Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Hello, welcome to the Call It Like I See it podcast.
I'm James Keys, and in this episode of Call It Like I See it, we're going to react to the attack on the presidential palace, Supreme Court and the Congress in Brazil by supporters of their former President Bolsonaro, and consider whether anything can or should be taken from this. Along with the January 6th insulation, what looked similar in many ways in the US as far as the ongoing viability of democratic governments.
We'll also discuss how many states in the US have been working to modify their education curriculum to better prepare students for the modern world. And consider what we should be looking to accomplish and what we need to avoid when a society looks at modifying its school curriculums.
Joining me today is a man who may stand out in the crowd, but he's just ordinary people. Tunde. Ogolana Tunde. You ready to take it slow for the people today?
[00:01:25] Speaker A: If I go any slower, they're going to fall asleep.
Don't ask me to do that.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: All right, all right. For sure, for sure. You know yourself, know your audience.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: Now, we're recording this on January 9, 2023, and I want to start today with the shocking events from this past weekend in Brazil, where supporters of the country's far right, former President Bolsonaro, stormed the Presidential palace, the Supreme Court, and the Congress, and a scene that in many ways resembled the January 6, 2021 insurrection here in the U.S.
now, information is still coming out about this, so we're not going to try to go too deep and analyze all of the details. But with something like this happening twice in two years in two very large democracies, we wanted to at least get into whether something bigger may be happening here or not, as far as just the viability of governments of the people.
So, Tunde, what was your initial reaction to seeing this? When this starts coming over the screen or notifications on the phone or however you start seeing it.
[00:02:33] Speaker A: It'S funny. I want to say, wow, I was so surprised. Unfortunately, with a backdrop of the last five to 10 years in both domestic and global politics, clearly it was surprising to see people storm under a capitol. But it wasn't such a shock anymore. So I'd say that kind of what stuck out to me is that I wasn't as surprised as I otherwise think I would have been prior to like the last few years. After seeing a lot of politics globally, we've seen a lot and things that I know we'll discuss on this great show today.
[00:03:10] Speaker B: Yeah, like for me, actually, what's interesting is that it hit closer to home to me because of where we've been. Like I feel like five years ago or 10 years ago, if this thing had something like this had happened, I would have more so chalked it up, let's say maybe 10 or 15 years ago, I would have chalked it up and like, oh, that's what happens in foreign countries, you know, what happens in other places and stuff like that. And so it hit me differently in terms of seeing this after it just happened here. And you know, like, just my initial reaction was really one of, okay, we're going down this road here where apparently people have decided that when they don't win an election or a certain number of people have decided, both in this country and apparently in Brazil, that it's just not, that's not okay. They're not okay with the fact that they don't win. And you can come up with reasons why you're not okay with it, but ultimately it comes down to the fact that you're not okay with the fact that you didn't win.
And so that's where I get to this concept. Okay, well, hold on. How does democracy work if one side or if everybody, a significant portion of one side is like, yeah, it's only works if we win. This is only cool that we, we're only going to do deal with this if we win. And so, I mean, do you have any thought on why it seems like we're having, you know, like a substantial number of people and prominent democracies, you know, like United States, huge and you know, long, long standing democracy. Brazil hasn't been a democracy that long, but they're still very large, a large country, large democracy. And we're seeing people that just seemingly aren't willing to lose anymore. And if they lose, they hop on the first train saying, this isn't right, we need to change this, we need to overturn this. Not by winning the next election by stopping anybody else from exercising power. Big picture wise, what do you see here? What do you take from that?
[00:05:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean the big picture is pretty big. So there's a lot of moving pieces and let's try and unpack them. So one is, I mean, we've identified in various conversations over our journey on this show that democracies as we tend to know them and feel comfortable with them in general, like, you know, this kind of quote unquote western style democracy, whether a democratic type of republic, constitutional republic like ours, or a parliamentary system like Great Britain, you know, just kind of Or Australia or did that because we live in this era, we I think just naturally believe that this is normal. And what I'm saying we've identified in other conversations is that actually democracies are, are the abnormal in human history.
[00:05:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:05:51] Speaker A: The norm is authoritarians, strongmen, warlords and authoritarians come in all shapes and sizes. Right. It could be a religious authoritarian system like the Taliban or the Catholic Church back, you know, 500 years ago that dominated Europe.
So those, that's one style of authoritarianism. Or it can come in the form of dictators of like the 20th century, like the Stalin's, the Adolf Hitlers, the Fidel Castro types.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: You take power basically and you put up and put in your allies and so forth. Like Putin. I mean like exactly. Putting your allies in key positions. But everybody, it, it revolves around you.
[00:06:32] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think, and probably the style historically that most of us in the west would understand would be something like monarchs, you know, King George, for example, of England, of which we broke away and formed the United States, you know, in 1776 with the Revolution.
