Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Hello, welcome to the Call Like I See it podcast. I'm James Keys, and in this episode of Call It Like I See it, we're going to discuss the recent anti Semitic comments by Ye, formerly known as Kanye west, and discuss or consider whether the way mainstream society reacted to these comments was appropriate or a bit overboard or a bit weak, especially considering his position and status in society and the nature of the comments.
And later on, we're going to take a look at some new research which is leading scientists to warn us that there's a good chance AI will destroy humanity, which, and this isn't in a movie, this is like real scientists.
Joining me today is a man who is one half of two of America's most wanted. Tunde. Ogonlana Tunde. Are you ready to show the people why you have all eyes on you?
[00:01:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm just trying to think, who's the other half?
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Sabrina, of course.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: Okay. I was gonna say, is it my wife?
[00:01:15] Speaker B: Yeah, of course.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: Is it some criminal I've been doing stuff with that no one knows about? You know, like, what are you trying to expose here on me? We're about to do a show about conspiracy theorists, dude.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Oh, man, don't get them, right?
Just you and your wife, man.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, cool.
[00:01:33] Speaker B: Now we're recording this on October 31, 2022, and we hope everyone had a great Halloween. And by now, most people have heard about at least some of Ye's comments, which can rightfully be considered anti Semitic, such as him tweeting a couple weeks back that he planned to go Death Con 3 on Jewish people, which as a take on kind of the DEFCON numbering system that we have in terms of threat levels. And many have probably seen how these. These and other comments have been widely condemned from many corners of society and how many people and businesses have moved to disassociate from Ye because of them. So, Tunde, given the fact that Kanye is not a quote unquote leader in the traditional sense, like a business or political leader, you know, he's an artist.
What are your thoughts on the handling of this? And you can be more general as well. Things like this hateful, common hate speech or just speech that's very attacking towards a group by the media. And I'd say society, or what you could say maybe is decent society, mainstream society.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: Yeah, man. All great questions and throwing it in there. Actually, this is a little bit more of a sober week coming into this kind of topic because this is, you know, for me, it's why I'm even Lost for words and trying to answer you directly here because it's difficult to.
To bring it all together for me mentally, because I feel like, okay, on one end, it's unfortunate to watch someone, Anyone. Right.
Openly disparaging other groups, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, to me, anti Semitism is one of the oldest conspiracy theories out there in general in kind of modern society, dating back for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
So in that sense, it's just kind of sad to see this all brought up again after all the kind of back and forth of the 20th century. And everybody knows kind of what antisemitism has led to in the past. Right. And. And it's not just that the Jews get hurt. Everybody in the society where it gets proliferated ends up hurting. And so that's the sad part that we have someone who is traditionally, let me just say this, up until recent years, was seen as someone who was a little more conscious about things like the plight of minority groups, things like that. Someone in Kanye West. The second thing is. Cause you're absolutely right, and as you lead into the question, it makes me think of the definition of a leader, because as you said, he's not a leader in the traditional sense, business or political, things like that. But I think this is again, and we've talked in various shows, various ways, where our technology is constantly disrupting our own culture that, like, you and I grew into and the norms that we grew into. So I did a little bit of digging in preparation for answering this question, and I saw that, you know, Kanye west looks like he just got back on Twitter in the last few days. I mean, as we're recording this, Elon Musk just took over Twitter. So there's going to be some change a month from now. These numbers might be different, but what I looked up was when Kanye had been on Twitter prior, He had around 31 million followers on his Twitter account. And it got me thinking about somebody in the media who invited him on their program for an interview who's extremely powerful in the political media class, and that's Tucker Carlson. And Tucker Carlson averages around 3 million views a night, Viewers a night.
[00:05:08] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:05:08] Speaker A: So when I started thinking about it, I thought, you know, Exactly. James, to you and I, Kanye west isn't a leader in the traditional sense. That might be blind spot for most of us. Let's say older millennials and older, because you and I are Gen Z or, sorry, Gen X. But I think for younger people that didn't grow up as much as a defined structure of kind of who to trust as authority from, whether it's government sources, media, all that. I think he is a leader for a lot of people. And I think that's the thing that I realized that he's got more people following him every day when he was on Twitter than most Americans tune into the news every night.
[00:05:48] Speaker B: Well, and just to give you an apples to apples, I just pulled it up. Tucker Carlson has 5.2 million followers.
[00:05:54] Speaker A: I was a little bit off, but still.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: No, that's nowhere near. That's following Twitter.
[00:05:57] Speaker A: Sorry. Okay.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: Not viewers on, you know, cable news. Viewers would probably be a little bit more of a captive audience.
[00:06:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: You know, an audience that watches you or listens to you for a longer period of time. So that's. I'd say you'd have more influence over them. But I mean, it's an interesting point in the sense that what is a leader? Because you can also. Community leaders, industry leaders, there's lots of different types of leaders. And I think the question of whether he's a leader can be misleading, though, because, you know, and then I asked it. So I guess that's shame on me in the sense. But I think that's the way people have thought about it. And so it was good to start there. But really it's a matter of influence, and then it's a matter of the nature of what's being said. And as you said, antisemitism has been around a long time, but in general, if you live in a society, then there's gonna be all types of people in general and certain types of behavior, which you can call antisocial behaviors, behaviors that are antagonistic outwardly and show open hostility towards other members of society are bad in general for society. Those cause disruptions. Those cause all types of beefs. They can lead to violence and all that kind of stuff. What we know from observing history and stuff like this is that whether it's anti Semitism or other types of hateful, antagonistic, overtly antagonistic, oftentimes violent theme type of stuff leads to very bad things in society. So I think it's regardless of whether he's a leader or not, he has some level of influence, enough of a level of influence that we hear about it. Like if somebody just says this stuff in their living room and nobody ever hears about it, that's one thing. I mean, as you've said before and we've noted Dr. King said, you can't police necessarily what's. Or legislate what's in people's hearts. But how you comport yourself socially, it matters. And if you cross certain lines, if you're going down roads that are leading towards the types of things, antisocial things that we want to try to limit in a society, a group of people, then the response you're going to get is going to be one of pushback. Hopefully, if your society is decent, if it's cheers, then you have bigger problems. And so the fact that he's. Whether he's a leader or not, like I said in the traditional sense, and I guess that was why I. Well, not. I guess that was why I use the traditional sense, because whether you're a leader in the traditional sense doesn't necessarily reflect on whether you have influence and whether you should be held to a standard of, hey, we're not good with antisocial behavior, and you just putting it all out there like that. So, I mean, to me, answering the question, I think that the response was appropriate. I don't think it was overboard. It could have been stronger if people felt stronger. But at minimum, what people did was demonstrate publicly that that type of antisocial behavior was not something that they would tolerate, you know, that. That not something they would look the other way, which is hopeful when you're in a society, because societies go to really dark places when people tolerate antisocial behavior.
