The BS Filter by Cameron Reilly & Ray Harris

March 22, 2024 BS 124 – The Truth About The TikTok Ban

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Today we delve into the ACTUAL reasons behind the US attempts to ban / force a sale of TikTok. And we also look at some newspaper headlines and break them apart.

Transcript

BS 124

[00:00:00] Cameron: Alright, yeah, both of you give me a one, two, three, one at a time, Ray.

[00:00:15] Ray: One, two, three.

[00:00:18] Tony: Oh, is that how you do it? Okay.

[00:00:19] Ray: I don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. I really don’t.

[00:00:24] Tony: Four, five, six.

[00:00:27] Cameron: just to be clever. Welcome back to the Bullshit Fielder episode 124, recording this on the 22nd of March, 2024, uh, with me today, um, my two, uh, but you know, this is like a threesome, uh, rare

[00:00:46] Ray: An intellectually threesome. Yes. Yeah.

[00:00:50] Cameron: wife number two, Ray Harris, and, uh,

[00:00:54] Ray: been demoted.

[00:00:55] Cameron: Wife number three, Toni Kynaston. Um, I feel like, like a fundamentalist, uh, Mormon right now with everyone.

[00:01:05] Cameron: Get Chrissy in here and it’ll be scary.

[00:01:07] Tony: Well, I only get Cameron on Tuesday, so now I’m being promoted, I get Friday as well.

[00:01:12] Cameron: Big love. Once a month, once a month on the Friday, yeah.

[00:01:16] Tony: right.

[00:01:18] Cameron: Um, alright, well, um, Tony, Tony had such a good time last time he was on the bullshit filter. He said he wanted to come back and, and Ray’s happy because it means he needs to do even less work. Which, uh, less than

[00:01:32] Ray: that is correct.

[00:01:34] Cameron: Negative

[00:01:35] Ray: Negative. Yeah. Negative one third.

[00:01:38] Cameron: We’re going to cover a couple of stories today.

[00:01:40] Cameron: We’re going to try to anyway. Uh, we’re going to talk about the TikTok ban that’s happening, not just in the US, but there’s hints that it’s going to happen in other places as well, like Australia. Uh, we’re going to take a newspaper headline, a front page of a newspaper each and, and deconstruct it. And we’re going to talk a little bit at the end about China’s economy, so let’s, that’s a lot.

[00:02:03] Cameron: I’ve got a lot of notes here, so we’ll see how we get, how far we get. Who wants to start with the TikTok ban? Who wants to be the first cab off the rank? With that?

[00:02:15] Ray: Well, I do know this. Um, the House of Representatives have passed a version. The Senate is working on their version, which it means if it passes it, we’ll have to go to the House to then be reconciled. Um, it will be in committee for a while, so if it is going to happen, it is going to be still quite some time down the road, and even if it does pass the current bill, say, we’ll The company has six months to divest themselves.

[00:02:39] Ray: And so for the people in America who are freaking out like me, cause I pretty much give it, it’s my new crack cocaine, uh, Tik Tok is. And, um, so if it does happen, it’s not going to happen right away. But, um, again, I guess it goes to the very fundamental. The question of, you know, for, um, freedom of speech, um, we all know that Facebook steals our, our, our, our information.

[00:03:02] Ray: They sell it, whatever. Is TikTok doing anything else that any of these other social, uh, companies are doing? Are they just doing it for the Chinese government? So it’s a whole bunch of shit. There’s a lot of people in America who are absolutely pissed, even at the idea, the, the chance that this could go through.

[00:03:18] Ray: What are y’all hearing on your side of the pond, of the

[00:03:21] Cameron: I know why. I know why You like TikTok rage. I just realized it because they call it short form content and

[00:03:27] Ray: Yes. It matches me perfectly.

[00:03:30] Cameron: Yeah, yeah. Just you have loyalty to anything that’s short.

[00:03:33] Ray: in fact, in fact, most of the TikToks are too long. If I had to complain about anything, but yeah, yeah. Short and

[00:03:40] Tony: well, I mean, if someone, someone of our, some of the Raise Vintage and Our Vintage is on TikTok, is it dead anyway? Is it going to last six months? Really?

[00:03:49] Ray: Yeah.

[00:03:49] Cameron: yeah, that’s true. That’s what Taylor keeps telling me. TikTok’s dead. Anyway,

[00:03:54] Ray: Well, what’s

[00:03:55] Cameron: this is, this is a really, I don’t know, um, uh, shorter, shorter form content.

[00:04:00] Ray: Just a tick. Just a tick. Tick. Tick.

[00:04:03] Cameron: just the tip, just the tip. That’s what it’s going to be. Tip, tip, tip top is going to be called. Just the

[00:04:09] Ray: We’re going to be rich.

[00:04:12] Cameron: I found this, um, really interesting to dive into because I think what we’re looking at here is a whole bunch of conjoined interests.

[00:04:25] Cameron: When, when you do the Quibono. Follow the money, who benefits? There’s a whole bunch of parties, I think, that benefit from this, overlapping interests, conjoined interests. So, and I, because obviously we’re trying to answer the question, well, why is this? Well, I mean, okay, so there’s the official story, which is China bad, China spying, etc, etc.

[00:04:48] Ray: Right.

[00:04:49] Cameron: If we accept that, that, at least, if that is true at all, at all. As the reason for it, it’s only one of the reasons for it, and you start to look at who benefits, or who would benefit from this. It becomes quite fascinating. There’s a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, I think. But, before we talk about the US, uh, Tony, are you aware of the Australian, uh, calls to ban TikTok coming out of the coalition’s cyber security spokesperson, Senator James Patterson?

[00:05:21] Tony: I am. Yeah, I actually, actually found a list of all the countries in the world that have banned TikTok. I’m just trying to find it now, but they fall into two camps. One’s like in Australia, because TikTok’s banned for government employees in Australia, which it is across all the five I’s. So, Canada. New Zealand, us, England, I think India’s the fifth member, anyway, they’re all banned on government issued phones and tablets.

[00:05:48] Tony: And then there are other countries who generally have a problem with China, anyway, countries like Pakistan, Taiwan, Nepal, who have banned TikTok as well. So, you know, that’s It’s a thing, but I agree with you, Cam. I think this is one of the, this is a case of, you know, there’s a hundred or a thousand issues crossing the desks of politicians all the time.

[00:06:14] Tony: But as soon as someone with a bit of money spots one and thinks, I don’t really care about TikTok, but I can get behind this because it suits me. That’s the one that gets prevalence and gets traction. And, uh, so I think you’re right. I think, um, I think it, you know, the traditional line is a media hype.

[00:06:30] Tony: Social media because it’s stolen their news feed and subscribers are down because they’re going to, they get free news from Google, they get free news from Meta or TikTok or whatever. So they hate it. Um, so it’s a divide and conquer strategy by them, but also too, if ByteDance has to divest, which is kind of an interesting strategy to take by the government.

[00:06:51] Tony: No, we don’t want to get rid of TikTok, you just have to sell it. Well, who’s going to buy it? It’s probably Facebook. So you get concentration in the social media space. You’ve got concentration in the traditional media space and they do a deal when everyone’s happy. So that’s, that’s what I think is behind all this.

[00:07:06] Cameron: Yeah, I agree, Tony, and I think there’s some other parties there, but the large media companies is definitely, I think, one of them that has an interest in this. But just getting back to the Australian guy, I had a laugh at this, Senator James Patterson, who’s been on this, you know, for a couple of years. He, um, said that, uh, data on the more than 8 million Australians who use TikTok could be used to build a very sophisticated picture of our society.

[00:07:32] Ray: Hmm.

[00:07:32] Cameron: the fear. They might build a very sophisticated I was thinking, well, they could just watch Neighbours. Are we going to ban China from watching Neighbours? I mean, like, he won’t and he also is talking about TikTok having alternative ownership, so. I mean, just the fact that China would need to Our number one trading partner, who owns half of the country now, would need to use TikTok to develop a very sophisticated picture of our society, I find.

[00:08:04] Cameron: Just

[00:08:04] Tony: Yeah, or they’re trained.

[00:08:05] Cameron: statement to make.

[00:08:06] Tony: And the other argument I’ve heard is it’s going to be used by China to train its AI. in um, English language. I’m like, mate, if you’re not trying an AI based on Australians watching TikTok, it’s gotta be a very skewed picture. Good luck to you,

[00:08:21] Cameron: here’s one of the main arguments I had against the official narrative of this, is when you drill down into it, there seems to be very little backing it up. So the official story, of course, is, you know, China’s spying, or might spy, or could be spying on Americans. But, when they had congressional hearings and the CEO of TikTok was on the, on the, you know, the, the, whatever it is, what do you want when you’re being in a congressional, he’s not on the stand, but, he’s being, he’s being questioned, he kept saying to the Congresswoman I saw, Or a senator who was challenging him.

[00:08:57] Cameron: He was like, I’ve seen no evidence that this is actually happening. Do you have any? She was just going, oh, I find it very hard to believe. And he kept saying, well, where’s the evidence? She’s going, well, I’m just sure there is. And so I, in nothing that I saw, was there any evidence? But anyway, we’ll get into that.

[00:09:14] Cameron: So a bit of background for people that are confused about this, because I was. Trump. So this started under Trump back in 2020. Trump said he was gonna ban TikTok, and he signed an executive order in 2020 saying he was gonna ban TikTok, gave them a period of months in which to either sell their business or do something, um, as well as WeChat, wasn’t just TikTok, it was also WeChat, and he also had the thing with Huawei, Huawei.

[00:09:46] Cameron: where he was banning them and they, the Canadians grabbed the chief financial officer or something of your way at the time. Um, the Chinese government at the time called it a smash and grab forced sale and, and I, I tend to agree with that today. I think that’s what this is at the end of the day. I think it’s a smash and grab.

[00:10:06] Cameron: They’re basically just trying to figure out a way to crush TikTok and steal it, you know, for a, buy it in a fire sale. Um, they, the, the TikTok fought against Trump in the U. S. with this. They claimed he was doing it as retaliation for TikTok campaigns against his reelection. And they were given a preliminary injunction by the courts against Trump’s order.

[00:10:36] Cameron: So they, the, the court stopped his order and then he left government. So it all kind of, you know, fell off the radar sort of in January 2021 when Biden was sworn in. About six months later, Biden signed an executive order revoking Trump’s ban on TikTok, but ordering the Secretary of Commerce to investigate the app to determine if it did indeed pose a threat to U.

[00:11:04] Cameron: S. national security. Now, we did some stories about this at the time, I remember a few years ago, and one of the things that, um, we found at the time was that Facebook, or Meta, Facebook’s parent company now, Zuckerberg, had paid, uh, Public relations firm that had previously worked for the Republicans to, uh, according to, I’m reading this from the Washington Post’s article.

[00:11:31] Cameron: This is going back to March, 2022. It said, Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok. The campaign Includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and drawing and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor.

[00:12:04] Cameron: These bare knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry where companies vie for cultural relevance and come at a time when Facebook is under pressure to win back young. So we, you know, we know that Meta is running a campaign and whenever you see this, situation where claims are being made, but when you ask for evidence of the claims, there are none.

[00:12:34] Cameron: And people just go, you know, don’t look into my eyes. Don’t look into my eyes. Don’t look into my eyes. Don’t look around my eyes. Look into my eyes. Look at my eyes. It immediately, I’m like, Oh, okay, what’s going on here? And then you combine that with Meder, among others, probably are running a massive. PR campaign trying to convince, you know, a lobby government to do this.

[00:12:55] Ray: yeah.

[00:12:56] Cameron: starts to smell, it starts to smell very quickly, very, uh, badly. So anyway, so, uh, Biden did this thing, um, said that they had to, the Secretary of Commerce had to investigate it and that’s been going on. Now, meanwhile, late last year, the state of Montana banned it, but a federal judge Again, stopped it, called the measure unconstitutional.

[00:13:19] Cameron: So then, now they’re trying to do it via Congress. They’ve got this thing called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act

[00:13:27] Ray: Wow.

[00:13:29] Cameron: that passed 352 to 65, as Ray was indicating before. Now, and this is interesting, they’ve done this before. Now, um, I know you would have followed this much more closely than I did, um, Ray, but in March of 2020, they forced the Chinese owners of Grindr to sell the application, um, because of its connection to China.

[00:13:57] Ray: Can I just say, worst day of my life.

[00:14:00] Tony: Is that why Ray’s smoking a pipe now?

[00:14:03] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:14:03] Tony: He’s thinking

[00:14:03] Ray: That’s all I got. That’s all I got to do with my hands.

