Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we take a look at tariffs and consider whether in a modern context, they can be the answer to boosting american manufacturing. We'll also discuss polyamory and the way it seems to be having a bit of a moment in the culture right now.
Hello.
Welcome to the call it like I see it podcast.
I'm James Keyes, and riding Shotgun is a man. But when it comes to podcasting, he's definitely a big boy. Tunde Ogun. Lana Tunde. Are you ready to show the people the way you move?
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I gotta follow up to that cause as a proud father who's raised young kids, I guess if I'm riding next to you in shotgun, I'm officially am a big boy.
That means I'm not in the back on the booster seat like when my kid was four or five, right?
[00:00:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. For sure. For sure.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: Okay, cool.
I'm gonna go tell my wife you just upgraded me.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: You were there all along, man. So before we get started, if you enjoy the show, I ask that you please hit subscribe on YouTube or on your podcasting app. It really helps out as far as us trying to get the show in front of more people.
Now, we're recording this on January 30, 2024, and Tundang to get us started more generally, we've seen Donald Trump talking about a 10%, putting a 10% tariff across the board on everything, all imports. And we've even seen now that Nikki Haley is the person going against him, running against him in the republican primary, making a point to push back and distinguish herself in saying being against tariffs and so forth. So where do you stand on the use of tariffs in the modern us?
Are you a free trade absolutist or a protectionist or somewhere in between?
[00:01:53] Speaker B: Well, remember, only the Sith deal in absolutes, so I can't say that I.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: You're, neither of those two.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Lean more towards the Jedi and the Republic, so. No, but it's a great question. I would say this, you know, another. Another reason I can say I appreciate president or former President Trump, because as he rails about something, it kind of forces me to go look into it a little bit deeper.
I started looking at, okay, we do about 3 trillion of imports annually.
So a 10% tariff across the board on all imports would be an extra $300 billion hit, most likely going towards the consumer. So it's interesting because it's a good question.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: What you're saying there is that what a tariff is basically is a tax that's levied by the government, in this case, we're talking about on import. So anything that's imported, you're going to slap 10% on, and that 10% goes to the government. Meaning, like, if you import a $100, you know, television, then the. The importer is going to pay $100 for the television they're importing, plus $10 to the government for the 10% that's added on. So you're saying in addition to the 3 trillion in goods that are actually brought in, if you add 10% on top of that, that's 300 billion to go to the government. But the importer then turns around and sells it, and they're going to put that 10%, the extra 10% they had to pay. They're going to have to make that up somehow, typically with a higher price to a, you know, to the person they're going to sell to.
[00:03:20] Speaker B: Yep. Hold on. You took our thunder away for, like, ten minutes from now.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: That was good, man.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: No, but let me just answer the question real quick, and then we'll keep moving. Cause it's a quick answer. I mean, I would say this based on just how I think also my profession in wealth management and just my own education on our system. I mean, I'm definitely more of a free market leaner. I would say I'm indoctrinated into kind of neoclassical kind of way that we look at economics since the 1930s, I guess, let's put it that way. But I would say this. I recognize that kind of in a strategic and maybe surgical way, for various reasons, tariffs can make sense, whether for revenue reasons or for protectionist reasons. So that's why I would say, you know, just to finish off my joke about not being a Sith, that.
That's why I can't say I'm absolute, but I would say I lean more towards a free and open market type of system. So that's.
[00:04:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:22] Speaker B: Yeah, that's where I land.
[00:04:23] Speaker A: Well, I think that has the free. Having less barriers to trade has. We've seen that benefit the. You know, like, you can't say everyone, but you can say, like, you see, we've seen that benefit the world in terms of economic growth. Now, the spoils of this growth and all the additional productivity haven't necessarily been spread amongst all of the stakeholders. And so that's where the idea of people who push against the idea of just unfettered free trade push against saying, okay, well, essentially what you're doing when you have complete free trade is you're having all the workers in the world compete against each other because people will just go where it ever is cheaper to. To make things or to do things and then import them around the world where they want freely. Particularly, I think two things that have really did define the 20th century from this standpoint is the kind of push towards less barriers from a trade standpoint, from a tariff standpoint, and also the ability, the improved and increased ability to move things around. So when you put both of those together, then it's one thing if there aren't any tariffs and it takes three months to get things from place to place, or six months from things to get from place to place, but if you can get things, move things around in a matter of weeks all around the world, then that changes the calculation as well. But to me, I think it's actually less about being on one end of the spectrum or the other. I think both. I tend to not want to take tools out of the or take. Take arrows out of the quiver. So tariffs can form a part of a trade policy that can be used in a targeted way. Now, tariffs can be used for revenue, to generate revenue. We'll talk, I know, shortly, about how the US generate. Us government generated most of its revenue in the first part of the country's existence through tariffs. So they can be used for generating revenue. They also can be used to support or protect, so to speak, certain areas, certain industries. So if you want to have a certain industry, but you know that the businesses in that industry, in your company country won't be able to compete from a price standpoint with other countries, either due to the cheapness or availability of raw materials or the cheapness of labor, then you can use a tariff to balance that out, but they can be used for other things as well. And so to me, I think the question is less. I asked the question. So it's kind of disingenuous to say this, but it's less about it being free trade absolutists or protectionists and more about, well, what are you doing? What would you be using the tariffs for? I think you have to ask that, that question. Why is the tariff going in? To really be able to evaluate whether it's something that makes sense in this modern context, you know, because things are not, you know, like I said, the US used them for so long, but things are not what they were in 1820, right now from a global economic perspective.
[00:07:05] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that's a good. That's a good kind of segue as to kind of the why. Right. Why, like really peeling aback. If we go 30,000ft, it's kind of human history and the kind of societies. Right? Like, why would you have a tariff? Well, it's just like, why would you have any form of tax? So there's one reason, and it's interesting, and, you know, again, is I go down a rabbit hole and I start, you know, going down where I can't even get out sometimes. So I started looking at some historic stuff. Very interesting. I mean, there's. There's records going back to ancient Greece, the port of Piraeus, as far back as 399 BC, in the peloponnesian war.
