Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello, welcome. Call It Like I See it presented by Disruption. Now, I'm James Keys. And in this episode of Call It Like I See it, we're going to discuss the current state of American conservatism, looking at both its historical roots and also what the right has evolved into over the past decade or so.
And later on, we're going to take a look at the reporting on Elon Musk's neuralink venture that's about to start. Testing the use of implanted microchips in people's brains and using them to operate real world like external devices.
Joining me today is a man who longs for the old times with when people wore pajamas and lived life slow. Tunde. Ogon. Lana Tunde, are you ready to knock them out the box today?
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Yes, sir.
[00:01:04] Speaker A: All right. All right, now we're recording this. On January 24, 2022, and for as far back as December 2019, Tunde and I have talked about how we think that political labels in the United States today are operating more like verbal gang signs, which is a term we coined, than a true reflection of one's beliefs and their principles.
And so we found a recent article by noted conservative David Brooks very interesting because along with laying out key points of the basis or the bases of the conservative philosophical tradition, Brooks essentially argues that even though modern Republicans continue to identify themselves as conservatives and tout conservatism, much of what they do is the opposite of traditional conservative principles. And those are his words.
So, Tunde, I wanna give you a lot of latitude here as we get started. What stood out in this piece by again, conservative political and cultural commentator David Brooks entitled what Happened to American Conservatism?
[00:02:09] Speaker B: Well, you know, it's dangerous when you start giving me too much latitude.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: So.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: Let'S just, let's just, you know, let me make sure I keep my gu guardrails on here.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Fingers crossed.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: Yeah, Keep me within a certain channel of focus here.
I'll be taking us back to the Pharaohs and you know.
[00:02:28] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:02:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll find a way to bring in the Jurassic Period, the whole thing, man, if you really let me go. No, but, no, but listen, as you so eloquently led us into this conversation here, what a great article and what a great explanation I thought of what the true conservative principles, I guess, from the founding of people like Edmund Burke, the historical conservatives who really brought the modern, I guess, conservative ideology. And primarily, I would say culturally for us British and American politics.
Because I should say that just like liberals, conservatives globally aren't all the Same.
And there's different types of conservatives and conservative politicians in different parts of the world. So I would say the type of conservatism for this conversation is usually we consider an offspring of the British cultural conservatism that really probably took its strongest hold during the Victorian age and into the 20th century.
So getting, you know, staying on that note, though, and what he does a great job is focusing on the foundations of both liberalism and conservatism as political ideologies of thought for large societies. Let me just say it like that. And what I would say is Europe prior to, let's say the 1700s looked a lot like the Middle east looks today when we look at, or maybe how certain parts of Africa looked in the 90s when you had the genocide of the rwandans in the 90s. And what I mean is Europe was no different. They were just infighting constantly. A lot of Americans don't appreciate that most of the early immigrants from Europe to the United states prior to 1900 were religious refugees.
So what happened is people like Edmund Burke and others who are famous as the kind of founders of conservative thought from a political standpoint were the ones who began to see, okay, we need to organize. If we're going to organize societies in other ways, that people aren't going to knife each other to death every generation, literally, then we need to have a way to have competing ideas that can be debated and reasoned. And I would argue that the whole United States, through our revolution and the great documents, the Founding Fathers, like the Constitution, is an experiment in that that.
[00:05:02] Speaker A: I would say you got to go back a little further, though, and what Burke talks about, he does, he specifically mentions the 1700s, 1800s, in this time period, and he talks about the French Revolution and that being a more liberal type of approach.
It goes in, we put it in our modern terms, but you can look at it like this. The French Revolution, but that was the idea that reason men, you know, men could use reason and they could solve their problems basically with reason. Whereas the conservatives were a little more skeptical on whether reason alone, you know, with the Edmund Burke and so forth, whether reason alone could be used to build functioning societies. Both of them, though, were trying to solve the problem, like you point out of this type tribalism, where people couldn't solve problems without wars all the time. And so people are. All the different tribes are fighting all the time, all the different groups are fighting all the time in massacres and so forth. So they both start out trying to solve that problem. And it's different thought Processes on how can. Can people in a society share power without, like, you, like you so eloquently put it, knifing each other to death every generation. And so in a sense, I see it almost like the, the, the liberals and you know, liberal in this context, liberty. Liberals are pushing against this entrenched authority, monarchs, religious fundamentalism, you know, where the, the church just runs everything by decree and so forth. But that, that's pushing liberty. They come in and one thing that stands out to me about that is like they're, they want change immediate. And I think managing change is the key distinction you have between as what we call liberals and what we call conservatives and that liberals want change immediately. The, the French Revolution, they bring out the guillotine. You know, they're like, look, leaders got to go cut his head off. Boom. And then, you know, whatever change that needs to happen, let's just make it happen right away. Whereas the conservatives were more skeptical of that, you know, and saying, well, hold on, you know, you have to change is, is necessary, but you have to manage how fast the change comes. Because too much change too fast is just as disruptive as what we're trying to replace. And so ultimately you have that divide there where like cult. I see the conservatism that evolved out of that is almost a compromise between the liberal mindset that wanted liberty, give me liberty or give me death, you know, like need it right now, you know, needed it yesterday. And the entrenched power, so to speak, they're saying, all right, you know, I see the tide might be turning against us. I'm not really going to let it go willingly. But also to maintain order, you have to have. It has to be. It's almost what people call now incrementalist. You know, it's almost. They're saying the change needs to be a little more incremental. And, and it can't. You can't just up in society on people's whims, even if it's quote unquote rational, you know. And so I think that how to manage change is kind of the defining characteristic is what you're seeing with the conservatism in that sense and conservatism saying you gotta manage, you have to be much more deliberate and have more deference towards what already is. Because a lot of times what already is is contemplating a lot of things that we may not think about if we try to just create something from scratch.
