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 make sense of what is happening with the US economy following reports that 2021 was the best year in decades as far as GDP growth and the concern some are expressing now looking forward over the expectation that the Federal Reserve will be raising rates several times in 2022.
And later on, we'll discuss some reporting coming out of NASA talking about all the planets they're finding in solar systems far, far away, and just the interesting stuff that comes out of that.
Joining me today is a man who'll be swimming in the money, baby. Torpedo Tunde. Ogonlana Tunde, you ready to show the people your Steelo today?
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Yes, sir.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: All right.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Ready to fire.
All right.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: All right. Now we're recording this on January 31, 2022.
And, and we saw last week that the U.S. commerce Department was reporting that in 2021, the nation's gross domestic product grew by 5.7%.
Now, this is the highest rate of growth since 1984. So, yeah, that's like, that should be like a great thing. You would think that's a very good thing.
But one thing most everyone seems to agree on is that at least generally speaking, it doesn't really feel like last year was the best year in almost four decades. So, Tunde, were you surprised first? Were you surprised to see that last see last year being cited as the best year in decades? And what's your take on what we're hearing as far as why it doesn't feel like we're riding high from an economic standpoint?
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I was kind of surprised to hear, as even someone who's kind of, I would say, more tethered to the financial markets, the economy, and kind of that industry from what I do for a living than most.
I was also surprised, being someone that's entrenched in this world, to hear that, just like I was surprised and we mentioned it on a prior show, that the s and P500, which I would say many generally consider that the broad benchmark for the United States stock market, represented by the top 500 firms in the United States that are publicly traded, did 27% return last year in 2021 and had 68 individual days that were new record highs.
And you know, we have weekends, public holidays. So there's probably about 270, 280 trading days in a calendar year in the United States. So, you know, that was a surprise for me too. And I think, yeah, it's a surprise because. And I know we'll talk about some of this stuff. Number one, we're coming out of a very tough time with this pandemic and the kind of the global shutdown of the year prior of 2020.
And also I just think that as we've discussed regularly on our different programs, there's a lot of negativity out there just in our population. So we don't tend to think that things are going well. And so when you see these kind of stats, right. It just kind of, it's almost unbelievable. What do you mean? It was the best year. And so one of the things I'll do before I hand it back is just also remind everyone because I try and look at it all fair, right. It was a great year as a snapback year because the year before was one of the worst economic downturns we've had in our history. I think we had a negative 32% on the GDP in 2020. And again, that is 100% of the fault of the pandemic and the global shutdown. And so it's natural that in the year after that, when things are opening back up, that you're going to get this kind of snapback growth. And I think 1984 represented some of that too. When I went back and did some digging, we had the malaise, what they call it, of the 70s and high inflation and then a recession from about 80 to 83. So 84 was a similar kind of snapback year. So, yeah, that's my takeaway.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: That's a key part of this, is that if it's, if things are lower, so to speak, then the percentage growth will be higher. So, you know, like, so if it comes down a little bit, then it's easier to. When you grow back up, it goes higher.
And so, and I think the decrease, from what I saw the decrease in 2020 was a 3.4 decrease. So it does make up ground, but over the of two years, it doesn't necessarily mean that we would have been where we were already. So again, you know, we fall back and then we jump back up. And so we're jumping back up from a lower point. So, yeah, that makes sense in terms of explaining it. But it's also notable though. I mean, like, the snapbacks aren't necessarily inevitable, at least in theory. You know, like, you would hope that if you bounce, if you fall down, then you get back up and Then you can go to a higher height. But. But that's not inevitable. So I think it's worth taking a second to be happy and pause and say, okay, well, yes, we did. Mission accomplished, so to speak. At least in terms of 2021, that we got back on our feet and got things going in a positive direction again. I think that the uneven nature. And this is gonna cut two ways. You have the uneven nature of the growth, meaning someone like Amazon is gonna grow by leaps and bounds. Cause their business can continue on relatively, and then even more, grow even more when people have money to spend. Versus the hospitality industry, which had some bounce back. It wasn't as bad as 2020, but it's still not getting back to or growing from the levels it might have been in 2019.
So because of that, you can have.
Everyone won't feel the benefit, so to speak, or feel this record level of growth while at the. But that also gives us some resiliency, you know, the fact that we're not all in the same bucket, so to speak. And so if one person falls, everyone falls. It's kind of nice in a sense that certain companies with explosive growth or certain industries with explosive growth are able to kind of lift the whole economy up a little bit or at least get things going in a positive direction. Because sentiment a lot of times matters a lot with these things. How people think, how people feel things are going. Consumer confidence is something they track, you know. And so the fact that enough is going right, even if everything's not going right, that we can look at positives is helpful from an economic standpoint, I would think.
[00:06:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. And it's good. You bring up a good point about that. This could have been different. And I think I just want to touch on that for a second because let's go back to that period of time and let's say, I don't know, mid, late March through maybe May, June.
How scary was 2020? 2020 2020. Yeah. Thanks for clarifying. But definitely when we had a true.
The global economy.
[00:07:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:05] Speaker B: So that was scary. Number one, there were things that we had never heard of. Remember, the price of oil went to negative $40 a barrel. Because, remember, we talk about certain things and this is actually a good segue. Real quick. Remember the idea of a leading indicator. Stock market's a leading indicator.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: Most of the commodity markets are the same thing. So the reason why the price of oil, one of the reasons there was actually several reasons, but one of them, that it went to zero, was because there was so much fear and again, looking forward that people were worried that there was going to be no demand for oil for a while if the world really stayed shut down, or at least not the levels of demand that there have been. And then the fact that went negative was just for more some technical issues, which is a whole nother show. But the idea. So that was kind of scary, right? Who's ever seen oil go to zero and then a negative number? Then we were losing at one point, I think in late March through April, about 7 and a half to 8 million jobs a week in the United States, people getting laid off.
So I really thought that this. We had the potential to have the first conditions ever since the 30s of what we consider like a Great Depression, you know, in the first definitely in our lifetime that we could have had 40, 50% unemployment, that type of stuff. So that's why I want to give a nod. As dysfunctional as our government and all of us believe it's been, you know, kind of the CARES act and the speed at which everybody. And the tip of nod, the administration at the time, the Congress, the Senate and the Federal Reserve, you know, the players that were in charge at the time, they've been very dysfunctional, we know, in the last decade or so. But the one thing they get right was when they needed to all get together to make this happen, it happened and happened quickly. And so, and again you and I have talked offline to acknowledge it wasn't perfect.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: Right.
