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 weigh in on the question posed in an excellent piece from the New Yorker magazine entitled what's Wrong with the Way We Work?
Which touched on a multitude of different things in American society that appear to suggest that our conception of work is suboptimal, to say the least.
And later on, we're going to discuss some recent research into how and why human societies adopt rituals and how that kind of just plays out as cultures and societies develop. Even once the cultures and societies, the people in them forget what the ritual started as or what it was there for in the first place.
Joining me today is a man who understands that the main thing about money is that it makes you do things you don't want to do. And so he tries every day to help people with their money. Tunde. Ogunlana Tunde. Tell me, have you been able to find meaning in your work?
[00:01:20] Speaker B: Every day, sir. When I thought about a joke with a stripper pole, but I won't go there. So when he talked about making money. So I won't digress. We have a show to do.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: Oh, man. Well, you already teased it at this point.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: Yeah, and I remembered I'm married, so I don't need to get in trouble. Oh, there you go.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: Now we're recording this on January 18, 2021. And this past week, Tunde and I were intrigued by a recent piece in the New Yorker magazine.
It looked at our American society's approach to work from many different perspectives and also tried to put things in context from a historical standpoint. The underlying premise was based on the observation that most Americans today seem to be working more and more while simultaneously getting less out of it. That's less from many different perspectives, whether it be actual financial remuneration or the way it makes you feel at the end of it, or just anything or a lot of aspects of it, the headline really did say it all. You know, what's wrong with the way we work?
So, Tunde you and I both identify that this question is a very important one to consider these days. Because while our society has clearly left the Industrial age and entered into the Information Age, we're still operating on procedures and systems that were designed in and for the industrial Age. So what do you think of the premise of the article? Is something in fact wrong with the way we work or the way we think about what work is?
[00:02:50] Speaker B: As much as I don't like to say there's something wrong with the way we do it. I think the earlier way you described it is very accurate that our system has evolved over the last hundred years, but the way we work hasn't really kept up with that. So I would say that would be the way I would kind of break it down.
And I think it's interesting now too, as we're talking to realize that we're in, you know, post pandemic. Right. And I think, yeah, well, we will be getting there. But meaning the pandemic's already. We're in 2021. We've already had, you know, getting close to a year of this now. And I think, you know, what we heard at the start of this thing when the zoom, you know, and all this remote working kind of was forced on us en masse, was that these are things that were trending anyway, like people working more remotely and all that. And what the estimation is is that fast forwarded by somewhere between five and 10 years and we kind of were forced to even deeper into the information age and away from industrial age style working like showing up physically somewhere and looking at your boss and I and looking at your co workers and all that. So.
[00:04:02] Speaker A: Well, I think. Let me jump in on that real quick because actually it revealed in a way that the showing up part wasn't per se necessary in a lot of those because people would end up doing in many cases, not all cases obviously, but in many cases, particularly like with white collar work, those types of things, people would show up and then get on a computer, a networked computer, and then do a lot of the things that they do. And in this instance, once we were unable to show up, we would log into networked computers and do the same stuff. And so it actually revealed that. Well, actually, I guess the showing up part is optional from a fundamental standpoint. Now it may be better for various reasons, but it doesn't necessarily. That's not a prerequisite to doing a lot of the work that was being done.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: Yeah. And so I think that's an example of the pandemic forcing us to actually move ahead of schedule. Right.
And to your point, I mean, it's an interesting conversation just here about the pandemic because had this pandemic happened 20 years ago, let's say literally in the year 2000 and not 2020, we would not have been in the position to do this because the technology wasn't there yet. That's Barry, remember you still had the 56k dial up modems with that crazy noise. And then DSL came out. Right. So imagine we just didn't have the processes and the technology to do this stuff.
[00:05:30] Speaker A: It would have been much more disruptive to just what people were doing.
[00:05:35] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think that the pandemic gives us a good example of how it kind of happened overnight. Where we went from everything being a normal one way to this disruption and now this new normal. And to your point as well, that when the pandemic is over, there's a high probability that a lot of the remote work will remain.
So I think that's a good example of right now how we see these changes happening so quickly and moving us further and further into realizing that we're in the information age. I think that's something that's happened too, is technology has shifted so fast, relatively speaking, from a human historical standpoint. Because if we play this thought game for a second, imagine living literally 1000 years ago in the year 1021.
There's a high probability that our grandparents life wasn't that different from ours. And our grandkids life wouldn't be that different from ours. Right?
[00:06:36] Speaker A: No, I mean, like you could go 500 years in either direction and not just grandparents. I mean, you can go, you know, hundreds.
[00:06:42] Speaker B: No, that's what I'm saying. And so.
[00:06:44] Speaker A: And it's the same pretty. Pretty much the same lifestyle.
