Frances and Melissa discuss TikTok's ban in the United States, and whether or not it should be implemented. They discuss the pros and cons of the ban, and why it should or should not be implemented in the first place.
00:07:52.880He really is able to appeal to a demographic that didn't really have any interest for him before.
00:08:00.920And once this law actually went into effect, which was January 19th, a day before the inauguration, which is a total coincidence, by the way.
00:08:09.840Trump then, you know, he kind of says, oh, we're going to try and save it.
00:08:17.340I'm going to write an executive order.
00:08:51.920There's a lot of TikTok users are on edge.
00:08:54.340And eventually he, you know, the app goes dark on just hours before the ban was actually supposed to be in effect.
00:09:06.760And by the way, we should have a moment of silence, right, for the Zoomers, for whom they experienced like the worst 12 hours of their life when this app went dark.
00:09:32.400If you go look it up, it's called, it's like our stroke TikTok ban.
00:09:36.040People didn't know what to do with their lives.
00:09:38.280Uh, they were like, I don't have hobbies outside of this.
00:09:40.900They, a lot of, a lot of young folks use TikTok, I sound so old saying that, but they use TikTok like a search engine.
00:09:47.160So instead of like going to Google, looking up a recipe, looking up something, they actually, the first thing they do is to, um, go to TikTok.
00:09:53.740So that is the way they interface with the world and have been for the last, you know, a couple of years.
00:10:00.780Um, and so they were all in hysterics.
00:10:03.360There were a lot of meltdown videos being posted, but the app goes dark and there was a pop-up.
00:10:09.380So if you tried to load it, there was a pop-up saying, unfortunately, this, you know, app is banned, um, and there, you cannot access it right now.
00:10:19.260But they say something about President Trump might save it.
00:10:32.180I was actually about to get into that because what the law stipulates is that no American entity can update, maintain, or distribute the app in question.
00:10:46.000So what that means is that app stores run by Google, run by Apple, had to delist the app from the app store.
00:10:53.040So in theory, the law can go into effect on January 19th.
00:10:57.100And the app that you already have downloaded on your phone will still function because you don't have to go to the app store for new downloads.
00:11:04.880The only thing is that it can be updated, right?
00:11:07.460So over time, the app would actually degrade in terms of functionality because they're unable to patch the software.
00:11:14.560But in theory, ByteDance or TikTok could have just left the app in place on your phone if you had it, if you were accessing it through a browser and you didn't close that browser, you could still access it.
00:11:27.100But TikTok is the one that decides to take it dark hours before the deadline.
00:11:33.760And that's what I call the Zoomer nom because they didn't know what to do with their lives.
00:11:39.860And what that created was this giant backlash and people didn't know how to react to this.
00:11:48.820So this is a bit like psychological manipulation if you think about it.
00:11:52.700It's a bit like poker where you just keep raising the stakes and then you're like trying to call out somebody's bluff.
00:12:01.120And I think that's what they were trying to do because the outrage that was expressed during these 12 hours is a bit of a propaganda play.
00:12:09.300And then putting out this message pop up on everybody's phone saying that Trump is going to step in to save that, which, again, for the average Zoomer, imagine like they just took away your app.
00:12:20.980And now literally Hitler is going to swoop in to save this app.
00:12:25.500I mean, at this point, I think TikTok is contractually obligated to be called Trump Talk.
00:12:29.780And they restored the app after about 12 hours or so.
00:14:26.180I mean, how much of it is Trump saying that, you know, this is, not retaliation,
00:14:31.520but whether it's motivated by vengeance, whether it's motivated by making sure we're not rewarded.
00:14:36.980Because the thing is that when TikTok goes dark, where are the 170 million users going to go?
00:14:41.320Presumably, you know, Instagram has reels, right?
00:14:45.680And so it's kind of like a TikTok-like competitor.
00:14:49.080And so the idea was that, okay, they're going to flock there.
00:14:52.300And that would just help someone who, you know, maybe Trump blames for what had happened to him.
00:15:00.900I guess maybe he didn't notice that Zuckerberg has been on a, you know, change, has had a change of heart.
00:15:08.500A miraculous, an inexplicable, certain change of heart.
00:15:11.800I mean, he's starting to look quite human.
00:15:15.200And, you know, the way he's dressing, doing his jiu-jitsu, he's now, you know, doing a whole PR tour,
00:15:21.480went on Joe Rogan and announced that, you know, his company has, like so many other tech companies, gone too feminine.