[00:08:59] Speaker B: We know that some hedge funds, I remember the LA Lakers got 10 million. It was a big. All over the news that Sonic the hamburger chain got 10 million and certain institutions that probably had the, the cash reserves got, got taken care of. But, you know, it, at least overall it helped. So I wanted to just mention that.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, kept things moving along and yeah, nothing's going to bat, you know, hit a thousand, you know, you're going to. There's going to be some people to take advantage or whatever. And, and, and people tried to shame a lot of those companies into giving back money and some did and you know, and that's. That happens, you know, but you gotta break, you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette. I think that one other thing I'd mention on this point was, and this was brought up in a lot of the materials that we were reading was the nature of the recovery in 2021 also was defined by peaks and values, peaks and valleys in the sense that we're kind of a prisoner still of the pandemic and you know, like when the pandemic seems to be receding or vaccines are coming out, then things are growing like gangbusters and like rates that we haven't seen in years. And then Delta hits and it's like, oh man. And so things kind of, you know, shut that shut back, not shut all the way back down, but like he hit the brakes on a lot of that explosive growth. And then Delta starts to wane and then things start really ramping up and ramping up and ramping up and going hard and then Omicron starts, people starts bubbling up and then it's like, you know, again. So because of that, like, although each of those big jumps, those explosive growth growths, we able to make up so much ground that on net at the end, we ended up in a really great place. It didn't feel like it because every time we were getting into a good, good rhythm, a good momentum, the brakes got hit and things went back to a kind of a middling kind of return. And so that's the other thing that I noticed and which was, was brought up what I thought was a really good point as far as how, why it just didn't feel like it. And that's forget about. Like, well, now don't forget about. But we could also get into, you know, how the winners might have been, not the winners in this economy weren't distributed throughout society. And I mean that's. We talk about, you know, income and wealth inequality and other shows, but in this instance, you know, we're really focusing on the engine of the economy going in general because as you pointed out, Tunde, that's not a given where, given where we were in 2020, if this thing was handled differently or if the, if things went a different direction, it wasn't a given that we were going to get things back on, just get motion back on track as quickly as we did.
[00:11:23] Speaker B: Yeah. Now. And I think, you know, obviously the way that the economic recoveries are not felt by everyone and all that, I think that's something that is discussed in every, you know, boom and bust of economic times. When we heard the same thing coming out of the great financial crisis. I mean, pretty much our whole life, when there's been a recession coming out of it, we can point to it's not always even. And unfortunately, some people.
[00:11:43] Speaker A: Wait. Warren Buffett explained that. Warren Buffett explained that very well. There was a class war in his class one.
[00:11:49] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's over. They've won throughout history. I mean, remember like we joked on one of the shows, the Pharaohs weren't the guys building the pyramids.
[00:11:56] Speaker A: Right.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: They were telling other people to do it. So that's just the way that humanity's been. The wealthy people, you know, usually do dictate things.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: And that's interesting because like you point to, or historians point to, like the time after the plague, you know, like as being a time when labor got a leg up. And then the other time, really that you'll see in history is the post America New Deal, like that period where. But besides that, you're right, it's been.
[00:12:21] Speaker B: Pretty much actually nowhere. There's another one where we learned it on Reconstruction after slavery in the south, the only skilled labor were actually the former slaves who were actually the skilled ones, like the blacksmiths, you know, the guys who are playing the violin for their weddings, you know. And so they were the ones for about 20 years after slavery, they actually had some agency until the federal troops left. Yeah, until federal troops left in the Southern.
The southern majority got their way again through terrorism. But that's a whole nother conversation that we're not allowed to speak about anymore because it's apparently not allowed to be taught in class, the history of this country. Let me not digress too much. But anyway, yeah, we'll get to that.
[00:13:02] Speaker A: We got a whole.
[00:13:04] Speaker B: We got a whole month now to deal with that. Right. We got a whole month to talk about history and then we can't talk about it again.
But getting back to serious things here about money, because that's serious stuff about other stuff.
What I wanted to cite going on that topic actually was we had a show on 19 October last year, just a few months ago, that we specifically discussed the supply chain issues and how that has been such a disruption and how that's helped lead to some inflationary environment because there's other issues like printing money, which we'll get to. But I wanted to just cite a couple things because of what you're saying. It's right on there.
You had mentioned very appropriately in that show that we had experienced for a few decades prior to this, a deflationary environment, our supply chain. Because of the efficiencies.
[00:13:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: And that's something that a lot of us don't think about that, you know, and I think I was joking about, you know, when, when, when Columbus found the American continent in 1492. He was really looking for, at least the story we're told, right, is a shorter trade route to India for the spice trades and all that. So, yeah, this idea that there's been global Supply chains for a very long time on this planet. So if you look at it though, those supply chains back in Columbus day, the best they had were sailships and all that taking months to get across.
[00:14:18] Speaker A: An ocean or over land.
[00:14:19] Speaker B: And you got over land taking a long time.
[00:14:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:22] Speaker B: Now we have the Internet that can move money around at lightning speed. We have this, we have that and we have containers.
[00:14:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: Container ships, things.
[00:14:29] Speaker A: Yeah, so. So that has to the point being that that made things cost, let put downward pressure on costs because getting things places kept costing less and less and less and less and less for like a period of like 30 years. It just kept getting better and better and better.
[00:14:45] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:14:45] Speaker A: So we discussed how the point the show you're talking about was the one we released on October 19, 2021. Go ahead.
[00:14:51] Speaker B: Yeah, and so the reason why we brought it up is that the disruptions to the global supply chain messed up that deflationary experience that we all had. So now when China shuts down factories and the other countries do, and it's like you're saying like it was here fits and starts with how we were able to work based on how many people were sick and all that.
[00:15:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:11] Speaker B: Then that messed up that decades long downward trend of prices through efficiencies because now it became inefficient. So that's an interesting example of why it didn't feel so good last year. Even though the numbers told us a different story.