[00:06:46] Speaker B: Yeah. And by that, just for, you know, the audience, you know, in, in the year 1021, you know, my grandparent would have had to use a horse and probably would have wielded a sword. And you know, you had a blacksmith and they were banging out stuff on an anvil. And you know, there was a farming part of the town, I'm sure, and a warrior part and all that. And my grandkids would have probably had the same technology generally. And think about in our lifetime, you know, my. I was born in 1978. My grandma was born in 1912. Yeah, I mean, my grandma was born before like electric grids, you know, or they were just coming online. And she was born before plumbing was in every house.
And way before television, the airplane had basically just got invented. Automobiles I don't think were really around yet properly. And so that's a whole different ballgame to what I grew up with.
And then you look at my kids who are now fully entrenched in the Internet and all that. So I think with what we're seeing in this change is that the information age has kind of crept up on us. So if we look one of the stats, I Saw from this article was that most jobs created between 2005 and 2015 were temporary jobs.
And I like that they use that timeframe because 2005 was before the Great Financial Recession and 2015 was well after it, when we already been well into a recovery mode. So you can't just say that, oh, it was because we had a recession that a lot of temp jobs were created. And I think that's. That sentence got me thinking again about things like automation that would know that's.
[00:08:29] Speaker A: I think if you compare that with the other stat, with just that. As far as newer technology, technology invented in the last 20 years, only half of 1% are people that work with those technologies that they were created in the last 20 years. So what it reveals is that in the information age, the new things that are being that that need to be done, the new jobs that are being created, there just aren't many of them.
And that will create societal problems. That creates an issue where because we need things for people to do, ideally things that produce value, that they can then earn a living. Because one of the big changes with the industrial age, if you look back, was it was people being divorced from the fruits of their labor. You have division of labor, assembly lines or things like that. It's not that someone takes a project and sees it all the way through and then they produce a sword at the end, a blacksmith, you know, but they're making a piece, somebody's making a handle, somebody's banging out the metal, somebody else is fixing it together. And that's just a crude example, but just to kind of show how the division of labor allows, if one person's doing the same thing over and over again, they'll do it faster. And then you have somebody else doing another piece of it doing the same thing, and then you have machines doing part of it and so forth. So that all still was much more labor intensive than the direction we're going now. And I think what jumped out to me about this was actually that the concept of work was something that was created in the industrial age, like something where the term even was something that this New Yorker piece went into where the term was coined from a physics standpoint, which interestingly enough, I was aware of that the physics use of the term work. But I thought that that came after the use of work that we use just across the board in society. I assumed that was kind of the basic use of work. And then someone decided to apply that to physics. But it was the reverse, actually. And not to go down that path but the concept of work seems to have been defined based on you going in, providing your time and your energy to someone else's benefit, to a capitalist benefit. And in a capitalist society, obviously that would be something that would be. But now with Information Age, your time and your energy, there's just less people that are needed. And the amount of specialty to produce the things that are of value is very high now. It's not low. So I.
When you ask societally whether we're doing work wrong, I don't know that any one person is doing work wrong. But I think as a society, we've yet to change our. How we're looking at this, at the big picture in terms of what people should be doing with their time, what people should be spending their energy on, and how we can create an economy that's based on value being transferred from people to people.
That accounts for the needs right now and what the labor can and is doing right now and so forth. So it seems like less of we're working wrong. There's just been a disconnect as a result of this rapid change from industrial to information age. There's been a disconnect in terms of what people are and can do versus where the transfers of value are happening.
[00:11:54] Speaker B: Yeah, no, and it's also, I think, a function of like the period in human kind of time in our history.
Because it's interesting, as you're talking, I'm thinking about that, the Industrial Age, you got several things. One is Today we have 8 billion plus humans on the planet. That's a lot of people.
And, you know, when I was born, the world population was around 4 billion. Like I said, that was 78.
World population, I think, was 2 and a half to 3 billion in 1960. So let's just assume middle of the 1800s, the world population was under 2 billion, maybe 1.51 to 1.5 billion.
So the Earth was still the same size. So you had a lot of, you know, fewer of these huge mass populations. You didn't have a country like China with a billion people in one country,
[00:12:52] Speaker A: or India with a billion people, or
[00:12:53] Speaker B: India, or even the United States with 300 million, you know, so this idea also is a new thing where we just have a lot of humans that we've never, you know, human humanity has never experienced this before because what do we do with all of us? Because we're all sucking resources off the Earth, right? We all got to eat, we all use fresh water, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Where a thousand years ago, if there was only 600 million people on the whole globe.
Yeah, you had big cities like Rome and Shanghai, I'm sure, was still pretty big, relatively, and all that. But in the end of the day, there was still enough land for humans to go find somewhere else to live if they have to, and not be in anyone's way and still have enough resources. So part of the issue with work is also it's in a real abstract way, we're all competing as well as we're working.
So that's one interesting thing. The other thing is.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: Well, just on that, let me comment on that briefly.