[00:14:07] Cameron: yeah, and your

[00:14:07] Tony: And your mouth.

[00:14:08] Cameron: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:14:10] Ray: Thanks, Tony. Thanks.

[00:14:12] Cameron: Tony’s just slid right into the, uh, right into the tone of this podcast. So easily, isn’t he?

[00:14:19] Ray: little too easy.

[00:14:25] Cameron: So, uh, a Chinese company called Kunlun, Had acquired a hundred percent ownership of Grindr. Uh, well, it was 98. 59 percent actually of the company. They had to sell it, uh, because of, you know, basically the government came after them. They, this is great. They sold it to a US based company called San Vincente Acquisition LLC, March 2020 at a valuation of 608.

[00:14:51] Cameron: 5 million. Less than 18 months later, Grindr went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Guess what the valuation was at that point?

[00:15:05] Ray: Bye.

[00:15:06] Cameron: 1 billion dollars. Went from 608 million to 2. 1 billion dollars in under 18 months. November 2022, they went public. Now the way they went public is great. It was, they didn’t IPO.

[00:15:20] Cameron: They, it was via a SPAC. Tony, explain to everyone what a SPAC is.

[00:15:27] Tony: You can’t say that anymore, Cam. No, it’s a special acquisition, special acquisition, special acquisition company. So there was a thing back in the last sort of tech boom, especially around COVID, where In Australia you couldn’t do it, but in America you could, so it’s called listing a cash box. So basically it’s taking a fund, which doesn’t have anything in it, just the cash that’s been put into it by investors, and then IPO ing it, listing it on the exchange in the US.

[00:16:00] Tony: I think the law allowed them to have, I think, two years before they had to invest and buy something. And that’s one of the reasons why tech companies went for a run around that COVID time, was because you had all this money sloshing around that had two years to find something to acquire, and they were overpaying for things, basically.

[00:16:20] Cameron: It’s like the craziest fucking story. The way these things work, people just sink, you know, a couple hundred billion dollars into a vehicle, float it, it’s got no business, no cash flow, no nothing, but they go, Eh, we’ll buy something. And the deal was, yeah, you had a period of time you had to buy something, otherwise you had to give the money back to investors. So, um, a particular SPAC at the time called TIGA, T I G A Acquisition Corp, based in Singapore, uh, Why? Hmm, who knows. Um, acquired Grindr, and then, um, you know, it was publicly listed, like, bang,

[00:17:02] Tony: Mm-Hmm.

[00:17:03] Cameron: Um, now, I went into details. Who owns San Vincente Acquisition? Who owned Tiger? Surprisingly, Uh, I’d buy the same guy, um, a guy called Raymond Zage, who’s, um, now got something to do with Australia, according to his Twitter feed, but, um, he was the founder and CEO of Tiger Acquisition Corp, and also part of the San Vincente Partners Consortium that acquired it, um, so they, It, the shares, when it, when it went public, the shares went from 10 bucks to 70 bucks. And then there was a lot of selling and it quickly dropped to 4. 60. But

[00:17:50] Ray: when I’d get in.

[00:17:51] Cameron: where it’s been ever since. Yeah. No, you would’ve got in at 70 and it’s going to the moon and it dropped down to 4. 60.

[00:18:02] Ray: Sell, sell, sell!

[00:18:03] Tony: Well, and I guess the other question is, cam, we can’t track this, but did, did Raymond make many donations to a political, uh, party in the US to one of the packs over there?

[00:18:15] Cameron: yeah, possibly, I mean, I, I didn’t drill down that far, you can track some of that stuff. The point here I wanted to make is that, um, the, the, the Chinese owners were planning on floating grinder. Um, couldn’t. Shut down by the US government. So then Americans were able to acquire Grinder, bump up the valuation, float it.

[00:18:43] Cameron: Somebody sold a shit ton of shares at 70 bucks. Um, I’m not, I don’t know who, but I’m not casting aspersions, but somebody sold a shitload of shares and it was only like, uh, 500, 000 shares available in the public float. I mean, the rest were all, you know, Owned by the people behind the acquisition, the SPAC.

[00:19:08] Cameron: And, um, yeah, and, and a lot of people lost a lot of money. Obviously the people that bought in between 10 and 70 were deeply underwater and a lot, and, and the people that own this thing made a lot of money.

[00:19:21] Cameron: So, my point is that we’ve seen this before and, and in that case, it does very much look like it was a smash and grab to get this Chinese IP floated and somebody made a shit ton of money out of it. So the question then is what’s this really all about, the TikTok one? So, national security, as Tony pointed out, It’s already banned on government phones all around the world.

[00:19:41] Cameron: Um, corporations, if they have concern about security, can ban it from their phones. What’s really the national security concern when it comes to consumers phones? There’s this idea that, oh, they, they, they can develop this picture of what Americans are talking about on their phone, or they can maybe malware in the app.

[00:20:05] Cameron: But as part of the whole Trump thing. TikTok spent a shit ton of money to migrate all of their US customer data over to Oracle. And it’s a thing called Project Texas, because Oracle’s based in Texas. Um, and they’ve already done all of that. They’ve transferred 100%, supposedly, of their US customer data to Oracle’s cloud.

[00:20:30] Cameron: So, the first question, and, but, but now they’re claiming the, the Congressional hearings and all the Senators are claiming, We have leaked reports that the CCP is still getting access to all of U. S. customer data. So the first question I would have is, great, we’ll put the Oracle, put Larry Ellison, put the Oracle team on the stand and ask them, Well, how are they getting access to this?

[00:20:55] Cameron: You’re supposed to be controlling the security of all of this. Funnily, Uh, no one’s asking Oracle to provide evidence that the Oracle system that was put into place to protect US data is failing. The only thing I could see, uh, like no one from Oracle in the congressional hearings, uh, I think it was, uh, New York Times article said they reached out to Oracle for comment and Oracle declined. So surely if, if they’ve, if TikTok have spent a ton of migrating everything over to Oracle to protect the security of the US data, and if they’re suggesting that’s not working, that’s on Oracle.

[00:21:40] Ray: Yeah.

[00:21:41] Cameron: They should be forcing Oracle to divest its shares. But there’s no talk about that. I mean, unless I’m missing something.

[00:21:48] Cameron: Did you see anything about, Oracle being questioned about why the CCP is still getting access to US data?

[00:21:54] Tony: nothing.

[00:21:55] Cameron: would be the obvious question, right?

[00:21:57] Tony: of articles about that particular issue and, and uh, there was one from USA, a story from USA Today, and the quote is, uh, these threats are not theoretical, that’s the threat of data access by the CCP. In 2022, ByteDance admitted its China based employees brazenly access sensitive TikTok geolocation data to monitor American journalists.

[00:22:22] Tony: And they go on to say, this and subsequent revelations make clear that TikTok and other Chinese technology platforms are morphing into fully fledged state instruments of surveillance.

[00:22:33] Cameron: But that was before they migrated all over to Oracle.

[00:22:36] Tony: right. Well, I was gonna, I was gonna make the point that, um, do they, did the Chinese government really need to access TikTok data to track people?

[00:22:48] Ray: Thank you.

[00:22:50] Tony: If they do, you know,

[00:22:52] Ray: Yes.

[00:22:57] Tony: they don’t have ByteDance’s data, but they seem to be pretty good at tracking down and surveilling people.

[00:23:03] Tony: So I think it’s a bit of a spurious argument myself.

[00:23:07] Cameron: I agree. And, but I, I want to point, I, I get the security concerns. I’m not, I’m not, Pissing on the idea of, you know, security concerns and also the idea of foreign media, foreign media ownership. If you accept that TikTok is a media

[00:23:24] Tony: Mm hmm.

[00:23:26] Cameron: and a lot of people, like apparently half of America, has TikTok on their phones and particularly with younger 20s, they’re on TikTok all the time.

[00:23:35] Cameron: So it is a place where they get news. I mean, mostly. Dancing, and lip syncing, and comedy, but, but,

[00:23:45] Ray: That’s how I like my news. Yeah. That’s how I like my news. Yeah. Today.

[00:23:49] Cameron: to have, we used to have foreign media ownership laws. In Australia, until former Prime Minister John Howard scrapped them in 2007. And just, you know, I amped up cross media ownership, so you can only owe 2 out of 3.

[00:24:04] Cameron: And there was this, when that happened, there was this big, um, gobbling up of media in Australia. We now, you know, Most of our media is owned by either News Limited, Rupert Murdoch, or Nine Entertainment. Um, is News Limited a foreign owned entity? Um, I think probably it is. Rupert’s an American citizen. And that leads me to the next one.

[00:24:34] Cameron: America used to have laws against foreign media ownership as well, which is why Rupert Murdoch needed to become an American citizen when he started acquiring television stations to build Fox back in the 90s. He owned newspapers in the U. S. before that, uh, but in order to own TV stations, he needed to be an American citizen.

[00:24:53] Cameron: But then they got rid of that. The U. S. got rid of that 10 years ago as well. So 10 years ago, America said, you know what? We don’t need to worry about foreign media ownership anymore. We can scrap the foreign media ownership laws. Um, But now all of a sudden, we need to ban TikTok because it’s owned by a foreign adversary, which is a whole other thing.

[00:25:15] Cameron: I wanted to ask, when did China become an adversary? I thought they were your number one trading partner slash manufacturing outsourcer. Now all of a sudden they’re a foreign adversary. I guess they can be both. By the way, up until last year, Forbes, Magazine slash website was owned by a Hong Kong company.

[00:25:38] Cameron: Um, Hong Kong was also China. Um, but they only hold a minority stake today. There’s a German company, Axel Springer, that owns Business Insider and Politico. Um, so you still have, you know, foreign media or media organizations in the U. S. owned by foreign companies.

[00:25:59] Tony: And you can reverse Well you can reverse your argument about Rupert Murdoch and say he’s an Australian. I mean is it, if, if those other companies you mentioned, if their CEOs took out US citizens, if, if Xi Jinping took out US citizenship, he’d be able to buy, uh, media companies in the US. I mean, it’s a bit of a technicality.

[00:26:18] Cameron: Yeah, yeah, they might, uh, they, they might have to take a hard look at that if you try to become an American citizen, or any Chinese, any Chinese citizen. Could do it.

[00:26:28] Ray: right.

[00:26:29] Cameron: So, look, the whole security concerns thing I find, again, and when the CEO of TikTok asked them to present evidence, they just sort of, uh, rolled their eyes, they couldn’t provide him with anything, so, I haven’t seen any evidence for this, apart from, there were some claims that, uh, there were some leaked emails from TikTok employees saying that the CCP was still looking at it, But, you know, how much of that is real versus Meta’s PR campaign is difficult to tell,

[00:27:03] Tony: Well, there’s an interesting article I came across when I was doing research on this. It’s by our old friend Alan Kohler in The Guardian. And he, he, um, is Rallying against TikTok, I guess. I guess, you know, traditional media person rallying against TikTok. What’s new there? But he paints two reasons for that.

[00:27:24] Tony: One is the TikTok pixel, which he, uh, which he says, I’ll quote, All social media collect web browsing data on their users for advertisers to better target their ads. And while TikTok does that, it also gathers email addresses, phone numbers, locations, the destination of phone and video calls, the device’s metadata and more.

[00:27:48] Tony: It’s like a listening bug in the person’s home, as well as a GPS tag in their car, without their knowledge or consent. Permission is given in the T’s and C’s, of course, but no one ever reads them. So, he’s saying that TikTok goes further than the other pixels that are used by Whatever else. Um, but you know, the counterargument to that is, he’s probably got Alexa in his phone, listening to everything he says anyway, so,

[00:28:14] Cameron: which

[00:28:14] Tony: I’m not buying that one.

[00:28:16] Cameron: built in

[00:28:16] Tony: Um, but the other point he made, and this gets back to your, why is the conservative coalition in Australia against TikTok, um, he talks about, um, the fact that there is a, He says, right now, TikTok appears to be favouring pro harmless videos, and during last year’s voice referendum campaign in Australia, it appeared to favour the no case.

[00:28:36] Tony: So he’s also mounting the argument that TikTok is biased. And I think that’s what’s getting the conservative side of politics in Australia excited about TikTok and it being banned.

[00:28:47] Cameron: So that’s the second argument that is being made in the U. S. is that their TikTok are using their algorithm to influence the views of young Americans about political issues like Ukraine, like Gaza, and ostensibly the upcoming presidential election. So there, uh, the Department of Energy and Commerce that Biden told to, to do an investigation of this, I read their report.

