Episode Transcript
The following is a computer-generated transcript.
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Hello. Welcome to the Call It Like I See It Podcast. I'm James Keys. And in this episode of Call It Like I See It, we're going to take a look at how the US Supreme Court and a few recent decisions appears to be dismantling some of the guardrails for how things have worked in our society for the past generation or so. And these are guardrails that were put in place by previous generations. And we'll consider how the removal of these kind of guardrails, so to speak, but just kind of bounds of conduct may cause our society to evolve in either predictable or unpredictable ways or perhaps devolve. And later on, we're going to discuss whether there's anything that can be done about all the smoke that keeps drifting down into parts of the US from from the Canadian wildfires. Joining me today is a man who may not be God or a Supreme Court justice for that matter, but he is good at judging people's actions, Tunde Ogunlana. Tunde, are you ready to tell us about the hearts of men?
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Yeah, man, I can judge with the best of them.
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All right. All right.
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God. There. How's it getting? A bit nervous, But.
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Where is he going with this one?
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Didn't have to do too much thinking.
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And recording this on July 3rd, 2023. And we'll release this on on July 4th. So wish everybody a happy Independence Day. But over the past few weeks and really the past week, the US Supreme Court has issued some pretty significant rulings that. Represent fairly significant changes in the ways what's acceptable in terms of certain conducts in our society or the way that things are done. Things are operated. One deals with affirmative action, particularly affirmative action in college admissions. And in a set of rulings, there's two rulings primarily or principally students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard, and then also which deals with private universities and then Students for Fair Admissions versus University of North Carolina, which deals with public universities. The Supreme Court effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions. And in another ruling, 303 Creative versus L.A., the Supreme Court essentially found it unconstitutional for a state, Colorado, in this instance, to require a business or businesses that are open to the general public to offer their services in a way that's not discriminatory. And that's something that's significant for reasons we'll get into later. But it's a matter of it's balancing different. Interest there. And the way it came down to balance is is pretty much opposed to the way that the Supreme Court in previous generations or a previous generation found it to be. So to get us started. Tunde What are your thoughts on these recent rulings, generally speaking? And we want to start with just kind of how they are essentially tearing down guardrails in our society that previous generations saw from their experience were important to have in place.
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Yeah, this is a great set up, man. I think, you know, you said a couple things just there that when you said a previous generation of Supreme Court justices, that was good.
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Most generations of the US didn't have these.
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And that's why I say is good because it made me The first thing I thought of while you were speaking was Dred Scott, and the case from 18 was a 57. And yeah. And so and so the point is and the reason I say that for the audience is. Again, the our nation is ever evolving in various directions. Sometimes, you know, people think it's progress and it's moving forward. Sometimes they feel like it's moving backward. But from the what you said about the guardrails, I think that's a very good point because as you just stated, recent prior generations. Um. So I guess what happened coming out of the era of the 1960s Civil Rights Act, all that kind of stuff, which I know we'll get into this stuff and said, okay. Certain things happen and evolved in this nation, and it will take a certain set of processes to try and. Correct some of those what at least people like you and I might see are ills, let's say, like excluding certain, so to speak. Yeah. Well, and I would say like this excluding a certain segment of the society from participating fully. Right. And so let me say.
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Because, because I think you're really on to something, but I want to just phrase it a different way before I kick it right back to you is essentially what what they observed as we if we look back, the default or the the typical the the standard operating procedure, how things were going up till that point, whereas delivering a slanted result in terms of if you're going to look at affirmative action in terms of do people have access to higher education, you know, like reasonable access or not, whether or not there's any particular discrimination or just general, the way the system is set up, the way the the the inertia from how things have been and so forth. And then with in terms of businesses, do they have to serve people and so forth if they're open to the public. A lot of exclusion was was involved in that in terms of oh, we just don't serve this type of person, we don't serve people of this religion or we don't serve people of this skin color or whatever. And so to counteract those things, they put guardrails in place and said, okay, well, if you're going to be open to the general public, then you got to serve the general public without discrimination, particularly against certain protected groups. If we're going to do admissions, we we to counteract the the the the status quo that we have in place, we're going to have to put in. And that's where the term affirmative action comes from. We can't just sit back and allow things to naturally adjust themselves. We can't just remove the the specific discrimination or the act of discrimination. That won't be enough to change the the cultural, the cultural setup and the societal setup that we're in right now. And so I think that's kind of a good way to look at it. But but I know I broke in, but so go ahead and go.
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Yeah, yeah. So I think because the idea of guardrails I think is a well put term that you that you cite there because in the end, right, if we're live in a big society where everybody should, you know, is to be treated equal and respected, then you're right when you have a majority group and a minority group. And that could be in any nation, any society or religion, then there are sometimes forces within the majority group that may look to take their majority and use it as a way to dominate the minority. And I think that when you say guardrails, it's appropriate because, you know, I think about there's there's two things actually that I'll say and then I would like your thoughts on it. One is the repeal of certain parts of the Voting Rights Act probably a decade or 15 years ago in that period. And as we see, it's led to certain shenanigans in the way that statehouses are dealing with elections and gerrymandering and so on and so forth. The second one is actually probably less emotional because it's totally in a different direction. That's why you'll appreciate this. But it's about how human beings behave. And this would be in the financial world, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1998, which was a guardrail against the excesses by the banking industry and investment banks that led to the Great Depression after the crash of 1929.