[00:08:54] Speaker A: Well, here's the interesting thing I've noticed from this kind of moment, specifically with Kanye, because what he's done is what a lot of people that have used shock value to get attention haven't done, is he's moved at such lightning speed that he's thrown off those who try to take advantage of getting it more, maybe notoriety and exposure for themselves through bringing him on their platform. So, for example, when I realized how many Twitter followers Kanye had, that's when I. Because I started thinking to myself too, like, okay, this guy said something that appears on his face to just, like you said, be antisocial, anti Semitic, clearly. But it's just this idea of just kind of bigotry kind of continuing in our public discourse and why so many people seem to want to latch onto this is, you know, intriguing. And obviously, we're human beings and this is part of the, the game that we play, right? Tribalism and, and, and, and conspiracy and xenophobia and all that. So that doesn't really surprise me as much. But when I actually just started with, like I said, the numbers and prepping my head for this and looking at this, that's what I thought is, of course, it's not just Tucker, I don't want to just pick on him. It's, you know, Nori. Nori, the rapper that now has a podcast, invited him on. There's a couple others that quickly saw, oh, this could be something that I could through. And I'll just say this. If he has had or has 30 million Twitter followers, that means he's an influential guy in society. But by bringing him on my show, I can get some of that. Those eyeballs.
[00:10:30] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I mean. I mean, the Twitter followers thing might understate it. I mean, Kanye is a rock star, you know, for two decades nearly.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: So that's what I'm getting at is like, I could see someone like a Tucker Carlson saying, hey, I could. I could not only maybe broaden my appeal to other types of audiences that might not normally tune into me at night and blah, blah, blah. Right. Maybe I can get some more viewers. But then what happened is, because he kept going, meaning Kanye didn't just leave it at let me just disturb people to get attention and then maybe say something else. He actually appears to just continue wanting to go down this rabbit hole of conspiracy and bigotry and anti Semitism and all that.
That's what I'm saying is that now, I think where a lot of this is where it's interesting because of the microphones everyone has through the Internet, you're right, the more traditional corporate America and all that is saying, we don't want any of this, and he's lost a lot of money and a lot of contracts and all that. But there seems to be an undercurrent of people out there in the normal, like, regular, everyday people in the Internet ecosystem that actually now want this more often. And that, to me, is the fascinating thing, that this kind of public square of the Internet is becoming like a gladiator ring, really, where it's not a town hall where people want to come and just talk in it.
[00:11:46] Speaker B: People are careful and all that kind of stuff.
[00:11:49] Speaker A: Yeah, People want to just put a mask on like a gladiator so that you can't really see who they are, and then take that opportunity with a little bit of anonymity. Sorry. That the Internet can bring us and start clubbing other people to death.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: Well, that's been. That's kind of defined Twitter for a while, though. Like, the certain places in Twitter, that's kind of what it is. You know, Twitter mobs and so forth. Like, I think it's interesting that, you know, like, Kanye has been his whole career a provocateur, and in this Instance, you could not tell initially if he was trying to be provocative for some other purpose or if he was really going down a road of, yeah, yeah, I'm anti Semitic now. I'm all about. I mean, he came out afterwards talking about he wants Jewish children to ask their parents why he's mad at them. Like, just some crazy stuff. You know what I'm saying? And so I think that. Yeah, and you're correct, though. Like, he went further than. Clearly, people thought he was going with this because even with the interview reference to Tucker Carlson, notoriously, they had to cut a bunch of stuff from that. Tucker wouldn't air some of the stuff he was saying. He went on LeBron James program. They wouldn't even show the episode. They were like, all right, yeah, this is crazy. Nori put his out drinking. Drinking champs. He put his out and then pulled it back, like, all right. And so it was. That was interesting that people looked at this. Many people looked at this look at Kanye's history and be like, oh, he's just trying to stir something up. There's something going on here. He's. And it's like, no, no, no, he's. He's really on this horse. Like, he's really going down this road. And it really backed a lot of his. A lot of people he was doing business with in a quarter, in a corner. Because I know initially, for example, Adidas didn't cut ties, but then after the stuff kept going and going and going, it like, all right, we're out.
[00:13:30] Speaker A: You know, being a German company, I think they made the right move, you know, but just.
[00:13:35] Speaker B: Just the progression, though, of initially it was like, oh, okay, well, yeah, this guy, you know, he. He does provocative things from time to time. And. But it's not like, meant in a certain way like that.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: I don't know.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: I mean. But go ahead.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: Let me just add this because this is, to me where, like, the integrity of just Integrity, I guess it's just the only word I can.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: Integrity of integrity.
[00:13:54] Speaker A: Yeah, like the integrity of being a human being and then having, you know, scruples and some sort of moral compass in yourself. Like, and I don't mean about religion and all that. I just mean, like, because I think about both Tucker Carlson and Nori, right? Two very different guys, clearly.
