Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Mini Show #28: Union Busting, Latino Voters, Inflation Advice, Commodities Markets, Web3 Breakdown, & More!

Episode Date: March 26, 2022

Krystal and Saagar cover Verizon's union busting, latino vote shifts, terrible inflation advice, Rogan rejecting Trump, commodities prices, Putin's relationship with Trump, and a breakdown of everything web3!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/Justin Gest: https://www.amazon.com/Majority-Minority-Justin-Gest/dp/0197641792Kyle Kulinski: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCldfgbzNILYZA4dmDt4Cd6AMarshall Kosloff: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3O3P7AsOC17INXR5L2APHQJames Li: https://www.youtube.com/c/5149withJamesLiThe Lever: https://www.levernews.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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to see you, Andrew. Thanks for having me. So first of all, we wanted to tell everybody it's not the Daily Poster anymore. It is the Lever, and you guys are expanding. You put together a little promo video for the brand change. Let's take a look at that. The entity formerly known as the Daily Poster is now rebranding to The Lever. Right now, we're in the void where all facts are being questioned because there are very, very few trusted sources that the audience trusts doesn't have an ulterior motive and isn't skewing the facts. We are an independent media outlet. David Sirota, the award-winning investigative journalist, nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay of Don't Look Up, was nominated for four Academy Awards.

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The lever. The lever. So guys, subscribe at levernews.com. Other than despising hearing the sound of my own voice, that was great. Andrew, let's just start before we're going to get to some of your reporting on union busting, which is really important. But I think it's so critical that we underscore the importance of independent media. If we're going to have a better democracy, if we're going to have people really understand what is going on and why it's happening. What was it that attracted you to this outlet in this work?

Sure. Well, so I had worked for several years before with David Sirota. And so I actually helped him start start this new outlet when it was literally just like a sub stack newsletter. Didn't have a name. And it was right when David was leaving the Bernie campaign, he was he was just ready to, you know, get his thoughts out there. And he asked me to help edit it. And, you know, I was stoked, because the truth is, I've always loved working with David. And, you know, I knew, like, we have the same kind of thoughts on what coverage matters, what's not being covered. And, you know, we have the same kind of ethos for our reporting, which is that we wanted to, you know, both of us have always been devoted to covering

and exposing corporate power and influence on policy. Yeah, well, it's you together have built a really vital and formidable outlet. And so I'm excited to see the rebrand. I'm excited to see the expansion. I think it's like a critical backbone of the alternative media ecosystem, which we have to have because obviously the cable news networks, as long as their incentives are what they are, and the legacy media outlets, as long as their incentives are what they are, they're not really going to change. So we have to build an alternative ecosystem to provide people with that information. So let's talk about some of the reporting. The latest report that you have here, let's go ahead and put it up on the screen,

guys, is about a Verizon union effort and the predictable union busting that is occurring there. You say, Verizon sends in the union busters, Verizon workers seeking to unionize in Washington state. Say the company just brought in executives to intimidate them. So just break down the story for us. Sure. So workers at two Verizon retail stores in the Seattle area in Everett and Linwood, you know, started organizing and then recently asked Verizon to voluntarily recognize their union. And, you know, organizers said that Verizon immediately flew in a series of executives and labor relations managers to their stores starting the very next day, like after they requested recognition to try to dissuade these workers from unionizing.

And, you know, they said they've been sending execs in into other stores, too, and training in the area and training store managers to tell workers about how unionizing would be bad for them. And the other thing here that happened is, as this was all happening, a private Reddit page for Verizon employees, a longstanding page, announced that it was banning any discussion of unions. And these organizers thought that this was like a direct reflection of their organizing efforts and that the company was cracking down. And,

you know, the new news here is that actually, so on Friday, which, you know, now is, so on Friday, they'll be, the workers will be receiving their mail-in ballots, actually. So they said that Verizon's been applying pretty intense pressure so far, but that's all going to stop really soon. Wait, so what did you make of the Reddit piece of that? Because I thought that was interesting as well. So it's a private Reddit thread. It's not run by Verizon corporate. And yet they're saying, hey, you can't talk about union efforts here at all. And their justification is, listen, we're worried about people taking, keeping their jobs. We don't want them to face retaliation. But what did you think was going

on with that detail? Yeah, well, so it's a private page for Verizon employees. It's moderated by Verizon employees, but, you know, not, I guess, in their official capacity. You do have to be like a Verizon employee to actually join the subreddit. I think they like require a copy of your like badge. So it is for, you know, Verizon employees. And, you know, I mean, as you know, as one of the workers told us, you know, if you're worried about getting unfairly targeted by management and fired for what you're sending online, you know what you need, right? A union. And I mean, I think that is right.

You know, so I think, you know, there's maybe two elements to it where like, you know, the moderators, you know, may have kind of a point about, you know, like the company can target you based on online interactions. But, you know, I mean, I think it was also perceived as like this is sort of an effort by, you know, employees who are, you know, supportive of Verizon to cut out any conversation of unions. Can't have any agitation. So it's both a reflection of potential sort of like people who are sympathizers for the Verizon corporate position and also people who and also an indication of a genuine climate of fear where people don't want to be fired just for what should be protected union organizing activity. here that I think is really important, and I'm reading from the piece now. It says, Verizon is a big federal contractor. Since Biden took office, the company has received $133 million in federal contract payments. The company also benefits from expansive government subsidies. And you have the Biden administration promising they would, quote, use longstanding authority to leverage the federal government's purchasing and spending power to support workers who are organizing and pro-worker employees.

One way to do that, they said, the administration, is to ensure that federal contract dollars are not spent on anti-union campaigns and that the anti-union campaign activities by federal contractors are publicly disclosed. So is there any prayer that the Biden administration is going to actually live up to what they're saying there and make sure that federal dollars are not being used to support a company that is clearly engaged in union busting activity? Yeah. So, you know, this that was part of like a task force recommendation. And I think the task force was led by the labor secretary, Marty Walsh and Vice President Harris. And, you know, so that was sort of a recommendation within it. They have not taken any kind of official action yet there. But it is really an important, you know, part of this conversation, which is that, yes, Biden has pledged to, you know, he also pledged to ensure that federal

contractors only go to employers who sign neutrality agreements, committing not to run anti-union campaigns. And so, you know, there are things that they can do within their authority. You know, like, more broadly speaking, Democrats could pass the PRO Act, right, which would really make it a lot easier for workers to unionize. But that, you know, has obviously there's going to be trouble getting that through Congress right now unless Democrats, you know, decide to eliminate the filibuster, which obviously, you know, a few of them are so reluctant to do. So this is something that where Biden could act and make things easier for workers just with executive authority.