The Athenians, that was one of the largest ports in the area in the greek empire, at least on the greek mainland. And so they had a tax, an import tax, which they called a tariff for any goods that were being imported through that port. And that's how they raised money to operate and have their military funded and all that. And then there was another example I saw from the 14th century in Great Britain, King Edward III.
And it was the beginning, this looks like this went over for a series of about 100 years, the beginning of what was more of protectionist reason for tariffs, where they wanted to protect the wool industry in England. And there was a lot of competition from France and Germany that also had shepherds with sheep. And Spain, like we did the show on the alchemist, the young man was a shepherd. So in order to make sure that their shepherds, meaning the british shepherds, had more power and were able to produce more wool to compete better with their neighbors, the British put excessive tariffs on foreign imports of wool and therefore propped up their domestic wool production, which then led by the end of kind of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance period, England was the largest producer of wool, the world an exporter of it as well. So it was interesting to learn some of that stuff that there's reasons behind, you know, some of its taxation in terms of the reason for tariffs, for. For the purpose of revenue for a nation. Others might be protectionist, either to punish, maybe an adversary, a rival nation that might be producing some kind of good and selling it to you, or it could be to prop up your own economy, so to speak.
[00:09:33] Speaker A: Well, yeah, but protection, actually, I would. I would distinguish the. Using it as a quote unquote weapon, you know, trade war, so to speak, where you're saying, okay, we want to slow the flow of. We want to slow the flow of money going to you for goods, you. You, a different country, and your ability to sell us this and that by putting a tariff on whatever product. I think when we're looking at this and you mentioned your own background, and I think this is a very important here because all of us, you know, who are alive right now and are kind of available to even listen to something like this, we're raised in a time where tariffs are generally being looked at, frowned upon, looked at as negative, because there's been this trend towards more global trade and that has increased economic activity around the world. Now, there have been costs on this. And so people point to the low tariffs, or tariffs relatively low from a industrial, you know, post industrial era as the reasons why more developed countries have a harder time with jobs. You know, like they're losing jobs, they're not able to, you know, like they, in terms of, and I use this term not as a pejorative but more as far as low skilled work, these types of things move away from these countries because to manufacture something in the United States, if it's, if it requires people to do so, typically it's going to be cheaper to do so in another country, in a country where the wages can be lower and the cost of living can be lower. So it's not just you're taking advantage of people necessarily by paying less wages, it's just it takes less money to survive in a place like that. So two things just from a tariff standpoint that I want to mention, that where tariffs can be used not in a punitive way, not in an overly protectionist way, but in a humane way, which I think is often because the way we looking at tariffs is kind of broad brush negative, yada, yada, yada. Don't get, don't get taken into advantage is one, you can use them, or two things where you can use tariffs to raise the standards in other countries, you can force other standards or, excuse me, other countries to perform better. And one of those is wages. Pay your people more of a living wage. And if you don't, we'll use a tariff to adjust that cost. So at minimum, if you are going to pay people very under a livable wage in your country, then you're not going to then sell it to us and undercut our workers. Another piece is the environment. And everybody's, you know, a lot of people, you know, the people that, whose heads are above water, you know, are looking and saying, hey, you know what? We need to do something about the climate. But even if we, you know, the United States do all this stuff about the climate, none of the other kind, if other countries don't do it, it doesn't matter. Well, that's another place where tariffs can come into play, where you can use tariffs to say, okay, well, if you're producing things in a way, if you're, if your energy, you know, production and so forth is in such a way that it's very harmful to the environment, we're going to put a tariff on anything that comes from your country because you're using lack of care for the environment as a way to undercut prices elsewhere. And so we won't let you benefit from that, so to speak. We're going to try to balance that out. So tariffs can be used to kind of balance or provide for a country to almost, if you can look at it like this, impose their values on others or at minimum say, okay, well, if you're going to do business with us, you have to do business with us under certain constraints. Now, you can only do that if you remain a desirable marketplace, though. If you're, if nobody wants to do business with you anyway, then obviously you have no leverage with that anyway.
So I do want to ask you, because we're with tariffs, and we've talked about this concept of us all being kind of raised in this timeframe where free trade is the push and anything, any dogma that goes against that is like, oh, these people are crazy, or these people are very looked at, or looked at in a very negative light. What's your take?
If the US used tariffs historically so extensively, one, when you look at that, what do you see? And then two, why do you think things have changed so much that make tariffs so controversial?
[00:13:27] Speaker B: That's a good question. So clearly at the beginning and the founding of the country, if you think about kind of the 1789 period, we didn't have, we're just coming out of a war and we're a new country. So the idea of taxation of the population and all that, I mean, things, I'm sure weren't that organized.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: And there was no income tax, by the way, the United States.
And so you need money. Yeah. You need money. And you don't have a bunch of developed industries by and large.
[00:13:55] Speaker B: Yeah. And also, I mean, even things like there's no corporate tax, there's no income tax on anybody, individual, corporate, because, I mean, you're still, the country, still new. They still got to figure out, you know, how do you, what is a corporation? How does it look like? How does it operate? All that? So clearly, one way to just make sure that you're bringing revenue in is that when there's imports to levy a tariff. And so that lasted for some time over 100 years, and I think what really started to chip away at it probably several fold, one is just technology allowing for more mobility globally. So by, let's say, from the 1790s, we still had sail ships. By the year 1900, you got diesel powered, oil powered, huge, you know, what do you call it? Like, battleships and cruise ships that could take a lot of goods and people across the world very quickly. So I'm sure that somewhere in that development, there became the need for nations to start, you know, dealing with each other in a different way and having.