And both immediately do the. What most in the media do, the knee jerk reaction. Oh, well, let me get this guy on my show so that I can again expose myself to all of his followers and all this. And then it's like this.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: But that's in large part, that's that business, though.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: You run towards cracks, you run towards keep going. Because this is where I'm going with it. This is why. This is what's happening to our society. Once you let this in the door, then you end up having to do what those guys did instead of saying, here's a guy that doesn't appear to be in a good place mentally, emotionally, and now he's going down this road after all the other stuff that he's done the last few years. No, let me. Like you're saying, let me not think ahead. Let me just invite him on for the short term gain of trying to get into his ecosystem and get more viewers. And then what happens is when they invite him on, he's really saying crazy stuff that is even too much for them. And they have to. I mean, I'm not going to sit here and say Tucker apologized. But you're like, you're saying there's a.
[00:15:08] Speaker B: Lot that they left air everything he said.
[00:15:10] Speaker A: Correct. But remember, with Tucker on Nori, this is where it gets a little bit more personal for the people that watch Nori by inviting him on it was. That was the platform from which Kanye specifically began to question and promote the conspiracy theories about George Floyd's death. Think about it.
[00:15:29] Speaker B: On the platform, he's been going down that road. And I was gonna say before Tucker, remember, the big thing a month ago was the White Lives Matter stuff. And Tucker was. Tucker didn't bring him on right after the anti semi Semitic stuff. He brought him on after the White Lives Matter stuff. And then he got on there and started talking all this anti Semitic stuff.
[00:15:46] Speaker A: But that's what I'm saying. It's like, but by playing with this kind of fire. This is my point. When you playing with bigotry in general, this time it happens to be anti Semitism. It could be something else next time.
You're eventually going to get burned because the person who you're inviting on to do this is serious about what they're talking about. Most people don't joke about being a bigot in a way that ends up looking serious. Right.
[00:16:10] Speaker B: Well, you're still speaking wishfully though, man, because you're not necessarily going to get burned if your audience, if you're catering to an audience that wants that kind of messaging. Like, look at the Florida and Georgia University has played a college football game in Jacksonville. They play it every year. World's largest outdoor cocktail party. I don't know if they still call it that, but that's historically, it's going on for decades outside the stadium. Somebody projected message. Kanye was right. Like, there is an audience for this kind of stuff. And I think it's important ultimately, looking at this topic, it's important for decent society to shout this stuff down because like I said, a lot of people might look and say, oh, well, Kanye saying that stuff isn't going to influence me. It's not going to make me turn around. I'm not going to wake up tomorrow as anti Semitic or hateful of this group or that group because I heard somebody talk about it. But what it does is once that stuff, as you're kind of going towards, once that stuff invades your public square, a lot of times you can't get it back out because there is an audience. There are people who want to go down this road, who want this messaging out there who are driven and guided by hate and contempt for their fellow man. Those are antisocial people and they want to bring antisocialness to our society. And if you want to keep it out, then it's the job of what I would call decent people to shout the stuff down. It comes out, even if it's somebody who you would be inclined to like or, you know, and support for other reasons. You know. And there's another thing I wanted to get to you though, and you, you already mentioned this and I wanted to ask you if this affects your, your, your kind of, your outlook on this or how you view it. You know, yay. Being a black American and someone who has expressed socially conscious attitudes in the past, uplifting type, socially conscious attitudes, does this bother you more that he's gone down this or does it not matter his past, once he goes down this road, like, and just in general, as far as how we handle it, or should we be, you know, or should we be less severe because of the past or, you know, how do you, how do you weigh where he is now? Very clearly where he is now versus where he's been in the past?
[00:18:10] Speaker A: Well, I'm not as concerned about him personally. Right. I mean, he looks like a sad and tragic figure of someone who obviously has kind of spiraled downwards in his emotional state since we've seen him in a public sphere. Let me just put it that way, right? In a plain way. I'm not sitting here trying to diagnose the guy if he's got any issues or not, but clearly.
[00:18:33] Speaker B: Well, he's, I think he's been public that he's had, you know, that.
[00:18:37] Speaker A: So my point is, like, I don't Care to talk about any of that is my point. I mean, that's him. That's his business, all that. I'll say this. There's a lot of people that have mental health and emotional issues that still don't turn to bigotry. Right. So that's why in. In that part of it, I think we all have a responsibility. If, like you said, you want to live in a society that has certain norms and respect them. Now, you make a great point in what you bring up after my comments, which is, you're right. And I think this is what's happening in America now. We're having a battle. This is kind of, I guess, the cold civil war. Right.
Between people that kind of were comfortable with where this society was continuing to go after the 1960s of kind of a pluralistic, multicultural society in which you had things like the idea of political correctness not being an idea to shut people up, but as an idea that there are certain norms that we're all going to adhere to. Because like you said, if we have a multicultural type of society, then saying inflammatory things out in the open constantly is probably going to be disruptive. And a term you point very well is antisocial. Yeah. So we have to share this country with Jews and Muslims and Hispanic people and black people and white people and Asian people and all that. So we had from. In our lifetime, from when you and I were born in the late 70s up until about 10 years ago. Right. In the last decade, it was kind of a certain norms that in public, politicians and leaders in our society, business leaders as well, didn't promote and say certain things in general to try and.