The other thing consumer demand shifted we discussed, People were staying at home, decided, hey, I'm going to build a pool, I'm going to redo my living room, I'm going to redo my home office. So the amount of inventory that retailers had was, you know, not enough to, to meet that demand or the amount of inventory that the manufacturers had. And then there was other stuff like, you know, at least in the first part, in 2020, going into 2021, there wasn't a lot of driving. Right. So there was a lot of inventory and all that on that side. So we discussed all that. We even discussed the shortage of labor in key positions like trucking, longshoremen that, you know, there wasn't that many people. So those are all things that I think we could just go back and say that led to us feeling last year that things were still not good because we're still dealing with and reeling with all that. But yet the numbers when we look back say, wow, this economy was so strong that now we're running the risk of it being overheated.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: Well, yeah, that's really interesting that you bring that up because it's almost like all of that stuff shows what we may feel viscerally is how much better it could have been. In many instances, all these other things kept going wrong. But despite all that, it was still over. On balance, you had this explosive growth. But I mean, yeah, then you just mentioned as far as getting overheated and that takes me to where I wanted to go next as far as, you know, like a lot of people and I'm sure in your industry you get, you hear this a lot, you know, in terms of the financial planning and everything like that and wealth management.
So people hear, you know, you get on the news, the nightly news or whatever, oh, the Fed's talking about raising interest rates. And you know, to many people that means like, oh, you better get refi your house before that happens or something like that. But it means it, there's a lot else going on in terms of what that affects and what all that does and what they're trying to accomplish. So from that stamp from these reports, is that the fact that the Fed is talking about raising interest rates and is that something we should be fearing or, you know, like what's your take on that in terms of we just had this year, you know, that supposedly was great but didn't feel that great, you know, relatively. Is the Fed, you know, going off his rocker here? What's going on, man?
[00:17:35] Speaker B: No, I think, and it's a good question and I like the way you ask it, should we fear this? And I actually really appreciate the way you said that because fear is a dangerous weapon that has been used very effectively by our domestic American media.
And I found that it's really crept also into the financial media. And every article I see for the last year has been that the market is going to crash 50 or 80%.
And it's like, you know, well, when the market goes up 300%, you've been telling me the whole time it's gonna crash by 50%, I'm still better off being in the market, you know, so, so those are things that, should we be fearful? No. And that's one thing I've Learned over my 20 plus years in this, this is part of the game. Like the market markets have sell offs, right?
It's a cycle. And you just need to understand where you are on the cycle and how it relates to you as an individual, your family and your goals and where you are in life. Right. Like someone who's 25 years old will have a different experience in a rising rate environment than someone that's 82 because of just the nature of where they are as relates to their own finances and what they're looking at their money to do for them. Right. The 82 year old in the long run might welcome it because they want lower risk investments that pay a higher annual percentage of income or.
[00:18:52] Speaker A: Yeah. Which come online when the interest rates go up.
[00:18:55] Speaker B: Correct. So those would be things like CDs and boring treasury and municipal bonds and all that. It might be a little bit painful here in the short run as the market adjusts to rising rates. But suppose, I mean, I can only have a crystal ball, but suppose the Fed does rate hikes several times this year and it all settles down in the next two, three years. Those older savers will be rewarded and they'll be happier. And the younger folks may not be as happy because it's costing them more money to borrow for things that they might want to do like buying their new home for the 25 year old or buying a car. So if they've got to pay a mortgage of 7,8% in a few years, they're going to be less happy.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: So I think the key point you said though is that it's part of the cycle and I think the context here that is not, as you, you know, the media wants to. The general media oftentimes uses fear for attention's sake. So their context isn't necessarily where they'll specialize a lot of time. And the context here is that we've been in a abnormally low interest rate environment for a long time.
We're not supposed to be in these zero rates or near zero rates for this long. That creates risks of things like inflation, like, that creates risks of real things that can happen. And so it's understandable if things are going real. You said it. I know really eloquently. At times like the times when things are going great or at least the economy, you have this explosive growth. That's the time for the Fed to do things that almost in a sense, prepare us for the next time. They need to go all hands on deck. But we can't stay all hands on deck all the time, you know, which is with these easy money policies that we've had, have been all hands on deck. And we can't be like that all the time. There has to be a time where you pull back and you bring things into a.
I don't know if it's a more traditional environment, but at minimum, just out of the emergency kind of setup.
[00:20:42] Speaker B: Yeah, no. And I think, you know, you speak to a lot of good things. Looking back, we've had about a generation of this low interest rate environment, which you're right, is abnormal.
And if you think about it, it started back in 03 when Alan Greenspan, who was at the time the chairman of the Fed, lowered rates to around 1% or the Fed rate, and that caused rates to go down, which some people blame for the real estate boom of that era. And I wouldn't just blame that. I think there was a lot of other deregulatory effects of the financial system that led to that, which is a whole nother show.
But then we had then the great financial crisis a few years later in 0809, right.
Fed lowered to zero. We stayed at zero for a long time.
2013, Ben Bernanke at the time was the chairman of the Fed who just had a verbal comment that we may look to raise rates. And then what happened was called the taper tantrum where the bond market went nuts. And that's when the policymakers got scared, in my opinion, when they realized that if we raise rates on our watch, it's going to cause the market to drop and we want to stay in power. Whoever was in power at the time, right, not to blame anybody individually, I think that's a natural result for the way of people in power to think. So we kind of kept kicking this can down the road and actually started slowly raising rates because the economy was looking like it could handle it and all that. And then what happened in 2020, we had the pandemic and the Fed went from the slight, we were at a 75 basis point, which is 0.75% fed rate.
So kind of creeping back up to the 1% we were at in 2003.
[00:22:18] Speaker A: Shocking when green.
[00:22:21] Speaker B: And then it got slammed back to zero.
So what's happened is you're right and this is a culmination of a lot of things because we're in a very hyper polarized partisan environment. And that's why I want to be careful because this is not a Biden issue, a Trump issue, an Obama issue.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: No, this is an American politician issue.
[00:22:40] Speaker B: I could say it as much as I don't like, you know, bashing anyone. I could say it's a little bit of George W. Bush fault issue because he was inherited a balanced budget. I mean, we did have a budget surplus after the Clinton administration of 200 billion a year. And so, you know, but we had a war on terror that cost us $6 trillion and a tax cut along the way. So those are real things.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: It wasn't.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: You got it.
