Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello, welcome to 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 try to get a handle on what appears to be an increased radicalization that we are seeing manifest itself in American politics and. And which recently culminated in an insurrection at the U.S. capitol Building.
And later on, we're going to take a look at a promising discovery which may allow us to reduce the amount of plastic waste that is filling up our landfills and accumulating in our oceans and actually turn this waste into something that can be reused.
Joining me today is a man who is unimpressed by the goons he's been seeing on the news. Because what's a goon to a goblin?
Tunde Ogunlana Tunde I know things are crazy in the world these days, but I trust that Big Ballin still remains your hobby.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Big Ballin', baby. If I got goons and goblins out there, then, you know, I just gotta go find elves and hobbits, right?
[00:01:18] Speaker A: I had to counter for the hobbits, man.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Gotta go on the quest for the ring, brother.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: There you go.
Now, we're recording this on January 10, 2021, and I want to get right to our discussion. Unless you've been under a rock for the past few days, you're certainly aware that on January 6, 2021, followers of Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol during Congress's certification of the election of President Elect Joe Biden. This event and the seditious acts by Trump which led up to it have been discussed nonstop since then. So we're not really going to go into the nuts and bolts of everything that happened.
But what I do wanna ask you, Tunde, is what does this insurrection at the Capitol by followers of Donald Trump tell you about the extent to which radicalization has become a big problem in America?
[00:02:10] Speaker B: To answer directly, it tells me that it is a problem in America. And the fact that this happens, I think we can all say this is a big problem the first time. I mean, like you said, unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard some of the stuff that we'll get into today. I mean, the first time the Capitol has been breached, but by a mob, let's say, since 1814, 207 years ago.
So, I mean, obviously this is a big deal. And I was thinking about it. There's a through line here from Pizzagate, right, in 2016, four years ago, where a man was radicalized online to the point where he believed that at the time, the Democratic presidential candidate was having a secret, part of a secret child molesting cabal and they kept children in, in a pizzeria somewhere in Washington D.C. and he was motivated enough to drive from his home in North Carolina to Washington D.C. fully armed and shot a hole in the door.
And I think one of the things I've thought of this week as we all process this part of it was thinking this week that I think this is where a lot of people, even me included, looked at something like Pizzagate and kind of shrugged it off as a joke.
And Conor was like, yeah, there's just a few crazies out there, fringes. This isn't something that you really gotta worry about. And four years later, through a lot of, I guess means that we'll be discussing today, it culminates in that one type of guy times, let's say two or three thousand that actually stormed the United States Capitol and like you said, a committed insurrection, you know, and I hate to say it, you know, what makes this different than anything I've ever seen. It was basically at the bidding of the United States President.
And so, you know, I think it's time to stop pretending that this isn't happening like this. And you know, I'm not the type of person that likes to argue with people or be confrontational and I appreciate that there's a lot of people that like President Trump, he did get 70 million votes, his opponent got 80 million. That's life. But those 70 million, they're Americans and they're our fellow citizens and they're our friends and neighbors and they should be respected generally. But clearly this type of behavior is obviously not acceptable in a democracy. So that'll take me down to the reactions. I think obviously the reaction on the left is pretty predictable.
[00:04:37] Speaker A: Well, before you go in, let me actually give just my thoughts on the big picture. I think that this, this actually demonstrates that radicalization and we'll touch on some during the course of this podcast.
The sources, the things that are creating this environment for radicalization.
This is the challenge of our times.
This is the biggest threat that the United States of America faces in the foreseeable future from a political sovereignty standpoint.
Now what you have here is when people can be convinced of, cuz the people that showed up even after the fact now, minus the people that are trying to deflect and say, oh well, there's somebody else and we were framed, but the people that have stood up to claim credit for this from the Right. In the Republican Party or around the Republican Party adjacent, have the people that have defended it have said, hey, we did this because we were wronged.
But the problem is, is that their basis for believing they're wronged is fabricated, is not legitimate. It's not something that's been substantiated with any evidence.
But once you've become radicalized to a certain position, then the lack of evidence doesn't change your, your mindset in terms of where you stand and what needs to be done. So the radicalization means that once someone make. People make allegations and stuff all the time, you know, people, I'm an attorney, I mean, I say it. People, you can allege anything you want in a complaint and, you know, if you follow going to court. But there comes a time when you have to prove your allegations. And so through the radicalization, once Donald Trump makes allegations of fraud in court, he had to go. Once he made those allegations, he could file a lawsuit, but he had to actually go in and prove it. And. And when he couldn't prove it and didn't have evidence, his cases went nowhere. But in the court of public opinion, with people who have been radicalized, the allegations themselves are enough to substantiate any further behavior from them. So what we're in a situation now is that anybody can say anything and create ripples that will affect us all and in fact, gin up people enough to try to topple the government on their behalf. And so I think it's the problem of our day, and we'll get into the misinformation or disinformation that I think leads to it.
But this is part of the human condition, so we're going to have to wrestle with it. But this is part of the human condition in the information age. So. But go ahead. And I know you want to get into the reaction.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: It's fascinating. And that's what I mean is obviously this isn't the first time in human history or world history some sort of event like this has happened. But you're right, and it's kind of fitting that in the last few weeks we have done shows around things like social media and all that and its effect on our society, and then this happens.
[00:07:39] Speaker A: But it's beyond social media, though.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: Yeah, no, but it's the idea that in these new forms of communication, like we've alluded to, things like when the printing press came out, which allowed the message of Martin Luther, let's say, to disrupt the dominance of the Catholic Church, so, you know, not to say that anything is good or bad.