[00:15:00] Speaker A: Certain agreements, also more communication as well. Like, I think the actual ability to physically move things, but also the ability to communicate more quickly as well. Because in the 1800, you know, 1800, like, you want to communicate with somebody that goes just as fast as you've been able to communicate or send the goods as well. Like, you're sending letters by ship across the sea. There's no telegraph or anything like that. Yeah.
[00:15:22] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think all the technology improvements just led to changes in terms of how we operate as societies. But I think one of the things that I can point my finger to would be where you alluded to just a minute ago, which is the creation and the implementation of the income tax in 1913. Because as I was looking and preparing for today at some of the, like, I was looking at a chart that showed the revenue of the US treasury for the first six months of the fiscal year of 2024. It was the most recent numbers as of December 31 of 2023. And like you said, we're still here just a month later, at the end of January of 24. What was amazing was the amount of tax collected, probably over 80, about 70%, is a combination of individual income tax and Medicare and Social Security tax. And what stuck out to me a lot was the most recent numbers. The duties we collected, which are pretty much kind of taxes from importation, they're separate from tariffs, but they're more of the way we collect fees, was 118 billion.
Out of a number, we've collected 1.1 trillion. So it's about 10%. And then the other shrink one was the corporate tax. And that's what stuck out to me a lot, because I thought, this is an example, if you want to have some sort of conspiracy theory that I might buy into, would be my saying, money and power always find each other. So I feel like it's the slow chipping away of certain systems that we had maybe prior to the income tax and early on in, let's say, the first half of the 20th century, which allowed the revenue burden, let me put it that way, of what the country needs to run to be placed more on the backs of us as individual Americans, meaning the individual and the corporation was allowed over time, including now we've got the lowest corporate income tax rate or one of the lowest in american history. So I think that if I'm wealthy.
[00:17:25] Speaker A: That'S unmistakable when you look at the.
[00:17:27] Speaker B: No, no, that's where I'm going to.
[00:17:28] Speaker A: Shift the burden from the businesses and the business and the owners of the business to the individuals.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: And why, that's why I want to explain this real quick for 30 seconds. Why would somebody really wealthy, I'm talking about billionaires, hundred millionaire status want to do that? And this is where the game becomes again. There's international agreements for various reasons. We all know that. There's islands like the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, the island of Jersey, for example, countries like Switzerland that have been seen as tax havens or tax shelters. And what happens is some of these, especially the caribbean islands, are very favorable. If you set up a corporation, you got to be pretty wealthy because it's not cheap to do it. But what you can do is take a dividend from the corporation, you can get income a certain way and not pay taxes. So the bottom line is, if you can keep the corporate tax rate as low as possible, it's one way to legally escape the same taxation that is now levied upon individuals. And that's where books like rich dad, poor dad, for example, from 25 years ago try and explain that being an employee in the United States is the worst tax position to be in. And there's a reason for that. So I think that has a lot to do with why the idea of tariffs went down.
[00:18:43] Speaker A: Yeah, well, yeah, the idea basically there were benefit that people learned there were other ways to do it, or maybe not learned, but it was established there were other ways to do it. And then that those ways might have been more beneficial for people who were shaping public opinion. And so they say, okay, well, let's shape public opinion in a way to, to make tariffs toxic. Even though at the time of tariffs, you know, like, you look at the first 100, 150 years of the country, tariffs never really like, in terms of the average tariff rate, it never drops below 10%, you know, and now we're way below 5% in terms of that. And then we've been like that for a long time. I think that there are two ways you can look at it. I mean, in one way, I think both. I don't think, oh, I should say this, I don't think either is necessarily mutually exclusive. Definitely you can. It's an unmistakable trend to where you see the funding of the government, of the United States government move from business and commercial aspects to individual aspects. Like you could see that in mistakeable. So that lends to the idea of, okay, well, the business owners and so forth as a conservative, concerted effort to pay less. And so, and if you're going to pay less, you got to come up with another way to make the money. It's like, okay, well, let's go to the people and have them chip in more. And so there's that. But also, again, I think you got to look at the, how the technological environment changed over this time period in terms of communications, in terms of being able to move things around. And it does open up more opportunities. And it would be naive to say that each country and all, and as the world becomes more interconnected, that each country is going to just remain its own silo. The problem that you run into is that, and from what I see is that while tariffs as an absolute form and everybody be in their own silo would not be a way for to a global economy that can continue to grow and produce more prosperity for more people, that's not the way to do it.
The alternative doesn't necessarily have to be the complete other side. And this goes back again to the initial question I asked. Free trade absolutists or protectionist? Well, neither one of those are really the answer. And what you end up seeing a lot of times, I think, and why there's such a negative perception of tariffs is that people have kind of staked out this ground that, okay, it's either you go free trade 100% or you're a protectionist. It's one or the other. Like, there is no way that you can say, okay, well, how about we have, instead of global free trade, why don't we look at regional free trade? And so, like you set up free trade regions where, you know, maybe these, this collection of states, these collection of countries gets together and they have a free trade zone, and then others might do. So what you do with something like that, why that may end up with more prosperity as well as more broadly shared prosperity, is that when you put all of the same workers around the world on the same floor, basically, and people can move goods freely, you really do countries that have done better over time, you punish them for having done better and having a higher standard of living and so forth, you punish them for that. And in fact, you, instead of, well, there is motion to bring some of the lower countries up, but, and you're putting motion also on bringing the higher countries down. And so there are way, when you, when you do that, there are ways actually to bring everybody up or at least maintain the people who have gains, not bring them down as much. So I think the bigger issue is the absolute aspect. Do you have to be free trade across the board 100% or do you have to be protectionist? If you're looking at it as that, then yeah, the protectionism is probably worse than absolute free trade, but at the same time, there are still better ways to do it. And, but when it's presented as one coin or the other, then, yeah, you're going to end up having a negative view of tariffs because it's like, well, tariffs, if it's protectionist and that's it. It's going to be worse. That's worse than having some ability to trade and move things around.