[00:20:18] Speaker B: Keep, well, those boundaries. I would say this, though. If you're going to go that direction, you have to say it was progressively further as well. Like where it was in 79 was, or 78 was different than where it was in 84 in terms of what was considered acceptable social behavior by 94, 95, you know. Yeah, exactly. So it was progressing a certain way, but go ahead. Yeah.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: So we know that, you know, somewhere around 2010 or so, there became a big cultural backlash to that trajectory that we were on. And again, this show isn't about all that. So I'm not going to get into my opinions on the whys and all that, but it's just a fact that clearly the last decade or so, the things have changed in the way that we accept what our leadership says about people and also then how we follow in terms of the amount of Americans that want to follow someone that says these things. And I think that's where I'll kick it back in a second. I think that's where you're pointing out something that has to be taken into consideration because we're no different than humans of the past. We're the same as people were 100 years ago or a thousand years ago in terms of our intelligence and our emotional makeup. So the fact that whether it's Joseph Goebbels or the Spanish Inquisition or the Catholic church under Paul 2000 years ago, the same thing. Once you start demonizing a group and enough people start wanting to have traction on that, then there's usually gonna be some kind of tragedy after genocide, war.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: Unless it's shouted down, basically, if it's allowed to progress. There's a clear place this goes based on, like you said, all those examples of history and countless more. And to me, I look at like now and just, I think it was a few years back that it was reported or that Kanye or ye came out and said that he had been diagnosed as bipolar. So, but that, as you pointed out, that's not an excuse, that's context to the extent it matters. But ultimately being bipolar is not a license or an excuse to then go out and start being attacking and hateful towards people. But I think actually it doesn't bother me anymore what his history or his past was. I think it's important to note for someone who, or for anyone who doesn't support what he's doing because it gives him, in a sense, more credibility he is seeing because he was willing to speak truth to power in the past, then he can easily be seen. Now. If you want to support the messages he's giving as saying he's speaking truth to power, now he's saying things. He's not afraid to say the truth because he'll get shunned for it. In the same way he wasn't afraid to say the truth before. And so I think it's actually more. He's more dangerous from that standpoint because he hasn't been company line man from day one. He's, he's been seen. Now. It may be his reputation, may be bigger than it needs to be, you know, whatever, but it's still, again, many things are about perception. So I think it gives him more credibility. So it's even more important to make sure that free thinking people, people who can evaluate what's being said on their own and determine what they think about it, is that you push back and say, look, this is not the kind of society that and again, that's why we keep coming back to that. It's about we are the ones, we're alive. We're the ones who set what's acceptable. We as decent society, what's acceptable and what's not, as far as behavior towards our fellow people around us. You know, if you want to go around, if you want to live in a society where people can just walk around punching each other in the face, you'll see what will happen. You know, you end up having a lot of violence, a lot of death because people aren't going to be able to do that or aren't going to want that to happen. And so it's going to cause responses, repercussions and so forth. So if you. That's antisocial behavior, same kind of thing here. If you're going to allow and allow antisocial behavior to proliferate, then it's going to permeate throughout your society. As you pointed out, it's going to lead a certain direction. But where he's coming from, though, this is a, this is a more important. It's more important, I should say, for us to deal with it head on and not kind of just say, oh, well, we just ignore this and it'll go away eventually.
[00:24:21] Speaker A: Well, you know, I mean, talking about him specifically, then I want to not talk about him so much is, you know, here's the guy that 14, 15 years ago, I remember doing an award show, was handed a microphone and said, George W. Bush doesn't care about black.
[00:24:34] Speaker B: People in the aftermath of hurricane.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: And then a few years later, he's the one trying to be a provocateur wearing a Confederate flag on a jacket at a fashion show. My point is that I don't really care about any of that. The point is, is that he is getting people's attention by behaving a certain way. And you know, hey, some people do that and they do it right and they get their attention. What's happened is just like other people that go down some of these roads about attention getting, like we said, now he's gotten everyone's attention in a different way because he struck a nerve and discussed a topic that has been very sensitive historically and like we've been talking about, doesn't lead to good outcomes if a society starts accepting it. Right. And so that's where I think, again, my point about leadership is really collective because we've got political leaders who say really, really outlandish things about certain groups of Americans, right? Meaning whether they be from the south of the border, you know, Hispanic Americans or immigrants coming in from that part of the world. Or it could be Muslims, you know, they've been the target of a lot of political hot rhetoric or black people.
[00:25:42] Speaker B: Or like there's a lot of, you.
[00:25:44] Speaker A: Know, there's a lot. Right, But I'm just saying, like, so giving examples to not make it just about this guy, but here's, here's another example of leadership. So Elon Musk, I'll call him out in this era of this kind of rich guys that think just because they made some money doing one thing, that now they can tell everybody else how to run society. And I respect Elon Musk a lot with what he's done with not only Tesla, But Starlink and SpaceX and all that. But you know, this, this thing, he. Like I said, as we're recording this, a lot of this stuff is fresh, so it might kind of play out different in the next few weeks or months. But as we know right now, Twitter, sorry. Elon Musk successfully completed his acquisition of Twitter and is now, for the time being, the CEO. Until he said he does want to hire someone else at some point.
His first day, when he announced he's back to Twitter. This isn't Musk's fault that this happens, but he can't control this. But there was a frenzy on Twitter of people who were excited. And I remember, and I'm gonna say a couple words here that are pretty vulgar, but for the effect of it. One tweet I saw is a guy with glee celebrating. He says, yes, now that Musk is the CEO, I can say fuck niggers and fuck Jews.
And, you know, that's what I kind of thought of. Like, look, and this is where I think people like you and I are always in the backseat, you know, kind of backpedaling with this.
[00:27:09] Speaker B: There's a potential blind spot.
There's a potential blind spot for us. Cuz that would not occur.
[00:27:16] Speaker A: No, no. Is that I actually defend that person's right to say that publicly because I believe in the First Amendment and the freedom of speech, even though I recognize that could be considered insightful and all that, but just the general idea that, yes, I do think we should have people able to say things. And again, this is where.
[00:27:33] Speaker B: Hold up, hold up. See, I'm glad you brought this up because, yes, I believe in freedom of speech 100%. Not once during this conversation has anybody said that Kanye west need to be prosecuted. Freedom of speech is about whether or not what you say will get you locked up. So it's not about that you can have freedom of speech and still be shunned by society for saying certain things.