00:15:30.380We need to bring masculinity back to Silicon Valley.
00:15:33.760You know, we need to, the policies have gotten maybe too empathetic.
00:15:37.340Like, that's what he seems, which is so ironic, guys, because this is the, you know, Silicon Valley is a place where, I don't know,
00:15:46.520just six, seven years ago, you couldn't even say that maybe there were more male engineers because male and females want different things, right?
00:15:55.300Because, like, James Damore gets fired from Google for literally writing something very banal and supported by evolutionary psychology.
00:16:02.440Um, and so, I don't think we can discount that motivation, but I think the more easy one is just, you know,
00:16:11.260you have somebody who has donated to Trump's campaign, who sits on the board of ByteDance, who stands a lot to gain from it.
00:16:18.160Um, but also, it's just sheer popularity play.
00:19:41.160Just mouthing the words, okay, maybe, you know, I shouldn't be so mean, because, look, TikTok is, has created a platform for people who have poured their heart and soul into content, you know.
00:20:00.260Entire comedians' careers have really blossomed because of TikTok.
00:20:05.660There are TikTok celebrities now that, you know, just produce content for that app.
00:20:10.540So people's income streams, cooking videos, I can't, I have deep sympathies for the people that have, you know, put so much into creating content.
00:20:21.820And they have deep friendships on this app.
00:20:24.580I mean, it's just like people on Twitter have, you know, forming deep networks and friendships, although you could say a lot of it is just fake if you don't take it off the app.
00:20:36.060So, I think a lot of it changed also when, I think it was, I'm not cool enough to know, there was a rapper, I just know he was a black cowboy rapper, who dropped a song.
00:20:48.520Like, that was a new way that the music industry, with Billy Ray Cyrus, do you know what I'm talking about?
00:20:53.660KK definitely does not, but you might have a shot at knowing.
00:20:56.120Yeah, I don't, I know Billy Ray Cyrus are very, you know, achy-breaky heart.
00:21:03.020And Billy Ray Cyrus drops, they drop a song called, like, some old town cowboy thing.
00:21:09.920And, okay, this sounds so boomer of me, but that song goes viral on TikTok.
00:21:14.940And for music executives, this was another way, they realized, like, oh, this is another way to get a song popular.
00:21:22.420And the structure, the format of TikTok now introduced a brand new way for musicians to get their songs out there and to make it popular.
00:21:33.420It's such a good point, because now the music industry, when they produce music, I talk to musicians, and they say, well, you've got to produce something that is going to go viral on TikTok.
00:21:46.140And if it doesn't go viral on TikTok, then you're probably not going to have a hit record.
00:21:51.300Which is just a completely different way of actually looking at it.
00:21:54.820But then you think, as well, you look at the people who own TikTok.
00:21:58.780You know, we talk about, you know, the billionaire who owns TikTok, but BlackRock's involved in TikTok.
00:22:05.840Are BlackRock not going to apply a little bit of pressure to Trump and go, hey, we've invested however much money into it, a hell of a lot of money into it?
00:22:13.040Are you, they're not going to be happy that it's suddenly their investment goes overnight?
00:22:18.160Yeah, but, you know, I don't think perhaps BlackRock is also, what leverage points, you know, does BlackRock really have on Trump?
00:22:27.140I think at the end of the day, that is more of the issue.
00:22:30.340And the reason why, say, this China play with TikTok is so, such a big deal, it's really about what are the leverage points, right?
00:22:38.700I mean, a good analogy to this is really like, would we, if we rewind time and we're back during the Cold War, would we allow a Soviet-backed firm to buy NBC News, right?
00:22:53.840And we would be absolutely crazy to allow something like that.
00:22:58.500There's been a long history of the U.S. at least restricting foreign ownership of media.
00:23:05.400It goes back to the 1912, there was a 1912 Radio Act, which prohibited foreign individuals and foreign companies from owning a license to broadcast radio.
00:23:15.920I mean, back then it was radio in America.
00:23:18.620It was later expanded, and so, you know, that's why someone like Rupert Murdoch, who is an Australian citizen, had to get an American citizenship in order to buy News Corp, which runs Fox News and Wall Street Journal.
00:23:32.580And likewise, in your country now, where we sit, there was a takeover bid, right?
