Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 5/19/23: Buttigieg's "Cathedral Mind" in WIRED, Worker Happiness, AI Anti Trust w/ Matt Stoller, IRS Tests Free Filing, Michigan's Toxic Paper Mill, Living Longer But Sicker

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

This week we discuss Pete Buttigieg's doting profile in WIRED that refers to him as a "cathedral mind" among other things, Matt Stoller on AI anti-trust legislation, and James Li on Americans living longer but sicker lives.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Secretary Pete Buttigieg, if anybody was going to do a profile of this man, the very first question, Crystal, should be, why are you so bad at your job?

And instead, Wired decided to do the opposite. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. You're not even going to believe this headline. Quote, Pete Buttigieg loves God, beer, and his electric Mustang. Sure, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation has thoughts on building bridges, but infrastructure occupies just a sliver of his voluminous mind. One particular segment of this is so stunning. It says, quote, As Secretary Buttigieg and I talked in his under-furnished corner office one afternoon,

I slowly became aware his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers. Other mental faculties, no kidding, are a portion to the Iliad, Puritan historiography, NewsGuard Spring, though not in the original Norwegian. Fortunately, he was able to devote yet another apse in his cathedral mind to making his ideas about three mighty themes, neoliberalism, masculinity, and Christianity intelligible to me.

First of all, when you start writing that way, smack yourself in the face. Just pour a quart of water on and smack yourself a couple of times. This is like deep insecurity. Like, let me show people how smart I am. How smart I am. Let me throw on every big word I can think of. But let me also just think a little bit about this from an even deeper level.

Why is your whole mind not occupied on infrastructure? That's why every time I fly, I get delayed. And why moms with their kids got stranded on the Southwest debacle. Or we could talk about being involved in breaking the railroad strike. I mean, like his tenure as secretary of transportation has been legitimately catastrophic. It turned out that you actually needed someone who was good at doing this job, who wasn't just good at like spinning, confused reporters, doing cable news hits and hanging out with donors in a wine cave. You actually needed someone for this job. And he has dramatically failed.

It's honestly amazing to me that you could find anyone who would write such an embarrassing hagiographic puff piece of this man at any time, let alone now, given his manifest record of repeated failures in the job that we have entrusted him with. And I just want people to understand, you didn't cherry pick quotes in this. No, no, no. That's the second paragraph. It's particularly gross. Let me just read you how this begins, this piece begins. It was tweeted out.

Here's the tweet that went out with it. With a remarkable blend of intellect and empathy, Pete Buttigieg brings a fresh perspective to the forefront of public discourse. That's what Wired tweeted out as their headline, to which a bunch of people replied like, is this real or is this parody? The picture they put with it speaks volumes as well. The opening paragraph, here's how it goes. The curious mind of Pete Buttigieg holds much of its functionality in reserve, even as he discusses railroads and airlines, down to the pointless data that is his current stock and trade, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation comes off like a Mensa black card holder

who might have a secret go-have-it or a three-second Rubik's Cube solution or a knack for supplying off the top of his head the day of the week for a random date in 1404 along with a non-condescending history of the Julian and Gregorian calendars. What? I can't. This fawning, celebrity-style, hagiographic journal, I guess you'd call it journal. It is so disgraceful and confusing to me. I really just don't even know where these people come from. I don't even know. First of all, nobody can solve a Rubik's Cube in three seconds. You're talking to a former Cuber over here.

This is part of your cathedral mind saga. That's part of my, listen, I mean, the funny thing is about Rubik's Cubing is I won't get too into it. My best time was 45 seconds. That's all I'll say. So I doubt that Pete Buttigieg can solve it faster than that. That's an okay time, by the way. There are real people out there who can do it much faster. My favorite thing by reading and looking at all of this is the level to which she was

seduced, this woman, Virginia Heffernan, because she is also getting deeply into the weeds. She goes, what is neoliberalism? What happened to it? Always getting mugged by reality. She asked questions about the tendency of markets and about paleoliberalism versus, listen, okay, these are all great discussions, maybe for a weekend segment on this show with an intellectual or if I have an opportunity to ever interview Pete Buttigieg, all of my questions will be on the FAA, on the secretary of Transportation, on his genuine job responsibility.

I don't care what he thinks about paleoliberalism. I care about are Americans going to be able to fly on time or at least closer to on time? Are you ever going to break a railroad strike ever again? His views on Christianity, gay marriage, paleoliberalism, industrial policy, the Iliad, Norwegian, and all that are immaterial to his actual job responsibility. And that's actually the biggest problem with this entire thing is it's narcissistic on behalf of Buttigieg and narcissistic on behalf of the interviewer. I also think some of the ideology that is espoused in this piece is just really, to me, disturbing and flat out wrong, too. They say, she writes, not everyone, it seems, even wants a rising standard of living if it means they have to accept the greater enfranchisement of undesirables, including, of course, women,

poor people, black people, and the usual demons in the sights of the world's Ted Cruz's and Tucker Carlson's. So to really unpack that, I think is actually quite revealing to the core of the politics of someone like Pete Buttigieg, who apparently believes that some large portion of the country is so craven that they don't even want a better life for themselves if it means that black people are also going to do well or women are also going to do well, et cetera. And I mean, this is antithetical to what I view, my view of human nature, my view of the country, my view of politics. So there's a lot, there is a lot going on here, but fundamentally this is a powerful person who is right now in a position where he could be fining airlines and holding them to account, could be putting

forward new rules to make sure that a disaster like what happened in east palestine that you know he could barely attend to or notice that that never happens again could be trying to provide resources for people who were poisoned probably by what happened there um and instead like what i don't know what even you're doing with this article but it is i also was just thinking about faux intellectualism i know a lot a lot of people like this who are quote-unquote well-educated, but then I'm also looking at this and he's like, she's bragging about him reading the Iliad. You're really bragging about reading a high school text? I would be more impressed if he was reading like a history of trains or something from 1800 to maybe learn the intricacies of his job. But instead, it's all like said in

such a, it's like the Big Bang Theory. The Big Bang Theory. It's very masturbatory. Yeah. It's ultimately what it is. It's like intellectual masturbation. Right. Like, look how smart I am that I know these things that Pete Buttigieg is so smart about.