[00:22:38] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's just interesting because when you really think about it, this is probably the one of the longest issues maybe for, you know, human societies and their said leaders in terms of governments or kings or whatever, in terms of just dealing with this because you have, remember, just for everyone listening, you've got obviously a global world. One of the main things that is needed around the world in different ways are things like natural resources.
So it could be some country or nation sits on large deposits of nickel or copper or iron and then another country sits on a large oil deposit. Right. And they want to trade because both need something, you know, that the other has. And so this is where this all comes from. And I think we're talking a lot about the financial aspect of, you know, how do you raise money for the treasury of said country and all that? There's also other things. I mean, this maybe go back to some of what I alluded to earlier as some strategic reasons, sorry, strategic reasons that a country may decide to either impose tariffs or lighten tariffs. And, you know, I'm thinking of things like, number one, when we imposed tariffs in 2018, for example, one thing that the European Union did was retaliate with actually specifically targeting bourbon from the United States. I learned then that we do 1 billion a year of exports of bourbon to Europe and they put massive tariffs on, which hurt our bourbon sales, which may have hurt workers in Kentucky and areas like that. So there is the war aspect, then there's the other, which is even, I don't know how to say this, I was going to say humanitarian, but that's not the right word. But a relief on certain pressures from us. So I'm thinking something like NAFta, for example, the North American Free Trade Agreement. First of all, to your point, James, transportation, especially between three countries, meaning United States, Mexico and Canada that sit on each other's border.
Yeah. Got to a point where I'm sure that you just had to maybe update some of the laws about how quickly can a container truck pass through a given border crossing, things like that. But then there's other things because remember, we've got a lot of conversation today still about immigration in our country from the southern border, which the fact that Mexico is not going anywhere and we're not, that might be a long term conversation for the rest of the nation's, you know, existence. But the reality, remember, most of the people today in the recent period of time are not Mexicans trying to get across to our country. Even though I know some of them are still mexican nationals, most of them are people coming from the real beat up areas like Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador, Central Americans. Right. But remember, prior to the nineties, especially, let's say prior to year 2000, but really the eighties into the nineties saw an influx of actual mexican migrants trying to cross illegally. And what most of the time was for work, the mexican economy was beat up. So one of the goals of NAFTA was to say, look, if we help the Mexicans prop up their own economy through making building factories and having our corporations hire more mexican workers, their economy over time will improve and hire mexican workers in Mexico. Correct.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: In Mexico and then be able to bring the stuff here with real problem.
[00:26:06] Speaker B: Yeah, correct. It was, seemed to have a double benefit to your point because I didn't think of that. One is mexican labor would be cheaper. Number two is mexican people on mass would become employed. So that means a, our goods might be able to be imported for cheaper and sold to Americans for cheaper than we can make them domestically. And then number two, if the America, if the mexican economy does better, then there'll be less of a reason for people to try and cross the border illegally.
[00:26:33] Speaker A: So both of those things happened, you know, both of those things happened.
[00:26:37] Speaker B: And here's what I was going to say. That could be a great noble idea. Right. And that's why I think, like you said about being absolutist, I'm glad we tried it. Right. I'm sure the benefits seem to have outweighed the negatives. Now, what are some of the negatives? Did it cost some american factory jobs? I'm sure it did. And the evidence does show that the second thing is there's something we can't control there, which is the mexican culture and how their government operates, the level of corruption and the influence of things like the drug cartels and all that. So we can only do so much in a country like that without doing what we try to do in Iraq, which is literally going in to do regime change, which I definitely am not recommending that we try and send our military into Mexico just to fix their own.
[00:27:18] Speaker A: Well, and I mean, and that doesn't, that doesn't necessarily, Iraq is the model.
[00:27:22] Speaker B: Of, but I'm making that extreme statement, James, because to your point about absolutists, this is why, you know, nothing's perfect, right? Like NAFTA was a genuine attempt to fix something, but then it's, it's, it's turned into, for a lot of Americans, has become a boogeyman.
[00:27:39] Speaker A: Well, but I think NAFTA isn't very instructive, though, because when I talk about the idea of a regional agreement versus doing it just worldwide, yes, there would be, you talked about the benefits from the ability to one, strengthen Mexico, bring their, bring their standard, their standard deliverance lower than ours. You bring theirs up some and it might chip ours just down a little bit, but it makes people in Mexico happier, makes them less likely to want to give up or to risk it all to come here. You know, so you have that. So you decrease pressure in that way there. But where this becomes, where it becomes untenable is that if you say, okay, let's do that, let's take that same concept and do it across the whole world, you put your own standard of living in free fall. It just, you can weather it more. There's just less people in Mexico than there are in all of Asia, for example. And so when you make the american worker compete just against Mexico, there's only so much how much that or so much that can chip away from what the american worker has achieved over the last hundred years or something like that, versus if you make the american worker compete against everybody across the whole world, that puts a lot more downward pressure on it. So regional agreements are just more tenable. They're going to have less of an impact. Now when we talk about the impact. So we should talk about it both ways because how do tariffs affect people? You know, like then, so one way, the most direct way that people go to first is that if you put an import tariff on something, then typically speaking, as I mentioned at the very beginning, people are going to pay higher prices for the thing that is subject to that tariff, if it becomes retaliatory. You brought this up with the bourbon, then that will the people who work in the United States, and then if their products are being exported, if we put a tariff on somebody, and then somebody puts a tariff on us, then what ends up happening is, okay, well, that worker, their job may become at risk. Because if you're selling bourbon, if you're from in the bourbon industry and we stop, start our billion dollars in sales going to Europe, start becoming in jeopardy, that may put pressure on people in the bourbon industry. So it could cost jobs in the United States if tariffs become, are reciprocated against us. So there are ways to make my.
[00:29:41] Speaker B: Jack Daniels bottle a lot more expensive.
[00:29:44] Speaker A: Well, it shouldn't make yours more expensive. It should make the guy in London's more expensive.