[00:23:03] Speaker A: Like, I'll say this. This isn't a defense at all, but this is just a statement of, like, they changed the philosophy of how we were gonna operate. And so the outcomes that we got almost were anticipated. It's like, hey, who cares? Dick Cheney's famous for saying, who cares about deficits?
They just changed kind of what we were going to try to do with the economic, with the budget and all those things. And so I may look at that and think it's a negative, but it wasn't that they were being like, oh, how did this happen? It was like, you know what? We're just gonna do this and we don't care anymore about this other factor that has had guided decision making for a while.
And I think you're. I want to just add one piece.
[00:23:40] Speaker B: Okay, you're right. I want to finish that up. So go ahead.
[00:23:42] Speaker A: You're right, though, that this is not a particular party or anything like that. It really, it seems like once Greenspan dropped it down to one, both parties kind of, you know, they got drunk on the idea of this easy money policy, because basically, like you said, whoever, if they raise the rates back up to some traditional level, then whoever's in power then is not going to be in power anymore because the stock market's going to drop and everybody's going to blame them. You know, like, whoever. Whoever it is.
So it's like there became this incentive for the politicians to put pressure on the Fed to keep the monetary policy a certain way that would allow for.
They wouldn't put any brakes on the growth that we were having, whether the growth justified putting brakes on it or not. And so that kind of.
There was a reinforcing thing there where we just got stuck in this policy. That is not something, again, that you're supposed to just be in all the time.
But now, go ahead, you can finish up.
[00:24:41] Speaker B: Yeah, no, and so. Because it's great, because you helped me segue to where I was going, actually, which was gonna be monetary and fiscal policy and kind of why we're here. But before I go there, I'll just finish out on a certain thing about the way you made a good point somewhere along the line, I think without the agreement or understanding of the national society and all of us American, they were just understanding of us. Yeah, there was a major policy shift about, like you're saying about. Yeah, deficits don't matter and all that kind of stuff. Because, you know, at a time there was a time when they mattered. And what I'm getting at, as you know, we had a budget surplus in 2000, 2001.
By the time George W. Bush left office in 2000, January of 09, let's just call it the real date, we had somewhere between 4 and 5 trillion of debt.
And then it was like it was already set in motion. So then when Obama gets in office, not only is it already deficit spending, just when he comes in with a $1.8 trillion budget because of the TARP and not as much revenue coming in, then we had the hyperpolarization of Congress and all this kind of stuff that happened. So the only thing that saved us was the sequester when the Bush tax cuts expired in 2012 and allowed to raise some revenue, that did put a dent a little bit in the budget deficit, but the fiscal deficit kept going up. So by the time Obama leaves, right around 1918, 19 trillion in total debt. So that's amazing. Just in eight years to rack up that much. And then it just, it's like exponential. So then when Trump gets in, by the time he's out after his four years, we're at like 25 trillion.
[00:26:18] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Like, I'm not going to stop this. Like, this is, you know, this is what, like, so that's when everybody kind of gets in and just continues.
[00:26:24] Speaker B: That's what I mean. Like, no one wants to be the bad cop that has to stop the party. And then. And so what happened is we have been under what many consider a Keynesian economic system for a long time, I guess, since we've had a central bank since 1913. And what that means is that the premise, without having a whole lecture here, is that the government doesn't need to do excessive spending in good times, but during recessionary environments, when the private sector has no liquidity because no one's got money because of the recession. Right. That the government can spur economic activity and velocity of money through its own spending, basically printing money.
[00:27:06] Speaker A: And this was the innovation that came out of the Great Depression, which allowed us to avoid a depression after the Great financial crash and the Great Recession.
This knowledge right here is what. They didn't do it in the Great Depression. The Keynesian people came up with it. And then they've kind of lived by it since then. To your point. And then when the Great Recession hit, the government knew what it could do to prevent a depression and did it. And that's why. Yeah, and then Obama comes in and starts spending all that money, because that was. That's the prescription, basically, if you don't want to go into the Depression, but go ahead.
[00:27:36] Speaker B: Correct. And that's a great thing to stop and look at for a second because you're right, it's hard to say, well, something that never happened could have been worse than this. Right. Because so many Americans I know are bothered by our national deficit and all this stuff. But you're right, when the 2008 financial crisis happened, that was the worst economic disaster that we've had in this country since the 1929 crash. And so all that we had to go historically was say, okay, what did the Fed do that time?
And what they did clearly didn't help out to avoid a 40% unemployment and a decade literally until 1939-41, when World War II was happening, we were in a depression, basically in some sort of bad recessionary environment.
So to avoid another decade of that, they said, well, let's do the opposite, which was print money.
So Fast forward to 2020 and that's where I'm going with it is what you had between 2008, really from 2000. Because what I'm saying is the money printing during the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is what hurt us going into 2008. And so really, so what you had for the prior 20 years is almost was presidents spending freely.
And then we had a true crisis, which was the pandemic, the first time the whole world was shut down and that basically all US Businesses were told to either shut down or that somehow they were affected. Right.
So actually our leaders did the right thing by doing the cares act and printing all that money. The problem is, is that they threw $5 trillion, it was like gasoline on top of a bonfire that was already lit. So they threw all those trillion dollars on top of the trillions that we had already printed. And so when you look at the two factors of the truth that we have more money in the system, that with a lower interest rate environment, so people are just buying assets because they don't want to. There's no point in leaving your money in the bank when you're earning zero. So you're just going to buy other stuff, real estate, stocks and all that. Plus you have that disruption that we talked about in things like supply chains and the international scene of moving things around efficiently.
It's a natural result that is going to lead to higher prices and inflation. And inflation and so and so and.
[00:29:50] Speaker A: I think easy money policies on themselves, the lower interest rates on them by themselves could lead to inflation. You know, like as we talked about before, there were other factors going on. All these things are a big pot of stew that were keeping. Even though the monetary policy was something that was encouraging inflation, that we had other things like the supply chain efficiencies and so forth that were encouraging deflation. So we had all these other factors. But it's a delicate balance, so to speak. And again, you're not supposed to have those interest rates like that forever. One thing I want to mention, because I want to move, but it's interesting to me, I thought about this. Depending on what the Fed does over the next year, two years with the interest rates, Biden's like shaping up as the take your medicine, or in Tunde's words, eat your broccoli president.