Correct. It's like the idea that physicists sit around like in the Big Bang. It's like a dumb person's view of what smart people would talk about. Like nobody who actually has any intelligence would think or act this way and portray themselves like this publicly. And also that the interview fell for it shows that she herself is also, as you pointed out, deeply insecure cathedral mind, Iliad, Norwegian,

all this other Gregorian calendar. It's like, look, people who are actually very, very intelligent do not need to try and force it in your face like this. So overall, disgraceful, bywired. One of the most embarrassing things I've ever seen. There's a real strain of this. Remember whenever they were like, he speaks nine languages and all this during the campaign. It turns out he can say hello.

I can say hello in 12 languages. That's not even a marker of intelligence at all. It's just one of those where, and also it's not qualification for president. It's just. It certainly hasn't proved to be a reasonable qualification for secretary of transportation, which is your job, which you have failed at. And nothing should make you lose sight of that. Some really interesting new news about how Americans and workers are feeling about their workplace.

It's going to put this up there on the screen. Workers are happier than they have been in decades, mostly because of labor shortages and shifting expectations leading to improvements for millions. So the data here is absolutely fascinating. Of the survey of 1,600 workers was conducted in November, what they found is that unemployment remains low and the decline in job openings suggests that workers might have fewer options and might be feeling more anxious. But what they instead found, Crystal, is that we are at the highest level of worker job satisfaction in modern history, up to 62.3%. From that data shows that that is up from 60% in 2021 and 56% in 2020. What they found is

that the people who are the happiest are those who voluntarily switch jobs during the pandemic and individuals working in hybrid roles with a mix of in-person and remote work. Male satisfaction is higher in the workplace currently with every component, especially in areas such as, quote, leave policies, bonus plans, promotions, communications, and organizational structures. And really what they show here is that the main thing that gives people work satisfaction is a sick day policy, a bonus plan, mental health benefits policies, communication channels, and promotion policies. Those are like the six top things of worker satisfaction policy. But really what it underscored to me is when you give people options, optionality like hybrid work or volunteers

switching jobs for higher wage, people are happy. When people feel like, yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things, right? You look at, okay, what's changed to make this landscape feel better for America's workers. First of all, the lowest paid jobs are actually the ones that have seen the largest wage gains. So that's significant for low wage workers. People who are sort of in the middle of their career, they're the ones who are most likely to benefit from these hybrid work schedules. And to your point, a key component of happiness, not just in the workplace, but in general, is people feeling like they have control and say over their own lives. So even the fact of being able to pick like how many days I'm going to be

in the office, how many days I'm going to be at home, having that level of flexibility and optionality and control over your own life, which is something that you should be able to take for granted, but obviously many people can't, that contributes to a sense of happiness. That's one of the biggest shifts that they say, the biggest year-over-year increase in satisfaction came from work-life balance and workload, which gets to some of what we talked about with the pandemic, sort of resetting people's values and their priorities. And then with the hybrid work options, they're able to implement some of those revised priorities into their work-life balance and into making things work. And so I think those are important pieces of this. I also think another part is during the coronavirus crisis, there were

a lot of people who were forced to switch jobs. There were a lot of people who decided to switch jobs. And of course, it's always, you know, nobody wants you to have to switch jobs. There were a lot of people who decided to switch jobs. And of course, it's always, you know, nobody wants you to have to switch jobs. No one wants you to be out of a job. But when you do switch jobs, number one, that's when you see your largest salary increases, when you switch jobs. And number two, that appears to have resulted in people more affirmatively choosing the work that they're doing. So they're shifting maybe out of like frontline service worker into warehousing roles that they're finding more fulfilling or have larger, higher wages or have a more predictable schedule. So the fact that so many people are sort of like forced into a new situation seems to have on the end of it had a

silver lining of improving people's quality of life. That's actually the part I found most interesting is that a huge portion of the people who got laid off in leisure and hospitality left to go work in logistics or warehouse chains like in Costco, where, quote, the hours and the pay are better. You've got stable schedules, you can plan for childcare, transportation, not dealing with irate customers, and it's a more pleasant working environment, which leads to two things. A, Costco has to pay more to lure some of these people over. And B, the people who do want to work in service industry are getting paid a ton more because the available pool of workers is not there. It's a lot easier to deal with an irate customer when you're getting paid, let's say,

$20, $30 an hour with tips and $2 an hour with effectively a real wage rate of like $15 per hour. So you're basically getting a double raise in that. And then you've also got a lot of white-collar workers who love hybrid work. It also does kind of underscore to me where the job satisfaction amongst full remote workers doesn't appear to be that high. A lot of full remote workers appear isolated. They don't particularly like it. They don't have that connection.

Hybrid, to me, seems to be like the best of both worlds. You've got a little bit in person. You still have some company culture and all of that, like maybe say three days a week, but you've got enough where moms and dads can figure out who's going to pick somebody up or drop somebody off and work their, you know, dentist appointment into the lunch break, et cetera, and still get the job done. I think that's probably the best of both worlds. I think it also depends a lot on where you are in your career, you know, because I think if you're early in your career and you're just getting into that office culture, maybe you prefer more in person. If you're, you know, mid-career, you may prefer more of that hybrid or even remote work schedule. I think it just

really depends person to person, which is why having the choice and the flexibility is what really, you know, people are sort of looking for and responding to here. So I think we have to put the other like negative side of this out there, which is that the fact that there's a tight labor market, which makes it a lot less risky if people do want to change career paths. That is something that the Fed is actively looking to destroy. So this improvement in quality of life and worker happiness may be short lived if they continue down the path that they have been on. Yeah, agreed. Hi, I'm Matt Stoller, author of Monopoly-focused sub-stack newsletter, Big, and an antitrust policy analyst.

I have a good segment for you today on this big breakdown. It's about AI and the policy choices we're making right now to structure how this remarkable technology is deployed. So let's dive in. Okay, so there's a ton of chatter these days about artificial intelligence on Wall Street, within government, all over Silicon Valley, in the media, in Congress. Constant hearings, constant chatter. As just one example, let's take a listen to 60 Minutes last month. We may look on our time as the moment civilization was transformed, as it was by fire, agriculture, and electricity. In 2023, we learned that a machine taught itself how to speak to humans like a peer, which is to say with creativity, truth, error, and lies. The technology, known as a chatbot,

is only one of the recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, machines that can teach themselves superhuman skills. I mean, I'm rolling my eyes a little bit, but I mean, the technology is clearly important. It's not like fire or agriculture, but it's a big deal. Okay, so what is it? What is this machine learning stuff? Why is everyone so excited? All right, AI, it's a bad name, but what it means is it's a broad method of taking large data sources and running them through an algorithm to train a powerful pattern recognition software