[00:29:18] Cameron: One of the things they said was a recent office of the director of National Intelligence, ODNI report showed that the CCP was using TikTok to target political candidates and influenced to 2022 election cycle. But I went to the ODNI. Report that they referenced and when you go to that report, it just says that TikTok accounts run by a PRC propaganda arm reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the U.

[00:29:51] Cameron: S. midterm election cycle in 2022. So they’re not like, so when you read the, the energy and commerce thing, it suggests that they’re hacking TikTok to influence stuff. No, they just set up some fucking accounts where they were doing TikTok videos, which they could do if it was owned by Americans. Like,

[00:30:10] Ray: Yes.

[00:30:11] Tony: Which happens on Meta. I

[00:30:14] Cameron: everything.

[00:30:15] Tony: welcome, you know, recall back to the Cambridge Analytica controversy during the Trump campaign. It’s the same deal.

[00:30:22] Cameron: And again, this is, this is sort of my point here, is when the department that has been appointed by Biden to investigate this for the last three years, in their official report, building a case for it, that’s the best they can come up with? And they, and they kind of give you, like, their report goes, well, the ODNI found that, But when you go and read the report, it’s a fucking nothing burger in the report.

[00:30:53] Ray: Whoop!

[00:30:53] Cameron: just the skinny, if that’s the best they could come up with after three years, is well, they set up some fake accounts on TikTok to try and influence, like really? That’s it. That’s what you’ve got.

[00:31:08] Tony: But also too, my rebuttal to the alleged bias with TikTok is, thank God, because the mainstream media is full of pro Israel stories. So, of course, you know, the other side is going to get squeezed in too. Doing TikTok videos or, or, you know, making their points known through the Guardian or whatever else they do.

[00:31:28] Tony: Of course they are. There’s no room for it in mainstream media.

[00:31:31] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:31:33] Ray: Well, it’s like you said, um, like you said, just, excuse me, it’s like you said a second ago, Cam, it’s a, it’s a sexy headline with a nothing burger inside the actual details, and that’s where you have to go is check out the details. So, yeah, it’s tantalizing as long as you don’t read the report. And on a side note, didn’t Rupert just recently get married?

[00:31:52] Ray: I’d like to wish him and

[00:31:54] Tony: He’s about to.

[00:31:55] Ray: bro a good bow too. I hope they have, um, all the happiness and, and for decades. Decades to

[00:32:01] Cameron: many happy

[00:32:02] Tony: He’s marrying a, he’s engaged to a Russian. So,

[00:32:06] Ray: that should be illegal. That should be illegal. I’m sorry. I don’t know what, I don’t know anything about it. I’m sure

[00:32:12] Tony: your media, your foreign media ownership laws, they’re like a wet paper bag over there. Come on,

[00:32:17] Ray: if you got enough money, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t freaking matter. And going back to,

[00:32:22] Cameron: media ownership laws. That’s my point. They scrapped

[00:32:24] Ray: we got rid of, well, they get in the way of making money, and that’s what America is all about. And going back to Cam’s question about China, um, And I think we’ve touched on this before, but World War II and the Cold War really shaped America.

[00:32:37] Ray: We don’t really know where we stand, unless we have an enemy. They don’t have to be a real enemy, they just have to be a declared by us enemy. Then we have something to focus on and it justifies our massive military budgets. But, again, the um, The reverberations of Cold War, uh, Cold War history will be with America for a long time.

[00:32:58] Ray: If it’s not China, it’s gonna be somebody else. We have to have an adversary because if you don’t, then you’re just left with trying to have a good life and America doesn’t do that very well. We need to be fighting. We need to be pitted against someone.

[00:33:15] Cameron: Well, I can tell you who your adversaries are because I looked it up. So, as I said before, this new congressional act is saying that they’re gonna ban any app that’s owned or controlled by a foreign adversary. My first question is, when did China become a foreign adversary? I couldn’t figure out. Um, when, the closest I can come, I could come, to finding out when China was first declared a foreign adversary by the United States was during the Trump administration.

[00:33:47] Cameron: Uh, to the best of my knowledge, that’s when they suddenly decided China was a foreign adversary. Now, according to the definitions, a foreign adversary is a nation or an entity that poses a strategic, military, or economic threat, to To another country’s national security, interests, or values.

[00:34:06] Ray: Right.

[00:34:08] Cameron: So, any country that’s competing with you, economically, is a threat to your economic interests.

[00:34:15] Cameron: And therefore, could

[00:34:17] Cameron: be, could be declared a foreign adversary, seems very loose sort of an argument. Now the US, of course, is a strategic military and economic threat to every country on the planet, so I hereby announce that Australia has declared the US as a foreign adversary.

[00:34:37] Ray: Right back at ya.

[00:34:39] Cameron: now, I want to, I know people are going to be thinking this, um, Steve Sammartino says this all the time, he’s very anti China, married to a Chinese woman.

[00:34:48] Cameron: He says China already blocks many foreign media outlets, social media platforms, other websites, Facebook, Twitter, Google, you know, the BBC, CNN, Wall Street Journal, Time, New York Times are all banned in China.

[00:35:03] Ray: Mm hmm.

[00:35:04] Cameron: Uh, Reddit, Snapchat, et cetera, et cetera. They’re all banned in China. So he is always like, well, fuck China.

[00:35:11] Cameron: We can ban China. China bans Western apps. We can ban China’s apps and it’s all good. Fair enough, we can do that. But when they do that, we accuse them of censorship. It’s an autocratic, they don’t believe in freedom of speech. It’s autocratic, it’s outrageous when we do it.

[00:35:32] Ray: Yes.

[00:35:33] Cameron: do it, we go, well, it’s national security.

[00:35:37] Ray: it’s measured. It’s measured. It’s thoughtful.

[00:35:40] Cameron: when they do it, they say it’s national security. You’re trying to, you know, Western media organizations are trying to infiltrate our society. We say it’s outrageous. When they do it, we say, eh, you know, it’s fine. So there’s this thing called the code of foreign, uh, CFR. And they have a determination of foreign adversaries.

[00:36:04] Cameron: Here’s what it says. The secretary has determined that the following foreign governments or foreign non government persons have engaged in a long term pattern or serious instances of conduct significantly adverse to the national security of the United States or security and safety of the United States persons and therefore constitute foreign adversaries solely for the purposes of the executive order this rule and any subsequent rule.

[00:36:29] Cameron: Here’s the list. The People’s Republic of China, including the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Two, the Republic of Cuba. Three, the Islamic Republic of Iran. Four, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, aka North Korea. Five, the Russian Federation. Six, Venezuelan politician Nicolas Maduro. Just Nicolas Maduro.

[00:36:54] Cameron: The rest of Venezuela’s fine, it’s just Nicolas

[00:36:57] Ray: lovely people.

[00:36:59] Cameron: The other name, the unofficial name of this list, is the list of countries the US failed to overthrow in the last 75 years.

[00:37:06] Ray: Yeah, we don’t like that. We don’t lose

[00:37:08] Tony: ha ha.

[00:37:09] Tony: ha.

[00:37:10] Cameron: You’re now a foreign adversary. Cuba, for fuck’s sake, what? What is Cuba’s military or economic threat against the United States? Like, is it Cuban cigars? They’re trying to infiltrate the country with good tobacco? Well aged tobacco? I don’t know.

[00:37:29] Ray: That’s the best I got is the cigars. Yes.

[00:37:33] Cameron: Okay,

[00:37:33] Cameron: so

[00:37:34] Ray: don’t like to lose. Yeah.

[00:37:37] Cameron: up with. Um, number one, tech companies. I’m gonna, I’m gonna drill down into these a little bit, but tech companies. Big tech companies, particularly Meta, the Military Industrial Congressional Complex, the MIC, Jewish lobbyists, and, uh, large media organizations.

[00:37:59] Cameron: And the politicians that get funded by all of the above, right? That’s who stands to benefit as five, five basic, uh, conjoined groups here, I think. Now,

[00:38:12] Ray: brokers of America. Yeah.

[00:38:14] Cameron: yeah. Um, you know, we were talking about Meta’s campaign against him before. ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is often described as the world’s most valuable non public startup.

[00:38:30] Cameron: Last year it was valued at 300 billion.

[00:38:34] Tony: Oof.

[00:38:34] Cameron: publicly listed, but they plan to, they plan to IPO in China. Um, but of course, if they lose the U S market, that’s probably going to be more difficult. Uh, but if the U S if some U S organization, it’s not just Meta, there’s also the Trump’s former treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, who, you know, he’s talking about putting together.

[00:39:02] Cameron: He said, he’s already got a group of investors ready to jump in and buy this. Well, yeah, of course you do.

[00:39:08] Cameron: Wow.

[00:39:08] Ray: me last week. Yeah.

[00:39:09] Cameron: Trump was trying to ban it and Trump’s former Treasury Secretary is ready to buy it.

[00:39:15] Tony: Well, Trump’s flip flopped. He’s in favor of it now. He doesn’t want ByteDance to be sold.

[00:39:20] Cameron: we will talk about that too, I’ve got stuff on that, we’ll talk about

[00:39:23] Tony: do I.

[00:39:24] Cameron: Right, so, most valuable non public startup in the world, um,

[00:39:31] Tony: you need to add, sorry, excuse me Cam, you need to add Wall Street investment bankers to your list because if ByteDance lists in China, they don’t get a taste, so they would be against it too.

[00:39:44] Cameron: yeah, good point, your Goldman Sachses, your Morgan Stanleys, all those guys. We’re going to underwrite the, but it’ll probably be a SPAC anyway. They don’t have to do a traditional IPO. It’ll just be a SPAC. Um, in terms of the threat to Meta, I looked up a number of, uh, studies on where TikTok ranks, um, in terms of social media, penetration, hours, all that kind of stuff.

[00:40:11] Cameron: Globally, they come in at number three. After Facebook and YouTube, but, uh, they, they, they sometimes appear lower down in the rankings, like number five, but that’s when the studies break out various Facebook properties. So you have Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, et cetera, which are all owned by Facebook.

[00:40:34] Cameron: So if you merge them all together, it’s number three after Facebook and YouTube. Um, it’s the fourth most popular social platform in the US, but Again, the top three are all Facebook properties. So it’s actually number two in the U S and as I said before, almost half of the population in the U S are on Facebook.

[00:40:57] Cameron: And obviously it’s a major threat to Facebook’s revenues. If it’s gobbling up. As much, uh, user minutes as it is, user attention. So, it’s a threat to Facebook, and it tends to be capturing a lot of the younger demo, which is probably a pretty big advertising demo. Facebook’s playing back well with its, it’s like, reels and that kind of stuff, but it’s got a long way to go.

[00:41:23] Tony: That’s what I was going to say. Imitations of, the fact that Facebook launched Reels suggests that they see TikTok as a threat.

[00:41:30] Cameron: Yeah! And, you know, we know basic capitalism is, if you can’t beat them, buy them or kill them, right? And they’re trying to do one or the other here. They’re trying to kill it or buy it. And I love the, the US politicians position on this. This is also in the secretary of the energy and commerce paper.

[00:41:50] Cameron: They’re like, Hey, we’re not trying to ban TikTok. Don’t come after me saying we’re trying to ban it. We’re not trying to ban it. We’re just trying to force them to sell it. It can still be around. If China doesn’t, if the ByteDance or the CCP won’t allow them to sell it, that’s on them. That’s not, that’s not about us, that’s on them.

[00:42:11] Cameron: By the way, Chinese government has said that any sale of TikTok would have to comply with their law on tech exports, exporting Chinese IP, and they may just shut it down and say no. Like the US government is preventing American companies from selling chip technology. To an AI technology to China, China can go, fuck you.

[00:42:35] Cameron: You’re not getting out TikTok. And then it just, yeah, just ceases to exist.

[00:42:41] Tony: That’s, that’s an interesting curveball. Where does the Oracle data sit then?

[00:42:45] Cameron: Yeah, who owns the

[00:42:46] Cameron: Oracle

[00:42:48] Tony: and is there a

[00:42:50] Cameron: They don’t have, they don’t have the algorithm.

[00:42:52] Tony: if we if we see Steve Zuckerberg walking out with a very big hard drive from, from the data

[00:42:58] Ray: One into each arm. Yeah. Tackle that guy. Yeah.

[00:43:04] Cameron: So drilling down into, um, some of these other, so the, the military industrial congressional complex. So if, if TikTok, if the content on TikTok is turning young Americans in particular against continual support of the war in Ukraine, against continual support of Israel and the genocide that they’re committing in Gaza.

