wanted to just make the kind of analogy and what I really thought when I was thinking about all this with the war on drugs, because you alluded to it earlier, and you're right. You know, when you and I were kids in the 80s, we had to go through the DARE programs. Remember D A R E? I don't remember what it stood for, but it was Nancy Reagan's big push as first lady. And, you know, it was about all about not doing drugs. And here we are 35 years later, and marijuana is pretty much legal in the United States. I mean, I think there's 48, 49 states that have it legal. You've got now things like psychedelics that are accepted by the medical community as things that actually can help people.
It's just like drugs don't seem to be as big of an issue. And I think that's also because of the vagueness of the war on drugs.
And I think it goes back to, like you said, about just you can't control people's behavior. It's accountability. So if you want to have a war on drugs, just prosecute drugs. You don't have to have an extra war on it. If we want to have a war on terror, we can't stop every terrorist. We're just going to make sure we hold people that do things accountable.
[00:33:01] Speaker A: But you also create an environment where these things don't proliferate. If you created drugs or terrorists, all of these things, like a lot of these things, they're behaviors. Somebody's not born into them. They're behaviors that are a result of conditions.
Terrorism is a political tool.
It's done to create political change. And so understanding that and not just saying that, everybody whose skin is a certain complexion is a terrorist or that. And we understand that when it happens in our country, for whatever reason, we understand the nuance of terrorism and so forth. And that it's not just a skin thing or a religion thing, but it's actually, it's a condition thing. It's a conditioning. It's a condition and a conditioning thing. You can be indoctrinated, things like that. And if you go after those things, then you can have more of an effect as far as causing these things or creating these things, making it, making environments where they don't flourish, where it becomes not something that's not the thing to do. And so, I mean, I think you, I want to finish just. You made a point earlier that, you know, prior to 911 and even now, you know, like the. Our nation is so big and prominent that the only thing that can really take it down is coming from the inside.
And we've seen that, you know, with, with nations who are adversaries are actively working to, to, to make Americans hate each other and so forth. And I think 911 basically is something we have to be very careful with because the level of trauma that we all experienced as Americans from that day we may have become come easier marks for the people that want to pull, make us go at each other's throats. And the results would suggest, along with the things that you've talked about as far as the media, the social media and everything, but those changes in technology that this stuff is, it does have us at our throats, at each other's throats more. And that's the formula that would actually end up taking us down. So I mean, I think we have to be aware of this and actively work against it because this is the threat that we face. It's what we see in the mirror, basically, or across the street or however you want to say it now. I wanted to also. We saw this other article and there's no easy transition away from the 911 discussion. But you had sent this to me earlier in the week and I wanted to discuss it on the show because it raised a lot of interesting points.
And what it discussed basically is it asked the question, like, why do modern humans, you know, in most societies, most modern societies in particular have so much trouble with their teeth? Like, you know, we're animals and you know, we have a, the teeth, teeth are a part of our body and part of, you know, what we, what we have going on, how we eat and all that stuff.
But teeth, we have teeth decay, we have teeth Misalignment, all these things are rampant, you know, in society. And what's that from like that it's like it's not like we have our skin falling off or something like that or like other parts of our body still function, you know, like even if it's suboptimal, it's not like just falling apart all the time like our teeth do.
What stood out to you in this article about the teeth? And you know, we'll have this in the show notes as well, but it's from Scientific American. And what stood out to you in this piece about what's wrong with our teeth?
[00:36:07] Speaker B: It was actually fascinating because it's just another example about how our modern living and there are examples that our teeth through the fossil record have started to decay as early as 10,000 years ago in different ways than kind of pure nature. So I think just the fact that.
[00:36:26] Speaker A: It'S pointed to agriculture.
[00:36:28] Speaker B: Yeah, that's what I was going to say the minute we had an advanced society or beginning to have a gunning out of hunter gatherer stages as a humanity, that our teeth started showing different kind of wear and tear. And it was interesting because that's what this anthropologist said is that she's over the last few decades looked at the fossil records of hundreds of thousands of animals and also ancient humans and she realized that animals don't have teeth issues in the wild. They don't have crooked teeth, they don't have cavities and all that. And so it's just interesting.