[00:06:47] Speaker B: So for completion's sake, let me add this piece because one of the one piece about that that seems to be at least, you know, like based on what we've seen over the last few hundred years, those, one of the defining characteristics of those a lot of times where they were hereditary and that they were able to convince people that their family was ruling with the grace of God or with the blessing of God. Like so it was. That connection seems to be harder to make nowadays. Like hey, hey, I should be your leader. My son should be the leader after that, because this is what God wants. Like that people don't seem to go for that as much anymore. But that where you can still have a religious type of thing, but not necessarily a hereditary religious type of rule.
[00:07:27] Speaker A: I agree and that's what I'm saying is I think, because what we're witnessing too is remember this is all new for humanity in a certain way. If you look at the last literally 150, 200 years of human history because of the technological advancements, especially, you know, steamships, then airplanes and all that. This, this is the, the rare last 100, 150 years, like I say, is, is the most contact humans have had with each other in the whole history of humanity.
[00:07:55] Speaker B: Good point.
[00:07:56] Speaker A: So, and also we've got the largest population on Earth at any given time.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: Right.
[00:07:59] Speaker A: We've got 8 billion people.
[00:08:00] Speaker B: So whatever it is today and then whatever it is tomorrow is the largest.
[00:08:04] Speaker A: No, and I'm Just saying, like, let's say like I've seen estimates that, you know, around the biblical times of Jesus there's estimates that the world population of humans was 180 million people. So I'm just saying that back then you had wars and all that, but people had a lot more room to operate and kind of go and get lost and not have to deal with other humans. Now we're constantly in each other's face. Now you got, and now you fast forward to like this last 20 years literally is going to be the Internet, social media. That puts us even more closer, said a different way.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: It's almost like we were, you know, last 100 years, 50 years we're all in each other's space, but in the last 20 years we're all in each other's face. Like it's like literally.
[00:08:43] Speaker A: Well, and that's what I'm getting at is so if you look at now going back directly to Brazil, and I think it's a good point you make about the religion, kind of the hereditary aspect of it, where that's no longer alive so much in our culture again western societies. But what takes the place of that and what takes the place of maybe religion is this idea of nationalism.
[00:09:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:05] Speaker A: And so that's where a lot of the kind of people that want to support this stuff find their cohesion and their like mindedness is not through their religion, not through supporting, let's say a dynastic authoritarian leader. But now it's the national, the nationalism.
[00:09:22] Speaker B: And one thing about the nationalism is always that it's a specific, what it's specific in their mind, what their nation is. It's never, it's rarely the entire nation as it is. It's always the nation as they see it in some particular form. And so yeah, I agree with you in terms of we are in a state or in a period where there's a lot going on right now. And some of the systems that may have been able to, to, to expand out over, you know, in the 20th century or whatever are facing some because of that, because of the changes and so forth. There's friction in terms of these systems. And so I think that in many respects, and the concept I'd want to, or the two things I'd like to discuss here is one, the idea of a democracy or voting, a participatory government versus the trajectory that a lot of these democracies are on right now and what'd been happening over the past 30 or 40 years. And I think the idea of a democracy Is something that many, many people, even people who try to overthrow elected governments, a lot of times feel like they support the idea of the democracy. But what there seems to be a disconnect that is that people are increasingly willing to act on. Not in history, but more so in this current iteration over like last hundred years, post World War II era, where they don't like, they don't like the trajectory that they're, that their, their democracies on, you know, where more and more people get to, to participate, where more and more people's rights or more and more people's interests are being considered. And it's not more of a narrow group that's saying, hey, this is all about this narrow group and everybody else get in where they fit in type of thing. And so I think that this idea of a democracy versus this trajectory they're running up against each other, we're seeing that. And this can happen in any nation. This can happen in the United states with a 200 plus year old democracy, it can happen in Brazil because there's a order that people have become accustomed to or that many people become accustomed to, or they fondly think back of. Even if this wasn't something that they lived through, that the trajectory that these nations are on right now isn't necessarily what they look back at and say, oh, those were the golden times, those were the great times. So that to me is where I see this conflict, where, and then it's leading to this apparently. I mean, this isn't my opinion. I'm just saying look at what's happened. There's leading to saying, hey, if the idea of democracy comes up against the way I think things should be, then forget democracy. Then it's like, no, we just gotta take, we gotta take it in the same way. Like the people you pointed out in the earlier 20th century, they would say, look, we're just gonna take power, you know, like this is how it's gonna work.
[00:12:07] Speaker A: Yeah. And I definitely wanna get back to a little bit of kind of what happened globally in the early 20th century. But we can do that a bit later because it's a good. Again, I realized as I was researching, preferring for today and reading about the early 20th century. It's also interesting because that was the first time we had societies organized in the way we do now, like large cities and all. I mean, you didn't have that in the 17, 1800s and all that kind of stuff and the type of migration we saw in the early 20th century. So we'll get back to that. But and just to kind of just respond and continue on, what you're saying is I think it's just coming down. Maybe this is a function of my age and just where I'm at in life and observing these things. Maybe it's a function of just. This is all playing out now like we said in this post 100 to 200 year era of this, it's really the industrial age way of organizing large societies. Post industrial age way. And is. And is. And what I'm saying is, is in you and I have kind of joked about this privately, right? This idea of people that are okay cooperating with others, even if they don't fully agree with their views and all that and other people that just aren't there and they're just not comfortable unless they feel everything is the way it should be in their mind. And I'll give, you know, I'll give the audience an example of that. Personally, I identify as a black American in our society and our culture.