I guess if you're a Catholic priest at that time, you would have seen Martin Luther as the radical. And these guys are gonna upset the apple cart. Yeah, that was the other thing I felt watching the whole thing, I was like, what's the end game here? Let's say you guys did succeed in all this. You know, you're gonna start, you know, you're gonna put a guy in the head of the treasury and start, you know.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: Well, no, it would stall Donald Trump as the unquestioned, the Supreme Leader.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: I know, it's just fascinating. So getting back to the topic at hand here, the reactions just finishing off that thought, I think were pretty predictable. Obviously anyone who considers themselves a Democrat or more progressive or quote unquote left, I'm sure I haven't heard any of them embracing this action. So I think that was predictable.
And I think on the Republican conservative right side of the kind of country politics, it's been mixed reaction as we all know. Some condemn it, some say I told you so. And this we know, we saw this would infiltrate our side from early on. And some like you alluded to briefly and I want to get into that a little bit more as we discuss this, have already kind of claimed that these, they're victimized and that they were someone else. And what I find fascinating about this moment is some of the stuff I've heard like just people say as I'm watching them being interviewed in the news that they didn't think that police would shoot at them, that the police only shot at others, and that they were surprised. I saw some people being interviewed that are hardcore Trump supporters and they just said that they were very surprised to see this happen, that it's only the left and antifa that does violent acts and things like that. So that to me struck out as part of the radicalization too.
And that's why I think in some way this can turn into a positive long term, let me just put it that way because I think unfortunately those of us who saw this type of thing from a while ago, I'm not surprised that this happened. I'm sad that it happened and we can't take a shot. Cause I'm still on my 30 day drive here.
But no, on a serious note, I'm sad that it happened, but it's like you could see the authoritarian style tactics from the beginning. And so this got way more out of hand than I would have predicted. I mean, I'm not going to sit here and say, oh, I saw this coming. X amount of time ago I didn't, but I think now many more in our society may recognize that, number one, what leaders say is important.
Number two, you can't take it as a joke because I thought about this.
Prior to being banned from Twitter, the president had 90 million people following him on Twitter. And assuming that there's no bots there. Right.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: Which you cannot do.
[00:10:52] Speaker B: No, I'm just saying. But just from a number standpoint, let's just say 1% of those people were actually unstable.
And I believe most of Trump supporters are not unstable. I believe that they can think of
[00:11:04] Speaker A: his rhetoric for context. 1% of all people are probably unstable. No, that's not a social statement.
[00:11:10] Speaker B: But what I'm saying is just that out of 90 million, 1% is 900,000.
[00:11:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:14] Speaker B: So imagine if there's 900,000 of our fellow Americans are unstable, that when he says, go liberate your capital, like in Michigan, you know, 900,000 out of 90 million is a lot of people. If they take that serious, that we can get some disruption.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: And so I think this is going to remind hopefully the rest of our society that doesn't take things to this extreme, that leadership matters, words matter. The other politicians, not Donald Trump, but those who have, and I'll call them out, the guys like Ted Cruz, Josh Howie, Lindsey Graham that have continued to promote these kind of ideas that have radicalized people and give the people that wanna believe these things some sort of legitimate out. It's like you've talked about emotional off ramps in the past, you know, when, when you, when you believe something, but then other people who, we all in society. And that's why I don't necessarily. I think it's a symbiotic relationship. It's not like these people are stupid that we're storming the Capitol and we see now that we're getting to know some, you know, not knowing, but finding out in the media who some of these guys are. I mean, you got retired, you know, military veterans, you have CEOs of businesses. So these are people that are our neighbors, everyday people. They're not like as human beings, they aren't on the fringe. Maybe some of their ideas are, but they live in our society, among us. And when they look at a senator or a news station that's telling them these same things that's being tweeted by the President of the United States.
To me, they're being radicalized by our own politicians and by people who know better.
And so that's who are looking to
[00:12:54] Speaker A: take advantage of Whatever situation. And actually that's what I wanted. I wanna push back on you a little, but it's more on the periphery. Some of the people are just normal, everyday people. Some of them are actually instigators and radicals like the descendants of the Timothy McVeighs of the world. Some of them are. But actually the problem is, the real problem is that when it's legitimized by people who appear to be serious people, when the crazies are legitimized by someone in the office of the president or, or someone in the office of a US Senator and they're saying the same things, you allow the ones who are the ones that are the extremists to blend in to the crowd. And the people who otherwise might be more inclined towards being moderate or being able to operate within the context of the law start to, they look around and hey, I'm with the extremists. And so I might as well just behave with the extremists. And that's actually what we saw here. In any group you have the people that are any group, but you got the people that are the crazy, the real crazy is the ones that will really get it popping. And then you have the mass of that can go in any direction. And once if, if the people who are the real ones that really are getting on and popping are, are legitimized, then the whole group will go towards that. And that's what we saw, you know, like so well now you touched on something I wanted to kind of get into.
I don't know if you had a final thought there.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: I did two things. One is, and just in following what you said, you know, watching some of the, the post of this event footage the last few days and some of the interviews, what I found fascinating about this week was we live in this ecosystem that we live in called the United States culture and political kind of stuff in 2020. And one thing we know is that over the last couple years, so called conservatives, Republicans, people on the right have really taken that embrace this idea of law and order and that they protect law enforcement, that law enforcement is often a target unfairly. And what I found fascinating is looking at some of the social media posts for those who organized this event and were really fervent about it, they said they wanted to go there to kill cops and out of this event and hang the vice president and hang the vice president. And unfortunately a police officer was killed in this event.
And you make a great point about hanging the vice president, which I'll also get back into later for another reason. But for this reason, it is because I think you're right. A lot of those Trump supporters may not have realized that they're putting themselves in the camp with this. Yeah. And now the chance. Let's see how they, you know, let's see how they proceed from here. Are they gonna continue to embrace having this as part of their movement or are they gonna also shun this? Because one thing I've thought about this week is I didn't see anything about Wednesday that had to do with being conservative or being a Republican.
I saw radicals.