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Guardrail from a generation with experience of the downside. Correct. They put in place we take away the guardrail and then less than ten years later, we have an economic crash.
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And that's why I wanted to bring that one up, because it's not about race. It's not about our country in that way. It's just about the fact that, like you said, there's a living memory of people that were around during the Great Depression and say, hold on, when we let banks play around with with with people's investment money and go to the casino with it and buy stocks, it didn't end well. Yeah. And then and so what happened by 1998, that generation was like, oh, well, we're smarter than them. And then, like you said, ten years after that, we have the Lehman Brothers and financial collapse. And again, it didn't look exactly the same as the Great Depression and the crash of 29, but similar things led to a similar result. And luckily, we as a nation and our leaders acted quickly enough to do things like Dodd-Frank and the Basel Accords and all that, so that fast forward, when we had the next banking crisis this year, we didn't have such a bad result. And I think what we could expect is with these guardrails taken out from a cultural standpoint to protect the interests of the minority, I don't think we should be surprised that within a decade or 15 years we do see some forces try and be more aggressive and taking this back. Right. So, I mean, well.
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That's I think that's the if you frame it as guardrails, then that's almost an inevitable conclusion, so to speak, because these aren't. And the reason I think it's important to look at it in this way is that affirmative action isn't some inherent right. That's not something that oh, well, of course you have to have affirmative action because you know that that's that's something that someone should inherently have in their society. Affirmative action in this context is specifically in response to the way society had evolved through conscious action and also just through the way things were based on some of its conscious, some of it's just minority and majority stuff. And so it was the knowledge that the people are alive at that time had that wanted their country to to offer people a more fair chance and to be able to leverage and utilize the talents all around society and not have large segments of society that because they lack access, because they lack the right, the right exposure to certain things, that we just don't get anything out of them. You know, we can't get their best and brightest to contribute because we, you know, we're not opening our doors to them, so to speak. So but it's not something that's an inherent right. So it's something that extra that you're putting on or that you're setting up to try to guide society in a direction that you think is helpful for the society.
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And then the same thing with the the businesses. There's there's no inherent right to do business with anybody who opens their doors. You know, like that's not something that's some inherent right. But we saw where society went when without any kind of without addressing that in some way, in some affirmative way. And the people at time at that time were like, oh, well, this is going in a very negative direction. This is something that we don't want to see. So they put that in place. So but that's why that's the other piece, why guardrails is appropriate is because we're not talking about rights in a sense. The voting piece, it's analogous in the sense that the Voting Rights Act took extra steps than what would be considered in the abstract necessary for people to be able to vote. I mean, the the we have voting amendment in the Constitution like that should be enough, you know, like for everybody to vote. But through practice, it was seen that that's not enough. And there were always all these shenanigans going on to deny certain people the right to vote. So they did more to try to, okay, we got to put more laws on the books. So you certain states that are the worst offenders in this. If you guys are going to make changes, you have to get them pre-approved.
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Pre-clearance is what it was called. Like all this additional stuff, you know, that was meant to counteract the behaviors that people were doing. The people at the at the time lived through and like, oh, well, this is this is the stuff that's causing the problem. And so while voting is a right that everyone should have, even the implementation of something like that required additional guardrails. And we'll talk about, you know, we can talk about later how the removal of those guardrails or a lot of those guardrails. 15 years ago or so, we saw an explosion of disenfranchisement and a lot of efforts to keep people out of the vote. So much so that you can argue that John Roberts changed his mind and 15 years ago was saying, yeah, yeah, the voting rights stuff, we don't need it anymore to in June this saying, okay, you guys are going too far. We can't let you do this in terms of disenfranchizing taking the right, the right of people to vote or to have their vote. Heard in Alabama and thought just to just to throw it back to you. But the I thought your point on the financial crisis was was a great analogy as well, you know, because again, that's not that doesn't go to any rights necessarily of an individual person or a group of people.
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But that goes more to, again, people seeing, okay, well, if we don't have any restraints on here, here's the direction things might veer into just because of human nature, just because, you know, greed or just because of shortsightedness or, you know, any type of thing. It could be negative qualities or just, you know, just normal human qualities. And so they put the guardrails on. And when we take them off, a lot of times we end up having to learn basically the same. We have to learn the same lessons over again when we take off the guardrails that the previous generation set in. And maybe that's something that's important, you know, from just from an entropy standpoint or maybe not. But it seems like we're going down that road with these decisions. And I wanted to ask you just to keep us moving, you know, like what stands out to you most in like, we'll look at affirmative action first, then we'll look at the the the second one. The second issue in terms of the quote unquote, religious freedom or the ability to discriminate. Second, in business, the ability to discriminate in business. So an affirmative action. What stands out to you most as far as the discussion and the role, whether it should or does have a role in our society or, you know, like, what do you think?
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Well, I think that I mean, first of all, I think what this current ruling, you know, everybody needs to recognize what it is. It was a ruling specifically on the use of affirmative action and and certain things like quotas as relates to college admissions at the university.
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They've turned it race conscious. And just where that race is one of the considerations. It's not like I don't know that it's hard quotas because I think hard quotas have been when been kind of pushed out of the system a while back. But in terms of looking to to achieve a certain balance and race conscious is the terminology that's been used for the past 1015.
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Well, the point I'm making is just for a lot of people that are very concerned about this and feel like it's an erosion of rights and things like that, I mean, it's it's a very specific. Interpretation about affirmative action as relates to university admissions. This isn't hitting other stuff now. Is there a risk that other challenges to other parts of affirmative action in corporate America and other things? This could be a door opener. I don't know. That remains to be seen. Right.