program. Unlike things like crypto or self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, this big machine learning stuff, it's real. It's a real technology. It actually does stuff. AI algorithms underpin computer-assisted language production, image generation, engineering, and programming, a bunch of scientific endeavors. And some of the stuff that people have been able to do is pretty extraordinary. Take protein folding. Now, protein folding is one of those extremely difficult but critical problems in biology. It's useful for drug discovery, all sorts of scientific advances. And an AI program solved it. It's been like a 50-year problem that no one could solve,

and they solved it in 2018 with one of these tools. Okay, so that's really good. But the thing about scientific advances is that how we deploy them, in fact, the very technology that we create is a function of law as much as engineering. So as an example, in the 1960s, IBM sold a certain kind of computer, a mainframe, and it dominated the industry. These computers included all software that IBM told customers they might need. It was all IBM software and you got it for free when you bought the computer. Because of an antitrust suit, IBM unbundled its software to be sold separately, thus allowing rivals to actually make and sell software for IBM machines. The software industry

was born. Okay, so we didn't have a software industry before that. That case created the software industry. And had that antitrust suit not happened, we may not actually have had one. We might have just thought of computers as this thing that you buy in a bundle. In other words, there's no one path for technology. Technology developed under different legal regimes, even if the know-how, the scientific knowledge is similar, actually is fundamentally different. And the thing is, is the monopolists know this? Okay, so now with all that in mind, with that context, let's talk about the politics of AI. Here's former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who is a monopolist par excellence, explaining that

the industry should set its own rules. Let's take a listen. It shouldn't be a regulatory framework. It maybe shouldn't even be a sort of a democratic vote. It should be the expertise within the industry helping sort that out. The industry will first do that because there's no way a non-industry person can understand what is possible. It's just too new, too hard. There's not the expertise. There's no one in the government who can get it right. But the industry can roughly get it right, and then the government can put a regulatory structure around it. Schmidt is one of the more important political figures in the last 25 years. He's highly influential under Obama, Trump, and Biden. Also the architect of Google's monopoly,

one of these people that spans business and politics in a really savvy way. And Schmitt's commentary matters because it embeds two myths that characterize how we talk about power in America. The first is that markets exist as part of the state of nature until this external force called government comes in and regulates them. Now, that's not the way things happen. The truth is it's not whether to regulate markets, but how. Markets are not natural things. They are political institutions structured by human beings. There's all sorts of different types of markets. So, for example, social media, it's a regulated industry. It's not unregulated. It's just regulated to let Mark Zuckerberg decide what happens. And underpinning Zuckerberg's power is a whole host of public rules, from the corporate charter

itself to property rights, which are mandated by government, to restrictions or abilities to use data in different ways. Now, Eric Schmidt's myth, and it's a broadly held myth, is done for a specific reason. They want to set up a question of whether we should regulate as opposed to discussing how to do so. And the reason to set the question up this way is to suggest that anybody that wants some sort of public input into how we innovate into the technologies that we develop will bear a heavy burden, because then you're asking for the government to come in and do something to this natural myth, the natural state of the market, the state of nature.

Okay, so that's the first big myth. The second myth is related and it is that technology is merely a result of scientific or engineering prowess. It's just an external force that happens. And then again, government comes in to regulate technology. Again, this is to subtly set up tech barons as the legitimate arbiters of power. Now, remember, they all operate through companies that are chartered by public mandates. All their property is structured by public rules, but they want to pretend otherwise. They develop technology and then the idiot interlopers in the government try to make

everybody wear a seatbelt. Those nerds, right? But of course, this is all ridiculous. How we develop technology, as I showed with the IBM example, is a function of science and law. And you can see this all over the place from the breakup of Standard Oil to the breakup of AT&T in the 1980s, both of which unleashed in 19 teens, the 1980s, fantastic innovation in energy, in telecommunications. You see this all over when how we structure markets really has this kind of catalytic impact, or it withholds innovation, or it structures innovation down certain paths. Okay, so why is Eric Schmidt putting forward these myths? Well, they came together in a very important deceptive question designed to structure the future of AI. And that is, will AI disrupt Google's search monopoly? This is an important question, right? And it's framed in a way that embeds these two myths into the question itself.

So here's that same 60 Minutes program putting forward that sort of premise. Worldwide, Google runs 90% of Internet searches and 70% of smartphones. We're really excited about... But its dominance was attacked this past February when Microsoft linked its search engine to a chatbot. Okay, so Google's PR department presumably worked very hard to have 60 Minutes set up the question that way. Why? Well, because the government is threatening Google's monopoly. And I'm going to get to this in a second. But in doing so, it's threatening the ability of any AI firm to monopolize the future. So in 2020,

the Trump antitrust division accused Google of monopolization. And that antitrust case is being heard by a judge over the course of this year. Let's take a listen to a then Department of Justice official in 2020 explaining the case. This morning, the Department of Justice in 11 states filed an antitrust civil lawsuit against Google for unlawfully maintaining a monopoly in general search services and search advertising in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Okay, so specifically, the argument is that Google excluded competitors from the search market by making sure that Google is the default search engine anywhere you go. So, for example, the company pays $15 to $20 billion a year to Apple to force iPhones to automatically bring up Google Search as the default instead of, say, something like Microsoft Bing.

Google bought Android, which is the operating system for the majority of mobile phones globally. It puts its search engine in front of users as the default, and then it collects search data from those users. It uses that data to tweak its own products, but also prevents its rivals from getting that data to improve theirs. In essence, one way to think of it is that Google bought up all the shelf space and says, you can't put rivals on the shelf space. It's just Google search. In all, Google pays $45 billion a year for contracts, just domestically, for contracts to block out rivals. Signing deals with, and here I am quoting directly from the DOJ filing, Apple, LG, Motorola, Samsung, major US wireless carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile,

and Verizon, browser developers such as Mozilla, Opera, UC Web to secure default status for its general search engine, and in many cases to specifically prohibit Google's counterparties from dealing with Google's competitors. Okay, so you can see the resulting decade-long search monopoly in this timeline of the search market. Now, if you look at it, the most dangerous time for Google was between 2010 to 2012 for two reasons. First, the government came close to getting an antitrust suit.