I think that is an incredibly important point because all the time we hear like, ah, they're doing what they can. What do you think? You got the filibuster, you got the parliamentarian, you got Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, what can you do? He's doing everything possible. But you're saying and you're pointing out very specific things that the Biden administration and Joe Biden promised to be the most pro-union president in history could do to make it easier for workers to organize that they just have decided not to do. That is completely and 100 percent in their control. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us and breaking this all down for us. Guys, go and subscribe to The Lever.

It's TheLeverNews.com and support the incredible work that they are doing. Really grateful for your time today. Thank you. Joining us now to talk about some of the demographic changes in this country and the way that Republicans have been peeling off Latino voters from Democrats is a great friend of mine, Justin Guest. He is a professor of policy and government at the Schar School at George Mason University. Great to see you, my friend. Good to see you, man. So there's a lot I want to get to, but first of all, you've done a lot of research on demographic shifts in this country, in countries around the world, how that's worked out for political systems, both in ways good and bad. And it's given you some particular insight into the trouble that

Democrats are having with Latinos right now. So just break a little bit of that down for us. Sure. Well, the United States has been trending in the direction that we see of other majority minority states around the world, where you see a lot of minority groups growing in number. You often see the U.S. trending in that direction over the last two decades where what racial or ethnic identity you are often is predicting or more predicting of your political choices. But that's starting to change in an interesting way right now because recently there have been a number of polls that are showing that Latinos are actually beginning to marginally move closer towards the Republican Party, whereas before they were almost a two-third, one-third split, a two-to-one split towards Democrats. And that was something that was true for other minority groups and remains true, in some cases even more extreme. But Latinos are moving closer and closer towards a more even split to the Republican Party in a way that we haven't seen really since George W. Bush in 2004. So let's track it then in terms of history, and that's what you write about in

the book. How does that track with recent arrivals to the United States in the 1900s? How long does that transition away from ethnic voting bloc to kind of a total assimilation into normal American politics take? Well, in some cases, it never really goes away. You know, there's a lot of times parties make a bond with a particular minority group or other identity group, and that bond lasts a very long time. You know, we see that today with a lot of Cuban Americans and the Republican Party. And that's just true in general. So there's no real sort of broad rule necessarily. But certainly when a minority group, when an immigrant group begins to vote, not as that identity group, not as an Irish person or an Italian person

or a Catholic person, but just as a sort of everyday American or finds another form of identity, whether it's a white racial identity or perhaps a professional identity, as an attorney or as a union member. That's when you really start to see what you might call assimilation

because they have dropped what had made them distinct and different before and have taken on a different identity. Yeah. And by the way, guys, the book is called Majority Minority. That's why we mentioned that a couple of times. We can go ahead and put that book jacket up on the screen and highly recommend it to all of you. So this is particularly noteworthy because it's the opposite of predictions that were being made both by the Democratic Party that had this idea of the coalition of the ascendant and these demographic changes in the country were just going to like guarantee their political power

forever. And now they're in a situation where they're facing down likely significant losses in the midterms. Biden looks extraordinarily weak for reelection. Of course, you never want to outright bet against an incumbent president. And the other piece of this is specifically with Donald Trump, because his rhetoric was so inflammatory with regards to immigration, he had such a hardline hawkish view, especially in the 2016 election. All of the pundits were predicting, oh, there's going to be historic margins among Latinos for Democrats. And in fact, not only have we not seen that, but Trump improved again his, you know, his stand with Latinos in the 2020 election. We see poll after poll that in the midterms, Latinos may sort of split their vote 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans. So what has triggered this shift right now at this time, do you think?

So many people think it's that Latinos are looking differently at U.S. political parties. But what I would argue is that actually Latinos are looking differently at themselves. They see themselves through a different prism, not necessarily. And by the way, we shouldn't be generalizing across all Latinos. Yes. But those who are shifting their votes in particular, we can generalize a little bit more about. We're seeing them in pockets of the country like South Texas, South Florida. You have a lot of

Americans there who actually self-identify as white Hispanics. So in the census, you're asked your ethnicity, whether you're Hispanic or not Hispanic, and then you're asked your race, white, black, Asian American, Native Pacific Islander, et cetera. In this case, you have a lot of Latinos who also identify as white, and that white identity may be superseding their sense of Latino solidarity. In many cases, like the parts of South Texas, the borderlands of the country, many of those are people of Mexican origin who never actually necessarily migrate to the United States. The old saying there is, I didn't cross the border. The border crossed me. So they're historic Tejanos who have actually always lived in that part of Texas back when it was actually part of Mexico.

Now, that's not the majority group, but there is a sense that they are different because the many generations that they've been in the United States from the immigrants who are recently arriving from Latin America and elsewhere. Yeah, so how does that trend then for our politics moving forward? So there's a couple of ways it can go, right? Which is that increasing identity politics makes white people rediscover or reignite identity politics. That's probably not good for everybody involved. The other way that it goes is that, generally, kind of how I see things, everything breaks down more along class lines

as we move forward with assimilation. It's even with high levels of immigration. Which way of those trend lines do you think it'll go? Well, I can tell you the way we want things to go is not that this is the politics of whiteness and Latinos are just assimilating into an understanding of whiteness that is somehow nationalistic and exclusive of other cultures. What we hope is that the Republican Party is actually making a concerted appeal to people of minority backgrounds and to Latinos in particular to create this change. Now, from my observations, I'm not seeing that appeal. I'm not seeing that concerted effort to bring in Latinos necessarily. What I'm seeing is more the sort of broadening of the politics of whiteness

to reach the next most quote-unquote assimilable group. And I think that's problematic actually for U.S. politics going forward. So let's broaden out because the book focuses on, okay, there have been other countries and other places where you had a group that was previously in the majority that becomes then in the minority. How does that typically go? Yeah. So it's a mix of conflict and coexistence and different countries have different experiences based on a variety of things that I write about in the book quite extensively. I say six different countries and they are so different. One thing they all have in common, aside from the fact that they're all islands, because they're very fragile demographies that change easily, is that they have all reached

a majority-minority milestone, which is the milestone that the US will reach in around 2044, 2045. And that is when the original or native ethnic or religious group loses its numerical advantage to one or more minority groups. And they have all gone through this. And what we see across all these places, Crystal, is that there are pivots that they can take towards coexistence or pivots that they can take towards conflict. And you see a mix of both, But the places that pivot towards coexistence are inspiring in the way that they are redefining who they are. They are focused, they're not dropping their heritage,

but they're re-understanding and broadening the understanding of the nation, right? And this goes back to what we were just chatting about with Latinos. Are we broadening the nation or are we broadening whiteness? And I think that's the real question for the United States.

Can we broaden the civic understanding of who we are as a country? And that's when we can actually follow those coexisting countries well. Which places did well? Yeah. So I would say that the place that did the best is probably actually Hawaii. So Hawaii was, of course, its own country until the US annexed it forcibly in 1893. And even at that point, it was already a majority-minority country. But Hawaiians were always actually very open to intermarriage. And with a sort of shrinking native population, in terms of blood quantum, a native population shrinking, they began to open their minds about what actually constitutes being kanaka, what constitutes being Hawaiian.