[00:27:54] Speaker A: Yeah, and so. And so. But the thing is, is that I started more thinking about that guy and people like him. Right? Like, I'm thinking, hold on. And this is where you're right. This is my blind spot. Because I don't. I don't. I don't. I'm not suspicious of other groups of people. Right? So.
[00:28:10] Speaker B: And you also don't feel overly constrained, that you can't go around and treat people like shit.
[00:28:14] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. That's my point. Like. Like, I started thinking, like, wow, look how many people. Like, this is what they've been waiting for. This is where their mental and emotional energy has been residing.
[00:28:25] Speaker B: That it has, like, shackles to them, that they can't be shitty.
[00:28:29] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Like. Like, I'm looking at the news. Oh, Elon Musk is CEO Twitter. I'm like, okay, good, maybe I'll go look at their stock. Maybe see if it's. If he turns it around, it might be worth buying. Like, you know, just some normal. But someone else in the same time and country, right, living at the same time as me, was salivating. Oh, my God, now that he's back, I can use the N word and I can make fun of Jews and I can disparage other people. And that's what I'm saying. Like, and this is what I mean by leadership. I'm not gonna blame Elon Musk for that. Right. He can't control what people say on his platform. But I'm a little disappointed. It's been a week.
[00:29:01] Speaker B: I think he can control what people say on his platform. Your point is? Yeah, I understand your point.
[00:29:05] Speaker A: Let's just keep it going for the sake of this conversation. What he can't control and what I am disappointed in him being now the leader of Twitter is he could have made a public statement and said, hey, guys, look, I seen on the first day of Twitter, like, he could have had a little. He could add a tweet himself. Hey, I'm here for free speech and all that, but, you know, to be celebrating racism and bigotry and poking people in the eye, maybe that's not what I brought this thing for. I want people to speak freely. I don't want to. Da, da, da. And that's kind of what I'm saying. Like, that's when I started thinking about this gladiator ring versus a town hall. He also says, oh, this is a public square and a Public, your thing. But you know what? When you got people gathered in a public square, they actually still got to moderate themselves because they're still. And because they're talking and they got to look at each other. Because if you don't moderate, it turns into a mob and probably a lynching of someone. Right.
[00:29:55] Speaker B: Antisocial behavior has consequences. You go to a football game or a basketball game or whatever, you would not expect to just have somebody walking by coming up to you saying crazy stuff. That's what I mean. But that's what you're saying as far as we moderate each other because antisocial behavior has consequences. And we understand that. And so here's the thing. The issue is that there's more of us, so to speak, than there are people who are just dying to be terrible towards other people. And that's why it's. When things like this come up, it's important for us. Again, this isn't a freedom of speech issue. You can say what you want. You just got to deal with the consequences. No, you're not going to jail, but there's going to be consequences that have nothing to do with the law. And so that's what's happening here and that's what's going to happen. And I'll say this, the one other point I'll make and are related and I'll bring this up, you know, in the sense that it's in a similar vein, you know, as Kyrie Irving, who's placed in the. For the Brooklyn Nets and NBA, came out with, or he retweeted and expressed some support for a film lately. And that film, it's been termed throughout the media, it has anti Semitic themes. I didn't like that, by the way, because I wanted to know what about it was anti Semitic. Like, don't just tell. Don't just say, hey, make me take. I'll just take your word on it. Like, to me it just looks like a film. And so I did have to go research and research and research and eventually found out, okay, yeah, yeah, this thing is talking about some anti Semitic stuff. Got it. That was one complaint I had though, in looking at that. I had to do all that digging because on the surface I can be like, oh, you guys are just picking on this guy. But no, no, it actually did. But so people coming. There are people who are coming for that information and that are putting it out there. Now he's getting blowback about it. And what it does, though, is it illustrates that there is still.
There are still people who do not want this stuff in our society and who recognize that the stuff that this kind of stuff coming out, even if your overall message is not one. Kyrie. His defense was, hey, I have no problem with any religion. So his overall message may not be hate or contempt for any group of people, but if he's promoting things, that part of their message is that you're still going down that road. It's one of these things that look, I mean, there's a hypersensitivity. I would say I told you this offline, like with respect to Jewish people and black people in America, like, there's a hypersensitivity for sure as far as how things go. But it's well earned, you know, like, it's not like this is like, oh, nothing ever happens to people like this. Why would you guys ever be sensitive about that? It's like, no, no, no. It's well earned. In recent times, recent history and in modern times, we've seen terrible things. We've seen synagogues get shot up. We've seen, you know, all types of race related stuff. You know, like this stuff still happens to this day. So that society, it may be. Well, just let me say this. It may be something that people get annoyed with, that there's this hypersensitivity. But it is well earned and it's something we got to live with unless and until we can, we collectively can shout down these voices so they don't keep popping up so much.
[00:32:50] Speaker A: Well, I mean, this is why this is the battle for kind of this stuff right now in the country, right? Because number one is a couple things. Like I said. Clearly we have leaders now that want to promote more of this division and all that, whether on the corporate side now and political and all that kind of stuff, right? So that's one thing that.
[00:33:08] Speaker B: Or you could set another way. They see it as profitable for them to go down that direction.
[00:33:14] Speaker A: And maybe you're right. Maybe there was a shame a few decades ago of profiting off this stuff in the open. And now there's no shame. So that's life, right? The second thing though is this is what kind of saddens me. And let me get through this for a minute. Number one is to watch black Americans who have been such victims of conspiracy theories. How do you think things like Tulsa happened? The red summer of 1919, it was because of stereotypes that black men were raping white women or all these things that we know are bs. And now to see black Americans doing this to other groups and latching on to conspiracy about Jews and the banking and the media and the Hollywood and all this stuff and at least conspiracy theories. So that's just sad to me, number one, I'll call that out all day. The second thing is that what we're looking at here, which I find interesting, is that the aggressor, again, this is the authoritarian playbook, the one that's aggressive and that strikes out, then claims to be the victim when people react to.
