Okay, we're back, we're live here, it's a Monday morning, 10 o'clock. And I'm Jay Fiedel, this is Think Tech Hawaii, and we're going to do Think Tech Asia right now. And we're going to talk with Richard Hornick. Richard Hornick is a journalist, journalist, can I say that? He's a lecturer at Stony Brook University in New York, but he's much more than that because he's spent years and decades covering China for Time Magazine and other organizations. But he's been around the news media that covered China for his whole professional life. And we have the joy of having him here. He gave a talk not too long ago at the China seminar, which is an important organization in Hawaii, which covers China and reveals things about China you wouldn't otherwise know. And Richard spoke there about what is at mind control in China. So I found a remarkable education for myself. We made a movie for OC16, which played a couple of weeks ago. If you have a chance, look that up on oc16.tv. And he's here with us today to talk about the same subject. Welcome to our show, Richard. Jay, it's always a pleasure to be here. It's great to have you. So let's talk about China until five years ago. So it looked like it was getting more democratic, more like the U.S., it was opening its mind, so to speak, opening its heart. And we could have, at least in the future, an evolving improvement of our relationship with them. But something happened with Xi Jinping. What happened? Well, I don't think they were ever going to be a democracy like the United States. I think what they were striving for was to find an Asian path to creating accountability for their government. That's what most people want in the world is, you know, if you asked most Chinese, if you want to vote for president, they'd say, why? You know, that's not... But make sure that the local party chief doesn't, you know, steal the best land every year when they're doing the land appropriations. And you know, they were moving along, and they were using, I thought, one of the most interesting elements was they were using social media as a way of getting around having an electoral process, because you could follow very easily how people felt. And people were using social media to out corrupt officials.  And then the people, the netizens of China went out and found ways that they could look them up. And he had a different wristwatch on almost every day, and they were very expensive. And he wound up in going to jail. So I thought this was very positive. And in fact, I really thought that what had happened was they had managed, what social media was doing was to defeat the key strategy of any authoritarian government. And that is to atomize the population. What does atomize mean? It means that everyone has to keep to themselves what they think. So you and I, if you were living in, I covered Poland during the 1980s, early 80s. And people were afraid to say what they thought, because I didn't know if you were a spy, right? And so I kept, so people were, people in these societies go around thinking, well, maybe everybody else is happy, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm wrong. And every once in a while, that explodes, and well, social media blew that up. Social media made it possible for people to see that they weren't crazy. They weren't the only ones who thought that this was not the way it should be. And I remember something about the Chinese culture, I mean, that if the government doesn't work for you, if it doesn't provide a working economy and quality of life, then there's an inherent right of the people to turn it up, to change it, maybe by revolution. Right. It's a little less direct than that. It's sort of the mandate of heaven. So in Confucian philosophy, it is the duty of the government to care for the people. And if they don't, then the mandate of heaven will be withdrawn. And that normally over Chinese history was evidenced by peasant riots and revolutions and that sort of thing. But if you have the social media outlet, then you relieve that stress somehow. Well, and it's not just relieving the stress, it provides the one thing that authoritarian regimes never have, which is a feedback loop. The only feedback loop they have is from spies, you know, people.  So with social media, you have, you know, the wisdom of crowds, you have lots and lots of inputs.  I'm relying on the whole society to tell me what's going on. So what's so interesting about this is that social media requires, required technology, required the internet and all that. And China was going, you know, big time on expanding the internet at the time. But now the technology is used for maybe a different purpose. Can you explain what happened in the last five years? Yeah. Well, I mean, first, the first thing that happened was they, China decided that, and they've always had a kind of love-hate relationship with that, with the outside world. And they decided that the internet was creating, bringing in too much bad, too many bad influences. You know, Deng Xiaoping, when he opened China to the, to the outside world, he said, you know, when you open the window, some flies may come in. Well, I think they thought that, you know, a whole swarm of mosquitoes were coming in. And so the first thing they did in 2011 was to create what they call the great firewall of China, which is to block Chinese netizens from access to the outside world. So no Facebook, no, no Google, no Twitter, all of that. And they created their own versions, which were very, very successful. So, so that, so that's the first thing that happened. And the second thing that happened was that in 2012, Xi Jinping was chosen as the new leader. And he was confronted with a very, very difficult situation. Corruption in all this wonderful openness that we were talking about, and all this economic growth, there was an enormous amount of corruption, especially after the 2008 financial collapse when they had to pump billions and billions, trillions of renminbi into the system. And he basically decided that the only way to fix this was to shut everything down and to start really controlling society using social media and the internet and other technologies, not as a feedback loop, but as a way of controlling the Chinese mind or closing the Chinese mind. And that's what's been going on for the last five years. So are people aware, do they tolerate this? Is this something where if you're having a good middle-class life, you're not going to complain about it, and even though you know things have changed? Yeah, I think absolutely.   It only affects you when it's just like here, I suppose, when, you know, who's ox got gourd? You know, if you're living in a town in the city and everything is fine and dandy and, you know, so what if I can't, you know, see, you know, what's going on, you know, on Google or Facebook? Who cares if, you know, people are being shut down for saying negative things? Doesn't matter. But if you live in a city or town where there is a problem, like a new chemical factory is being built, then, you know, and you're really afraid of the pollution or it's already been built in or the pollution, and then you can't say anything, then people sort of push back. So it's, you know, it's a mixed back. Yeah. OK, so I guess most people would say I don't want to get into an argument about this. I don't want to be punished in any way, so I'll just let it go. I don't care about Google and Facebook. So how has it evolved in those years with the success of the governments of Xi Jinping's initiative to close down the Chinese mine? Well, it's becoming, it's incremental. So they started with the outside and then they started clamping down on internal communication. So for example, I don't know if you're on Twitter, but on Twitter you can have any sort of handle name you want. And there's no... It's anonymous. It's anonymous. In China, they have effectively eliminated all anonymous handles. You have to have real registration, that's number one. So if you say something, they know about it. And they have 200,000, 400,000 people who do nothing but scan social media for people saying untoward things. Can we take a digression at that point? Sure, sure. I have this vision of a huge big building somewhere in Beijing, which doesn't have a lot of windows and which has a lot of security around it. And all these guys who never tell you in the outside what they do for a living are in there scanning everything that goes over the internet. How far off am I? I don't think it... There are a couple of buildings like that, but they're doing other things. They're doing more sort of outward. They're the people who are trying to steal information from the US government and that sort of thing. This can be... Because of the nature of the job, it can be distributed widely. You shouldn't do it from your home. But it's always secret. You don't know... Oh no, I mean, I think most people... No, it's not really secret. They're pretty open about it. So if I'm doing... If I'm scanning your email, whatever it is, I'm a scanner. That's what I do. I mean, most of it is done through artificial intelligence. I mean, they're always looking for keywords, June 4th, 1989, you know, those sorts of things.  So the latest one or not the latest but recent was a year or so ago when Obama visited China. And anyway, Obama and Xi Jinping were walking together. Somebody decided that Xi Jinping looked like Winnie the Pooh and Obama looked like Tigger. And so Winnie the Pooh is now a forbidden term in China. Anyway, so it's at that level. But more recently, they have made every platform responsible for all of the content. Now here in the United States for many, many years, they're beginning to change a little bit. But Facebook and Twitter and Google said, you know, we're just a carrier. We don't have any responsibility for what people say. And they've been successful in that region. Well, except it's changing. They're now being forced to accept. In fact, I just saw Unilever is threatening to withdraw all of their advertising from Facebook and Twitter and other platforms if they don't crack down on all of this horrible, you know. But it's not the government. But it's not the government. Although people, you know, you could argue that they're afraid that the government would investigate. But anyway, if you're Waybaugh and if I own Waybaugh and you are, you post something that's incendiary and I don't take it right down, they come after me and you, but they come after me. So it's really been quite effective that way. But, you know, there's still elements. But to me, what's more, and we were talking about, you know, what is the surveillance state going to be like? So the Chinese have taken the latest technologies, facial recognition, you know, scanning the internet, and they are developing a sort of a 1984 approach. So that, for example, in the last few weeks, I forget, some major city in China, in the railroad station there, they've arrested eight people who they know or are known to be criminals based on facial recognition software, sort of like the Minority Report, you know. But more like the Minority Report, they are developing a social credit rating system. So you have a FICA score. You can borrow money based on your, whatever it is, 700, you know, rates are low, 500, you have trouble getting a loan. In China, what they wanna do is create a social credit rating where they watch everything you do on the internet. Again, using artificial intelligence. So if you go to pornographic sites, that's against you. If you buy books that are sort of incendiary, that's against you. If you are caught doing bad things in the airport, and they've had lots of problems with their tourists, you know, opening plane doors and that sort of, all of this stuff gets funneled into a new social credit rating system, which they're hoping to have complete within a couple of years. And that will be used to decide if you get a job.  