And that broadening was expedited when the U.S. took over, right? Because you have a sense of almost an external threat and very harsh assimilation regime made Hawaiians actually realize that they were all kind of in and against U.S. assimilationism. Now, we don't have the luxury of some kind of external enemy trying to take over our country right now. And I was hopeful, actually, that the coronavirus pandemic would actually serve as a kind of external enemy that might strengthen our solidarity. But unfortunately, that didn't come to pass.

Yeah. So whenever you say whiteness, what does that mean? Like in terms of assimilating whiteness, right? So because like what's wrong with a Tejano person identifying as white? I'm from Texas, so I'm very familiar with the border crossing. And I remember, you know, seeing that at the time and being like, yeah, I mean, it kind of makes sense. And like you were saying, these people see themselves as legitimately part of the Texas identity in a way that a lot of people in the Northeast and their politics don't really get.

So what do you mean when you say that assimilation is itself whiteness? Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. So whiteness itself has changed over the course of American history. So early in our history, of course, whiteness referred to being Anglo-British or maybe Anglo-Dutch, Northern European Protestant, right? And that broadened actually in really important ways that brought us to our contemporary understanding of who we understand as white, right? And of course, identity is always not just about how you feel, but how other people perceive you. And that has also changed over the course of American history. So in many ways, actually, the evolutionary nature of whiteness, the evolutionary nature of identity is in some ways a strength of the United States because we

can actually conceive of our identity changing over time in a much more versatile way than maybe other states could. On the other hand, it's also problematic because it's so paradoxical. It creates contradictions in who we think we are. You know, if we take a look at our country right now through a 19th century lens, right, that white Northern European Protestant lens, we're already a majority minority country. You wouldn't include Greeks or Slavs or Jews or Italians or maybe even the Irish because of their Catholicism into the old conception of whiteness. And yet that has evolved over time. And so I think that that is the flexibility of identity.

But the worst part of this is that that flexibility allowed the country, by bringing in new people into the understanding of whiteness, it actually led to the persistence of the subjugation of people of color. So people who were deemed too dark to be white or too different to be white. And that's what's so problematic. We want to create a civic identity that is not hinged on any kind of phenotypical appearance or any kind of race or religious background. We want to create one that is all about the civic identity of who it means to America, that America is an idea, a project

that we are all contributing to. Do you think that because of some of our American mythology, we might have a leg up on other countries in doing this? Because as much as we fall short and as much as there are constant contradictions in all of this, we do have this notion of America as a country of immigrants and people of all races and colors and creeds coming together in this belief in the American ideal. Does that give us some sort of cultural propaganda advantage in being able to pull this off? Absolutely. I'm actually an optimist about this. There's so much to be pessimistic about our social affairs, the strength of our social fabric right now. But America has a number of structural advantages to who we are. It's not like immigration has just suddenly happened in

our history over the last 20 years, and this is a shock to the system. That is what happened in a lot of the other countries that I studied. We're different. We've been receiving immigrants since our conception, right? Second, intermarriage is growing and mixed race children is growing threefold in the last 10 years, according to the US Census Bureau. It's remarkable. What that does is it blurs our identities, right? It means that it's harder to divide us over ethnicity or race or religion because more people are of mixed backgrounds. So you can't just say that there are hard lines between us when people are embodying the transcendence of those differences. And so these are structural advantages alongside the sort of evolving and flexible nature of American identity. And so we have a lot of attributes that we can leverage in that direction.

At the same time, we have a lot of fear mongers who are actually trying to leverage those differences against us. And I think that's what's so worrisome. And so I think that the United States is at a crossroads right now. And whether we pivot towards coexistence or pivot towards conflict depends on what we as people understand and what our leaders actually pursue. Yeah. I'm mostly an optimist on this question, too. It's been great talking to you, Justin. Appreciate it. We're going to have a link down in the description to the book. Go ahead and check it out and we'll see you guys later. Great to have you, Justin. Thank you. Pleasure, guys. Thanks. Inflation is obviously killing everybody in terms of their wallets,

in the gas pumps with gas prices and all of that. And that's led to questions amongst elites of how exactly do we get these poors to stop complaining? So the people over at Bloomberg have some good advice for all of you. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. Inflation stings most if you earn less than 300K, which is 90% of the whole country. Here's how to deal. Number one, take the bus. Okay.

Number two, don't buy in bulk. Number three, try lentils instead of meat. Number four, nobody said this would be fun. Let's go put the next one up there because there's some other helpful advice in this column. Let's put this up there, please. Yes. From selling your car to foregoing chemo for your dog. Some tips on how to beat inflation. You know, I think they should have split the difference, Crystal, and just said that you should eat your dog because that's probably more protein than these lentils. Listen, no one said this was going to be fun, Sagar. No one said this was going to be fun.

So Bloomberg's advice is screw you, let your dog die. Also, why wouldn't you buy in bulk? I don't understand that. Because you could pay more whenever wouldn't you buy in bulk? I don't understand that because you could pay more whenever you're not buying. So the theory is that when you buy in bulk, especially food, you actually just end up consuming more. And so you don't get the savings. That's the theory that I've heard expressed. So highly controversial theory, I would say. I'm still committed as a Costco shopper. Yeah, let me read you a little bit from this, just so you guys can get a full sense of what's going on here.

They say, though your palate may not be used to it, tasty meat substitutes include vegetables, where prices are up only a little over 4%, or lentils and beans, which are up about 9%. So, you're not even, like, really doing that great on the price savings. Plan to cut out the middle creature and consume plants directly. It's a more efficient, healthier, and cheaper way to get calories. I'm sure it's good for people's health, maybe, and it's certainly good for the planet. But, you know, it's a lot to say, like, you should change your entire diet and go for lentils instead of the things that you— That doesn't even make any sense. Well, and here's the thing. The part that really actually bothered me was the whole framing of

this is going to hurt for anyone making under $300,000 a year. That's the whole country. That's 98% of the country. You know, and they act like that's like low income. But I mean, it does show you how much these price increases are so significant and the gas price increases are so significant that, you know, it is going to hurt people pretty far up the income scale, especially given how high costs are in housing and other things. Here's the pet chemotherapy one. They say if you're one of the many Americans who became a new pet owner during the pandemic, you might want to rethink those costly pet medical needs.