00:23:38.220There was an attempted takeover bid for the Telegraph and the Spectator, and Parliament had to convene this session because the Emiratis kind of put together a group.
00:23:48.500And there were concerns, should we be letting the Emiratis own, you know, a newspaper, a broadsheet in the U.K.?
00:23:57.380And eventually, you know, the pressure worked.
00:24:01.040It was, no, we shouldn't, and it was sold to a British, you know, a British owner.
00:24:06.800So we have these laws and restrictions in place.
00:24:10.180But I don't want to be glib also about the potential First Amendment issues, and maybe we should actually discuss that, right?
00:24:17.300Because there is a legitimate concern in many libertarian types, Thomas Massey was very much against this legislation.
00:24:25.760And they said, look, you know, we have to be worried about civil liberties here.
00:24:32.360There's two issues with the potential First Amendment violations.
00:24:37.160The first one is that one could argue that foreign propaganda is basically editorial discretion by another name, right?
00:25:58.900The Chinese have walled off their entire ecosystem, media ecosystem.
00:26:03.500But the issue of reciprocity is very different from the issue of foreign propaganda in America, right?
00:26:11.000And whether or not we should, quote unquote, allow it.
00:26:15.420Just on that, Melissa, there's a follow up, I think, that's important as well.
00:26:19.000I have heard a lot of people say that TikTok for Chinese people is totally different to TikTok for Westerners.
00:26:27.780And this is where I think you start to get into meddling operations because if it was universally the same, you'd go, well, you know, this is, yeah, okay, this app's owned by China, but it's freedom of discussion, whatever.
00:26:41.580But in this instance, my understanding is the Chinese content is all wholesome and prim and proper, whereas all the degenerate stuff is being pumped into the West effectively.
00:27:09.100And that becomes so popular in China that they then hive off a foreign version called TikTok.
00:27:16.260So TikTok is then a derivative of Douyin.
00:27:19.860But the point of doing that is to separate, I think, users.
00:27:24.940They don't want American users corrupting, you know, bringing whatever.
00:27:30.160Think about TikTok as a vector for woke ideology.
00:27:33.740Why would any country want that, right?
00:27:36.140And it was, especially the stuff about gender and, you know, please pick your mental, you know, issue for the day.
00:27:45.220It was promoting a lot of even eating disorders.
00:27:47.900So why would the Chinese want that kind of influence on their platforms?
00:27:51.160And then Douyin, so Douyin has been hived off from TikTok.
00:27:56.920And you're right that the content is not only different, it is also limited.
00:28:02.540I think because the Chinese government became very concerned with too much use, heavy Internet use in general.
00:28:09.380So the, you know, the moment they felt like, okay, our youth are playing too many video games, they limited the number of hours that youth, the youth in China can actually log on to play video games.
00:28:22.180This is the kind of thing you can do in an authoritarian country, right?
00:28:25.140Like we try to ban big gulp sodas and it's like, oh my gosh, like fascism is here, you know, Hitler is here.
00:28:32.320So we can't do that kind of thing, but the Chinese government can.
00:28:39.360And I think there has been evidence that it was a study done by Rutgers University and another institute called the Network Contagion Research Institute, which, by the way, is not a left-wing institute at all.
00:28:53.840They do a lot of work on far-right misinformation stuff that, for me, is a little overboard on what they claim and they don't really focus on Antifa's violence, for example.
00:29:06.320But this group have put out now two reports.
00:29:10.900And what they show is that when you compare the total volume of posts on Instagram versus TikTok, and they looked at it across various hashtags.
00:29:24.240So like Taylor Swift, hashtag Taylor Swift, hashtag Cristiano Ronaldo, there's a certain baseline ratio of number of posts on Instagram versus TikTok.
00:29:33.660But then all of a sudden when you compare that with hashtags, you know, like Tiananmen Square, Hong Kong protests, or anything that is culturally sensitive to the Chinese government, it is completely out of whack.
00:29:46.620And that was used as evidence to show that TikTok was suppressing topics that were, you know, not, the Chinese government just did not want people to know about.
00:30:03.000And that is the argument I agree with in terms of potentially being able to throttle discussion.
00:30:12.800Or shape discussion would be a more...
00:30:19.700But when you shape discussion of certain things beyond just Tiananmen Square, but more about, you know, America's attitude to China or whatever, that to me is a foreign influence operation.