[00:43:26] Cameron: Then that’s a threat to the military industrial congressional complex. I didn’t call it that. Um, Eisenhower called it that. If you have an issue with that, take it up with, uh, President Eisenhower. Um, And you know, I tend to, as listeners of the show know, I mean, my, my, my basic premise of the way that the U.

[00:43:47] Cameron: S. economy works is that it’s largely driven by the military industrial congressional complex. These are the issues that tend to drive a lot of the big ticket items. Like wars, you know, Ray, you said earlier that we need an enemy. That’s because the M. I. C. needs money. And the easiest way of extracting money out of the U.

[00:44:06] Cameron: S. Treasury, uh, It’s to say, Oh, we need to go and fight this war over here. Or we need to prepare for a war over there. You know, you know, the, the Pentagon’s budget is like one third of the US budget. And that money goes straight from US taxpayers to all of the tens of thousands of companies that, uh, benefit from Pentagon contracts.

[00:44:28] Cameron: So. Um, I, I see that this is a threat. Any, any media platform that’s a threat to U. S. ‘s geopolitical warfare, be it military or economic warfare, um, needs to be shut down. The Jewish lobbyists will get to. Um, Tony’s talked about, that’s part of the whole Gaza thing. Tony’s talked about large media oil goods and Wall Street bankers.

[00:44:52] Cameron: But when you get any situation where you have multiple, very powerful interests. All having a united view. You know what it reminds me of? The Kennedy assassination. we, when you look at, you know, who killed Kennedy, if you don’t believe the official cover story, you know that, well, the Mafia wanted Kennedy dead because they felt like he fucked them.

[00:45:16] Cameron: They got him elected and then he fucked them on Cuba. Yeah, thumbs up. Um, LBJ wanted him dead. Because he was about to kick LBJ off the ticket. He was running for re election. They hated Johnson. They were going to kick him off the ticket. Johnson’s lifelong, when you read the biographies on Johnson, um, you know, his lifelong dream was to be president and he was in his 60s.

[00:45:39] Cameron: He knew this was his last shot. So, he needed to, you know, he needed to stay on the ticket. Best way to stay on the ticket was to have Kennedy dead. Um, the CIA hated Kennedy because he was talking about, um, defunding the CIA because they fucked him over Cuba. Um, the Cuban emigres wanted him dead because he gave up on overthrowing Castro in Cuba and pulled out.

[00:46:06] Cameron: Um, the, the American military wanted him dead because they felt he’d fucked them on Cuba as well. Uh, uh, J. Edgar Hoover hated him. Because he was, you know, trying to fuck with Hoover. Um, he was one of many presidents that tried to fuck with Hoover and his brother as well, Bobby. The two, the Kennedys hated Hoover and vice versa.

[00:46:29] Cameron: Um, cause Hoover was still saying the mafia didn’t exist. It was made up. And Bobby Kennedy was running his own parallel investigation in the mafia and showing that Hoover had basically been, um, covering up the existence of the mafia for decades. So you had all these different interests that hated the Kennedys and wanted the Kennedys gone.

[00:46:49] Cameron: Um, to what level were they all involved, uh, individually or, or colludingly in his assassination? I don’t think we’ll ever know, but certainly there was a lot of people that wanted him gone.

[00:47:03] Tony: you’ve got to throw JFK’s either arrogance or stupidity into it to get into an open topped car in LBJ’s home state

[00:47:13] Ray: Good point.

[00:47:14] Tony: and go for a drive in public with all these people against him, yeah.

[00:47:18] Cameron: yeah.

[00:47:20] Ray: think about that.

[00:47:21] Cameron: getting back to TikTok, a lot of these powerful interests want TikTok gone. Now, one of the things I’ve heard from Hunter, my son, who’s a TikToker, is that it’s all, he goes, it’s all about the election. But I don’t get that because it’s basically got bipartisan support. It’s not like the Democrats or the Republicans are siding on this.

[00:47:38] Cameron: They both seem to be, um, on board with this, except for Trump. The Republican presidential candidate is the one major Republican, I mean there’s also Rand Paul, we’ll talk about him in a second, and there’s a few outliers, in both the Democrats and the Republicans,

[00:47:57] Tony: yeah.

[00:47:57] Cameron: yeah, but it’s mostly bipartisan. Now, um, you’ve researched the Trump story, Tony?

[00:48:06] Tony: Yeah, well, so, uh, as you said before, Trump tried to do this when he was in, uh, in power, uh, and it fell over with a thing called the Berman Act, which, um, uh, they’re now saying they’ve learned from that, or the legislators are saying they’ve learned from that, and they’ll get round the Berman Act, um, in this, in this case.

[00:48:26] Tony: But, you know, what I, what I read in the research in this piece was that Trump had been lobbied by TikTok and convinced that he was Out polling Biden on TikTok and doing much better, and then therefore now was in favor of TikTok. So it’s the old, it’s the old story of, it’s the old story of when he, when he was empowering, his daughter used to say, put it in pictures, make it into a kid’s storybook, and put it in front of him. Otherwise, he’ll lose, he’ll lose attention. Yeah,

[00:48:57] Cameron: different story, but just to quote Trump first, he said if you get rid of TikTok, Facebook, and Zuckerschmuck, we’ll double their business. Zuckerschmuck

[00:49:08] Tony: got, I’ve got that, I’ve got that quote as well from last week, came out in opposition to the legislation, partly because he says it would help Facebook, which banned him from its platform for two years.

[00:49:19] Cameron: they are the true enemy of the people. But the other story is that his change of heart about TikTok came very shortly after he repaired his relationship with Republican mega donor Jeff Yass. Whose firm has a multi billion dollar stake in TikTok. Um, now Jeff Yass, you know, Jeff Yass, I’m sure Tony, he, he’s one of your heroes, Jeff Yass,

[00:49:48] Tony: No,

[00:49:48] Cameron: no?

[00:49:49] Tony: No, don’t don’t.

[00:49:51] Cameron: he will be one of your heroes after I tell you this story. The 65 year old Yass, who grew up in Queens, made his first riches when he and poker playing buddies from the State University of New York found ways to tilt horse racing odds in their favor.

[00:50:07] Tony: fantastic.

[00:50:08] Ray: Wow. Wow.

[00:50:15] Cameron: double A, uh, double S Tony. So he runs, he runs, uh, an investment firm called, uh, Susa International Group based outta Philadelphia. Um, he’s also in the advisory council of the Cato Institute. He’s the richest man in Pennsylvania, largest donor in the 2024 US election cycle. He’s donated 46 million to Republican groups and campaigns.

[00:50:45] Cameron: Um, the Sasquatch, the Sasquatch International Group invested in TikTok in 2001. They were one of the earliest investors. Um, So they’ve made, it was into ByteDance, I guess. So they’ve made a shit ton of money out of TikTok. I think they own about 15 percent now of ByteDance

[00:51:09] Tony: I think it’s important. I’m sorry to interrupt. It’s important to point out, though, in this situation, they’ll only make money if it sells or if it lists.

[00:51:16] Cameron: Yeah, good point. Yeah, but he is against the TikTok ban Um, and now so is Trump, after Yass had a meeting and agreed to support Trump, and then Trump changed his position on TikTok. Yass is also a major donor to Senator Rand Paul, who’s also come out against the TikTok ban. But, having said that, unlike Trump, Rand Paul’s position on things like this, freedom of speech, has been consistent over his political career, as was his father’s, Ron Paul.

[00:51:48] Cameron: So I don’t think there’s a correlation between, you know, Yass probably supports Paul because of Paul’s position on libertarian free speech and that kind of stuff. I don’t think Rand Paul’s switched his views. Trump, on the other hand, has obviously flip flopped on this. Um, but here’s the interesting thing, because I want to talk about the Jewish lobby.

[00:52:10] Cameron: Um, but Jeff Yass and his partners in Susquehanna are all Jews and major supporters of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, et cetera, et cetera. So, um, that’s interesting because as we said before, one of the big arguments that’s being made, uh, for the banning of TikTok is it’s influencing young Americans on their views of things like Israel and America’s funding and support of Israel, which is potentially going to impact.

[00:52:41] Cameron: Uh, Biden’s chances of re election. He’s got this massive amount of voters that are angry at him. Young voters angry at him about what’s happening in Gaza, but they probably aren’t going to vote for Trump either. So they probably just, you know, may not vote depending on how scared they are of another Trump victory.

[00:53:00] Cameron: But just sticking on Trump for a second. Um. Trump apparently doesn’t campaign on TikTok. Biden does, but MAGA figures are very support, uh, very, very popular on TikTok. Conservative comedians. I’ve never actually seen a conservative comedian. I don’t believe that such a thing exists, but I did read that there are conservative comedians, um,

[00:53:28] Ray: they’re not funny, or you just haven’t seen them?

[00:53:31] Cameron: I just don’t think you’re

[00:53:33] Tony: it used to be people like Dennis Leary and uh, who’s the guy now that, I forget, I forget their names, I don’t watch them. There are a couple out there.

[00:53:41] Cameron: The other Dennis, the guy who used to host, um, SNL’s, um, Weekend Update,

[00:53:47] Ray: Oh,

[00:53:47] Cameron: can’t remember his last name. Dennis, uh, yeah, whatever his name is. Guy with a beard. Yeah, he talks like that. Um, Donald Trump Jr. last year, Uh, ripped the idea of a TikTok ban saying it was government overreach and, uh, support from establishment of both parties and big tech.

[00:54:09] Cameron: He was all for it in 2020. Now, to do it would be government overreach. Tucker Carlson, who I have a newfound respect for, surprisingly, after his interview with Putin and then his interview on Lex Freeman. Did either of you, I know Tony and I did several hours on his Putin interview. Did you then listen to it?

[00:54:29] Cameron: Lex Freedman’s interview of Tucker Carlson,

[00:54:32] Tony: No, I don’t like Tucker Carlson.

[00:54:35] Cameron: but do you like Lex Freedman?

[00:54:36] Tony: No.

[00:54:38] Cameron: Okay. Well, why don’t you like Lex Freedman?

[00:54:42] Tony: Oh, I, I subscribed to his podcast and I forget now who it was, but he had some conservative. Jordan Peterson or someone like that, and I just went, no, forget it.

[00:54:51] Cameron: No, I didn’t listen to that one. Well, he did an interview with Tucker Carlson, which I listened to, not liking Tucker Carlson, and listened to the whole thing and at the end of it went, You know what? I agreed with at least half the things that Tucker Carlson said. Half the things that he said I thought were batshit crazy, but half the things he said I was like, yeah, I agree with that.

[00:55:09] Cameron: So, which surprised me because

[00:55:12] Ray: Yeah.

[00:55:12] Cameron: thought he was a complete tool. Um, but anyway, on this he has said that, uh, there was a hidden agenda. It’s a creepy, low IQ Chinese plot, but that does not mean that people trying to ban TikTok have your interests in mind, he said. And again, I tend to agree

[00:55:29] Tony: A creepy low IQ plot. That’s,

[00:55:32] Cameron: That’s what he says, I don’t agree with that bit.

[00:55:35] Cameron: But the bit about

[00:55:37] Tony: he’s standing from the lofty heights of a high IQ looking down on the low

[00:55:40] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:55:40] Tony: plot.

[00:55:43] Cameron: And the funny thing is, like, he’s very self deprecating in the Lex Friedman interview. He basically says, Listen, I’m not a very smart guy, I’m not a very good interviewer, I’m not, uh, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m not very clever. Um, you know, he’s very self deprecating, which was interesting.

[00:56:00] Tony: And he’s being named as a potential VP for the Trump ticket as well.

[00:56:05] Ray: Oh, that would be sweet.

[00:56:07] Cameron: guy when he was at Fox writing internal emails saying Trump was a fucking idiot and he couldn’t, he couldn’t wait for Trump to be out of government because he was sick of interviewing him. How are they gonna, how are they gonna spin that?

[00:56:19] Tony: Uh, they don’t need to, it’s Trump, right? I’m gonna, I’m gonna sell TikTok, I’m gonna ban TikTok. No, I’m in favor of TikTok. It doesn’t matter. It’s just, it’s just, yeah.

[00:56:29] Cameron: voters, logic, reason, history, nothing

[00:56:32] Tony: No, no.

[00:56:34] Cameron: I want to talk about

[00:56:34] Cameron: the

[00:56:34] Ray: of the cult.

[00:56:36] Cameron: So I know, um, you know, particularly some of our Israeli, uh, listeners, and I gotta, I gotta, uh, shout out, I won’t name him, but the particular listener who I’ve corresponded a lot with in the past, I called him a Jewish listener in the past.