Could be Vladimir Putin now being a victim every time the Ukraine's knock him back. Right. Because he attacked them. It could be Donald Trump saying he's a victim because they kicked him off Twitter because he was being so vulgar to people. Right. It could be any of these people. And now Kanye west is gonna be the big victim. You see the way he's typically.
And that's the thing. It's like, what do you do when you're that minority group? Because let's say the Jewish community says nothing, then in a sense, they're kind of inviting it to happen more.
[00:34:50] Speaker B: But if the Jewish community is demonstrating that it's acceptable behavior.
[00:34:53] Speaker A: Yeah, but if the Jewish community speaks up against it, or those who want to support either the Jewish community or. As we're talking about, support, not allowing antisocial behavior to have a public square, in a sense, yeah. Then what happens is Kanye plays the victim again. And that's what's happened. Right. See, the Jewish media wants to stop me. See this, see that? And it's just like, yeah, he tries to use the.
[00:35:16] Speaker B: And it's crazy, though, that to me.
[00:35:18] Speaker A: That'S what I'm saying. Cause remember when they kicked Trump off Twitter after the January 6th thing?
[00:35:22] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:35:22] Speaker A: And then I remember talking about all these Trump fans that I have in my life. They were like, oh, this is a violation of freedom of speech. And I was like, well, it's not really, because Twitter's a private company. I thought that.
[00:35:31] Speaker B: And he's on the right for it again. Like, I. Yeah, yeah. I always have to say that because it blows my mind. People always talk about people. Really do. A lot of people, not everybody. A lot of people think freedom of speech means freedom. You can say what you want with no consequence. It only means you won't get. The government won't prosecute you. That's what it means. It doesn't mean that there's no consequences. There can be perfect.
[00:35:50] Speaker A: Think about the projection, right? All these people worried about freedom of speech.
When they have the controls of power and government, they actually try and do things like silence people. And that's what I mean by this.
[00:36:00] Speaker B: We're seeing this with all the history that they're trying to ban.
[00:36:02] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
[00:36:03] Speaker B: But I mean, this is the freedom of speech thing. Just give me a second here to say this because it blows. This is like you walking up, you know, like, yo, you walk up to, you're younger, you're single, whatever. You walk up to a young lady, start saying crazy negative stuff about her, then she slaps you and walk away and be like, well, hold on, I have freedom of speech. Why would you get mad at me for that? It's like, of course, if you say things to people that are, that are out of line, out of whack, they're going to react. Now if you're not getting prosecuted, that's your government, that's your constitutional freedom of speech. But I agree with you. I want to say this and I want to mention or jump on that victimhood piece as well, but the, it is disappointing to see this. I've seen, you know, throughout and this, whether it's Kanye or even the Kyrie piece I mentioned a second ago, like, where there's like, there is some like, thought in the black community or teachings in the black community sometimes where it's about, oh, okay, well, it's attempting to instill pride and attempting to instill, you know, self belief and historical, you know, looking back at, there's, there's history that's hidden that, you know, you'll be proud of and stuff like that. And I get it, you know, in terms of the history that you're taught in America and the way that when, when black folks, when, when Africans got to United States, such an effort was made to detach them from any connection to any type of thing to be proud of or where, where there's, you look back in history and so forth. And so you and I have talked about these. There's, there's a lot of different theories that float around or thought processes that flow around. I don't think those are inherently a bad thing. Where the problem goes is when you, when those things incorporate teachings that are, that you're basically trying to build yourself up by tearing other people down, you know, in ways that aren't justified. If you want to say, hey, the European slave trade was, was terrible and yada, yada, yada, hey, yeah, that's fine. You can say that. Like, that's something that's pretty well established historically. But when you start going on things that aren't, you can't really substantiate that are, are expressly Trying to tear another group down. That's when you go too far. In my op, in my view, like, if you can't substantiate it, then that's not the. That's not the direction you need to be going. And so I think it's unfortunate as well though, because. But it's not an apples to apples like the. That you have been subjected to something as a group doesn't mean necessarily that you yourself won't turn around and subject somebody else to it. You yourself to do it to another group. The transitive property doesn't seem to apply in.
[00:38:24] Speaker A: That's the human part of it. Like, fortunately, everybody in this country, like.
[00:38:29] Speaker B: It would happen to Irish and then once Irish were considered as white, they would start doing it to black people or it happened to Italian. So it just seems like Jewish people.
[00:38:38] Speaker A: That immigrated here after the Holocaust to escape European persecution of Jews that became racist against blacks when they moved.
[00:38:44] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:38:45] Speaker A: There's gay people who are racist or, you know.
[00:38:48] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:38:49] Speaker A: People that hate gays when they know that, you know what it feels like to be discriminated, you know, like, so it's a whole. Yeah.
[00:38:54] Speaker B: So that's an unfortunate thing that you'll see.
[00:38:57] Speaker A: People are human beings sometimes people human beings. And this is where the lack of teaching history really just means that we're doomed to repeat ourselves because this has already happened in American history. I mean, you know, we've talked about the film A Birth of a Nation where Kyrie's response to when people say. And this is the interesting thing seeing. I mean, I guess this is the beauty of integration right now. Black people can be racist too openly and not act like their actions don't matter.
[00:39:23] Speaker B: Well. And just be kind of disconnected from the kind.
[00:39:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:26] Speaker B: Like the reality like how directly this is impacted.