[00:08:07] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think where that comes from was Burke identified the world as an extremely complex place and One thing that stood out to me, which I thought was a very good quality of conservative thought and being, is that the idea of one of the founding conservative principles is humility and modesty, especially in the face of complexity. And it's this humility to acknowledge that things are complex enough that I can't know everything.
And that's why, like you're saying, the conviction is that the social, that social change should be steady but cautious and incremental because we can't predict too far out, because things are so complex, if we make changes fast, we may not be able to handle the outcome or the consequence.
[00:08:57] Speaker A: It's the limit of our rationalism. Like we can't plan for all these things that we just can't contemplate all of them.
[00:09:04] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's why to me, it was a great read because, you know, I was like that. That sums up a lot of how I see the world, which, you know, I never thought of myself as an arch conservative, but I'd be proud to carry this mantle to say that, you know, I'm reserved and I'm modest and not to have too much radical change too quickly, too often, you know, that that meets actually my personality. And it's interesting point you make. I just want to highlighted about the Founding Fathers because there's this interesting dance that we play here in the United States in our American culture.
Because you're right in one way, the Founding Fathers and the whole kind of revolutionary period was very radical and not conservative just on what it was. Like, let's just throw off the king, let's just do this whole new experiment and we don't even know how it's going to play out.
[00:09:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: And like you said, but there's spectrums. Right. Because you know, you had people like Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, who are much more aggressive in their writings and their rhetoric. And I would say they were pretty much liberals at that point. And then you had others who were still more conservative and saying, hey guys, you guys can't go nuts. And I would say the true conservatives in the colonies might have been the people that still. Like, for example, there was 14 colonies, but we generally talk about 13 because the 14th being Florida. The governor sided and wanted to stay with Britain.
He would have been a real conservative back then, Right?
[00:10:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:34] Speaker B: And now you sign a treaty and.
[00:10:36] Speaker A: Then separate in 20 years. Over 20 years, slowly.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Cause what happened is, and just to explain that real quick, Britain then sold Florida to Spain and then we got it from Spain. That explains all that. But the Idea is that, is that in different times, conservatives and liberals look different. Right. Because not a lot of people are sitting there calling a Founding Fathers liberal today, in today's definition.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Well, but I mean, they were unquestionably liberal. I mean, and that's one of the Principles of the U.S. constitution and declaration of Independence are, as pointed out by Brooks in this article, they're fundamentally liberal things. They're based on liberty and individual liberty, not the state having all the power. It's a, it's a government of limited power, so to speak. But, and that leads me to one of the things I wanted to ask you, because he actually talks about some of the key distinctions in American conservatism and kind of the inherent conflict it embodies, in part because the key, the first key distinction he points out is that conservatives in America, in the United States are set up to protect a liberal system. You know, a system where there is no entrenched power, where power has to be shared, power has to be transitioned routinely all the time. And so the status quo, so to speak, changes all the time. And so a true conservative in this sense is protecting a system that is a liberal system, the US Constitution, so to speak, which creates a tension in it because there's so much dynamism in the US Constitution where change can happen, change can happen fast. You know, Congress can pass a law, boom, that can be a lot of change, that can be difficult for society to deal with.
And you know, like, that creates a tension, basically, so to speak, for someone who's more conservative minded in that sense.
[00:12:26] Speaker B: Yep. And that's where I think the idea of also sentiments come in. And we learned that, I mean, in recent years, right. Laws are only as good as how people want to actually as a society. Right. In total follow them and, and all that. And so what conservatives I think really look to as well as kind of, let me put it this way, let me rephrase that, because conservatives believe that reason alone isn't enough to really govern and help a society maintain itself. Then you have things like norms and sentiments, which are really cultural nuances that are passed down through the generations.
And he gives a good example.
[00:13:08] Speaker A: Explicitly want are very defensive of these. They're very protective of these things. Yeah.
[00:13:13] Speaker B: And so he gives a good example, which is a very simple one that we can all relate to in the article. He says, you don't have to tell a British person when they're at a bus stop to form a queue, you know, a line. And I thought about it because I was like, you know, we're similar culture here in the US you're right. If people are just gathering and waiting for something, sometimes you'll see they'll just naturally form a line without having to really talk to each other about it. And I would say that's something that's not like eating or going to the bathroom. That is an instinctual thing that you're born with, that's passed down. That is a cultural thing. Because I'm sure there's a lot of societies where they don't, you know, people standing around won't get in the line. But that's something. That's an example. And I think that's where we have attention in America as well when it comes to things like some of our racial and cultural history.
Because, and this is the problem too, when many Americans to this day still don't want to have these open discussions about our history, because you can't deny the fact that the country was founded in a certain way where certain people were allowed to participate, certain people weren't.