The government investigated, but it actually didn't bring a complaint, unfortunately. Second, at the time, in 2007 or so, Google had a desktop search monopoly. But the iPhone, the smartphone, starting in 2007 but really accelerating into 2009, 10, 11, 12, it opened up a new market and opportunities for new kinds of search engines that used location data and other things you can have on a phone. And these were potential rivals to Google. Consumer habits in desktop had solidified, but they hadn't in mobile search. At the time, though, and this is one of

these inflection points, kind of like the inverse of what happened in the 60s with the IBM antitrust suit, policymakers decided to allow Google to leverage its power in desktop search to grab mobile search. So Google bought Android, and that didn't go challenged. There are laws you could challenge mergers, but the government didn't bring a challenge. And then it had all these contracts with distributors that were explicitly excluding rivals, and the government didn't challenge those either. So that technological inflection point is similar to where we are now with AI. As was the case then, there are lots of potential paths for what kind of technology we develop, what kind of AI-enabled web we have. And there's a good analogy, like the Google

story is sort of sad, but there's a better case where we can look at how stuff worked really well and we don't have to go back to the 60s. The Google case that the government is arguing right now is built on a similar case brought when Microsoft was busted in the 1990s for doing something to a browser company called Netscape. Microsoft wanted to dominate this new thing called the internet. So it bundled its browser, its own browser, Internet Explorer, with its operating system and paid distributors like Internet service providers such as AOL, Yahoo at the time to not carry its browser rival Netscape. In short, like Google is doing now, it bought up all the shelf space and tried to deny that shelf space to rivals. The goal for Microsoft was to make sure the entire web belonged to them.

There's a lot more there, but I'm not going to go into it. Fortunately though, the antitrust division brought an antitrust case. And so Microsoft didn't use its power over browsers to block the next generation of innovators. Again, Microsoft lost the case, but the remedy was overturned on appeal. Very complicated. But the basic point was brought forward in an article in 2020 by Charles Duhigg at the New York Times, who went back, talked to a bunch of Microsoft insiders about what happened in that period from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s when a whole bunch of new companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon were growing. So here's what they told him. He said insiders were thinking of reprogramming Microsoft's web browser, the popular Internet

Explorer, so that anytime people typed in Google, they would be redirected to MSN Search. Or perhaps a warning message might pop up. Did you know Google uses your data in ways you can't control? Now, Microsoft was so powerful and Google so new that the young search engine could have been killed off. But, quote, there was a new culture of compliance and we didn't want to get in trouble again. So nothing happened. The myth that Google humbled Microsoft on its own is wrong. The government's antitrust suit is a reason that Google was eventually able to break Microsoft's monopoly. If Microsoft, quote, if Microsoft hadn't been sued, all of technology would be different today. That was a different lawyer involved in the case. Again, there's no such thing as an unregulated market. There's no such thing as deregulation. This is bad language, bad concepts to stop us from thinking about power. We chose to regulate the browser market and operating softwares in the early 2000s to allow Google and a whole bunch of other companies

to escape Microsoft's clutches, just as we chose to regulate the market in the 2010s to allow Google to crush its rivals in search and throughout the web. And these choices led to different political and technological destinies. A lot of innovation, much more decentralized market in the 2000s, a lot of authoritarianism, a much more monopolized market in the 2000 and teens. So let's get back to the current case against Google. The judge is a guy named Amit Mehta, and he is set to decide whether to toss the case, to narrow it, or to let it go to trial. In a recent hearing, the potential competitive threat of new technologies like AI chatbots came up,

and the judge, Mehta, he was intrigued, and he sort of bought into the myths that Eric Schmidt was peddling, but he wasn't totally sold. So now it's worth asking the question, if AI is so great, why aren't AI-empowered search engines being offered to consumers right now where they actually engage in search? Now, Microsoft tried to do this. And a few months ago, Microsoft's Bing did actually get a slight bump in usage. But Google was still at 90% of the search market. And now Microsoft's Bing is back to where it was. Google is still a search monopoly. It's not what they say, but that is in fact the case. And Bing is not the only rival search engine to Google. There's smaller ones like Neva and DuckDuckGo

that have different approaches to incorporating AI. Neva is personalized and ad-free. DuckDuckGo doesn't track users. So these are differentiated products that you can use if you want. But these search engines are not being presented to users because Google searches the default. So only really sophisticated users are actually getting to them. So unless JudgeMeta rules against Google, then as Google rolls out its own AI programs, Google's AI programs will be the default as well. So here's a video on how Google is going to turn the whole web into its own walled garden by integrating everything that it has. That's

remarkable. And they're going to keep doing things like that to make the web its own walled garden. In fact, Google, using AI, will probably attempt to eat the whole web. Now, so that means that at worst, Google is going to control pretty much everything that we see. It won't just control directing us to what we see. It will control what we see. At best, if we don't, if Judge Mehta rules badly, AI could be an oligopoly of the well-capitalized. So maybe you'll also have Microsoft or Facebook or Amazon, but that's kind of all you'll get. Well, we can already see firms

preparing for different futures. One way to restructure search is to present what's called a choice screen to users instead of giving them a pay-to-play default search option. So that actually worked. In 2017, Russia did this and it actually broke Google's monopoly. And if Judge Mehta actually forced that as a remedy, the $45 billion of annual payments would just go away. DuckDuckGo and Neva could actually compete. And it's almost certain that companies like Apple would unveil search engines that they are developing. And yeah, Apple is actually developing one. They just, why would they deploy it if they're getting 15 to $20 billion from Google a year? If that money goes away, they will deploy their search engine. So you'll see a lot more competition in the search

market if this, this, um, monopolized structure gets taken away by a judge. So an antitrust decision against Google would unleash an explosion of innovation around search, and that means AI-enabled search. More importantly, the deployment of AI would be less likely to be monopolized because this decision would create a presumption against monopolization in the new business environment. OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, or anyone else who grabs a chokehold would have to worry about a judge ruling against business methods intended to restrain others in this vibrant space. That's how the law works. It works via precedent. The stakes here are high. In the last technological inflection point, the shift from desktop to

mobile, enforcers and regulators and Congress wrote rules to facilitate monopolization and allow Google, Facebook, and Apple to dominate our phones and the mobile web. That occurred by the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, closing its investigation in 2012 against Google with a unanimous vote, allowing Facebook to buy Instagram and WhatsApp, doing nothing about Google's suite of acquisitions, and Congress not actually coming in and making any laws around the use of data and various other things. Okay, but that was a different political moment.

People were a lot more comfortable with monopoly at that time. They didn't think it was a big deal. But today, it's different. So this is an FT, a Financial Times op-ed by an activist named Sarah Myers West. And it shows that we haven't made policy choices, but there is actually a genuine dialogue about consolidation in big tech AI. See, move fast and break AI up. People know that there's a concentration problem. And it's not just that there's a lot of chatter about it. I mean, I brought up West's op-ed, but there were hearings in Congress. People are talking about it. I mean, I brought up, you know, West's op-ed, but there were like, there was hearing, there are hearings in Congress. People are talking about it all the time.