It may sound harsh, but researchers actually don't recommend pet chemotherapy, which can cost up to $10,000 for ethical reasons. What do you think about that one, Sagar? I think that anybody who loves their pets as much as I love my cat and my dog, that they should be able to spend whatever they want. And it's up to them. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it if you're broke, but look. More what it is, is that the way that they talk down to people and are just like, you people, you got to cut corners. Sacrifice more. Nobody said this would be fun. Instead, we should be running as many columns as possible. What to do about it? Here's plans. Here's ways we can bring that. You've done now monologues on the oil companies. We've had an

economist about how to drop gas prices. We've talked here about food prices, about maybe bolstering nitrogen production, fertilizer, all of that in order to bring that down. Working with the supply chain, national guard, there's so many things that we could throw at this. And already, already we are seeing prices increase in food. Right as we're taping this segment, I just read a Wall Street Journal piece on how already the Russian increase in food price is beginning to go in there. Wheat prices, wheat isn't everything. I mean, oil, sunflower oil, seed oil products, not that you should be eating them, by the way. But I just find this – so first of all, we're going to have malnutrition.

It's not like we already don't have a massive obesity and health crisis in this country. This is the worst thing you could possibly do to push people towards the cheaper, worse for you options. So there's a lot that's happening right now. Yeah, I think that's- It's just awful. It's like this, first of all, if you are in a situation where your budget is stretched by inflation,

which I think, as they are pointing out, it would be overwhelmingly most of the country, you're probably gonna be in a better position to know how it's going to work for you and your family to cut quarters than a random Bloomberg columnist. And every mom that you see at the grocery store is doing this. Yeah, of course. You can see them doing it, honestly. So that's where the sort of contempt comes in,

to think that people who are struggling don't already know, aren't already thrifty, aren't already cutting all kinds of corners, aren't already well aware of like the best ways to make their budget go as far as possible. That's number one. And then number two, as you said, it's like this personal responsibility narrative around a crisis that is not these people's fault whatsoever. So use your perch instead at Bloomberg to talk about solutions that will actually directly help people so that they don't have to, you know, cut out the pet chemotherapy and take the bus and only eat lentils. Maybe use your perch to focus on those solutions and pressuring the government instead of, you know, just kind of shifting the burden onto the

populace. Yeah, exactly right. Who are all scrambling at Aldi or Costco or whatever for cheap stuff. Shouldn't have to be that way. You guys might have seen a viral Twitter thread which said that Donald Trump was going to go on the Joe Rogan experience. And turns out that's not true at all. But now it's not just here that Joe has debunked that, but he made some interesting comments about whether he's going to interview any political candidates anymore in the future.

Let's take a listen. There's been a whole thing where 100 people at least have texted me and sent me emails and contacted friends because they heard Trump was coming on my podcast. And the source of it is a fake Trump account on Twitter that said I'm going on the Joe – it's Trump's face and it's a fake account that said I'm going on the Joe, it's a Trump's face and it's a fake account and said, I'm going on the Joe Rogan podcast soon. And I think it came out of the fact that Trump was on the Nelk Boys podcast and then YouTube removed that podcast. They, they, they pulled the podcast, which is, you know, that's one of the craziest things you could do because then everyone's going to talk about how youtube removed that podcast like you can't even have trump talk

right right well former president of the united states you you you can't let him talk somebody did send me apparently not but somebody did send me a uh a note saying that he was going to be on your show it's crazy yeah but i thought i'm i the original – I'm not really sure if that's the case. It's not the case. Yeah, I know. I'll send you the – look, I am – I have decided that I am very apolitical when it comes to the future and like in political candidates. I don't want to have that kind of an influence and I don't want to – I don't want to – I want to be someone who can watch and observe. I don't want to be someone who's actually affecting this.

See, I actually – while I understand his decision, I think that's very sad. We just were looking at that morning consult polling around the people who actually listen to Rogan, and they are the persuadables, truly in the middle, kind of all over the map ideologically. And part of the takeaway from morning consult polling was these are exactly the type of people that politicians want to reach. You and I have always intuitively understood that. That's who our audience really turns to be. And it's always funny that the politicians don't want to engage with it. But the fact that he's declaring outright that he doesn't want to do that just shows you that the immense pressure from the media and others have made it so that the biggest podcaster in the world doesn't want to engage with these topics because they can see just how much backlash that that is. And that's a self-own

by the media because you're also making it so that the lack of incentive to engage, you know, is really would be politically beneficial to the whole country and to others. And it's just a form of gatekeeping that has now obviously had a back. Now, look, he can do whatever he wants and should he, you know, he doesn't want to deal with it. And I wouldn't want to deal with it either if I was him. So I completely understand where he's coming from. But I think it's a net loss for the country for that to happen. Yeah, I think that's right.

I think this is probably, you know, I'm also reminded of the reaction to him, like, casually making a statement that he'd probably vote for Bernie Sanders. Yeah, that's right. And he got baked for it. Right. And then, you know, the Bernie people, understandably, were like, the most popular podcaster in the world would vote for him. Yeah, they, you know, they used it for their campaign because obviously they saw it as political benefit as any candidate would. And then because there was so much media hatred of Bernie,

then they go on this witch hunt to show why it's a terrible thing that such a popular host and media figure supports their campaign. And that opened a whole, you know, a whole ugly direction. And it's really been sort of since then that the knives have been out for Joe in a really significant way. And then, of course, it increased another level when he ultimately went to Spotify. I think the other piece of this is that, you know, part of the foundational value and approach that Joe takes to his show is assuming the good faith of whoever he's sitting across. That's true. So, you know, sometimes, occasionally, you might find a politician that you can sit down with in good faith and have a great discussion. I personally thought, like,

that his conversation with Bernie Sanders was a great example of that, where they had a really good exchange. And there were a lot of people, I think, who, you know, got around some of the media caricature of him by having him sit for that long form of an interview, but there just aren't that many instances where you will actually get a politician who will sit down with you in good faith and actually engage and be willing to admit where they're wrong and be open-minded and say things that are uncomfortable or controversial or provocative or whatever. Certainly with Trump, that would be very difficult to pull off because that guy's just, he's just full of it all the time. So you can't go into a conversation

with Donald Trump assuming you're going to have a good faith like exchange of ideas. So from that perspective, I understand why he would want to just say like, you know, I don't want to do this anymore. I totally get it. I totally understand where he's coming from

and why I also wouldn't want to deal with it. Same in get it. I totally understand where he's coming from and why I also wouldn't want to deal with it. Same in that position. I can't imagine what it's even like to be at the center of one of those storms. I just think that this is a good example of how the media has made it untenable for people who are that big and culturally influential to even want to engage in politics.

It makes them keep their virtual monopoly on the conversation. And worse, it just bludgeons anybody who dares just speak their mind. And speaking your mind is the most important thing that we have in this country. And it's exactly, you know, for this reason that the incentive is to not do so. When, frankly, I think we'd all be better off if politicians did engage with it. But that's his right, you know, to make that decision. And I guess check one for the media on this one. It's a sad situation, in my opinion, that this had to happen.

Hey, guys, our friend Marshall Kosloff, he's going to be conducting interviews with experts and newsmakers for us here on the Breaking Points channel. We're really excited. Yep, here it is. Hello, Scanlon. Welcome to Breaking Points. Hey, Marshall. How's it going? Great to talk with you. So as you know, and as you cover on Substack, YouTube, TikTok, all the various platforms you're on, there's always different stories going on right now.