Then up until about 50 years ago, that changed naturally, to the point that we're saying if a conservative is saying, if a conservative mindset is more comfortable with slow, incremental change, we need to recognize, and it's not a good or bad either side. It's just this is the way it is. And if we were more honest as a nation with ourselves, we probably could get through this easier. When you're talking about something as sensitive, let's say, as Jim Crow segregation, for example, that's where people like you and I were legally restricted from participating in the full American society at one point in this country, up until 1965, legally and maybe 1968, buying homes with the Fair Housing Act.
So for people like you and I, change couldn't come quick enough. Right. That was all the protests in the street and the civil rights movement and all that. But then you have this whole other part of the country where that change was too fast for them.
[00:15:12] Speaker A: Well, but then there also wasn't an agreement that change should happen. You have a lot of reactionary in there, too, so you can't.
[00:15:16] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, but that's.
[00:15:17] Speaker A: The conservative in that situation would recognize the change that was coming and maybe say that it was too fast. Like which Martin Luther King talked about that in terms of, oh, you know, like he would call them the white moderates that would be sympathetic to his cause, but saying, oh, you're moving too fast, though. And that was that, that tension there. And I think actually that is the the what you point to is the biggest limitation, I think, of the conservative approach is that by giving deference to the past, things that are always already in place aren't already in place all the time for a good reason.
Sometimes they're in place for a bad reason, sometimes they're in place for a non reason, so to speak. It was just the way things happened. And so deference. A lot of times I see this with legal precedent. Legal precedent is a conservative type of approach to law in that sense, where what that means basically is that decisions in court are guided by existing decisions, and particularly there's a hierarchy of the court system and all that. But why we all look to the US Supreme Court as the top court, but all the other courts implement law and they look to rulings that have already happened to then guide their decision. And the point of that is to have law reliably administered. People should be able to guess or know in advance what's going to happen based on what's already happened. And so with precedent you have that. But if the precedent is bad, you know, if you have Plessy v. Ferguson as precedent, then which is the same, separate but equal is fine. You know, at the end, at the end of the 18th century, or, excuse me, at the end of the 19th century, then what ends up happening with that is that you will end up giving deference to that, even though that is an inherently unfair and unjust decision.
And there's no way to really, really get out of that cycle unless you're willing and able to take a fresh look. And sometimes, like you said, when there are things that are happening that are unjust and we consider ourselves a just society, the change, who's to say that the change has to happen slow? In the same way, who's to say the change has to happen fast? It's a difficult question to have. And so the default mindset of always giving deference to the past, I think puts you in a position where you can be led astray sometimes, where you're defending and protecting things that don't merit defense and protection, but you're doing it for the sake of comfort. And it's oftentimes for the sake of comfort for the person who's not affected by it directly.
[00:17:47] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think it's a good way to put it because what I was thinking in my head was really a sense of rigidity. But I think the need for the comfort and those who aren't affected by some of these things just creates that natural rigidity against any change.
And another thing I want to point out, which I think, you know, I'd like to get your thoughts on, is then, you know, because when we're talking about BURKE and the 17, 1800s, like we talked about earlier, that was still the influence of the British conservative culture on the American culture. I think by the 20th century, let's say by the middle, by the 50s and going into the 60s, we had then enough time for a true American conservative culture to begin. And I'll talk about people like William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, kind of the stars of the conservative movement in the middle of the 20th century.
And maybe let's discuss kind of how that's a little bit different, because to me, that's where things like communism and the idea. Because remember, Burke and what Brooks points out is the original folks like Burke didn't really talk about government that much in discussing conservatism.
And now our culture is generally. Conservatives tend to be more apprehensive of central government and authority rule.
[00:19:08] Speaker A: And that's because of those philosophical tenets. Though if you're going to give more deference to local traditions, established customs and so forth, then there is a risk. And this actually, I think, is correctly identified. There is a risk with government fiat in ushering in major change. Like, you can end up. Intentions don't solve problems. And so the issue a lot of times you have with people with sweeping change, again, there are circumstances when sweeping change is necessary. You know, when. When it comes to the 13th Amendment, it's necessary. You know, like. But ultimately, if the government centrally decides, okay, we want to accomplish A and A is very, you know, we want to eliminate poverty. How they actually do that, though, there's unintended consequences with everything there are things won't work out the way that they think they. That the planners, the central planners oftentimes think they do. Housing projects are a great example of this. Those weren't set up to screw people over, but it ends up, you know, and practice and ended up creating a situation where. Where poverty stacked on top of poverty created just areas where it wasn't conducive to growing in that sense. And so. And that wasn't the intention. But ultimately, you can't just look at, okay, I'm gonna solve the problem. And therefore, because my intentions are good, I'm good, whatever I end up doing, it'll work out better than what it already is. A lot of times what we see happening when it's all centralized planning is that you don't get the results that you want because. And this goes back to reason can only do so much. Like the existing structures are in place because of a wisdom that has been learned over generations. A lot of times, just again, not always. How do you tell the difference between the existing structures that are in place that are helping us and the ones that are holding us back or that are antithetical to the values that we say we have?
[00:21:01] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think it's interesting because the American spin, or I wouldn't say spin, let me put it this way, the American focus on the central state as the enemy is very interesting and actually comes from a very real place. Because if you look at, like I said, William F. Buckley, I think he first wrote his newsletter in 1954.