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And oftentimes when the Supreme Court just just for context, oftentimes when the Supreme Court goes in a direction like this, it is something that is seen that will be applied consistently in other areas. But you're right that there are specifics here that deal with college admissions that may or may not be apples to apples translating into other contexts. I think that's a good point.
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And I think that and that's where going back to just the thought of affirmative action, I mean, let's let's get into it, right. It's kind of started around 1973 under President Nixon. And the idea, you know, President Nixon was an interesting guy, you know, Republican guy who was all about law and order. But one thing that he championed was what he called black capitalism. He was very like in the idea that blacks and black communities coming out of the 60s needed to be enfranchised and needed to be there, needed to be a fast track to get black businesses and black folks kind of in the mainstream as it relates to entrepreneurship, things like that. So they created things like the which is called the minority business enterprise, and those were businesses that were 51% black owned. And then through affirmative action policies like federal contracting, those, for example, if a federal contract, let's say, there was going to be a bridge built in a state. And it was on an interstate highway, which was going to be federal dollars. The federal contract might say that. The the. You know, 20% of the spend on subcontractors has to go to businesses that are MWBEs. 51% minority owned. And the idea was just to start leveling the playing field because as we discussed earlier, the culture of the United States up until that time is that specifically black people, but others were being excluded from participating in anything like that. So they just saw you or a black person you showed up to try and compete at an RFP.
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You just wouldn't get the business no matter what. And a lot of times they'd tell you why because you were black. So these were all things done at that time to try and right that. And what I would say is to answer the question more specifically now is fast forward, now 50 to 60 years. I would say this affirmative action and integration generally have worked. We have seen huge changes in the society, in my opinion, for the better, where we have more representation of people in business, corporate boardrooms, all that that look like that mirror the population. And, you know, there's certain Americans that are fine with that, like you and I, and there's other Americans that are intimidated by that. And I think that we are in that moment where all these things are being rehashed. And so. Well, let me ask you, does it need to be. Yeah, that's what I was going to pass it back just to finish up. Does it need to be changed or updated? I don't know. Maybe. Right. Just like is the NAACP who's been making a lot of noise on this. Is their mission the same as it was in 1923? Probably not. And I think that's where we need to look in our society and say. Are these things still important? Relevant? Yes, I do believe so, because I do believe what we just said. If you take away the guardrails, there is a chance that things can slide back to what we didn't like.
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If history is any teacher, I mean, like may or may not, but like when it wasn't there before, society went in this in blank direction. So but I do think reasonably assume that society might go back in that direction once it's.
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I think we should do. And Israel, I'll just hand it back. I think we should acknowledge that the changes have been positive. And if we do need to look at these things and kind of just tinker with them around the edges, I'm okay with that. Like, I'm okay having that discussion. That's all I'm saying.
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Yeah. I mean, it's interesting you bring that up because I like when I look at this, there's a couple of things that come to mind and I would generally agree with you that for the for what they were trying to accomplish, they have worked, you know, like affirmative action type programs. Now, has it been perfect? No, nothing's perfect, you know, Has it been, you know, immediately or it cleared all of the discrepancies that were there that were based on, you know, the way the culture had been or just different available and opportunities? No, of course not. But it had pushed things in a direction. And you know that some people would be happy about that. Some people would be intimidated by that. But I think a lot of people in this issue in particular look at it and say, okay, well, if it worked or if it has really it's done a good job in terms of what it was intended to do. Is it even still necessary anymore? You know, and like that's I look at that, you know, and similar to when John Roberts was talking 15 years ago, they didn't think the protections in the Voting Rights Act were necessary anymore. Our country's in a different place now. We're a different country, yadda, yadda, yadda. And he was wrong. And to his credit, he he issued a ruling in 2015 years ago or so that indicated that he believed and said that he believed that that Voting Rights Act wasn't necessary anymore.
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And then he issued a rule, you know, he was on the side of a ruling just last month saying, oh, no, no, no, you guys are doing too much. We got to bring back some of the Voting Rights Act. You know, we got to protect the Voting Rights Act because what you guys are doing is too much. So. When you look at it from whether it worked. And so therefore, do we not need it anymore? I think it's a fair question, you know, and I think that gets into the unknown. It is an assumption to say, well, when we didn't have the guardrails on this stretch of highway. People kept veering off and flying off a cliff. And so we put the guardrail up and then we now 99% of the people don't fly off the cliff. And so. Okay, well, now, hey, maybe people have learned now to slow down so we don't have to have the guardrail up anymore. We can take that guardrail off and people won't fly off the cliff like they used to. That's possible. You know, but whether it's likely or not, that may strain credulity. Credulity. But I think the other thing that we have to keep in mind with this and this is related to what I'm saying, is that there's a lot of discretion involved in things like government contracts or in college admissions or anything really where there's going to always be more qualified people, a lot more qualified people based on whatever your standard for qualification is, there's going to be a lot more qualified people than there are openings.