[00:15:53] Speaker A: But this is what that has become at this point. That is. That's what the people that warn people about Donald Trump, that's what they were saying, is that, hey, he's going to take you down a path that you're not going to where you end up. It's not going to be something that's familiar to you, because he requires undying and completely complete fealty every time. And as soon as you like, you can do what he tells you to do 99 times. And if you refuse, like Mike Pence on the hundredth time, if you refuse, then you're his worst enemy immediately. So requiring that complete fealty. This is what Comey called out, by the way, years ago. James Comey called that out.
But I do wanna move on. You had kind of mentioned the politicians that play into this and that have. There's a symbiotic relationship. So do you think that radicalization is something that this type of radicalization is brought about intentionally like that? This is the intention of, whether it be media organizations or politicians who want to. To benefit from it? Or do you think that this is inadvertent, like a product of circumstance? Like, we've talked about the social media impact, how that's had on the public discourse and so forth. So we have. It could be a product of circumstance where, you know, this is not. We'll go ahead.
[00:17:08] Speaker B: I can't even wait for you to finish. I think it is intentional, but I'll say this. I think it's intentional, but I don't think it's a conspiracy.
[00:17:15] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: So I don't think people are.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: It's not a hidden conspiracy.
[00:17:19] Speaker B: Well, what I'm saying is people aren't all colluding together in these huge things. What I mean is the politicians are doing certain things on purpose because they know it'll trigger people's emotions to be angry at the other side and show up for them and all that. And what I'm saying is.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: And what that does, by the way, is removes accountability from you. If the other side, if you can make it so that the other side is evil, that everything the other side stands for is going to ruin the country or whatever, then no matter what you do, no matter if you steal money, no matter if you lie, cheat, do whatever else, your supporters cannot hold you accountable because the other side is actually evil. But go ahead.
[00:18:05] Speaker B: And this is why it's a creep towards radicalization. Right. I didn't take it serious when they called Democrats socialists and all that because, again, I'm thinking rational, like, all right, I've lived under enough Democrats. I know. Like, the stock market didn't close for four to eight years whenever a Democratic president is in office.
Like, I get it, taxes might go up and all that, but that's different than communism. You know, we're still a capitalist nation. And, you know, so not even a kid in all that here. But the idea that, you know, the Georgia Senate runoff was the day before this happened and actually concluded the counting of the votes, I guess, that morning, the day before that election. So two days before this happened on Monday, Kelly Loeffler's basically calling her opponent a socialist and that basically, that the world's gonna end if he wins. And I get it. She's gotta say that to his politics in that way. But what I'm saying is, I don't think Kelly Loeffler wanted Wednesday to happen. And I don't think she wanted people to come in there with those plastic handcuffs looking for Mike Pence and wanting them to be hanged on that noose they made that gallows they made outside the Capitol. So what I'm saying is. So I don't ascribe Kelly Loeffler to all that craziness. But what happens is, with years of this out there, what happens is someone who was listening to that type of politician 10, 15 years ago. And this goes back to our show last week where we talked about the battle cry Sarah Palin made in 2008 after she lost, let's take our country back. People took that serious when they have politicians in the Congress and the Senate telling them that the president of the United States is illegitimate back during Obama.
I'm not saying this because I like Obama or because I think people should think like Democrats, saying is, there's enough people that took that serious that really felt that somehow a guy made it to the Oval Office who wasn't an American citizen.
And when you have people in the Congress and The Senate that don't push back hard on that, then people are going to believe it. And then the others, the more like you said, the Timothy McVeigh descendants, they begin to encroach on people that are already started down the road from the politicians. That's why I said.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: And they view that as an opportunity.
[00:20:21] Speaker B: Correct. And so that's what I'm saying is that it is on purpose. But that's why I stop and say, I don't think they're colluding together, but I think it goes back to the term I've used a lot of this stuff, the ecosystem that many are exposed to. And then I think this is where we can bring in the last decade of things like social media, YouTube, the way.
[00:20:43] Speaker A: Let me actually say. And I'll turn it back to you. But like, I think the answer to the question is that the actions that lead to it are intentional. And which is kind of what you're saying. Maybe they're not intending for the exact outcomes, at least consciously intending for those outcomes. They're just thinking. That is like, I think with Kelly Loeffler, she thinks she has to say that story in order to get elected, which is unfortunate because we're no longer in a battle of ideas. But I think that the acts have been more successful than anticipated because of the circumstances. And you're about to get into the social media. I know. I think that because of social media, because of the fractured media environment that we've seen evolve over the last 35 years, it's been more successful than even they would have anticipated in terms of the ease in which you can radicalize people. Like the YouTube algorithms are built to radicalize people. Again, that wasn't the. The intention wasn't to build them in order to radicalize people, but they are built to make it so that you go down rabbit holes because that keeps you in front of the screen.
So I just wanted to get that point out before we got too far away from the question, but go ahead. I know you wanted to get it.
[00:21:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: No.
[00:21:51] Speaker B: And so this whole week, all I've thought about is ISIS and Al Qaeda and all these groups that we project out about how they people get radicalized online.
And I thought, this is the chickens coming home to roost. We've now seen Americans radicalized and committing acts of terror. And I know that someone might say, well, how is this different than the BLM and Antifa and all this stuff we saw in the summer?
Look, acts of violence and destruction of property and hurting other people is terrible. And I'm not condoning anything that happened this summer. But I will say there's a difference between people that gather in a protest and you have thousands of people. And like we've acknowledged, no matter who the people are, you're gonna have some negative elements in there that do stupid stuff.
That's different than being instructed by politicians of your own country and being told by the President of the United States in the morning to go down and basically harass. Even if the president can honestly say, I didn't intend for them to enter the Capitol building, he did tell them to go to the building and harass elected officials to do something that couldn't be done, number one. And number two, there's no reason for it because the election was legitimate and what you mentioned, all the court cases and all that. And that's where I do blame those other politicians who are prominent, like in the Senate, who didn't push back on this immediately after the election and who kind of let it kept playing this game. And all the emails that I see that I received from these different campaigns about how the radicals and this and that and the socialists and people are scared.
