Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] James Keys: In this episode, we take a look at how out of control corruption and oligarch power can be beat back through the lens of the Ted Theodore Roosevelt documentary that's currently airing on Netflix.
Hello, welcome to the Call Like I See it podcast. I'm James Keys, and joining today is a man whose takes can get you up to speed, like a little red Corvette Tunde. Ogunlana Tunde. You ready to podcast like it's 1999?
[00:00:43] Tunde Ogunlana: Only like it's 1999, actually. So, yes, let's do it.
[00:00:47] James Keys: All right. All right. Now, before we get started, if you enjoy the show, I ask that you subscribe and like the show on YouTube or your podcast app. Doing so really helps the show out. We're recording on October 13, 2026, and today we continue our Streaming between the Lines series and take a look at the documentary Theodore Roosevelt, which was released in 2022 and is currently available to stream on Netflix. The documentary, directed by Malcolm Venville, takes us through the life of Theodore Roosevelt, who was the 26th President of the United States and perhaps the first US President who tried to take an active role in trying to use the power of the federal government to give working Americans a fair shake or a square deal, so to speak, relative to the power of special interests and the wealthy and corporate titans that usually tried to slant everything to their favor, either directly through the government or by keeping the government out of the way so they could do whatever they wanted to do.
So, Tunde, what did you think about how Teddy Roosevelt in the documentary, how he's portrayed as a fighter for the common man, particularly taking on big business at a time when big business pretty much seemed to do whatever it wanted to do.
[00:01:54] Tunde Ogunlana: Yeah. And I think, you know, what hits me hardest about watching this documentary was exactly what you said watching it today in 2026, the naked corruption that Teddy Roosevelt dealt with and saw. And I think that, you know, I appreciate the documentary too, because, you know, Teddy Roosevelt wasn't a saint.
He's a pretty interesting guy himself. And so I think what he recognized, he didn't.
He wasn't out there wagging a finger saying, these guys are so bad and they're not pious like me or anything like that.
What he just recognized, I think he was the first person to recognize, or at least the first public figure that I know of to really publicly recognize the risk of this hyper capitalist appetite of the industrial age and that Gilded Age and their destructive nature. And I say that broadly because I know we'll get into later, maybe some of the physical destruction that he felt needed to be stopped. And that's when he created the national park system. But in the context of. I think where we're starting here is destruction of the society through corruption. You know what I mean?
[00:03:04] James Keys: Well, I mean, just the way that they want to operate, though, you know, like, one of the things that stood out to me was in the meatpacking.
In the meatpacking story, they talked about how first there's a story, a work of fiction that's written, talks about the horrors of the meatpacking industry.
And then, so Teddy Roosevelt sees this when he's president. Oh, he has his own investigators go look and do all these unannounced inspections and stuff like that, as, you know, to see what's going on. And they come back and it's even worse than in the fiction in terms of what they're doing with the meat. It's all on the floor has, you know, it's diseased, it's rancid. And then this stuff they're selling to people. And it was. It was. To me, one of the things that was dramatized in the documentary is he's sitting there with these titans of the meatpacking industry, and they're like, oh, if you're going to regulate us, it's going to. It's going to wipe out our whole industry. And basically, this is how these guys talk, these industrialists talk always is that, oh, if you put any restrictions or handcuffs on us, it's going to be the end of the world, and we're never going to be able to do anything anymore. And he just, you know, he just looked at them like, no, that's not going to be the case. We all know any thinking person knows that by making them operate a little more cleanly with a little more sanitation, you know, that it's not going to destroy the industry, but they'll play up. And we hear this all the time, oh, if you don't. If you don't let the corporations do what they want to do, it's just going to destroy the industry. If you don't let these guys just do whatever, like, oh, you can't put any regulation on them, then they won't be able to do what they're supposed to do. We hear this all the time. And the way he just was able to take that, a man coming from privilege himself and be like, nah, I know this game that you guys are trying to play and then set aside. So to me, his willingness to look in the face of. Of powerful corporate interests and, and basically call their bluff and say, look, you guys always are trying to create this type of crisis, this type of, oh, if you don't let me do whatever I say, if you don't just do whatever I say, everything's going to fall apart. Many people fall for that, many people in leadership fall for that. And so it's like, okay, you guys can do whatever you want. But Roosevelt was willing to say, well, no, you know, you're going to do it, you're going to hold yourself to, I'm going to hold you to a higher standard and then you try to make it work. And then lo and behold, guess what? They made it work. And people can go buy meat. At least until recently. Go buy meat. Being confident of where it's from and how it's been handled.