But either way, so there are. It's not. There are no. This goes back to the kind of the idea with economics that there are no free lunches like what you have to do. And this is why I think you said something very key there. We tried NAFTA, and so if we're going to be honest about it, then we can learn. Okay, well, what can we learn from this as far as what worked, what didn't work, and how can we do it better in the future? Or what should we avoid if we're doing a trans Pacific partnership or if we're doing anything like that? But the problem a lot of times that we end up with is that either the problem you end up with is that a lot of times people come in already with what they decided, what they want to do. They're not interested in learning the lessons from what we've already seen. So I do want to look, just kind of because I want to keep us moving with the current talk, with the idea of 10% on everything, or which people have said, which Trump's thrown out, said, oh, well, it's not enough to really fundamentally change anything, but it's something, it could give our people a little bit more of a leg up here domestically or something like that. Nikki Haley saying, you know, this is a terrible idea, or even now, and I don't know if this is just bluster, but, you know, Trump talking potentially 60% tariff on China or whatever. Any comments on those before we get out of here on this?
[00:30:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's. I mean, look, I'm glad you said you don't know how much is bluster, because you're right. We need to acknowledge we're in a presidential election year and people are going to say things to get attention. So I think not all of the presidential nominees will do that. So I think we do need to kind of just be patient and sift through some of that. Now, it's interesting because I think that this conversation, the way it's being had, also reflects just maybe the opinions and the ideology of whoever's saying it. So, for example, Nikki Haley not getting too much into, again, political kind of jokes and conspiracy, but if she's being funded by the likes of the Koch brothers and other billionaires who have a lot of business interests, she gonna be against tariffs because a lot of that kind of, you know, a lot of. Yeah. That's gonna distort their kind of. Yeah. Their activity. Right. Someone like President Trump, who is, from an ideological standpoint, is, number one, wants to be seen as tough and strong. And number two, you know, however it plays out is saying America plays out.
[00:32:01] Speaker A: As more of a populist, though. I mean.
[00:32:03] Speaker B: Yeah. So saying, like, like, we don't need to go into whether something like this would hurt America, but just the rhetoric and the, and the marketing of the idea of America first, you know, hammer in China sounds like, you know, direction he needs to go in.
[00:32:15] Speaker A: So not just that as a populist, someone would be more inclined to do things that would be considered long more protectionist, you know, saying, hey, even if it hurts us, we will, we will cut our nose despite our face if it will pay higher to prices for things in order to have more jobs here. You know, like, and so, and that, again, that's not saying with judgment. That's just saying in terms of the incentives based on how you market yourself and how you present yourself, things that would, that would tend to create more jobs in the US, even if it creates higher costs. A protectionist person, a populist person would lean more towards that stuff.
[00:32:49] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think, and that's where, again, this idea of kind of what is, like, the ideology behind it to me is interesting, too, because even we can look at president, former President Trump's first term, right, when he had, when he had implemented initially the tariffs on China, that was, that was, that was seen as one way to deal with a foreign adversary who looks like they potentially can grow as powerful as us. And we may want to stop that.
The prior ideology for the prior president was something like the Trans Pacific Partnership, which was more of let's, let's create a trading partnership. Like you say, a tariff, maybe a tariff free or tariff reduced zone within all the neighbors of China and the Pacific allies. Of ours on the, on the, on the, on our side, on the, in the western hemisphere. So countries like Chile and Mexico and us and Canada who have, you know, are on the Pacific coast. And this way we can kind of, as well.
[00:33:49] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:33:50] Speaker B: We can freeze out China over time. And maybe if we move more manufacturing to, to Vietnam and Thailand and Taiwan and all that, we'll just weaken and diminish China over time. Kind of like the tortoise where former President Trump was more like the hair. I want to hit him now, boom. And create a disruption. So this is ideological, right? How you deal with this? And I think that going forward?
[00:34:13] Speaker A: Well, some of that is ideological, but some of that's just personality. You know, like you said, tortoise and hair type of thing. Like, okay, I'm the personality type to say, hey, let's try to diminish their, let's try to diminish their relative strength with something like the Trans Pacific Partnership or let's try to just hit them straight in the nose right now. And, you know, with some people, the criticism of some of the stuff in 2018 was just that it was without, it wasn't targeted. It was like there was, it was seeking more of an emotional satisfaction than something that would actually be a chess move that two or three steps ahead, we're coming out ahead versus, hey, will we get the emotional satisfaction of hitting them on the nose?
[00:34:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think one of the things to the point you bring up about that just being kind of a, hey, let's just do this and not really think of the consequences. There's always consequences. Like we talked about, NAFTA even was the $30 billion that the Trump administration then had to commit and pay to american farmers because once we hit China with tariffs, they had retaliatory tariffs. And again, when you don't think these things through, that's what happened. That's when we learn. Again, I thank former President Trump because I learned a lot under his four years, because that's when I learned that we, you know, one of our biggest exports to China is soy and corn. So, like, okay, I guess that's the deal. We're importing all the crap and electronics and they're importing food and we're selling them. You know, our farmers are doing the, you know, the economic activity. So that's kind of my point about tariffs, right. What I learned in preparing for today because I was much more negative on tariffs. And then I read a bit, it's like, okay, they can actually be neutral if again implemented over time. And like you said, with some sort of targeted focus.
[00:35:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:51] Speaker B: The concern would be, like you said, from an emotional and ideological sense, if anybody, not just President Trump, but anybody, comes in and says, I'm just going to put 60% tariffs across the board because I feel like it, because I don't like China. Now after I praise the chinese president every frigging time I open my mouth, then what you're going to see is that 11% of our economic activity get totally disrupted. And we learned again, ecosystems can deal with slow change over time, but if you have disruptive change, it's going to throw everything out of whack. So, you know, the disruption of the supply chain in 2020 wasn't that comfortable.