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So there's always going to be a lot of discretion in situations like that. And so what we've seen in our in America, you can't divorce American context from this in the abstract. All of this stuff is extraneous. But in American context, what we've seen is when there's a lot of discretion, certain groups get the short end of the stick very consistently. And so if unless that's gone away, then it's something that we at least have to at one, we have to understand that if we take away the guardrails, then there's a high chance that we slide back in. And again, that may be necessary, though, because in the same way that in order to get to Dodd-Frank, you had to get rid of Glass-Steagall. Like there's a certain level of entropy here where people got to. People do have to learn the same lessons over and over again. We've learned throughout history that humans don't retain the the lessons of history as well as you might think, no matter how knowledgeable they are on history, you know?
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Yeah, that's true.
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Yeah. So I want to keep us moving though. And so I wanted to ask you about kind of this and I'll term it as religious freedom because really what, what you can look at it as it also invokes freedom of speech and so forth. This was in this in the case, the 303 creative violence. What it really got into was you had a person who is a religious person who wants to offer business services but didn't want to offer them the nature of the services, like writing stuff, creative material. They didn't want to offer them to members of the LGBT Q plus community. And with that, essentially saying, Hey, because of my religion, because of my religious beliefs, I don't want to offer my creative services in them. And so that's it's actually is another ruling that's relatively narrow. It's not as blanket as it might be sold. But with that and so I'll talk about that just in the context of religious freedom to discriminate, you know, because that would be discrimination to say, hey, I'm going to offer my services to anybody except you, you know, because of this and that in a business context. So Tunde like, what do you think as far as the balancing act that that comes in here? Because we are a society that does value religious freedom and freedom of speech. You shouldn't be required to write things. The government should not. This would be the government requiring you to write things that you don't want to write, so to speak. And, you know, so freedom to practice your religion versus preventing discrimination, which as we've seen again, looking back through history, once you start opening the door to say, hey, yeah, you can go and discriminate in what you're doing, that goes to places that we may not. We've we've as a society have determined not to be to bring out the best in us.
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Yeah. I mean, well you bring up some interesting points that all have their own cross currents. So one is freedom of religion. Yeah. The other is freedom of speech. Yeah. And the other is a society that says on its surface that it doesn't like discrimination and discriminating against individual groups or taking away their rights to participate in the society. So when you have those three cross currents, they're not always that's why they call them cross currents. They sometimes cross each other. They don't always move in tandem. And so, yeah, someone who feels that their religious belief will prevent them from or should prevent them from being able to serve certain groups. In this case, you know, a gay customer and also has this freedom of speech, I guess, to be able to verbalize that, to say, I don't want to serve you. That runs up against that current of we don't like seeing open discrimination in the country. Right. In terms of the general American would probably say that. And the guardrail.
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That had been put up just real quick, the guardrail that had been put in place with that is the creation. What the what legally the framework was, is they created what are called protected groups, you know, And so these groups, whether it be groups that historically faced a lot of discrimination or that were prone to that. So like you can't do that to these groups. You know, it's historically what the the the the the guardrail, so to speak, has been. And so and this is and as Sonia Sotomayor Justice Sotomayor said, this is the first time that the Supreme Court is saying, hey, okay, actually, you can do this to one of the first time since these guardrails have been put in place. You can do this to a protected group.
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Yeah. And I think. Though, you know, and so this is where I say because I think this is where kind of sometimes the the intellectual crowd or those who don't like seeing religion used in this way, meaning used as a wedge to discriminate against people will try and cite things like, oh, well, the Bible doesn't really mention homosexuality and all this, and none of that really matters. Religion is something special, right? Like, I'm not here to comment on people's religious beliefs, but what I would say is. You know, we we as a country say that we tend to not like Sharia law and we tend to not like the way that the theocracies in the Middle East look that is very repressive and does take away rights of homosexuals, women, people that have other religions. Right. That aren't Muslim in those countries like Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. I mean, try practicing Christianity or Judaism and openly in one of those countries, right? So America, again, this is where I find that our culture is fascinating because for for some of us here, because I bet you the person who doesn't want to serve this gay couple and using their religion as a shield also is the type of person that espouses freedom. And what is going to say that you can't trample on my freedoms? Right. And my point is, is that.
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Sharia law and, you know, like like we've seen in this country in the past.
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Yeah. And if we and if we allow people every time they just don't like something or somebody to say, well, it's my religious belief, kind of like we said, like my joke with sometimes the the service dogs. Right. Like it used to be just when you're blind or something serious, you get a service dog. Now it's that if my back hurts and I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, I get to bring my my, my dog on the airplane because I'm emotionally distraught. And so my concern is that when you start letting people, like you said, when you take the guardrails off of certain things, like we know that discrimination against gays is something that is real, it's been around and gay people have gotten killed and hurt and all that. And the society, like you said at some point in the last 40 years kind of said, you know what, gays deserve the same protection as African-Americans and other groups that have been harmed only because of who they are.
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And to do so, we have to go a little bit above and beyond the kind of hands off approach of saying, hey, just don't do it. Like if you do stuff, if you do commit a crime, then you know, you do the time, so to speak. We got to do a.
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Little bit more. I think this to me is more of a slippery slope, actually, than the affirmative action on the college admissions stuff, because when you allow someone to say, because of my religion, I don't want to serve this group, like you said, you know, and I'm not going to joke when I say this, Up until 1978, Mormon, the Mormon Church of Latter day Saints would not allow blacks into the priesthood because they taught that blacks were sinners. They were descendants of ham, and that's why they were black, because they were all sinners. So I could I could see a mormon. And I don't want to pick on Mormons. I'm just saying that it's a religion.
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That I know of.