I don't have much patience to want to suffer the likes of racist people. Right? The Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi Party, things like that. However, in the spirit of America and the spirit of freedom of speech, I believe that the government should not prevent them from speaking either. I believe that if they get a permit, as is allowed by the US Constitution's First Amendment, and assemble to express their grievances in public, which would be a rally or a protest or whatever it is, they're allowed to do that. Okay?
So that's to me, I'm a cooperative type of guy. I can say something that I'm not comfortable with personally, the spirit of this country. As long as they follow the law, right? They're not out there burning people's houses down and lynching people. But if they just want to protest and say that they're better than me and all that, I got to understand that that's going to be part of this Greater Society of 300 plus million people. There's just going to be people that feel that way. But the law, and I trust the system, right, that the law and all that is there to protect someone like me. That's why they have to say their peace with in accordance of the law. There's other people in this society that look at that and say, I don't think those people should be allowed to say that. And if I was in power, I would break the First Amendment or I break the Constitution just to be able to shut those people up. So there's people in our society that would do that to other people.
[00:15:13] Speaker B: Just to be clear, though, that's not necessarily counter protesting them, you know, like, because you can think that they have the right to protest and think that you have the right, which you'd be correct, to stand on the side of the protest, on the sidewalk and say, hey, get out of here. We don't.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: Like that's across the street.
[00:15:28] Speaker B: Exactly. And so what you're saying is more so that the person, by doing that, it should not be, they shouldn't be arrested for doing that if all they're doing is protested. And the law shouldn't be changed to say that they can't do that depending on the message that they're saying. And I think that what you're ultimately saying it is some people want to have it both ways and other people want things to apply to everyone. And so you recognize that, okay, for this to apply to me, for me to be able to come out and protest or do whatever, if I don't have, if I have a problem with something, then as long as I'm going to do it in an otherwise lawful way, you recognize, you say, hey, I'm fine with that applying to everyone. And what you're pointing out is that some people aren't okay with things going both ways. They want to have it where it's okay for them to do it. Their issues are more important to society in their mind. And so therefore they can impose what they believe to be important on everyone else and what other people believe to be important, they can say, no, we're just not going to deal with that. And so, yeah, you are dealing with ultimately two different types of personalities. And where we get into a risk, I think, is that what we've seen. And I'm glad you brought up the industrial era type of thing, because what we saw with the industrial era, and you can go back and look at this if you want. I mean, it's kind of gets kind of fuzzy after you get back. Start looking at, you know, the dawn of agriculture and then, you know, different things like that. But the industrial era is recent and we have decent historical records on it. Where, when the era when people and all these cities started getting crowded, all that like the way of life started changing for so many people. There was a lot of friction initially on how these societies would be organized and run. And initially the people who just who wanted to impose on other people, in many respects, in many cases they took power first. And then that led to disastrous results and a kind of more a spirit that was less, that was More cooperative, to put it in the terms that you and I discuss a lot of times more. So took over. So when we're looking at it from an information age standpoint and this kind of friction that we're seeing that seems to be gathering some steam and how easily people can, can live in a bubble of information and say, hey, yeah, this is, I like this message. I'm only going to get my information from this source. And then they can, they can believe, you know, anything. They can believe that the other side is from Mars, you know, like, and, and then start acting on stuff like that. The, the concern, I think that we need to have an eye on or, you know, like, is that we may be heading into a place of more friction where people who want to impose, because we're in this information age now, where it, in terms of how societies are going to be organized ultimately and how people are going to interact with each other, the people who want to take it and make it their way and not cooperate with others, this seems to be their opening. You know, like they, they, they, they, they kind of were pushed to, they were marginalized a bit more and with the trajectory of the industrial age, but now it seems like it's fair season, it's open game again in terms of who's going to be able to, what type of personality is going to be able to really put their imprint on how societies are running.
[00:18:38] Speaker A: Well, I think too that each, this is why it's interesting too, each nation has its own cultural nuances.
And I find that at least here in America, the people that seem to be in, in the camp of wanting to disrupt the democracy are also people that feel like they were once in at least some of this mindset. Right. That their group was once had total control and was in the driver's seat. And now they seem anxious and apprehensive that other groups have risen.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: Right, that's, that's actually exactly what I was talking about when I was talking about the trajectory of things.
[00:19:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. You know, so what I'm saying is.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: Let me add one other word to what you're saying.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:19] Speaker B: And so therefore the people that you're talking about that feel like they used to be more in charge, they feel a certain entitlement that they still should be in charge. They feel like they're entitled to these positions, not that they have to earn them at the ballot box. And that's exactly what you see here. Yeah, you didn't earn it at the ballot box, but you're upset because it's like, well, no, I'm entitled to this regardless of what the votes say.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:40] Speaker B: And that goes back to create pretexts and whatever.
