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 consider how much of a role politicians and the law should have in personal health care decisions, particularly in light of the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion which would overturn Roe v. Wade, as well as what we've seen over the past year or so with the COVID vaccine mandates or the threatened ones or whatever.
And later on, we're going to take a look at some of the recent. Some recent findings which demonstrate that modern humans, which is Homo sapiens, have been around even longer than was previously established and which would open the door for more interaction with the prehistoric other Homo species, the other type of beings like us that were around and so forth.
Joining me today is a man who can tell you what to do when they come for you. Tunde. Ogonlana Tunde. Are you ready to bring the people into your inner circle?
[00:01:22] Speaker B: Yeah, only if they pay their way.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: All right. All right.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Now everyone's welcome in.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: Everybody's welcome in. Oh, oh, oh. That's breaking news.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: Yeah, they get a lollipop and goodie bag on the door on the way in.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: There you go. Now, we're recording this on May 16, 2022.
And over the past few decades in the US we've all lived kind of in a societal environment where in many instances, politicians and others who had access to the levers of power in our government were legally restricted on how much control they had over a person's personal health care decisions.
An example of this would be abortion, where Roe v. Wade, which was a 1973 Supreme Court decision, and it guaranteed the constitutional protection of abortion rights to a substantial extent, it formed essentially a line in the sand to keep various state governments or any government back.
And then on the flip side, we've also been living where there's areas where the government could force one to make certain health care decisions, like to get a vaccine, compulsory vaccines and so forth, whether it be for kids or whatever it was.
Now, there was actually a Supreme Court decision that paved the way for this vaccine mandate, which was Jacobson Vaccine v. Massachusetts, and that confirmed that states can enforce compulsory vaccine laws, and that dates all the way back to 1905.
So we've lived in this society where both of these things, both of these thoughts and practices have been going on and we've been able to keep them straight. Our heads haven't exploded or anything, but the ground appears that it may be shifting on this A little bit.
We've seen a Supreme Court draft opinion which overturns, just flatly overturns Roe v. Wade. And this would signal a substantial change in how our society is balancing the amount of control that politicians and the society at large has over certain personal health care decisions. But at the same time, or, you know, going back past couple of years in the COVID pandemic, we saw a lot of pushback on vaccine mandates and that becoming potentially a partisan issue where there may be some organized push to change that precedent that we've been living under as well. But Tunde, let's start at the abortion issue. What was your reaction to the leaked draft itself and more broadly to this apparent push to take freedom away from the individual on this issue and allow the state to dictate outcomes?
[00:03:48] Speaker B: I mean, I wasn't surprised, put it this way. And it's interesting because I know there's been a speculation I've seen on the news, various programs about the leak and all that.
I could first of all, I don't know who leaked it, so I'm not that special.
But I could see both sides having a reason to want to get this out ahead of any potential ruling on it or decision.
And we need to acknowledge, right, they haven't decided anything yet. So we still want to see how this plays out in the next month or two from this recording.
[00:04:23] Speaker A: But that's an interesting point, just to piggyback on that, that you can see interests being served on either side with this being leaked the way that it was. And so it actually makes it a deeper mystery in a sense. Like some people, if people want to be partisan, they can just always point to the other side and say the other side did it and then only look at the reasons why they would think the other side did it. But you can come up with very coherent reasons why either side here would want to get this leaked in advance of it coming out and not to just hit people out of nowhere, you know, in July or something like that. But go ahead.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, clearly we didn't have enough to to BS about in this country.
They thought we were all getting bored. So some smooth sailing.
Let me leak this and let's just get people excited about something.
But. But no, and what's interesting to me about this, because it brings back up, not really bringing up, because we, like you said, abortion has been front and center our whole lives. We're both born in the late 70s, so we were born after this Supreme Court decision.
So for our whole lives there have been people trying to undo Roe versus Wade. And it looks like they may have finally, out of decades of hard work, gotten there.
So that's why part of this, to me is just the old, like you've said, in other words, kind of cultural and political battles. It comes down to who wants it more, who's been more organized behind the scenes.
This is why, quote, unquote, Republicans and conservatives have been focused on the courts for so many years. Right.
This is all playing out the way that. That's why I said I'm not surprised that this could potentially happen. The overturning of Roe vs Wade. One of the things that did strike out to me, though, was because I started preparation for today, of course, started doing some reading. And first thing, and one of the things I read, I'll quote that says Roe vs. Wade was a landmark decision of the U.S. supreme Court in which the court ruled that the Constitution of the United States protects a pregnant woman's liberty to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction.
The first thing I thought in my head is, that's a very conservative ruling. You know, like, I thought. I thought it was all about keeping the government out of individual liberty, out of your face and out of your personal decisions and the ability to have privacy and like you said, individual liberty. So it's just. It again, strikes me as one of these things where the labels that people say they claim tend to morph based on, as individuals, what they see as their, you know, their kind of their situational ethic at the moment or their moral thing. Because in some, like you said, in one way, and it's interesting how both sides are similar on this, right? Like, I'd say most of the people that seem to not like the government telling them to wear masks or that there should be vaccine mandates tend to be the type of people that politically support taking away Roe versus Wade.