So that, to me, is the most sort of chilling thing. Well, it's chilling in the sense that it's, in the case of Equifax, that's a private company, not necessarily available to the government. Here, it's the government doing it. Actually, it's not. It's the Chinese platforms who are doing it at the behest of the government. So it's Alibaba and Weibo and all, and so they're doing this, which raises a separate issue, which is, do you want to share your information as a non-Chinese with these companies? Alibaba would like to challenge Amazon here in the United States. Weibo would like to challenge Facebook. And Twitter, Huawei, the communications manufacturer, wants to sell equipment for 5G. The new Xiaomi makes these cheap mobile phones. But, you know, You have to assume that everything is gonna get back to the Chinese government. Yeah, yeah. And in fact, I just saw this, a journalist in China who went in for her American who went in for her annual visa conversation. The official said, you know, we see you tried to organize a meeting on December 8th, and it was not done through her public thing. It was done through WeChat, through a very, what's supposed to be private. So, you know, they're obviously surveilling this. Now, when I was in China in the mid-80s, we assumed that all of our phone calls were being listened to and that we were being followed and that sort of stuff. But what this does is it gives the possibility to watch everybody all the time.  You don't know what your social media rating or your social rating is.  I mean, these companies are incredibly fallible as Equifax has more than demonstrated. So, yeah, you could find yourself in a very, very difficult situation. Chilling is the word. Richard Hornick, you know, this is very chilling. It was chilling when we heard it at the China seminar, which is actually within the friends of the East-West Center and therefore under the rubric of the East-West Center. In fact, Richard was at the East-West Center for a time, yeah? Yes, 1993, 94. Yeah, anyway, we're gonna take a break now and we'll come back, we're gonna find out just exactly how more chilling it is and how it does mind control on everyone in China. We'll be right back. I'm Ethan Allen, host of A Likeable Science on Think Tech Hawaii. Every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., I hope you'll join me for A Likeable Science, where we'll dig into the science, dig into the meat of science, dig into the joy and delight of science. We'll discover why science is indeed fun, why science is interesting, why people should care about science and care about the research that's being done out there. It's all great, it's all entertaining, it's all educational, so I hope to join me for A Likeable Science. Aloha, my name is Mark Shklav, I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join us. I like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii, not just law, love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea. Aloha. Okay, we're back on Think Tech Asia with Richard Hornick and journalists, journalists who are speaking today about China and its attempts and successful attempts to do mind control in the Xi Jinping administration, which is likely to go on for a few years, actually. So, one of the interesting things in my view is that people, until this sort of began to happen and foment into the press, didn't know. They thought it was heading in a good direction, internally and in the daily life of the city. Everybody was very impressed with the technology and the Chinese had all these new systems which often were reminiscent of American systems, but now there's a bit of a dark side to that. So, tell me, it's not China bashing, it's China skepticism and there's a difference, right? Absolutely. My view is that I see the potential of China. I see what they could be doing with social media, with all of these things, and to me, it's a shame because what I don't call it mind control. I call it, my talk was called the closing of the Chinese mind. And if China wants to be that superpower in the 21st century, they need to go up the economic ladder. And that economic ladder, going up the ladder from being an assembler to being an inventor, avoiding the middle income trap that I talked about a year ago, that requires innovation. And innovation requires collaboration and it requires open communication. And so, yes, Xi Jinping is trying to close the Chinese mind and he's not doing it because he thinks that's a great idea. He's doing it because he thinks he has to. He inherited a dumpster of fire. The corruption was out of control. As I said the other day, I'm not sure I would do anything differently than he does. He's facing a billion, 1.4 billion people who many are happy, many are very discontented. There's lots of issues out there and there's a lot of corruption. They have a lot of problems and he's trying to get his arms around that and his view is that this is the best way to do it. And maybe in the short run he's right. But for me, the history of China is one where the swings are between total control and complete chaos. The Chinese have a word Luan and they're absolutely horrified at the thought of chaos. Chaos is the cultural revolution. Chaos is Tiananmen, chaos is the peasants revolt, the boxers rebellion, all those things. A lack of order. Lack, more than a lack of order. Just a lack of any civility, whatever. It goes back to dog eat dog, Hobbesian. Anyway, but I think one of the reasons they have these episodes is that they're so intent on maintaining order that eventually all of these things that get pent up will explode. So it would be better to have them out a little bit. So most countries are somewhere on a continuum between order and chaos. Somewhere in here, right? And China is binary. It's one or the other. And when it blows, and it will blow at some point, and maybe 40 years, maybe 100 years, I don't know. But anyway, I think Xi Jinping is doing the best he can. I don't think he's a bad guy. I think he really thinks this is what China needs. And we'll see. But this may not use your term atomization. This kind of going toward atomization changes the way people collaborate because they're afraid of what they might say, get them in trouble somehow, even if they didn't intend to get them in trouble. And so they shut down. Therefore, you don't have the collaboration you need for creativity. And this is going to affect them ultimately for sure. Well, and also, even Chinese companies that have subsidiaries, they're doing the same thing the Japanese did. They're buying Western companies for their technology and innovation and that sort of thing. But because of this great firewall of China, they're about to cut off one of the last ways that you could get access to the outside world, which is VPNs, virtual private networks. And this is going to hurt Chinese companies as much as it hurts Western companies that are trying to operate in China. So it's not the sort of thing that creates problems right away. Again, it's the failure to fulfill the potential that they have. Right, which is huge. Which is huge. And especially in this field. And one thing you talked about in your comments, which I'd like to cover is academic freedom. Well, freedom of speech in general, but also academic freedom. So how does this affect the press? How does this affect teachers, faculty, teaching in universities? Well, over the last, again, five years, there's been a real crackdown within universities. For the first time, about three years ago, for the first time since Mao, a professor was sent to jail for a lecture he gave inside a classroom. There's always been a sort of wall around the university. The university, the academic inquiry was, especially since the end of the Cultural Revolution, was permitted. And that has been, that is being cut down. The other thing is that they're really reinforcing the need to study Marxism, Leninism, Mao Zedong thought. Now they've added Xi Jinping thought as part of it. That's extraordinary, isn't it? It is. I mean, it's actually in the Constitution now. Xi Jinping is definitely has more power at this point in time than Deng Xiaoping ever did. More like Mao. Much more like Mao. And they're even using the same terminology. They've photoshopped his portrait to make him look a little bit more like Mao. The cult of the personality is really going on. And again, this may be something that he thinks is necessary. I don't think he's doing it because of his ego. I think it's all part of this process. But yeah, so that was the point of my talk was the closing of the Chinese mind is that you stop academic inquiry. The news media have been way cut back. Five years ago they were starting to do some really interesting things. But there's almost nothing left of that. So it's become more and more difficult for people to exchange ideas. And it's not just in China because this is washing out into American universities that have campuses in China. It's affecting American universities that have things like the Confucius Institute, which does the Chinese language training and then uses that as a lever to keep universities from inviting the Dalai Lama. The University of California, San Diego had the Dalai Lama do give a commencement address. And the Chinese office that handles overseas scholarships has blacklisted the University of California, San Diego because of that. So there's like- And you mentioned that in Canada the Canadian government has shut down all of it. It wasn't the Canadian government, it was actually Canadian academics. Really? Yeah.  Because of these problems. Yeah. This is, it's not super important, but there are other ways that it's kind of, they're trying to infiltrate and will have some impact. Yeah, well, and ultimately it'll have an impact on relations with them, don't you think? Yeah, I mean, it's so hard to separate the noise of Trump from what's really going on in US-China relations. But look, China deserves to have the respect of the world. It is enormous power. It's the second largest economy in the world. They have great military prowess. And they have a neighborhood. Just, we have Latin America and the Caribbean, this is their way they view it. We have the Monroe Doctrine, why shouldn't they have the same sort of latitude in their part of the world? One Belt, one Road, they're trying to influence everywhere. Yeah, I think that's gonna get them into the hubris thing. As you mentioned, there's no word in emandering for hubris. Supposedly, right. But because that's a real sense of overreach. And they've got other problems, which nobody, the people don't really talk about that much. I mean, they still, they don't have the cash reserves that they did even a year ago, a year and a half ago. They lost about a trillion dollars in capital flight and other things in 2015, 2016, 17. So, where's all the money gonna come from for this one Belt, one Road? And also, where's the feedback loop? Many of the investments are turning out to be not very useful. There are a lot of countries in Africa and other places that are getting loans to build projects that'll never pay for themselves. So those loans, they're concessionary, but they're still alone. So that's on, they're gonna be indebted to the Chinese. There's gonna be resentment.  Well, you know, being the United States wasn't so much fun sometimes. It wasn't easy.  You know, they're gonna start facing that as well. So what happens with Xi Jinping now? I mean, he's been successful.  The closing of the. The closing of the mind has been successful. Nobody's really complained about it. He's looking for another term, isn't he? So he's a very powerful guy. The rule has been that you only get two five-year terms. And he's beginning his second five-year term now. But the Standing Committee of the Politburo has no, contains no obvious successor because there's an age limit. And so there's a lot of talk and it's just talk. Nobody knows what's going on and side-junked on high.  I don't care what they say. Nobody knows. But if you look, you know, there's a wonderful book written in the mid-70s by a Belgian diplomat, Simone Lay, called Chinese Shadows. We can never really see what's happening in China, but we can see the shadows on the wall, like the cave in Play Dome. Anyway, so we can see the shadows. And we can see the, you know, and that's, that seems to indicate that he has no intention of leaving. Let it go, yeah.  So that's, you know, another 12 years away. So, yeah, I don't expect to see him leaving anytime soon. It really is chilling. Thank you so much, Richard, for this discussion. I hope we can do this again with you. There are so many other questions and issues. Happy to do it any time, Jay. It's a great pleasure. Richard Hornick, thank you so much.