And I wanted to speak with you because you are an excellent synthesizer. You are taking all these stories, putting them together, providing something comprehensive that people could really think about. So I wanted to just take this Wednesday to go over and talk through some of these big top line stories to guide viewers. So let's just start. We were talking right before this recording and you were saying you were really concerned about commodities. That's something we should really focus on. So let's just start there. Sure. Yeah. I mean, you've just seen a huge run up in commodities since the invasion and really over the past year because of the pandemic across everything, right? So wheat, corn, soybeans, and then an input into all these commodities is fertilizer. And you've seen

fertilizer have a huge run-up in price, mostly because Russia and Belarus are both massive producers of fertilizer. And also an input into fertilizer is natural gas. And so we have a whole energy crisis that we're grappling with. So it's almost everywhere you turn, one of the inputs to the processes that we have become so reliant on is sort of crumbling away. Yeah. And you just said Ukraine, Russia, but then also the broader pandemic, how much of the surge in commodity prices has been driven by what's happened in the past month and how much it was a long-term trend that we should be worrying about. Yeah. I mean, wheat is up like 20%, I think, since invasion day. And I think it's up like 69% over the past year. So a large portion of it is because of the invasion. And I think that most of it is worrying because of the war, right?

So planting season is getting disrupted. Flows are getting disrupted. So being able to get fertilizer onto the actual crops themselves is disrupted. Being able to go and farm the crops is disrupted. So it's all of those things that we need to worry about, yeah. And how is this going to be felt in our lives over the coming months and even the year? Yeah. I mean, I think that a lot of us are already feeling it, whether that be through a higher grocery bill or through prices at the pump. The Federal Reserve decided to raise interest rates to help combat or attempt to combat some of this inflation. So hopefully

we'll see some of it stem soon, but it'll depend on how quickly these supply chains can recover. It'll depend on what the end of this war does look like. And it'll depend on how companies choose to manage how they mitigate the cost. I'm glad you brought up supply chains. It seems like for the past COVID period, there's been all these different supply chain incidents. And now this is just the latest one. What is the current state of the supply chain discourse post-invasion? We've seen the narratives shift at different times. We're past Christmas. Where do things stand now?

Yeah, it's still up in the air. It's difficult to get ships around a little bit, but I mean, everything is still running like it's supposed to, but because gasoline prices are so high that puts pressure on trucks, that puts pressure on planes. And so those are core components of the supply chain. And that makes that whole process more expensive. So we don't really have the same bottlenecks at the ports that we used to. It's still not great, but it's not like, Oh,

everything's building up because of X, Y, Z. It's more like everything is just becoming a little bit more expensive. And let's talk about gasoline. You just had a YouTube video and sub stack out around this. How much of the current increase in gas prices is due to those geopolitical tensions and how much is actually under control when it comes to the US specifically? Yeah. So gasoline is super interesting, right? So it comes to the US specifically? Yeah. So gasoline is super interesting, right? So it responds to the price of oil, but WTI crude oil is not necessarily gasoline. Gasoline is a refinery process from crude oil itself.

So it responds to... And crude oil has bounced between $100 a barrel to essentially over $130 a barrel, which is huge moves, huge, huge moves. And variability in oil prices like that freak out the people who like the different gasoline stations because they're like, oh my gosh, how am I going to manage? And gas itself is pretty low margin for gas stations. They make most of their money through selling snacks or whatever, but a lot of people, gas prices are sticky. So if oil prices go up, gas prices go up, we're not going to see gas prices fall as much. So if you think about the invasion, a large function of the price of oil fluctuating so much is because the United

States has sanctioned Russian oil. There's talks that Europe could potentially sanction Russian oil as well. And then in the US, we're trying to ramp up shale production. We're trying to get more oil up. And there is a little bit of movement, but it's not like in terms of actual movement versus what is actually being produced. It's not a one-to-one ratio. So we're trying to find different solutions, whether that be from Saudi Arabia or having OPEC produce, OPEC in general produce a little bit more.

So yeah, that's kind of up in the air too. And as we're thinking about this broader geopolitical picture, you did some writing around where things stood at the start of the invasion. It's been a few weeks, obviously. As you're looking at the analysis of these various issues, whether it's the commodities or the broader sanctions, how much confidence do folks have that this is basically going to be the status quo for a long time moving forward? In terms of how the sanctions

are playing out on the prices of everything? Yeah, just how the sanctions in the current confidence, and basically the way to sum it up is, is this the type of situation across these boards we're discussing where things could just get better next month, let's say if a peace deal happens, or are these longer term baked in problems now? Yeah. I mean, I think that'll depend on what the end of the war looks like, right? So like, if I'm not sure if Russia like just backs off, like, and then things can kind of go back to normal a little bit faster, potentially, like sanctions get lifted. Everybody goes back to normal somehow. It'll just depend on what that actual endpoint looks like. I think most people are expecting a little bit of pain for longer because it's not like you can just invade your neighbor and not have consequences happen because of that. Like the plan with the economic sanctions that the United States and the West have implemented on Russia alongside other countries is to decimate Russia's economy. And so in terms of them being a part of

this sort of like how we think about pricing models, how we think about a globalized economy, like they're just not going to be the same core component that we're used to. And like the economy is essentially a giant Jenga tower, right? So if you remove one of those Jenga pieces, like we're sort of doing with Russia, the whole thing becomes that much more unstable. So I think that's how most people are thinking about it. It's just like, who knows? And this is the question I really wanted to ask you,

and no one really knows, so I could understand if you don't have the perfect answer, but how does crypto fit into all of this? It seems like when it came to the sanctions, critiques that this could lead to evasion, how is the crypto picture playing out so far? Yeah. So I think there's a couple of interesting things with crypto. So Russia, the government itself can't use crypto to evade sanctions. There's no evidence of that happening. It's not something that we see, like it's a public ledger. So you would see if all of a sudden a country

started moving billions of dollars or tried to do like sneaky things. You do see the Russian people and Ukrainians buying crypto. So you do see upticks and flows there, which I think is good. They're able to get away. Like the ruble has completely lost all value, which is Russia's currency. So that's been really valuable for the Russian and Ukrainian people who are trying to find stable currency to put their money in, their hard-earned money. And then crypto has been a really strong donation tool. So I think last time I checked, it was over a hundred million US dollars have been donated in terms of crypto to Ukraine, which is really valuable. So I think there's a lot of, you know, the president of the ECB came out today and said that people, Russia was using crypto to evade sanctions.

And I think that's just more about trying to grapple with regulation around crypto. So it's the narrative doesn't match the flows though. You know? Yeah. And to sum this all up, we've hit a bunch of different topics, everything from crypto energy, agriculture, geopolitics. How would you just as an analyst of this space, sum up the broader story or just the moment that everyone seems to be working their way through right now?