And the people that are pro choice and want to keep Roe versus Wade also politically tended to be the ones that wanted the government to do vaccine mandates and do the mask. So it's interesting how you got a little bit of both mixed into it. Based on what people believe, then they want the government to do that en masse. And if they don't believe it, they're like, government, get off my back. And it's just, yeah, like you can.
[00:07:55] Speaker A: You could, on the surface level, boil it down to. I want the government to do what I think is important, and I don't want the government to do anything that I think or that is not an overwhelming, compelling thing to me. Now, since you mentioned that, I will say there is one distinguishing point that from a legal standpoint that you'll see and that is the getting an abortion does not implicate necessarily the same public health issue as a communicable disease. So. And we can get on, get into this more later, but.
[00:08:25] Speaker B: Yeah, but you're a piece there.
[00:08:27] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I'm a lawyer, so I'm, so I'm not.
[00:08:29] Speaker B: So I'm gonna throw, I will say this, though, also, I'm throw tomatoes at the tv.
That's what I do. You, you, you sit there and think about stuff like this.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Well, yeah, that's what, that's what jumps.
[00:08:39] Speaker B: Up to me when I see it.
[00:08:40] Speaker A: But the other one, on the other hand, you know, implicates more of a religious type of which I thought you were going to mention, but.
And not, you know, like that's why we're both here, but the religious piece where something that would be considered a violation of someone's faith, so to speak. You know, and, and that's what's interesting about that is that obviously our morals and, you know, we'll be discussing this in future, future shows, you know, when we go into, we're going to take a closer look at some morality and so forth and where it comes from. But people's morals can come from a lot of different things and their law in some ways is going to be influenced by someone's faith. If you're a person of faith. Now, we're supposed to have a hard line there, you know, though, where, you know, the matters of faith aren't supposed to dictate our laws. So there's, it's stickier when you get to the abortion issue on that versus the vaccine issue on that. Unless and until then, people say, oh, well, these were tested a certain way, and so therefore these vaccines were tested. So we've seen that argument. These were tested a certain way, and so I can't use them for that reason or anything like that. So all of these things, to your point, reveal a situational ethic that we see. But I would say generally my reaction, I would, you know, just to go into that initial piece was it. I actually went, my reaction was similar to yours and just that, like, this has been the organizing principle of the approach to the judiciary branch of federal government on the right for at least 40 years. Like, so that this happened. It seemed like this was an eventuality more than anything in the sense that this is what they have been working to do for a very long time. This is why Mitch McConnell got rid of the filibuster for judicial nominees. This is why many people in the Republican Party, for example, who did not like Donald Trump, but he promised to give them the judges that they wanted and he said they went along with it. This is paying off on that bet, you know. And so it, to me, it was, you know, that it happened. Now it's like, okay, well, I would, I would imagine this is what they've been building to and they succeeded in that sense. And that is something that, that's how our society works. There's ebbs and flows to these things. They've been. Since Roe v. Wade or the aftermath of that. There have been, there's been a highly motivated and as you pointed out, very organized and passionate group of people who have been working to do this. And they used in many ways the democratic process. Some, some, some ways I would say that it wasn't really the way you're supposed to go about things when start talking about blocking Supreme Court or not considering Supreme Court justices that have been duly nominated. But I will say this.
Well, go ahead. I know you wanted to jump back in because there was another one point I wanted to make, but I wanted you to give you a chance to respond.
[00:11:17] Speaker B: Well, yeah, no, one of the things that I just going back to the religion part real quick, because that stuck out to me too. So I just wanted to say a piece before we jump from here. Number one is, you know, the Constitution doesn't say anything specific about abortion. Maybe it doesn't even say anything about privacy as opposed to due process. Right. But neither does the Bible to my knowledge, nor the Quran, nor the Torah say anything about abortion specifically. So it just, this goes back to where people choose what they want their hot button to be out of any document that they consider sacred. Right. So because there's a lot of good stuff in the Bible that I never hear talked about. Like, yeah, we'd be spending all treat people, you know, and all that.
[00:12:03] Speaker A: We would be spending all our time on poverty if people were really living.
[00:12:06] Speaker B: Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like there's a lot of, there's a lot of very, very good things about how to treat people in the Bible that I never hear get talked about.
And so, and so what I'm getting at is the people that say that they're, let's say, constitutional originalists, that they believe unless it's in the Constitution written there by the guys who are alive in the late 1700s and it was just how they intended then it's. Then it's illegitimate. It shouldn't be part of our conversation as a country. And I'm just, that's what I was joking in my head thinking. Yeah, but they're not originalists with the Bible.
I don't see abortion or any of some of this stuff that we talk about in today's politics and all that. Not in the Bible. But they bring it all.
But they say this is all about religion. And my point is also just to add in there that our First Amendment takes care of this argument about religion in any of these decisions because of the Constitution. Yeah. The First Amendment says that Congress will not legislate any form of religion or anything religious in that sense. So whatever. And that's, I want to be very clear here, because religion, this is why I think the health care topic is very sensitive because it does involve things like our bodies.
You know, things that are deep seated beliefs about not only our bodies, but things like sex, reproduction, all that, which for a lot of us the morality of that is founded in some sort of religion. So the point I'm making here is trying to have this conversation with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer is I'm not knocking or bashing religious religion in my statement. What I'm trying to differentiate is that this country was founded by men who came out of kind of that Protestant and Catholic fights in England and in Europe. And they, they all knew what these passions could lead to. So they tried to create a society that would keep the religion separate from the governing part.