[00:36:31] Speaker A: Yeah, well, it's particularly because things are so interconnected. I mean, so there are, you're talking about chess moves. There's so many downstream effects on anything you do when we're talking about global trade, trade. So to me, I'm happy that they're bringing it up because I think the conversation is a worthwhile conversation to have. I mean, obviously we're having the conversation now talking about it because, again, I don't like the idea these things, like, it's all just accepted that this stuff is just bad and we shouldn't look any further into it because there are places in ways that these things can be helpful. When you're talking about tariffs, the first question you should be asking a lot of times is, what are you trying to accomplish with the tariff? Are you trying to accomplish something that we say, hey, we have, you go back to the founding of the country. There are certain industries that they wanted to develop. And so they say, okay, well, if we want to develop this industry, we have to put a tariff on other people's goods in that industry, because if everybody can just import them, they won't take the time here to develop the industry. And over time, the thinking was, and this is like, you know, Alexander Hamilton type stuff, over time, you can develop these industries and you'll have cost savings, because once the industries are developed, then they won't be cheaper to import it than it would be to develop it. That's less. So the issue now, at least in the United States, once you've already reached the top dog status, the biggest issue you have is that your cost, your, the cost of living, the cost to live is so high that your workers are going to make you less competitive in terms of manufacturing goods. And so that's what we live with over the last 50, 70 years or so. And so but that doesn't mean that we have to just throw our hands up and just do free trade. And again, it has to be, there have to be ways to be targeted either to protect industries, protect workers in certain industries, or, or use it, again, in a way that we can force other countries to either live up to a higher standard from a worker standpoint or, like I said, in the future, from a climate standpoint, from an environmental standpoint. And so again, we shouldn't be pulling out arrows out the quiver and just throwing them away. These things, they have a long history. And there are ways that they've been used to the benefit. There have been ways they've been used to the detriment. There are pros and cons. But for that reason, again, you have to look at it, try to understand what you're trying to accomplish and then understand what you're dealing with. And that's how tariffs can form a part of a economic policy for a nation in a way that doesn't just submarine all global trade or, you know, put, put the hammer on it.
[00:38:51] Speaker B: So, or we can just put 60% tariffs on a country we say we don't like and just feel good about it.
[00:38:56] Speaker A: You're good, man. And then go to the car, man.
[00:38:58] Speaker B: That was a lot shorter and quicker.
[00:39:01] Speaker A: Yeah, there you go. So, all right, so for the transition of all transitions from tariffs to polyamory and which is, you know, poly Amory also that's talking about like, what we're seeing in the culture, so to speak, is a lot of discussion on relationships, which, of course, you know, you always have a discussion on relationship magazines. Everything we're talking about relationships. But polyamory, which, you know, people consider to be a consensual relationship where a person will be with in a, you know, not monogamy but a relationship with multiple people. So, and you, so you'll have, you know, a woman and she'll have two guys and, you know, they, they all know about each other and they're all good with the arrangement. So obviously, just from the traditional culture that we've seen this, which is one of monogamy in the United States, this seems to some a little bit different or to others crazy. So, tunde, I want to give from your standpoint what stands out to you. Just for reference, there was a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, we'll have that in the show notes, talking about polyamorous relationships.
I want to know from that piece, we can start with just what stood out to you.
What did you make out of reading these stories about these polyamorous relationships that.
[00:40:21] Speaker B: Were profiled, my wife said, I couldn't speak in this section of our show.
Then I told her that the article was in the Wall Street Journal. She said, okay, there's a reason we.
[00:40:35] Speaker A: Chose the Wall Street Journal. This is a very buttoned up.
[00:40:39] Speaker B: It's funny. I realized, as in a serious note, because I went in, I showed her the article and said, why don't we try something like this? And then slap in the face. So I realized that I'm pretty boring compared to what a lot of people are doing.
I was surprised to see that they are estimating as many as 22% of Americans engage in this type of behavior, which is 1% lower than the 23% of Americans who have their bachelor degree as their highest. I was like, okay, that's a lot of people. Almost a quarter of the country.
That's why. I mean, that seems like a high number, because, I mean, hey, man, you.
[00:41:15] Speaker A: Don'T know what's happening. You and I are friends.
[00:41:17] Speaker B: I guess we never really sat down and had this conversation about how we live in. With our wives. But I, like, I'm assuming most people out there, not a quarter of the people I know are sitting there that are married, having, like, bringing over somebody. That's. I mean, it's one thing.
[00:41:30] Speaker A: It's like, I get it. I mean, and not to get too down into the weeds, but it doesn't strike me as swinging, so to speak. It seems like a.
[00:41:39] Speaker B: But you've got a relationship, so it's not cheating. Right. It's cheating with consent. And that's what I mean. Like, I just. I mean, maybe people are doing this, and I'm just out of the loop, right? Like, I just haven't had a conversation with anyone I know that's married. I was like, yeah, yeah, my side piece is showing up for dinner with my wife tonight.
[00:41:55] Speaker A: Yeah, that's exactly what it sounds like. The thing to me, actually. This, on one hand, this to me. To me seems like one of those things where, one, we might be in denial or like, we're just not paying attention because this struck me as maybe.
[00:42:08] Speaker B: We'Re just not at the cool table, dude. Like, going on.
[00:42:11] Speaker A: We're saying we culturally, like the whole thing because this is. Isn't this exactly. Doesn't the french president have a mistress and a wife? Like, this seems to be exactly that. And that's, like, in public view, everything. This is a. Or maybe it's the. Maybe the previous president. Not. Maybe not the current one. Or maybe the current one. I'm not.
[00:42:30] Speaker B: I'll just put our politics here. I ain't trying to chase presidents in other countries.