[00:19:43] Speaker A: Yeah. And that goes back to several things, you know, that we can identify in American culture. But that's, to me, what's interesting about watching it happen in Brazil, because clearly they have their own cultural nuances which are different than ours. And then. And what I find interesting, and to take us down this road here is a lot of the stuff I'm reading is the people supporting not only Bolsonaro, because again, none of this happens in a vacuum just like January 6th. If you just look at the images, you think, okay, you could be led to believe that, okay, this was just a protest or even a riot that just got way out of control that day. But as you pick it apart, and as we're seeing now, even kind of real time, just before our recording of this, as more information is coming out that this has been in the works for some time, planning this type of event at the Brazilian capital and the government buildings. And a lot of the people who supported Bolsonaro, they were pining for the 1980s style military government that Brazil once had. And I thought to myself, I thought those were bad. People got hurt and a lot of people got killed. Extrajudicial killings by the government, all that.
[00:20:55] Speaker B: You don't usually hear people in democracies saying, man, we could only have the military dictatorship back.
[00:21:00] Speaker A: Correct. Yeah, exactly. And then, so that's what got me thinking about, well, again, the same contrast to the American authoritarian streak of maga. Right? Make America great again. I mean, I'm not gonna blame everybody who jumped onto that slogan as wanting Jim Crow style segregation to come back. Because I know that one of the things about a good vague slogan like that is that it can mean different things to different people. But I do believe there was a healthy faction of Americans that like the idea of taking America back to a time when the democracy didn't work for everybody equally. And I'll say that very eloquently and leave it at that.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: Well, I mean, but that's. There is, you know, like the 1950s or so, you know, is a time.
[00:21:47] Speaker A: When you say, oh, that was such a much better time in America. Just like the Brazilians are saying. Certain Brazilians are saying that the 80s was such a better time.
[00:21:55] Speaker B: You're saying, imbaba make Brazilians.
[00:22:02] Speaker A: But the idea is that. But that's my point is to me, those are the non cooperatives within the societies, the respective societies. We're siting here, us and them. Because what they're saying is, I want to go back to a time when the people in my team, my tribe, had a great.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:17] Speaker A: And. And those other people over there, you know, the government made sure that they were kept separate from me.
[00:22:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:23] Speaker A: And that's what I thought of when I thought of a military dictatorship. Like, they didn't have courts and stuff back then.
Military police just came to your house and shot you in the head.
[00:22:32] Speaker B: And I was thinking, explicit, though, you know, it's pretty explicit because, you know, in our case, I'll just say this.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: And I'll pass it. What's a lynching in the south in the 1950s? It's an extrajudicial killing.
[00:22:43] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:22:44] Speaker A: That's my point.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: Jim Crow was a system like that. But, you know, like the Brazilian thing. I think it's a good point that you make because the Brazilian thing actually is that in name, whereas the American. Oh, let's go back to the 1950s. It's not like that predated the Constitution. It was just the constitution wasn't being enforced in the same way, in a way that would be considered what we would consider legitimate right now. And so it's more of a. It's like. It actually is more shocking to the point. Like, hey, let's go back to the time before there was a democracy when the people who I supported just told everybody what to do at the point of a gun. Like, that's kind of what they're saying there in terms of wanting to go back to a military dictatorship. I mean, to me, I think that we can build those things out. And I mean, we have to be careful not to get into people's heads. But I do think what we can see pretty explicitly from this is the unwillingness. Something is wrong if I lose something is wrong with the system. If I lose something is wrong with this type of government or this type of voting or. Because that's the premise you're starting from. You have to understand anytime you see these types of things, it's produced that the election was stolen and that is not immediately followed with a bunch of evidence, verified stuff. Then that is not a claim that's being made for the truth of the matter. That's being made to justify whatever belief that you already have or, you know, because. And that's why it's un. It's ineffective on people who don't want to overthrow the election. They're just like, oh, yeah, whatever. Like, we'll wait to see the proof. You know, show us the proof. But when you just say it and you just put it out there and just let it go into, and just let it spread out and spread out and spread out, that's what's called a pretext. We're going to do something about this and the basis for us to do something is we're going to say that it's stolen, but we don't have anything to back up that it was stolen, to prove that it was stolen, which most of the time, when you make pretty explosive claims, the more explosive claim that you make, you got to come up, you got to back it up. But again, this isn't about backing up that they think that Lulu, the current president, stole the election, that this is about creating a pretext for us trying to forcibly take power, remember? Well, let me, let me, let me on the same, in the same analogy, the, you know, stop the steal wasn't about necessarily, at least from an effectiveness standpoint, wasn't about proving that the election was stolen. They got shut down every single time they tried to do that. Like, it was like, oh, okay, where's your evidence? Oh, we don't got it yet. Okay, case dismissed. Like 50 something times, you know, so it wasn't about, though its power wasn't about proving anything. Its power was creating a pretext to justify breaking the law, going above and beyond and trying to forcibly overthrow what's going on. And so again, seeing that twice in two years, we need to take note because this is not, these aren't isolated incidents. These aren't things. There is a pattern going on here and there are people that are observing this and they're going to, this is going to keep trying again.