Whether people like me and you think they should be scared or not is irrelevant. The fact that they are was proven on Wednesday.
There's enough Americans ginned up to believe this, that this is now our chickens came home to roost. So we now have to deal with domestic terrorism.
[00:23:45] Speaker A: Well, this isn't new in terms of domestic terrorism from a abstract standpoint.
Black Americans have dealt with domestic terrorism throughout much of the country, throughout most of its history. But I think if you want to compare the Black Lives Matter things that happened this summer, the massive protests, I think there are two major distinctions. One you raised, which was that they weren't being instigated on to commit acts of violence or to use quote, and I'm quoting, use force to enact their goals.
But then also they didn't go after the seat of power at the United States. So, I mean, that's a big difference. If you march on the street and okay, yeah, it's terrible that people would break windows of stores and do that type of stuff, but that's still different, I mean, anybody would acknowledge, than attempting and actually accomplishing a siege of the US Capitol.
That's different.
That's different.
[00:24:52] Speaker B: I can't believe it, bro.
Donald Trump actually accomplished something Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee never did, that
[00:24:59] Speaker A: they were trying to do.
[00:25:01] Speaker B: He got a moment to storm the U.S. capitol and put Confederate flags all in the United States Capitol. I mean, that's amazing. 150 years after the Civil War was over. No, no, I think that's fascinating.
[00:25:15] Speaker A: The radicalization piece. I think you raised an interesting point with the, like Al Qaeda and isis, because a lot of times, and this is part of our bias, this is us as humans, our bias.
I believe it's called the fundamental attribution bias. And what it is basically, and I'm going to use this twice here, that's why I wanted to call it out specifically. But the what it is is basically when you see somebody else do something that's not optimal or that doesn't play out right, you attribute it to them as their personality, who they are, their character. But when it happens with you and you do something or your side does something that is not optimal or that not is not something that you're proud of, then you attribute it to circumstance. And you're saying, oh well, these circumstances led to this. And so in this instance, I look like when we saw the radicalization online that was happening, that how Al Qaeda was using that or later on how ISIS was using that to radicalize people, like they were radicalizing people in other parts of the world to come to the Middle east and start fighting using the social media technology. So it is effective for that. But we were looking at that and saying those people that were being radicalized are the problem though. Those are weak people, weak minded people or whatever. Like they had a character flaw that allowed them to be radicalized. Not that the circumstances that they were in made them susceptible and then they got caught up in something that was bigger than they realized, you know, and that's radicalization in a sense. Well, that's what's happening here Now. The people who were on the side of the people that have been radicalized are saying, look, it's the circumstances, it's the circumstances. Look at all these circumstances as to why this happened. They're not saying that, oh well, it's the character of the people that did it. And I'm not saying we should say that, but what I'm saying is that the analogy that you give is very instructive. The same thing that can happen to people to get radicalized to go fight a holy war in the Middle east is happening here in America where people are getting radicalized to go fight against a Democratic election.
And that's why I call this such a big problem. Like, this is not something that's going to go away. Now. It is good that we were able to see and I say that good in the sense, in a large scale sense. It's good that we were able to see an example of the extent to which this can be disruptive because we as humans forget how these type of things play out. We have to be constantly reminded each generation or a couple times a generation to remember, hey, if you get into bed with a snake, you might get bit. And I say snake meaning extremists, people who are extreme. Like, if you welcome them into your ranks because what they're. They bring a certain energy because they talk, you know, in terms that are seductive, then eventually it's going, something's gonna happen to you too. Because that's why we try to. Most of society is generally moderate and that's why we try to engage in civil discourse and so forth. Because once we start going to the edges, then things can get a little, you know, a little crazy. So I want to get to solutions or at least ideas for how we can, you know, get this to a better place. But did you have one other thing you wanted to.
[00:28:27] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. I mean, obviously, I know we could talk about this all day, but one of the things that struck out to me too this week for the first time ever, I mean, luckily this stuff doesn't happen too often, right? So I guess this, this is the first time we've had a major event that they could claim. But, but on the social media posts. And this is where it's interesting that immediately I started watching certain more conservative outlets the night of Wednesday when this happened and then subsequently after. And some not all, because I can appreciate many are calling this what it is. But there's still some that are saying this wasn't Trump supporters, this was antifa, or this was someone else.
And look, I'm not here to defend antifa and I'm not really sure what the hell antifa is and I don't really care. But the idea is that I've been watching now on social media and online QAnon claiming that this was them and they're proud that this happened. And it reminded me that's why I keep using like ISIS, Taliban, al Qaeda. Because remember back 15, 20 years ago when all that stuff was hot, what would happen? A bomb would go off somewhere in the world and someone would claim it.
[00:29:39] Speaker A: Hamas, same thing.
[00:29:40] Speaker B: Hamas or even like, what? Remember the bomb that happened in Spain? And I think it was Basque separatists or something like. Or the far.
[00:29:47] Speaker A: No, this goes back, Ira. I mean, if you want to go
[00:29:50] Speaker B: to the Irish Republican Army. So that's my point is that. That's when I realized, wow, this QAnon thing is now becoming like one of those. It's gonna be this insurgent group within the United States and they just wanna blow everything up. You know, like you said, this is now, the morphing from the Timothy MC days is just different now. It's the same strain of this anti government, anti this or that.
But now here they are. And so that's why, again, it's. I think.
[00:30:17] Speaker A: But the risk, though, now they've been embraced by certain elements of a major political party.
[00:30:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:30:23] Speaker A: And so the risk is much greater right now.
[00:30:25] Speaker B: And that's where I was gonna go, because I think part of the radicalization is that. And you've alluded to this too, and that's why I can't participate in that anymore like I used to, which is this false equivalency, you know, because I don't want to appear partisan and I don't want to be in conflict. When people would say, oh, well, it's all on both sides and all that, I'd be like, yeah, I know. And it's not really.