[00:56:51] Cameron: He said, Hey, I’m not Jewish. I live in Israel, but I’m not Jewish. My apologies. Israeli listeners, um, may have an issue with this, but the, here’s what I found. The, the progressive group Roots Action noted that AIPAC. Big Jewish lobbyist group in the U. S. is the largest donor to this bill’s author, Republican, uh, Mike Gallaher.

[00:57:13] Cameron: The Jewish Federations of North America, the umbrella organization that represents hundreds of Jewish communities, backs the bill. Um, the JFNA said the single most important issue to our Jewish communities today is the dramatic rise in anti Semitism. Our community understands that social media is a major driver of the drive in anti Semitism, and that TikTok is the worst offender by far.

[00:57:40] Cameron: Today’s vote showed the strong bipartisan support for ensuring that TikTok cannot continue to push hateful messages into our communities, and we urge the Senate to To quickly take up and pass this legislation. That was a quote from

[00:57:54] Tony: essentially,

[00:57:55] Cameron: CEO, Eric Fingerhut.

[00:57:58] Tony: me just butt in here because it’s not TikTok that’s driving the anti Jewish movement. or anti semitism, uh, that they’re talking about. It’s turning Gaza into a concentration camp that’s driving the anti semitism that people

[00:58:13] Cameron: always been a concentration camp. It’s always been a concentration camp. It’s the genocide in the concentration camp. Well, their argument is, okay, so the, like, it’s not, it’s not TikTok that’s creating the content. It’s, American and you know, Gaza, like a lot of the, um, TikTok feeds that I follow are citizen journalists in Gaza reporting on what’s happening in Gaza.

[00:58:42] Ray: Mm hmm.

[00:58:42] Cameron: And these were people I followed before the war in Gaza as well. The, they were, you know, reporting on Gaza for years from TikTok. And of course, you know, they’ve been reporting on it. Some of them still alive. Some of them have been killed as part of this. Um, But what the, the accusation is that TikTok’s algorithm is presenting more anti Israel content to American audiences, uh, than pro Israel content.

[00:59:17] Cameron: Um, but again, you know, is there evidence for that? No.

[00:59:22] Tony: too, my understanding, very limited of how the TikTok algorithm works, is it gives you what you want to see, based on what you’ve seen before. So TikTok isn’t sitting, Xi Jinping isn’t sitting there going, in front of the keyboard going, Oh, bro,

[00:59:37] Tony: pro Palestinian TikTok reels to North Dakota now, ding, push the button.

[00:59:42] Tony: No one’s

[00:59:42] Ray: And, and, and, go ahead. Sorry.

[00:59:44] Cameron: my mother, my mother sent me a message like a day or two ago, um, saying, I think the universe is trying to tell me something, uh, YouTube just suggested a video by that same neuroscientist who was presenting it with wacky ideas that I watched like last week. I said, oh, well, if by the universe, you mean YouTube’s algorithm that’s designed to try and get you to watch more stuff like the same stuff that you.

[01:00:11] Cameron: Spent two hours watching a week ago, then yes, the universe is trying to send you a message. She goes, but I did, this was a completely different podcast on YouTube that had the same person. I’m like, yeah, that’s how the algorithm works. And I’m pretty sure the people in Congress have the same view as my mother.

[01:00:28] Cameron: It’s like, Oh, but in their case, the universe is the Chinese communist party presenting people with more anti Israel, uh, commentary.

[01:00:38] Ray: Well, I don’t know about the algorithms, but I do know that if you kill, you know, 32, 000, you know, 99 percent of them are innocent people in an area like Gaza, and it’s on tape. That’s going to do a lot more than any algorithm will. That’s just facts. That’s just bloodletting.

[01:00:56] Cameron: Semite. You’re an anti Semite, Ray,

[01:00:59] Ray: and that’s exactly what I wanted to get to later.

[01:01:01] Ray: The State of Israel, however, um, maybe they hired Barry and Stan, but you cannot criticize anything Israel does, because if you do, you’re an anti Semite, and then they’ve got you pegged, and it’s a brilliant, brilliant campaign, marketing, whatever, uh, and so, yeah, it’s just one of those things, what do you do, but clearly, because you’ve been saying this for years, Clearly what they do, they overstep the line a lot of times since the creation of that company, excuse me, of that country, but they, if you do criticize them, then you are the worst person in the world because you’re an anti Semite.

[01:01:38] Ray: They’ve got that locked in a bag and it’s

[01:01:41] Cameron: And there’s a, there’s a great book on that that John Mearsheimer co wrote, um, 15, 20 years ago now called the Israel Lobby. Highly recommended. I read it when it came out and he talks about, he’s got the evidence and the history behind how they weaponized the term anti Semitism to mean any criticism of Israel’s actions, um, and it’s been incredibly successful.

[01:02:06] Tony: I’m very reminiscent of what you spoke about before, Ray, about needing an enemy to bolster your own psyche. It’s just like the US.

[01:02:15] Ray: Well, not only that, but Israel can, all Israel has to do is go What the Holocaust, and it’s like a Trump card. They win. What are you gonna argue? You know? You know what I’m saying? Uh, it’s, it’s the ultimate Trump card. We can’t let this happen again. So we have to kill a lot of them before they kill a lot of us again.

[01:02:36] Ray: It’s hard to argue, you know, circular.

[01:02:38] Cameron: not just the JFNA, um, the Republican Jewish Coalition also supported the bill’s passage, the head of, um, the International Relations Department at Istanbul’s Yildiz Technical University, um, I read this in a Turkish, cause I was reading a lot of Al Jazeera and trying to get international perspectives on this, um, Turkish news sources.

[01:03:02] Cameron: The, uh, he said that the U. S. House move is aimed at protecting Israeli interests. In a recent interview with MSNBC, ADL head, uh, Jonathan Greenblatt said, TikTok has become the 24 7 news channel of so many of our young people, and it’s like Al Jazeera on steroids, amplifying and intensifying the anti semitism and the anti zionism with no repercussions.

[01:03:29] Cameron: So the Jewish lobby in the US, very big supporters of the bill, very much against TikTok for these reasons. But as I said before, the weird thing is Jeff Yass,

[01:03:38] Ray: Yeah.

[01:03:38] Cameron: ByteDance, who owns 50 percent of ByteDance, seems to have been the guy that convinced Trump to flip flop, is also a major supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu and the far right Israeli government that’s doing all of this stuff.

[01:03:54] Cameron: So, you know,

[01:03:56] Ray: Well,

[01:04:00] Cameron: in recent years according to tax records. Um, Oh no, so that’s Greenberg, one of the co founders of Sasquana, who runs a family foundation called Seed the Dream. He’s given more than three million. But Yass and his other co founders, um, Arthur Danchik, um, have funded a whole bunch of Israel related and Jewish causes.

[01:04:19] Cameron: So, I guess you can sit in both camps. You can be supporter of Israel, is, you know, Jewish lobby hates TikTok, but you own TikTok. You know, that’s capitalism for you, right? It reminds me of when Reminds me of when we were doing shows about what was going on in Syria, when the Obama administration was fighting ISIS in Northern Syria and Al Qaeda were fighting ISIS in North Syria.

[01:04:51] Cameron: So the Obama administration was supporting Al Qaeda to fight ISIS, but also hunting Osama Bin Laden. Uh, but they’re like, you know, it’s, uh,

[01:05:02] Ray: it’s complicated. 3D chess. It’s 3D chess. But here’s

[01:05:07] Cameron: is my friend, except

[01:05:08] Ray: what, but exactly. But here’s what I’ve learned. You can be a president. You can be a prime minister. Yeah, yeah. All that’s nice. But if I’m a multi billionaire, they knock on my door. They come to me because they’re going to need me for the next election.

[01:05:21] Ray: So, this guy, Yaz, can do whatever he wants and to a degree. It has to be tolerated because you’re going to, some politician is going to ask him for more money in the future. He can, he can, he can be controversial. He can, he can not, he doesn’t have to be, you know, consistent the entire time. He can do whatever he wants to do.

[01:05:38] Ray: They will still come to him because they have to.

[01:05:43] Cameron: The other argument that I’ve seen Matt Taibbi make is that this is a really bad president because if this goes ahead, it will enable future administrations, including a future Trump administration, to just start calling things owned by foreign adversaries and it’s very loosey goosey. But my counter argument to that is Trump just does whatever the fuck he wants anyway.

[01:06:05] Cameron: He doesn’t give a

[01:06:06] Ray: That particular day,

[01:06:08] Cameron: Yeah,

[01:06:09] Ray: day, and it could change,

[01:06:11] Cameron: but I get Tabi’s rule. I mean, we saw what happened when, uh, W started, you know, basically just declaring anyone foreign enemy, uh, enemies of the state. And then that, once that got enshrined, that just, you know, continued into the Obama administration. Um, you, it, it, once these things become precedence, Uh, it’s very, I mean, you know, the biggest example in the Trump era, I remember, was people started going, um, what are the checks and balances on a president starting a nuclear war again?

[01:06:44] Cameron: Oh, we don’t have any. Uh, really? Yeah, yeah, we don’t have

[01:06:48] Ray: I set a precedent? Yeah.

[01:06:50] Cameron: He could, and I don’t think anything’s been done about that since then either. I mean, everyone was horrified in 2020 when we realized, um, well, before that, when did Trump become president? 2016, when Trump could, when Trump could. Launch a nuclear missile and there’s nothing anybody could do about it because there are no checks and balances in place.

[01:07:15] Cameron: The only hope you had is that the generals with the briefcases would go, no, I’m not going to do that. Yeah, uh, that’s the only, only way of stopping somebody like Trump or any other batshit crazy or president with Alzheimer’s, like Biden, um, to launch a nuclear weapon. There’s no checks and balances in place.

[01:07:42] Cameron: And I don’t think anyone, but we’re gonna ban TikTok. Let’s focus on banning TikTok, not changing that fucking rule.

[01:07:49] Tony: We rely on the submarine commanders to just go, really? Is that the order? Are you sure?

[01:07:54] Cameron: Yeah, yeah, yeah, like the

[01:07:56] Ray: Can I get a check? Check on that. Exactly. Yeah.

[01:08:00] Cameron: I’m done on this topic unless you guys want to keep

[01:08:03] Tony: One last thing, and it was in an article I was reading about this, it talked about how the vote was, um, It was partly swung by the, uh, security intelligence officials in, um, in the U. S. And the quote is, House legislators also received a series of classified briefings by intelligence officials that observers said helped boost support for the bill.

[01:08:27] Tony: Senators will receive similar briefings over the coming weeks, which will help determine the way they vote. So that raises two things for me. First of all, if that’s swaying the legislators into voting for this, What the fuck was in the briefing? And why isn’t it made public? If they really have hard evidence that something’s going on or,

[01:08:46] Ray: And they want support.

[01:08:47] Tony: yeah, why don’t they just tell us and then we’ll get our, get our support as well.

[01:08:51] Tony: Which leads me to the second conclusion. There’s something, there’s something in there which may not, the legislators may not want to have leaked. And going back to the article about all the pixels tracking everything, I mean, you know, is there, are the CIA going to the legislators going, well, you might want to support this, however, If we do, if ByteDance continues, we might just have to release where your car’s been in the last 48 hours and what you’ve been saying and what you’ve been watching on TikTok and all those

[01:09:20] Ray: Yeah.

[01:09:21] Tony: So that’s what annoys me about these things is the secret briefings going on. It’s supposed to be an open and transparent democracy and it’s swaying voters and we don’t hear a thing. It’s swaying legislators and we don’t hear a thing about it.

[01:09:32] Cameron: But the other, and the other argument though is, I remember when secret intelligence briefings had convinced the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, turned out to

[01:09:44] Cameron: be Bullshit. I remember when secret intelligence briefings were driving the media narrative that Trump was in cahoots with Putin to win the 2016 election.

[01:09:59] Cameron: And we had to have massive investigations into that, that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and went for three and a half years. At which point they came in and said, yeah, there’s no evidence for any of that. It was all made up and it was all bullshit. Based on the, uh, Steele dossier, which was fucking bullshit, and we all knew it was bullshit from well before 2016, because he’d been peddling it for a couple of years.

[01:10:21] Cameron: So this whole, and that’s, this gets me about America every time. Every couple of years, we go through the same thing. Oh, we have secret intel. That we can’t reveal to you, that means we have to go and do all this stuff and spend all this money. And then five years later, we find out that was complete fucking bullshit.