[00:05:26] Tunde Ogunlana: Yeah, no, I mean, you're right. And this to me is why this documentary was fascinating. Because also if you think about the historical arc of humanity, the industrial age is relatively new. It's 200 years old roughly because the early first quarter of the 1800s is when the steam engine was in invented. So that marked the beginning of the industrial age. And like any age, just like the information age, it didn't just automatically change everything overnight. Right. It took a generation or two for that stuff to start creeping in and beating out the agrarian age type of stuff. And so if you think about it, that period of the late 1800s, early 1900s was the first time humanity had seen this, like, this ability for in one generation, people like John D. Rockefeller or John Pierpont Morgan or Cornelius Vanderbilt to, to basically rival governments in their wealth and maybe even exceed them. And I think what's fascinating seeing this documentary in 2026 is that we now have historical context unlike they did back then. We now can see, okay, well we know why they created, you know, he, he did the trust busting, Teddy Roosevelt, why he broke up monopolies, why all this stuff and why again, it may be bookended in the 30s with FDR and the new Deal. And then like you said, the prosperity that we all have enjoyed in the United States since then, you know, the largest middle class by the 1950s, through an economic system which didn't change, it was generally the same capitalist America as it was 60, 70 years prior. And so that was a cultural change, but the system itself remain relatively the same. So that to me, James, is interesting about that period, that the rules of
[00:07:14] James Keys: the game change though too, you know,
[00:07:16] Tunde Ogunlana: but what I'm saying is it's not a whole like we didn't become Marxist. Right. We didn't go into some really different system like you're saying. The regulatory framework changed. And I think that's part of. I remember the show we did recently about power and about some of the research about when people are in power, how that, how that actually makes changes to the brain again, things we know now. So as you're talking about, about the past and about that period of Teddy Roosevelt and what he witnessed, I'm thinking about the present and as you put. Well, that today we're hearing similar things. Oh, well, you can't raise taxes. Elon Musk is worth a trillion dollars. If we tried to think outside the box, like creating a new tax system to try and confiscate some of that back to the people, which is part of the system of the United States. So let's not pretend it's not.
[00:08:06] James Keys: Then, yeah, John Rockefeller and JP Morgan would still be the richest people or their families would still be the richest people in the country if the system wasn't designed to refresh itself like that.
[00:08:17] Tunde Ogunlana: Yeah. And so, and so my point is, is that we're hearing the same arguments today and it's fascinating to me how well they still work, that we gotta feel sorry for Jeff Bezos. Yeah. And Zuckerberg and all these guys. We shouldn't touch their money. It's so important that they have this record levels of profit at the expenses.
[00:08:35] James Keys: Hold on. This is, this is perfect, Bezos. Hey, if you, if we let these Amazon workers go to the bathroom in their shift, it's going to destroy Amazon. We can't do that. Yeah, we heard then. Or you know, we didn't, but it's documented. Oh, if you, if you take the kids out of the factories, the factories are all going to close. If you only make people work 40 hours a week, then United States is just going to fall apart as an industrial power. Like all of these things, like the idea that if you don't give me exactly what I want, then everything is going to fall apart is the song of the capitalists, the industrialists. And I mean, they do it because it works. Because that's the thing that stood out to me in this about with Teddy Roosevelt, is that the JP Morgan, to the world, those guys are sharks. The way they rose to the top amongst all the other sharks in their industry is by being the baddest shark. And so oftentimes then when they're dealing with government officials, they're not dealing with other sharks, you know, they're dealing with, oh, you know, Either a well minded person who's not a shark, or they're dealing with somebody who just wants their back rubbed, which we'll get into the corruption part of it here in a second. And so Roosevelt though, was a shark on his own. And so he was able to meet them head on and say, okay, well you got this big company you're doing on this, why got this big government and this big framework here when I can keep you in line with it, you know, and so, and he was the again, what seems to be the first guy that looked at the government like that. And because those sharks looked at the government as either an obstacle that they needed to overcome or something they were going to appropriate and make a part of them getting bigger and badder and stronger.