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The illustration for the for the purpose of this conversation. It's the only religion I know of that has made a statement about a racial group in this country, like from a religious standpoint and some of Mormon business owner could say, Well, I don't want to serve James and Tunde because my religious belief is they are sinners because they're black. And I don't want to serve a sinner. And you can't infringe on my religious right. What is our country going to do to day? Someone does that.
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Well, I mean, if you want to go like because someone will.
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Do it is my point. Well, but I mean.
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Well, let me tell you this. You could play this out even more to where you can reveal where people. This is not something generally. And my problem with it is not something that's generally people hold on principle, you know. Well, because.
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Religion allows you to make a lot of situational ethics excuses.
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Well, think about it, though. Think about it like like you brought like you mentioned, the Sharia law. And I commented on it also like the if someone was to say like or you say like people have a problem, don't or people we tend to say, hey, we don't like the way that theocracy is operate in the Middle East. That's not because they're operating as theocracies. Those people that that we're talking about here. That's because they're not Christian, you know, because they're another religion. You know, it's not a problem with religion in the law. It's a problem with Islam in the law. And so it's not a general, hey, we don't want religion in the law at all. And so imagine the time when someone, because of an Islamic belief or another religious belief saying, hey, I won't I won't do business with a woman because in my religion that, you know, women need to be, you know, this or that, you know, And then and then they cite this as precedent saying, look, now it's a slippery slope. We're not there yet because this does put in a caveat. This this ruling does go into that.
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It makes a point to talk about. This is more of a creative thing. This is something where you're asking somebody to create something for you, something you know, like that is beyond just this isn't just offering somebody a ride. This isn't ride sharing. Like we're it's not like it doesn't involve you having to, you know, like, this is you creating from your own expression, you know, that's why the First Amendment is involved as well. But ultimately, you're correct in the sense that once you start once you start saying that discrimination is acceptable in blank context, it becomes harder to push back against discrimination and other contexts if history can teach us anything. And that's what the history teaches us in that sense. So once we take down this guardrail for creatives, then it might get expanded out and that would just that that would be something that would go in a direction in terms of we're going to have a society that's not based on discrimination. It's going to be based on equal opportunity, equal protection and so forth. That goes in the direction that would be anti that. And so, yeah.
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Well, can I, I want to jump in real quick.
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I'll say one more thing because I'll let you respond before we move to the next piece. But ultimately, though, it does seem like I mean, it's no coincidence you're talking to a generation or two from when this stuff was put in place because you mentioned a good term before, and that's living memory. Living memory is very important on this stuff because as we see right now with the way our society, certain elements in our society are going to war with teaching history, once you get stuff out of the living memory and there are people who aren't familiar with the reasons why certain things are in place, while you have people actively attacking the teaching of history, it's easy to to to to then look at things not in the context. In which they evolved. But in the abstract and if you're looking at it in the abstract, then it's a lot more palatable to say and it may it actually makes a lot of sense to say we don't need affirmative action or this person should be free if their religion, you know, is this that they genuinely held religious belief, then, you know, they shouldn't be forced to create things for something that they don't believe in, you know, So the the lack of the fact that you take it out of the living memory combined with the, hey, let's get this stuff, any kind of teaching of why this stuff might be in place out of history, you it's easy to end up here, basically. Yeah. So I do want to keep us moving though, the moving forward, you know, Do you think these rulings will be impactful? You know, like and I guess to some degree, we've kind of said that, you know, like it at least has the potential to be impactful if we're looking at history as our guide at all, but just impactful on our society and our economy. You know, as as you know, everything continues to move forward and evolve or devolve, you know, and either that. Or do you think the reaction to this may be overblown.
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On the affirmative action side and the Colorado ruling side? I do think we got to see how those play out. I think obviously, especially the affirmative action said to me this, the Colorado one could be more of a slippery slope. I think affirmative action was pretty specific to the university concern. Um, and let's see how they play play out. So I don't know if the reactions are overblown or not. I just think, you know, let's see how it plays out. Let's put it that way.
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You know, it's interesting. I think that the reactions are overblown, while I also think that they're probably correct. Yeah. You know, and it's yeah, it's because but again I think that this is this is probably necessary just in looking how things operate like you mentioned to me offline, just in terms of like in the book Sapiens that we did a couple of months back, you know, like there's no justice in history. Like you have to fight for this stuff all the time. And so where do you get the impetus to fight for it? It's from stuff bad, bad things that you consider bad happening. You know, the people who wanted to get rid of affirmative action have been working for 40 years to get rid of firm action. And so and the people who wanted to keep it have been chilling. Yeah. You know, so no, you're right. It makes sense that eventually they would they've been working. They've been trying to change the composition of the court. They've been doing all this other stuff. The people who've been wanting to discriminate because of religious reasons or other reasons, they've been working since the 1960s to try to get that stuff. And the people who haven't who don't want to do that have been you know, not to say they've been chilling and not doing anything, but they haven't been working to, you know, gain every edge they can to maintain the what they found.
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They've kind of especially as you get generations that have grown up under this, they take it for granted, so to speak. Yeah. And so to me, this is probably necessary to some degree so that people can see, can appreciate what it is that they have lost and then go back and fight for it again. And so this isn't like the end of the world, so to speak, you know, like and so anybody saying at the end of the world, I mean, that's that's overblown for sure. But in terms of being alarmed, you should be alarmed if you if you think that if you want a society, live in a society where we empower people from all over to try to be their best, best selves, that's that's a selfish desire. I want if you want America to be great, then you you don't want to shut off 30% or 20% of the people from being their best because who knows what like you might be shutting off the opportunity to get this, the opportunity to get that to build on. We want more people.