[00:42:36] Speaker A: I'm not saying it to cast aspersions. I'm saying, like, no, I know we've seen this, like, and we don't think much about it. I think one of the things that stood out to me in the article was that one of the people they profiled was a woman, you know, and she had her husband, and then she had her boyfriend. And it was like, it was in the boyfriend and husband, you know, they were cool. And, you know, like, it was. They weren't cool like they were together, but they were cool. Like, they knew the arrangement and everything like that. And so maybe this is something that we are aware of, but we kind of look past it, or we just. We tend to. If you're not engaged in the lifestyle, you just think, oh, that's just other people. And there just may be more other people that happened. So, like, so you look at it from that standpoint, I'm like, okay, maybe to your numbers, you know, it may be more common than it seems like, because when I go to dinner, I don't see a bunch of threesome couples that seem to all just be together, so to speak. But one of the things that stood out to me, getting to the meat of the article, was just how in those relationships, people seem to have different roles. And so, like, you'd have the. The woman would have one husband who was. Or have her husband who was more of her emotional, and then the other guy was more of her, you know, like that. That's not to say that he was a plaything, but just kind of like, that was kind of the person. She'd do more adventurous things. We'd go hiking and stuff like that. And so there seemed to be kind of a break between the roles of each person, which kind of reminded me of just regular friendship, you know, just like, okay, yeah, I got. If I'm going to the bar, I got, you know, certain friends I would hit up, and if I'm going to the library, I got other friends I would hit up or something like that, you know? So it seems. It doesn't seem as crazy when you kind of look at the mechanics of how these things are happening other than the fact that we are, our society tends to hold up monogamy as the standard.
[00:44:17] Speaker B: Yeah, no, and I think part of it is it got me thinking. I wrote some notes here, so I'm gonna have a joke here first about just personality because when I was that, yeah, no, I was reading it and I just realized, because when you're saying about, it's interesting because, I mean, I just don't live like this. I'm pretty satisfied with the one person I'm with. Meaning, you know, not to get, like, right into details, but the bedroom stuff's fine for me. And then the companionship part is fine for me, too. And that's what I realized. Like you're saying on a serious note, it was like, some of these people, they really have this. Their spouse is the one. They really have the relationship they enjoy, they love. There's just something missing in the bedroom. So they got the side piece for that. And like you said, others, maybe their bedroom, maybe certain things are good, but they actually, there's a part of the emotional side that, that is not being satisfied by, let's say, the spouse, that maybe it's not negative enough that they want to get a divorce and leave. Maybe they enjoy, you know, most of the time. But like you're saying, maybe if the spouse doesn't, like, you know, mountain climbing or, you know, mountain biking in the trails, but the side piece does, that just is another way to get an outlet and be happy. Right. And fulfill that need. So that's kind of what I realized. I was like, yeah, I'm just not wired to want to go in that direction, you know, at least the way my life and my brain has evolved. The other part, I realized I was joking in my head reading about this. Like, scheduling could make, I'm just quoting the article here. Quote, scheduling can make a military planner sweat. More relationships mean more drama, from in laws to breakups, not to mention the lack of sleep. And then it says, who has time for this? End quotes. You know, and that's what I was thinking. Like, I'm so lazy and so content with being chill like a tortoise. I'd be too stressed out trying to manage more people. I'd be stressed out trying to manage schedules and time. And so it's just not for me. For some people that might, I don't.
[00:46:17] Speaker A: Think that the suggestion here is that it's for everybody, though. I mean, I think kind of what we're talking about here is the fact that it may be different, different strokes for different folks, so to speak. And I agree, actually.
But what we normally see is the idea that monogamy should be for everyone. And so this kind of challenges that to say, okay, what is monogamy for everyone? Because some people apparently seem to do just fine not doing monogamy. I will say this, though, the. I can definitely see where, from a cultural standpoint, the idea of monogamy came from, because I look at these things and I'm like, these people must be very mature, you know, because from just a societal standpoint, remember, a lot of norms in society evolve from the idea of keeping things from just boiling over all the time. Like, if you're in a village of 150 people, you can't have. I mean, one of the ten Commandments is about, you know, not going after other people's spouses, because just from, like, you can't. You can't hold a band of 150 people together if everybody's going after these other spies, each other's spouses. So you gotta have a level of, you gotta have certain kind of norms that will allow a group to function together. And so to me, that's what I see monogamy as kind of serving in many respects, more than anything, most people, I don't know, could handle emotionally. The intimate relationships foster jealousy, you know, things like that. So it seems like most people probably aren't gonna be wired to do something like this because I don't see how most people would be able to deal with the idea of, in an intimate relationship, they're quote unquote, sharing. So it seems like monogamy kind of fits into that. But from what we're seeing here, maybe that's just there are people who like, definitely this wouldn't be for everyone, but there are people who, seemingly, from a just kind of emotional makeup standpoint, are able to deal with those emotions or don't feel those motions the same way that maybe many people would where they'd be out here, you know, like getting in fights and attacking people over something like this.
[00:48:12] Speaker B: Yeah. I think maybe we should do our next show on this from Utah. And apparently we might be able to find some people that can. We could interview and ask them how that goes to be married to, hey.
[00:48:20] Speaker A: Man, if we go to the street, we should be able to find one out of every four.
[00:48:25] Speaker B: Apparently, they're not as out in the open about it, but. Yeah, no, but you said something about the societal thing, and that got me thinking about just even discussions we've had, like, on the book sapiens, you know, this idea of a real and imagined order. And if, you know, just for the audience, the book sapiens talked about this from a cultural standpoint. So the real order would be something like physics, right? Like gravity. I throw. I throw a rock in the air is going to drop on the ground, that's. That's kind of just the natural laws. We're not going to affect those too much. Right. Yeah.
[00:48:55] Speaker A: But I need water and food and air to survive.
[00:48:58] Speaker B: Survival. Yeah.
[00:48:58] Speaker A: It's not, like, correct.
[00:49:00] Speaker B: So that's why it's called the real order. The imagined order would be things we spend a lot of time on the show talking about, like tariffs. Right? Like, like things like the idea of systems, you know, racist religion, caste systems, all that. The way we. We organize ourselves as people. To your point about laws. Right. The way fact. I gotta wear a seatbelt. That's an imagined order. Like, you know, we weren't. That's not a natural law. Right. Drive.