[00:10:05] Tunde Ogunlana: Yeah, well, you know, it is very interesting you went down that road because they gave a good example in a documentary about the 1902, I think it was the Northern Railroad Security Trust. Oh yeah, yeah. And the busting up of that. And what's fascinating, Jamie, this is why, you know, I'm concerned for our fellow Americans in today's environment. And that's.
[00:10:23] James Keys: Are you going to explain the example?
[00:10:24] Tunde Ogunlana: Yeah, yeah, I will.
But it's also why I'm nihilistic about where we are because what happened was, you know, like you're saying that, that, that that trust was a monopoly. So JP Morgan controlled railroads, he controlled, you know, banks, he control, he was basically, he had the ecosystem. Kind of like when we talk about Jeff Bezos with owning a retail store, the grocery store, defense contractor that shoots missiles and rockets in the air. All this stuff, right? My kids, type 1 diabetes stuff comes in an Amazon box because Amazon is also in pharmacies. So we have, now we're back to a monopolistic environment today and we see that there's very, a lot of similarities to that period. But with JP Morgan, what happened was as Teddy Roosevelt began to, like you said, be aggressive towards people like him and saying, nah man, you're not doing this, he became aggressive back. And what began to happen was the formation of unions in the coal mines.
And Teddy Roosevelt, similar to a recent president we had that went on a picket line in an auto strike. But you know, Teddy Roosevelt seemed to be more serious about how he dealt with this behind the scenes than modern presidents. Teddy Roosevelt said that he was going to support.
[00:11:41] James Keys: You got to set it up. Because what ended up happening was the industrialists go to Teddy Roosevelt behind closed doors and be like, look, you got to send the army in to get to clear These strikers, we got scabs that'll come in, clear the strikers out of the way, you know, like, use the army. And so. And then. So then Teddy Roosevelt says to those industrialists, you know, go ahead. I just wanted to set that part up.
[00:12:02] Tunde Ogunlana: No, no. So I'll. I'll finish where you're going. One of the best comebacks he had was, you know what? We'll use the army and the federal government. Maybe I'll. Maybe I'll actually nationalize all of these coal mines, and we can make the miners to be federal employees. And of course, they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Right? And that's your point about.
That's your point about having a guy who's in the presidency that's also like a shark, right? Like a badass that won't be pushed around by industry.
And I mean, this is a good conversation that we're having for the audience, because think about it. It's a question like, so what is the role of government? Think about it. That literally happened, that industrialists who saw their employees trying to fight for better wages and ask just for a little bit of, you know, to be compensated for their labor in a better way so they could live in some kind of Tunde At that time, their. Their reaction was to go to the President, United States, and to say, let's use the army to put these American citizens down who are working for us.
[00:13:03] James Keys: And these are the wealthiest people in. In the world.
It's not like they don't have money that they couldn't pay the workers a fair amount. It's. It's the principle of it that in their mind, workers shouldn't. It would be a fair amount.
[00:13:14] Tunde Ogunlana: It would be similar to billionaires today buying their way into an administration, and then at that administration, creating a paramilitary unit, maybe with three letters like ICE will run around town to intimidate people.
And, you know, or even if you
[00:13:29] James Keys: were an industrial billionaire, trillionaire industrialist, and you're getting investigated by all these regulatory agencies, and then you buy your way into the administration and create this thing, you know, maybe government efficiency kind of under that guise, and then fire all the people that were regulating, investigating you under the guise of efficiency. I mean, it'd be kind of like that.
[00:13:51] Tunde Ogunlana: And you also destroy the agency that was buying $4 billion worth of food from American farmers, only to hear those farmers wonder why they can't sell food anymore. But that's a different show that was
[00:14:04] James Keys: inspecting the food and making sure that it wasn't.
Yeah, so. But.
[00:14:09] Tunde Ogunlana: But that's why I say it's a good question for us as Americans, right. This, this documentary getting back to it is is it brings those realities like no, some people will use the government and weaponize it against everybody else in society. Or and I, and this is where I can appreciate because I am an entrepreneur and I work in the capital markets. So from my world of the kind of growth crowd in Wall street, they feel like the government has been weaponized against the industrialists a lot of times but and is about confiscating from them. So this is an example where this is a democracy, right. And if, and if, and if those who are in the working class and you know, whether it's a coal miner back then or the Amazon driver today, if they don't get together collectively to bargain or to vote for their own interests, then we see the way that these things happen. And it's. And that's what I mean by us reading that article about power recently because once now that we know from scientific research and FMRI scans on the brain and all that that power actually changes the cognitive nature of a human brain, that people lose empathy and all that. That, that's the idea of creating a system like you said, that kind of refreshes this tree every so often because had we not done that, you're right, John Pierpont Morgan and Rockefeller's families might still be running the United States today.