For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Today we are joined by Cheedo Onuma, who's a Nigerian journalist. He's writer. He's also the coordinator for the African Center for Media and Information Literacy. And we are going to be talking about the end SARS protests, which have been taking place in Nigeria for the past many weeks. So the SARS is of course a special anti-robbery squad, which has been accused in Nigeria of a lot of atrocities against people, including killing, torture, all kinds of atrocities. And these have been, of course, going on for many years, but a recent incident which took place early in October. The video footage came out and ever since, people have been taken to the streets in massive numbers, especially young people. And a couple of days ago, there was even an incident where armed forces and police reportedly fired at the protesters needing to deaths. So we have with us Cheedo to talk about all this. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Yes. So first of all, I just wanted to ask right now from the reports you have been getting over the past few days, what has been the kind of, what has been going on on the ground? What has been the kind of mood of the protesters as well, if you could talk a bit about the reports you're getting from Nigeria? Well, as I said, thanks again for having me. It's quite tragic. It's quite unfortunate what's going on. And it's getting worse from the pictures and videos we were seeing. We've been asking, and when I say we, I mean civil society activists, human rights activists, those concerned and interested in the situation in Nigeria, for the president to come out and speak to the nation to let people know that we have somebody in charge. Because what is going on now from reports we are receiving, the impression you get is that nobody is in charge. So people are taking laws into their hand. It's gradually slipping out of protest into lawlessness. Banks have been attacked, media houses have been attacked. And this was aggravated after the incident that happened a few days ago when the military was deployed. And that angered a lot of the young people who were protesting and they literally took the laws into their hand. And since then, there has been a vacuum of leadership. And what it has meant is that all manner of people, of course, created by states, you call them whatever you want to call them, miscreants, hoodlums. These are monsters created by the states and they've taken advantage of the lawless situation that we found ourselves. Interestingly, the president will be speaking, he's built to speak at 11, at 7 p.m., rather, Nigerian time. That's in the next 20 minutes or so. So we'll wait to hear what he has to say. The danger is also looking at reports from other parts of the country that there are attempts, which usually happens to turn it into a regional ethnic or religious thing. And there are sporadic killings and cases here and there of killings based on revenge, on ethnic or religious grounds. Absolutely. And in this context, of course, one of the many media reports have pointed out that the protests against the SARS units, it's something that has been going on, that the sentiment is something that is not obviously just spring out of the blue. It's been a complaint, it's been an issue for quite a long time for many, many years. So could you maybe also take us a bit through the kind of record these units have and what has been their function in the state? Well, it's really not about SARS. It's about all security architecture of in neocolonial states like Nigeria, which essentially has very impressive, whether it's labor that is embarking on peaceful protests to demand for better welfare for workers and so on. The same has been the attitude of the states. They use the security forces, they use the military whenever they feel like. The SARS unit, special anti-rubbery squad units started many years ago in response to criminal activities in first in Lagos, then spread around much later, spread across the country. But over time, because the state itself has not been able to secure its citizens and citizens, not just ordinary citizens, including the law enforcement agencies. They are training, poor training, poor infrastructure, poor welfare and all that. What you find is that these people in turn visit the mayhem and violence they experience from the state on citizens.  They become the bandits themselves and use their guns to extort money from young people. And the police force in Nigeria is essentially colonial. The only thing that differentiates it from the colonial forces, the Nigeria that is in, it's in the name. So the whole question of violence, extortion, dehumanization of citizens that happen during the colonial era is essentially happening in the new country. So now what we see because of new media technology, because of social media, we get real time pictures and videos of this happening. If not for technology, if not for social media, a lot of these stories that we hear today, these violence against citizens by the police, but specifically the SARS unit, nobody would. We may hear them, but we probably won't have evidence to support the claim. So it's been a long history of tortures, violent attack by the state through its security agencies against citizens. And because the state, as I mentioned, is incapable of reining in these people, because they're also essential part of the state. The security forces have taken laws into their hand. We saw it a few months ago. Even the attack on the Shiite Muslim protesters in Abuja. Before then, a few years ago, it was the protests that brought them in contact with soldiers, and soldiers killed so many, so many of them. So the state in Nigeria has not been known to, the state in Nigeria essentially has always deployed force as a means of stopping protests and as a means of ending any peaceful demonstration against the state. So the violence that the SARS unit is visiting on citizens, it's just from the playbook of the state. And of course, there is also the economic angle to it now that they know that the state doesn't care. We have the gun, we can do whatever we want. Why not? So they go after young people, the way you dress, the way you look, they will pick you up, set your phone, ask you to send money to their account, take you to the bank to make withdrawals and all kinds of, and these reports we are coming in and piling up and nobody was doing anything about it. Obviously, the hierarchy of the police seem to have been in on it because the reports were widespread with evidence and for many years. So there was no reason, there is no way they would say they didn't know this was going on. Then it started from extortion and detention and violation of rights to then going to their stream form of death where people are unable to meet their demands, they could go ahead and shoot you, kill you, maim you and nothing, nothing would happen. So in a sense, the outrage that is going on in the country today is a response to years of hunger, of sitting hunger, of people feeling helpless. Now they think maybe rightly so that this is an opportunity to revenge or get out on a pound of flesh because up until now, as I speak to you now, nobody, not a single police officer has been indicted, not a single police officer has been called out or punished. He just tells you how unserious the state is in dealing, even when they say answers, you would think that which is one of the demands of the protesters that release all those who have been detained. Unfortunately, the releases we've been seeing so far are being done by the protesters. They are the ones who's going to the prisons or police stations to release people who were illegally detained, arrested and detained by SARS officers. So in a sense, it's unfortunate, but that's the reality is that we saw this coming. It's only a logical response to a situation that had really gotten out of hand. Yes, in this context, I also wanted to maybe ask you a bit about the policy framework of the state itself. And now you mentioned some of the economic issues people are facing across the country, respective of which background they come from. Could you maybe talk a bit more about maybe over the past 20 years or 25 years, what is the kind of economic policy framework that the state has adopted? And how is that, for instance, affected the youth who are maybe today in the forefront of protests? Well, that's really the reason for all of this. We say we have a democratic government in place, a government that doesn't listen to the yearnings and aspirations of the people. Essentially, the state in Nigeria is neocolonial and they still in tune with IMF and World Bank policies and the implementation of these policies, of course. Not just in Nigeria, across West Africa, across Africa and indeed across the world, have dire consequences and implications. Just last month, the government increased the cost of petrol and increased the cost of electricity. It was essentially a recommendation from the IMF World Bank to enable, to facilitate more loans. So there was supposed to be a protest by organized labor, late last month. And as usual, the state was able to get around labor, whether I don't know the as details, but at the end of the day, labor called off the strike. So citizens were still willing from that shock of increasing the price of petrol and increasing the price of electricity when the NSAS demonstration started. So it fed into each other, once a demonstration built on the back of frustration, violation of rights, then hinged on the diminishing economic power of citizens that you do not have electricity. You are increasing the cost of electricity when you can even supply enough electricity for citizens to use. You are increasing the price of petrol. When the roads are death traps, people can move. You're comparing the cost of petrol. Nigeria is an oil producing state. You're comparing the cost of petrol to Saudi Arabia, for example, where the minimum wage, the minimum wage in Nigeria today is less than $50 a month. You're comparing it with countries where you have minimum wage of anywhere between two or three thousand or more. You're comparing it with countries where you have social infrastructure in place, health, education. On about 70 to 80 percent of Nigerians send their children to private school. No matter how you it's private school. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's good, but at least it distinguishes it from the public school, so-called, which has completely collapsed. 70 to 80 percent, if not more of Nigerians seek private medical help when they are sick. The public hospitals are all but collapse, you know. So you have the people who have been decimated economically. There is nothing that the state offers to them in terms of health, in terms of education, in terms of welfare. And the state continues to brutalize and push citizens to the world. This, what you see today happening is just the necessary outcome of that. People are fed up, they are tired and say, we can't take this anymore.   We die from bad health conditions and so on. So it becomes a catch-22, catch-22 situation. All of this, when you put all of this together, it's just a cocktail of problems and that's what what is exploding in the country today. And in this context, I also wanted to ask you maybe say a longer term perspective question. In the sense of course, across the world, we've seen waves of protests happening in many such countries, both in Africa and in other continents as well. And many of the demands being of course similar, especially at this age, many of the demands against police brutality, against the neoliberal policy framework you talked about. And most of often the question is asked in terms of from the mass protests from the absurdities that we see happening at the ground. Is there a possibility of structured demands arising or have they already arisen, which look at say engaging say the state or the people for structural change and reform. So do you see such demands being raised? And could you maybe talk a bit about that? Well we hope so. That's the idea. It's interesting that the current crisis in Nigeria happened when people on the left are trying seriously to organize in anticipation of things like this. And now it almost caught on our worth. We find that we're scrambling to scratching our heads to say why did we keep this so late in the day? How do we take control of this revolutionary fervor that is currently going on? So it's a big challenge. It's something we are looking at, we're reflecting on. The Nigerian situation is a bit complicated. All the ethnic religious cleavages, the fault lines that were put in place by colonialism, then of course the neoliberal conditions that people live in today. So you're not just dealing with a clear-cut situation. There are a number of factors that the balance in all of this is intricate. We will have to be sure to get it right in a way that takes into consideration the sensibilities, the desires which is an aspiration of all the groups. But having said that, I think it's important to say that that's the only way to go. This unstructured, uncoordinated approach is not going to solve the problem. We've seen it before. We've known how it ended, how the state has responded. In between all of these, there have been some structured demands by civil society groups trying to highlight some of the some of the key issues that people across the country, whether in the north or in the southern part of the country, are going through. For the protestants, they've made initial demands which the states, including the needs to disband the SARS unit and prosecute people who have been found guilty of committing any atrocities or crimes, but also providing compensation for those who are victims. But that only scratches the surface in the gamut of things that ailed the country, which are essentially economic and how they deal with that. It's something that progressive forces would need to sit down and reflect deeply on and engage in a structured and coordinated manner. And I hope going forward, these are some of the things that, like people are meeting their discussions within groups in the country and also outside the country on what needs to be done less than we're hoping that this doesn't generate any further and that at the end of the day people would sit down and make these demands. The good thing about all of this is it's just shown the capacity of citizens, of young people, how far they can go in pushing their demands. It will be difficult now going forward for the states to take people for granted, knowing what they've been able to achieve, what they can do. So it's left for those who want to bring about real credible change to take advantage of this opportunity, of this opening and present at least a minimum agenda that speaks to the welfare of citizens across the country, to the economic emancipation of citizens across the country. Absolutely. Thank you so much, you know, Numa for speaking to us. We'll stay in touch with you as the protests continue over the coming weeks as well. You're welcome. Thank you so much for being in touch and I appreciate your time. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.