And it's not just that. There is actually an antitrust trial and that I talked about earlier, and it's the first of many. There's a bunch that have been brought to against Google, but this is the first that's going to trial. And it's actually being brought by a reinvigorated antitrust division. And it may be the case that Judge Mehta rules badly. Maybe he'll rule that he wants artificial intelligence monopolized in the hands of a few. That would, I think, in my view, be a subversion of the Sherman Antitrust Act, but judges haven't done a particularly good job recently. It could also happen that he doesn't do that, that Mehta surprises and acts like a judge called Harold Green, who was the courageous judge in the early

1980s who broke up AT&T and did as much as to bring forth an open future as any engineer in Silicon Valley. But regardless of how meta rules, the case is sure to be appealed, and Congress is going to be done publicly with the government's antitrust enforcers on the right side, with the possibility of appeal and the possibility of congressional action, of state legislative action, of action all over the world. We have a long way to overcome the myths that I laid out in the beginning that Eric Schmidt put forward. These are very powerful myths. They are embedded in how we think. That is the false question of whether to regulate our markets versus the fact that they are just there are rules and a debate is what kind of rules those are going to be. Or pretending that

technology is just this external force that kind of happens and that then government comes in to set some boundaries instead of seeing collective action as foundational to how technology is developed in one way or in another, it's always we the people that structure the path of technology. So it's on us as a democratic society to tell our lawmakers who represent us that we don't want our scientific knowledge, our engineering prowess, our innovation controlled by the few. We must be as jealous in defending our liberties as the

monopolists are to take them away. But it starts with freeing our own minds from their bad ideas. So thanks for watching this big breakdown on the Breaking Points channel. If you'd like to know more about big business and how our economy really works, you can sign up in the description below for my market power focused newsletter, Big. Thanks can see a headline from The Washington Post. The IRS tests free e-filing system that could compete with tax prep giants. So they're saying that they've been sort of quietly constructing a system, a software system, that would allow Americans for free to file their tax returns digitally. That's according to current and former agency officials with knowledge of this who told the Washington Post it's going to be a pilot program for just a smaller group of people.

Actually, in January, when the 2024 filing season begins, according to people who know about it, it was developed actually by the IRS and the U.S. Digital Service, which is kind of the White House's tech consulting firm agency. Ryan, this is really interesting to me because the IRS has cooperated a lot with the e-filing giants. It's almost like a public-private partnership, so that they've been sort of in the shadows developing something that will compete with these businesses. I feel like they've been instrumental in propping up. It's quite interesting. Yeah, those 87,000 agents are being put to some good use. Although it was always what, like 7,000 new agents, like 80,000 new employees, right? Something, yeah. So for the background on this, as you know, I've got a book coming out at the end of this year, and I go over the TurboTax fight from 2019.

So this is fresh in my mind. But if you remember, TurboTax and the other kind of free providers were trying to slip into law a provision that would basically ban the IRS from doing this. And they got John Lewis to carry the water for them because you just can't oppose anything that John Lewis did. That was the one rule in Congress. If John Lewis is for it, you have to be for it. And it went through the House unopposed. Every Democrat, every Republican voice voted for for it and I've got some details on on how that happened and it's it's kind of a fun story, but It was then exposed and it was blocked in the Senate and so as a result that allowed The IRS to go forward with this technology

And so one of the compromises that they had made with the TurboTax types was that, okay, we will continue our cooperation with you so that you can prop up this business of helping people file their taxes online if you also develop a free product for people to use. So you can have your premium thing where you'll get more money back and you'll do your taxes accurately, but for free, do this one. And they just kept, obviously, foot dragging, slow walking, and have never developed a free product as they've promised the government that they would do. So in the background, IRS was like, this can't be that hard. And also, we have access to all the IRS back-end stuff. We can do this.

It's absurd, but also telling that we don't have that yet. Like that we're such a privately controlled government that even our tax, our revenue engine couldn't develop a website to just let people give it money. Like you're getting trillions of dollars from the public and you couldn't build a website for them to send it to you. But now finally, they're breaking through that opposition. You know, hopefully it actually works because I think if people can save the money that they're spending on H&R Block or TurboTax filing online, I think, sorry TurboTax, but like that's a good thing. You know, I hope though that this that this isn't a situation where, in the same sense that the IRS has less funding historically than it has had in the past right now. That's absolutely true.

And who ends up getting squeezed when you start arming the IRS with tons and tons more resources? resources. There's like actual evidence, and Sager's talked about this a lot, that, you know, pretty much suggests it's going to be a lot of middle class taxpayers who end up having to deal with these audits, even ones that cost them a lot of money when they haven't really done anything wrong or there's no evidence of wrongdoing. And I hope it's on a similar situation with this, because as somebody who has had both Obamacare, like on the DC exchange and private insurance in recent years, the private insurance, like on the DC exchange and private insurance in recent years, the private insurance, like just let's talk about the infrastructure and the websites. There's so much easier to use than the government ones. And we know that the Obamacare websites have had problems going back to like the literal inception of the Obamacare websites.

Um, and so I hope again, that what doesn't happen is that people who, you know, want to pay the flat TurboTax fee, get it over with, end up then having an inferior product. And the option is TurboTax charging like $500 for what used to cost less because they need to make up that base. So, I mean, this is what an industry guy is saying. He's with FileYourTaxes.com. He says, is there a need for the government to come compete with in terms of functioning private sector industry? Bless you. It seems like they're saying it's, where's this one? This is the guy from Intuit. He says, a direct to IRS e-file system is wholly redundant and is nothing more than a solution in search of a problem. Right. So this could disrupt what is, as the post says, a $14 billion e-filing industry. And again,

a lot of that is because you get the cooperation of the IRS to begin with. And so I'm sort of in agreement and then in disagreement with your take on this in that I think some of these private filers are actually pretty efficient and relatively easy to use. At the same time, I do think a basic function of the IRS would be having an easy-to-use e-filing program that is free for taxpayers because we spend our money propping up the IRS. Like, our money is funding you. So it's a little bit of both for me.