The thing that you bring up and what actually makes that happen is that we've gotten much more efficient at creating or using resources. It's not that people couldn't reproduce a thousand years ago to grow the population to that much. It's just that the existing systems at the time couldn't support it. What's happening now is that there's enough in place that our know how allows us to support relatively 8 billion people. That doesn't mean everybody's living high on the horse, you know, high on the hog, but that does mean that people are having children and children are surviving sufficiently through, you know, childbirth and so forth, that we've gotten the population to be that high. And so that's a result of the fact that we can produce food more efficiently. We can access water and transport water, we can transport food. We can do so many things that we couldn't do when the population wasn't that. And actually, one of the points made in the piece was that the farmer's dilemma, so to speak, the more efficient the farmer gets at producing food, the more he has to keep being efficient to produce food because the population grows to meet that. And so we've kind of seen that as we've gotten more. As we as a society or societies around the world, I've gotten more efficient at our production of food, our medical care and all those things. Our population grows immediately to reach that capacity, and we have to continue to become more efficient or bad things can happen or we end up in a situation now where it's kind of the opposite problem. Like, now we got all these people, what are we going to do now?
[00:15:27] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's where I'm going next with it is this modern way of us working is just very new to the human experience.
Like, it wasn't like.
[00:15:36] Speaker A: Yeah, that's an excellent point.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: In the biblical days, people were literally punching clocks. Right?
[00:15:40] Speaker A: Yeah. No, I mean, that's excellent. Like it took from the industrial age Starting it took 50 to 100 years for labor to kind of respond correct, to be like, oh, okay, so this is how we're being done. Like it was jarring though. Like, and this is why I come back and say, well, you know, it's suboptimal. But I don't know that we could say that we're doing this whole work thing wrong in the sense that when another piece or another nugget in here was just talking about the things that labor, the victories, especially in the initial stages that they were winning, where they're winning laws that say that children under nine can't work under or over a certain amount of time. Or you think like that it's like, oh my goodness, like that stuff is so far from our conception right now. Children under nine, like, oh, so the 10 year olds can work that long, but the nine year olds, so but labor, it took labor a while and then labor did finally get its legs, so to speak, into the 1900s and was able to get a more equitable balance as far as how the spoils were distributed in an industrial age society. But it seemed like just as they got that. Now I've pointed to, and many people, they point to it in this New Yorker piece that the breaking of labor in the 1970s in the United States from that has coincided with equality, income equality decreasing, you know, that, that we're on the reverse trajectory now where people are working more or they're more productive and real wages, which is how much your weight you're making relative to inflation, real wages are not going up. I've pointed typically to that like, oh well, you take away labor and labor unions and labor no longer can get, can bargain fairly with capital. But I also think after reading this, that part of that, what's an accelerant to that has been that we've entered the information age now. And so the same practices from a labor union standpoint that were effective in the industrial age may not be effective or may not work.
You probably have to adapt what labor should be doing as far as organizing and what it should be trying to achieve in order to get a fair shake for the workers as far as how the spoils are distributed like that. There probably needs be people who figure that out as far as how that's going to work in the information age. You probably can't do exactly what was done in the 1950s from a labor standpoint and make it work in the information age. So I mean, I think that's. So I hope it doesn't take 50 to 100 years for labor to figure out how to approach capital in this age. Because the way things are going now, 50 to 100 years, we'll be in a different age.
[00:18:16] Speaker B: Yeah, it's true. And I think that, I mean, you hit it on the head with that. I mean that it's just. How long is it going to take for our society to recognize what you just said? And I think it'll take a while. Because what we're really getting at is here is culture.
Work is part of our culture and the idea, remember? I mean, think about how we've all been kind of indoctrinated and I can even feel myself feeling this way, right? Like if you don't work, you're a loser. I mean, that's how we've all been raised, right? Like, you'll get a job, go do something. And you're right not to that.
[00:18:51] Speaker A: Think about, like what you had mentioned before, as far as how work was even specifically defined. You mentioned this offline to me, how work was specifically defined and it excluded the things women did.
And it's like man. So work is a construct that was created and we all buy into that. Well, most of us buy into that and accept it as just some immutable law when really it's just a way to describe something. But. Oh, go ahead, go ahead.
[00:19:19] Speaker B: It's also a way to describe the something in the modern context of the industrial age, right? In the industrial idea, like we talked about, punching a clock. Like, I can feel myself in my mind already coming to these conclusions. It's so indoctrinated to me, right? A nine to five, you got to work eight hours a day, five days a week, you're going to get overtime if you work more or whatever. Long story short, that is like you're saying it's all a construct that was developed and it's not necessarily, it's not necessary for humanity to survive. So, for example, I'll quote here part of the article, which was interesting to me. Gorillas often spend more than 50 hours a week gathering and eating food. Human hunter gatherers, acting purposefully, typically spend only between 15 and 17 hours a week on feeding themselves, leaving them plenty of time for all of those sorts of things. So I was thinking about it like, you know, if you and I, you know, lived, you know, 5,000 years ago in some hunter gatherer society, you know, that kind of work is necessary to survive.
Basically, after that we're hanging out, right?