Between the Afghan withdrawal, which he did, the last three presidents knew they should do it and knew that they were going to take heat for it if they did it. And Obama and Trump were like, nah, nah, we're good. And Biden was like, all right, we'll do it. And then with this, if the rates go up, if they get over one, he's going to be the eat your broccoli president. Which is just funny to me. I mean, that's the old guy. I guess they're all old now.
[00:31:01] Speaker B: He'll be like George H.W. bush one term. Yeah, that's some effective thing, George H.W.
[00:31:07] Speaker A: Bush. But, yo, you're right, because he was the guy. Remember, no new taxes need my lips. And then he got in there like, this voodoo economics isn't going to work. And then he raised the taxes because he was like, the Reaganomics thing, it doesn't make any sense, but either way.
[00:31:20] Speaker B: But I want to speak to that. That's why the partisanship of today is really hurting our country. Because no president is a magician that waves a wand. And in their administration, in their term, everything happens and we see all the results, Right?
[00:31:36] Speaker A: Yeah. So, yeah, we kind of have to count on them to make the right decisions that will allow things to happen. Correct. To play a good way over time.
[00:31:42] Speaker B: Yeah, we've got 300 plus million people. We got a 25 to $30 trillion annual GDP economy. I mean, one human being is not going to change all that in one year or four years.
So what I was going to say is.
[00:31:55] Speaker A: No, especially because the circumstances that they're in rely so much on what everybody did before that. Is it like coming in with a clean.
[00:32:02] Speaker B: It's like each president is pushing a ball up a hill and they all got to, you know, they did the next guy. It's like, or a better thing would be a relay. They pass the baton to the next person and so, and they kind of do well or suffer based on how well the guy before him was running, you know.
[00:32:19] Speaker A: And so I mean, that's not to say they have nothing. I mean their decisions do matter. But yeah, it's not solely like play out over time.
[00:32:25] Speaker B: Like here's an example which is interesting. Part of some of the inflationary. I mean, I would say this isn't a majority, but this might be a meaningful percentage, like maybe 10 to 20%.
Remember, we had tariffs put on steel, aluminum and major metals that we use to make everything in this country.
So tariffs, everybody knows that tariffs are inflationary because it's a tax on importing something. So if, if a pound of steel costs $10 and I'm gonna put a 25% tariff on it, that means it's gonna cost 12.50 now just to bring it in the US which means naturally. Cause if it was selling for $11 by the time it got here, now the American distributor has to sell it.
[00:33:07] Speaker A: For 13 or 14 just to develop for $11 anymore. Yeah. So the point is well taken though because that was done by Trump. And then Biden comes in and if inflation's going up and he's like, oh, you know, but it gets pinned on him.
[00:33:18] Speaker B: But what's interesting though is because we recognize this on our show at the time, on the 19th, at the time, Biden just ratified and recertified the same tariffs. So I remember saying that obviously both men saw some reason of why they want to do this. I don't know why, but we can't deny that those kind of decisions have lagging long term effects and they're just inflationary. So what I'm getting at though is when I was just giving hw praise is that the whole 90s boom and the paying off of the debt probably came from his decisions in 1991, which lost him the 92 election. But it fixed a lot of things that were an issue from the 80s, like the deficits and all that stuff.
[00:33:56] Speaker A: Well, yeah, it actually, interestingly enough, it helped give Clinton a cleaner slate to work with. He didn't have to inherit.
Bush was able to make a very unpopular decision that Clinton didn't have to come around and do so he could put his energy elsewhere. But I do want to. There's one question I want to ask before we get off of this topic altogether, and that is, I mean, do you think that the Fed is ultimately. I mean, I get an idea where you're leaning. But do you think they're doing the right thing and then they're on the right track here and as far as that goes?
[00:34:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think, look, I think the Fed has done the best job they can, I'd say, since Ben Bernanke. I mean, really. I mean, that was amazing that we got out of, like we said, the great financial crisis with an experiment just trying to not do what they did last time. Janet Yellen took the ball from him and seems to have done a good job along her tenure. And then now it's Jerome Powell. And I think, you know, it's amazing how transparent they are. I mean, anyone that didn't know if rates are going up this year, just choosing not to pay attention to financial news because, you know, for the last six months they've been telling us that they're raising rates in 2022. Yeah, they just had a meeting last week. They're going to raise rates at least four times this year. So, again, this sucks in a certain way. It's painful, generally. Historically, rising interest rates immediately have a 100% negative correlation with asset prices. So what it means is it makes money more expensive to borrow, which means it costs more to carry debt, which means that usually prices go down. Correct.
[00:35:32] Speaker A: People buy less things. Yeah.
[00:35:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
And so the house that was selling for a million dollars on the corner, or let's say someone needed a million dollars of a mortgage at 3%, they can afford a certain amount of monthly payment. But if that mortgage rate goes up to five or six, the same monthly payment might only be able to buy an $800,000 mortgage, not a million. So those are things. So the person with their house, trying to sell it can only hang on so long. At some point, they're going to bring the price down. And that when you multiply that by millions of transactions every day around this country, that's how you get the sell off that comes from rising rates.
[00:36:06] Speaker A: But I mean, that ultimately ends up being one of the signals, you know, when you see that, that, that all those purchases going with real estate and so forth, it's like, okay, well, maybe we can raise the rates now because these very low rates are enabling all of this real estate that we saw over, over the last, in 2021, when real estate was just going crazy. And so, yeah, you own your house and you're like, oh, you're bracing for.
What's Zillow going to say next month.