Yeah, I would just say like uncertainty is probably the biggest word. Uncertainty, just uncertainty and uncommon circumstances. So nobody really knows what's going to happen. We have a general idea of how we can start moving in the right direction to protect agriculture. But in a globalized world, you just have all of these delicate little balances that are happening all the time. And I think that we've gotten really used to this perfect world almost of a globalized economy where we can rely on other countries. But that's become

increasingly not it. So yeah, uncertainty and uncommon circumstances. Kyla, this has been really great. I'd love for you to just go down the ledger and just shout out everywhere folks should take a look at your work. Yeah, yeah. So I'm on Twitter at KylaScan or on Instagram at Kylala Scan. I have a YouTube channel, Kyla Scanlon, Kyla.substack.com. Everything is self-named, not because I intended to, it's just as easiest that way. And then, yeah, so YouTube podcast is called Let's Appreciate. It's on Spotify, Apple podcast. And yeah, I'm across the board. Just Google me, Kyla Scanlon, and I come up. So yeah. Hey guys, Kyle Kalinsky is letting us post some of the clips from his channel

that we think you guys will really love in the Breaking Points community on our channel. Yep. Let's get to it. So, Bill Maher, on his show, was asking questions about Russia and Ukraine and the war that's ongoing. And he said something

that's getting quite a few headlines. Let me show you the article here. This is in Mediaite. Watch. Bill Maher asks, Why didn't Putin invade Ukraine when his boyfriend Trump was in office? So I'm not going to show you the video because HBO and Real Time are massive copyright sharks. But I will read you this.

So Maher says, But I know you were watching our show last week and you heard me say, Why didn't Putin invade Ukraine when his boyfriend Trump was in office? I mean, Trump stood with him at Helsinki and defended him over our own intelligence agencies. So I was just asking the question, and maybe you do have an answer. Why not? When Trump was in office, it would seem to be the more logical place. So this guy, Max Brooks, responds, not to be confused with the lovely Michael Brooks, who would never say

something so stupid. No, he didn't invade because he didn't need to, because you only roll out the tanks when you think you're out of options. And Putin had a great asymmetric strategy to dismantle NATO from within. I don't know why they spelled NATO like that. And it was working when the commander in chief of the United States Armed Forces calls NATO obsolete. You are on the road to a fifth column victory. And that's what he was doing. And it's a matter of fact, we know now in 2018, thank you. Maybe, well, we know this. In 2018, Trump wanted to pull out of NATO. And it was John Kelly and John Bolton who had told him, who had to hold him down like a rabid dog to stop him from doing that. And if Trump had won a second term, he would have done it.

But Biden being elected caused Putin's plan to go up in smoke. So right off the bat, I do not buy that for a second, this idea that Trump would have pulled out of NATO. He did say many NATO skeptical things, which, by the way, sort of based. But he never would have actually done it because, and we saw this on a number of different fronts, like with Afghanistan, for example, there were a number of times while he was president where he tweeted, we're moving out of Afghanistan. That's what we're going to do. It's going to be tremendous. It's going to be wonderful. And then some general would walk into

the Oval Office and say, sir, we're not doing that. And he'd be like, you're right. No, we're not going to do that. That's not a good idea. So ultimately, whenever Trump got pressure from the intelligence agencies and the deep state and his own staffers, he would back down. He would back down. When he's told like, we can't do that and we're not going to do that, he would be like, okay, I guess we're not going to do that. That's fine. Again, there was a time, I specifically remember when he tweeted, we are getting out of Afghanistan. And then he just didn't get out of Afghanistan. Eventually they set some sort of date, they negotiate with the Taliban and they set some sort of date, which was after Trump was already out of office, but they didn't, he never actually did it. He never did it. And by the way, Biden actually

followed through on that. It's one of the best things Biden done, but unfortunately Biden ruined it with sanctions afterwards that are now starving millions of people in Afghanistan. So it's, it's sort of like, uh, the lowest bar of all time that you praise him for getting out. If he's actually hurting civilians even more. Anyway, I digress from that point. Trump was a cuck to the deep state. All you needed was one person who was wearing an official military uniform to come in and say, sir, we're not doing that.

And he'd be like, okay, no, you're right. I think you're right. I think that's a good point. And it happened time and time and time again. So he wasn't actually going to pull out of NATO. That's point number one. But point number two is

this idea that like, oh, Trump was Putin's boyfriend. I don't know why everybody overlooks what was actually happening in terms of the policy under Trump. So he didn't allow the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is something Russia wanted massively, and so did Germany. But he said no to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. He wouldn't allow it. Now, Biden came in and said, okay, sure. Now, to be clear, I was actually on Biden's side with that because I don't think it's the U.S. place to tell these foreign sovereign nations what kind of a deal or relationship they want to set up.

But Trump said no to that, which is the harsher position against Russia, and Biden said yes to that. Now, eventually that became a point of leverage when Russia invaded, where now Biden was able to turn around, and Germany was able to turn around and say, well, now we're not going to do the Nord Stream 2 pipeline because you're aggressive and you're invading your neighbor, which is good. So you had a point of leverage. If you allowed it and then you disallowed it when he invaded, you had a point of leverage, which was a good thing.

But Trump said no to that. The other thing Trump did, which Obama refused to do, is arm Ukraine. He did that. Now, it also happens to be the case, remember the perfect phone call that Trump made with Zelensky, where Zelensky was basically asking, like, hey, where are our weapons? And Trump was like, well, maybe I'll only give them to you

if you give me dirt on Hunter Biden and Joe Biden. So he also withheld some of the military support. But under Trump, before that, we had already given military support, and that's a policy that Obama didn't want to pursue because Obama viewed it as too aggressive. And, you know, basically prodding Russia too much. But Trump armed not just Ukraine, but also a lot of those weapons did go to the Azov battalion.

Trump was arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine. That's what happened. Now, that is right for criticism. But nobody's making that criticism because they're too busy making this dumb criticism like he's Putin's puppet. Well, if he's Putin's puppet, why were there endless, you know, NATO exercises right on Russia's border under Trump? If anything, he was too bellicose. He was too hawkish. He was continuing the same policies of many of the previous administrations. Obama was a little more dovish than Trump on this. But, you know, you go back, like, Putin invaded Georgia under George W. Bush. George W. Bush is a neocon hawk.

George W. Bush, on paper, is a lot like Donald Trump, a Republican who is not all that bright. And so the idea that, like, well, he wouldn't do it under Trump, my guess is if Trump got a second term, Putin would have still done it. That's my guess. Now, we don't know. We can't, you know, break down some sort of alternate timeline

because it's just educated guesses when push comes to shove, and everybody knows that. But my guess is he would have done it under Trump if Trump got reelected. But, you know, Mark can't help himself. He always goes back to the standard Russiagate arguments, and that's what this is. It's a standard Russiagate argument of, like, Trump is Putin's puppet.