[00:14:00] Speaker A: And everyone is free people making laws based on religion. Like, okay, well this is what my faith says. So therefore we have to make this a law.
[00:14:07] Speaker B: And that's a great point because we all remember how many laws. We talked about this on other shows at the state level. There was over 200 laws passed by between 2010 and 2020 about not having Sharia law in the United States. So we tend to not like the idea of a theocracy. Right. And like at least one is someone else that might want to do it. And I think that goes back to the point why I bring up the way I thought about the religion part in the Constitution is that's already settled.
So that's. I'll get off my horse and pass it back.
[00:14:39] Speaker A: Well, I'll tell you this. One other thing that I wanted to mention on this is, and this is about just this push to move this from an issue of personal liberty and freedom to one that the state dictates. The Supreme Court really is the tip of the spear here, the action is really happening on the state and then potentially on the federal level at some point.
Once this protection, because remember what Roe v. Wade did was put a line in the sand or put a border around what the government could make laws about as it relates to this issue.
And so we're seeing though, you know, like that, we're seeing state efforts like that have a fascist bent going on. And I don't say that lightly, like, you know, laws that are going up that says you, you can't get an abortion. And then you can't, you can't get an abortion in this state, you can't get an abortion in another state. And we're going to set up checkpoints at the highway if you're going from Texas to New Mexico or something like that, and make sure if you're pregnant, then we might detain you. And like this, there is an effort here. Like, this is not fun and games, basically. And I want to say that just because to me, I've taken this seriously the whole time. I've heard people say, hey, we have to overturn Roe v. Wade. This is our organizing principle for the Net. And I believe people when they say that. And so therefore, when I see this happen, it's like, okay, well, they've worked hard, you know, like, they've been doing this. They've been, you know, I commend their efforts, so to speak, their organization, and obviously I'm not happy with the outcome. But if they're going to work that hard, and nobody's working that hard against them, as you said, who, who wants it more then up until now, at least they've wanted it more. So we'll see if that galvanizes people against it. But this is, you know, and other things, though, you know, just we got bounties now on the books in states like you turn in, spy on your fellow citizens, turn them in, you know, things like that. It's something that, where we have to look at what the Supreme Court is doing and understand, okay, yeah, that's notable. That's a shiny object. But we can't stop our evaluation there.
What's happening and what's about to happen here is the action actually is the other shoe that's going to drop when we see what several states, half of the states or whatever, it's going to be put very serious restrictions on people, turn their citizens into, you know, the reporting agency against the other. And where we see you can get an example of this is like with voting rights, you know, as the Voting Rights act was whittled away and whittled away in terms of what? The pre clearance issue. When certain states had to get pre clearance for, for changes they wanted to make to their voting, they got rid of that. In the last 20 years or so after that, that happened. And everyone's like, oh, no, that's a pretty serious. That's a big deal. But at that moment, we didn't see the full effect. We didn't see the full effect until over the past 10 years or so when we've seen the extreme levels of gerrymandering, the extreme levels of voter disenfranchisement, disenfranchisement that that has allowed. And so really, like I said, what we're seeing now is, okay, this is happening, but, but what's about the other shoe is where it's gonna, you're really gonna see how this, what kind of society we're gonna move to as a result of this.
So.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:41] Speaker A: Oh, go ahead. If you have.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: Well, I was gonna say that, you know, the interesting thing is for those. And you're right, like, that's what I'm saying. Like, people who aren't fans of this potential for Roe v. Wade to be taken away really need to really think hard about how they want to respond to this and be strategic because, you know, the Republicans and conservatives are being rewarded right now for 40 years of hard work and focus. And this is, it's interesting. You know, I think I've heard now, you know, I've heard all these stats that as much as 70% of the United States population is okay with either keeping Roe as is, or, or keeping some form of legalized abortion around.
So what's happening is, remember the term activist judges and all that?
Those were terms used to galvanize and coalesce people that were pro life in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. Because the Republican Party was smart in one way. They knew that they didn't have the popular support to overturn Roe versus Wade.
So if you can't do it from the ballot box by having politicians win elections who are going to campaign on overturning Roe versus Wade, then what you need to do is you need to play the parlor trick games that have been played over the last few decades. Gerrymandering, Electoral College, all that, and make sure that you can ram in judges that will do exactly what appears to be happening. Right. A case in Mississippi was contested and then was sent to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court looks like, based on this leaked document, may rule to Overturn Roe versus Wade. So there's a very.
For those that want to pay attention. And I think that's the problem with a lot of the people that oppose or that are pro choice, I should say, that oppose this decision to overturn Roe versus Wade. They only show up in the street to protest.
They're asleep at the wheel when the heavy lifting is going on, when it's not election time. So that's what I would say to people that are not happy with the potential direction all this is going is that they need to just be awake at all times, not just when it's time to get in the street.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I mean, and just one point of clarification, like the numbers suggest that they did have the votes to get politicians to run on the pro life or the anti choice position or whatever. Like public support was less in favor of rights to terminate a pregnancy if you go back 49 years or 40 years and so forth. But because the Supreme Court tied it to the Constitution, they didn't have the support to do a constitutional amendment to amend the Constitution to overturn what the Supreme Court said as far as tying it to a constitutional right. So that would necessitated going after judges to get to have the judges overturn their previous decision.