[00:20:24] Speaker A: And so meaning, you know, and they cited a, like a hunter Gatherer tribe. They were talking about that the original affluent society, like the guys are just gambling all day.
[00:20:35] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean. You're telling stories, you're hanging out.
And in today's world we look at that as somehow they're losers or they're loafers, you know, like, what do you mean? They're not like spending 60 hours a week trying to figure something out so they can get more money. And I think that's where concepts like money come into play. Where again like I mentioned that if you're looking at the 1800s, I mean there was some great, like you said, I mean it's just why I love history about learning how things were. They talk about a law in 1833 in England that was enacted that said that kids between age 15 and 18 could not work more than a 12 hour workday and like the coal mines and stuff like that. So like you're saying like, okay, so if you're 19, you can be forced to work 20 hours a day or you know, does that mean, you know, kids at 14 years old, do they start work like.
[00:21:27] Speaker A: Well, it's crazy because like I'm sure that was a big victory at the time, you know, the 15, the parents of the 15 year old olds were like, whoo. You know, we can, like that's so. But to us it sounds so regressive, you know, so that's what I'm saying. Like we have to actually also have context. A lot of times there's a tendency to look at everything as it is now and be like, oh, this is so bad, this is so bad, this is so bad. And definitely there are challenges now and things that we need to try to do better, things that we need to figure out solutions for. But it's helpful sometimes to look at where we've come from as well and say, okay, well yeah, we're doing a little better than they were.
[00:22:02] Speaker B: I'll give you another one because it shows the evolution of it. Cause this one's interesting. In 1819, the British Parliament passed a factory act that barred the employment of children under the age of nine in cotton mills. So it's like you said, so did that mean a 10 year old still has to.
[00:22:16] Speaker A: Yeah, that's exactly what that means.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: But I could see that. Cause think about, they're saying the year 1819, so I could see that just like we're dealing now with social media, right? It's a new thing, new technology, it hits the system and then after a while people see all these warts in it. And then, you know, I'm assuming this decade and going forward we're going to start addressing some of that technology stuff.
[00:22:38] Speaker A: No, that's an excellent point. That's excellent.
[00:22:40] Speaker B: So think about it. 1819, I bet you 100 years before that, in 1719, a cotton mill did not exist. And that's the whole point. Right.
I'm sure that because the idea of work prior to this age, this industrial age and before there were factories, that that idea didn't exist.
Like there was.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: You would do things in the field, on the farm and a 10 year old would be a part of it, would be.
[00:23:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And because it's the family, like you're saying, like, okay, if a six, seven year old kid is picking berries with their mother and they're helping dad, you know, with the cows and harvest, that, no one really looks at that as like child abuse. Right. Because they're with their family, they're learning, they're a helping hand.
But you know, I guess by 1819, enough British had experience looking at small kids being worked to death in these. I said, hold on, we gotta do something here.
[00:23:35] Speaker A: So to your point though, they had to actually see it go wrong.
[00:23:39] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:23:39] Speaker A: In order to try to come up with a solution. And so part of that, we seem to be living in an age partially because of what you point out, that things advance so quickly right now, but we seem to be living in an age where we have all this new stuff and we are seeing how the ways that these new things aren't working for us. And then smart people have to figure out ways to what guardrails to put up for this new stuff so that we can make it work better for ourselves. Yeah.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: And I think it's partly society's reaction to it too, because like, I mean, that's why this just stuck out to me. Like social media. Because just like today with social media, right, Some people been ringing this bell for a long time, right. The last decade about social media.
By 2011, 2012, I started reading things about the divisiveness and all that. And even I, because I was on social media at the time, whatever, you know, I can control myself on this thing, whatever.
And then you fast forward to the 2016 election and you see how it was used to manipulate a bit there. And then you fast forward to now and we have this great line in insurrection storming the Capitol. A lot of it, it's been used
[00:24:43] Speaker A: to create alternate realities.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: But where I'm getting at is just like today back then, I'm Sure. There were similar arguments where those that are early to spot some of the downsides of it are shunned because of the nature of the capital side of it. Right. A lot of people make money off the social media and technology stuff today. So it's been a lot of that, like, oh, you know, it's not that bad.
[00:25:07] Speaker A: You're an alarmist.
[00:25:08] Speaker B: Yeah, you're an alarmist. All that. And then it takes really bad things starting to happen for the rest of society to say, well, hold on, maybe we do need to look into this deeper. And I think I could probably see that argument leading up to 1819, where I'm sure there was like a capitalist side. And we know that Great Britain and London has been a financial center for many centuries now. There's probably a lot of, you know, British industrialists making a lot of money saying, oh, you know, it's okay if these kids work here. We've got a good environment for them. They don't really. What would they be doing anyway? You know?
[00:25:40] Speaker A: Well, that's part of it also, like, because there was no compulsory education at that time.
[00:25:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:25:45] Speaker A: And so, you know, they'd be starving,
[00:25:46] Speaker B: you know, at least they're bringing a wage home to their family. Even though, you know, it's.