And so do we want that or not?
[00:15:34] James Keys: That's the setup. That's the point. And so yeah if you don't have a, the system is no longer dynamic anymore. You know, like there's a reason why our system has historically and then, you know, we'll see if this can continue though has continually people coming up out of nowhere. It's because the winners of course the government is going to work towards trying to pull some of their winnings out to reinvest it back into the system society so that new people can come out of nowhere and create something, you know, the Bill Gates of the world don't exist in a society where resources aren't being put back in to educating the next generation and that's not a priority. You know, so we see that and otherwise it's just all going to be oh well, if you got it, if you've won it. I talk about the concept of forever winners, you know and a lot of times once people have won they want to be a forever winner and never have to continue to, to, to, to. They're not taking you out the game but just that you got to continue to engage in the system, you got to continue to be innovative and know if you want to keep growing, you know, and so, and that is helpful for the system, if that's what we're trying to look out for, is a system that actually can, can deliver prosperity and deliver it to more than just a few people.
Along those lines though, one of the things that was discussed in the documentary was how Roosevelt really pushed against corruption and real, I mean as a part of that, how rampant and just common corruption was amongst officials, you know, what public officials and you know, like the, you know, and this is like from law enforcement to government officials and so forth. And like we're living in a time now where it seems like corruption is increasing or at least becoming more brazen, like things that people used to try to seemingly do in private and kind of get away with people do in public now. So what do you make or what kind of what. Yeah, what do you make of what we, the way we saw Roosevelt in terms of his push against corruption and also just how kind of that was the status quo at the moment when he came into office and it was him deciding that he was going to try to make some, do something different with that.
[00:17:34] Tunde Ogunlana: Yeah, I think, you know, the biggest illusion, I think that we've been sold in our current era that we live in is that somehow our government and our system will self correct while it's taking millions of dollars from the corporations it's supposed to regulate.
And I think that's a big issue. Right. Like this idea that in the last 15, 16 years, legally money is considered speech.
So unlimited speech, like the First Amendment, we have now the ability since 2010 to have unlimited money in politics. And I think that you're, you're, you're one of the people in my life that has gotten me to appreciate the word incentives. Because you have always railed that basically if you want to know what's going on, just look at the incentives of the people. And I think about it, I mean, back then in Teddy Roosevelt's time, like you're saying the incentives were corruption, kickbacks, people and like you said, they do a good job. And for the audience just, you know, if you watch the documentary, they show how when he was police commissioner and he would go and investigate the police officers, just go randomly down the street, he saw police officers harassing people and getting bribes and all that stuff. And his thought was, how can the public trust our system if at the very bottom level the lowest public servant who is, and I don't mean lowest out of disrespect. But in terms of hierarchy, the lowest public servant is the one interacting like a police officer.
[00:19:12] James Keys: More importantly, that's the one that's the representative of the government that they interact with the most.
[00:19:16] Tunde Ogunlana: Correct. And so when you and I are growing up, we had, I remember our country had a lot of pride culturally because we would hear about banana republics, countries like Russia or Mexico, where if you get pulled over by a police officer, you might, you might want to have some cash on you because they're on the take right there at the ground level with the public.
And so we don't have that right. We get pulled over for a speeding ticket in America, you generally don't feel like you're going to get harassed to pay this guy money or go to jail right on the spot.
[00:19:46] James Keys: But in Teddy Roosevelt's time, that was the way things.
[00:19:48] Tunde Ogunlana: Correct. That's my point. And so I think, and that's why I started off with, as you were asking me the question, my answer was like, yeah, it's this illusion we've been sold culturally that, oh, don't worry about everything you're seeing on TV. Don't worry about the $400 million plane to a president. Don't worry about, like you said, the wealthiest people in the world, the wealthiest man in the world going into government and being a Koch president for five months and just making all of his problems going away. And somehow after being promised we were going to do certain things, we hit $40 trillion in debt and we were at 35 trillion when he got into government. So the idea is that, is that, yeah, these things won't self correct. I think that's the lesson from Teddy Roosevelt's era is someone's going to have to get in there and shake this up. Just like someone got in there and shook up the order that Teddy Roosevelt through FDR created. Right. We got here because bold men came in over the last 10, 15 years and smashed that system.