So it happens to be that as they mustered the judicial strength to overturn Roe v. Wade, they actually lost the popular support to an overwhelming degree. And so that's just kind of an interesting footnote with this. And so now the popular support is squarely. It's not 50, 50, it's not, you know, whatever it was 45, 55 or whatever, it's 70% plus. And so, you know, but the hard work in working on the judiciary has paid off from that standpoint. So your point is still well taken.
Just wanted to clarify that it wouldn't have been necessarily a law. It would be more like an amendment to have to try to take out what the Supreme Court did. But nonetheless, I want to look at this also from a different lens though. And that lens is what the vaccine mandate, because on one hand, what the abortion issue looked at or the way that was embodied and historically over the last 49 years was the government being prevented, a government, whether it be a state government, whatever, being prevented from infringing on the liberty of women's liberty in terms of making personal health decisions related to abortion up to a certain point. And so that is a putting handcuffs on the government to say that to stop people from, or to excuse me, that prevents the government from stopping people from making a Certain choice related to healthcare. The vaccine issue is kind of an inverse, but it really invokes the same thing in the sense that that is where the government will make laws not to say you can't do something, but to say you have to do something. A compulsory vaccination, so to speak. And so, and we've seen like that's been. You cited when we did a show related to the vaccine mandates, you know, a while back, you cited that case, you know that, that Jacobson v. Massachusetts case going back to 1905 that said that the government can do that. So looking at what we did or what the way things were reacted to on the vaccine side, side by side with direction, things are going with the abortion. What stands out to you about how these issues are discussed and reacted to.
[00:22:35] Speaker B: What stands out to me is really kind of what we've been talking about is that these issues, and I think this is what makes it stands out is that we have the kind of freedom in our society, things like freedom of speech.
Because in China and certain other Russia, I don't want to keep picking on the same authoritarian countries, but we could even pick on third world countries, you know.
[00:22:57] Speaker A: Well, they're the big.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:22:58] Speaker A: So that's, it's kind of, you know.
[00:23:00] Speaker B: I know, I'm just making a point like whether it's the Congo or, or Myanmar or wherever these kind of countries are that have more of a top down style. I'm pretty sure whatever they say the rule is for your health care, that's what it is.
[00:23:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:11] Speaker B: And you know, and there's no like complaining. There's no, I'm not going to stay in my house because of COVID and all that.
[00:23:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:16] Speaker B: They just get forced to do it. And so, and so I think this part of what stands, if they don't.
[00:23:22] Speaker A: Do it, then their neighbor will report them and the government will come get them.
[00:23:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
And that's again the interesting thing here is because what stands out to me is this is how people react when they have the ability to. Right. In a freer society, when they can say things like it's against my religion or I don't believe this was in our founding document 200 years ago. So there's, you know, part of this messiness is because we have our freedoms. And I think, you know, it's interesting, like you said about what you just said about in the authoritarian systems, the Russias, the Chinas, that people rat on each other and they're taught to rat on each other. And it's interesting how in A country that says it so much loves freedom that we have states like Texas that just came out with a law that deputizes anyone to rat on someone else.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: Get paid.
Yeah. And financial rewards.
[00:24:21] Speaker B: Yeah. So for. For. If they get a health care procedure done. So the point is, is that this is why things like freedom of speech are important and why the First Amendment to the US Constitution is so important. Because even in a country like ours, which has a culture of saying it loves freedom, it loves privacy, it loves independence, we can see through the way that certain state legislatures have behaved in recent years that all they care more about control, and it could be control here of what people do with their bodies.
We had shows about the control that they're trying to do now about education and what people are taught from a historic standpoint about how what happened in this country's past.
So it's interesting that from a culture of people that say they love freedom and openness, how scared they are of allowing people to make their own free choices.
You know, and so it's just. That's, to me, kind of what stands out about this.
[00:25:19] Speaker A: It's almost like you have a freedom to agree with me, but if you don't agree with me, then a certain issue, then that freedom kind of ends at that point. And like, in terms of. We talked about that last week, though, in terms of how you and I just in our own personal journeys independently, have kind of learned how a lot of that talk is performative. You know, it is something that people say things to get. It's almost like, you know, playing to the crowd like a wrestler would do or something. You know, it's, you know, doing the little twirl and putting your hand to your ear or something, because, you know, that. That those are the buzzwords that the crowd wants to hear. But a lot of times it's not something that you. They're looking really for you to deliver on, except to the extent it's things that, where, hey, if you agree with me or if you think the way I think, then you have. You. You're free to say whatever you want to say. But if you want to teach somebody something that I don't like, then you're not free to do that. You know, we don't have freedom of speech then. But what stands out to me actually, is actually how difficult the balance is because I, you know, at the beginning, I kind of mentioned how, you know, well, you know, with the vaccines that invokes or, you know, like the vaccines is a. An example because that's actually a health procedure, whereas the masks, it kind of raises the same kind of feeling that we saw pushback that we saw. But it's not even a health procedure. That's like kind of. That's not much different than making people wear shoes, you know, like in terms of what we do in society. But the balance is very difficult, I think. And I think that we should all appreciate that.