[00:25:50] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I think you're right. And I think, you know, as, as you're saying it, I'm, I'm seeing a lot of connections and the, and, and some of the connections are, you know, again, the Internet plays a large role because all this stuff can be seen instantly around the world. So you have two things happening simultaneously in some corners. It's giving those who go back to cooperatives versus non cooperatives, those of us who are the cooperatives, maybe the more moderate people within these democracies that generally wouldn't be in the street yelling and screaming about stuff or just the people.
[00:26:26] Speaker B: That are loyal to the system over whatever they think should happen.
[00:26:30] Speaker A: It gives us, like you're saying, the real time experience to see, oh, this is happening and this is democracy is something that needs to be protected constantly. The second thing it does is it gives those who Are the non cooperatives the real time view to say, okay, this might be my chance to make this happen in my country and do it this way? And I think what you just said was very good because what you also did was prove your point about why the need for hyper partisanship and this type of polarization that we see from the authoritarians to point at other people in their society and say either it's their fault why your life is bad, or they're so evil that if they get in, it's going to be so bad. And again, I'm not in Brazil and I don't know the Brazilian culture, you know, as much as I know American. But in America, we see that with the idea that, you know, there's a. I would say there's a much stronger domination in the mainstream on the right of people that think that the left or Democrats would ruin America if they had a seat at the table. And I think same thing must be happening in Brazil. And that goes back to not seeing your opponent as legitimate to have even power. Right? And that's when you stop having a democracy, when you can't share power with someone you don't agree with. Now, how do we get there at the same time, and that's why I'll hand it back in a second, is I was very, I would say surprised but not surprised at the same time when I said earlier that I could believe that the Brazilian thing was a protest that just got out of control beforehand. And then I'm watching stuff today that's telling me, no, this was just like January 6th, we learned from this year of hearings and stuff like that, which is similar actors, people like Steve Bannon from the United States. I watched a video of him talking in November to a large conference in Brazil saying the exact same things he was saying to Americans after the 2020 election. Talking about how it was stolen, how. Talking about how it was all about the integrity, or lack thereof, of the voting system. Voting? Yeah. The machines, the technology. And you know what else is interesting, James, That I heard him say.
He referenced Carrie Lake, the lady in Arizona, Arizona who lost governorship and as of now, January 9, is still contesting her loss and still putting lawsuits and things, even though most of her stuff got thrown out by courts. And it made me realize, James, again, this is where the technology comes in. People like you and I are sitting there watching the boring stuff like regular news and all that. We don't see a lot of this traffic and this rhetoric that's going on in these spaces in The Internet and.
[00:29:24] Speaker B: How that hits in those places.
[00:29:26] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And what Steve Bannon has done an excellent job of over this last decade, when you think about it, because I'm going to bring something else in here which he was involved with. No, no. Which is Brexit.
[00:29:36] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
[00:29:37] Speaker A: My point is just saying that the ability to disrupt democracies, now, Brexit, luckily just meant Brexit. It didn't lead to a collapse of the British government or something like that, but if you look at it, it was instigated by a lot of people in the United States. And they found their guy, whose name at the time was Nigel Farage. Remember that British politician.
What happens is he found his guy. Steve Bannon found his guy named Jair Bolsono.
[00:30:07] Speaker B: Bolsonaro.
[00:30:08] Speaker A: Bolsonaro, sorry. And his son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who was the one inviting Bannon into the Brazilian discourse, political discourse, and creating the same type of groups that have been created here. And so that's what I'm saying is that it's interesting to see that through the Internet, the United States, like I said 40 years ago, when I was a kid, we were exporting democracy in terms of the ideology of democracy.
And it seems like now we have this undercurrent of American culture that's promoting and exporting the ideas of fascism and anti democratic ideas. It's just interesting.
[00:30:49] Speaker B: It's a playbook now. I mean, and it's interesting you bring Bannon up because basically he's established a playbook at this point that where you find discontent in a society, entitlement discontent, and you feed that, you feed that, you run the, you know, like the whole Internet style, just overwhelm them, fire hose, a falsehood on them, and you get them real fired up and then you pull trigger on these things and it seems like there's a playbook. And I mean, I'm glad that you brought that up because that is to me where we need to be concerned, because this playbook is actually. We see it and we see it not working, at least in terms of the January 6, in terms of what we just saw in Brazil. But playbooks get refined also as they keep going on and on and the operation of these may get better. And if this is kind of the move now, and it's been shown that using technology that you can find these disaffected people, these upset, these people who are. It's easy to get them to say, relatively easy to get them to say, yeah, the other side is illegitimate or the other side is evil. And you fire them up a certain way, then you can make extreme things happen.
That lesson actually is being learned to the positive of the people that are running the playbook. They're seeing this as like, oh, it's working okay, now we can refine this the next time. And so there's a big concern here. Like again, this is, this is, we're starting to see a trend here attacking government buildings in large democracies after you lose an election. And so we need to be aware and you know, we're going to need to pay attention to what's happening here and make sure that, you know, we don't, that something like this doesn't happen, continue to happen in the future. And each time we're surprised because one of these times they're going to, they may pull off something that's even more shocking.