[00:25:50] Speaker A: We're keeping them busy. We're keeping them busy. You know, like, we're saying, hey, you just want them running around, you know, creating ruckus around the house.
We're going to keep them busy, we're going to teach them responsibility and all this stuff. So I'm sure all that stuff was said and sold and, you know, and it's people to exploit it in order for people of goodwill to say, hey, whoa, this is. This is too much, you know, and to really realize it. And so I think that being in a moment of transition like this, we actually are just. I mean, you can consider us the fortunate ones or the unfortunate ones. I'd say fortunate, though, in a sense, though, that we can be a part of coming up with the solutions.
And so, as we see now, there's so much inertia once things are put in place.
Like, work is something that you have to leave the house in order to do. You have to be working for someone who's going to give you cash. And so everything that's done at the house is none of that's work. And it's like, well, that doesn't really make logical sense from a consistency standpoint, but it just inertia made it a thing because once, once it became that, then it's what it was. So in this instance at this time, we can be a part, we being, you know, humans right now could be a part of that next defining of what this stuff is going to be and actually try to make it a more, either more inclusive or something that just serves people in a better way. So I mean, you can look at it in a negative, you can look at it as positive, you know, like most things in life. So I mean, well, where do you see things going from here? You know, like as we, you know, as we really, you know, hit our stride in the information age, you know, like what do you see happening as far as how we're able to come to grips with work in our society, with employment or with entrepreneurship or whatever, or just purposeful action in order to sustain yourself, your family and so forth?
[00:27:36] Speaker B: I'm not sure, honestly, because things are moving at lightning speed. I mean, like we talked about just last year, right, the pandemic caused a shift that was unpredictable because you couldn't predict the pandemic two years ago. No one would have thought this many people be working successfully from home and remotely. The other thing that's done is created different realities. Like you mentioned, folks like you and I, because we tend to be more in the white collar, service oriented side of the economy. We probably haven't skipped a beat over the last year in the way that we work and how we work.
But had we been serving tables at a restaurant or working in a hotel or a cruise ship, we would have been really struggling last year and to this day, and that's what I was going to say. I think that in the short run the pandemic will obviously dominate some of this conversation in terms of how people work. But I think in the long run we're going to continue because what I'm seeing now is technology starting to encroach in areas that on the surface weren't anticipated. I'm sure if you thought real hard about it, technology can replace everything over time. But what I'm saying is, for example, I think I mentioned this in another discussion prior to the 2008 crash. There are around 75,000 bond traders in Wall Street.
As of, I think the stat was as of 2019, that number was under 20,000.
People don't think of bond traders a lot when they think of jobs lost to technology.
But those are jobs being lost to technology and those are obviously well paying jobs. You know, that's you've got, you know, 50,000 people that were earning 350,000 a year. Plus that aren't earning that anymore. So then we've got, you know, I've got a friend that owns a diesel company that repairs fuel injectors for diesel engine, a very specific niche. And I was talking to them recently and they were telling me how this new technology has come out, I guess for the diesel something and like their business is down by like 20 or 30%. And I think it has to do with the fact that it's a more efficient way to run the diesel truck. So that's what I mean, technology is going to start encroaching on all of our professions in our lives. And I think, yeah, it's. Society has to.
I think we're going to have to redefine what work means and what our role in society is as individuals. Because this idea of universal income and all that, I mean, that's an idea, but based on our, like we were just saying, right, well, it's limited.
[00:30:15] Speaker A: It's limited because while it does serve a purpose of making sure that people have money in their pockets, it doesn't serve the purpose of giving people one, something to do per se and to a way to take ownership, as you had mentioned before, of something like this is.
[00:30:32] Speaker B: Well, that's where I'm getting at. Is it like, that's why I was saying, even I hear myself say the universal income is like, you know, like you're saying, I'm thinking in my head, oh yeah, we're gonna have a bunch of people laying around getting paid. And I think that's the problem, right, is we're still in this industrial age culture of work. And I think it would take really grandiose kind of mindset of we'd have to actually rethink what this whole thing of work. And like you're saying, what do we.
What are we as millions of people in a society, what is our role to contribute to that society?
[00:31:04] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:31:05] Speaker B: Under the industrial age, our role was work. I mean, literally. Right.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: Well, but even still, that was a limited definition of work though, because again, that definition of work didn't.
Arguably the most important job would be to rear the kids and make sure that the next generation survives. And that wasn't even included in that definition of work. So I would, I mean, I, And I think you, you kind of anticipated where I was gonna go. It needs, There needs to be a new Deal, so to speak.
And not saying you need to do FDR's programs or a square deal where you got to do Teddy Roosevelt's programs, but you need some type of a Fair deal.
That is a new arrangement between society and the members of society as far as how we are going to. How the spoils of what's being created by society are going to be distributed and who's gonna have access to that. I don't have a problem with people laying around getting a check.
If you hit the lottery and are born into, you know, a wealthy family, you can lay around and get a check and nobody bats an eye because of who your dad was. And that has nothing to do with, you know, your.