The balance on how much control politicians or anyone, really anyone. I mean, people want to get their hands on the lever of power in government, usually because they want power to do stuff. They don't want to just be there because they like the view. But either way, how much control they should have, whether their intentions matter. If it's, oh, if I want to do this law because this is the way. Because based on my religion, I think that life starts at conception and I think that we should change birth certificates from birth. I think birth date is irrelevant. We should just say conception date on birth certificates and start tracking everything there.
I look at the intersection, there is one that's kind of silly. I use that example because I started thinking like, well, hold on, if my wife is pregnant, should I be able to claim an extra dependent on my taxes?
Or if kind of pregnant women drive in hov two lanes just by themselves, like how far out culture?
[00:27:41] Speaker B: Well, technically, if you believe that birth begins, I mean, life begins at conception, that hov lane comment is actually pretty interesting.
[00:27:49] Speaker A: So. Hey, what about the tax thing? Same thing.
I say that just to point out that cultural.
[00:27:56] Speaker B: Go ahead, I got one for you.
I don't know if you want to go down this road because I don't know if it's healthcare culture or whatever, but if, if you had to make a choice being, could a fetus be trans?
[00:28:09] Speaker A: Oh my goodness.
Oh my goodness. Yeah.
[00:28:12] Speaker B: At what point do they become a boy?
[00:28:14] Speaker A: Well, see, I. But that's a bad question for me because I'm a biology person, so I'm a science person, so I, I can't like, I can't go down that road.
[00:28:21] Speaker B: I just wanted to see your face, that's all. I wish the audience because if we had a TV show.
[00:28:26] Speaker A: Yeah, so it's a visual or it's not a visual medium, so. But no, I mean, yeah, I point out, like, culturally we've accepted a certain definition of what being a person is or you know, but I say that to say, like beyond someone's intentions. But I want to make this law because I believe this for a religious reason or I want to make this because I think it's good for public health.
It's really helpful to have some independent way to evaluate these things. And so, because what we're seeing is it's a difficult issue. And if you're just evaluating each one based on a sliding scale of whatever is invoked by it, oh, well, this one invokes my religion, this one invokes my concern over public health, yada, yada, yada, then you will end up tying yourself in pretzels if you ever try to be consistent about it. It's a difficult issue. We need some way to evaluate whether or not the government should have any, because I'm one that would lean more towards the government should be staying out of it. But I also recognize, though, that that probably it doesn't work for that to be an absolute right either. So that really, my reaction is to just take note. Looking at both of these, it's a difficult balance. It's a difficult path to walk, to stay in a space that's coherent.
[00:29:40] Speaker B: Well, let me help you here, because you're not the only person to have see this as a complexity. As I was doing my own research, you know me, I love the history stuff. So I said, okay, how long has this debate been going on in America? So in 1821, Connecticut passed the first state statute banning abortion in the United States.
[00:30:00] Speaker A: Oh, wow.
[00:30:01] Speaker B: And says, you know, 30 out of the 37 states prior to, you know, 1900, and six of the 10 US territories had codified laws which restricted abortion. Along with the Kingdom of Hawaii, where abortion had once been common, every state had abortion legislation by 1900.
So again, this is something. And here's what I was thinking too, because that was interesting to read, that the Kingdom of Hawaii had. Had. Had restricted it, but it had once been common there. Which is interesting, which tells me, okay, you know, back when it was the Kingdom of Hawaii, when it was Polynesian, maybe culturally there was just. It wasn't seen as a. As a moral failing maybe to. To do something like this where in our culture it was. So by the time America kind of took over Hawaii, you know, the situation changed. And I just found that interesting reading that.
That part of me felt like, well, there must be a part of this that involves also the technology of the time, because I'm thinking that, you know, probably by the late 1800 or the 1800s, the technology of gynecology and all that had changed to a point where you could do something like abort a baby and with a procedure, let's put it that way, versus maybe back in like a Thousand years ago, it was, you know, they give you some plants or something that just, you know, kill the fetus that you ingest as a woman. So that's what got me thinking about it too, is, yeah, as, as probably the, the technology got better and easier for a doctor to just do this within, you know, a short period of time and the woman did to generally leave without being totally scarred or inability to have future children.
They were probably happening more and more, which then brought this into a discussion in the bigger level of the society. Should this be allowed or not?
[00:31:59] Speaker A: There's another piece you have to consider there, and that is that if you recall that childbirth was no sure thing for most of human history in terms of the baby survival and not just childbirth, but up to two years.
It's one of those things that having a kid didn't mean that you were gonna raise a kid, so to speak, for much time. So as technology evolved and science evolved and they were able to keep people alive better, there may have been more of a.
It may have come up to where people. It may not have come up as much when people lost half of their kids before 2 years old anyway, so to speak. So the societies change, cultures change.
[00:32:39] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good point.
[00:32:40] Speaker A: Yeah. How things go change and so our society is going to be. And then the other piece I should say with this is that we just have a lot more people and a lot more people really close together now. And so we have to, we have to deal with more people, more different agendas, more different mindsets in terms of our day to day life now. So again, that's why I keep coming back to, okay, we need some way to evaluate these types of things that don't just default to, well, I think this because of my religion, or I think this because of this or that or whatever. Because we'll never get to a place where we can live with the result. We collectively can live with the result. We don't have to agree with the result, but we have to be all be able to live to a certain degree with the result.