Hello everyone, and welcome to the annual meeting of the Global Future Councils, 2019, where – and this particular issue briefing, which is on preserving the planet's biodiversity. The session is filmed and webcast live. It's an issue briefing, so we'll be talking for about 30 minutes to get some insights from our panelists, really looking at how we can preserve the planet's biodiversity. Given that, there are a million species at risk of extinction according to the United Nations. So how can we avert a sixth mass extinction? Now, the panelists I have today on my immediate left, I have Caroline Anstey. I also have Thomas Emakora. I have Diane Bannino-Holdorf, and I have Carlos Manuel Rodriguez Echandi, who's the Minister of Environment and Energy of Costa Rica. Sorry, if I just give everyone's titles again. So Caroline Anstey, who's with the Inter-American Development Bank, Diane Bannino-Holdorf, who's a Managing Director for Food and Nature at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and then Carlos Rodriguez Echandi, who's the Minister of Environment of Costa Rica. I'm going to put the same question to everyone on the panel. Why do we need to preserve the planet's biodiversity? Why is it important? Yes, please. Thank you so much. Coming from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, I'll bring the multi-stakeholder lens to answer the question, but really from the lens of business. I think as business has recognized the urgency and risks and opportunities associated with climate change, the same is true with preserving nature. In fact, part of the opportunity here is to make sure we're not talking about these as siloed agendas. They're really very much linked. Whereas within climate, we've seen the linking of reporting through the task force for climate-related disclosures where we're capturing the costs, risks, and materiality of climate. We are starting to do the same for nature. One of the things that we've done within the World Business Council for Sustainable Development is in partnership with groups like the World Economic Forum, WWF, We Mean Business and Others, is to create a platform called Business for Nature, which is one of the areas where we'll be able to bring together the voice of business, both on the solutions and actions that are being taken, but also on the policy asks, what's the enabling environment that creates action consistently across business to really be able to take action on preserving, conserving, and sustainably managing nature and biodiversity? I'll pause there and bring in some more examples as we go. Caroline? I think I would reiterate that.  We live in societies. Societies and human beings are an integral part of nature. You take away nature. You begin to take away the air we breathe. You take away what we eat. You take away what we drink. I simply don't think that we can exist without a robust natural system around us. The problem now is we don't price in that natural system. So we have an economy that essentially rewards short-term investing, which may be antithetical to nature and doesn't reward long-term sustainable upholding and boosting of nature. And I'll come to that later. I think that we need to protect it because it's a moral imperative. As simple as that. And yeah, of course, nature underpins human well-being underpins our economy. And what is happening with nature is going to happen with us humans. This is not just losing one million or so of a species. Our consumption and production patterns is affecting the life-supporting system of the planet as serious as that. It's not separate to us. No, not at all. The problem is that we humans, we believe that we are far from nature. Yeah, we are the dominant species, but we are part of nature. This planet has seen bigger and stronger species throughout its history. They have come and gone. That may be the case with humans. If we don't react immediately to what is happening, it is very serious. So it's not just that we're changing the climate or it's not just that we're polluting the environment or losing species. We are affecting the life-supporting system of the planet. So life in the future may not be similar to what we know today if we continue this unsustainable consumption and production pattern. Thomas. So I'm going to walk in the same direction here, which is that it's a binary choice, really. Do we want to continue as humans to live on earth or do we not? I think we've estimated that there is possibly a greater threat to human life within the century as both world wars combined just through climate change. It's more of a question of life or death than I think just biodiversity. We should be the most concerned about ourselves and the best way to preserve ourselves is to by help the planet be at its best regenerative capacity. There are many, as a futurist and having worked with the XPRIZE and MIT and different organizations, the G7, thinking about these kinds of questions, I think that the shortest path to success is to see ourselves as the threatened species more than the rest of the others. We're the threatened species. Given that all of us on this panel are threatened species, what does it say? Why do we even need to make a business case for this? One of the challenges is that as many of us have said is we haven't really put a cost to nature. And so while business is increasingly at recognize that their future as ours as humans does depends on the availability of the natural resources upon which the business models depend, we have to get to a consistent way of pricing those and we have to be able to recognize those who are doing well with improved costs of capital or improved recognition and stock price while also creating equitable risks for companies who are not managing those costs well. That's really an important part of this challenge. Do you see companies are doing that? We do have companies who are starting to improve the transparency of the reporting, the transparency of their sourcing, starting to build in those externalities of both environmental and social risk of their supply chain into their internal cost basis. What we don't yet have is a consistent mechanism for looking at that pricing across sectors in the same companies in the same sector to be able to really recognize and reward and challenge those who are and are not doing it well. So there's our companies who very much are responding to the challenge. We need to put the frameworks in place that will enable us to do that very consistently across businesses and sectors, particularly those sectors that are most at risk like those in food and land use, seafoods, extractives, et cetera. I mean Caroline, you work in the in your career has been in international organizations. Are you seeing this happening? I'm seeing it happening, but what we have now with we have islands of best practice in an enormous ocean of mispricing. So we still have governments that are subsidizing fossil fuels, making fossil fuels cheaper than they need to be. We have governments that are supporting... How are they sort of... How are they making... Because they're putting money into the fossil fuel industry, the same with unsustainable fisheries, the same with unsustainable agriculture. This is public money that's going into... It's public money or it's incentives. And as was just said, we need carrots, but we need sticks as well. We need to make it clear that it's no longer the case that if you want to have a green investment, you almost have to pay more.  And the way we do that is to price in what they're called the externalities. So if you build a bridge and to do it, you have to chop down a huge swath of forest. The cost of that forest to the economy or to the locality has to be priced into the price of the bridge. So we level the playing field. Similarly, we need to know from companies their entire supply chain and we need global metrics. At the moment, companies are sometimes integrating environment and social into their programs, but they're no global metrics and they're no global standards or regulation. And without that, consumers don't know. I believe that today, many consumers will make the choice to buy the green product, to invest in the sustainable investment, but they just simply don't know the difference because we don't have transparency in accounting or in labelling and we need that. Consumers and maybe even perhaps citizens. I want to bring in Carlos Manuel because anyways, your government has been held up as being extremely progressive in its environmental policies. I mean, how have you sort of actually tackled these challenges in your country? Well, first let me say that let me give you a reality check. 50% of the nations of this world doesn't have a rule of law. There is no transparency. There is no good corners. There is no respect to human rights. There is no independent courts. There is no free press. There is no private property. There is not many things. How are these tied to the environment? Many, many very important enabling conditions. Unless we come to realize that we need to heavily invest in the transition towards the good governance models. We will be bulldozer, bulldozed by climate change and loss of biodiversity. Climate change. I'm very concerned that, you know, there is a lot of civil long rest because of what I just mentioned. And climate change will just basically add more fuel to that social unrest. And this is just going to dramatically increase in the next one to two years. It's not just the well-educated kids from the north that are doing strikes because of climate change. It's way more serious than that. And it's going to happen heavily in those countries that are trapped within this social environment trap whereby the lack of governance will be kind of the detonator of conflicts. And that is a reality. In my case, I come from a country that, when my grandfather was born in 1898, Costa Rica was probably the last developed nation in the western hemisphere. And today, Costa Rica lives longer than the average American, lives happier than any American, with a smaller, way, way smaller environmental footprint. And that has been basically because my country has been investing in all those items I just mentioned before. And I can, you know, add one more for which has been key to us that was when we abolished the army. Seventy years ago, we abolished the army in Costa Rica. We heavily invested in education and health care. And all of a sudden, you know, people come to realize that nature is part of our development agenda. Costa Rica has been able to go 100% renewable energies, double the size of our forests, at the same time that our economy tripled in the population. Have you brought citizens along with that? Yeah, of course. In Costa Rica, it makes economic sense to protect nature. As a matter of fact, we have a decarbonization plan that aims to be zero emission by 2050, where we plan to be 60% forest cover in Costa Rica. Today we are 52, and we've been restoring degraded lands, coming, bringing nature once more. That is giving us a high possibility to be more climate resilient in water, particularly in the water sector, in the energy sectors. By the same time, we've been able to create national mechanisms where protecting nature makes a lot of sense. By the way, we've got a carbon tax in Costa Rica. It's not like the northern concept where you put a tax so people will be more efficient in how they use fossil fuels. No, in Costa Rica, we've got what I call a tropical carbon tax, where it deals with the market failure of the positive externalities.  