00:30:32.660And if that's happening, that's really what the concern I think ought to be.
00:30:36.160But then would you have a problem if it's an American or if it's, say, a British owner?
00:30:42.360Spotify, for example, is owned by a Swedish company, right?
00:30:48.880Is it a problem just because it's a foreigner or is all, you know, because I think the United States has a legal precedent of saying that companies are people, too, because of Citizens United.
00:31:03.440And therefore, companies actually do have free speech rights in America.
00:31:07.980And when a social media company makes editorial choices, meaning throttling things, that is well within their speech rights.
00:31:18.020So this is a case called the Net Choice case.
00:31:23.720So essentially, the old Twitter, for example, old Twitter, where they ran into trouble before Elon rescued it, was not that it was throttling conservative voices and, you know, boosting pro-trans, pro-gender ideology people.
00:31:43.660The issue was the government telling the old regime or telling, you know, engineers at Twitter what should and what should not be boosted.
00:31:54.660That was the issue, the First Amendment issue.
00:31:56.960It wasn't actually that Twitter was censoring people at all because if you run a social media company or platform, you should be able to censor people however you like.
00:32:07.080If tomorrow, you know, you decide, I'm going to start, you know, KK.com or something, and you, you know, just say, I don't want to hear anyone who's gay.
00:32:16.180I'm just going to ban everyone because I don't like to hear anything gay.
00:32:52.460So the, and what happened was, and correct me if I'm wrong, it was the American government looking into it and going, well, this poses.
00:33:01.400It's a very clear, very real security risk because there are people who are gay who are in government or whatever else that this can be used as a tool to blackmail.
00:33:14.660And who's gay, who's not seeking, you know, maybe homosexual tursts.
00:33:20.280All that is, can be used for blackmail.
00:33:23.880The app was then, went through the same treatment.
00:33:27.580Uh, the U.S. government eventually managed to successfully force his divestment.
00:33:32.520And, uh, Grindr was sold to a U.S. company for $600 million.
00:33:37.200Now, notice that no one said anything about, you know, censorship when my rights were deprived.
00:33:45.040Um, but that's because Grindr complied.
00:33:47.620And so I do find it very disingenuous when TikTok turns around and says, oh, you know, our rights are, um, actually being eroded here because if you comply, all the speech still stands.
00:34:04.040And that's one of the arguments that all, most of the Supreme Court justices actually made in the hearing.
00:34:10.520You know, they said that all the speech, all the content that currently exists on TikTok, they remain the same.
00:34:17.220This is not about manipulating speech.
00:34:31.300So that's how they tried to shut down the, the, you know, the argument about this being a First, um, First Amendment violation.
00:34:41.160No, but you're right about, about Grindr.
00:34:43.320And there are other cases that are coming up soon.
00:34:47.120Um, I don't know if you guys have heard about the DJI case, uh, potentially.
00:34:53.940So DJI is a Chinese company that makes drones.
00:34:58.060They are the world, world's leader in the drone market.
00:35:02.140They produce, you know, all, all the commercial stuff.
00:35:04.380Like if you have friends that own drones, you know, farmers that want to do agricultural surveys or just hobbyists, they all have DJI.
00:35:11.760And, uh, recently there has been a lot of, uh, furrow about, about DJI drones because, you know, it's collecting a lot of information.
00:35:22.400You're flying these drones around, um, you know, your house, maybe near a military installation or near an airport or something.
00:35:30.880And there are actually these things called geofences where the software can block the drone from entering certain protective spaces determined by the FAA.
00:35:40.000Um, but, I don't know, last week, I think, the geofences were dropped.
00:35:45.600And so it was maybe five, six days before the inauguration.
00:35:49.360Um, the software, the DJI software dropped the geofencing.
00:35:53.760So that meant that the drones could actually go a lot closer to airports and things like that.
00:36:00.100Um, but imagine that you're, again, this is another issue with who's controlling the stuff.
00:36:06.160Like, you have a geopolitical adversary.
00:36:09.040Um, this is a Chinese company that essentially can just change their software and change the performance and, and what you're doing with these drones.
00:36:18.520This is a scary situation to be in, not to mention that currently as it stands, because we've outsourced our, you know, so much of our industrial capacity, the United States cannot build a drone exclusively and solely in America.