And I learned that too because when I was a kid my, I grew up in the D.C. area so you've got a lot of immigrants and we had people in our area that were from Ethiopia, other areas in Africa.
And I never forget that when you would, when they would have someone visiting or something, someone new, they would be dark skinned, jet black person with the whitest teeth you ever seen. And I'm just talking like pearly white teeth and I remember one time asking someone like how the hell the teeth are so white, you know, and, and they told me that there was this root that they just chew on and that apparently, I'm sure through the eons of ages they discovered that root might have some positive thing on the teeth. But I think it's also because people traditionally in those parts of the world also didn't have the exposure to things as often as we do, like sugar and coffee and things that just stain your teeth and create bacteria. So it's fascinating.
Even things like, things like wisdom teeth because I've had three wisdom teeth removed.
[00:38:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:02] Speaker B: And the article talking about that.
[00:38:04] Speaker A: Enough snakes in your jaw.
[00:38:06] Speaker B: Yeah. And the fossil record of ancient humans, you know, prior to agriculture, none of them had issues with wisdom teeth. There was enough space for all the teeth to come in. And that's what they were talking about, is because we eat processed food and a lot softer food, our teeth actually, like, our teeth evolved to. To be ground down a bit, so the body's expecting a certain amount of space in our mouth. But because we eat such soft food, especially early on when we're infants, our teeth actually don't grind down the same way that evolution had them do.
[00:38:42] Speaker A: Well, there's one other piece with that, though, which to me was what stood out. There were two things that stood out to me, but I'll start with that one.
They said that texture of food, particularly when you're young, makes a difference on how big your jaw, how much your jaw grows. And so your jaw. When you're younger, your jaw. If you eat a lot of hard food, nuts and different things. They didn't say nuts, but that's what I'm imagining. But just other things that are hard, a harder texture. Not smooth mashed peas and banana, but things with texture that stimulates your jaw to grow more. And we know that our heads and stuff are growing when we're young like that. So, I mean, that's not crazy to think about. But that was fascinating to me, like, oh, yeah. So I need. I need to give kids, or we need to give our kids, you know, harder food so that their jaw will properly develop, which makes sense, you know, like, in terms of, like, that that's a signal that your body's looking for. Okay, well, how much. How much do I need to grow this jaw based on what I'm eating and what I'm not eating? The other piece that stood out to me. And actually, before I go there, what you said was also true, though. Like, as far as how it's. Our mouth is expecting for the teeth to be worn down some. I got that as being later on, though, like, as we continue to, you know, teens and beyond, that they would expect our teeth would not remain.
[00:40:00] Speaker B: Yeah. That by the time you're an adult, your teeth are a certain width. That's what evolution has. Has our jaws designed for. But because in the modern world, and because especially they said with the Industrial revolution and processed food. Yeah, it's gotten even, like, worse.
[00:40:13] Speaker A: Like, it's gotten even worse. Yeah, yeah. So now was the microbiome, and we've.
[00:40:18] Speaker B: Had a lot of 700 different individual bacteria are in our mouth.
[00:40:24] Speaker A: Yeah, that's pretty cool. So we've learned a lot, though, over the last 20 years about our intestines and our gut, so to speak, and how that microbiome has a lot to do with our health and everything like that. But now they're saying, oh, in your mouth, too, there's another microbiome there, an environment that. I know.
[00:40:41] Speaker B: It's amazing.
[00:40:41] Speaker A: Yeah. And so you need to, depending on what you eat, what you drink, you promote certain things, and other things get put to the side and don't grow. And the things that cause problems with your teeth, maybe from eating a lot of sugar or different foods, we may be promoting more of that growth as opposed to the things that protect our mouth. So I imagine we're going to have probiotic toothpaste pretty soon, if we don't already.