Your propriety or your character or anything like that. So I don't have an issue with that. I think if you're going to do something like that, it would have to be in conjunction with. There still are things that need people to do them. And so while so much money might be able to be made on Facebook with a few programmers, if you go to a restaurant, you still need people there to serve you, you know, like. Or you still need people to cook the food and stuff like that. And if we want to, if we value those things, maybe we can't make or we shouldn't make the restaurant owner pay a ton of money for those types of things. Particularly in industry where the margins already are small, and industries where the margins are huge, then maybe you can approach it with maybe a tax type of mindset saying, okay, well, these margins are huge. You're going to have to share some of these spoils with your, you know, with the workers. But in areas where the margins are small, you know, or areas of public concern where, you know, a city, a municipality, or a state might be doing the work, we do need to find a way, I think, to deliver more for people who do these things that we consider to be vital but just that aren't from a pure capitalist standpoint, that don't haven't been deemed to bring a significant return on investment. And so if we can allow the work that needs to be done, but people still to somehow, whether that be some type of supplementary income that is based on what you work, you do something that we deem important, whether it be in a teacher or whether it be a server at a restaurant or whatever, a driver, and your income is supplemented somehow. But we need to figure out some way that society and its adherents can participate and also live. Because one of the issues that we don't want or that we want to try to avoid as well, is if you're just going to give people a check, which again, fundamentally I don't have a problem with, but I think it raises Unintended consequences. If you do that and you disincentivize people from doing things on their own, then you create a smaller tax base, which you don't want to do. So we want to continue to still have a large tax base. We want to encourage people to do things, to take risks. I think if you give everybody a check or something, you might probably encourage people to take more risks.
You have more entrepreneurs out there because it's like, well, I'll start this business and it doesn't work, then I won't starve, my family won't go on the street. So there are benefits to that. But I think we also, in the same way with a lot of different things, we want to try to not look at it in such a narrow way that we miss some pretty obvious unintended consequences. So bottom line, as you said, I think there needs to be some type of a new agreement as far as what your role is, what you need to contribute to society and then what you will get out of society as far as your contribution and where that goes. And in the same way that people talk about with health care, with the health care is that in many countries government has a role in making sure those are provided. Whether it be the government being the insurer or whatever. That's just changing the arrangement here. It's something that the employer primarily is providing. And as we've left the industrial age, that's shown to not be really a workable model anymore. And so we should do something now, whether that is we go to a single payer system or we do something else.
We have to recognize that the way we've done it is not necessarily workable anymore. And we have to look forward and say, okay, well what can we do now to account for the problems that we're dealing with? And then they can put us in a better place.
[00:35:45] Speaker B: Yeah, no. Well, for the record, I'm going to say I'm not down with handing people checks.
And that's what you are.
[00:35:52] Speaker A: If their parent put a lot of money into trust, you're fine handing them a check.
[00:35:57] Speaker B: No, I'm not. That's my point that the data shows that anybody given money, whether they're rich or poor, ends up probably not having a fulfilled life. Some of the highest rates of.
[00:36:11] Speaker A: That's true. You don't value it as much as just give and see.
[00:36:14] Speaker B: And some of the highest rates of drug abuse are the wealthy trust fund type babies, people that don't have to deal with adversity as they're growing and climbing and have a goal for something. And I think, you know, and you know, we live here in South Florida and we have our local Native American tribe, which is well known, and they've done a great job in making wealth for themselves through gambling and other things that, you know, they do in the state. And unfortunately, you know, I know that one of the facts is that each member of the tribe gets $10,000 a month for themselves and for each child that they have. So, you know, if you've got a husband and wife, they're earning 20,000amonth. And then if they have three kids, they've got another 30 coming in. And unfortunately on that reservation and the tribe itself has a high rates of alcoholism, drug abuse and other things. So that's why I'm saying it's sad.
[00:37:12] Speaker A: It doesn't solve all the problems. Basically, that's my point.
[00:37:15] Speaker B: Throwing money at people, this doesn't solve problems.
And that's my point. That's why this is gonna be a very, very difficult and long road to get to whatever this post industrial age thing looks like for work. Because I just.
Because as we're talking, I'm thinking about all the industries that are privately owned, that have customers. And to your point, Cause I could see it happening, like, maybe not you don't give people money, but you either subsidize or start making free certain services that we pay for anyway today. Like, let's just say hypothetically, I don't know, I could think of electric bills, cell phone service, Internet service. Like, let's just say they just. The government said, okay, we're going to just subsidize and cover that cost.
But then the reality is, all right, well, there's businesses that are right now employing people like whoever my cell carrier is that I'm paying, whoever this or that company is. How do you transition out of that? Right. And that's. I don't have an answer.