00:36:37.560And in a world in which we've just seen, you know, the dangers of an unsecured supply chain, we just saw one of the most, uh, brilliant, uh, you know, counter-terrorism attempts ever made, uh, when Israel managed to infiltrate supply chains for pagers, for Hezbollah pagers.
00:36:59.580And all these pages simultaneously blowing up in a very surgically, uh, tuned attack, you would want to secure your supply chains.
00:37:11.400Imagining, you know, letting your drones, which are now dispersed, I mean, there are millions and millions of drone owners now in the United States.
00:37:18.760And so this same national security issue is going to come up with DJI very soon.
00:37:24.800There are, there have been national security probes into it.
00:37:27.120There is talk of potentially banning it.
00:37:29.960So it's, yeah, it's not just, you know, Grindr.
00:37:32.200It's a lot of other companies that, that are now at risk of, um, being banned.
00:37:37.460Do you think the issue here, Melissa, is that I think, you know, the Francis Fukuyama, uh, the end of history in 1991, that there's been this sort of sense that, well, we don't really have adversaries anymore.
00:37:51.480We're all going to hold hands and sing Kumbaya and trade.
00:37:54.560And, and a lot of efforts and overtures were made to China, uh, to try and bring them into the, into the global economy, which has happened.
00:38:02.480But what hasn't happened is what everybody claimed would happen, which was the idea that, well, if, if they get richer, then they're going to become freer.
00:38:11.700And, and the standoff that now exists between geopolitically seems to me like a standoff between democracies and authoritarian countries, effectively.
00:38:20.080It's not so much about ideology as much as it is about the form of government.
00:38:24.060And this way, this Western way of thinking is a kind of luxury belief, almost the idea that we don't have enemies.
00:38:32.580We don't have people who would use power that we give them over us and the vulnerabilities that we expose to them in order to do things or achieve things at our expense.
00:38:43.440Do you think this conversation about, about forcing TikTok to divest or people talk about having a band, likewise, some of the issues you mentioned is really fundamentally a gradual process of realization that we're not in the end of history world.
00:38:59.200We're in a world where at least two countries are attempting to prize the leadership away from the Western world.
00:39:06.740And we're going to have to reckon with that somehow.
00:39:09.860Yeah, I, I, to some extent, I do think the fever has kind of broken over this.
00:39:14.380We have started to realize that the world that we were promised pursuing a, you know, pro engagement attitude towards China in the hopes that they would liberalize, in the hopes that they would open up, turn out to be a bad miscalculation.
00:39:33.260Because it turns out that they were then kind of exporting their own authoritarian ways.
00:39:39.320Like, you know, the Chinese state has not only built a surveillance system for their own people, but they've exported that surveillance system now to us.
00:39:50.880And if they are able, well, through the Internet of Things, through the technologies, you know, and if they're able to actually use our own laws against us.
00:40:02.820Like, we're essentially cucking ourselves with our own laws, if you think about it.
00:40:06.160Because if they, if they can use that, if they can claim, imagine if they were successful in claiming First Amendment violations, right?
00:40:13.960The irony of just the situation where an authoritarian state that denies free speech to its own citizens can claim First Amendment violations to its own benefit, then I think we deserve to lose World War III.
00:40:27.600We might as well just wave the white flag, just, you know, cut our losses, just, just at this point, just give up prematurely.
00:40:34.160Because we just cannot, you know, closed societies can hack open societies very easily.
00:40:42.280And if we cannot, you know, have muscular principles that we are able to defend our, our way of life and our system and our laws, then on the grounds that somebody is denying some, you know, basic freedoms, I just don't know how we're even going to face up against the reality that we do have foreign adversaries.
00:41:10.260They want control in this, you know, increasingly bipolar world.
00:41:16.040We've seen Russia and China really get pushed together.
00:41:21.540It's, they've gotten closer since the, you know, the, the Russia-Ukraine war as well.
00:41:27.000And it's, they're now coming together to even form things like, you know, digital currencies that own central banks, digital banks.
00:41:35.320And it's very worrying because the world is now decoupling.
00:41:40.240But I do think that decoupling is necessary, right?
00:41:42.680Because the Soviet Union collapsed on its own contradictions.
00:41:48.520It, you know, pursued glass knot and then perestroika.
00:41:53.720And it collapsed because it just could not sustain itself economically.
00:41:59.660The problem with China is that they studied the Soviet Union's collapse very carefully because they know that that's exactly what they need to avoid.