[00:20:45] James Keys: Yeah.
[00:20:46] Tunde Ogunlana: And so now the people that, you know that, that, that are the conservative ones are the ones that used to be seen as the ones that were, you know, I guess more radical.
And now they're trying to conserve the system and the people in charge are just the bold radical ones breaking everything. So we need another Teddy Roosevelt to come in and be the counterpoint to break this stuff.
[00:21:08] James Keys: Yeah. Actually what stood out to me was that Roosevelt was pushing against everything, the incentives.
What was lacking was a lack of disincentive to being corrupt.
Corruption. You always say money and power always find Each other. So a official of the government has a level of power. And so the natural order of things would be that money's gonna find that power because people want influence over power and so forth. So the natural order will be corruption unless something intervenes to interrupt that. And so what Teddy, the Roosevelt documentary really made clear to me is that Roosevelt himself, him as a person was the thing that interrupted that. It was not like there was some clamoring for the public from the public. The public was just trying to get along more or less and just make things do. And if they had an ally, they'd ask. But it wasn't like people were saying, hey, we won't vote for anyone who is corrupt. Just like now, where it's not like people are saying, I won't vote for a congressperson who likes to trade stocks while they're in office.
People aren't demanding that that stop happening. You know, it actually it seems like it takes a person who independently on their own character, you know, which really makes me concerned. But it takes a person who on. On their own character will be like, no, this is wrong. A conviction, this is wrong. We're not going to stand for this. And I'm gonna go blow up this system, so to speak, that everybody thinks it's okay because everybody who's in the system is just getting paid. So they're gonna. They like, they're not. Not incentivized to. To do it absent their own character. And so this really gets into the idea of, man, it would be really nice to stop having to stop electing people who either, oh, well, it's about this identity, or I'm afraid of this kind of person. I've been told that this, this person is going to eat my pet or like to stop making all these decisions as people. We the people based on these things that we fear or these things that we hate, which is how we're getting manipulated and actually try to elect people of character. You know, character. It seems to be the thing that's lacking that was present with Roosevelt. Why he took it upon himself to attack the culture of corruption, whether it be at the city level in New York or the state level, or at the federal government. I mean, he was so effective at going after corruption. The reason he became president was because in New York State, they wanted to get him out of the governorship. They were like, yo, man, this dude is messing up all of the. All the back scratching. Let's make him vice president. So that way vice president doesn't have a job.
He could get out of our hair and let us get back to scratching each other's back. And that's. Then the president gets shot, and then he becomes president. So it's crazy to me that the party, you know, his political party at the time is like, yeah, yeah, we got to get rid of this dude from. They're his own party from being the governor because he's too hard on the corruption, and then he ends up putting him in a spot where he ends up taking over the presidency. But it's not going to happen. Like you said, the norm seems to be that in any society, there will be corrupt individuals and corrupt intent that are trying to find each other with money and power. And you need people of character if you want to push back on that. If you don't. If it's not people of character who won't do it and don't want to do it, not because of the incentive structure, but because. And once you get people like that in place, you can put in disincentives in to not do it, but to actually turn the tide. You need people of character.
[00:24:42] Tunde Ogunlana: Yeah, no, it's true, man. I think that, you know, the sad part, I think, is that, you know, we're just gonna need to have a little more pain for enough people to collect the.
[00:24:54] James Keys: It seems that way. It seems that way.
[00:24:55] Tunde Ogunlana: Or.
[00:24:56] James Keys: I mean, you may have some money of character coming up, you know, that. That eventually can. Can, you know, like, it seems like you got to come with the sneak attack, though. You know, it's like, all right, you're a person of character, then you get in power, then you're like, okay, yeah, I'm gonna cut out all this. This BS that you guys have been doing. So, yeah, last thing I wanted to get to, man, is, is just kind of open it up for you. What else in the documentary stood out? You had mentioned earlier that you would want to say something about national parks. That was a big part of Roosevelt's legacy, you know. So what else stood out to you in this?
[00:25:22] Tunde Ogunlana: So I think the national parks thing stood out a lot, I think, you know, I found. I think everyone, and I'll just say it again, should watch this documentary. I think Roosevelt is a very interesting character.