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Some some people do just want to shut it off.
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But I mean, that's what I'm saying for sure.
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That's what I'm saying. That's you. But let me jump in there because you brought up something that and I know we want to jump to part two is just real quick to finish off kind of on the economic side. Like when I said earlier that affirmative action work and integration work and all that and you're speaking to that now, which is you had a segment of society that was being excluded. And, you know, it's one thing for for people that want to judge and say, you know, affirmative action is just a handout and it's just, you know, it's either blacks taking something or some white liberal just giving handouts, this and that. Well, if that was true, then black people would have fallen on their backside or on their face, I should say, when given these opportunities in the 70s and 80s, you know, we wouldn't be having black executives and black dudes like me or you that are entrepreneurs running successful practices and businesses. Right? Because if we really weren't capable of doing it, we wouldn't be able to do it. So a lot of the economic growth and expansion in this country over the last 40, 50 years has been because of the more people being included into the system. Now, yeah, unfortunately, I'll say this. Unfortunately, there is a segment of white America that's been told that because of the inclusion of others, it was a zero sum game and it hurt them and their financial lives. And I would say that's incorrect because at 24, $26 trillion, annual economy is big enough for all of us to share this pie. Well, and.
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Also the whole point of capitalism is to keep continually grow the pie. You know, that's what we're doing here is to grow the pie. Like if it was zero sum, capitalism doesn't work.
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And on fractional banking and all that kind of stuff. Right. It's about growing. And so but but I just want to finish on this is that and the evidence is in where the economic centers of the country are. And I'm going to say this just straight up. If you look at every single state out of 50 states, it's going to be your most diverse areas of that state that drive the economics of that state and therefore the country. So we're in Florida. It's basically South Florida, Orlando, Tampa are the economic engines. Atlanta is going to give you the economic engine of Georgia, New Orleans, Louisiana. Charlotte, North Carolina.
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And the research triangle and.
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Yeah, exactly. At the universities, which is what? Diversity of thought? Diversity of people in university settings, right. And so basically there's a certain group of Americans that are trying to attack, whether it be enlightened, philosophical kind of discussion, whether it be pluralism and multiculturalism, whether it be, you know, all these kind of things. Like you said, the guardrails were put up and the country continued to flourish and actually expanded bigger and bigger. And we became the only superpower by the end of the 20th century. Right. And now there's people that aren't happy with that from an emotional standpoint of a demographic concern and be bringing up things like great replacement theory and all that. And they want to take down and dismantle what was built. And I think that, like you said, those of us who don't want to go that direction need to appreciate that these people are serious. And I think that's your point. They're showing us through this type of rulings and legislation that they're serious and elections have consequences because like you said, I tip my hat off to them. For 40 years they were focused and aggressive. And the last president gave them the judges they wanted. And here we have the results. So people that don't like it need to show up and participate in this democracy. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I dropped the microphone.
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No, that's actually something I've been saying for a long time is a lot in most cases, not in all cases, but in most cases. And United States, you know, modern day is one of these cases. You get the democracy you deserve. And if you go to the Jim Crow South, I mean, that's a little different. Like if you're saying we need federal troops to to to get allow people to vote and stuff like that, That's not.
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But that's what's the sad part about not telling history. You're right. They had to send federal troops to integrate the Little Rock High School in Arkansas to.
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Allow people to vote or to like. Yeah, I mean, and how close this is to. But the point being, I want to Keys I want to keep moving. The point being is that in that type of scenario, what I'm saying doesn't hold true. But in general scenarios, you get the democracy you deserve. If you don't show up, then you can get written out and excluded. And if you do show up, then it's very difficult to do that. But it's not just showing up every now and again. Also because there's a lot happens in between. So, you know, in our democratic system, you know, it's not you know, it's a republic. We elect representatives and then we also have these other forms of government that are not democratic in terms in this case, the Supreme Court. But ultimately, those people are still put in place by people that are accountable to the people. And so you got to show up if you want to either move things in a direction that you want it to move, want to move them, or to prevent things from backsliding from the direction you want things to go. And so and that's what we're seeing right now. And again, that needs to be refreshed from time to time. I come to believe, I've come to believe, and that's just what we're seeing right now. And so we'll see now where the energy is, you know, and that that will determine where we go from here. So I think in general, you know, again, it's overblown in the sense that these aren't, you know, like just the end of voting, you know, so to speak, which would not be or, you know, voting voting votes don't count anymore.
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That would be a much bigger deal. But it does it is indicative and it should be a warning signal to people saying, hey, things have taken a certain trajectory and unless you intervene, you all intervene, we all intervene, then things are going to continue to go this way, or at minimum, things that we have grown up with and become accustomed to may not be there for us and, you know, and our our descendants. So the second thing we want to discuss today is now this is. There are A couple of weeks ago, we saw like in much of the United States, particularly the East and Midwest and mid-Atlantic, smoke coming in from wildfires that are burning in Canada. And then it kind of dissipated a little bit. And now it's back again in a many areas. And this is like stuff that's covering hundreds, 100 million people, you know, in the United States and obviously people in Canada as well. And so seeing it twice in a relatively short time frame, we figured we want to say something on it. Just so what has been your reaction to to to this? You know, these wildfires that are burning apparently out of control, many of them out of control in Canada. And, you know, like also just the realization of how little we can do about this right now, like it's just happening and there's nothing you can do about it.