[00:38:19] Speaker A: That's what I'm saying, like the unintended consequences are something that, like, you can't just be, hey, we'll just do blank. Like you do need to give some thought. And your point is, well taken. Unintended consequences are a real thing that for something like this. And yeah, to me, the best thing I can come up with is some type of supplementary thing like things that the work or the things that we consider to be very important, but from a capitalist standpoint don't get the same type of return on investment where people make a lot of money on it. Then society probably needs to step in and make it so that people are properly incentivized, possibly financially through doing stuff like that. And that's the best I can come up with as far as. Because again, those type of things aren't going anywhere. You're going to need human beings to work in a hotel. You're going to need. And people are going to want to go to hotels. They're like. People are going to want to go to restaurants. People want to do all these things. And so there is no answer that's out there right now. But there is going to have to be some type of different arrangement. Particularly one of the consequences of these industries where you don't need much labor yet you can generate massive profits. Are these windfalls that we're seeing and that are being created on the backs of society. Basically the infrastructure that society has created. Google didn't invest a trillion dollars to come up with the Internet, but they are building on top of that in order to make a lot of money. And that's fine. But somehow some way that money needs to also make it back to where that investment came from so that further future investments can be made as well. And a lot of times we don't look at it that way.
[00:39:57] Speaker B: That's the concept of taxes. But, you know, we don't need to get into loopholes.
[00:40:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, we don't have to get like that's.
[00:40:02] Speaker B: But one of the things I want.
[00:40:03] Speaker A: The point I wanted to leave with, though, just is that I got one. I think that, I mean, ultimately what you said initially when we talked about, you know, what, where things go from here is right. And what, you know, we kind of both jumped on was just that we're going to need to figure out what the next arrangement or bargain is, you know, between society and the members of society as far as what we're going to prioritize, what's going to be valuable, what's going to be paid. And then once we decide what's going to be paid and what's going to be valuable and so forth, we decide where that money comes from. And you know, those are the things like we can't let. Just because we don't have the answer now doesn't mean we shouldn't ask the question. We have to ask the question and then we'll figure out an answer either by seeing something go wrong. As you've pointed out, there's a lot of times that's how we humans figure out things is we see something go wrong and it's like, okay, well, we can't do it. Like that we got to try something else. Or someone will come along with some insight. And that someone might be Tunde Ogunlana.
[00:40:58] Speaker B: Not me, not you, not this one.
I don't want to fight that fight.
[00:41:05] Speaker A: No. So, and another. The other topic we wanted to discuss today.
We saw in the National Geographic. That the question was asked. And they were looking at some emerging research on rituals. And, you know, rituals can be anything. They talked about it in the context of New Year's Day.
And what people in a society or a social group will do. And you don't necessarily know why you do it. But it's just part of a routine. But it has meaning to you. So it's not just any routine. And so the question that was really what they were trying to really discover. Is where these things come from. And we thought it was a good question. Where do the rituals that we have come from? Are they something that are.
Do they have utility?
Did we lose the utility?
And what the article came to was just that a lot of the rituals come from ways to avoid risk. Or to minimize risk. Or to somehow make life more pleasant or less risky. So, Tunde, what did you think of this theory. As far as rituals. And where they're coming from and so forth. And where we are now with them?
[00:42:11] Speaker B: It's just fascinating. I think made a lot of sense, the way the article read. And just this idea that, you know, rituals are part of the human experience big time.
[00:42:21] Speaker A: And let me say. Actually, I'm sorry, but, you know, rituals. They define them as repetitive, symbolic behaviors. That we experience as purposeful. Though we generally can't explain how they're supposed to work. And I quoted that from the article. But that's how they defined ritual in that sense. But go ahead.
[00:42:37] Speaker B: What I found interesting about this is going back to the kind of anthropological side of it.
Where these things all developed for our survival.
It's interesting that the root of rituals may have been to overcome diseases and danger. That makes a lot of sense, too.
[00:42:56] Speaker A: I know one of the things. For me, that was looking on the long arc right now. In our society. We have answers for things like what we would consider definitive answers for things that, through most of the human experience. We just didn't have answers to.
And so, like germ theory, you know, things like that. And so I look at these development of rituals. And their proliferation. And how it's something that's in every single human society. Every. You know, it's. It's something that is certainly part of our humanity. Is the development of these things. The Spread of these things and how they are repetitive and they pass along through generations and so forth. And I look at, I'm always looking at these things as far as like providing answers to questions that didn't give answers or that we weren't able to find answers for previously.
And I think rituals provide that in many ways as far as, particularly when you look at rituals that are in place around health type things and they provide you with, even if it is misplaced certainty, they provide you by going through this process of steps before childbirth or before something else, you know, 500 years ago, even if it may have been misplaced, as far as the faith that someone put in that it did give you a certain, a human, a certain level of certainty, a certain level of calm as far as to be able to approach these challenges or these things that they were doing.