Bottom line is it's way too complicated to do taxes in the United States, and a lot of that is because of a tax code that has been completely constructed by special interests and lobbyists and does not serve the average American but serves special interests and serves wealthy Americans. Yeah, and I guess we'll see. So far, IRS.gov is actually pretty good. I've used it for like, you know, there's some few basic things that you can do on it and it actually functions. I was impressed by that. So we'll see like if they can, and it would be nice

for the government to be able to demonstrate that it can do things again. So we'll see if it can, because it is up against all of these forces that are in opposition to it being able to do things like Intuit spokesman Rick Heineman Who and credit to The Washington Post in the very next paragraph they write Intuit spent 1 million dollars between January and March lobbying both House and Senate lawmakers on issues including tax system integrity and intellectual property protections according to disclosures I wish they'd do that in like Pentagon coverage, by the way. Yes, yes.

Now, clearly, you found a populist issue when even like the Washington Post reporters are like throwing shade at the Intuit quote that they're including in their own. And saying, you know what, I'm checking the disclosure filings on Intuit. See what they spent on lobbying. Boom, million dollars. There you go. You spent a million bucks lobbying for three months. And then you're giving us a quote that says the solution will unnecessarily cost taxpayers. You just spent a million dollars

of money that people paid you to develop this software. You gave it to lawmakers and lobbyists in order to prevent them from building a competitor to you. So don't tell us about waste unnecessarily costing taxpayers money. And on a high note, I guess we can all agree that both our government and private sector is a mess right now. There you go. So come on, IRS, show us you can do it. We'll be watching. So we're joined now by Jordan Cheridan of Status Quo News. He's been on the ground in Kalamazoo doing some really important reporting about a toxic paper mill there, which seems to be having

some local impacts. So Jordan, first set up for us and for our audience as a reminder what you found on the ground and then tell us what the reaction has been politically. Yeah, Graphic Packaging International. It's a multi-billion dollar packaging company. It's plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It's a cardboard recycling plant. It's been there for a long time, and for a long time, residents have been complaining of horrible smells coming from that plant, predominantly in the poor black part of Kalamazoo. high rates of asthma, COPD, heart disease, cancers in this neighborhood. But basically nothing happened. And there was a health study initiated in 2020 by a resident, not the government, but a resident who just was really aggressive and paid out of pocket for a

toxicologist to look at some of the gas data. This is what drove the health department to do a gas study, to do a study on the dozens of volatile gases coming out of this plant right into the black community. Frankly, the health department dragged their feet for three years on this health study that could have been out probably in a year. And when I went down there, you know, we reported right next to the plant. I got sick. Just being next to that plant, trying to speak coherently, you get a headache,

sore throat, burning eyes. As far as the, you know, five to six miles down the road, the smell and gases are now going into the west side, predominantly white neighborhood, because the plant expanded two years ago with the help of Governor Whitmer's administration. So essentially, you've had a plant emitting far, far more than is regulatory allowable for years. But because of big business and its financial importance to Kalamazoo, city officials basically ignored it. Thankfully, our report got traction. Also, thanks to Breaking Point for publishing our report from us on the ground. And this seemed to kind of force the health department to finally release the health study. And that

health study found that they're releasing at least one gas, hydrogen sulfide, at 19 times higher the allowable limit. So the article we put up a moment ago has some of those details. They say that the data that has now for the first time been publicly released over the past four days has shown hydrogen sulfide, which you just mentioned, concentrations near the factory as high as four parts per billion. It's a foul-smelling gas that can cause health issues when humans are exposed to it. Federal government says levels should not exceed 1.4 parts per billion for long-term exposure of a year or more. And of course, this plant has been in the community for years. So these residents are having to deal with, you know, not only the quality of life of having to live next to this

like smelly, horrible, gaseous thing, but also real health impacts that they are feeling day to day. Tell us a little bit more about the residents you spoke with and what they had to say about how this has impacted their lives. Yeah, and I just want to note that health study, although finally it's good that there is a health study, is lacking. For example, in 2020, they found it at 19 parts per billion, which is 10 times higher. So they kind of cherry picked their findings.

But anyway, that's the Michigan Health Department. People in Flint know that. Yeah, the residents, it really is stunning. I mean, just being a block away from that plant doing an interview, I was interviewing a resident, Deanne Winfield. She's got horrible asthma. Her 17-year-old daughter had a minor case of asthma

before they moved blocks away from that plant. The asthma got way worse living next to that plant. She died of a severe asthma attack. Oh my God. Jesus. Her 32-year-old son didn't really have asthma growing up. They moved near that plant. He's now on 24-7 oxygen and has had a lot of close calls, life or death. I've spoken with residents who live in that community. They can't really have guests over because the smell is so bad. Over the summer, they can't open their windows. I interviewed residents that you look at a playground on the block is empty most of the time because parents don't let their kids come out. There's a daycare right near, like 300 feet near that plant.

The kids are not allowed outside. There's elementary schools nearby. Kids don't go out for recess. And the really, I mean, I'm not shocked because this is America, but the really horrible thing is the city has known about this for years. The state has known about this for years.

And they basically blew off the residents who were begging for health studies, data, something to be done because this plant employs 650 people, off the residents who are begging for health studies, data, something to be done because this plant employs 650 people, you know, donates to the colleges, the nonprofits. I mean, you know, this is neoliberalism and most of our factory jobs have been sent to other countries. So a lot of these cities are starving for employers and basically let these employers

in many ways poison the community. But it's severely high rates of asthma, COPD, cancer. And also in 2015, there was 1,950 black infants under the age of one who died in this neighborhood. And then mysteriously, they took the data off the website. So we don't know what the data is since then. But that was five times higher for black infant death than white infants in Kalamazoo. Wow. Unbelievable.

And you can bet if something like this was placed, I mean, it just wouldn't even happen that it was placed in a predominantly white, affluent, suburban neighborhood. I mean, there's no way that they would let, you know, people who are considered worthy by the state be and have more political power be poisoned year after year in this way. I mean, one thing I was wondering, you know, the area I grew up in, there was a paper mill that we would drive by sometimes. It always smelled bad. Actually, Kyle and I on our honeymoon drove by one and I immediately like recognized the smell. I was like, that must be a paper mill.