You know, we didn't get into it in this discussion, but his few years that he spent in out west in states like Wyoming and Colorado and all that, especially in that period of the late 1800s, I think was a big.
Had a big influence on him. Not only on all the stuff we've already discussed in this discussion about how he saw the American public and his fight for the public.
But I think this is where he also fell in love with the country itself and with its vast beauty.
You know, the Rocky Mountains, the wildlife, things like that.
Yeah, all that. Yeah. And it's interesting, too, because he was out there. They talked in the documentary about his encounter with Native Americans back when we were still having legitimate Indian wars, when the United States government was at war with the Native Americans. So I think that all fed into his perspective of the man we saw as president.
But something else stuck out to me in the discussion of the national parks. And as I was doing a little bit of reading and research, one thing was the idea of ownership.
This is a part of American history that isn't discussed a lot, but America was founded as an experiment of the aristocracy from the colonies.
Remember that the king was the big dog with all the power and the money.
So there were a lot of colonists here who had a lot of money themselves who wanted to get away from this dominant guy and just have their own system where they could have this playground in this new world where they could have the women be subject to them. They got their slaves. They're driving the savages out of the land so they can have all this raw land for themselves and no need to share it with anyone else. So up until Roosevelt, there was no idea that the government was. Would own land on behalf of the American people.
And I found it fascinating that by the time he was done being President, there were 230 million acres of American land that was owned by the American people.
[00:27:29] James Keys: Which, just to make the point full circle, that would be land that the rich people couldn't buy.
If the government owns it, that's to their detriment, their deprivation. In their mind, they should be able to buy it all that, you know, think about property owners or the voters initially in this country.
[00:27:48] Tunde Ogunlana: Yeah. And think about all of us alive today that have enjoyed time at a national park, a state park, kind of this concept of there should be an area in our society that's still pristine and allows us to go see some nature. I mean, the example of, like, Central park in New York, you know, that. That even in that dense city, no developer can touch that area because the city collectively feels like, hey, we just want to have this park to go and get away a little bit, you know, see some trees and some swans and whatever. Whatever else in Central Park.
[00:28:18] James Keys: And a lot of them could be made by private interests if they. If that was opened up to them, you know, and so, yeah, it's deprivation of moneyed interest and power, you know.
[00:28:28] Tunde Ogunlana: Yeah. And so, and one of the examples, because I remember learning about this, James, about the buffalo and the example to me of why this is important and how industry plays into this, I was taught my whole life up until recently that the reason why the buffalo almost got extinct in the United States was because of our Indian wars. And we had to, you know, kill all these buffalo to make, you know, to stop the Native Americans from having a food source so that we could, you know, as Americans, beat them. I guess now the holes were poked in that over the years as I read other things about. Yeah, well, you know, Native Americans can eat other things like deer and elk and fish and rabbits and, you know, bison isn't the only thing.
So then I learned recently, actually watching a different documentary, that bison hides were the number one sought after material for making belts for steam engines during the industrial age of the middle to late 1800s in Europe.
So remember with the African slave trade, they would take the raw commodities from the colonies, send them back to get refined in Europe and sold into, you know, the other, other parts of the world and into other parts of Europe.
And so I wanted to.
Doing this part of the conversation made me think of that. And so I just wanted to look it up. It gives some real stats as to the importance of putting guardrails in place to unfettered industries. So in the early 1800s, there was an estimated 30 to 60 million American bison that roamed the North American plains.
They say primarily between post World War II. So between 1868 and 1883 is when most of the slaughtering happened. Tens of millions were systematically wiped out. Basically by the year 1969, 1900, there were fewer than 1,000 bison counted in the wild.
[00:30:16] James Keys: So all that post war, that was fascinating to me.
[00:30:18] Tunde Ogunlana: You said all that Civil War, Correct. Primarily. So that's fascinating to me that unfortunately, in a 40 year period, tens of millions of these things were killed. Now why says before electricity powered factories were powered by massive steam engines.
And again, they found that bison hides were much thicker and stronger and could resist the friction and all the stuff going on, going on in those machines, more so than cattle hides. So that's specifically why bisons were sought after.
And it says that if a factory had 100 machines, it needed miles of continuous high tension belting.