[00:39:28] Speaker A: You know, like you said, he's kind of distancing himself from the movies topics. Right. But he's. Oh, I love all religions and all that. I think about it, the film Birth of a Nation, you know, I'm not gonna sit here if you don't know much about it. Look it up. Right. 1915, it was game changing in American culture. And it basically put a lid on whatever remnants of reconstruction were still around and really elevated Jim Crow and segregation and all that. And it's no mistake. I mean, you reminded me this in a private conversation. Within five, seven years after that movie, the Ku Klux Klan had its highest membership of its history.
[00:40:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:03] Speaker A: It changed the direction of American culture for a few decades because people saw film that was propagandized to say, you know, just to show all the stuff that, you know, the south was this great place and unfortunately the north came and freed all these black slaves that were eating fried chicken in the halls of Congress when there was reconstruction and they were raping a bunch of white women. And people believed that and ran with it.
[00:40:25] Speaker B: And I could see somebody, and not everyone, but enough. And enough people of a certain kind of mentality.
[00:40:32] Speaker A: Yeah. That were aggressive, that could scare the moderates. Right. And that's where Kyrie's tone deafness into what he's promoting is very sad because I could see, let's say there was a celebrity like a singer or a boxer back then that was quoted in the newspaper saying, Birth of a Nation was a great, great film. And let's just say that, you know, there was a black reporter in the room which, which may not have existed back then. And they asked, well, don't you think by promoting this film you could be inciting, you know, other people to do negative things against, let's say, blacks? Because, you know, they might believe this.
[00:41:09] Speaker B: Movie owning its messages, all that stuff.
[00:41:11] Speaker A: And he would have said what. He just said the same thing. He'd have distanced them for, oh, well, it's just a movie, you know, I don't, I don't have a problem with black people, but I just like the movie.
[00:41:18] Speaker B: I'll raise you on that, man.
[00:41:20] Speaker A: It's the same thing.
[00:41:21] Speaker B: The President.
[00:41:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:41:23] Speaker B: You know, was known to have watched the movie, which again, provides that kind of. So that's. Yes. I mean, we got a little bit off, you know, kind of the specific topic. But the point is, is that this is all the same stuff. And it's either you want to be a part of a decent society where antisocial behavior is frowned upon and is reprimanded when it happens. It's not coming from the law. It's not a freedom of speech issue. It's coming from fellow members of the society. Hey, that's not acceptable. In the same way that a parent would say what's acceptable and not acceptable behavior, you know, in their household. You know, like, it's like, look, we're all in this together and we have to decide what's acceptable and what's not. But second topic we wanted to look at today is, all right, we've seen, you know, the Matrix. People seen the Matrix and all the different types of movies where you have these post apocalyptic type things. And a lot of times it's AI, you know, iRobot, you know different things like that, where it's AI that's going to be, it's going to cause all these problems for humanity, it's going to get out of control and all that. And so it was interesting to me to see, you know, a reputable, reputable researchers from I think it's the UK and Australia.
And this is in Popular Mechanics, this isn't fantasy world. And they're talking about that there's a pretty good chance that AI will destroy humanity is the subject of the research and now the point of the research, they don't engage in fetishizing this type of thing, but it's to try to figure out, well, if we are obviously the AI thing. People are programming AI and artificial intelligence into programs and so forth and having machines be able to learn and then make decisions and so forth. And so as that gets more sophisticated, they're trying to come up with recommendations and tips and so forth to try to avoid the scenario where the AI ultimately gets smart enough and determines based on the qualifications and the criteria we gave it, that human beings are actually the problem. So what did you have any, any, any kind of major reaction to this or what were your thoughts seeing this?
[00:43:30] Speaker A: This reminds me, there was. It's actually funny because we talked about this series recently, that series explained on Netflix documentary series. There's one little. Because it's a multi, for the audience, a multi series episode of just about 30 minute clips on different topics and just explains them. So one was coding. And what was interesting on that one, I think this was 2011 or 2012. There was an issue with a small town in Texas because all of a sudden the 911 system just shut down and stopped working. And the reason is, is because the whole system had been programmed like in the 80s and they never imagined that I guess at the time it was a small town that they get more than X amount of millions of calls to this 911 dispatch place.
And hypothetically these numbers aren't accurate. But let's say they had 1,000 people in the town. So maybe whoever programmed it in 80 said you we're never going to over like go over 50 million calls or something like that.
[00:44:32] Speaker B: Well, it's just how many, how many digits he accounted for, correct?
[00:44:35] Speaker A: Yeah. So they were talking about in the coding and so what happened was, and no one clearly ever checked this system since right. To say let's, let's update it or something like that. And to the point I just made, the computer itself wasn't smart enough to come back when it got to, let's say number, call number 4,998,000 and say, hey guys, I only got a few calls, you know, things left in my system. You guys are going to check me out. And so what happened is the whole system shut down and no one, and this is, you know, it's a. Actually emergencies happen, right? People trying to, people having heart attacks, people having domestic violence issues, trying to call 911 and the whole system just shut down. So created an issue. And they thought at first, you know what they thought it was, they thought it was like a cyber attack from some terrorist group or something like that. And so when they started looking into it, that's what they realized. This wasn't a hack or a cyber attack. This was the limitations of the coding that was entered. And so that was the interesting. So that was the first I had heard of some of this stuff like AI could do us damage, but not in the way, not like the certain movies like a Terminator or Matrix where it's going to come and like consciously come and attack us is that we get too reliant on it and we kind of either forget that we set it up a certain way and then some big issue like let's just say God forbid that was a nuclear power plant and not a 911 thing where it just kind of shut down or something happened and let's say you had a meltdown because of bad programming that could have actually caused an issue with humanity long term and to a big part of the world. So that's what I found interesting is that we're going to have our own blind spots as this technology gets better, that it might not be what we feared again, our own projections that it's going to behave like us and come and try and dominate us like we try and dominate everything else as humanity, that I might just fail because, you know, we didn't account for something well.