We have created a very positive incentive for nature conservation. If the payment for carbon matches the cost of opportunity or doing the wrong irrational agricultural livestock activities we want to avoid, people will protect forests. And this is what we have done in Costa Rica. It makes a lot of economic sense. So the good governance, the dealing with the market failures, which was very well mentioned by Diane here, are two of the things that has really worked very well in Costa Rica. Diane, in terms of those redressing, I guess those market failures, can you see an upside from business to do this? If we can get this right, we can actually flip economies and we can create incentives much like what Carlos was saying at the ground level for particularly rural communities where investment is actually often desperately needed. And that all of a sudden creates a very different mindset around what investment can look like. It's a little bit like the energy renewables concept. Once you flipped the switch into cost benefit for renewables, we're going to see the same thing with providing the cost benefit of nature. That's why we need the pricing models. That's why we need these mechanisms, these positive incentives, but also driving consistent governance on these mechanisms so that we can really flip economies to create business opportunity and investment on the ground. Thomas, how do you see civil society being part of this and driving this forward? Well, I think that the example of Costa Rica is obviously outstanding and I would say it's particularly outstanding because there hasn't been a particular civil society push. It's been a governmental approach for multiple generations, which of course applaud, and I wish it would be possible to mimic that in so many nations. But as the minister just outlined, the conditions for doing that in many places are not possible. So I think the way to hack it, if you want, when you don't have a government that is enlightened is to try and distribute capacity by informing citizens of what are some of the relevant policies that might be enforceable in their own geography, be it regional, national, city at the city scale, et cetera, or bioregional, and to sort of equip them with that sort of knowledge and to take part in activist actions that cripple governments' current actions, especially when it concerns indirect or direct subsidies to hurting or creating negative externalities in business in general. So I think that if you look at what Extinction Rebellion has been representing, especially in the UK, so I'm currently producing a documentary about the founder, and not so much because I want to support Extinction Rebellion itself, but I think it's important that we are looking at what are some of the tools that we have at our disposal when we cannot use the normal legitimation processes and we need to sort of create a new process. So Extinction Rebellion is interesting in particular because of its theory of change. So Roger Harlem is a learned academic, and he was the co-founder, and he really looked into how Gandhi, Vandela, and Martin Luther King's techniques of nonviolent civil disobedience can be instrumentalized through, call it, targeted incidents that galvanize public opinion. So we need to learn from history, and one way to look at this is to say that for a long time we were only willing to, let's say, put our life on the line for our civil liberties, but now the right to life being connected to biodiversity and planetary regeneration capacity, things have changed. And so that's my opinion about civil society. We need to give them the tools to think correctly whether it's through the climate reality or other information tools that we might have. I think non-scientific is better. It's not about the facts anymore. I think we know that we're doing the wrong thing, and we should be able to stop what is obviously poor for the planet. And then there are levels of graduation. I think there's an obsession with data and science, which has been very important to prove the point against climate deniers, but I think we're past that. So we need fast actions. Caroline, how do those fast actions happen? I just wanted to come in on this term, market failure. It's one that we use. I actually think this isn't about market failure. I think this is about the fact that we have a skewed market. It's not that there's somehow some gap and the money can't reach, or we can't support biodiversity, is that the system is tilted to discourage any long-term investment. So how do you tilt it to... I think you tilt it back through regulation by making companies integrate environmental, social, governance factors and making that public, by disclosing information so citizens and consumers can see who's investing one way, how products are made. But I think the really important thing, and I think the first step should be that government policy has to change. We've talked a lot about business. I think that governments have to change in terms of subsidization. And what is interesting now is the first time, I think you're seeing demand from young people, from millennials, from long-term investors, that now you see the business roundtable in the U.S., you see some governments realizing they will not stay in power and businesses will not meet their shareholder demands unless they change their fundamental models of the bottom line. And the bottom line in just short-term profit is not going to be enough anymore. Can you see there are some countries which are doing brilliant work on this? We're very pleased to be joined by Carlos Manuel, but are there other countries where you can see these tipping points, these changes happening? I think there are many countries that are doing this, whether they're moving away from coal-fired generation or they're changing their agricultural policy. I see other countries that are doing less, perhaps at the federal level, but where the localities are very, very active. I think in the U.S., for example, the cities movement and indeed the cities movement all around the world are taking action. And I think that is a product of the fact that we now have much more citizen participation. And in the end, people will have to respond to that. But I think that I really think we have to stand up there and talk about, and Davos has talked about this, a new form of stakeholder capitalism. And what that really means is that nature has to be a stakeholder as well as humans, as well as the physical environment, the economic environment, the social environment. We can't just think of our economies in the old way. Thomas, I'm going to come to you in just a sec, but we have a few minutes left. So if there are any questions, could you have your questions ready, Thomas? Very quickly, I just wanted to say how excited I am, but what you just shared, because stakeholder-led capitalism is something we probably can only perform today with the tools that we have, the tools of the Fourth Industrial Revolution or however we decide to call them. So through blockchain, crypto, artificial intelligence, and a number of, let's say, new uses of the way that we treat data, hopefully more ethically over time, I think there's a great opportunity. So we're faced with one of the greatest challenges ever. At the same time, we do have the tools at our disposal, and I think the work, for example, of the Rocky Mountain Institute that I helped as well, and Amory Lovens or others who've been writing about natural capital for some time, is finally, it's possible to perform that switch, and I'm tremendously excited by that. And I want people to at least feel that they can place hope that we have the instruments of change. So you actually are optimistic? I don't think it's about that. I want to be optimistic. We can come back to other remarks from the panel, but I think we have a question here from... Yeah, I'm Kerry Thomas. I work for a media company called Tortoise based in London. I wanted to ask the panel specifically to address sort of real world live question, which is the Amazon rainforest. Given your concern, Karen, about mispricing, and given what you said, Manuel, about the need for political engagement, how...what sequence of things might start to price the Amazon rainforest correctly? And is that the first step? What's the order of play that gets into the right place on the rainforest? Well, I would really love to hear Carlos' response to that, because he has to deal with these issues in real time. So let's hear. So what we saw this last year in the Amazon is what is happening all over the tropics. It's not just the Amazon. First point, it's happening in Sumatra. It's happening in Madagascar. It's happening in the Congo Basin countries. It's happening in Cambodia. It's happening in Mesoamerica all over the place. And forest fires are used by humans to do land use change to put land on the production, even though the conditions of soils may not be suitable for large-scale farming and agriculture. And why is this happening? Because there is not an international market for carbon credits at all. That's the only option the owner of the land or the country does has. And unless we agree on Article 6 on the Climate Convention, we will continue having global deforestation at the levels that we have them as of today. If we are unable within the Climate Convention to fully agree on how we will implement Article 6, the signs that we're sending to the private sector, particularly to the big agro business and to other sectors within the business community is that the business, as usually, is there and they can continue doing that. So that's one issue. But it's not just the lack of Agreement Article 6, which is the main thing. It's also the price for carbon forests. The few funds that can really mobilize resources for carbon payments are paying $5 a ton. And that is an insult to any nations with pride and decency. In Costa Rica, it costs us around $17 to $20 to generate a ton of carbon. And our carbon is high-quality carbon. It's not like that regular carbon coming from three plantations with exotic species. The carbon that we generate in Costa Rica is Gurbain carbon associated to biodiversity conservation and human well-being. Nevertheless, they offer us $5 a ton. Why $5 a ton from a high-quality carbon generating Costa Rica and somebody's paying $80 a ton for a cement plant in Switzerland? I don't get it. So if we don't fix that problem, we will have a major situation because without the carbon forests of the tropical countries, we will never, ever achieve the 1.5 degree. And global deforestation is happening as usual. Probably this year where, you know, forest fires increase more than 80% in the Amazon country basin. So we need to deal with these issues at the same time that good governance, particularly on the environment and for the sector is extremely important. We keep on having big issues on how we manage natural resources from the government perspective. We divide governments and agencies within renewable and non-renewable natural resources. In Costa Rica, I'm the Minister of Energy and Environment. I don't have a Minister of Energy to fight with. We are able to really set landscape policies and that has helped us a lot. And please don't get the wrong impression. Costa Rica is not an example. We got a mess. We are a huge mess in our country. Pollution