[01:10:40] Cameron: And they go, And the New York Times, which pushed the stories, like the WMD story, does a Mia Culper and says, Oh, we’ve learned our lesson, we will never, Run stories from anonymous sources that turned out to be Shalabi, the guy that hated Saddam Hussein and was in exile and wanted to be the president, and then we made him the president, and then he turned out to be a cunt, so we had to get rid of him.

[01:11:00] Cameron: But we will never do that again! And then, a couple of years later, they do the whole fucking thing again, and it’s just rinse and repeat, and no one ever goes, Hold on, didn’t you just say a couple of years ago that you wouldn’t do this again? No one ever, it just never happens!

[01:11:17] Ray: Yeah.

[01:11:18] Tony: not just that, but the news, news, um, traditional media or newspaper people, they’re defunded so much that, you know, I would have hoped that as soon as a person with a nose for news read that quote, they’d be trying to find out what was in the secret briefing. You know, surely one of the politicians that was lobbied would leak it, or, uh, you know, even, even in deep background, but we don’t hear a thing about it.

[01:11:41] Tony: There’s no one following up

[01:11:42] Cameron: CCP probably knows what it is. They probably heard somebody talk about it on TikTok. Uh,

[01:11:48] Ray: Aha.

[01:11:50] Cameron: Um, And the other point, you know, uh, before we close this off, I’ve seen a lot of, a lot of people are making on TikTok is if you have issue with the way that social media companies are using consumer data, great. Let’s pass some laws that prevent social media companies from using consumer data. And let’s put some restrictions into place and let’s put all the, you know, legislative things into place that monitor, track, blah, blah, blah.

[01:12:19] Cameron: But no, they’re not going to do that because that would affect Facebook and Google and Microsoft and Apple, et cetera, et cetera. So the Mag 7, which, did you see what happened to Apple’s share price today, Tony, the Mag 7? Uh,

[01:12:35] Tony: I didn’t.

[01:12:36] Cameron: Apple’s just been hit with a, uh, um,

[01:12:40] Tony: Ah, the,

[01:12:42] Cameron: yeah, uh, what do you call

[01:12:44] Tony: about restricting trade.

[01:12:46] Cameron: Yeah. What do you, what do you call those things?

[01:12:47] Cameron: A frigging monopoly. They’ve just, just been hit with a monopoly lawsuit. The share price just crashed. Um, you know, it’ll probably recover cause who the fuck cares? It’ll take years. Um, so, so to wrap up, what’s going to happen with this? My guess what’s going to happen is I think the Senate will pass it, I think, um, Biden will sign it, I think TikTok will fight it in the courts, they’ll appeal it, it’ll go to the Supreme Court, That’ll take a bunch of time, Biden’s going to lose the election, Trump will be back in, and then it’s just a fucking coin toss to see what Trump does about it on any particular day.

[01:13:29] Tony: It was shut down meta. Because he banned for two years.

[01:13:33] Cameron: yeah, yeah.

[01:13:35] Tony: Yeah. Well, and the other

[01:13:36] Cameron: of the country, which plays into my next story.

[01:13:39] Tony: there is a side issue to all this too, which is kind of tangential, but in little old Australia, there’s an issue going on about the fact that the social media outlets signed a deal, self enforced deal, with the newspaper originators of news to pay for that News content on their platforms.

[01:14:03] Tony: And then Meta pulled out last week or the week before and now there’s pressure on the government to enforce the deal. And it’s being watched quite closely around the world. So, you know, there are these, these issues on social media are really attracting some heavyweight hitters, um, to, to the party.

[01:14:20] Cameron: I loved Hunter or Taylor’s analysis on that the other day was, ah, Facebook is struggling. They can’t afford to pay the news companies. Like, yeah, I don’t think that’s the point. I think their point is, fuck you. We don’t need to pay you this money. What do you, you need the money more than we need your news on our platform.

[01:14:38] Cameron: Um, they’ve let it run for a couple of, I think it’s a negotiating tactic, right? It’s like, they’re going to cut the fee that they pay by, you know, 50 percent or whatever it is, because at the end of the day, the media companies in this country are running out of cash. They know they need it, you

[01:14:54] Tony: Yeah, absolutely.

[01:14:56] Cameron: Media companies are fucked.

[01:14:57] Cameron: Speaking of media companies, we said we were going to dissect some headlines.

[01:15:00] Tony: Yes.

[01:15:02] Cameron: Who wants to go first?

[01:15:04] Tony: Well, I’ll, I’ll kick it off. Um, and I, what I’ve done is slightly different to that, but I’ve looked at the Murdoch headlines in Australia. And this goes back to two days ago to, to Wednesday of this week, which was the 20th of March when I sat down and did the exercise. So I asked myself, first of all, what, what did I think was the top three things going on in Australia on Wednesday, the 20th of March?

[01:15:28] Tony: And I thought of, The visit to Sydney by the China’s Foreign Minister, which hadn’t happened for a long time. The possibility of an Israeli war crime trial over starvation in Gaza. And a local issue, the RBA left rates on hold, which is kind of like what the Central Reserve did in America. And I’d I rate that as an issue because out of those, it has the biggest impact on my life.

[01:15:53] Tony: So they’re the kind of big picture things going on for the newsworthy. In Australia, there is a very large concentration of the media in the hands of Rupert Murdoch. And you, you sort of feel that the most if you leave the capital city. So he has a newspaper headline in every capital city. He has a national newspaper, and he basically has all the regional.

[01:16:15] Tony: Towns sewn up as well. So, the Australian headline, that’s the newspaper, that’s the national newspaper that Murdoch owns. The top three headlines on the front page of the Australian were Conviction PM has a caveat. And that’s the other thing about Murdoch’s headlines. They don’t pause, they’re not, there’s no grammar.

[01:16:33] Tony: I mean, Conviction PM has a caveat was their headline. I’ve got no idea what that even means. The sub headline is Anthony Albanese, who’s the Australian Prime Minister. His decision to add the condition of bipartisanship to putting forward promised religious freedom laws has revived the cultural political wars.

[01:16:50] Tony: Well, Modoc never let the cultural political wars go into remission. There’s no reviving them. This is a continuance of them. The other two headlines were Monitor on rapist, detainee, taken off, and Wong’s message to Beijing, don’t accept the gospel of Paul as the word of Australia. So, a common theme to the Murdoch front page is a crime and order headline, and for background to people who aren’t in Australia, Uh, we’ve had some overseas, uh, immigration detainees, they tried to get into Australia illegally, they were put into, um, again, what allegedly were concentration camps offshore.

[01:17:29] Tony: Uh, there’s been a law, um, changed, or, or a high court decision which has allowed some of those to go free. Turns out some of them were, uh, criminals in, in their past lives, but they’ve been, um, forced to wear, uh, Ankle monitors, and it’s been a hot cultural war issue in Australia about law and order. And so someone’s been able to get their ankle bracelet off.

[01:17:51] Tony: That’s front page news according to Rupert Murdoch. And the last one was, again, um, about the culture wars. Paul Keating is a past Prime Minister of Australia. He is, he is not buying into the Orca steal, which we’ve signed for defence relations with the US and the UK. And he’s not buying into the China bad.

[01:18:12] Tony: Um, image of China. And, uh, so the Chinese foreign minister said, hey, I wouldn’t mind meeting with Paul when he comes to Australia, because at least he’s the same one, okay, in the, in the country. And so Rupert Murdoch’s taken a pot shot of that. Um, I’ll just do one more. The Herald Sun is the Murdoch newspaper in Melbourne.

[01:18:30] Tony: There’s a similar one called the Telegraph in Sydney. The headlines on the Herald Sun on Wednesday were Fossil Fools, Appeal Backfires, Climate Protest Pests Who Blocked Westgate Bridge. in brackets, forcing mum to give birth on side of road and at longer jail terms. So again, there’s a lot of grammar you need to unpack in that sentence, and the question that begs me is that these are people who were forcing the bridge closure with their protests, putting a gun to the head of the mum, forcing her to give birth, I mean, it’s just, it’s inane, and the other two headlines were Top Nick, Best First 50 Games Ever, Sporting headline, I don’t know who Topnik is, uh, and smiles as Kate on the Mend, so Royal Celebrity.

[01:19:16] Tony: So this has been the Murdoch way of doing things, the Murdoch strategy in Australia. I’m going to talk to people with what they like in terms of sport and celebrities. I’m going to push crime, crime is a problem, and make people fearful. And I’m then going to slip in a bit of a conservative, um, You know, rationale or a conservative line on things that are going on in the big news.

[01:19:40] Tony: And that’s, that’s been going on for years and years and years. And if all you get Access to is if you’re in a like a Wagga Wagga or somewhere in the country, all you’re getting access to is that kind of news. That really does shape the culture in Australia. And it doesn’t just happen in Australia. I mean, in the, in the States, the New York Post, which is owned by, Murdoch on Wednesday had only had one headline, Strong Arm of the Law, High Seas, SIEZ, James plots to take Trump’s buildings, help Democrats by bankrupting the Don.

[01:20:16] Tony: James is the prosecutor in New York who’s, uh,

[01:20:20] Ray: James.

[01:20:21] Tony: Yeah, he successfully, um, won the case against, uh, Donald Trump. In the UK, his, the, he owns the Telegraph, and the headline there was Diversity Drivers Backfired, Warns Bad Knock. So, again, if you’re only getting that side of things, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, Reinforcing that the culture wars, it’s not really news and it’s pushing a point and it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a well worn path for him.

[01:20:50] Tony: I was, it may happen in the US if you ever get concentrated media ownership like we do here and, and Murdoch gets that big, but it really does have a sway on, on society in Australia that follows this and, and talks about it around the water cooler and, you know, amongst friends and it’s just pisses me off no end.

[01:21:10] Ray: Well, it shapes their world. Yeah. Sorry,

[01:21:13] Cameron: Rupert isn’t actually immortal, Tony, um, and a vampire, what happens when Rupert dies, do you think?

[01:21:20] Tony: Well, I think it’s been the big power struggle, and, you know, Michael Wolff and people like that have written books about this, but Lachlan seems to be the anointed successor. There was a battle between James and Lachlan, and we can just go and watch Succession to see how that goes. But, um, James was the, was the more progressive of the two and wanted to shut down, um, Fox News and, and become a, uh, a more, uh, progressive organization.

[01:21:44] Tony: Independent or centrist view in the news media. And Lachlan’s going, nah, this stuff sells. I’m going to back what my dad did. So I, if, if, if Lachlan does take over, when Rupert goes, I think it’s business as usual. It continues on.

[01:21:59] Cameron: Mmm. You don’t think it’ll all be divested?

[01:22:01] Tony: and, and there is concentration in the US too. I mean, I was surprised when my travels over there last year, when I was going to places like Augusta in Georgia and Las Vegas, that the local news station is a Fox News station.

[01:22:14] Tony: So it is still, if you want to turn on the nightly news or the morning news in, in anywhere in America, perhaps outside of New York and LA, you’ll get the Fox News. And it’s the same sort of, um, sly strategy that Murdoch uses here. It’ll be stories about celebrities, stories about sport, that’ll be the headlines, and then there’ll be just this little article about, you know, how it’s, how crime is a problem and how it’s due to the woke nature, woke nature of the legislators or something like that.

[01:22:43] Tony: It’s a, it’s a very well worn, um, playbook for him.

[01:22:47] Cameron: Culture Wars?

[01:22:48] Ray: If it ain’t, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. So, and it’s making money, so yeah. Well, my first one we’ve already touched on, we were talking about Israel earlier, and what it is, is um, this war’s been going on for five, what, five and a half months, 32, 000 Palestinians dead, obviously the vast majority of them are innocent civilians, women and children, and what it is, is Biden has, you know, Again said, can we please, can we just please get a six weeks, six week, uh, ceasefire?

[01:23:18] Ray: Let’s exchange the hostages, you know, all that kind of stuff. Uh, Hamas is saying we will not give back any more people until this, there’s a permanent solution, which of course is not going to happen. But the point I want to make is, If America can’t check Israel, then nobody can check Israel, and if they want to go into Rafah, which they’re planning on doing, and it’s going to be a ground campaign with men with machine guns and tanks, uh, there’s going to be a lot of collateral damage, but if we can’t If we can’t get them to slow down or, or whatever, do a cease fire.

[01:23:50] Ray: This is just gonna go on and, and there’s gonna be more and more people and entities that are gonna turn against Israel just because they’re becoming the very monster that they supposedly are trying to defend themselves from. So it’s, it’s just getting, I don’t know who knows where it’s gonna end. It’s not gonna end anytime soon.