00:42:09.520And so they did the reverse, where they actually opened up markets first before anything else, right?
00:43:43.560There's no indication at all that it is going the way of the Soviet Union.
00:43:47.980Um, it, the advances that the Chinese state has made on AI, on a lot of these technologies that are just boosting productivity at the forefront.
00:43:57.440About five years ago, China didn't make a single EV.
00:44:00.920Today, it's the world market leader, surpass Tesla.
00:46:53.720When you think actually, I think it was a couple of years ago, that Taiwan was accusing TikTok of helping to push pro-Beijing, anti-Taiwanese propaganda into the minds of young people via the app.
00:47:15.260It's only banned from military devices.
00:47:17.020Unlike, say, India, which banned the app entirely in July 2020.
00:47:23.460There were border clashes between the two countries and India was like, enough, we're just going to ban not just TikTok, they ban a bunch of other Chinese-owned apps.
00:47:35.980I mean, you can see it from, you know, the basic fact that, like, people are, you know, picking their identities through TikTok as well.
00:47:49.260It's so easy, it so easily influences young people that you have phenomenons that are social contagions that spread like wildfire on this app.
00:47:59.500Susie Weiss wrote a great piece for the Free Press documenting the rise of, like, pick-your-own-mental-health issue.
00:48:10.840So, things like Tourette's syndrome, you know, with the verbal tics, because it looks very cute on camera, but kind of like the more performative kind of mental-health issues.
00:48:37.760But, and you have also eating disorders that have spread like wildfire on the same app.
00:48:46.040And so, you know, social contagions so easily take to TikTok.
00:48:50.760Why wouldn't, you know, the ability to actually change people's minds on a single topic?
00:48:57.620There have been some theories about this, you know, this idea that the entity behind orchestrating this whole desire to ban TikTok is actually Israel.
00:49:17.900What their argument is, is that there's been too much pro-Palestinian messages have been spread via TikTok.
00:49:27.060And that has engendered sympathy to the Palestinian cause.
00:49:30.580And what the Jews, Israel and Mossad have done is then pressure the US government to shut it down because it's making people too aware of Israel's war crimes.
00:49:55.000So that is a function of what is happening in terms of the levers of control on TikTok.
00:50:02.820But regardless, this argument is based on the idea that there's no other way for pro-Palestinian content to show up, which is completely false on other platforms.
00:50:14.980I mean, you have, you know, influences like Candace Owens, like Ian Carroll, who have amassed huge audiences.
00:50:24.200And even after veering into anti-Semitic territory, far beyond just pro-Palestine, they have built even bigger followings on other platforms.
00:51:40.280Two and a bit months in order to sort this out.
00:51:42.360Now, that's not a long time when you think about the deal that needs to be struck, the various parties, the fact that the Chinese government, ByteDance, have dug their heels in.
00:52:14.300They kept insisting, you know, TikTok cannot be sold.
00:52:18.740We are, you know, going to, we would rather shut it down, the CEO said.
00:52:23.400So there was this idea that, like, this cannot happen.
00:52:26.520They blamed it on Chinese export controls.
00:52:28.960They said China just, you know, Beijing has export controls on algorithms, and this is one that falls under them, which, again, is very ironic because you just were trying to base your argument that TikTok is not a Chinese company and there's no Chinese influence.
00:52:43.980But then apparently China is not allowing you to sell this app, which is cuts against your argument.
00:52:50.240And so, yeah, fast forward to where we are now.
00:52:55.400Trump has signed, has passed an executive order saying, all right, we're going to, you know, try to find some time.
00:53:02.000By the way, I don't even know if this executive order can actually stand in court.
00:53:06.140Again, because the law has gone into effect.
00:53:08.940The idea of whether or not there's been qualified buyers lined up, it doesn't seem like a deal is anywhere close to being looked at.
00:53:27.520But the latest reports I've read is that there is some indication that ByteDance is softening.
00:53:33.900They seem to entertain this idea of a 50-50 joint venture situation with China.
00:53:43.900My worry, though, is that, you know, and this is kind of the day work, my day job, what that entails is analyzing China risk, China exposure, and, you know, advising companies on how to navigate that.
00:54:01.120But is that, let's say the leading candidate is Elon Musk, okay?
00:54:18.560But my concern is that, let's say the Chinese government just comes out and says, you know, the only person that you can sell this app to is Elon Musk.