Sure enough, it was. Like, is this just what happens when paper mills are set up? Is this plant particularly egregious? Is it, you know, the level of concentration that goes beyond just an odor and creates obviously health complications as you're tracking here? Give us some sense of that piece. Yeah, I mean, the devil's advocate will say, Jordan, there's paper mills all over the country and all of that piece. Yeah, I mean, the devil's advocate will say, Jordan, there's paper mills all over the country and all of them smell. That is true, because a lot of what they're releasing are smelly odors. Just because it smells doesn't necessarily equal health hazard. The problem with this plant in particular, by the way, the net worth of graphic packaging is $7.8 billion. They're not using carbon filters,

I've learned, at this plant, which is stunning. They're releasing over 30 types of volatile organic compounds, and they expanded in 2022 with the help of Governor Whitmer, who knew, and her administration knew of the complaints and the data. So they are releasing way more of these gases as of the last two, three years. So it's gotten a lot worse. So they could mitigate the health impacts, but they choose not to. Correct. And by the way, I mean, the state health department, the environmental department say they have, you know have air sensors up, which is similar to what we're told by the EPA in East Palestine. But I talk to residents and

they say those air sensors that are supposed to be around the plant, half the time they're malfunctioning or taken down. So it's really questionable how thorough the testing has been. This health study that came out, it's good that finally we know at least the hydrogen sulfide levels, but it did not test for other volatile organic compounds that independent testing from a toxicologist had found, including carbon disulfide, carbonyl sulfide, methylene chloride, a whole batch of potentially hazardous volatile organic compounds. So this plant in particular is basically just gating regulations because the state is allowing it to, because it's more expensive to follow regulations. You have to spend more money to mitigate the release.

And yeah, I mean, you said it right. Most of these kind of plants, whether it's a paper mill, when you have mining, fracking, auto, they're chemical plants. They're usually dumped in predominantly poor black, brown, now poor white communities, obviously Native American reservations. With this, now that the white part of town, since the plant expanded and is emitting more gases, now the white part of town is complaining. So it'll be interesting to see if more affluent white people start complaining,

maybe something will be done. I really appreciate the way that you stay on top of these stories. I mean, you've been dogged and continuing to focus on, you know, the poisoning of Flint and, you know, the lack of any accountability there and the lack of really even fixing the problem in Flint, you know, on the ground in East Palestine. You've really put a spotlight on these issues. And I think it's so vital because it shows you really the shocking treatment of, you know, people who are considered less worthy.

The American, you know, underclass is considered by elites here in D.C. and around the country. So, Jordan, thank you so much for your work and thank you for joining us today. Thank you. And please subscribe to Status Quo on YouTube if you can. Modern medicine helping us live longer and healthier? We go be helped us lose weight and keep it off. Or is there maybe a darker, more sinister agenda? Perhaps a longer, but

sicker life? Big pharma. Big food. The mainstream media, medical professionals, the government. I think that just about covers all the main culprits. Yes, it is Big Pharma, Big Food, the mainstream media, medical professionals, and the government acting in concert to spew propaganda in an effort to make us all sick. Let's go back to January 1st. It's typically the day where many

people, at least for a few days, muster up the strength to hit the gym, make a meal plan, get better sleep, to say that this is the year I'm finally going to get healthy. Now, curiously, that same evening, CBS 60 Minutes airs a segment about the obesity epidemic ravaging the United States. Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity doctor at Mass General Hospital, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, says common beliefs about obesity are all wrong. It's a brain disease. It is? It's a brain disease. The number one cause of obesity is genetics. That means if you are born to parents that have obesity, you have a 50 to 85% likelihood of having the disease yourself, even with optimal diet, exercise, sleep management,

stress management. Okay, this face, Leslie Stahl's face, is that not the look of, I don't know about that, man. But regardless, if obesity is in fact a genetic disease and nothing we do, eating right, exercising, sleeping well, does anything to help, the only logical conclusion we can draw is that the solution can only be medication. The drug Wagovi that you inject yourself once a week with something like an EpiPen. What the medication does... It's part of a new generation of medications that brings about an impressive average loss of 15 to 22 percent of a person's weight, and it helps keep it off. So the message from the mainstream media is pretty simple.

Obesity is a disease. Take a drug. But is that the whole story? Let's start by taking a look at this chart. Data from the CDC showing the obesity rates of American adults, which was virtually non-existent in the 1950s, is now projected to hit 50% by 2030. Get that, half of Americans will be obese in just a few years' time. Now, you and I, we may not be a wealth-credentialed doctor like Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford of CBS fame. I don't work at General Mass. I don't teach at Harvard Med. But it's odd, though, because unless the human race experienced some kind of quantum leap in genetics, there must be something else we're doing that is destroying our metabolic health. Callie Means is a former pharma consultant and co-founder of a company that promotes food as medicine. Recently, he spoke to our very own Crystal Ball and Sagar Anjeti, and he offered

this perspective. I believe our food system is rigged and our healthcare system stands by and profits from that. Yes, let's first start by examining our food system. The average child is eating a hundred times more sugar than they did 100 years ago. Researchers say sugar is basically as addictive or even more addictive than cocaine. Sugar activates the opiate receptors in our brain and affects the reward center. Every time we eat sweets, we are reinforcing those neural pathways, causing the brain to become increasingly hardwired to crave sugar, building up a tolerance like any other drug.

Now, some of you out there are probably saying, I have really good self-control. I don't drink soda. I don't eat candy. Ergo, I don't have a sugar problem. But oh yes, you just might. Are you a fan of barbecue? A quarter cup of barbecue sauce has on average 16 to 20 grams of added sugar.

What about salad? That's healthy, right? Well, oftentimes, light salad dressings replace fat with sugar. For example, two tablespoons of this light honey French dressing has 11 grams of added sugar. You think you're getting your day started off right with multigrain cereal? Although it may not have bright colors, chocolates, or marshmallows, many popular brands of multigrain cereal have between 6 to 14 grams of added sugar per cup. Think about it. If you are a food industry executive, bonuses on the line, shareholders demanding astronomical growth quarter after quarter, what do you do to get a leg up on your

competitor? Well, you add sugar to your products to make them more addictive so people buy yours and not your competitors. And then they try to one-up you, and all of a sudden, sugar is everywhere. But it's not just sugar. The foundation of our diet, and it's really taken me a while to even understand this, we know our diet's bad, but the foundation is added sugar. It's processed grains. And processed grains didn't exist until 100 years ago. The processing totally changed it.

It takes the fiber off. Fiber. What is fiber? Well, it's a type of carbohydrate that is found in plant-based foods such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and seeds. According to the Mayo Clinic, eating a high- diet helps you maintain a healthy weight and lowers your risk of diabetes, heart disease, and even some types of cancer. But for some reason, fiber has almost completely disappeared in a lot of our most popular food products. Products you might buy thinking it's full of fiber.