But it's also massively ironic, because, hold on, if Putin invaded Ukraine under Trump, that would have been called evidence of Trump being Putin's puppet. But when he doesn't invade it under Trump, they turn around and say, well, that shows you're Putin's puppet. You're his boyfriend. So then understand something. This is a hallmark of a

conspiracy theory. It's a non-falsifiable claim. If Putin does it under Trump, that proves he's his puppet. If he doesn't do it under Trump, that proves he's his puppet. Well, maybe the whole dialogue is stupid and unnecessary. And instead we should be focusing on what actually is happening on the ground and what Trump actually did and what the results of it were. But nobody wants to have that conversation. So, again, my guess is, if Trump got a second term, Vladimir Putin still would have done it. He probably still would have invaded.

That's my guess. But certainly, the claims of him being a Russian puppet or him being Putin's boyfriend, it's the liberal brain worms, man. There were so many salient criticisms to make of Donald Trump. Like, for example, stop arming neo-Nazis on the issue of Ukraine. And nobody had time to make it because everybody was too busy

saying he's Putin's butt buddy. So, Bill Maher, swinging and missing as per usual his guest here swinging and missing as per usual and um their their analysis I just think is is totally wrong it's totally wrong this idea that Trump actually would have pulled out of NATO there's no way he would have had the balls to do that. There's no way. I highly, highly, highly doubt that. So there you have it. Bill Maher and Max Brooks having a stupid off on real time. Hey guys, we're excited to partner with upcoming YouTuber James Lee of 5149. He's going to explain culture, politics, anything else that needs explaining, and we're really excited about it. Yep. Here is his latest effort. Let's get to it.

Hey there. My name is James Lee. Welcome to another segment, a term Web 3 or Web 3.0, tossed around quite a bit lately. In fact, Web 3 featured prominently this year at South by Southwest, the tech film and music festival that just concluded last weekend. Martina Wolkoff wrote on GeekWire, an online tech news website, quote, Web3 is dominant. It seemed like every street corner in Austin was plastered with announcements for an NFT drop, a new metaverse, or a crypto event. In one of the first activations I walked into, I was offered a complimentary NFT at the door and proceeded up the stairs to see multiple people in headsets playing a social VR game that was being projected on the walls.

Most of this technology has been a part of South by Southwest in the past, but this year it was inescapable and part of almost every conversation. So today we're going to be diving into the World of Web 3, a kind of catch-all term that technologists and investors and the media have applied to the ushering in of a new era of internet, one that is built on these decentralized blockchains and manifesting in many different application and use cases such as cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DAOs, and DeFi, all of which we will get into today. Now, I'm not going to be able to cover everything in this segment, but hopefully after watching, you'll have a good understanding of the fundamentals of Web3, what the purported vision is,

some, this is important, some of what the skeptics are saying, and what the future might look like. So the characteristic of Web1, if people remember their original AOL account, was an ability to look in a curated walled garden at a set of content that was not interactive, but was presented to you on AOL the way that Time Magazine used to show you the articles they wanted you to see inside of their magazine. Just you could see it on a screen. The innovation of Web 2 was that suddenly you could not only read content, but you could also write content. This is when the blogosphere became a big thing. People remember this from the late 90s, the early 2000s. The reason for the centralization of the internet, of course, was that all of that activity was being monetized by a very small number of companies. Facebook,

as the chairwoman mentions, Google, and two or three other companies. What makes Web3 different is the ability to own the actual network. And that's what crypto assets themselves represent, is an ownership stake in an underlying network. So when you hear people talk about, for example, Layer 1 tokens, what they mean is this is your reward for providing the ledger maintenance services, the computing power to the network that on web one and two was done by Google, right? So now people in my hometown of Pueblo, Colorado can actually own the Ethereum network, but they can't own the internet. That's owned by Google and a few other companies. That's what the project of crypto is all about, is allowing people to directly own the networks that have native assets that are supporting it.

And that's the nature of decentralization. That was Brian Brooks, CEO of an artificial intelligence company called Bitfury and a crypto expert explaining the vision of Web3 to Congress, a vision that I think is full of promise, the economic and digital paradigm that we are in features power that is concentrated in the hands of a few giant corporations like Facebook, Google, Amazon, who dominate the current iteration of the internet known as Web2. And this imbalance of power makes the possibility for regular people to take back the internet and own a piece of the pie as part of Web3, incredibly alluring and enticing to entrepreneurs and just the average onlooker. For example,

NFTs or non-fungible tokens have become this crazy internet sensation where images of crypto punks or bored apes or other digital art collections are selling for upwards of a million dollars online. Even as people still don't quite grasp what an NFT actually is, a simplified explanation I'll give to you today is that at the heart of NFTs and other crypto creations is the blockchain technology defined simply as the shared decentralized ledgers and databases that power Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that in some instances are used to create unique, uncopyable digital files with numerous other use cases, one of them being NFTs. Today, what we're focusing on so far in early NFT mainstream knowledge is collectibles and art. However, the far bigger impact of an NFT is the technology itself. That token has an

underlining smart contract potential built into it. That contract can represent anything. For example, if we issued the NFT now, two things happen that are better than the paper ticket or the virtual ticket that those two events are issuing today. One, immediately that becomes a digital asset. The organization in that ticket can say,

if this piece of art, which is a ticket, all this is going to blend. Think about the art festival. They can make a very beautiful digital asset as the ticket. When that ticket, that piece of art is sold in the future as a collectible, no different than a ticket to the first world series or the world cup. I can go on eBay right now and buy a ticket stub from the first world cup, right? when that's sold the person that owned it and ebay will make all the money however in the future the people that issued the nft will that was gary vaynerchuk known online as gary v i'm sure many of you have heard of him this famous

digital marketer who is now uh quite the nft mogul and some of the applications and use cases he brings up are indeed quite interesting, right? Instead of centralized distribution platforms holding all of the power, the smart contract capabilities underlying NFTs can actually more fairly compensate artists and creators for their content. For example, artists can make millions of dollars in the Web3 ecosystem by monetizing their assets and then selling them directly to their fans. And then they can make way more money this way compared to what they would otherwise earn from a more traditional Web2 type service like Spotify. Now switching gears a little bit to another use case of blockchain I mentioned earlier, something called a DAO, which stands for a Decentralized Autonomous Organization.