And if you think about the Second World War, you had Italy, Russia, the Nazis, Japan, that were all authoritarian states and really were the first experiments in state run socialism.
Fascism is something that's new that Mussolini started in the 20s in Italy.
And again we're coming off again this history of people. How do you organize large societies? And Italy was just a country founded in 1870. Before that it was the city states where Florence would be battling against Venice and the other one would be battling against this France. Think about it, had Napoleon after the French Revolution and that was only 50 years before, 70 years before the Second World War, you had Russia with the czars, and then the Lenin and the Bolsheviks and then you had China and Mao. And Mao was really a response to the British occupation in the late 1800s. So what happens is in response to how things were, certain large nations just chose to do exactly what you said. They just were like, let me rip this band aid off. Let's kill the czars, let's kill the French king, let's kill all these people that were the establishment all these hundreds of years and let's just try this new thing. And I think we've all seen none of it really worked that well for those populations. You know, like you're talking about the Russians, Stalin starving 20 million people, trying to do some re engineering.
[00:22:57] Speaker A: I mean you look at the French tunde, look at the French, kill the king, kill King Louis and then Napoleon emerges a few years later. Like they end up right back and.
[00:23:05] Speaker B: They kick in out after a while they hated him. And then like that's what I mean, Mao didn't end too well.
[00:23:10] Speaker A: But what I'm saying though is that when they kicked out, when they killed the king, the goal wasn't to have another dictator. The goal was to then create a society with, with, with liberty. But because it happened so quickly, they the society wasn't able to adjust and adapt new norms to that would allow liberty to survive and thrive. And so ultimately, because it went right back to a dictatorship.
[00:23:32] Speaker B: And that's what I'm saying is that it's interesting that American conservatism, because of the fear of that type of aggressive action from the state that we saw in the middle of 20th century and other countries, began kind of hyper focused on this idea of centralized power and really went back to like the Federalist Papers and people like Jefferson before he became president, to really embrace the idea of decentralized power and decentralized government, which actually I support.
[00:24:03] Speaker A: I think that's the distinction that allowed the Americans after the American Revolution to create a system that a strong man couldn't just take over.
It was the decentralization that they didn't allow there to be too much power in any one place. You had the President, you had the Congress, you had, you know, you had three branches of government on the federal level. And then the states still had a ton of power.
So ultimately we are.
That type of setup basically avoided the problems that the French fell into right after they get rid of the king and so forth. Because the Americans did a similar thing and the king wasn't there, but they threw off the yoke of an existing structure and had to create a new structure. But because of the way they did it with the lack of central authority, it was something that was able to survive. At least that's part of the reason why that we can as we can.
[00:24:55] Speaker B: You know, it's cool, we did Brexit like 150 or 250 years before, you know, people made up that term now. But you know what's interesting though, because it got me thinking when he said, I started thinking about George Washington and I thought about the humility and what a great example. I mean, I don't know George Washington personally, whether he would say he's a conservative or not, but the fact that he could have followed the avenue of King George and been anointed, some people did want to make him the King of America, of the United States. And he said, no, I'm stepping down after the second term. He showed that kind of deference and that humility as a leader to say, this isn't about me, this is bigger than me. And I think that's where to me, it's just interesting after I read this, such a eloquent way of thinking, the kind of Burkean way of conservatism and all this and even some of the Milton Friedman and Buckley stuff. And I just feel like. And that's why, like we said about the gang signs, I just feel like a lot of people that call themselves conservative today don't behave this way. And it's just very interesting to watch. Like, we're talking about decentralized power, but then the modern American conservative wants to centralize power and have everything fealty to one or a few leaders. And there's no such thing as states rights. You got states doing other states about how they dealt with elections and all that. And it is interesting to me to watch all of this, especially after reading this article.
[00:26:27] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I mean, and that's. The author is pushing back basically against the direction that he believes that the conservative, quote, unquote, is moving.
And I mean, like, I was gonna actually ask you about that. Like, he actually said, the author Brooks said that he thought that Trumpism and the modern GOP is actually antithetical to conservatism and pointed, you know, the. What was it? The least conservative statement of all time happens to be one of your favorite quotes. What was that again?
[00:26:58] Speaker B: I alone can fix it.
[00:26:59] Speaker A: Yeah. Which again, if you look back to the whole thing of deference to existing things and that reason and thought process can only get you so far, I alone can fix it is the opposite of all those. So it was interesting that he cited that I thought of you when I read that.
[00:27:15] Speaker B: I told that to my 10 year old when we were working on his bike and all he did was laugh at me.
[00:27:20] Speaker A: So, you know. But. So now what was your office. But what was your, you know, what did you take away from that?
[00:27:27] Speaker B: From. Sorry, what?
[00:27:28] Speaker A: Well, just what he was leading into. Just saying that the direction that the modern GOP is is equal to a lot of things that can serve.