[01:24:08] Ray: Does this play into certain Hamas leader’s hands? It seems like it does. I don’t know, but it’s just very scary that this could go on for a very long time and there could end up being hundreds of thousands of deaths, not soldiers, women and children, and it’s just going to happen and we’re not going to, or we can’t stop it unless we’re willing to go in.

[01:24:30] Ray: And we’re not going to do that. So, and there’s an election coming up. It gets convoluted very quickly. So it’s just a nightmare. It’s just like the perfect storm of a nightmare.

[01:24:41] Tony: Where was the, where was the headline that you picked up that story from? Where was it

[01:24:44] Ray: Oh, I got this. I’m sorry. Um, I got it from Reuters. I got this particular, uh, the several articles from Reuters. Um, and what it is, is, um, And, and Netanyahu is pretty much just coming out and saying, look, we’re going to do this no matter what. Uh, let me see if I can find the actual quote. Um, well, there’s the, there’s the Israeli strategic affairs minister, Ron Dermer, who’s basically saying, we’re quite confident that we can do this.

[01:25:12] Ray: And when he says this, he means the raid on Rafa. We can do this in a way that will be effective, not only militarily, but also on the humanitarian side. So basically, They’re somehow going to send in men in tanks when there’s over a million people in Rafa, and they’re only going to kill the bad guys. And if anybody has studied history for even five minutes, you know that the army is not a scalpel, it’s a broadsword.

[01:25:36] Ray: There will always be. Collateral damage. So the point is, this is going to get, um, very ugly, but as we all know, politics is always local. Netanyahu is going to do whatever he thinks is going to be best for him, his party, whether he needs to get re elected or just to stay in power. They will, they will, just like everybody else, they will do whatever they think is best for them.

[01:26:00] Ray: Um, and it’s probably going to mean the death of a lot of people. Sorry,

[01:26:03] Tony: Yeah, no, look, I, I completely understand what you’re saying, but I want to come back to where you read that because was the headline about Biden trying to stop it or was the headline about Israel going into Rafa?

[01:26:14] Ray: It was, it was more about Israel, and I’m sorry I don’t have it in front of me, but the headline pushed the idea that Netanyahu was going to do whatever he was going to do despite Biden’s for a ceasefire.

[01:26:30] Tony: Yeah.

[01:26:30] Ray: the thrust. Uh, the article, yeah.

[01:26:33] Tony: so yeah. So that’s, I guess that’s the point I wanted to explore. Um, the, the, the story is about, you know, should, it should be Netanyahu, push on into Ra, into, um, Raffa, but the US media puts the headline, Biden tries to stop it, or Biden, you know, is unsuccessful in trying to stop it. So it’s. Again, there’s, there’s, you know, there’s a political slant to the story and I’d like to unpack, you know, who’s pushing that and who benefits from that.

[01:27:04] Ray: Yeah, that’s a good point, because obviously the election’s coming up, Trump is a pro Israel, he’s just gonna back him, and let’s be honest, he doesn’t care, but if there’s anything, I, and I, and Cam, with all due respect, I disagree. I think unless something completely crazy happens, and it’s probably going to, I think Biden’s going to win in, in that it’s not so much Biden winning the election, it’s Trump has alienated so many other people.

[01:27:28] Ray: Unless you’re a white guy, there’s very little reason for you to vote for Trump, but that’s a discussion for another day. But if there’s anything that they can do to chip away at Biden’s chances, and one of them is saying, look, he won’t even support Israel in their hour of need. They were attacked. And if he can’t support them, then is he really the right guy to be the President of the United States?

[01:27:52] Ray: So I, I take your point, Tony.

[01:27:55] Tony: I’m just looking at the betting market for the US elections and Donald Trump is the favorite on Betfair.

[01:28:02] Ray: Mmm,

[01:28:03] Cameron: I’m looking

[01:28:03] Ray: well maybe for me it’s,

[01:28:05] Cameron: FiveThirtyEight’s polls have Trump, um, uh, overall, um, well ahead, but some polls Biden wins, but mostly Trump’s way ahead in the polls.

[01:28:19] Ray: Here’s the next thing, and Tony mentioned Letitia James, the Attorney General of New York. She has already, and this is a very convoluted legal thing, which I am not an expert in, she’s already filled out some of the paperwork to start grabbing possessions of Trump in New York on Monday. Um, we all know that Trump is self centered, we all know Trump is not quite there in the head, but he’s got a proven track record of Browbeating people over decades.

[01:28:44] Ray: He’s very good at it. But what happens when the very base, the very essence, the very thing that makes Trump who he is, he’s a, he’s someone who owns a lot of real estate. What if he suddenly loses, has taken from him some of his real estate? He’s said some crazy things in the last 70 whatever years. I think that’s nothing compared to what he’s going to say between Monday, if she starts taking property.

[01:29:10] Ray: And the election day, it’s literally, it’s like, you’ve got all these models. You’ve got all these predictions. You’ve got all these things. All to me, all of that goes out the window when he truly flies off the cliff, when he starts losing his golf courses and, and his place in New York, something seven, I can’t remember what it’s called anyway.

[01:29:29] Ray: So all the models go out the window when he starts losing. The very things that make him who he

[01:29:35] Tony: Really? He’s been bankrupted six times before. Didn’t hurt his

[01:29:40] Cameron: shit for years. Like he just gets more and more popular. The crazier the shit he says, the more popular he

[01:29:46] Tony: and that’s a good point.

[01:29:47] Ray: with the, within a certain group of, of Americans.

[01:29:51] Cameron: that are going to vote.

[01:29:53] Ray: we, we will say, and Seven Springs, that’s the place. But anyway, so, uh, and maybe on my part, it certainly could be wishful thinking because. He could really fuck up this country if he gets elected again.

[01:30:07] Cameron: the

[01:30:08] Ray: He could really fuck up a lot of things.

[01:30:09] Ray: Yeah.

[01:30:10] Cameron: The fact that he’s ahead in nearly all of the polls at this stage is just mind numbingly fucking mind fucked. Like, what? How? How is that even remotely possible in any sane universe where after Like, when did he start, like, seriously running for president? Like, say, 2014, 2015.

[01:30:37] Cameron: Um, it’s been ten years of Trump insanity, four of which he was actually the president, and, you know, 1. 6 million of whatever Americans died of COVID, and yet he’s still winning in the polls! Like, what?! The fuck? It was crazy enough. I remember when the show that we did on the bullshit filter, when he got elected and, you know, my opening line was, what the actual fuck, America?

[01:31:02] Cameron: Like, I did not expect that to actually happen.

[01:31:07] Tony: what the actual fuck Democratic Party if you can’t beat someone like Trump? Come on.

[01:31:11] Ray: It was, yeah. Hillary.

[01:31:14] Cameron: Well that’s what I said back then, like, after everything that’s happened since then, and he’s still winning in the polls, like, how fucking broken do you have to be as a political party when you can’t even beat Donald Trump in the polls? Like,

[01:31:28] Tony: Yeah, and why are you still running Kamala Harris? I mean, I think there should be a poll as to whether Biden lives to get to the election, but, um, you know, whether you like Biden or not, I think people are saying, forget Biden, he’s not going to make four years. We, we’re not voting for Biden because of Kamala Harris.

[01:31:45] Ray: Exactly. Her negatives, exactly. Her negatives almost rival Hillary’s and you make a very good point. I think what a lot of people are thinking is like, well, let’s get Biden elected and then he could die and we’ll have Kamala. And she’s not perfect, but the point is she’s not Trump, but there’s enough, how should I put this delicately?

[01:32:02] Ray: There’s enough white Democrats who would rather not see her be president. Uh, you know, For four years, if Biden can’t, if Biden were to win and then not be able to fulfill his duties. So racism is still quite powerful in America. We cannot, America still got a ways, a ways to go. We still got a ways to go.

[01:32:24] Ray: Speaking of which,

[01:32:26] Tony: The other, the other issue about, sorry, just, sorry, right, before you leave that topic, the other issue that there was a good opinion piece that I read in the, um, our financial review today saying that, um, if Trump is bankrupted, that it does expose him to being supported by foreign actors, um, to, to pay for his campaign and get him into office.

[01:32:45] Tony: And that’s, that’s got to be a risk for the U. S. in some, in some respect.

[01:32:49] Ray: not only is it a risk, but Alina Haba was asked that very question in the last 24 hours. And they said he, that they, they said something like, they asked her, we’ve heard rumors that Trump has made feelers to Saudi Arabia. And Russia, uh, about maybe someone helping him out in his moment of need. Um, and of course she’s a lawyer so she gave a very vague answer.

[01:33:13] Ray: She’s like, well, there are certain rules and stuff like that, but all options are being explored, but you’re absolutely right if you have, if, like Elon Musk said something like, um, if I loan, I’m not gonna loan Trump money, but if I loaned him the money, And he wins. To have the President of the United States owe me big time?

[01:33:31] Ray: That would be incredible! You know, you could, you could write your own laws or whatever, but it’s a very valid, uh, Criticism.

[01:33:37] Cameron: Isn’t that how the system’s always worked?

[01:33:40] Tony: It is.

[01:33:41] Cameron: said before, that’s why the mafia assassinated Kennedy, because they got him elected. That was in 1959.

[01:33:49] Ray: yeah. So Trump could be in jail and still win the election, and then I guess he could just pardon himself.

[01:33:57] Ray: Except for the stuff in Georgia. That’s a state crime. He cannot pardon himself for that. Yes. Who he could run this country from the jailhouse. What? That would be awesome. That would be

[01:34:07] Cameron: Alright, I took the New York Times, and there was a number of, uh, things on the front page on this day, which was Wednesday, March 20th, but the one that I chose was, Heating Beijing, Hong Kong Passes Anti Dissent Bill.

[01:34:23] Ray: Oh, mm-Hmm.

[01:34:24] Cameron: Um, now interestingly enough, the front page of the New York Times paper on that day, when you compare it to their online today’s paper, Uh, Things are a little bit different.

[01:34:36] Cameron: Um, the, the article, same article, but, um, the headline in the online version was Hong Kong adopts sweeping security laws bowing to Beijing. Slightly different.

[01:34:53] Ray: Tone,

[01:34:54] Cameron: that was, that was the story that I picked up on. So first of all, the term bowing to Beijing, or in the paper version, heeding Beijing.

[01:35:02] Ray: mm hmm,

[01:35:03] Cameron: In other words.

[01:35:05] Cameron: Obeying the government because Hong Kong is a part of China and Beijing is Chinese government. So, but when they do something that the government wants, they’re bowing. To the government or heeding the government, just the very terminology of the headline speaks volumes. And one of the things I’ve learned about the New York Times over the years we’ve been doing this show, and I’ve been dissecting and analyzing, it is, it’s really interesting when it comes to domestic stories, uh, I think the New York Times is actually Quite reasonable journalism.

[01:35:41] Cameron: Whenever they’re dealing with a quote unquote foreign adversary is where it’s just bias to the hills. Like it’s written by the State Department or the CIA when you read the New York Times foreign adversaries. And this is, you know, we’ve done stuff on Cuba and Venezuela and looked at how blatantly biased the New York Times coverage is.

[01:36:02] Cameron: This is another one. So it’s bowing to Beijing. Which suggests, when you read it, that Hong Kong is some sort of independent country that’s being told what to do by the Chinese government, not that it is China. So

[01:36:20] Ray: They’re being bullied, the perception. Yeah.

[01:36:22] Cameron: um, and one of the things that I did is I read the New York Times article and then I read The coverage in the South China Morning Post, which is a pro Chinese paper based out of Hong Kong, but reading their coverage of it where they were, they were criticizing the Western media coverage of this passing of the laws.

[01:36:43] Cameron: So they’re both biased, right? But it was interesting to get the two sides of the story. So Alex Lowe, longtime journalist with the SCMP, and I read the SCMP every day. It’s like Haaretz. I read Haaretz every morning. I read the SCMP every morning. When I say read, I scan it and a whole bunch of global news sources, just part of my waking up routine every morning.

[01:37:04] Cameron: He writes, since there are 160 articles under the basic law, I suppose our critics can claim that we have been bowing to Beijing 160 times since Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule in 1997. New York Times article says, The new legislation which was passed with extraordinary speed. Low says, The passage of the domestic national security law has taken almost 27 years, yet some of them describe it as being fast tracked.