[00:32:40] Speaker A: Well, I'll say this, like I said this transparency both ways. So the good news is all those big democracies you mentioned have already come out of all strongly against it. Even the, quote unquote right wing new prime minister of Italy, she condemned it hard on Twitter. Talking about this is anti Democrat. So my point is, is that hopefully with the shared transparency of all this, meaning both sides seeing it all happen in real time, that those who, the cooperatives who do want to protect democracy and these things will also not take this as a joke anymore.
[00:33:10] Speaker B: Well, you know, the interesting thing about it is that it really, the pressure that it puts on, and we see this in the American political system a little bit is more on the quote unquote conservative side because it pits the conservatives that are loyal to the system against the people who they purportedly see as on their same side but who want to say, no, we need to overthrow the system if the system doesn't deliver to us what we want. And so it actually creates this friction there. So it's interesting you point out how, you know, the Italian prime minister is like, no, this because she's basically taken aside there, you know, because there, there is a friction there that we see that, you know, is another interesting wrinkle here. But we got it. We got to get out of this topic. I know we can. There's going to be more to come out. I mean, and it's it. We'll see what else happens as far as what we learn and what lessons. To your point, what lessons can be learned. So second topic we want to discuss today, we see, we've seen some reports 2023 is a pretty substantial year in several states because Florida and Michigan for example, have added financial literacy as a requirement for graduation from high school. So you have to take a course in financial literacy. We see New Jersey moving towards adding information literacy and learning how you know just how to process information years, particularly information you're getting online and learning how to understand and cross check and understand primary sources, secondary sources, facts versus opinion. They're adding, they just passed a law to add that to their curriculum. So we're seeing educational systems try to adapt to a more modern, more modern needs, or what we may consider to be more modern needs. I mean, there's still always, as my parents termed them, the three Rs. Reading, Writing and arithmetic. But there's other stuff that it may be important to learn, you know, and that may be important to equip our citizens to have a knowledge of as we send them out into the world to hopefully become productive members of society. So what, what did you take from. Or, you know, kind of what, what were your thoughts on some of these reports on, you know, bringing these modern kind of learning lessons to high school? But I mean, just still to making them part of a curriculum that people are going to be exposed to. You know, whether you can start with the financial or the information, like either one. Just what were your thoughts on seeing this?
[00:35:25] Speaker A: I thought generally positive. I think just, you know, anytime we're looking at adding things to our educational curriculum for kids that helps them deal with the modern world and modern challenges, I think it's, it's, it's a positive direction. So I'd say that as my overarching answer without having seen every single school board in this country's specific ideas. Right? Yeah, but I think, yeah, generally, if, if the things that I've seen when they're preparing, you know, financial, like you said, financial literacy, media literacy, after everything we've spoken of, even on this, just the, the prior section of our show today, this, that the ability for people because of this new technology, with the Internet, so much disinformation and, and even more so than that, I would say as I was reading about the New Jersey legislation, I started thinking bigger than just disinformation and kind of that side of it that I initially think of when I think of media literacy within the Internet. I thought about all the discussions we've had, both on the show and privately, and I'm sure with other people, about the disruptive nature of things like social media on kids. Right. And the teenagers and the studies.
[00:36:43] Speaker B: Front lines of it.
[00:36:44] Speaker A: Yeah. Like how many young girls, teenage girls, the suicide rates and the depression Rates have gone up since 2012, when Instagram was first really implemented on society. So my point is, is that if we could actually teach kids like how to look at these things and not and, and be able to teach them, like, look, not everybody looks like lives like you see on social media. You know, this, this, this and the things we've talked about, body dysmorphia and muscle dysmorphia, all these things. So I do think, you know, if, if we can help kids better enter this world now of as and come into it when they're adults, at least having an emotional or an ability to have a way to control them, their emotions and understand how to deal with the Internet. I think it's just for the better.
[00:37:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I, I, my reaction, my initial thought, you know, just kind of seeing this is that it represents asking the right questions. Because I think with the educational institutions at every level, what needs to be the right questions are what do people need to learn in order to again be productive members of society? And some of the stuff that may be prioritized may be things that are less important than some of the things we're talking about right now. You're much more likely as just any person, you know, just somebody, you know, an average member of society, an ordinary person, you know, you're much more likely to need the skills of understanding opening a bank account or dealing with credit agencies and so forth. And what credit, credit agencies are looking, judging you on when they create credit scores, that's much more likely to, or having an understanding of that is much more likely to affect your life and your ability to navigate through society than trigonometry, you know, and that's so, so that's a good question. But whether the question when you're looking at something like trigonometry or whatever is like whether learning that type of stuff in the abstract, you know, just, you may not need this or, but some people are gonna need it has other benefits. We have to ask that question as well. So, you know, for me, I look at these and I'm always like, okay, well, it's a good idea in the sense that, yes, we should be trying to figure out what holes in the education system or what holes are people not learning, because these conceivably are all things that people could be learning from their parents. Again, whether their parents know it is a whole other thing. But at the same time, so, you know, we want our education system to account for that, but at the same time, I do wonder, okay, well, there's A cost for everything. There's no free lunch. So, okay, if we're, if we're gearing at things this way, what else? Or what should we be de emphasizing? Or is there something we need to actually de emphasize? Because if you just mandate something without de emphasizing something else, then you almost leave it up to, you know, whoever's implementing it to say, okay, we'll, we'll deemphasize this. And so I wonder. I'm, I'm me. I'm sitting there and it's okay, well, Florida is one of these states. So is Florida going to de. Emphasize history?