[00:27:37] Speaker B: This is the tough part for someone like me, and this is the difficult part because I don't like, you know, I don't ever want to appear to be partisan and because I do think that, like you and I have said it many times in this show, I mean, the world would suck with only Democrats in charge, and it would suck with only Republicans in charge. I mean, you do need a healthy liberal and conservative wing of a national political situation to make sure that there's the good tension on both sides. Like you're saying the progressives want to move too fast. You need the conservatives tugging on their coattail a bit, saying slow down. And when the conservatives want to look in the rearview mirror, you got to have someone Tapping on their shoulder, reminding them that there's progress and things change and all that. So to have moderate leaders on both sides would be beneficial. Now. You're right. I mean, what we've seen has been, I think what the founders, as well as pretty much every American, at least national politician I've ever seen has worked hard to go against, which is, first of all, I used to think Americans made fun of what we called banana republics and Eastern European bloc countries that had this kind of thing that you got the picture of the guy like Kim Jong Il in every house, you're fealty to the one man, the one leader. It's all about the loyalty. And if you're not loyal, you're out. And if you question the leader, you're out. I didn't know that this many and this high percentage of Americans would embrace this. It's interesting to me to watch it. And I agree. This isn't conservatism and none of what I'm seeing is conservative. I'll take and I'll steal your term and I'll pass it back to you. What I see is radical.
The current Republican party and the GOP now in 2022, I'm not even going to say in 2015, I'll say now.
Reminds me of hippies and the left in the 60s.
They want to blow stuff up, they want to disrupt, just like the Democrat. You know, in terms of the real fringes are the ones that stormed the 1968 convention. That reminds me of the storming of the Capitol. You know, there's this everything emotional and we just got to if kind of like we talked about offline, like the Communists in Russia 100 years ago.
They knew that they weren't going to win with their ideas politically. So what they do, they just burned it down and killed all the czars. And I feel like that's what we're dealing with today. We're dealing with people that have given up trying to have a political debate with their opponents, have no respect for other views. At least the people in leadership right now in that party and will just run roughshod and aren't offering governing solutions, just offering rhetoric like CRT and Dr. Seuss and, you know, every other outrage thing that can pick emotions.
[00:30:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think you're. You put a lot in there.
[00:30:28] Speaker B: I know. On purpose.
[00:30:29] Speaker A: And so I mean, I think.
[00:30:30] Speaker B: Get it out.
[00:30:32] Speaker A: The.
I think part of the problem we have is that we equate Democrat with liberal and Republican with conservative.
[00:30:40] Speaker B: I agree.
[00:30:41] Speaker A: And that gives people Cover for not being actually what they are. Like, I look at someone like Joe Manchin and Joe Manchin's clearly a conservative and that's fine. Like I said. Yeah, he's actually saying that isn't what.
[00:30:51] Speaker B: The Republican Party should do, which is challenging the Democrats in a legislation.
[00:30:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:56] Speaker B: Like on message.
[00:30:57] Speaker A: Just because we can't let you get an advantage. But yeah, I would say this. The, like, having you said you ultimately ended in the right place when you said that you need healthy governance, requires people that want to move things forward and maybe are always dreaming up new ideas. What can we do here? What can we do there? And then you also need the person who's saying, oh, I don't know if we should do that. I don't know. Like that may be a little too much and really vetting it and check like, is this your idea? Even past mustard, you know, like, why are you doing it this way? Why are you doing it that way? We need both. Because if you have just one, you either will. Won't be able to get out of your way and adopt to new situation, adapt to new situations. Excuse me. And be able to meet new challenges as they come forward with new ideas, or you'll be lurching from point to point, always trying to put out this fire, put out that fire without regard for the way, Any regard for the way things are done and the way that may help things or may. That may. That may serve purposes. And so you need both. And so what we have right now, I think, is because there's. It seems like there's just a tantrum being thrown on the right. You know, like, it's just. They don't, they aren't trying to persuade the majority of the country that their way is the right way anymore. It's very insular. It's just. We're just talking to each other. We're just talking to each other. We're not trying to go out and say, hey, what we're doing is best because this and this and this and this is just. Those other guys are bad. Those other guys are bad, whatever term you want to use to signal that they're bad socialists or, you know, whatever. But those other guys are bad. And that's what we, you know, we're just going to talk to each other. They're not trying to persuade, you know, like the persuasion part, and then they're not really willing to share power.
You know, if the other side is in power, it's illegitimate by definition because the other side's in power. Is Illegitimate. And so those two things, like that's a departure from what you can term as. Like, as you pointed out, that's not slow and incremental change in terms of whatever we're doing in society. That's a very radical approach to take. And saying we need to over. If the other side is illegitimate, the only answer is to overthrow.
And so if that's the case, then.
[00:32:58] Speaker B: You'Re not storming the capital is your only.
[00:33:00] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:33:01] Speaker B: When you're, when you're being told that things are stolen.
[00:33:03] Speaker A: And what you said is that's radical behavior, you know, So I agree with him that what's happened here is there's been a march to extreme, a march to a fringe that we really see in the leadership. I don't think the rank and file necessarily are banging that drum, but I do think they run the risk if they are uncritical as far as uncritically viewing what's happening with the leadership and in the media circles, that they may be led along on a road basically. That is not a conservative approach to anything. And that they may end up like ultimately supporting the radical, where they're like, oh, how did I get here?
I thought I was supporting status quo, keeping things close to the vest and so forth. So I think we run a real risk because the people who are pushing this radical stuff aren't coming out and saying, hey, let's be radical, let's blow everything up. They're saying, no, no, I'm conservative. You know, like, I'm all about conservative. And then that's what they say they are.