is crazy. Transportation is very inefficient. But we've been investing in the institutional governance part of it. And we will solve this problem in 10 to 15 years. But again, my point here is you need to really invest in what I will simplify as a good governance. Thomas, if you make just remarks, very brief, because we have one more question. It's on the same kind of vein. So I fully agree with Minister here about the need for a fair carbon pricing as it being essential. However, I think there's no silver bullet as to how we're going to deal with the Amazon. And I think it's important for us to speed up piloting of new types of initiatives that leverage the fourth industrial revolution tools. And in particular, I think if we can set price on land using cryptocurrencies and in general blockchain processes for fundraising and crowdsourcing, donations from around the world, I think we can speed up the process to empower indigenous communities to defend their soil. Because it's really, it's not just the price of carbon. It's the livelihoods that are attached that motivate them to do the wrong thing or to give in. So I think indigenous groups to me are the number one vector of change in the Amazon and in most of the endangered forests because they hold the keys to Stuart forest. They've done it for a long time and it also links up with human rights and decency. I sit here on the council for human rights and the fourth industrial revolution. So there's a deep link here and I think decorrelating those issues is a wrong approach and also really testing things quickly that are currently not being done at a not national scale but rather sub-regional scale where you have, for example, the mayors that can push for this rather than national governments. That's my opinion. Okay. Last question. Thank you. Thank you, Max. There's not a question really. It's more of an observation. I come from Singapore and I work for the Straits Times. One of the things, you know, taking up from what you said about vectors of change, I find the millennials as huge vectors of change. In fact, one of our big commodity companies based in Singapore's Olam International, you'd know that company very well. He's our chair. Absolutely. He's your chair. So your chair, Sonny Berges, tells me that a lot of his thinking on sustainability was driven by what his children told him. Dad, you have an opportunity to do something about it. So I think if we bring the millennials into the debate from the ground up, we'll have pressures building on companies to do the right thing. Should we almost turn that into a question and say, how would you bring, okay, I mean, if we could, if I could have very, very quick remarks. Just to say, extension of going is mainly is very millennial related and also the sunshine movement. So absolutely. I think that was part of the civil society question asked. I think the millennials already very involved. And I see it on the business side, businesses and banks are rushing to get into impact investing because millennials want to make sure their investing has purpose. And I think companies are finding now that as a part of a recruiting deal, they have to be able to offer purpose. They cannot attract in the war for talent. They cannot attract the talent unless they stand for something beyond their bottom line. So I think we're seeing this pressure from the bottom up coming. And I celebrate it. I rejoice at it. It's timely. And we have to ride that wave now and take that opportunity. As Caroline just referenced, millennials are recognizing their power in the workforce. And I think equal, like we're seeing in civil society, they are even in larger numbers in companies. And what Sunny has also shared is that yes, while much of his awakening came from his children, what he's really hearing loud and clear is from his own employee base. We see that across all of our company members. That's where we're going to see huge drives, both with what it takes to create solutions within the business, because they're starting to move into the types of managerial positions where they can have impact with their voice, but equally through their expectations and where they choose to put their time when they go to work. Carlos Manuel, very brief. Well, I will say that not just millennials should be putting a pressure to the companies as, you know, consumers, they should engage in politics very, very quickly. I mean, otherwise, there won't be any planet left to them. They need to understand that they're not just consumers. They got a political responsibility. And they need to step up and begin positioning the environmental issues within the political discourse, campaigns, plans, and operations. And that is not happening. If I want to run for president in Costa Rica just on climate change, I won't make it. Probably we'll have, you know, one percent of the votes. So we got an issue there as well. We need them to be, you know, politically responsible, step in, and do their political career as well. Thank you. And in your country, we have to stop there. But thank you. Thank you very much.


Like today's video, give it a thumbs up, consider subscribing or let me talk about this time sensitive. But that's it for that section of the news. Now, if you wanna stick around, I'll answer all your questions the best of my abilities and we'll go over there. Maybe we'll talk a little bit about Satoshi VM stuff. Now, let's see what you got and that's it. Beardy had a pretty good tweet today. The Leonardo DiCaprio one with the McDonald's tab. Very funny, excellent job, Beardy. Thanks for the news. Dave, any new AMP updates? I haven't heard anything. Seems to be a great community. That's all I really know. Die-rich digital media says boomer. That could be me. I'll take it. Helium on Solana. Yes, exactly. A thing about Kusama. No, again, my stance is pretty much the same about most products that are out there. If you, pretty much whatever you own, it's probably gonna be pretty well on the boom market. That's pretty much it. Aristotle Players says Robby allowed to support Trump without getting demonetized on YouTube. We'll find out, huh? If I say Biden or Trump, and we'll see which one who bans me first. Die-rich digital media says I love you, Robert.  Let me tell you, since I've been in since 2017, people love to tell me how much of a mourn I am and the different trades that I do. I am okay with that. Look, man, it just is what it is. Some people like to get a little risking. Some people do not. I do a little degenery, degeny stuff, which I share with my little private group, but that's about it. Juxty's Rob, how about you help me find property in PR? In return, we can go to Smokehouse. I'll be buying it in line of first-remember, all the rounds. Good news, I have a couple of real estate agents that are top-notch and I'll introduce you to them. And they'll show you all the different fantastic commercial and retail housing units that you could can check a stick at. So yeah. CBK says you could have very easily doubled whatever money, but holding Tron as easy as you could with Bitcoin, but since everyone has a Bitcoin Maxi, it's true. You could have 5X, 7X'd, if you just would have bought everything at the very lowest part for Solana. You could have done that. You could have made like a 50X. Man, maybe not 50X, a 30X, if you would have just dumped everything into bonk. It's just one of those things that, of course, you can do it, but it's all about risk-first reward.  If again, now someone disagree with him, it's true. Look, I've been doing this for a while. Some people have their opinion. That's what makes the world go round. Everybody's got their opinion of what they think is correct. People do fall for anything. And they also have a very poor memory like Goldfish, and they forget these things. James is sensitive. James isn't sensitive. James just likes to put information out there, and get things rolling. Ah, Michael says, what's your cycle top prediction for Tia? I have no idea. I have no idea. But boy, Celestia guided a great video a couple of days ago on it. I highly encourage everyone to go and watch it. Did you know that the founder and creator of Celestia was, he hacked into the CIA, CIA or FBI a couple of times, and that's his claim to fame. Fantastic computer programmer apparently. And they got into, he got into Bitcoin around 2010, as a matter of fact. So this guy's one of the OGs of the space. Looks pretty good. Glad I'm dollar-cost averaging it. That's a crypto-esque wire. Your free speech and crypto, I have to agree. Helium network for Solana's mobile token. Now I don't really know the difference actually. I think it's HNT. Let's take a look. You can see that. Actually, it's right over here. Helium HNT, but if you do a search there's one that comes up. I think you're thinking of this one. Maybe you're looking at a helium mobile. This is ranked 197. This is also on it, helium.com. Ba-ba-ba. Where'd it go? Tokenomics. Let me see over here. Ba-ba-ba. Let's take a look at that. What is the, let's take a look here. 230 billion total supply. This was launched recently. Man, flat, flat, nothing. And then all of a sudden, let's see. Oh, look at that. Helium follows me. Who to thunk it? Okay, gotcha. Interesting. Got 10 miners of helium-easy money. Wow, helium mobile is free money basically. FD white is in here. Everybody check out his YouTube channel. Good stuff. Yeah, you're in mobile token on the helium network. Yeah, okay. And then Pat Freeman says, I'm back with a truck on Solana, which is not a bad play. That's good stuff. Great, just learned something new every day. Rob won Lambo from Sweatcoin, probably never. It seems like Sweatcoin is a stable coin. It doesn't really move too much at all. That's a shame. Rob yelled it and Rob doesn't yell. Hey, Banerjee is there. This gentleman is doing great work over on X and trying to get all the scammers out. Many, we salute you. What's that saying? I don't see it as a, guys, I don't, no, I gotcha, it's okay. I try not to ban anybody. The only people I ban is the scammers. That's about it, spammers. Besides that, everybody's got their own say. Even if you disagree with me, that's what makes the world go round, right? Rob's how's your back? It's pretty good. I'm able to stand up. I'm able to do a little light jogging and all those things. If you've ever had a herniated disc where essentially your, between your two vertebrae columns, the disc essentially ruptures, it's pretty painful. But no surgery, just therapy, prolozone and some other magical stuff in the back. Only takes three months, three months of rehab. Not bad, huh? Nas is here.  