We're just not going to learn history anymore. We're going to learn how to open a bank account. And, you know, I don't know what the answer to that is, but I mean, you know, we've seen how certain history topics are treated. So I like the idea in that it represents a asking the right question. But I am concerned on. I think it's a holistic discussion more than just, hey, let's just add this.
[00:39:56] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think. Well, I think that's where it's good that there's a discussion. And I think, you know, I've heard a lot of.
I mean, I've felt this way too, over the years. Right. Like, why aren't we teaching financial literacy, like, at least in high school, if not sooner. Right. Meaning earlier, like late elementary into middle school. And I don't think. I think that's probably something that most Americans would agree that, yeah, kids, why shouldn't kids learn about just balancing their bank account or, you know, and that's. I was reading some of the stuff that's going to be in the Florida curriculum, and it's all good stuff. It's, it's, it's. It's learning how to file a tax return.
[00:40:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:36] Speaker A: Learning about personal insurance policies. You know, like, why, why do you have to have auto insurance? Why do you have to have homeowners? You know, why should you think of life insurance when you have a family? I mean, all these things are things that no one ever taught any of us. And the school level individually, we all learned it after school as we were adults and trying to figure it out. And for some people, they learned all this stuff a little too late. So I think the ability didn't even.
[00:41:01] Speaker B: Learn the right lessons from.
[00:41:02] Speaker A: Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, they didn't get it early enough where maybe if they got it as a teenager, at least some of these concepts. Obviously, I'm not expecting a teenager to, you know, be a certified financial analyst or certified financial planner or CPA by the age of 16. But the idea is that if you just can go into college with a little bit more knowledge and then from college, if you're interested, you keep learning. If not, maybe there's still something that's retained when you're in your 30s from your school days.
[00:41:31] Speaker B: So I think the education system, yeah, but the education system right now is, it has not been. Nobody's taken a step back from what I've seen and said, okay, is this serving us best? Let's take a not, let's. Anytime you have an existing system and your answer is to tweak here, tweak there, tweak here, tweak there. You always run the risk of just stacking solutions on top and not ever optimizing. And so I think, and this is kind of my hesitancy on this is saying, okay, well, but let's optimize, let's optimize the system in terms of, okay, well, we're doing this, there are going to be trade offs. So I think that this should be taught things. Again, these are the kind of life lessons that are very, going to be very helpful and very practical, you know, but in the same way we've seen with education. I don't want to go down this path. But you know, for the same logic is why sex ed was introduced to the schools. Okay, well, we want, there's a certain amount of people interact with each other. We want to have a certain baseline of people understanding facts. We've seen a lot of pushback on that. And so I mean, I think that in terms.
[00:42:33] Speaker A: Let me just stop there. Think about, I mean, I knew I.
[00:42:35] Speaker B: Threw a grenade in the room.
[00:42:36] Speaker A: No, no, no. But I was going to say, I don't know when Sex Said officially kind of got popular in the United States. But let's just assume it's been several decades because I know you and I sat through those kind of classes and world enough that has been a few decades. So. But my point is because we tend to think, don't believe that there are people out there that are naive and there are people out there that just don't have all the information.
So think about a basic sex ed course at whatever the young teenage age. I guess I think it was like middle school when I first had my first kind of class that talked about literally a sperm and an egg. Yeah, that's what I mean. Like that basic information is still important. Yeah, right. Because people got to understand how babies actually are created. And that's what I mean, it's not.
[00:43:18] Speaker B: About they are created and how they're not.
[00:43:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:43:19] Speaker B: You know, like diseases are transmitted and you know, like it's.
[00:43:23] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. So what I'm saying is. Yes. Can some in our culture start whipping up fear that sex ed classes are going to be showing porn and teaching kids how to have threesomes and all that? You know, I guess there's people that could believe that, but I think the bigger idea is that because it's a sensitive topic, which is sex, we should just like you said we should, we should want every kid at least armed with the basics.