[00:34:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:01] Speaker A: Then they get out and start talking about blowing stuff up and saying, we got to get rid of all this.
[00:34:04] Speaker B: Stuff and they behave radically. No, it's, it's interesting and let me say this.
[00:34:08] Speaker A: So what it reminds me of is a wolf in sheep's clothes, basically. It's like you're telling all the people that are actually conservative that you're conservative in order to push something that's not conservative.
[00:34:18] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think one thing I wanted to quote out of Brooks's article, he says here, conservatism's profound insight is that it's impossible to build a healthy society strictly on the principle of self interest.
When I read that, I was like, damn, that's right up my alley.
And again, like, seriously, like, right, that is a very, to me, good way to look at. So you can't build everything just thinking about yourself. Even like a marriage. How are you going to have a good marriage with two people? Imagine now you Got a big society. And again, like you said, so then when people begin to embrace, a leader says, I alone can fix it. And if you're not loyal and if you don't, you know, all this, it becomes really a self interest way of managing things.
[00:35:05] Speaker A: Number one, you better be careful, Tunde, because that quote stood out to me as well. But more so because of American conservatism. Embrace its embrace of capitalism to the extent that it does. Because capitalism is in large part set up about doing an economic system based almost entirely on self interest.
[00:35:24] Speaker B: So yeah, be careful, that's a longer discussion because there is something to be said about the creative destruction of American capitalism.
So that, that is an interesting way to look at how economics can be seen through, you know, this kind of lenses of these, of these political ideologies.
[00:35:42] Speaker A: The phrasing was build a society.
And so, you know, I'm just saying like there's political self interest, but there's also economic self interest. So. But I don't want. That's a tangent.
[00:35:50] Speaker B: Well, but I think also because remember you can have like we've had in like certain European countries you can have, or Australia or Canada, you can have a capitalist country that still has the objective that we're not going to let everyone fall through the cracks and have some sort of, you know, breaking out.
[00:36:04] Speaker A: Correct. What that really is, I mean, so you, you were able to quickly and.
[00:36:06] Speaker B: Succinctly on that one man.
[00:36:09] Speaker A: You know, because what it is basically is that that means that that is a condemnation of unrestricted, unregulated capitalism. Correct. But I tell you this, the conservative, American conservative has leaned more towards that over the past 50 years though. So I mean it still creates, like I said, that's one of the tensions. And this is mentioned, but that's part of that, this is mentioned in Brooks's piece as well. Just that's one of the other areas of tension that exist with the American conservatism is the embrace, the full on embrace of just free marketing capitalism without much reservation. You know, where it's like, okay, well this stuff is good, but you know, that doesn't mean it has to be completely, you know, like completely unrestrained and whatever. So it's interesting stuff though. I mean a lot of these things, because they're thought exercises, taking absolutes from them in any direction is very dangerous.
[00:36:56] Speaker B: Yeah, no, you're right. And you know, for me I just want to end on Burke's talking of partnership. I thought that was kind of beautiful. And he says, you know, a partnership basically that A society, we're all partners. And he says, partnership in all art, every virtue, all perfection, as the ends of such partnership cannot be obtained in many generations. It becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. And I thought, what an interesting way to describe any big society. Right. And I think that's where we have some of our tensions today, when he talks about a partnership between those who are dead. And that's when we talk about our history and our past and like we're seeing now these fights. What is America's history? Are we gonna talk about things like slavery and Jim Crow segregation, or are we not? And are we gonna act like that.
[00:37:48] Speaker A: Stuff happens, but that again, goes back to comfort. Are we not.
It makes some people uncomfortable to talk about that.
[00:37:53] Speaker B: And are we gonna talk about climate change and things for the partnership with the future, those who aren't born yet and things like that?
[00:38:01] Speaker A: You know what I thought of, by the way, when you said, when they. When he wrote that was that it was a conservative movement that ended up creating national parks and all that.
Started as a conservative.
[00:38:13] Speaker B: The idea of conserving. Yeah. I mean, people don't realize Richard Nixon.
[00:38:16] Speaker A: Environmentalism started as a conservative thing, but then when it ran afoul of industry, that got Teddy Roosevelt throwing out the party. One of the things.
[00:38:25] Speaker B: Well, but also. And that's what I was gonna say, that Nixon was the one that penned the EPA into law.
And again, the why. Why? Because we were polluting the rivers and stre.
And I think that's your point. The word conservatism has the word conserve in it for a reason. And it's incremental change. So that goes back to like you said about gang signs. It's no longer about being a liberal conservative. It's on the red or blue team.
Literally, it's Crips or Bloods.
[00:38:52] Speaker A: No, and that was the point of the original discussion we had. And that was back. That was episode eight and we're in 120something now. But that was the original point then, is that we were like. The terminology that people were using to describe people was not reflective of their principles. It was just. And the way people would self describe. And so it's helpful that we actually talk about what something is supposed to stand for now. And so as opposed to just saying that, hey, you're not saying things that actually stand for what you mean.
In this instance, it was about what does being a conservative really mean? And so it was interesting to read that. We definitely recommend the article something to read because it goes into it in much more detail than we did on the specifics. But I do want to.
[00:39:34] Speaker B: I'm just smiling because if anyone does go back, and I love the plug for our eighth episode because we do have a big library. Just excuse our audio. We're much more professional.