You have fringe on the left, for sure.
You definitely have an American Communist Party. You have American socialists. You got. All that stuff is real. I'm not saying it's not. The difference is generally the Democratic Party as an establishment holds that off and keeps it at bay generally. And I'm not saying liberalism or liberals. I'm saying the more extremes that would do, like violent acts and all that. And that's not Black Lives Matter I'm talking about. Joe Biden has never gone. Barack Obama, the Pelosi, all these people that certain people on the right hate so much with so much passion. I've never seen them tell a crowd of people to go storm a building or to go liberate their state capitol.
[00:31:28] Speaker A: And put more succinctly, you don't see Joe Biden telling Antifa to stand back and stand by.
[00:31:34] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. That kind of stuff. Like they condemn it all and this and that. And that's all I'm saying. I'm not saying that, again, that Republican politicians en masse like this stuff. But what I'm saying is that when they don't push back, and that's where I think, I hope will come as a positive result of this over the next decade or two, that the next time there's some kind of person in office that Americans start saying is illegitimate or they weren't born in the United States, that more politicians from prominent parties behave like John McCain behaved.
And they show that kind of leadership and conviction. And if they lose, they lose. And I think that.
[00:32:11] Speaker A: But that's real leadership and that's putting America first.
[00:32:13] Speaker B: That is putting America first. Because when you behave like Ted Cruz and Josh Howley, you promote this and then this is the difference too. And then we can move all the people that kind of helped to incite this, like the Lindsey Grahams, like the Kelly Loefflers, like all them, when push came to shove, they all capitulated. And then tell everyone on the Senate floor on Wednesday night, oh, this is. The election was fair, it wasn't stolen. And it's funny, I really actually like Lindsey Graham's speech that night, on Wednesday night. I thought it was a very well done speech. The only thing that I thought when I'm watching it, I thought, man, you've been telling your own constituents that there's problems with the election, that it has to be investigated. And you've been being cute.
You didn't maybe say the word stolen, but it's just like the birtherism thing. Instead of pushing back on it, they were cute and say, well, I haven't seen his birth certificate and all that. And again, I'm not saying all this to defend Obama.
[00:33:09] Speaker A: They gave it oxygen, man. They gave it oxygen. And I do wanna wrap this up, man.
[00:33:12] Speaker B: Yeah, that's all. I'll just finish my thought that to your point, by giving it oxygen, now it's come alive and now they're surprised and they're wondering why no one's gonna listen to them now when they're saying, well, I was wrong.
[00:33:22] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, and ultimately what it is, basically, is that when extremists are trying to infiltrate your side, you on your side have a higher duty to push back because your side is more inclined to trust you. And you need to do that immediately. You need to do that sooner. You can't wait until you've given. You can't give it oxygen. Give it oxygen, give it oxygen.
And then when the shit hits the fan, for real, be like, oh, actually, no, no, this isn't serious. This isn't real.
So you have a higher duty. And that is what we're saying that the people in this case on the right failed to live up to. Is this higher duty on pushing back as extremists were working to infiltrate their side. And they tried in 2016, by the way, if you go back and look at the receipts, 2016, a lot of them said that, hey, if we go down this road during the primary, during The Republican primary, a lot of them said, including Lindsey Graham, we go down this road.
Yeah, if we go down this road, we're gonna end up in a terrible place. And then once the party decided to go down that road, they got on board. And so it's one of those things.
[00:34:27] Speaker B: Let me go on one more because this is one I gotta get out. And Jeremiah Wright, because it's an example, it's an important example because that was an example of when the whole campaign was going on in 2008 and the old tapes from Jeremiah Wright came out. Obama's pastor of the church he sat at for many years and where he was saying, goddamn America and all this, remember that caused a lot of fear for a lot of Americans because they basically thought that this guy was like some black radical right, that he was gonna basically make up for all of America's sins and do all this crazy stuff to white people and all that, because he was sitting in the pews of a guy speaking like that. And that's. I think it reminded me of that because you're right.
I think there's many of us in this country that are used to not allowing those type of extremists from our group in because we recognize that it'd be detrimental for the long term progress of the group as a whole.
We've been able to keep the people in the fringe, really on the fringe. I think what you're identifying is this is an example where unfortunately a major political party and also a movement, because if I was a staunch conservative American, I'd be offended from what I saw. So I'll keep it away.
[00:35:51] Speaker A: And I think to make the point, Obama disavowed those comments from right right away. Like, he didn't let it hang in the wind and say, oh, well, you guys did the context, this and that. Like he said, no, I'm not with that stuff.
Yeah, that's the obligation you have as a leader in your group is to make sure that the more radical elements in your group aren't emboldened and empowered. And so moving to the next piece that I wanted to get into. I mean, this piece doesn't have to be that long because I don't know that we're gonna have any great answers. But solutions, man, like, how do we, how are we going to unwind?
America's very wound up. Particularly like certain Americans are very wound up right now, very upset they've been radicalized.
How are we gonna deprogram people? How are we gonna pull this back and bring us to more of a place where we can have a civil society? I mean, can we solve this by just banning people who try to leverage radicalization in violent ways? And I say that to reference the fact that, you see the social media companies now are deactivating Donald Trump's social media accounts and so forth, whether temporarily or permanently. Is that a solution here or what do you think?
[00:37:04] Speaker B: Yes, it is. And I hate to say it, I hear people now crying, oh, but his freedom of speech is being taken and all that.
[00:37:12] Speaker A: No, it's not.
[00:37:12] Speaker B: First of all, a lot of the people that are saying that always are the ones that are defending private businesses from making decisions. Right? I mean, we had that whole case that I think went to the Supreme Court about a baker that didn't want to make a cake for a gay couple in some state. And the same people that are saying that the president's rights have been taken away are the ones that were defending the ability for a business to make its own decision on who it served as its customer.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: So I think it's for an example that's not as messy.