00:54:26.720The problem with that is that Elon is very exposed to Chinese markets through his other companies.
00:54:38.800So, yeah, we don't have a Chinese owner.
00:54:41.400But if Elon Musk owns it, he, through Tesla and SpaceX, because of, you know, they have factories in China, they can't manufacture a lot of things without the Chinese market.
00:55:05.020They kind of, you know, they say, like, if Elon just shuts his mouth, it's the same thing they used to say about Trump, right?
00:55:10.060If he just shuts his mouth, think of, you know, how much more people will like him and his policies.
00:55:13.640I actually kind of like that we have the richest man on Earth, serious billionaire who knows everything about rockets and, you know, brain chips, tweeting memes about cocks or something.
00:55:32.980He'll say things that are sometimes wrong.
00:55:34.740He's been tweeting a lot about U.K. politics recently.
00:55:37.040But the one thing he's very careful about, try to find the worst thing he's ever said about the CCP or about China, it's hard to find, right?
00:55:49.420And so my concern is that through exposure, and this is why it does matter, Elon might be a little bit beholden to the Chinese government in other ways.
00:56:02.580I mean, he's not obligated to turn it over, you know, to turn American user data to the Chinese, like in the current structure, but he might be beholden to the Chinese government in other ways.
00:56:12.960And now that Donald Trump, with Elon Musk's support, is in charge of America, how do you see that play out vis-a-vis China?
00:56:23.800Because that was a big talking point in his first presidency.
00:56:27.740China, you know, every comedian had a routine about it, the whole thing.
00:56:34.300So obviously the war in Ukraine has meant that the focus is there.
00:56:37.860The war in Gaza has taken the focus there too.
00:56:42.040And what I see from Donald Trump is a willingness to do deals that might not be, that allow him to get a deal without necessarily getting the best outcome for the side that he might have been seen to be supporting, let's put it that way, right?
00:57:02.180You know, you look at Israel talking about the ceasefire, which I think a lot of people feel is, I mean, you're getting the hostages back, but you're doing exactly the same thing that caused October 7th in the first place, which is you're releasing terrorists from jails.
00:57:16.500You're sending them back to Hamas, who are celebrating.
00:57:19.860On Ukraine, clearly he's going to try and do a deal as quickly as possible without necessarily regard for the long-term consequences.
00:57:28.580Is he going to, what do you make of his China approach now in that context?
00:58:03.920But midway through, I noticed that Donald Trump had single-handedly reversed what was the consensus that drove U.S. foreign policy for decades since Nixon went to China.
00:58:17.700From something that was pro-engagement or some sort of like tacit acceptance of China's rise in the world to a offensive position.
00:59:11.480And it was obvious in the way they conducted themselves, you know, how they retaliated against countries that wanted the investigation into COVID origins by economic pressure.
00:59:21.880And, you know, this whole thing about China extending its censorship tentacles to even companies beyond China.
00:59:29.780American companies couldn't, you know, say what they wanted to say.
00:59:32.400You couldn't tweet what you wanted to tweet in support of Hong Kong if you were a basketball coach.
00:59:37.120So all of this made people realize, like, okay, this was not the sleeping dragon that we thought it was.
00:59:43.800And so fast forward to today, you know, I thought Donald Trump was going to be able to build upon that legacy, which, to Biden's credit, he continued.
00:59:55.900He extended a lot of Trump's tariffs on China and even in some ways actually doubled down on America first.
01:00:06.240You know, the CHIPS Act and a lot of things that he had passed.
01:00:08.940And so I thought, okay, wow, it's like a permanent change in the entire foreign policy establishment.
01:00:16.120And so what's shocking is that that's why this reversal is taking me by surprise because, you know, this is Trump's last term.
01:00:28.040He doesn't actually have to do anything that's popular.
01:00:30.980He can actually just be a total jackass and make America great again.
01:00:35.980Like, just pursue all the unpopular things.
01:00:37.960He doesn't have to seek for anyone's approval.
01:00:40.920And so it's a bit shocking to me that he has taken this posture.
01:00:45.120And I think, you know, there seems to be this uneasy balance right now.
01:00:50.540MAGA 2.01, because it was such a broad tent, you have, it was like a weird band of people that kind of came together to deliver the White House, right, for Trump.
01:01:01.480And a big part of it was the tech right, which was non-existent the first time.