And we're not going to get to that point if there's no kind of agreed upon. Like that's why we have law, is to try to get to some agreed upon, okay, this isn't the, this may not be the best way to deal with this, but it's a way to deal with this seems relatively reasonable, a speed limit, for example. Like, it's like, okay, well we could just make a law that says, hey, drive safely.
But how are we going to evaluate that. So we create this an arbitrary number in many respects. Now they take into account the physics of driving around from what I understand. But it's relatively arbitrary. It's like, look, we want people to be relatively careful, so we'll do this. But we don't want to put an overbearing restriction on people either. So people aren't driving 35 miles an hour on a straightaway highway with, you know, five lanes. So there, there we have to do better essentially as society if we want to make this stuff work because they're always going to be, things are going to change, you know, like technology is going to change, customs are going to change, there's going to be cross pollination across things and so forth. So all of that, I mean it's, this is one of the issues that reveal that to us because the divisions here are deep and they are calcified.
Yeah, yeah, man. So I do want to get into the second topic and you had brought this up to me and we've talked about this in different ways before in the past and other shows, but it's a new finding so we get to talk about it again. And that's just with ancient or modern man and how far back modern man extends and what all was going on between modern man and all these other human, you know, pre modern men that apparently were walking around. I think you said it's up to nine at this point that they have.
[00:35:09] Speaker B: Confirmed between nine and 21.
[00:35:12] Speaker A: Oh, between nine and 21.
[00:35:13] Speaker B: Which ones you read?
[00:35:14] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So I mean, which is just fascinating. Obviously like we all, we see a bunch of Homo sapiens every, you know, when we look around. But it's fascinating to think that you go, you show up somewhere and there's like these human like things, but they're not humans. But you know, beyond that, what's your thoughts? The big headline here is that now they're always trying to track the minimum age for these remains that they found that the oldest remains they found that are for sure modern man. And they thought it was 200,000 years old. Now they're thinking 230 based on samplings as far as volcanic eruptions and so forth that are found with it. So what's your thought on, you know, this research that's establishing that modern humans have been around longer than previously believe and anything else that stuck out to you about this?
[00:35:58] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's very interesting. I mean it's number one, the, the thing I found interesting and we've talked about this stuff on several of These science conversations, especially post pandemic, the idea that science is not absolute and as technology improves and the ability to study things.
[00:36:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:19] Speaker B: Is refined.
That just like with COVID Right. That first it's new, and then after a year, they kind of got a lot better idea how to deal with it. So the guidelines might have changed. Here they go from 200,000, thinking that was the oldest, that humans went back in our modern form.
Now they're going back 230,000 years. So again, I was thinking in my head, like, you know, a contrarian, like, oh, okay, how come science always has to change things? And then I started reading. They explained it in one of the articles I read.
It had to do with the way that they could break down the radioactive carbon of the volcanic ash around where the bones were found. And it's just better dating technology now than it was 20 years ago when.
[00:37:04] Speaker A: They found it and they found this stuff. They found these remains in the 1960s. So, like.
[00:37:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Longer than I thought.
[00:37:11] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it's pretty interesting that, you know, like, they're still able to go back and study this and, you know, again, with, as you're pointing out, with better techniques as far as to be able to place these things.
[00:37:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And so one of the things I found interesting, just getting. And this, again, if you. If you take kind of the theory of evolution at its face, that. That, you know, we've evolved from primates, that, you know, you got to kind of at least somewhat believe in that to have this conversation. But the idea.
I'm setting it off that way because what I'm about to say is the idea is that we broke away from chimpanzees and that type of primate about somewhere between 6 and 7 million years ago.
[00:37:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:55] Speaker B: And what happens is there's evidence that over a few million years, there were various species of hominids, you know, human like creatures. And then somewhere around 300,000 years ago is where we get the kind of trace of Neanderthals, Denisovans, and the beginning of homo sapiens around 200 to 300,000 years ago.
And so what I found interesting is they said that some of these species, again, like I said, they're somewhere between 9 and 21, depending who you read. And even some of them might branch two into one, you know, some of these scientific research studies. But what I found interesting is that they said that the last to die out, they believe, was around 10,000 years ago.
[00:38:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:38:50] Speaker B: And then. And then it was humans alone. You know what I was thinking? Man, just interesting about.
I don't think as humans we appreciate how powerful our culture is in terms of all of us, like oral history, all this. I mean, think about it. The Bible and the Christian and Jewish and Muslim religions are still the most powerful things in the world and are thousands of years old.
So, you know, this idea that we can hold onto ideas in our culture as humans for a long time isn't new. And I was thinking about like, well, the Jewish religion, for example, Judaism, 6,000 years old. And just like everything else, Judaism probably came from other stuff, right?
[00:39:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:29] Speaker B: And I was thinking, man, if something was going on, it was around 10,000 years ago that looked like a human, but wasn't.
I was thinking that could be where. But that's on a serious note. That's where ideas like hobbits or the yeti or Bigfoot could have come from. Meaning we could have been human beings like us sitting around a campfire could have been dealing with some things that looked like us but weren't us. They were hairy, they were a little bit scarier.