These are the same people that argue that companies should be able to pollute as much as they want without the federal government regulating them and so forth.
[00:37:52] Speaker B: Even better. So I appreciate that. Follow through. So, yeah, I mean, so again, this is an example of the.
The situational ethics of some. But the reality is, my answer is yes. I mean, I don't think this is a violation of freedom of speech. Again, first of all, what's the government doing it? Well, it's also been well noted that, I mean, yes, good point.
So that's one thing. So I definitely don't want to overlook that. But it's just, it's been well noted that many thousands of people have been kicked off of all these platforms for much lesser things than what the President United States has been doing the past four years. I'd say that they've let him behave this way for too long.
Remember, he told people last year during the pandemic to go liberate their state capitols, and people showed up in Michigan with guns going into the state capitol building.
[00:38:48] Speaker A: And I guess, by the way, I think we should recognize explicitly as a precursor to this.
[00:38:53] Speaker B: That's what I was gonna say. I guess we didn't take that serious enough as a warning sign that this could happen. And I thought about it, too, and I appreciate that.
[00:39:01] Speaker A: Let me jump in with my initial thought on this. I think that one, I think it's messy because the ACLU raised the point as far as how Twitter, Facebook and so forth, their power on this is unchecked.
There's so much power in the hands of one or two people to be able to block somebody from these platforms and so forth. So I am concerned about that. I don't think it's a First Amendment concern, but I think that it is a concern overall. Like, not just in terms of banning people, but just in terms of how much their algorithms determine what we see and everything. Like, their amount of power concerns me in general, and this would be another example of that. But this is not free speech. But I'll say this, as far as whether it could work, this reminds me actually of when we did the 48 laws of power. And the 48 laws of power, I don't know if you remember, I had to go pull it because I wanted to look at it. Law 42, Strike the Shepherd and the sheep will scatter. And that's the law where Green talked about. It's an interesting thing, the democracy in Athens, in Greece, two and a half thousand years ago, where once they created their democracy, they realized that people would pop up from time to time that were trying to destroy the democracy, that were demagogues, or they're doing this and that, and their solution was to banish them.
So that's what I thought about when I saw this.
[00:40:22] Speaker B: Like, oh, wow, this is banishment. No, I'm laughing because you're right. I'm thinking about, like, banishing some guy like, you know, back in the Middle Ages, you know, beyond the town gates, you know, like on the walls of the castle. And now it's like, you're right, this is the 21st century information age version of banishing.
[00:40:40] Speaker A: Banishment. Yeah.
[00:40:41] Speaker B: And I want to mention one thing
[00:40:43] Speaker A: or two things, actually.
I think you're correct that the problem or part of the problem here was that they let the Trump, as far as him getting deactivated in his accounts, they let him get away with so much that actually when you finally say that's enough, it's actually a little bit unfair. I explained this. As far as parenting, you need to be consistent as a parent. You need to apply your rules consistently. It's not fair to your kids if sometimes you let them get away with something and then other times you drop the hammer on them and it's like, well, hold on, I just did this like yesterday and it wasn't a problem. And now you're gonna. Now you're dropping a hammer on me. And so behaving consistently when you're setting standards. And so Forth is important. And so actually that Facebook and Twitter were so inconsistent, so wildly inconsistent with how they applied these standards to the President for so long. Of course, now he's like, well, what do you mean? I've been doing. I'm doing the same stuff I've always been doing. Now I'm blocked. So that is unfair. Now, granted, I would take the position that too late, too little too late is better than never.
So from that standpoint, and the other thing with this, and I think from a solution standpoint that we'll have to look at, and this goes again to my point that the social media companies just have too much power in this way and in other ways, is the algorithms somehow need to be regulated. You sent me something this morning to look at as far as that. And New York City is looking at hiring algorithms and possibly trying to regulate those. And so I think that there needs to be something there in terms of these algorithms in general. Again, the algorithms which decide what content you see when you go into these social media programs that make them curators, that makes the social media companies curators of information. And if they're going to be curators, we need to know what's going on, or we need some way to control what's going on. Because we can see, left unchecked, these guys are operating solely in their best interest. And their best interest includes radicalizing people, because that keeps them in front of the screen. Their financial incentive is to radicalize people. So somehow we need to change that financial incentive or regulate that financial incentive so that the social media companies are not.
Their incentive structure is not set up to radicalize.
That's part of the problem here. And so I wanted to leave that for a solution if you wanted to. I want to move to the next
[00:43:03] Speaker B: topic, but just to finish up. It's amazing, amazing, because what you said is so valid. And I think it just makes me feel like these type of things do create strange bedfellows, too. Because the one thing that I do really agree with the President is this section 230 needs to get looked at, this inability for these companies to be held accountable for what's on their platform. Now, I may have a different reason why I come to that conclusion than the President of the United States.
[00:43:28] Speaker A: And you may have a different solution that you would propose as well, but I do. We need to look at it.
[00:43:33] Speaker B: You got to look at this.
Everyone else has to be regulated, right? The phone companies, the media companies of this and that. But it's just this new.
This technology has allowed these Companies to just really fall through the cracks. Because they kind of don't touch on any of those other regulated areas 100%. So they can kind of fall through the seams and say, well, I'm not. I'm facing.
[00:43:54] Speaker A: Well, they do, Tunde. But the law is reactive. And so the law has a hard time making rules against something that are novel, that are new. Like, it's just difficult to make something that nobody's ever done before. And we don't know the effects of illegal. So it's actually healthy that the law gave them a little bit of rope.
See what you're doing now we can find. Yeah. Now we can try to find where the point is, where it becomes too much. If we didn't give them the rope in the first place. Then we stifle innovation. And we don't even find out where it actually becomes a problem. Now we can kind of get an idea of where it becomes a problem. And then try to tailor regulation to address the problems while still allowing for innovation. So. And we can take it from there.