It's a funny thing. Because the rentals, if anybody wants to know, first of all, you can do short-term rentals on Airbnb. That's great, it's fun, make a decent amount of money. But at some point, things sort of slow down, competition just really heats up. It's just like Bitcoin mining, essentially. There's just too much competition out there and you're like, you know what, this isn't really working out for us too well. So on three of our properties, we actually sold one. In the second property, we're renting it out at the end of this month for a long-term renter for six months, which is great because you have a long-term renter in there and it just month over month over month just comes in there instead of having to make sure that everybody's happy there, Airbnb, people come and making sure that the cleaning crew is available and making sure that everything works right and all that stuff. I mean, it's more profitable, but yeah. So as far as rental properties in PR, there's plenty of them. The thing is, though, is that it's saturated. It just really is. But if you know how to like maneuver, it works out pretty well. That's why I like to diversify. That's funny, Bill. Who hasn't? Oh, thank you. I'm gonna send you an AARP. That's okay, man. I have already got an AARP. They send me emails all the time. Ben's chair is here. Yeah, my son's got one. He's got a helium miner. You don't want a miner's rob, a helium miner where it paid for itself and the altcoin hasn't even started. I know, that's what's crazy. I've got a node with playable and also a hypercycle for the AI play. That'll be okay. Oof, number three. No, man, that'd be great. I gotta get Jerry back on the show. Jerry's a real gem. Yeah. Is Solana a goodbye? I mean, I'm buying it every day, but I'm also buying Bitcoin every day and Ethereum every day and some other things every day. But yeah, I think it could do well for me. I mean, I don't know, unless there's some kind of black swan event, I don't see it really dropping to below five bucks or 10 bucks when it was before. New day residences. What happened to days when you saw with XRP? Man, when I got in, I loved XRP. It made sense to me. It just did. But now with, I mean, look, if you win a case against the SEC and they come out and explicitly say that you are not a security and your price still stays that stable over time, something going on, that's all I can say. And people believe in it and I've still hold some, but I'm not gonna buy any more, I'm done. There's a lot of other things out there that I think will do better, but you're welcome to hold it and see what it does. I mean, who knows, it might do awesome. But to me, I always think like it's just a, like I never understood the idea of just doing one thing. Like I got a brother, he's all into gold and it's gold or nothing. He's like a dumber Peter Schiff. But when I'm talking to him, I'm like, I guess, man, sure. And I never understood the whole theory.  But some people, like, even like Warren Buffett will say, you know, sometimes it's not good to diversify, just go all in. It's, that's fine. If you're, you know, a financial savants and you can pick the right plays, but if you go all in and say, like, I don't know, BitConnect or Luna, then didn't really work out so hot. So maybe you should diversify. Let's see. Nice to catch a last human lunch, that's good. See, every month that comes out of escrow, but then, you know, the XRP community will say, no, no, no, but then, you know, things get taken out, but then they put it back in and there's only so much that's in like, I don't want to deal with it. Just seems like it's just a constant drop. That's a good idea. When my boys already had 10 miners pumping out mobile token, just gives his friends or family a little money to let it run at their houses. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Eric says, anyone know the flap about Tia, Celestia? And it's less than promised airdrops. Something like farming airdrops later was run, of course. And that was hot for about a month and then all of a sudden it's kind of died out. I even tried it, but I'm like, you know, I was gonna do videos about it, but I'm like, damn, there's just so much risk to it. And then you have to connect your hot wallets.   I'm like, ugh, forget it. Forget it. Red Panda Pie. I was wondering about boxable long-term durability. You know, someone who has one or any feedback, I don't know anybody who has one. That's the thing about, we had the founder and CEO, boxable on a couple of weeks ago. Looks like a great product, but it's been out for like a long time. And, you know, I mean, they've sold a bunch of their products to the government, but I don't know if it's really rolled out to the general masses. But every time I hear about it's like, it's coming, it's coming, it's coming. So I'm like, well, I'll see, but I don't know anybody who has one, quite honestly. New Day says, do you do a, pre-search knows it all? No, I don't, I don't know. I don't pre-search or do, or do you mean do you do research on nodes? I'm not for sure what you're asking. Chris says, herniated. Takes around one to three. Jesus. One to three years to heal. I had three shots like medication, physical therapy. Took me two years of being pain-free. Man, I gotta tell you, I'm doing pretty good. It took that long. Not bad. Not bad. Frank says, so the show, you have an erection of where to buy mana. Let's find it. Best way to do it, Frank is, I go to CoinGecko and you're looking for essential and mana. And what I do is I, is a little document here, or a little link that says markets. And the markets, you can take a look here and you can see, well, I don't know where you're at. If you're in the US, you're kind of screwed because unless you can get into Kucoin. But I've got a feeling, oh, it's on Coinbase. So, if you're in America at Coinbase, but here's where they all are. Kraken, I think it's everywhere. It's pretty good. So, yeah, I would just go there. I mean, and Binance is in there, so it's Binance or Kraken or Coinbase. I don't see any, aha, they have it on Uniswap too. So, even if you don't have access to any of those centralized exchanges, you can go to Uniswap. And if you're looking for ways to do that, I just did a video a week ago. It was the DEX how-to manual, updated over 2024. Links, or the video is here in YouTube somewhere, or you can just go to danteagescrypto.com, my website is 100% free and all those videos are there. I had someone tell me XP will reach $50 after the court case. It never happened. To be fair, it could still do that. I'm not too sure, but also to be fair, how bullish was everybody before the ETF came about? Everybody was. Even I was, I didn't think it was even gonna get, actually get passed and it did. So, Rob, what hot wallet do you use to keep Bitcoin? I don't use any to keep Bitcoin in a hot wallet. What's the point? I don't do that. I just keep all my Bitcoin in cold storage. It's been much, much easier. Tangem or LA Powell or Ledger, take your pick. I use all three of those. Cow with a K. Any ideas on scale? Scale's a good project. And actually we talked to them to launch our game Flappy Bird. And it's a gasless chain and it's super fast and does really great stuff and we've talked to the team and it was almost a fit. It just didn't, didn't materialize. We picked another chain and we think this is gonna work out much better for us, but we also will probably be launching on scale as well. So we'll be multi-chain and it just works. So yeah, I've actually bought some and I hold some. Banners broke, it says, Rob, do you know why the reason why the fees are different on hardware wallets to send Bitcoin, different between Ledger and Tangem for instance, just whatever they set. And it's just actually whoever they partnered up with. Like if they partnered up with Junkie MoonPay, you're gonna pay a lot of money. MoonPay is the biggest gouger of prices in this whole industry, quite honestly. Okay, you can say a centralized exchange, but that's really ridiculous. And like a lot of people use them because they're like, it's the only game in town. But Tangem, and I talked to Tangem like, just don't use those guys. They are price gouging. And I don't know which one they went with, but I don't really do much in there to like do any kind of swaps because it's a cold storage device. But yeah, it's just set by the manufacturer and whoever they pick up. Hopium turned copium. Nas says, XRP never made sense to me. Banks used derivative contracts to prevent currency volatility for foreign exchanges. Banks not going to use more volatile crypto for dealing with client money. It's true, but there was this one part about the ODL and on-demand liquidity and how they were able to actually move funds across borders because it was a very inefficient method by using Swift, which was created in the 1960s. So I kind of understand where they went with that, but I see what you're saying here, but I mean, it has a use case. The question is, are the token holders really going to see that price appreciation as time goes on? I don't know. Thoughts on the side? Nothing, I don't know it. So probably do great. Eddie's here. Rob, what are your end of 25 prediction for MATIC? Do you guys want to see a price prediction? Of course, everybody loves that, even though they're worthless. That's okay. So I want to steal this from Ben again. Aha, found it finally. So what was the question? MATIC, right? We can take a look at these risk bands. This is what the risk bands tell us. And of course, they shift in time. So it could be a little bit higher, it could be a little bit lower. But right now, chain, how does this chain like? This is not right, sorry. Polygon, wow. Polygon is as far as key risk levels, it's at 0.1 and this goes on a level between zero to perfect 1.0, 0.02 to 1.0. Right now, like for example, as far as risk levels go, Bitcoin's like 0.5, like right in the center. So like it'll probably appreciate and it gets heated up at one, it's 105,000. That's the price prediction for right now, essentially. If you take a look at polygon, the risk level is very, very low for where it's been. That's pretty good. That's, I'm glad I'm dollar-cost average in this thing. So 0.1 and it's saying at 0.5, it's at four bucks, that's pretty good, 0.66 dollars, 0.78 dollars. Around 0.75 is when I would start to think about, really think about taking profits, 0.85, 14 bucks. And at one, which I don't think it'll hit, but maybe 21 bucks, there's your answer. Those are always interesting. I should do a video just on that. People love it and I couldn't be blamed because I'm like, that's on Ben, that's his website. Just kidding, Ben. Ah, let's see. Jay just right, cold storage, ecological generation health, wealth, I gotta agree there. Thank you, Slack. Cal, the K, Robbie saw if anything lady, decided I wasn't gonna go up. No, I didn't really strike me as like this is the time to do it. The only last thing I can remember, like taking a big profit was bonk, that was about it. But I still think bonk has a ways to run. Oh, actually, would you guys like to win $5,000? This is not AI generated. Hold on real quick. Stick with me, you're gonna like this. Right, oh, so, these guys. So if you look at, if you go to CoinGecko under categories, they have Solana Meme Coins. This is what I got. They have a category called Solana Meme Coins. And number one is bonk with a market cap of $690 million. Second is dog with hat, which I actually bought some of my little money, $403 million. And the next one is Myro. And thankfully it's down 10% in 24 hours. That's fantastic, $178 million. Doesn't matter. So Myro reached out to me. I'm like, hey, man, can we get a video? And I'm like, I didn't know you guys. Look at that for a month. Geez Louise, how about three months? And I said, I don't know you guys. I said, well, we can, you know, we can compensate. I'm like, ah, I don't really like doing that because then I gotta disclose that stuff. And I said, hey, how about this?    Probably not. But like just for reference, I talked about this today on NFA life. This is my portfolio. You can see on the top Bitcoin, how much I have, it's a lot. And the rest of the stuff, I mean, goes down. And where it says other 67, I have 67 other types of cryptos. Is that too many? Properly. Am I gonna sell them all? Absolutely.  