[00:43:49] Speaker B: Well, yeah, and that's the. That's where I came with this analogy from. Because that one actually is more triggering for people. But it's the same concept in terms of, hey, these are things that are going to impact your life. You know, you're interacting with people or you're interacting with the financial system. You know, like, people don't walk around with a bunch of cash nowadays. Like, it's bank accounts, it's debit cards, it's credit. Like, you know, understanding how to balance and how to understand, you know, if you're using a debit card, you got to have the money, all that stuff and how, you know, how your credit score is generated, you know, what's important, paying your monthly amount on time, all that kind of stuff. Like that's not information that is inherent to the you. Like, we don't learn that stuff. And when we're, you know, like walking around, learning how to walk, we don't learn that stuff. So it's important to learn it's tricks of the trade, so to speak, in a society. And so it's helpful. But you know, the other thing I wanted to get to on this is like, are there any like, particular concerns that you have, you know, as far as is these ideas of trying to incorporate more practical knowledge? Because what this does, again, what we should acknowledge though, and I don't think there's a problem acknowledging this, is that the way the educational system was set up initially was thinking that this stuff would be taught by the parents, by the family, by the church or whatever and then others, we're going to teach you this mathematics and language arts and stuff like that, and you learn these other more soft social skills from the. We'll teach you history. But you learn these soft social skills, you learn from your social apparatus. And so concerns like in terms of bringing this more in or even, I mean, again, the idea is one thing but even the implementation, the implementation of trying to customize education to meet a specific. Your agenda may be good, your agenda may be bad, but customizing education like that.
[00:45:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think that this is where it gets delicate because I felt myself, even when I was talking about the sex ed examples that I just, even in my own mind at that time, I thought about, okay, what about a parent that would say, I don't want my kid learning that because it's against my religion. I don't want them learning about sex at this age and all that. I'm not going to argue with that parent. I mean, this is a very delicate situation. Right. We're talking about kids, we're talking about people who are the parents of these kids, and we're talking about the need for us to have some sort of collective agreement as to how we're going to educate kids en masse. Right. And I think, you know, the sex ed one you rightly pointed out was one that was more of an issue from the cultural standpoint, maybe when we were younger. Today, it's arguments, it's interesting. It's the greater arguments of the culture, right from history when they were removing the Confederate statues and all that talking about our ethnic and cultural tensions that we have in this country, and now the fights on education are about how are we going to teach those to our kids, how are we going to teach history? And we've seen in the last year or two where on the aggressive side, some counties in this country, I remember there was one in Pennsylvania, they banned books on Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass because they just thought that you shouldn't be teaching kids about any of that. Luckily, those school boards reversed those decisions because that is not seen as non mainstream history.
Other areas have brought up things like critical race theory or other things that to me are like arguing about Sharia law 10 years ago. There are things that exist somewhere in the world, but they're not really existing where you're pointing everyone's attention. But that tells me that there's more of a political agenda there.
[00:47:26] Speaker B: Well, but the one that hits the home or the one in Florida is the epicenter for all this stuff is the idea. And I mean, I know Ron DeSantis, the governor, has been pushing this stuff and he's been getting rebuked by the court system, but he's not really relenting. And it's just his concept is that anything that makes that could make someone feel guilt or feel bad shouldn't be taught. Now, again, the unsaid Part of that is that only certain someones feel bad or feel good because they're not taking out Manifest Destiny because of how a Native American may feel about that. So it's still very privileged and targeted of a discussion and saying, oh, well, if this makes somebody feel guilt, it makes a white person feel guilt, then we don't want to teach it. But it's still, you know, it's something that when you start trying to. It represents. When you start trying to get out of the three R's, the reading, writing and arithmetic, then these questions become. The questions become more pointy because it's like, okay, well, the concept of, okay, we don't want to teach sex ed, or someone objecting to sex ed because they're saying, I don't want, you know, it's against my religion. Well, I mean, I'm pretty sure that sex isn't against anybody's religion because that they would have no more adherence eventually because they wouldn't be able to procreate. You know, so it's, it's all premarital sex. But it's like the sex ed doesn't teach, doesn't tell you to go do it. It's telling you the mechanics of it. So it's still a matter of interpretation. And I'm not attacking that interpretation. You know, like, I get it, you know, it's a sensitive topic for that. And so on the financials, the same thing. I mean, when I first read this, my thought was like, oh, yeah, so now JP Morgan Chase is going to be out here lobbying people to get the credit. They don't want everybody to learn about the credit stuff because it's like, oh, no, we're not going to be able to charge as much interest if everybody knows what the game is. So. But I mean, that's me being silly, though. But you do want the education system to be flexible. You know, you don't want the education system to be in a situation where we do these, do things a certain way because that's the way we've always done them. But I think you have to recognize also it's a slippery slope, you know, and that every. Apparently everybody's not getting into it for the same reasons, you know, like in terms of are we trying to better equip people for dealing with a modern world, or are we trying to prevent people who might feel guilt because of something that somebody else did, but only certain people, you know, to feel guilt? And so we'll not tell important parts of history. I mean, like, there's, there's a lot of agendas that could be happening. And this has always been the case throughout history in terms of how history is manipulated, related or cold. So. But I think we can wrap from there. We appreciate, appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call Like I See it. Subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review us, tell us what you think, send it to a friend. Until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:50:08] Speaker A: I'm Tunde Oana.
[00:50:09] Speaker B: All right, we'll talk to you next time.