[00:36:29] Speaker B: Or next month after that? Well, no, that's what I was going to say, and that's a great point, because the reason why they're raising rates is because the economy has done so well. Well, so it's this idea that it's kind of like, you know, putting the brakes on while you're going down a hill, because if you don't, you just keep accelerating and at some point you'll have, you know, a crash that's painful. So by putting the brakes on and tapping the brakes, are artificially slowing down the economic engine to say, let's not let it get too out of whack, because the car crash is a. Is a certain example, but it's not perfect because there's other things than just an economic crash that would happen if you let this continue, which is certain things like economic inequality, because people who have assets when rates are low and things are booming like this tend to do better because they already had assets. And so everyone continues to be frustrated over, you know, the top 1% or the top 1/10 of 1% and all that. And, you know, part of it is there, you know, they've had some policies and tax breaks and all that go their way. But also part of it is that they came into the last decade in a better position than the rest of us. Right. Because they already. Yeah, yeah, they came a bunch of stock and real estate, and so they.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: Were already in position to benefit greatly. And that's actually. I know one of the things we were gonna. The last thing we're gonna talk about really, was the monetary policy versus the fiscal policy with the Fed, you know, dealing with the monetary policy, meaning that's like interest rates and stuff like that and total supply of money. What's the interest rate? And then are they printing money or not? And so forth where. And that's. That's the Federal Reserve. And they do that. And like you said, I would agree with you. They've done, you know, under the circumstances, they've seemed to have done a pretty good job. But there's another component here that we're actually missing because of the polarization and because our Congress and does isn't functioning like a full. Like a branch of government right now. And that's the.
Excuse me, the fiscal policy, which deals more with like, taxation, tax rates and stuff like that. And so, yes, the asset owners benefited because of the monetary policy, but they were only able to benefit in a way that may have been out of whack because Congress is, in terms of. The fiscal policy is completely like. It's just they've abdicated, they're not trying to get ahead of things anymore. The only thing Congress ever does with those things is small things here or there. They're not trying to figure out, okay, well, how best can we optimize this? And so forth. And so we end up in a situation when we're not at all really trying to optimize what's going on.
We're not taking. Other than the last thing, like I pointed out previously that it was like a paradigm shift with George W. Bush saying, okay, well, here's what we're trying to do now. And then they did it. We don't have. Nobody's doing that kind of thinking anymore. Like, what do we want to do from a fiscal policy standpoint? How do we want to promote either a more just economy or a faster growth economy? The only people doing anything is the Fed and the monetary policy. But I mean, I kick it back to you because I know about a fraction of which.
[00:39:25] Speaker B: No, no, it's going because, and I think it's a great point for us to finish this discussion on is the dysfunction of our political leadership and how that's impacting our finances as a nation and the decisions that are made. So you're right.
There's two important terms, as you mentioned, monetary policy and fiscal policy. So the Fed has a mandate. Their mandate is to try and keep inflation low and to keep unemployment low. And they can use their monetary policy tools, which are, like you said, the interest rate environment. Because the Federal bank, the Federal Reserve bank, sorry, is the central bank of the United States.
So all the banks in the United States can go to the Fed to borrow money when they need to. So they have a certain interest rate called the Fed funds rate. And that is the benchmark then where all other interest rates in this country kind of come from. And so without getting into a whole lecture here.
So that's all they really do.
[00:40:23] Speaker A: Well, that and then the amount of money in circulation as well.
[00:40:25] Speaker B: Yeah. But through that is how they control certain things. Like.
[00:40:29] Speaker A: Like. Correct.
[00:40:29] Speaker B: Because they can.
That's a good point. They can control interest rates like that as well. And that's what they've done. Right. When you hear that the Fed has a balance sheet and they're unloading it or they're loading it up and that's the money supply and that affects it. So but that's policy.
[00:40:44] Speaker A: That's all the Fed. Those are the Fed's tools and that's what their goal is as relates to the employment and the inflation. And that's it.
[00:40:52] Speaker B: And so then you have the fiscal policy, which is the legislative branch, which is Congress and the executive branch, whoever the President is at the time. And their job is spending by the government. So those are the budgets, those are things like how much deficit we going to get into or are we ever going to get into a surplus and all that. And things like the tax code, which is very important because the tax code manipulates our behavior as consumers. For example, you remember the boom of hummers back in 2005, 2006, when they all started showing up on the street. That was the first time under the Bush administration was introduced that if you have a vehicle over five or six thousand pounds that you could write a dollar for dollar off your income. So a lot of small business owners are like, all right, well if I spend 100,000 on a Hummer, that can write that against my income, there's actually an incentive for me to go buy this. And it created the behavior so people buy, started buying more trucks and stuff like that. So where we're getting at is the Fed's job is not to do that. Their job is not to create policy and new laws. And what's happened with our dysfunction really since the last decade of Congress not being able to be healthy and create new legislation that can move us forward as a country and only being reactionary and emotional and outrage driven, then the Fed's kind of just doing this on their own and interesting. We had a private conversation that. This reminds me of last year when Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman, was getting heat from some climate activists and they were upset, I guess they were feeling that as a central bank in the United States, he should do more with promoting green energy. And maybe, I don't know, maybe banks shouldn't lend to companies that do fossil fuel. I don't know what their angle was. And he made a good point. He came back and said, that's not my job. I'm a banker.
I'm not here to deal with the legislating how green energy happens and all that.
[00:42:45] Speaker A: And remember one of the points that came up when we talked about that was. And we don't want him to be doing something.
[00:42:49] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:42:50] Speaker A: He's not an elected. Yeah.
[00:42:51] Speaker B: He's not an unelected official. So it was a good point him pointing out that that's not my job, that's the job of the elected officials if you want money to flow a different way to green energy deals or whatever. And so it was a good point he made because it's like, I think our courts, the Supreme Court and our Financial leaders like the Fed have kind of just been propping up our nation for the last decade and the executive.
[00:43:19] Speaker A: Branch, too, with all these executive orders. But that's not the way.
[00:43:21] Speaker B: Executive orders.
[00:43:21] Speaker A: Yeah, that's not the way it's supposed to work, though, because every President gets in and rescinds everybody else's executive order and then does their own. And that's not the way it's supposed to work.
[00:43:29] Speaker B: And that's not good, no matter who the President is and whether you agree with their executive order or not. Because as we've seen in the last decade, whoever you thought you were happy with, if they were your guy in office, the next President comes in and just race is the executive order.
[00:43:42] Speaker A: And what I thought you were going to say there is that the economic growth and opportunity depends in large part on stability. Correct. So if we're just going back and forth with the wind every four years, then we're not able to provide that stability. Part of the reason why the United States economy is so big is because of the relative stability that it's had as a nation and as a financial system over the last 100 years. And so we lose that when Congress. Yeah, you're right. When the Executive branch, the judicial branch, and then the Federal Reserve are the only people working still. And Congress just doesn't work anymore. They're just doing whatever. They're not legislating, you know, and so that. That creates a problem for all of us, particularly because Congress, as everyone's heard before, has the purse strings. And so we. The Fed, can only do so much. And so we're. We're at one hand, or really more than one hand, tied behind our back as far as our financial House. But, you know, it's still. Still floating, you know, so. And that's that. I guess that's a good thing.