Today, we're looking at decentralized autonomous organizations and how they work. A decentralized autonomous organization, also known as a DAO, is like any traditional organization like, say, Uber or Google. The big difference is that it's autonomous. DAOs are run by programming code written on a collection of smart contracts written on Ethereum. Imagine an autonomous Uber-type transportation company. Let's call it DAOuber. DAOuber has been created by a group of developers

and entrepreneurs as an alternative to centralized transportation companies. It operates completely transparently and independent of any human intervention, including its original creators. No boss. Again, given the amount of control the giant tech companies and corporate behemoths

have over our lives as consumers and the kind of exploitation that gig workers experience under their monopolistic control, I think it's impossible not to be excited about what's being sold here. This kind of decentralized autonomous organization, a utopian co-op organization where there is no CEO, there's no board, there's no hierarchy, and everyone has an equal opportunity to shape the organization. We saw the promise of DAOs when over $50 million in crypto funds were raised to support the campaign of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange

to fight for his freedom from US and British authorities. Finally, the other term I threw out earlier under the Web3 umbrella was DeFi, which stands for decentralized finance. And the idea here is to use the blockchain technology to create a new internet native financial system that could potentially replace the traditional Wall Street intermediaries and trust mechanisms. DeFi is a term for the next generation of digital financial services and products that is being built on and enabled by blockchain technology. So blockchain technology is the overall innovation behind Bitcoin. And Bitcoin, you could think of as the largest use case of blockchain technology today.

Blockchains have gotten much more sophisticated, and they enable much more complex financial use cases and applications. These new use cases are called DApps, decentralized applications. When you think about DeFi apps, it's greater than the parts, right? It's not just a collection of these DApps, it's an interconnected ecosystem.

And the goal of DeFi is to create a new financial system that is fully digital native from the beginning. It's gonna be faster, it's gonna be interoperable, it's gonna be more transparent, it's gonna be native from the beginning. It's going to be faster. It's going to be interoperable. It's going to be more transparent. It's going to be global from day one. Anyone around the world can use these financial products and services, accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Okay, so anyone with an internet connection can now own a piece of the financial system.

Are you guys maybe sensing a theme here? Whether it's DeFi, cryptocurrencies, DAOs, or a simple NFT art collection, the orchestrators and marketers of Web3 products and services have leaned heavily on the word decentralization while peppering in other aspirational descriptors like transparency and democracy. And to me, this, first of all, indicates that folks are aware and understand that power in our society has become much more centralized with just a few people or organizations in finance and tech basically controlling all the rules and regulations that dictate the direction of society at large but

are we being sold something real here can Web3 actually revolutionize the world by shifting power from these centralized platforms and organizations to regular people? James Muldoon, author of the forthcoming book, Platform Socialism, How to Reclaim Our Digital Future from Big Tech, wrote recently in Giacomo Magazine, Web3 is unlikely to meaningfully redistribute value because it doesn't challenge the fundamental drive to commodification that now dominates the web. Right, within a capitalistic economic system, commodification is this idea of transforming things such as goods, services, ideas, nature, personal information, or even people

into objects of trade or commodities. And that is really what drives our society, isn't it? Things, whether it be the goods, services, ideas, nature, or even people that we just talked about, they're only as valuable as the money they can be exchanged for. And in today's world where there is money to be made, you can pretty much bet that there will indeed be a small group of people or organizations that have unequal asymmetric access to these opportunities, even in the so-called decentralized Web3 ecosystem of DeFi, cryptos, DAOs, and NFTs. I'll give you an example here today. In the case of NFTs, many projects are corrupted by a practice called whitelisting, in which

certain people are invited to buy their NFTs before they're available to the general public. And what whitelisting means is that many profits flow to these well-connected insiders who get their NFTs at a discount and then can sell them for more profit once they're released publicly to the market and the price jumps. A study by Chainalysis found that whitelisted investors who resold their NFTs made a profit 75% of the time versus just 20% of the time for non-whitelisted users. This is kind of similar to IPOs in the stock market in that a tight circle of insiders who have early access to investment opportunities will reap much, much more of the reward compared to your average regular retail investor. And taking a look at crypto and the NFT landscape as a whole, and this is as of 2021, the top 9% of accounts hold 80% of the $41 billion market value of NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. The top 2% of accounts own 95% of the $800 billion

supply of Bitcoin. That doesn't appear to be too decentralized at all. And in the case of DAOs, which once again is this utopian-esque organization where people can cooperatively share power, early signs also point to this being more of an illusion than reality. This is according to Professor Scott Galloway of NYU, quote, Web 3 acolytes claim DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations, are superior to traditionally organized corporations. But many efforts, many early efforts, have fallen short. It's not clear that most of these enterprises are even decentralized in practice. Constitution DAO, which made news when it lost out in a $43 million bidding war for an original copy of the U.S. Constitution, hadn't even established a governance model before it shut down because the founders

hadn't figured out how to prevent a few large holders or whales from taking control. I don't think that's too surprising at all. And based on the evidence so far, I'm not at all convinced that Web3 and something like a DAO can actually radically redistribute value from the hands of a few back to the masses, especially given who owns the development of this technology. Take a look at this graphic from CNBC. Blockchain startups raised a record $25 billion in venture capital last year, an eightfold increase from previous years, according to CB Insights. I mean, just think about it for one second here, what they're trying to sell you. I think this is the kind of neo-colonialist type message that the businesses and the tools that

we've created, and when I mean we, I mean the venture capitalists, these businesses and tools will liberate you. For example, people like David Marcus, a Web3 entrepreneur who previously ran divisions at both PayPal and Facebook, including their failed crypto project Diem, are saying things like, quote, I've never felt this connected to a community of builders like the crypto Web3 one. I'm not talking about folks who are in it for a speculative win. I'm talking about people who want to rebuild the Internet's infrastructure to move value and power in the hands of people. Now, the question is, do you think that's actually possible? Because, you know, let me reiterate the sales pitch once again, right? What they're saying is by embracing Web3 products and services, which they've developed and they own,

we will somehow be more free. I mean, that seems highly unlikely, right? We're being advertised that Web3 and its various use cases and applications will result in a decentralization of power out of the hands of a few. But in reality, what I think is actually happening is that power is already in the process of being re-centralized into the hands of even fewer tech overlords. Maybe the original vision might have been more different and more pure, but as we're seeing in efforts by the government of China and even in Canada, the cashless world likely to be built around Web3 can actually be controlled in a very similar manner

to existing monetary systems and online platforms, despite the Web3 proponents' promise of decentralization. So I think the more likely reality you are headed toward is a world of government-issued digital currencies within an ecosystem of other newer technology applications that will be controlled, once again, by a very small group of venture capitalists, hedge funds, and giant tech firms

who themselves have deep ties within the federal government. Now, the last thing I want to say today is I encourage you to continue to monitor and discuss the development of Web3 technology. I will certainly be doing the same because I do think there is a little bit of validity here. And in fact, there are certainly some people who will take full advantage of this period of rapid technological change with these massive market bubbles to reap huge financial benefits. kind of significant realignment to the existing power structures and that Web3 is merely a marketing buzzword that serves to distract us from and prevent us, quite honestly, from coalescing in a way that can actually lead to you and I having any kind of meaningful controlling interest in the system and society that we live in. I hope you enjoyed this breakdown of Web 3.

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