[00:46:26] Speaker B: But also though it, it's something that like there is more to our decision making than rational, you know, like, yes, no, you know, let's maximize pleasure, minimize pain and all that like. And so anytime you're going to have a computer system set up to make decisions on a large scale for something like the operation of a factory or you know, and so forth, then if you're going to base that on logic and rationality, then inherently there's going to be some limitations on that and, or it'll create certain type of paradoxes that it's like, oh well if this condition, then we got to do this. But we have three conditions to account for and you get inconsistent results based on what you're initially told it to do. And so I think that it could be, yeah, it could be just something where. What. Something we didn't think of. But it also could be again, the nature of computer decision making is still. It doesn't account for some of the fuzzy things that human decision making implicitly brings in. I mean, and you can see this with the self driving car dilemma that they've been having. You know, like they're trying to teach these self driving cars and they're trying to, you know, program them with a certain level of artificial intelligence and making decisions and so forth based on what they're observing. And because of human drivers not always obeying the kind of rules that they're saying, hey, this is how people are going to drive. That throws the AI off. So. And it may not be human drivers doing something that is the craziest thing in the world, but it's like, well, no, we're not expecting. They see this car here, they see that car there, they're not expecting something to happen. And then it happens. And then the AI is like, well, you know, it goes into either it, either if it's not programmed to then make its own decision on the fly, then it might shut it down. Or if it is programmed to make its own decision on the fly, that decision that it makes on the fly could be disastrous.
[00:48:20] Speaker A: You know, it's interesting because it goes back to. And we did a show on this I think a year or two ago, like how we think, we keep thinking of ourselves, humans like as whatever machine is the machine.
[00:48:33] Speaker B: Like our memory we considered like to.
[00:48:35] Speaker A: Be like memories, like a videotape. Like it's not like, I think it's another example like you're saying the fact that with all of our technology and resources that we still can't perfect just an artificial driving car. I mean forget about a terminator machine or you know, like, or something that's really difficult.
[00:48:51] Speaker B: They could do an artificial driving car if it was the only car on the road. Yeah. Is that if you put other humans on the road then it becomes infinitely more.
[00:48:58] Speaker A: But that's what I mean. Like we don't give ourselves enough credit like that we're so complex. Like our brains are really that complex and kind of elastic. Right. That's the inelasticity of machines is something that we haven't figured out yet. I guess just how to, how to, how to be, how to, you know what it is. And this is how to be irrational.
[00:49:18] Speaker B: Correct. When, when, when, when it seems they're.
[00:49:22] Speaker A: Always looking for A plus B and the rational system. And that's again goes back to even as me. Again, not to overlap things, but going back to even the first part of our discourse. That's why I'm a fan of the freedom of speech. Because irrationality is part of human nature and part of our society. So we always have to account for it in whatever is going on in our society and in humanity. And I think going back to this AI stuff, we're not going to figure out AI properly until we figure out how to have machines be able to do that. Where it's not always binary ones and zeros and always just have to match up. But it's like the machine also has this 10% ability to go a little bit rogue. But then that's where you see.
[00:50:01] Speaker B: But that's where you get to this, where it's like if they have that 10% ability to go rogue and to make its own decision, the decision it makes, we may not like.
[00:50:09] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
That's when you risk the Matrix or Terminator. Yeah, maybe the thing does. And I think again, but that's projection, right? Because we're worried, because we do that as humans, whenever we get a foot in the door, we want to dominate something. Whether you know, nature or other groups of people, whatever.
[00:50:23] Speaker B: If a machine is programmed to maximize efficiency at all times. Humans aren't overly efficient all the time.
[00:50:29] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:50:29] Speaker B: So I mean, if we identify humans as, hey, the biggest problem I'm having for inefficiency are these people walking around. If I can get rid of these people walking around.
[00:50:36] Speaker A: No, you're right about it. We've done a lot of shows lately on the environment.
An AI could say there and say, look, I've been programmed to make sure the Earth is sustainable for human life.
And it could come and say there's too many people fucking this up.
[00:50:52] Speaker B: Well, the best way to do that might be to get rid of humans.
[00:50:54] Speaker A: That's my point. They might say, yeah, we gotta go from 8 billion back to half a billion. And let me just, I'm just gonna like, like Thanos, snap my fingers and just make seven and a half billion people disappear. We're gonna start this over.
[00:51:03] Speaker B: Well, to your point, that might be.
[00:51:05] Speaker A: The best thing for humans, long term survival. We wouldn't like that. We wouldn't like that living through it.
[00:51:09] Speaker B: But I want to get out of here. But there's one thing I will say, because you brought up the concept of projection, and that is, you know, we talk about that commonly, but projection is where you project the way you think or your. Your thought process onto something else and. Or someone else. So if your motives are this, you assume somebody else's motives are that as well, because you're projecting it onto them. And the thing also that stood out to me about this was the idea that this is an interesting thing to look at, because right now, the title of the article is There's a Damn Good Chance AI will Destroy humanity. Researchers say in a new study, well, I could replace iaa. Excuse me, I could replace AI with that and say, humans. There's a damn good chance that humans will destroy humanity. Researchers like. So, in a sense, it still is a projection, in the sense that, oh, yeah, we can see the way we're spiraling out of control now. That's not to say that this isn't a worthwhile venture, because like I said, they're trying to come up with recommendations on the kinds of constraints you should do when programming AI. That's real knowledge. That would be helpful. So ultimately, though, it's still one of the. We got to get out of our own way before I think we got to worry about AI coming down and bringing it.
[00:52:17] Speaker A: You know what? I don't. I just waiting for them to perfect the metaverse so I can just escape this thing altogether.
Headset on it. I let my binary code AI just take the job.
[00:52:27] Speaker B: Cool. So we can wrap it from there, man. We appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call It Like I See It. Subscribe to the podcast. Rate it. Review us. Tell us what you think. Till next time, I'm James Keys Tunde with Lana. All right, we'll talk to you next time.