Don't send them that far back. Just send them back to about.
Don't go past 60, go 60. And after.
We're much more professional, no customers.
[00:39:54] Speaker A: So I'll tell you this. Well, no, from that I think we can move on for this.
There was a second piece we wanted to discuss today and that is about putting microchips in people's brain, which seems.
[00:40:05] Speaker B: To go from one extreme to another.
[00:40:07] Speaker A: It seems to be like a nightmare that's happened on many different sci fi novels and movies and so forth. But apparently it's coming to reality. So Elon Musk's company or his venture, the neuralink is they're preparing clinical trials apparently for implanting microchips in people's brains and then using. Having the brain signals, you know, brain has electrical signals and using those signals from the brain to then operate items in the real world that you may be sitting in front of a computer screen and it can control the computer screen or conceivably you could have a prosthetic leg on and it can control the leg. I mean, so the implications of this are pretty broad. But obviously what could go wrong? Like there's a lot of things that could happen in a way that would be in our worst nightmares as well. So what was your thought or takeaway from seeing this, that this is happening now?
[00:41:02] Speaker B: You know, it's funny, I didn't think of this until now because we just got done talking in the first half of the show. I was. This is a pretty non conservative topic because this ain't incremental change.
[00:41:11] Speaker A: This ain't incremental change. This is not.
[00:41:14] Speaker B: I'm like, yeah, this is why we've got some tension in our society too. You're right, because technology is not moving incrementally. It's moving at a lightning speed.
[00:41:23] Speaker A: But see, here's the, this is the tension though, because this is one of the tensions, the economic tension that Brooks broke brought up because it's big business that's pushing these, these advances or, you know, you can consider them advances or whatever, you know, whatever you consider these changes. Big business pushes a lot of these changes. You see the same thing like with pesticide use or Things like that, where things that are radical changes, but because it's big business. And to try to restrain them would involve regulation.
Then the Conservative party, so to speak, or the Conservative mind says, oh, well, we gotta. We can't restrain big business. So we're cool with all this crazy change? Yeah, conceivably.
[00:41:58] Speaker B: Well, let's see if anyone wants to restrain microchips in the brain. So this is not. Not go back to the first part, but to stay on this one.
[00:42:05] Speaker A: That's what I'll say. So it's, it's interesting.
[00:42:08] Speaker B: I mean, I don't know, I.
Look, I have a tough time with some of this stuff because, you know, I have, as I've mentioned on certain shows, I have a kid with a chronic illness. You know, it's not a brain injury, but it's type 1 diabetes where they're working on a bionic pancreas. Right.
[00:42:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:24] Speaker B: And part of me is like the Thanos part, which is like, you know, what. What are we going to do with 20 billion people and, you know, solving everyone's health problems. And, you know, at some point, you know, natural selection is real. People got to die and, you know, regenerate with new life.
But then I'm a father with a kid with a problem, and if someone said we could fix some pancreas with a microchip or something today, I'd be the first in line. So I recognize that tension and you know, more acutely than most, probably. Yeah.
So my point is like, you know, the study that, where it's been successful was a monkey that they got to move a cursor with his brain.
[00:42:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:58] Speaker B: And that's where they're going to start the initial kind of human trials on people that are paraplegic and these other people that, you know, to see if they can move cursors on computers and start actually engaging with the world better. And so for me, it's like, no, I wouldn't want to see that incremental. I think if we can help a human being live a better life that's otherwise paralyzed or something like that, or maybe, you know, even be able to write and to their family on a screen, maybe they can't speak or something, that'd be great.
[00:43:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:43:26] Speaker B: But to your point, I mean, do I want to see the Terminator or something for that? No.
[00:43:31] Speaker A: So.
[00:43:31] Speaker B: So I do think, you know, it goes back to everything, I think, that we have an issue with in our society, and it goes back to how we're wired. Like, we've talked in certain Shows about we're kind of wired as human beings to be, you know, we're the ones that survived natural selection 100,000 years ago.
So the one that was more paranoid about the tall grass that was shaking a bit was the one that ran away quicker instead of the one that got curious and one explored and found a lion behind that grass. Right.
So that's what I'm saying. Like my paranoid side and my fear side is like. Yeah, like everyone else. Right. If this gut's in the wrong hands and, you know, you create a bionic soldier or just gets into, you know, if, let's say.
[00:44:13] Speaker A: Or like a mind control like you.
[00:44:15] Speaker B: Yeah, like Order 66 in Revenge of the Sith. Like, we all get these chips in the next three generations and someone just says, carry out order 66, you know, and we all just go some direction as a society.
[00:44:26] Speaker A: So, I mean, I think the question here that makes it more.
Brings more skepticism is that it's in your brain. Yeah. Like with organs and so forth. We do transplants, we do lots of different things. And you know, like, there's modifications that are done.
And so I think we see that a little less. A little less sinister, so to speak. But I think with any advancement, we just have to be comfortable with the fact that it could be used for good and for bad. But that doesn't mean you just don't do the advancement. You can look at airplanes and, you know, like, airplanes, when they were invented, not 20 years later, they were being used to kill people, you know, like more efficiently. And so. But that doesn't mean that when they were first, when the Wright brothers were testing the airplane, we should have been like, hell, hit the brakes on that, homie. Like, you can't do that because that's just. That's the duality of life, is that you have advancement. And the advancements are going to help in some ways and they're going to be potential for abuse in other ways. And so that's honestly you going back to the first part of this.