The second topic we wanted to talk about was there's been a recent discovery of an enzyme that essentially eats plastic. Eats certain types of plastic and converts them into a liquid. That then can be reused and create something that is of significant value. Meaning it's worth it for somebody to spend the money to make the enzyme, use it and so forth, collect the plastic, deploy the enzyme and create it. And they can make a profit. There's a profit motive potentially available. That would allow us to reuse all of this plastic that we're. And we've done several shows on this plastic. These plastic, probably plastic in our water, plastic in the ocean, microplastics, all that stuff we've done. Because it's freaking crazy that it's out there. So what was your thinking, or what was your reaction to seeing this enzyme that. You know, I know that you had. You had talked about how this is an enzyme that has evolved to do this. But, you know, what were your thoughts on this?
[00:45:33] Speaker B: That part was fascinating. I know we'll talk about it, but general thoughts. I mean, just. I can say finally that I wasn't sad.
I felt.
[00:45:40] Speaker A: And actually to let people. We have new listeners. So I just. That Tunde almost, in every episode said they find something that he's sad about. And so at some point, we just started making. We made it a drinking game where every time Tunde says he's sad. If Tunde says he's sad about something in the episode, then we take a Shot, but it's sad because it's a figurative shot.
[00:46:01] Speaker B: James put me onto a dry January, everyone. So we just can't drink in January when I say I'm sad. So I guess we'll have to make it up starting February 1st on that show, you know. But anyway, no, but on a serious note, it made me feel good about our ability to potentially combat this issue. And by this issue, I mean what we're doing to the planet. Pollution in general. I think sometimes we get, as a society, in our discourse, we get too caught up on the very long and vague concept of climate change. And like we talked about on our show last week when we did about the Milky Way and the galaxies that when you're trying to multiply 6.3 trillion miles, that's a light year times 12,000 light years. It's too much for your brain to handle and you kind of get lost in the sauce. And I think sometimes climate change is like that for a lot of us when, all right, it happens over time. All that something like pollution to me is a lot more just straight up, we know especially we're here in South Florida, so we have a lot of waterways. And you can see it. You just see plastic bottles. You see this, that. So I think this idea of plastics is real and it's amazing. I saw that we average now 78 million tons of plastics that go into trash that get disposed of every year and only 6% are recycled. I started thinking in my head, over a decade, that's 780 million tons. If we don't increase our consumption in a decade, we'll have well over a billion tons of plastic. And it's true at some point, what do you do with all this stuff?
So I think that the idea of if they found an enzyme that can eat this and the waste of the enzyme creates, like you're saying a liquid that can create another product.
[00:47:52] Speaker A: I mean, how fast what the enzyme does. And enzymes are. They're not living, so to speak.
They're things that are produced oftentimes by living things that break down. Things like we produce enzymes in our digestive system that break down. So that's.
And what the enzyme does is it breaks down the plastic into something that is then useful. And the enzyme, like I said, you pointed this piece out to me like, as a very significant piece that the enzyme has evolved to do this.
It's. The enzyme initially was. Or the base of the enzyme came from something that broke down the waxy substance that's on leaves of plants. And it Developed, it evolved to then. Or it changed to then develop to be able to break down the chemical bonds in plastic again in a way that leaves you with raw materials that can be reused again. And so, yeah, it's fascinating. And, yeah, it's encouraging. Actually, my thought on this is that it really goes back to. This is, like, part of my worldview. And that is just because we don't have an answer to a problem right now doesn't mean that we should be. That doesn't justify denying the problem or trying to minimize the problem. I think that that actually is one of the biggest thing, Biggest impediments to progress is that when we see things that we don't know the answer to, there's an inclination to try to minimize the problem because that makes us feel better. We don't like seeing problems that we have no idea how we're gonna solve. But human ingenuity has, throughout history, solved problems that before the solution existed, nobody knew what to do. I mean, the wheel was the solution to a problem that, prior to that, no, people didn't have any idea what to do with it. And so, you know, how are we gonna move this heavy stuff? I don't know. This time I came up with a wheel, and then it's like, oh, there we go. It's easy. And so that's what we.
[00:49:47] Speaker B: True human ingenuity. I'm sure there was at least one person in that group that argued it was a bad idea.
[00:49:52] Speaker A: I bet you before the wheel was created, people said it was. It was immoral to move heavy stuff.
God doesn't want you to move heavy stuff.
[00:50:01] Speaker B: Let's be glad they lost.
[00:50:03] Speaker A: They always do. But what they do, when leaders or when people wanted us to deny problems simply because we don't have a solution at the moment, they hold us all back. And so I think we gotta be weary of people who tell us that we look and see issues, we see problems, and they tell us, oh, it's not that big of a deal. Oh, it's not that big of a deal. We saw the same thing with COVID We saw people trying to tell us it was not that big of a deal because we didn't have a solution at that moment. But other people luckily got in the lab and started trying to come up with these vaccines and so forth. And hopefully we haven't come out on the other side yet. But hopefully that work will pay off. And we'll look back in five years like, yep, we had no idea what to do. You know, in March of 2020. But, you know, people came up with a way. And so I think that this is just another example of that. Like, if you look at a problem and we put our bright minds on it and we put our problem solving on it, then eventually we'll either figure something out or identify a way to address the problem. And so that's what this is. And so I'm very encouraged by this. I think this is a first step, though, not a last step like this. They see this and then somebody else is going to see this and then build on that. Now, I sound like a patent attorney right now because that's the whole concept with patents, which I'm not going to get into right now, but just innovation leads to further innovation, and unleashing innovation is in everyone's best interest. So I'm happy to see this. I'm encouraged by it. And I think that this is human. This is. This is a part of humanity that dates back to, you know, the whole time we've been here and that we should all be very proud of and we should embrace.
[00:51:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Now. And I think one of the things that's. Funny, I was going to say with your comments about those, it reminded me of just what we talked about in the first half of the show with Wednesday, that there's still some people that don't see anything wrong with what happened Wednesday, you know, or that we'll deny
[00:51:51] Speaker A: there's anything wrong that robs us of the ability to solve the problem.