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I'm trying to figure out who to blame.
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Well, that would be much more entertaining.
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Is it. Is it green? Is it green? Energy's fault or. I think. I guess technically. Right.
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Space lasers.
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Space lasers. That's what it was. That sounds like it, because it's a very rural area. So only space lasers from and only Jews have those, right? Like no one else. Right. So anyway. But no. So on a serious note, you know, look, it is what it is, right? I think I thought about this on a whole different subject. I was watching some old footage about like the Dust Bowl and stuff from the 30s and what was going on back then and the tornadoes in Texas in the 1920s and 30s. And it dawned on me, I was like, Man, this is interesting that the population was a lot smaller back then. So when you had these type of events that were affecting people, there probably were a lot more of them happening. It's just that when you had less humans on the planet, you could have tornadoes, wildfires and all that. And knowing as it goes back to if a tree falls in the forest and no one's around to hear it, does it make a sound? So if an earthquake happens in a certain part region of the world where the tectonic plates moved and literally there's no humans there, we wouldn't know about it and we wouldn't be concerned. And I think with 8 billion humans on the planet and hundreds of millions in North America now, when you have these kind of fires raging, it does affect I mean, I was reading that 100 million Americans are being affected. Yeah. And there's only I think Canada's population is only like 22 million. So I'm I'm going to assume they're all affected if 100 million of us are affected.
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And so on the way the winds go, you know, like at least their eastern, you know, half.
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So I think I think that's something we should just be prepared to see more of this and not even getting into things like climate change and all that. I just think because of the size of our population, anytime there's going to be natural disasters, more humans will be effective affected. So therefore we will hear about it and it feels scary. And so I got another, but I'll pass it back.
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Yeah, let me because I was going to say to me like, there are two conversations and you got to be able to to separate the two in a meaningful way, to really be able to conceive or to to understand this kind of stuff. And one is, is that just on Earth things happen, you know, like all the time. Like this isn't the first time you have wildfires burning in Canada. This is this is what happens with forests. You got fire like naturally, fires will occur, they'll burn, they'll replenish the soil. New things will grow on top like that's a part of the earth and how it works for billions of years, you know? And so when we're looking at it, or at least 8 billion years, at least 1 billion, but but hundreds of millions of years, this is stuff that happens. And so you don't immediately have to jump to climate change when you see something like that. This is like, oh, man, this is messed up. You know, these forests are, you know, like. And one of the defining characteristics about these fires is that most of them are in remote areas. Like there aren't any people around. People aren't going to be affected by the fire itself. And so in Canada, it's like, well, we're just going to let it go. Like it would be more dangerous to try to send somebody up there to fire fight it, you know, like then just letting it go because it's not going to other than the smoke, it's not bothering anybody. You know, like and these are these are huge forests. And, you know, like that's just a part of the natural cycle.
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Now you do that now. That's the first thought. Then the second thought is climate change changes the climate. There's more heat, you know, with with greenhouse gases, there's more heat. There's areas that become drier. So certain areas can become more prone to burning. And what on one hand, that requires additional maintenance. You know, we've heard about even when the fires have been in the US in terms of the level of of human started controlled burning that needs to happen to try to prevent this type of stuff from getting out of control, you know, like so because there just needs to be a certain amount of cycling that happens. But at the same time, you know, you can you can have this conversation, you can look at this and say, okay, yeah, climate change is probably bringing more of this to us, but it's not existing at all because of climate change. And so being able to have those conversations or being able to have those thoughts separately in your mind like, Yeah, probably isn't great that the world is warming and or that that we have these greenhouse gases, that gases that are changing climates in different places, less moisture, you know, more heat and whatever. But at the same time, I mean, this kind of stuff does happen. I mean, like, this is not some. Oh, my God. I can't believe a forest is burning in the in in the on earth. Like, that happens and it happens, you know, regularly over the course of millions of years. Hundreds of millions of years, thousands of years, whatever.
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Yeah. And that's why to me, there's not too much to say about the fire itself, because like you said, that's been happening for since, you know, trees started growing on Earth. I'm sure that lightning strikes were causing fires and things over time.
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So that's a good point. And so, I mean, the conversation really does go to how it's affecting people more than anything, because.
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That's where I was going is, you know, my thing is more looking at I've found it, actually. And I remember we talked about this a couple of weeks ago. So not now because this is like the second time I'm hearing of these forest fires in about a month. Yeah, because they started a few weeks ago and then we didn't hear much. And now we're hear that they just keep burning and the smoke is just still bad. And people got to with respiratory issues and all that got to watch out. But remember when it first started like a month ago, where I found it fascinating was really just looking at how we as a society discuss and handle these things because it's no longer where, oh, it's a forest fire and this is this. And you know, I hate to call out a network and an organization because I don't want to look like I'm trying to be taking sides here. But I was dumbfounded. I turned it on to Fox News and they had a split screen. With a host and anchor who was standing outside or sorry in their studio saying how the media is being hysterical and you shouldn't have to worry about staying inside with this smog and all that. And on the split screen, they were showing downtown Manhattan, like outside the studio, and it was all smoggy. And I remember telling you, like, I'm fascinated by this psychology that Fox is displaying here because. You know, it's one thing to talk about a, you know, election lies and all this stuff that's kind of like you can't really see it, really. And it's also not something that people kind of constantly learned about. Right? Most of us have learned like the basic, like stop, drop and roll. Like if you're in a house in a fire. Right, Right.