And you're sitting there telling stories, trying to get your kids to be good, you know, when they're little and you're saying, oh, that guy in the mountain cave is going to come get you. And it might have really been some Homo erectus or. Yeah. Or some Neanderthal or something. So that's what I. That was the first time when I saw that it was as late, as recent as 10,000 years ago, we still had non human hominids on the Earth. That was kind of cool. I was like, damn. Like, that's probably where a lot of our scary stories are coming from.
[00:40:25] Speaker A: I mean, for real, that's a really excellent point that you made. That is a very plausible explanation of Bigfoot, so to speak. You know, some, some species of Homo that was not Homo sapiens. And to me, the progression is what really is fascinating in the sense that a lot of times when people talk about, okay, yeah, Homo, the Homo species, which is, you know, Homo sapiens, but also Homo neanderthalists and all that, you know, all these different human.
[00:40:52] Speaker B: I'm just glad we're mature adults because the amount of times you say in Homo, man, I can see if I was a teenager, we'd have some bad jokes right now.
Sorry, go ahead.
[00:41:01] Speaker A: But like, you see these and they're not here anymore. So if you do buy evolution, then you then look and say, okay, well, we conceivably are improvements of them. Like, we are at the top of that pyramid. So to speak that they were a step of. And we either wiped them out. Which one of the pieces that you sent me on this goes into that, which I'll let. Yeah, I'll let you get into that.
Or, you know, we out competed them in general. Like, we, we got all the food, they didn't get any of the food. And that was that. And then we've talked, I've known previous shows, we've talked about how we could have also just incorporated them in, in smaller amounts into ours, you know, start mating with them and whatever. But like, to me, that's the fascinating part of this, is that the, you know, you had, you would have if you were. Yeah, if you were walking around. One of the things we're looking at talks about, you know, if you're going back 200,000 years, you're going to have, you know, maybe 10 species of homo beings walking around. You know, now granted, you're not traveling the world, so you're only going to, you know, not going to run into everybody, but just that you're going to have that going on.
And at a certain point, Homo sapiens, modern humans probably realize that, yo, we're the big dogs here. You know, we're the big dogs here. So, like, we keep growing and advancing and eventually are spread out all over the world. And so as we, once we get into our recorded history, which you're looking to religion for that, you know, the earliest recorded history, you were probably looking at religious documents for that. And that's. We can, you know, rely on them as much as we could rely on anything that was 6,000 years old. But, like, once we get to that point, Homo sapiens had been through a lot. Homo sapiens had taken over the world, essentially, you know. So to me, that progression is just fascinating, like, because we can't imagine, like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna go into this. Go, go, I'm gonna go, go to this island. And then there's a whole bunch of little things running around that walk like us and talk like us, but they're clearly not us or big things, you know, like that.
[00:42:55] Speaker B: And that's the thing too, because, you know, I think there was different discussion where I mentioned that there's the estimated population of the world 2000 years ago. So let's say around the time of Jesus, they estimate there was somewhere between 180 million to 200 million human beings on earth.
So think about 8,000 years prior to that when there was, you know, if around 10,000 years ago, if that's when the last of these other humanoids, or whatever you want to call it, the Homos were around.
You got to imagine how many fewer human Homo sapiens there were. Yeah, there might have only been a million Homo sapiens around. So think about how vast and open the Earth would have been without just humans. And like you're saying, I could see it take maybe 100,000 years for us to get rid of all of them because of just the vastness of the Earth, you know, like, just to be able to navigate across seas, all that, and find these other beings. And that was the interesting thing that one of the articles I read, I'll quote here, it says we are uniquely. Says about humans, human beings, we are a uniquely dangerous species. We hunted the woolly mammoth, ground sloths and moas to extinction. We destroyed plains and forests for farming, modifying over half the planet's land area.
And so it's basically getting at that because of our brains and our intelligence. And they said, and the article goes on to kind of say, once we figured out how to do, like, really hunt and have our societies, that might have been the death nail for these other hominid groups, because we may have just been able to outsmart them literally.
But the other thing to your point about, I think you mentioned that we may have interbred with them. I mean, the evidence is there where people from Australia, like Aboriginal Australians and people from south and Eastern Asia, you know, I would say Thailand, Vietnam, all up to China and Japan side of things, have the Denisovian DNA in them. Still today, the humans, and then most of every other human outside of sub Saharan Africans have Neanderthal DNA in them.
So it stands to reason that humans didn't exterminate all of these other hominids, that we must have interbred with them and their offspring were allowed to live so that the rest of us have this. And I would say this. This is where kind of reading this stuff makes you realize more that race is a human construct built on social order. And it's BS because the fact we all have, all of us except sub Saharan Africans have Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in us means that the Sub Saharan Africans must be the pure humans the rest of us are, including me and you. Right. Like, meaning in America, people like us are considered black, but we really have a lot of Caucasian in us as well. And that's just life. And that's. So these racial structures of modern humans is all about casting us into a social order and hierarchy.
[00:46:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:13] Speaker B: Whereas you see what I'm saying?
[00:46:14] Speaker A: Well, No, I mean, when you look at the racial thing now, what's interesting to me about that is almost like we're hardwired to do that in the sense that I'm sure that these same things were done when there were all these different hobo species around, and they actually were different at that point. And there may have been people saying, oh, we need to treat them the same and. Or we need to bring them into the village and hey, but he's hairy.