That's why we need to come up with systems and structures in our society that will allow. That will restrain some of the worst impulses from some of the worst people or the people that are in situations that may bring out the worst in them. And so if we can have these kind of. Whether it be, it can't be laws alone to the head nod to the conservative, it can't be laws alone. It has to be more than that. But there have to be laws, there have to be norms, have to Be traditions that restrain to some degree so we can get more of the benefit and receive less of the downside. And that's what I see this as. Like, yes, I'm not gonna be the one to say, you shouldn't be doing this, but there's a risk involved that I think illustrates the need for guardrails in society. How we get those is part of the ongoing debate that we need more people to have. You know, we need less people to just be saying, screw everybody who's not my. Who's not on my team, and more people to be saying, okay, how can we manage this as this new stuff comes online? And that's. This is one of those.
[00:46:20] Speaker B: What's interesting is because you alluded to something in a private conversation I'll bring up, which is you had made a joke that the Chinese invented fireworks and when they gave them to a European.
Because again, going back to our first thing, because of the tribalism in Europe at the time, the European figured out how to use it to kill people and created the gun. Right?
[00:46:39] Speaker A: Gun cannons and all.
[00:46:40] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So you're right. That one invention, that's the duality of humanity. One invention, you know, and we still have fireworks today, right? We just lit them off for New Year's Eve. So we have this duality. And I think that's where with the brain chip is very interesting that there will be the concerns of misuse, there will be the optimism of how it can help those in need and all that. One thing I would caution though, that I think we've all learned in this last, I don't know, 15 years or so, with the advent of the Internet being in the palms of our hands, things like social media and even discussions we've had in various shows, like the stress of things like your alerts, pinging, you, you know, like your texts, your emails, your.
What I'm saying is don't put them in your head. At least that's what I'm getting at. Like, hopefully mode, as we transition to whatever this future looks like, one of the norms or sentiments that we begin to incorporate is really like dealing with our own minds in a way that we don't. Cause I think part of what's going on today is everyone is hyper stressed. We, because of their ecosystems. And even like the phone, like I've turned every notification except for text on my phone, even my emails, because if I don't, like literally every 10 minutes, there's just a ping, ping, ping. And there's something stressful about that because then I'M not looking at focusing on what I need to focus on in that given moment.
[00:48:06] Speaker A: And so this is an illustration though, man. It's all this rapid change. The conservatives have dropped the ball. They're too focused on CRT and not enough focused on tech. They need to be reining in big tech, saying, yo, you should not be doing this to us. Well, I'm going to say this too.
[00:48:23] Speaker B: Fast because there's a spectrum. Some of them are concerned that CRT was all that changed too fast too, because, you know, for some people, integration was a problem, but I wouldn't blanket everyone with that. But. But no, you're right.
[00:48:37] Speaker A: I'm just joking. I mean, but it is.
[00:48:38] Speaker B: I know, but I was going to say we should start a conservative party in America. Why don't we do that? That'd be pretty cool, wouldn't it?
[00:48:43] Speaker A: Well, yeah. Somebody asked the question of whether or not kids should be on social media, whether there should be an Instagram for kids.
[00:48:50] Speaker B: We should start. That's what I mean. We should start a grassroots conservative movement here again, looking at Real World 2.0.
[00:48:57] Speaker A: Yeah, but I mean, I don't know. I mean, like, that's. I think it's going back to the front. I think it's different mental states, though. And again, how, like I talk about this in my practice a lot of times, some people are more risk averse, some people are more risk tolerant. I think it's the same thing with change. Some people are more tolerant to change. Some people, it makes them more uncomfortable. And I think oftentimes, if you're talking where the true principles lie, that's where you oftentimes will end up in your political beliefs in the United States. And so ideally, though, again, everybody can participate in good faith and it doesn't become a blood sport, which the whole point of the creation of these, as we started at the beginning, was about. So I think we can wrap from here, man.
The brain can try. I mean, we ended up talking about the first part with the brain. I was like, I was going to call it the brain control, but that's.
[00:49:43] Speaker B: When I kind of it.
[00:49:44] Speaker A: That's what I think about. But you know, ultimately, let me just.
[00:49:48] Speaker B: Say this because if they can perfect it to like total Recall, where I could just check out and have this crazy live or matrix, then I might think about it.
[00:49:57] Speaker A: You know, if we go in this.
[00:50:00] Speaker B: Direction in the real world, I might want to be in a pod.
[00:50:02] Speaker A: See, the thing is though, all these, it's two way. It's not just one way.
The term that stuck out to me in this thing is that what they're creating is a brain machine interface.
Interface. That means it goes both ways.
It means you can signals to it and it can receive it.
[00:50:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I know it can go to.
[00:50:24] Speaker A: You, but it can come to you, too. And so that's one of those things that.
Or as much as you can. So I don't know. We can wrap from here, man. So we appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call. Like I see it, you can get us anywhere you get your podcasts and subscribe to the podcast, rate us, review us, tell us what you think. And until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:50:44] Speaker B: And I'm a proud conservative.
[00:50:48] Speaker A: And we'll talk to you next time.