That's it. That's the rub. And now no one can say, ah, Rob's dumping on his community. Oh yeah. And they're all the tokens I'm gonna give you for free. So the only thing that I'm gonna have you guys do is you're gonna have to have a Solana wallet or a Solana address to where I can do this. And I just gotta figure out the logistics of it. But if that sounds like something you want me to do, we'll do it. And it's gonna be about $5,000 worth of those tokens. Let me know if you'd like to have that happen. Eddie. Eddie's got a great platform which I don't talk about enough. AWR Shield. And it's aw3shield.io. And what it does is it shows us like the different, like good and bad influencers, essentially. Which is pretty cool. Which I have 143 votes out of everybody. And you can rank these people by good or bad. And I have, hey, all right, I got 137 trustworthy votes and six shady votes which is not bad. Randy also known as Miss Teen Crypto has 102 trustworthy and two shady votes. That's crazy. I don't think I've ever heard her talk anything also about Bitcoin. Coin guy has 11 trustworthy votes and no shady votes. And Wadi, 23 and zero. And you can just put, you can add an influencer, you can search the profiles and you can find everything about them. And then you can go from there. Hey, what did James get? Oh, 11 and one. That's pretty good. This is a fun game. What did Tom do? What did Ben do? 11 and one, huh? Tom, nine and zero. Zero? I think you should have at least one shady vote from somebody. Just kidding, Tommy. Pepe Army, there's a lot of people, a lot of work in this one. And yeah, I checked that website out. aw3shield.io. Right, Eddie? That's right. Pat says, who wasn't dumping on someone at some point? Yeah. Oh, that's right. He says, Andy, get paid in crypto for reporting scams and scammers. I think Benny would be a millionaire already doing that. Excellent work. Tom is AI. Hey, if everybody could do me a favor, Tom Crown is really trying to get to 100,000. I guess when you get 100,000, you get a check mark, which you got to ask for it. I haven't asked for it, but he really wants that check. So if you could do me a favor and go to Tom's YouTube channel, just Tom Crown and subscribe would help out. Thanks. Thanks, Rusty. I'm that's the one. Hi, Yaro. Yeah. And then of course, if we do that, which we're gonna do it, it'll probably be on Dan Degen. I can't do that on this channel. It's very degenerate, but I'll talk about it and we'll bring it over there. And it'll probably be a live stream. So everybody can just get those, get those Solana tokens out. Oh, okay, it's not mine. I'm an admin. Oh, that's great. You can, if you guys want to, you can cut up that section of the video and stick it on Twitter or X or whatever you want to do for the socials and blast it out. You guys are doing good stuff. Thank you. Bonkers. You can download this green screen on Fiverr, matter of fact. That's a good question. Banner's Broker says, hey Rob, gaming is a really hot topic. Is Matic and Avalanche the winners or take it just more time? What's your honest opinion? My honest opinion is a new opinion, quite honestly. It's not a really well done one. If you would like to get professional opinions, there's Crypto Stash, Spaggy, well that's not even totally correct. There it is, there's Johnny Hussle from In the Game and my man, excuse Martinez. If you want to know like the good ones to get into, you gotta watch Jesus, he's really good. And I mean, all those guys are great. But also on this video right here, one thing that's great about Jesus is he got kicked out of the Gala Educator, whatever club that they have, because he was talking about price action and they just want him to talk about solely the games and whatever else, which I can understand from a legal standpoint. But instead of me getting like really ticked off and like, well, F Gala and that's whatever else. He's like, you know, they're still a good company. It's they still make great games and I'll still keep talking about them. I was like, that's a W in our industry. Excellent work. So yeah, watch those four guys. All I had to say is yesterday I had Ed Chang on from Avalanche, the interview. And he gave some pretty compelling points as to why Avax is running away with it as far as like for gaming. But listen to Asus, he talks a lot about Immutable X. He talks about Avax and most of other different things, playable and such. So yeah, listen to those guys. I don't know about that one. Eric says, Rob, is there anyone in the space you follow for real world assets and deep pin? No, I mean, Guy and his group have a pretty good lock on what it was. He just did a video on deep pin. And I think he did one like three weeks ago on real world assets. That's pretty much where I get it. Cause he's got a whole team that just does research on it. And it's really well put together. That's where I go. Also, he's also got this coin bureau club, which it's a paid club, but there's a lot of good information behind the paywall. So that's all I can tell you. Not a surprise, a lot of community doing everything and pumping its own coin. Look, Frank, you know, any community can do that. If any community wants, here's, I'm gonna make this as an open pledge. If any community wants to come on my channel and give me tokens that I will not keep, that I can give away for free, have at it, man. I will give everybody free tokens all day long. Every single stream doesn't matter cause they're free. So that goes, you know what, clip this and make sure that you clip the part where I say I'm not gonna keep any of it.  Narutu says, please talk about Beam. I, we and Ed Chang talked about Beam as a matter of fact. Looks like a fantastic project. And they're working together with their substrates for Avalanche. So, or the subnodes probably do fantastic, great. I need to actually look into it, maybe start buying it. Who knows? What are you doing a meetup in Australia road tour? That's one of the, I haven't really gone there. I've never gone there. I should go there. I'm sure my wife would love to go. Guy is underrated. Guy isn't, well, he's not that underrated. He's got 2.3 million subscribers. He does pretty well. It was me, Ben and Guy after the show today of NFA and he was showing us, we were going over some of the influencers that have fallen from favor, we would say. And they're, and cause he's got this section where it takes a look at the views. And he's just said, yeah, we're talking about these people. And then he's like, hey, you know, if it's not for, if it wasn't for, for a coin bureau and altcoin daily, he goes, those are like half of the views for all the crypto channels that are out there. And then they do like, between the two of them, they do like 300,000 views a day, something crazy like that. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Yes, that's a good one. Let's check trueflation. TRUF, all they rolled their token out. That's more like business to business stuff, but let's see, where did it go? Here it goes. This is aggregated though. Let's see. I'll do it later. Look at that. 1.86% the government part of it is 3.4%. I know people will say like, well, who cares about trueflation because that's not what drone Powell is going by. This is true. He's not going by trueflation. He's going by his own internal reports, but when we take a look at this, we can kind of see where things are going. And this is pretty much up to the minute, well, up to the day of what the real inflation report is. Wow, that's crazy. 1.86%. Mission accomplished. We'll see. That's good news for us. Let's see what it's like for the UK. Hey, it could be worse. Not too bad. Excellent stuff. Thanks for the reminder. Let's see. What I miss. Do you see Bitcoin going on a 35K by March? Sure. Let's hope so. You know, because the dollar cost average buys happen automatically on Coinbase for me. So I hope it does go that low or lower. Frank, thanks for the thoughts, Rob. Just makes me dislike or believe in community. Look, man, that's the way it is. Rob, when you're going to chat with Paul Barone again, go to the guys. Paul's busy. I think he's doing a great job over there. Eddie says, Rob, I got a picture with you. I don't remember. I don't know. Was this at London with the guys event or was this here in Puerto Rico? Usually one of these things. Yeah, thanks, Mike. Can you do DCA? Yeah, it's not easy. John says, I kind of missed the show with James on it. Yeah, we talked about it today, as a matter of fact. It was me and Ben and Guy. It was during the show. You'll see it when we talk about it. And I was, because I took one of James's charts and I said, ah, this is back in the day when we did the DCA Live. And I said, remember that, Ben? He's like, yeah, it was good times. I go, yeah, it was fun. Like I would just get to sit back and watch James and Ben debate on where things were going. It was always fun for me. Money printer. Jason, what's your take on soul? Is there ever a fan of no hold on any and that works down a few times in the past? We've centralized, but it was quite a run in the last few months. You know, it's either decentralization, it's either security or scaling, the trilemma, right? And, you know, so I did a great job with scaling and security. The decentralization, debatable. But it's more decentralized than say a bank, I guess. So, yeah, it tends to be doing pretty good. Now, maybe like Casper, who claims that they've solved this will be the next big thing, I don't know. But right now, I kind of ride in the wave and if you've used it, you know what I'm talking about. As far as like a DEX and also NFTs and like Magic Eden, it's fast, it's cheap, it's quick, it works. Wix says, so the ETF was sell the news. Having isn't sell the news too. Yeah, we took a look at it yesterday and usually like before the halving, you'll see a drop off. So, don't be surprised if it drops off and just say, well, it's par for the course. What news narratives do we have after that? You've got the same gamut of news narratives. World War III, inflation running up, rate hikes, rate cuts, the federal government's stepping in to take your pick of whatever nonsense is going on. Hyperinflation, disinflation and of course, unemployment and GDP and recession. So just take your pick, there's always something to worry about. Color films, Ben and James are fire and ice. Not really, I mean, we all got along. It was just that our communities, they, we clashed, the communities clashed so much that it was like, I'm kind of unnerving every time we did a show. So we're like, what's the point? We're here to like help people and everybody's being complaining. So we're like, yeah. So we split for a bit. They got a great show. We got a good show. Everybody's happy. Good summary, all sounds like bad news. Now, I just put a negative spin because I've learned that if you're negative and things work out pretty well, no one seems to blame you.  Why didn't I go up 100X? You lied to me. So now you just say, eh, why not do so great? But in the back of my head, you know what I'm thinking? Keep buying because very soon it's gonna go crazy. That's it for today. So look, everybody, thanks so much for taking the time to stop by. Appreciate it. Remember tomorrow, say I want smokeouts. You want to stop by, first beers on me. That's it for today. Thanks so much everybody and I will see you on the next one. Have a great day. Thanks. Bye.