[00:44:34] Speaker B: So I'm done. I'm gonna go storm the Capitol.
You just shoot now. I'm pissed off, man. Congress better get to work. They better get to work.
The next January 6th anniversary next year.
[00:44:49] Speaker A: Get to work.
[00:44:49] Speaker B: You know where to find me. Yeah, I might be there for a different reason, but I'll be there.
[00:44:54] Speaker A: Hey, hey. Just bring your sign. Get to work. You know, that's what they need to do. So.
[00:44:58] Speaker B: Well, maybe I'll get a pardon, huh? Let's see.
Oh, man.
[00:45:05] Speaker A: No, but with the second topic we wanted to discuss today, I don't know that there's an elegant way to get from where you just left.
[00:45:12] Speaker B: I was just gonna be like, forget that topic. Let's Just go with me storming the Capitol stuff.
[00:45:17] Speaker A: I want to talk.
[00:45:18] Speaker B: Hey, I'll be by myself, just with a little flag and stuff, you know.
[00:45:21] Speaker A: I want to talk exoplanets. And so basically what's happening here with the exoplanet is not. NASA has launched over the past few years. They're putting things in space that can see really far, basically. So they have, like, what we're talking about today is going to be NASA's Trend Transisting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. And it's found like 5,000 planets that when they call them exoplanets because they're outside of our solar system, they're orbiting other stars that are 30 light years away or 100 light years away. And the way they see them is basically when the planet passes in front of the star, you can see it and you can learn certain things about it.
And like I said, they're launching more stuff to try to be able to learn more, see these things even closer and everything like that. But ultimately they're finding some really interesting stuff, you know, as far as, like, just like in a lot of ways, like, your only thought process of thinking about this type of stuff is like Star wars and Star Trek, like, just all this different stuff, you know, all these different places. And this is all still in our galaxy, but just so, so far away, but so interesting, you know, like what. So what stood out to you as far as reading some of these things, reading about some of these planets?
[00:46:30] Speaker B: I was just wondering if each of these planets are flat around. That was my first.
That was my first, like, thing I was telling, like, dang, just the disc is gonna fly. Yeah, like, are they flat? Are they round? Am I gonna have to argue with the people on those planets about that? You know, all that kind of stuff. But no, it's interesting. You know, I'm fascinated by this stuff and I think it's pretty cool, actually. Just again, the amazingness of technology to allow us to see, you know, this refined HD cameras and this super telescopes and all that that they have.
But it's also interesting because, you know, I think it continues to give us this fantastical hope that somehow, whether in our lifetimes or soon thereafter, that we as humans are going to be colonizing all these places, like these great science fiction movies that we all see.
And again, reading this article, you know, like you said about these distances, man is like one of them was like, like 4 times 10 to the like, with a little number at the top, you know, that I learned at some point in High school. And I was like, wow, my brain can't even go there. And you know, again, I have to remind myself that one light year is the distance that it takes light to travel in 365 days.
[00:47:45] Speaker A: Yes. And light travels one light year is unfathomably correct.
[00:47:50] Speaker B: And think about this. I remember this from some of my nerdy journeys.
Light travels at 180,000 miles per second, right?
So imagine per second. I don't even know how many seconds are in a year. But then you got to multiply that so that number comes to 6.3 trillion something miles is definitely not trillion even. But so let's just say to round it down to 6.3 trillion when they said, like, yeah, this one's like 23,000 light years away, thinking in my head, like, hold on, so now I got to multiply 23,000 times 6.3 trillion to figure out how many miles that is. And that's what I'm saying is, you know, we don't have any ships that can even go close to light speed.
[00:48:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:48:34] Speaker B: And so, you know, the idea that somehow we're going to do. I mean, unless you can put us in this kind of quote unquote cryo sleep or in these pods like they had in the Matrix, and literally have humanity spent 50,000 years asleep waiting to get to one of these planets, I hope that nothing happens while you're on the journey. Like, you know, something doesn't collide with your ship or something. I mean, it just seems impossible. And then there's all the other stuff that we know and we've discussed, like, you know, your body only uses what it needs. So, you know, people that have spent more than a few months on the International Space Station, for example.
[00:49:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:49:06] Speaker B: After about three or four months, they lose about 30% of their bone density.
[00:49:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Because they don't have gravity.
[00:49:11] Speaker B: And you and I were joking. The more vulgar example when we were reading the article about male use of testosterone, that when men add testosterone to their bodies, you know, artificially, that they stop producing it and their testicles shrink. So, you know, there's all these. And then let's not even get into the radiation that without an atmosphere, if you're just in a spaceship for too long, you probably die of cancer before you get to the planet.
[00:49:36] Speaker A: Because. Yeah, I mean, I think that to your point, I mean, it's not happening unless people figure out a way to travel. And I like to deal with all this stuff. Well, no, until. And thus we figure out light speed is supposed to be the Fastest that. And as far as science goes right now, in physics and everything, it's believed that the speed of light is the fastest. That's the speed limit for anything. And so, essentially, people would have to figure out how to travel at light speed or how to fold.
Well, maybe not faster. I mean, if a year, but. Or how to fold space on itself with a wormhole or something like that.
[00:50:06] Speaker B: It's not going to happen.
[00:50:07] Speaker A: It's not going to be combustion.
It's not gonna happen like that. And so. But, I mean, I was fascinated, though, by just some of the things that they were finding. Like, to your point about the. Is it round or flat? They found a star that was the shape of a tear.
And, like, because it was getting pulled on by another star, they've seen, like, things where. Like, one of the things that was.
[00:50:27] Speaker B: The shape of a football. Like, it was.
[00:50:29] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:50:29] Speaker B: Chewy Griffin's head.
[00:50:31] Speaker A: They got planets that have, like, three suns around and stuff. Like, they got all this crazy stuff, like you said.