Cream of wheat cereal, it's got the image of a wheat stalk right across the top. But if you go to the nutrition label, it's got almost no fiber. Uncle Ben's whole grain brown rice. Somehow it's got whole grains. But if you go to the nutrition label, little to no fiber. Nature's Harvest white made with whole grain. Once again, whole grain all over the packaging, but little to no fiber. So while many of us have been told over and over again about the benefits of eating fiber, sometimes known as nature's superfood, almost nobody is getting their daily dose of dietary

fiber. According to the NIH, only 5% of people in the U.S. meet the Institute of Medicine's recommended daily target of 25 grams for women and 38 grams for men. Why? Because the food industry isn't incentivized to make food healthy. It's incentivized to make food addictive. Many of these ultra-processed foods are almost pre-chewed for us.

They melt in your mouth immediately. There's no protein. There's no water. There's no fiber slowing them down. There's no protein. There's no water. There's no fiber slowing them down. It's going to hit your taste buds and light up your reward and motivation centers of the brain immediately. Then there's a secondary hit of dopamine when it gets absorbed into the body. My goodness, over the last half century, the R&D divisions in these food companies have morphed into narcotics laboratories. They've found a way to

hack our brains and make a killing, both figuratively and literally. I mean, because of all the food that we've been eating, some of it criminally mismarketed, half of the country is now sick. And guess who gets to play hero? Common side effects are nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, constipation, stomach pain, headache, tiredness, upset stomach, dizziness, feeling bloated, belching, gas, stomach flu, and heartbreak. That's right. The healthcare system that includes healthcare services, pharma services, payers, manufacturers, and providers.

According to market research done by McKinsey and Company, profits across the entire healthcare industry are projected to skyrocket from $558 billion a year in 2021 to almost $700 billion by 2025. Now, that's a lot of money, but according to Cali Means, it's not the money that's necessarily the problem. It's the incentive structure. The problem with healthcare is that 95% of costs are interventions on people that are sick. That's how health care works right now. Every single institution is incentivized for more Americans to be sicker for longer periods of time. Now, I don't think there are that many evil people in the system, but that's exactly what's happening.

Incentives speak. It's larger than any one person. So not any different than the military industrial complex's willingness to trade human lives for profit, the $700 billion healthcare industry is wholly predicated on large swaths of the population being sick. Remember the CBS 60 Minutes segment on obesity where Dr. Stanford claimed on national television that obesity is a genetic brain disease? It's a brain disease. Turns out in the 13-minute segment on weight loss drug, Wagovi, the only medical experts interviewed by CBS

were doctors who had received thousands of dollars in consulting feeds in honoraria from Novo Nordisk, the maker of Wagovi and Ozempic, and the sponsor of that broadcast. Dr. Cody Stanford herself received over $15,000 from Novo Nordisk in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. So it's not an accident that not one medical professional in the 60-minute segment mentioned the concerning finding that for Ozempic and Wagovi patients, a third of weight loss came from muscle, bone mass, and lean tissue.

It's also not an accident that not one nutritionist was interviewed about food, and no one questioned the impact of the plethora of food products that are marketed, sold, and eaten by consumers in the U.S. but banned in most other modern industrialized nations. It's not an accident that the program never disclosed that Novo Nordisk, together with Eli Lilly, have at least 12 more obesity medications in development, and that the two companies are spending roughly $10 million annually on lobbying. A primary focus of that lobbying is the proposed Treat and Reduce Obesity Act, which has been introduced in congressional sessions annually since 2012, and would require Medicare to cover, among other treatments, chronic weight management drugs. It is a perfectly executed game of 4D chess.

Let me explain. The food industry makes billions of dollars selling food that's known to be toxic and poisonous, making millions of Americans sick in the process. The healthcare industry, in this case, gets to play hero, while also pocketing billions of dollars selling a supposed miracle drug to millions of adults and children. Both of these industries have worked out a little deal with the federal government, Congress, with lobbying money, with funding for the FDA, so that they can rewrite science and continue to sell food that

is known to be toxic and poisonous. The Nutrition Coalition found that conflicts of interest on the 2020 Dietary Guideline Advisory Committee were pervasive. 95% of committee members had at least one conflict with the food or pharmaceutical industries. The most frequent and durable corporate connections were with Kellogg, Abbott, Kraft, Meade-Johnson, General Mills, and Dannon. That sounds like quite the racket to me. But how is such a racket allowed to continue? It's a three-part playbook. We went directly to the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation, very respected civil rights groups, and it was a quid pro quo. Coke paid them millions of dollars and they labeled the opponents racist. And that shuts down debate. And according to Means, the same

playbook is being used again today. Novo Nordisk is paying the NAACP to lobby on their behalf to say opponents of lifetime obesity injections such as Ozempic and Wagovi are racist. The implication is that the lack of access to a drug such as Ozempic is an example of quote-unquote systemic racism and oppression. In addition, Novo Nordisk has also funded articles in leading research journals advocating for the government to subsidize their drugs to address racism. That is quite the playbook, but is there a solution to all of this? Because I think it would be irresponsible to simply point out all of these problems without offering a solution. There's a couple of things that I think are absolute no-brainers, and I think this is the bipartisan issue of our time. The first solution, he said, would be for the FDA to

revise the recommended added sugar for kids to zero. Right now, the FDA actually recommends up to 50 grams of added sugar per day based on a 2,000 calorie diet. Means a second suggestion, the federal government should eliminate subsidies for unhealthy foods. Right now, more than half of SNAP benefits are taken by retailers for meats, sweetened beverages, prepared foods and desserts, cheese, salty snacks, candy, and sugar. Just 23.9% go for fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, beans, seeds, and spices. Let's reform food stamps again. That's a program that 15% of Americans depend on for nutrition. 10% of it goes to sugar water. I don't think we should be paying tens of billions of dollars to subsidize them for kids. But alas, we all know the old adage, you can lead a horse to water,

but you can't make it drink. And what I mean by that is I'm only here to ask questions, inform, and connect the dots. So ask yourself this, all the technological advancements and public policy decisions of the last half century? Have they contributed to promoting a longer and healthier life or a longer and sicker life? Thank you for watching the first installment of Breaking Points Beyond the Headlines. I hope you enjoyed it. Discussion, questions, feedback, have at it in the comment section below. For more of me, please take a second to check out my YouTube channel, 5149 with James Lee. The link will be in the description below.

Thank you so much for watching and thank you for supporting Breaking Points. What up, y'all? This your main man, Memphis Bleak, right here. Host of Rock Solid Podcast. June is Black Music Month. So what better way to celebrate than listening to my exclusive conversation with my bro, Ja Rule. The one thing that can't stop you or take away from you is knowledge. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun?

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