[00:49:23] Speaker A: So driving the right side of the road in the United States. Yeah, all that.
[00:49:26] Speaker B: Yeah. So as we're having a conversation, I kind of realized I wrote a note. Like, it's interesting because I first I started thinking about, we're really still dealing with just the cultural influence we've all had from the victorian age. I mean, we're a british colony, right? So a lot of the things of, you know, the protestant version of Christianity, the way we marry, all that. There's a very victorian age still influence on us. And then I thought. Then I made me think further back. Well, it's actually all three abrahamic religions and you. That's why I'm glad you brought it up. In terms of even the Ten Commandments has things that says, you know, one to one, you know, don't cover that number's wife. But don't. It didn't say don't cover his wives or, you know, only cover the third one. So it already gives us impression that, you know, it's. It's a. It's kind of like a one to one kind of mate situation, as opposed to. Remember, we learned in sapiens, there was a tribe. I don't remember where it was, if it was in South America or somewhere else. I think it was South America, where they identified that the men and women, just. The women kind of just had sex with all the men while she's pregnant. Because the idea was that then no man knows which child in the village is his, and they just take care of all the kids. And so to me, that's a different imagined order. That's something that we can't even, like you said about jealousy and all that. Imagine seeing your pregnant wife going there, sleeping with a bunch of guys constantly. He'd be like, hold on. So it's interesting. Sorry, don't imagine that. But Taylor, I said, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that person, but don't ever listen to this. I don't want to get a text. I don't want to get a text.
[00:51:10] Speaker A: Keep going, man. Keep going.
Stop thinking.
[00:51:15] Speaker B: I know it's not you. It's not him.
So. But that's what I was thinking. I was like, so in our abrahamic religions, the other thing I've noticed for a long time, think about how we all point fingers at each other, meaning the three main ones, Christians, Jews, and Muslims. But they're so similar. So if you think about it, if you look at the fundamentalists in all three religions, the people that practice what, I would say the extreme, and I don't mean that negatively. I just mean they're fundamental in their beliefs. So if you look at Orthodox Jews, you'll never see a woman without a headscarf. Right. We know that the Muslims, you know, the moderate people wear a hijab. The extremes make the woman wear a burqa, and then you've got Christianity.
I've never seen a nun's hair. Right. A nun were a habit. Right. And so, and really religious christian women do usually cover their hair. So that tells me that to your point about the ten Commandments, there's something in the culture, in our imagined order that started a long time ago that we've all carried to today were generally, it's one, you know, when you marry, it's a man and a woman. But that doesn't mean, like you said, that naturally, that's the way it's always been or the way it will be.
[00:52:29] Speaker A: Yeah, there's certain benefits, I guess, from a societal standpoint or a cultural norm standpoint. And. But that's also looking at it from a particular culture because we can look at other cultures where. And then this, if you, if you study, you know, kind of, you know, just the way this happens. Like, you've seen cultures where the number of wives a man have will depend on how many women he can support, how many, how many kids he can support, versus just, you know, one to one. And this other thing. So there apparently, from a human culture standpoint, which has been going on for thousands and thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, there is more than one way to skin a cat.
Ours has certain, you know, like the reason you can look to what's happening with our norms and say, okay, well, I understand why that's there right now. You know, we're in this. We're in a place in society where people are challenging that. And it's interesting to see. Because to me, again, it's not necessarily thinking, okay, this is something for everybody, but that they can do it, you know, or maybe they do it for a while and maybe they don't. Like, I think the other thing that I see with these things a lot of times is that people oftentimes with these type of social decisions or, you know, kind of, okay, I'm going to go this way. In the culture, a lot of times people assume that they're going to do it forever. Like, that's the other thing here, is like, somebody may be in a polyamorous situation. Now, that doesn't mean that they'll always be like that. They may, or their sensibility may change, you know, so to speak. Or somebody in a monogamous situation, their sensibility may change these things because they're kind of what works for you that may or may not change. You know, like your friend group when you're 20 might be different than your friend group when you're 40, you know, in the same way that you're. Your taste for a relationship, so to speak. So I don't know. But to me, like I said, it is, this is very distinct from my lifestyle. And so, and as you. You've made the point that it's distinct from yours. So it piqued my interest in saying, okay, well, how do these people do this? You know what I'm saying? Because, like, the biggest hurdle I see is like, okay, well, yeah, so as you so artfully put it, seeing. Seeing your wife go off with some other persons would not strike me in a way that it would be very productive from a personal or a societal standpoint, so. But I don't know. I mean, it's.
[00:54:36] Speaker B: We're just two boring guys.
[00:54:38] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:54:39] Speaker B: The fact we started this show talking about tariffs, you know, it should be the proof to everybody listening that we ain't having that much fun.
[00:54:45] Speaker A: It was because we started on tariffs that we probably had to lean this far for part two, you know, so.
[00:54:51] Speaker B: But I think I'm just saying it proves we're not having that much fun.
I don't have that much time to have a side. Not a. Not even a side piece, I guess, a side piece that's not on the side that's involved. For me to do research and go down rabbit holes on the 1860 Tariff act, you know, between.
[00:55:09] Speaker A: I think it's less that you don't have it, but less that you don't have the time and more that you don't have the inclination because you got enough time to have a podcast in addition to your normal career. So podcast is your mistress, is what it is, basically.
[00:55:21] Speaker B: Okay, we can't say that too loud, but I think a whole nother can of worms.
[00:55:26] Speaker A: See, on that note, I think we.
[00:55:28] Speaker B: Can wrap from there.
[00:55:29] Speaker A: We appreciate every joining us on this episode of Kyle like I see it. Subscribe to the podcast rated review us. Tell us what you think. Send it to a friend. And until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:55:37] Speaker B: I'm Tunde Ogun. Lana.
[00:55:39] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk to you next time.