[00:50:37] Speaker B: That's like Tatooine, man. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
[00:50:39] Speaker A: Like, all this two son from that would be like, science fiction. But see, the thing is that, like. All right, the two things about space that make it endlessly fascinating. One is the one you've already talked about, which is the distances. Like, things are so far away that they could just be making these numbers up. Like, it's just like, what if they're off by a couple of light years? You know? Like, that's a huge distance. And so that's the one thing. The second thing that they really just makes space fascinating is, like, there's so much stuff, like, okay, so it's all far apart, but it's so much. Like, you have a couple of trillion stars and stuff like that. Like, and we're talking. We just look at our galaxy. We're not even looking, like, outside of the Milky Way. And it's like, this stuff is so. There's so many stars, and then these stars have planets. And it's like.
It's just. It's really difficult if you really play it out in your head. It's just like, what are we talking about here? Like, you know, it's funny stars or whatever it is.
Go ahead.
[00:51:39] Speaker B: As you say that, I'm laughing because I'm reminded, like, there's all this stuff out there. This is cool and all that. And then I'm thinking, yeah, but as humans, we're such pigs that not only have we polluted our Earth and we have, you know, 600 billion tons of plastic going into the ocean every year. All the stuff we know about. Right? Yeah, that. I was watching a documentary with one of these science astronomer guys. They were saying how they were showing this image that they have, I guess, like NASA has with all the space junk, the space.
[00:52:08] Speaker A: All the satellites and all that.
[00:52:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Because when the satellites, like, are, like, used up, takes them a while to float back to Earth. Like, they have them orbiting and programmed to orbit for like, 20, 30 years before they fall back down. So what happens is these things are starting to collide with each other because we don't realize how many satellites. I mean, you know, like, AT&T might alone have 300 satellites up there. And then another company there.
[00:52:34] Speaker A: They're all trying to put them in the same general area.
[00:52:37] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:52:37] Speaker A: It's not like somebody's putting satellites super far away and then other people are putting them super close. Like, there is a sweet spot that you want to put them in. And so.
[00:52:45] Speaker B: Exactly. For, like, GPS in the United States, they've got to be over the US because they got to be putting a signal down on top of us. They can't be over China trying to send us signals here. So you're right. And so what they were saying is there's a formula that when two satellites collide and break apart, they already have a formula of how many times that will break apart over time, because then the smaller pieces end up colliding later on with other stuff. And they say one satellite can end up breaking into a million pieces within a few years. And each of those pieces are traveling, on average, around 40,000 miles an hour. So each of them become like missiles on their own.
[00:53:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:53:23] Speaker B: And what they were estimated.
[00:53:24] Speaker A: Don't let them hit your ship.
[00:53:25] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So what they were estimating is within 40 or 50 years, if we don't figure out a way to deal with this, we could trap ourselves within our own orbit because we won't be able to put rockets out that can go past the Earth's orbit because they'll all get damaged on the way out. And now they're already. There's, you know, and this is the beauty I love of our country and our kind of creative destruction of capitalism. There's, of course, already companies out there trying to solve that and making, like, space vacuum cleaners and stuff. So someone will figure it out. But it's just an interesting example of how in our fervor and our quest to continue to explore and learn new things, we're creating more trash. So it's just like, you know, laughing like, man, we could trap ourselves in here and make sure we can't have.
[00:54:06] Speaker A: It be a shooting gallery right outside the atmosphere.
[00:54:08] Speaker B: And then another, you know, do you got anything else or are we ready?
[00:54:12] Speaker A: No, no, I was going. We can wrap from here, man, because.
[00:54:14] Speaker B: I got one more fun one which was.
[00:54:16] Speaker A: Well, go ahead, go ahead.
[00:54:17] Speaker B: Part of, part of. In reading this and just thinking about all these distances I had, I remembered that it was just in the last few years learning that the Voyager space thing, like that satellite that keeps sending us the pictures of Neptune and.
And Saturn and all the planets over the years, had finally got out of the solar system.
[00:54:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:54:36] Speaker B: And I remember that, that, that always kind of the Voyager was always with me in my life, because it was launched in 1977. I'm born in 1978. So by the time I'm in elementary school, they're already talking about this thing was like at Mars or wherever it was, you know, when I was a little kid.
And so I went back and looked just to make sure I had my dates right for this, for this podcast. It left Earth's. Sorry. It left our solar system in 2018.
And they said right now it's sending signals back from what they call the Oort cloud, which is a massive space between our solar system and then really outer space. Right. And so think about it is now we're in the fourth year of it traveling. It's still in that region. It hasn't even gotten to interstellar space yet. It's still within, like the outer boundary of our solar system.
[00:55:23] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:55:23] Speaker B: But it officially left our solar system proper in 2018. And I thought that's 39 years, almost 40 years for like, you're saying a regular. What we can produce as combustion type of, like, velocity.
[00:55:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:38] Speaker B: Travel. And it's traveling at 38,000 miles an hour nonstop.
[00:55:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:42] Speaker B: For 40 years, it took at that speed to get out of our solar system. So again, I just wanted to say that, that that's another example that under our current propulsion technology, we ain't getting to these other planets anytime soon. Because at best, it will be like one of those movies where you got to have two or three generations living on a ship and then you got to deal with the artificial gravity and the radiation, all that. So, you know, I think we just need to.
[00:56:06] Speaker A: We see how we deal with each other when we share a country or.
[00:56:09] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:56:09] Speaker A: Or a spaceship for multi generation.
[00:56:14] Speaker B: I don't even get. That's a whole nother show. We could create.
[00:56:16] Speaker A: We will close it from there.
[00:56:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And that's what I was going to say is that that's my sad way of realizing that my. To end the show that I am going to say that we have to eat our broccoli as a society and just deal with this planet. And however, whatever you think about climate change or global warming, what's going to happen on this planet, it's going to happen and we're going to be here. So it's.
[00:56:36] Speaker A: It's.
Well, yeah, man. I mean, you're right. And so, like, obviously, we would hope to get some sober leadership from that. And in democracy, if you want sober leadership, you have to. Your voters have to, you know, vote it in because it doesn't just happen. Yeah. Be engaged. It doesn't just happen. You get the democracy you deserve. So. But we'll wrap it from here, man. We appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call It Like I See It. You can get us again where, you know, wherever you get your podcast, subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it, tell us what you think, and until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:57:06] Speaker B: I'm Tunde Golana.
[00:57:07] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk to you next time, Sam.