[00:41:06] Speaker B: No, but the interesting thing, and we've talked about this in different ways, a lot of it with our mental states and how a lot of things in terms of our psychological hardwiring occurs at a time when we're pretty much a blank slate. So we can't stop the influences that hardwire psychologically and emotionally. Because most of us are. Yeah, because it's. Most of us are hardwired by our eighth birthday. You know, so this is the first time I was thinking, you know, that I learned about this thing with the jaw and about how we, you know, nature, through the eons of humanity, we evolved a certain way. And then this last especially few hundred years, because, remember, I mean, because of colonization, let's say with Britain, you know, with sugar and tea. I mean, people didn't just eat sugar all the time 500, 1,000, 2,000 years ago. Right.
[00:41:55] Speaker A: It was hard to get.
[00:41:56] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And so but with.
[00:41:58] Speaker A: You eat fruit, you eat whole fruit, but not just, like, sugar.
[00:42:01] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's what I mean. Just with technology, the advancement of globalization through trade with the big cities, sail ships, then steam ships, then, you know, now we have container ships and airplanes and cargo planes and all that. Now everyone around the world can enjoy the same stuff. And so that was one interesting thing, that cavities are the most common chronic disease in the world.
Like, you know that nine out of ten Americans have cavities. So it's just another thing like caffeine. Right. Like learning that these little things you don't even think about, like, wow, we all share this stuff in common. But then that's what I thought of, too, is the reason I bring up about the Hardwiring of psychology is because it made me realize from a physical standpoint, because that was from a mental and psychological standpoint, it's also out of our control. Even things like our dental hygiene, because.
[00:42:48] Speaker A: To some degree.
[00:42:48] Speaker B: But I'm just saying that because of how I was fed as a child, when I was 25, I was having three wisdom teeth cracked out of my mouth.
[00:42:55] Speaker A: Yeah. That part seems to me.
[00:42:57] Speaker B: That's my point. You don't realize, like, wow, that was just out of my control. No matter what I did with my. Myself to try and fix my mouth, at some point it's too late because.
[00:43:05] Speaker A: Too late.
[00:43:05] Speaker B: Yeah, because I got Gerber baby food shoved in my mouth. And like you're saying, not nuts and, you know, berries with seeds in them that are hard. And my teeth just didn't develop the way nature.
[00:43:13] Speaker A: Your jaw, you know, your jaw did.
[00:43:15] Speaker B: Yeah, your jaw. Yeah, exactly.
[00:43:16] Speaker A: So there. That's. The microbiome piece, though. Seems to be ongoing, though. So, like, the. The piece as far as your, like, obviously, what you're happening. What's happening with you when you're an infant or a child you have very little control over. But if you can make it that far, then we do seem to have some control. Just like with our. With our intestines, we do seem to have control over our microbiome.
But that's one of those. That. It's like the hardest thing to do because everything you do, you can't cheat it, you know, so it's really about what you do on a regular basis. And it's like, if you do things on a regular basis that are diminishing to you, then you will diminish. And if you do things on a regular basis that are uplifting to you or that they rebuild you, then you'll be good. But usually the things that are diminishing are the ones that are fun.
[00:44:04] Speaker B: No, but I think this is one of those examples where I think just a person in our society like you and I, I mean, that doesn't want to literally live off the grid and all that. And in any random big city in the world today, you can't escape this because, number one, like they said with the 700 bacteria, every time we brush our teeth, every day, we're killing some of the good bacteria.
Number two, so you're already throwing it out of whack. And then, number two, it's just. I just think it'd be so difficult to try and not have any sugar or salts or processed food just in today's society.
[00:44:35] Speaker A: Because you have to make all your own food. I mean you can't do without salt, like, but like the processed salt I.
[00:44:41] Speaker B: Think would be the more I'm just making a point that unless you're willing to live off the grid like that, like literally be out in nature and just then like a guy like you as an attorney or me with my business as a wealth manager, I mean, it'd be almost impossible. So.
[00:44:53] Speaker A: Because think about it, we have to work like, like people when they live like that. Their work was preparing food.
[00:44:59] Speaker B: No, that's what I'm saying.
That's why I say probiotic or whatever. I just don't think this mouth thinking gets solved in the way our modern society is because we're naturally throwing off that mouth biome. But one of the things that I want to, of course I am. One of the things I wanted to get to before we jump though is I was laughing to see. I told my wife this, that I'll read here. Dietrich and carbohydrate.