[00:46:40] Speaker B: All over and he's either 9ft tall or 2ft tall. He's not the same.
[00:46:46] Speaker A: Go on.
[00:46:47] Speaker B: So you're right. It's the same thing as Ted.
[00:46:49] Speaker A: So, like, it might be one of those things that, I mean, and this has kind of been shown with just psychology, like, we do fixate on differences. You know, we as human beings, we fixate on differences. And so we can be in a society where relatively relative to United States, for example, everybody looks the same or has, you know, more or less the same religion, and we'd still find a way to divide ourselves and then, you know, attack the other, you know, whatever that would be. And then we could be in a place like this and, you know, like, it's. We pick the things. Like, instead of we will have a bunch of things we can pick from in terms of how we're going to divide ourselves, we'll pick one or one will be picked for us from a cultural standpoint, and we'll just roll with that and disregard other things where we have may have similarities with people that are in a different, quote, unquote group from us and differences from the people that are in the same group with us because we prioritize, so to speak, where we're going to distinguish ourselves, you.
[00:47:46] Speaker B: Know, so can you imagine if human beings did that?
[00:47:50] Speaker A: Human beings do that like that. My point is, can you imagine, could.
[00:47:54] Speaker B: You imagine how dysfunctional the world would be if people did that?
[00:47:58] Speaker A: Well, but I think, honestly, though, that is actually one of the things that distinguishes the American effort, the American attempt, the American experience in the sense that it has definitely not lived up to the ideals that it set forth. But those are some pretty high ideals in terms of how people operate and have operated in human nature and so forth. It's a pretty high ideal to try to set up a society, to even say it, as you pointed out with, you know, again, not to pick on China. Most countries don't even try to get out here and say, like, yeah, yeah, everybody's equal under the law. Like most countries, they're like, nah, yeah. People who have the stuff say, nah, I'm not equal to you, you know, type of thing. So it's an interesting light that we can look at ourselves and like I said, I think that that's something that Americans should be proud of. You know, like a lot of times Americans want to be proud of, you know, this or that or whatever. But one of the things that Americans, I think should be proud of is the aspiration to try to go beyond kind of the lowest common denominator. And even though it doesn't succeed, you.
[00:49:01] Speaker B: Know, like, you know, the problem is for this specific conversation.
[00:49:05] Speaker A: What's that?
[00:49:06] Speaker B: You gotta believe that the Earth wasn't created in six days.
Well, and then you gotta believe that that shouldn't be in the law. So that's, that's. We got, we got a long ways to go before we get to this.
[00:49:16] Speaker A: Well, but I'll tell you this. I would think that if someone was an originalist from a constitutional standpoint, I think they'd be able to get there. But I don't know. I don't know. We never know. So. But I think we can wrap it up from here, man. But we appreciate.
[00:49:29] Speaker B: That was a good one. That was a good one, though. I'm thinking the Founding Fathers were actually deists, so that's, you know, so they would have believed in evolution, actually.
[00:49:38] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Well, that's actually, it came out of the Enlightenment.
[00:49:41] Speaker B: That's why I said that was a good one.
[00:49:42] Speaker A: Yeah, that's what I'm saying. No, I came out of the Enlightenment, which in hindsight, you know, a lot of the things they were saying with the Enlightenment are kind of Pollyannish and not really, really true. How things play out as far as how reason and we're going to get into this and.
[00:49:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:49:54] Speaker A: And now reason dominates and everything like that and emotion is, is.
[00:49:58] Speaker B: They believe that God is real and God created kind of the big bang. Like basically that God was a, was a watchmaker, that he, he made the watch, set it and then let it go. That he doesn't. That's what Deus believed, that God doesn't control our every day to day moves. So someone like the Founding Fathers being deists, could believe that God created the earth and from their evolution could have happened on its own.
[00:50:21] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I mean, but all of that though, it still ultimately comes down.
[00:50:26] Speaker B: I guess I'm an originalist because I know what the Founding Fathers were thinking. Right.
[00:50:30] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:50:30] Speaker B: Yeah, so.
[00:50:31] Speaker A: But it all comes down to like, we believe stories we tell ourselves the stories that we want to believe regardless, all of that, you know, like so. And I'm not. Are you saying.
[00:50:40] Speaker B: I was just doing that?
[00:50:41] Speaker A: Hey, I'm just saying that you can. Human beings are uniquely capable of believing whatever they want to believe. That's probably why we out competed all those other species.
[00:50:51] Speaker B: Because I'm like, maybe I'm one of those other ones. Like I'm a homo something. I gotta figure out that last part.
[00:51:00] Speaker A: Yeah, man, you're big.
[00:51:01] Speaker B: Let me go talk to my wife.
She'll tell you she has a better idea.
[00:51:05] Speaker A: But no, but I think we can wrap from here, man.
[00:51:08] Speaker B: Yeah, I think we need to. For I say something stupid.
[00:51:10] Speaker A: But we appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call It Like I See It. Subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review us, tell us what you think, and just share it with your friends. And until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:51:21] Speaker B: I'm Tuna.
[00:51:22] Speaker A: All right, and we'll talk to you next time.