[01:37:35] Cameron: So for anyone who remembers. They tried to pass laws like this in Hong Kong, uh, like 23 years ago or something in the early 2000s and there were massive protests about it. Um, and so they’ve been trying to pass these national security laws, basically rewriting the laws that were left over from the British rural era for decades.

[01:38:03] Cameron: And they finally got it through, but in the Western media, it’s fast tracked through. Like they have literally been trying to get this passed for decades. The New York Times says the new laws are establishing penalties including life imprisonment for political crimes like treason and insurrection which are vaguely defined.

[01:38:26] Cameron: It also targets offences like external inference, sorry, external interference, interference in quotation marks. And the theft of state secrets, creating potential risks for multinational companies and international groups operating in the Asian financial center. So, for a start, I like the fact that they put external interference in quotation marks, like it’s not a real thing, they just made it up.

[01:38:55] Cameron: MEANWHILE, THE U. S. IS TRYING TO BAN TIKTOK! Because of external interference, and multi nati like it’s a multinational company that’s operating in the American financial center, and they’re trying to ban it or force the sale of it. Under by the way, under current US federal law, anyone convicted of treason against the United States can face the possibility of death.

[01:39:22] Cameron: Or at least five years in prison. Um, but in China, in Hong Kong, it’s apparently really bad that you could get life imprisonment for treason. In America, you can get the death penalty, but they don’t point that out in the article. By the way, Yeah, we get the death penalty here for it, but they’re just doing prison.

[01:39:43] Cameron: It also says that in the US, the punishment for insurrection or rebellion against the authority of the United States, or for giving aid or comfort to its enemies, can lead to a fine imprisonment of up to 10 years and ineligibility to hold any office under the, in the United States. So. But in the, but in Hong Kong now you can get imprisonment for treason.

[01:40:06] Cameron: That’s apparently big news and a horrible thing, but in the US, um,

[01:40:11] Tony: to China and of course there’s been a lot of people getting five to 10 year jail terms after January 6th as well.

[01:40:17] Cameron: Yes. Now, uh, Lowe in the SM, in the South China Morning Post says, you don’t get to pick and choose which constitutional provisions you will respect and legislate and which to ignore and denigrate, or at least that’s what Western societies claim is the basis of constitutionalism. But if it’s being done by some other societies to which they are antagonistic.

[01:40:36] Cameron: Their propagandists will enter a united front to claim you can’t do it, even if that’s how we do it. It’s the same old, do as I say, not as I, not as I do.

[01:40:47] Ray: I love that. Yeah.

[01:40:49] Tony: be interesting to see what happens to the financial district in Hong Kong. There’s been some moves out of Hong Kong to Singapore by some of the big banks, big players, and there’s been speculation that the inaction of that law may cause more, but it’ll be interesting to see if it actually does.

[01:41:04] Cameron: And if they do, is that an inference that they’re actually encouraging treason and insurrection in Hong Kong? And if, if, if a law passes against treason and insurrection, and you have to leave the country, Uhhhhhhhhhh

[01:41:22] Tony: Yeah, we’re not guilty, nothing to see here.

[01:41:24] Cameron: Yeah,

[01:41:25] Ray: I’m leaving anyway,

[01:41:26] Cameron: it’s not because of that.

[01:41:28] Ray: gotta go, yeah,

[01:41:30] Cameron: health reasons. It’s like when, who was the CEO over here that just, uh, resigned?

[01:41:36] Cameron: Uh, Amcor. The Amcor CEO I pointed out in the Facebook chat group just resigned due to health reasons. I was like, yeah, sure it is. Yeah, that’s, that’s the go to line, right? Uh, New York Times says analysts say that analysts Say the legislation, which will take effect on March 23rd, could have a chilling effect on a wide range of people, including entrepreneurs, civil servants, lawyers, diplomats, journalists and academics, raising questions about Hong Kong’s status as an international city.

[01:42:09] Cameron: Analysts say. Very Trumpy, I thought. It’s like, people say that I’m the greatest president who ever lived. New York Times analysts say, which analysts? Were they? New York

[01:42:20] Cameron: Times? No.

[01:42:21] Tony: That’s very sloppy journalism, isn’t it?

[01:42:23] Cameron: don’t quote any particular analysts that say that. We just say, analysts say. Um, So, Lew, again, from the SCMP, talking about American criticisms, writes, This is coming from the same government that has been aiding and abetting Israel to commit genocidal acts against Palestinians by supplying them with some of the most destructive weapons known to man.

[01:42:45] Cameron: America’s murderous hypocrisy used to make me laugh, now it just makes me sick to my stomach.

[01:42:52] Ray: Nice line.

[01:42:53] Cameron: I mean, drawing maybe a bit of a long bow here, comparing domestic laws with support for genocide. But I would point to the current American president, uh, Joe Biden, Lazy Joe Biden. Um, what is it, like, uh, Forgetful Joe Biden. Um, his claim to fame, as people may or may not remember, before becoming VP in 2008, was how he pushed through tough on crime laws in 1984, 1986, 1988, and 1995. For the big one, which according to many studies, and I’m not just saying that I can point you to them if you want me to, led to mass incarcerations in the US.

[01:43:38] Cameron: There’s some debate over whether the federal law did that or they were state laws and his tough on crime stuff was just copying what was already happening at a state by state basis. But he was part of the whole very, very public justification on pushing through tough on crime laws in that 10 year period.

[01:43:58] Cameron: Which, whether it was at a federal level or a state level, um, pushed through, uh, you know, millions of families ended up in jails. But at the time of the 1994 law, during the Clinton administration, he publicly bragged how the Democratic Party at the time was supporting 60 new death penalties, 70 enhanced penalties, 100, 000 more cops, and 125, 000 new state prison cells.

[01:44:28] Cameron: That was Joe Biden’s public bragging in 1994 about how tough the Democratic Party was getting on crime. Let’s also recall that the United States of America currently has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. And has a greater percentage of incarceration of its population than any other country in the world, including China, Cuba, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

[01:44:57] Cameron: In addition to people actually in jail, 4. 8 million Americans are on probation or parole, which means on top of the 3 million odd, uh, People in jail. You’ve got over 7 million people under correctional control in the United States, 3 percent of the adult population that in many places therefore can’t vote, etc, etc, etc.

[01:45:19] Cameron: Um, so the hypocrisy of the New York Times on this and, and, and, and the lack of comparison with China versus the United States position on all these sorts of things always astounds me. I’m going to play a clip. This is guy now, this guy, Nury, he’s um, a British, British. journalist who lives in Hong Kong. Um, uh, some people say that he’s, you know, paid by the CCP.

[01:45:47] Cameron: He’s very pro CCP in his content, but it’s worth listening to as, you know, worth reading the SCMP. Here’s his, um, I’ll just play the first minute or two of this. Hopefully you guys will be able to hear it. Okay. This is the thing that started playing when it shouldn’t have before. Yuri Itachi. Western media outlets are telling you that China has imposed a tough security law on Hong Kong.

[01:46:13] Cameron: Ooooooh. But I live in Hong Kong and people in general here are happy about it. Why? Because we know something that the world is not being told. And I’m going to tell you what. First, this law specifically targets the hybrid warfare techniques used by the US, often called colour revolutions. Hong Kong leader John Lee said that in so many words.

[01:46:36] Cameron: Now the technique is for US agents to quietly go overseas and incite protests that build a very specific, a very particular narrative. Let me show you. The same colour revolution script was used in Hong Kong in 2019 and reused in Bangkok afterwards. Now on the left is the Hong Kong. So here he’s putting up media coverage of the protests in Thailand and the protests in Hong Kong and they’re almost identical.

[01:47:05] Cameron: Like, he’s got them side by side. You can see the exact same narrative, the exact same photographs being reused. To tell these stories. It’s quite interesting. And you know, his allegations about color revolutions in the U. S. We’ve talked about that a lot on this show. Uh, Tony and I talked about it, uh, on the Putin show last month.

[01:47:26] Cameron: This is fairly well accepted by critics of America’s, um, role in geopolitics around the world, Mearsheimer, Chomsky. People like that, people have analyzed this stuff is the so called color revolutions that happened in the early 2000s, uh, were being driven, engineered, supported to varying degrees by the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, all of America’s, you know, quasi government funded, uh, Uh, institutions in these countries that supposedly support democracy.

[01:48:05] Cameron: And this gets back to what you and I are talking about in the Cold War show at the moment, Ray. The playbook that they used in Iran in 1953 to overthrow Mossadegh, which is to take huge buckets of money and funnel them covertly into a country to fund criminal elements, um, political opposition, Uh, whatever it is, media, to buy media coverage, to basically create massive amounts of discontent, to organize protests, and, you know, as many people believe, happened in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, actually to fund and organize and orchestrate it.

[01:48:44] Cameron: revolutions to topple governments, covertly run. And, you know, as in the case with Iran, America didn’t admit to this until 50 years after the events, denied it for 50 years, and then went, Oh, that, yeah, no, no, we did. We did do that when the, when the, you know, the, the laws on, um, secrecy and, you know, freedom of information were up, they finally had to go, Oh, yeah, no, that thing we’ve been not denying for, wait, no, no, that, that was.

[01:49:14] Cameron: Us. Yeah, we did that. Um, so he’s, he’s got a point on whether or not, to what degree, I shouldn’t say whether or not, to what degree that that’s happening in Hong Kong.

[01:49:25] Ray: hmm.

[01:49:25] Cameron: You know, I don’t know, but, and probably won’t know for 50 years, but it’s, it’s definitely happening at some level. And

[01:49:31] Tony: Well, there was, sorry, I was going to say, there certainly was strong pro democracy protests in Hong Kong a couple of years ago. So,

[01:49:39] Cameron: Yeah. But the question

[01:49:40] Cameron: is, to what degree are they being funded and driven by the US? Yeah. You know, we’ve got a story I’ve been meaning to do on Bullshit Filter, um, we might do it in Cold War actually, coming up, is how the US was involved in Tibet. And the, the problems that China had with Tibet back in the fifties, which led to China taking over Tibet and everything that happened there.

[01:50:07] Cameron: You know, they were, they were involved in supporting the Kuomintang in Taiwan. They were involved in trying to, uh, influence what was going on in Tibet, trying to, you know, uh, topple the Maoist control over different regions of China. As we’ve talked about on this show, they’d been doing in Xinjiang. Um, it’s a whole part of the Uyghur pro, um, independence movement, largely influenced by the CIA last 20 years in the outskirts of China.

[01:50:38] Cameron: So anyway, that’s New York Times very, very biased, uh, coverage of, um, the Hong Kong vote.

[01:50:47] Tony: Yeah. I mean, it must be a legislative issue there, too, which hasn’t been drawn out. But if Hong Kong is a state and it had conflicting laws to the You know, tip it on its head, if Virginia came out and said we have these laws which are completely different and overridden by the federal ones, we have to change our laws to come into law. They couldn’t pass laws in Virginia that are unconstitutional. And

[01:51:16] Ray: There’s a hierarchy.

[01:51:17] Tony: thing, I guess the same thing applies in Hong Kong, but that’s not covered in the article.

[01:51:23] Ray: Right.

[01:51:23] Cameron: it’s the same thing with Xinjiang, like when the, um, when the, they were bringing Xinjiang into line with, um, China’s one child policy and, or, you know, the removal of the one child policy even, and, and, and increasing the amount of children that a family can have, people, you know, the Western media was saying, oh, they’re oppressing the Uyghurs and the amount of children they gave.

[01:51:47] Cameron: No, they were just, actually, the, that community had been given an exemption on the one child policy for decades, then they removed the one child policy and moved it up to like two or three kids, three kids you could have. They were bringing Xinjiang down into that level and they were like, oh, they’re oppressing the Uyghurs.

[01:52:06] Cameron: And the Chinese are going, no, we were just bringing it into line with the rest of the country and our policy on birth rates. But that was never told in the Western media versions of the story. All right. I’m cognizant of the fact that we’re two hours in, we haven’t even got to story number three.

[01:52:21] Tony: Yeah.

[01:52:22] Cameron: I’ve, I suggest that we maybe put a, draw a line under it.

[01:52:25] Cameron: Cause the next story is going to take another hour at least to talk about China’s economy. Maybe we can save that for next month.

[01:52:33] Ray: There we go,

[01:52:34] Tony: Sounds good.

[01:52:35] Cameron: Thank you boys. That was fun as always. Thank you, TK. Thank

[01:52:39] Tony: Yeah, thank you. Thanks for the invite. Thanks, Ray.

[01:52:41] Ray: yeah, thank you sir, gentlemen, yes, all

[01:52:46] Cameron: a good, have a good month.

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