[00:51:55] Speaker B: Correct. And that's what I mean, it's just fascinating that if you all, as we always want to do, if you extrapolate it out 30,000ft, then it's all kind of the same. Right. And that's why I just find it fascinating.
[00:52:06] Speaker A: Well, because the consistency is humanity. Correct.
[00:52:09] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:52:10] Speaker A: It's humanity. It's how we deal with things.
And as you talk about, oftentimes it's how we set up guardrails. We, if we're paying attention, we can see these errors that we tend to make, and we can set up guardrails to try to keep us from making those arrows or to minimize the extent to which those errors can lead us astray. And so it's a constant battle, though, because it's a battle with our underlying nature, how we're wired and so forth. I mean, even with, like, I don't want to go down this road too much, but even with the social media stuff, and they are. And then the media in general that are taking advantage of the radicalization or actually participating in the radicalization they're taking advantage of the biases that human beings are known to have, whether it be confirmation bias, whether it be the fundamental attribution bias I spoke about earlier, availability bias, the bias that things that you remember more, you find to be more significant just because you remember it more, whether or not it actually is more significant.
So therefore, you repeat something over and over again, over and over again to somebody, then they attach more significance to it because you repeated it over and over again. So all of these things are us dealing with ourselves.
And so it's fascinating. But I mean, I think that I look at this issue with the plastics and a possible way now that we can cheaply, because that was part of the issue with recycling plastics historically, has been it requires a lot of energy to do it. Like, you got to heat it up so much, and then what comes out of it is of lesser quality than what you started with. And so that degradation means that one, you're getting something out of it that's not worth as much, so you remove the financial incentive to do it, and then two, it's not as good. So why are we wanting to make a bunch of stuff that's not as good, but if we can use an enzyme that's going to break it down to its core constituency and then create something that is then better or at least equally suited to perform whatever job and has value like that, then I mean, that's huge. That's huge. I mean, we can possibly address the big island of plastic in the Pacific and that becomes a gold mine, literally.
[00:54:14] Speaker B: Yeah, it's fascinating. One of the things that I learned in reading and preparing for this is that they're estimating that in the near future, 20% of the oil and gas that we consume in the world, in the globe will be used towards making plastic. And that was kind of another thing I kind of realized, like, just this ecosystem of the Earth and our natural resources and chemistry, you know, obviously they're extracting oil out of the ground because from a chemistry standpoint, you know, it's obviously refined in a certain way that makes plastic. You know, it's added to the ingredients that make a plastic bottle or, you know, the casing of my iPad or whatever the plastic is.
So it just was another reminder that, you know, we're extracting these resources from the Earth that aren't finite at some point.
[00:55:04] Speaker A: That are finite. That are finite.
[00:55:06] Speaker B: Very, very good correction. That are finite, that aren't infinite is what I meant. My brain meant that. So thank you.
And that's my Point, we had one of these shows a year ago about oil and the environment and all that, and the idea that we were going to hit peak oil, but then the technology got better where we could do fracking and they could do more deep sea drilling off the coast of Brazil and deeper waters and all that. But at some point that's all going to end too, because the idea is just we're extracting the resources much faster than Mother Nature can produce them because it takes millions of years to produce vast amounts of oil reserves under the earth.
So again, this is why I said honestly that seeing articles and research like this, being successful is a good feeling because whether people want to acknowledge it or not, the way we've developed our relationship with the earth in consuming fossil fuels in order to power energy is not sustainable forever. Just because we consume things that are not renewable. I think that's the whole term. That's why I hate when this gets into the argument of do you believe in climate change or not? Because the argument is much bigger than that. It's about just renewable energy makes sense for humanity because of exactly that word, renewable.
We're not destroying the earth, number one. And number two, we're not robbing the earth of a resource that when it's depleted that we won't have a solution on how to deal with flying planes and delivering electricity from utility companies to homes and all that stuff. I mean, coal.
[00:56:45] Speaker A: And number three, it's infinite.
[00:56:48] Speaker B: That's my point.
[00:56:50] Speaker A: I would like to have, you know, I would like to have renewable money.
I would never run out, so can I have.
[00:56:58] Speaker B: But my point, as a country, we do. Maybe not as individuals, but we do, you know, the Federal Reserve, I mean, they just create a trillion dollars like in the last legislation.
[00:57:07] Speaker A: Right, but we don't want. Leslie, we won't go down that.
[00:57:10] Speaker B: No, no, but I do want to figure out how to do that personally because then I could have my little group of whoever and just like, what happened?
[00:57:17] Speaker A: Doable cash.
[00:57:18] Speaker B: Yeah, we'll have a meeting in my. Yeah, have a meeting in my closet and I'll get them all to agree and then they'll just produce like an extra million dollars just out of my, you know, shirt pocket.
[00:57:27] Speaker A: Yes. I mean, the whole concept of renewable energy to me seems like a no brainer. Like, you mean it won't run out?
[00:57:33] Speaker B: Oh, exactly. And we won't be fighting wars for these resources because we all share the sun and the wind. You know, it's just.
So let me not. Yeah, let's not give us the yeah, yeah. Like I'm about to start another show.
[00:57:46] Speaker A: Well, no, I mean, but it's ultimately, though, we like talking about it, though, because it's. It's an interesting thing that's going on. Like, a lot of times people get really wrapped up in one part of what's going on with humanity's doing here, what humanity is doing there. And there's always a lot going on, you know, and then even when things look crazy one place, there might be something to be hopeful about in another place. And so it's just good to be well rounded in that sense, to just try to touch on and think about and give a little, you know, a little bit of your headspace to something beyond what may be what everybody or what a lot of people want to talk about and rehash over and over again. So, you know, we appreciate everybody for joining us. Until next time, I'm James Keys.
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