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Like that. Like when your house is on fire, the stop kills more people than the fire.
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Correct. Like most people know that. Right. And so most people understand that smog and smoke are just not good to breathe in. And I thought, wow, this channel really is doing a number on their viewers of trying to keep them only focused on watching this channel because now they're asking the viewer to actually bend their reality in a different way to say. We have to be we have to continually be so contrarian to whatever the mainstream narrative that now that other news networks are talking about a forest fire from Canada, we're going to have to tell you that there's nothing to see here. And they had different anchors out there going on the street, breathing in deep breaths of air like that, saying, oh, I can breathe fine. And I just thought no. And I just thought I was like, this is worse than how people dealt with Covid. Like even that was a virus you couldn't see and everyone could get into an argument. This is like smoke in the sky that's darkening the sky. And you're trying to tell people.
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People to go, go, go, go.
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Outside. And the people with COPD and emphysema like, oh, don't worry about it, just go for a jog. Exactly. And I'm just thinking like, that's to me, what was more fascinating like that's a this is this fire is showing us so much about ourselves. Like why do we why are some people just so contrarian on just whatever the narrative is that even something so blatantly obvious that doesn't have to be about a wedge, they still want to be like, okay, well, don't look over there because they're just trying to tell you something that's not true. Look over here.
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It's like, I mean, some of it's like.
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Childish at some point, you know?
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But it's the constant theme that you can't trust anybody but us, you know, like. But you're right, though. The contrarian.
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Like the forest fire, I would have thought wouldn't have brought that out. Right? Like, I would think that we could all just get along.
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To.
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To quote another man from 30 years ago.
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But no, the I think and we can wrap from, you know, like this conversation. But I wanted to comment also on just the way we react to it and or how this is affecting people. And I think what we got to keep in mind, though, is a lot of times we're very parochial when we're talking about either our activity on on the planet, you know, whether that's climate change activity or I know a lot of times you bring up pollution and just, you know, like, hey, let's let's dump a bunch of chemicals in this river, you know, because it's cheaper to dump it in the river for some company than it is to to to actually dispose of it in a responsible way. But we got to keep or we it seems to me that it's very important for us to keep in mind that when it comes to the earth, a lot of this stuff is going to come back and bite us like we can't swallow this stuff like we do. Whatever we do here is either going to it's going to poison the next town down and then the next town up from us is doing stuff to to hurt us. Or it's in this case, you know, you got these fires burning and this isn't the result of of a person acting, but it just shows you the interconnectedness of what we're doing in the environment or in what the Earth is doing on its own without us, you know.
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And so we got to keep that in mind. Like if we're having, hey, let's reduce greenhouse gases or let's just reduce pollution that we're pumping into the air, you know, like that helps all of us, you know, in general, you know, like that's not something we're doing for somebody else unless you're saying somebody else being the next generation, our kids, you know, But it helps us because this stuff is all interconnected. We can't run and hide from environmental disasters in the same way that people want to run and hide behind gates or whatever from crime or things like that. And so that to me is the thing that hopefully this can remind people of is just that we share the planet and the planet we all need to pull from the planet and things that we do can really like. It's not something we can get away from, you know, like we think we're all, yeah, we're slick, we're going to do it. And, you know, it doesn't affect us. But no, it's going to come back to bite us in some way.
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Yeah, it's interesting, man, as you say that, I realized the only actual I mean, I may be wrong with this because I say the only, but I could have a blind spot. But the two areas where I feel like humanity has agreed on that specific statement. Is unfortunately only with war stuff, nuclear bombs and chemical weapons like gas. You know what happened in World War One? Like the idea that, yeah, the wind's going to blow that stuff right back into your own people, so let's just not use it. Right. And I think you're right that again, because those are more kinetic and they're immediate, it's easier for people to buy into that. Like, okay, we get it. A bomb drop, we drop two bombs in Japan and there are radiation meters in California going off, you know, within a week, of course.
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So but the thing also, though, I think we can give some give some credit on the CFCs where we had the ozone stuff. And that's a great point.
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So I knew I had a blind spot. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. But no, but you're right. I remember when we were kids. Yeah. Yeah.
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There's been areas where society has been able to act, and so that gives you, you hope that then this is an area that eventually will get there. But as we've talked about in other shows, the problem here is that there are so many people who are invested and there's so many powerful people, I should say, who are invested in the way things are right now, that there is a misdirection game that happens with this. That is just it wasn't to the same strength and degree when you're dealing with CFCs or even with the war stuff, you know, like there are defense contractors that lose money because of that, but it's not as pervasive as like the the the the fossil fuel people or just the the people who want to pollute, you know, to externalize costs and internalize profits. Just kind of the the general thing there. So but I think we can close it up from here. Man Hold on. We sounds like.
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A good business model. I've got to go find I've got to go buy stock in one of those companies, one of those privatizing profits and socializing the losses. Exactly. Shares of that one. I wonder if they pay a dividend so I can. We'll have to.
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We'll get into that one on another show because that's something. It is. It is a business, a good business model for the person who you know. In the short term, for sure.
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Yeah. Yeah.
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So but we appreciate you for joining us on this episode of Call it like I see it subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it, tell us what you think. Send it to a friend. Until next time, I'm James Keys Tunde Ogunlana. All right. We'll talk to you next time.