Carbohydrates feed acid producing bacteria, lowering oral ph. So I was joking. I was like, God, carbs again. They're just bad. There's another reason why carbs are bad now. It's on your teeth. And that was the interesting thing. That's what I was telling her that was fascinating, this article that they started finding that in the fossil record. That's what from 10,000 years ago. Because as we developed as an agricultural society, humanity started developing agriculture. They specifically pointed to corn and wheat.
[00:45:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:45:47] Speaker B: Just because they are higher carbohydrates. So it wasn't about sugar. It's just any carb is going to start affecting your teeth.
[00:45:53] Speaker A: But the fruits and the like, the tubers, like the roots and stuff that people that hunter gatherers would eat don't have the same level of effect. But also those are harder to eat a lot of though, like you can't with, with the thing about farming and with grains is that you can make a lot of it, you know, like it's so that you can eat a lot of it.
[00:46:11] Speaker B: Also the, the, the seeds and certain things within fruits and the skins on the vegetables are also designed with a lot of fiber. You know, that takes a lot of stuff out of our mouth that we digest. And then the last part, I'll say it says sucrose. Common sugar is especially problematic. So here's what was interesting about the microbiome. Harmful bacteria use it to form a thick sticky plaque that binds them to the teeth to store energy that feeds them between Meals, meaning the teeth suffer longer exposure to acid attacks. So that's what I thought. Hold on. So the plaque that we brush off bacteria is really made by that bacteria? No, it's their.
[00:46:47] Speaker A: Well, no, it's their make it. They make it.
[00:46:49] Speaker B: Yeah. So they can eat that.
So they eat that in between.
[00:46:54] Speaker A: Well, it protects them too. It protects them from like bag. Like it's a biofilm, basically.
[00:46:59] Speaker B: That's what I mean. It's hilarious.
So they're freaking sitting and they're hanging out producing plaque, which I'll call because they gotta excrete it. And it's on my teeth so that they can feed on it when I'm in between meals because I'm not having sugar, so I can't. So when they're not eating the sugar, I'm eating. They're eating a plaque. They. On my.
[00:47:19] Speaker A: And it also protects. But no, and it also protects them from good bacteria and all that. Like it's. They build a house, man.
[00:47:26] Speaker B: I know, I was laughing about it.
I'm over there like brushing and looking at my teeth different like, hold on, I gotta get these guys outta here.
[00:47:33] Speaker A: These dudes over here squatting.
[00:47:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Just had that show about the rent living rent free. I got these guys in my mouth living rent free.
[00:47:39] Speaker A: We all do, man. We all do.
[00:47:40] Speaker B: We got these guys living rent free.
[00:47:43] Speaker A: So now that's a good, good. That's funny thought, man. So. But we can wrap it up from there, man. We appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call It Like I See It.
You know, definitely the 20 year mark, man. It's a notable mark. I'm glad we were able to do a show on it. So hope everybody enjoyed it. But you know, also it's, you know, it's something to look back on with a heavy heart, but also to keep an eye on as far as how it's changed us, you know, in ways that we see and sometimes in ways that we don't really see. But until next time, I'm.
[00:48:12] Speaker B: Unfortunately, I'll predict that terrorists will continue to exist on the earth. Unfortunately.
[00:48:18] Speaker A: Well, as long as there's political disputes, you know, like, that's like saying war is going to continue to exist.
[00:48:24] Speaker B: Exactly. That's my point. Why don't we have a war on War. That might be pretty cool, huh? That'd be interesting.
[00:48:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
I don't know how you approach it. Every war is kind of war on war.
[00:48:34] Speaker B: I think for the next week maybe we'll have a show on it, you know, but in a way, every war.
[00:48:38] Speaker A: Is a war on. War. Like, because you're just trying to end the war in your favor.
So. But no. Until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:48:45] Speaker B: I'm Tun Dave on Lana.
[00:48:46] Speaker A: All right. Subscribe, rate, review, tell us what you think, and we'll talk to you next time.