And so my point is just saying that, hey, because of this need for industry and the short term profits of those European industrialists and American hide, you know, hunters and man, this Whole supply chain of the buffalo hide that within a 40 year period, we ran the risk of extincting an animal that, you know, is part of the fabric of American culture, right? And we revere the bison today in the buffalo. So the idea is that I appreciate Teddy Roosevelt because he had that also that thought of why is it these guys, right, to take that away from the future of Americans to see that beauty.
They saw them strip mining the mountains and the beautiful lands to make railroads and to make room for, you know, mines and things like that. And so the thought was, hey, these guys are going to destroy the American landscape and some of these beautiful animals in a very short period of time for nothing but short term profit. So again, that's why I appreciate the idea of the national park, the idea of conservation and the idea of saving something for future generations. And so that, yeah, I appreciate you letting me get that up.
[00:32:04] James Keys: I would, I would say for me, the biggest thing is probably a broader point to what you just said, and that is that Roosevelt understood that, of, that, the, that the government, you know, what was. The government was a tool to be used, as you pointed out, you know, when the United States was founded, the property owners at that time understood that the government was a tool to be used to get things that they wanted or to set things up the way that they wanted, but the common person didn't.
And you could argue the common person still doesn't, more or less.
But Roosevelt understood that these political battles, while it may seem to be about this or may seem to be about that, it's about how the government's going to be used. Is it going to be used to cordon off areas and enrich the few or maintain the riches of the few, or to create a dynamic system that everybody can have a shot at thriving or at maintaining even, even the signature kind of square deal. If the idea that if you work an honest job and then you should get honest pay and be able to live a normal life, you know, the square deal being the predecessor to the New Deal, that that concept is like, hey, as the government, we're going to try to arrange the system in a way that, not that rich people can't get rich, rich people can still get rich, but that if you, you know, play by the rules, work hard, that you should be able to live a decent life. And that is one of the things that the government can be used for as well. And I think that generally speaking, people who, the, the, the, the, the oligarch class, or however you want to term them, the Industrialists, they understand the government as a tool to be used to get things that they want, but working people generally don't. Working people tend to just take whatever's fallen on their head and just be whatever the, the, the, the oligarch class or a lot of them, you know, not everybody. Whatever Art tells them that is, then like, okay, that's what it is. That's just the way it's going to be. Oh, no, if, if we, if they have to, to treat their workers fairly, then the whole system's going to collapse. Oh, no, we can't, we can't. We got to make sure that they don't have to treat their workers fairly then. So Roosevelt, because he came from means, but was a man of high character, was not like, basically he wouldn't fall for the banana in the tailpipe. Every time they tried to pull it on him, he would be like, no, no, no, we can do things. We can be fair. We can create a system that's fair to people using the government and you guys can still get yours, but we don't have to bend everything to your will or every time you, you're trying to make everybody afraid. So understanding that power of the government, I mean, and then, you know, his family member, you know, Franklin Roosevelt, took it to the next level and then created a system through the New Deal that creates the largest middle class in history of the world. Something that since, you know, the 1970s, interests have been working to take apart so that you can create these vast dynastic wealths. And I would say they've been very successful in what we see now, you know, and that this stuff isn't inevitable. It's about how the government is used or where, what, what battles the government's kept out of. Roosevelt understood that and was operating on the side that he was trying to help working people and to get a fair shake. And again, it's not about working people taking everything over. It's about getting a fair shake. So I mean, just the idea for that, and that's not a perfect man, not a perfect president or anything like that, but just the idea, I think, laid the groundwork, if people will pay attention and follow that, you can get there. You don't have to be, you know, a quote, unquote, socialist in order to try to fight for people getting a fair shake and to not allow moneyed interest to do whatever they want to do. There are a lot of ways to do it through the existing system that's there. So, and he set the groundwork for that. And, you know, like, FDR took it to another level. And we've seen it, you know, kind of did taken apart, but it can be put back together, so I think we can wrap from there. It's definitely a good documentary. Check it out. You know, a lot of context on the history of the country and where things have been, because a lot of times that can give you insight on where things may go or what options may be available to take things, what direction to take things. So we appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call Like I See it, subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it, tell us what you think, send it to a friend. Till next time. I'm James Keys.
[00:35:52] Tunde Ogunlana: I'm Tunde and Lana.
[00:35:53] James Keys: All right, we'll talk soon.