And so, and they're passed down as far as, hey, if you want to do this right, then you have to do this step, this step, this step, this is how you have to clean your body or things like that. And so, and I find it no coincidence that religion plays into this as well because again, it seems to tap into our humanity. And the proof positive of that being is that even with all of the technology and the know how and understanding that we have now, you still see the same adherence to ritual, even though we might know, you know, that it does. Like you use the example, if you use it from sports, you know, where people might have a pregame ritual routine like the way they put their socks on, they got to put their one sock on before the other or something like that. And deep down inside, a rational person would not necessarily think that that is actually going to make some magical difference, but it may put them in a place of calm and may put them in, it may center them and so forth. And so rituals, and this is where I was going with this, rituals actually may be a way of communicating with our inner self more than even with the external world.
And so it allows us to find a place within ourselves a comfort as far as whatever activity we're about to engage in that even if it's misplaced, it still will. I mean, for example, the placebo effect, it'll still make us more able to accomplish or attack whatever it is that we're trying to do because we believe at that point. And so that's really what I took away from it. In addition to, there is overlap for sure with the type of rituals that have evolved around certain types of things like particularly childbirth, things like that, that were designed as far as cleanliness and things like that, well before germ theory was created and things knowing how to keep bacteria out and so forth. So there is a utility as well that has developed, but not always. And then like I said, even now, when the utility could be rationally seen as ridiculous, people will still embrace it. And so I think it really has to be about more so communicating inward than outward.
[00:46:25] Speaker B: Yeah. And you know, it's interesting, this whole conversation, because that was one of the things I was thinking too, was you look at something like our religious rituals, and I know that that can be a broad brush. Right. Like you said that back in the day, you know, things like a rain dance was actually a legitimate thing because we didn't understand how as humans, we didn't understand how rain fell from the sky. But as that knowledge entered our sphere, then, you know, people aren't doing rain dances in 20, 21st century, really, you know, in the modern world, let's just put it that way. And so.
But one of the things that I always thought about.
[00:47:02] Speaker A: But by the way, though, people would. May still pray for rain, you know, so it's not. It's not completely left, but they may not get out there and do a dance, you know, that's supposed to, you know. But go ahead. I'm sorry.
[00:47:12] Speaker B: I think part of it even, like I said, like, I remember when I played basketball in college, there were guys that had rituals about their warmups, ritual about how they put their socks on, rituals about how many jump shots they took in practice before the game. And if they went off of those rituals, they would feel like they're going to have a bad game. Yeah.
[00:47:34] Speaker A: It would put them mentally in a bad place.
[00:47:36] Speaker B: Yeah. It's like a superstition. So that's why it's interesting to me that this whole idea of the evolution of how we evolve with these rituals probably speaks a lot to also human irrationality, you know, because, you know, if you really think about it on its surface, how you warm up for a basketball game, other than stretching and making sure your muscles are warm, probably has. Is irrelevant.
[00:47:59] Speaker A: How you put your socks.
[00:48:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:01] Speaker A: As far as that's what I'm saying. Like, from a rational standpoint, that would come off as ridiculous. I mean, but you're 100% right. I mean, I quote from the article because we are so socially oriented, I think we tend to interpret any bad luck as something or someone, a spirit, a demon, a God that did it to us, you know, like, so that we assign meaning to things and so the rituals, a lot of times are the reverse of that, so to speak, or the undoing of that and saying, okay, well, let me do my ritual so that I can have comfort that this bad thing is less likely to happen to me. Because it also works with our normal biases. If you put your socks on a certain way and you have a bad game, then you're not going to blame putting your socks on the wrong way or, excuse me, the right way. But if you don't put your socks on the right way and you have a bad game, you will blame it on the fact that you didn't put your socks on the right way. So it appears to just be something that is very, very, very ingrained in our humanity. How we see the world, how we see what happens to us and what happens around us. Ritual seems to have evolved with that and as like a part of that that you can't pull back out. Like it's just a part of us. And they rituals come up that have been around for 3,000 years and rituals come up that have been around that are unique to a person.
And you know, and that's something it's. And so to think of it on that grand scale. Scale. That's why I thought that the article was at least worth talking about. You know, as far as this, this information and the research I should say that they've pulled as far as studying where these things come from and the actual utility of some, like legitimate utility of some, particularly the ones that are. That are related to health, some have some real utility and others where it's just totally whimsical and just kind of made up, you know.
[00:49:49] Speaker B: I think that speaks also to other things we've talked about in other shows, which has nothing to do with the ritual. But it's funny as you're saying that we ascribe all this stuff.
If it happens to me, there's something. And it just. Are narcissists, right? Like, all this stuff because it. Because it happens or doesn't happen somehow it was about me, you know, like, yeah, if it didn't rain or it rained is because of me. Like, I didn't do this ritual or I did or if I had a bad, you know, like. Well, maybe it's not. It just didn't rain because it didn't rain.
[00:50:19] Speaker A: Hey, well, you know, we're all the star of our own show.
[00:50:23] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:50:25] Speaker A: So, you know, that. That's good though. So now I. We appreciate everybody for joining us on this one, you know. So until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:50:32] Speaker B: I'm Tunde in. Lana. All right.
[00:50:33] Speaker A: Subscribe, rate, review, tell us what you think, and then we'll talk to you next.