01:01:06.860And the tech right and the original MAGA right, they don't agree on a lot of things, except that they just hate woke people.
01:01:13.500They just hate what the Democrats have done, and rightly so, right, to America.
01:01:19.320The first fissure of this was obvious over Christmas when there was this huge war about H-1B visas and this debate about, you know, how many H-1B visas.
01:01:31.500And the tech bros are very pro-H-1Bs because they hire a lot of them to staff their companies in Silicon Valley.
01:01:38.980The MAGA right was just like, no, why do we want to turn America into India, right?
01:01:44.840And so, not only do they not agree on these issues about immigration, they also don't agree on, say, like, lifestyle.
01:01:54.240Like, the tech bros are Burning Man going hedonists, right, who want to, you know, play transhumanism to its logical conclusion.
01:02:04.020The MAGA 1.0 are social conservatives that want to return to tradition or they tend to, you know, be more Christian, right?
01:02:11.160And so, on lifestyle, they are also very different.
01:02:16.320And then on the China issue, that's the other issue where in tech, generally, there is this more, because they're all, you know, business people have been a lot more pro-engagement, a lot more willing to work with China and to, you know, try a different tact.
01:02:32.420I think that is quite natural when you are just doing business in general.
01:02:38.140There's always a deal to be made, right?
01:02:44.780And even, you know, if you're a venture capital company, it's hard to not want to be tempted by certain startups in China that are, you know, making huge advances in robotics to AI.
01:02:56.860So, you want to look at those deals as well.
01:02:58.420So, there's a natural predilection for wanting to see China in that older, you know, pre-Trump way than compared to the MAGA folks.
01:03:08.320Like, so, if you've heard Steve Bannon talk recently, he thinks Elon is a demon.
01:03:17.560And if you see both of these individuals as figureheads for their respective sides in this broader Trump, you know, 2.0 tent, it's – I don't know how this is going to play out.
01:03:30.040Because, to be fair to the tech right, I would say that even within the tech right, there are the China hawks and there are the non-China hawks.
01:03:43.660So, it's not monolithic even on that side of the tent.
01:03:49.640But one of the things I think we need to remember, though, is that they need each other, I think.
01:03:57.400You know, in the same way that a healthy society needs conservatives and liberals, I think MAGA 2.0, they need the tech right and they need the MAGA right.
01:04:06.960Because the tech right is what drags them into the future.
01:04:11.920Think about, you know, being future-oriented, innovation.
01:04:15.520You need to have high trade openness for that.
01:04:17.440And then MAGA right is like, okay, don't go too far, guys.
01:04:20.740Like, you know, the thing you want to implant in your head or the artificial wounds, that is way too far.
01:04:27.080So, it's kind of like the gas pedal and the brakes within that movement.
01:04:31.440But given all the personalities and there are a lot of egos there, I don't know how that will last.
01:04:38.560Yeah, and that's the key point, I think, is the ego element of it.
01:04:42.280And that all of these people involved in this movement, particularly at the figurehead, they've all got huge egos.
01:04:49.620And how able are they going to be to step back and let something that they profoundly disagree with or challenges their worldview get implemented at party level?
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01:07:35.840The obvious question is what happens the first time Elon Musk disagrees with Donald Trump on an issue they both care about.
01:07:44.280What happens the first time RFK Jr. and Donald Trump, who don't agree on a lot of things, are forced to recognize and deal with that.
01:07:53.660What happens on all those things, right?
01:07:56.800And the question is, have all those people, do they have the ability for four years to set their ego inside and say, this is the guy that got elected.
01:08:12.580There should be a poly market to bet, you know, like when we think the coalition falls, like on these all these pairwise relationships, because I know I agree with you.
01:08:21.120I mean, the one thing Trump seems very different this time around is that he seems very much more willing to credit a team.
01:08:28.100He has actually kind of dialed back his central need for being front and center.
01:08:35.700He's given, you know, he steps aside, he gives Elon a lot of credit.
01:09:09.100And I guess what has surprised me is how just quite a few positions that Donald Trump has expressed in the past don't seem to be nearly as strong in his mind at the moment and the way he's communicating them.
01:09:27.040I think the, like I said, I think the Israel deal I found quite surprising, to be honest, because I don't, it's a good deal for the parents of the hostages.
01:09:37.160I don't think it's a good deal for Israel, not even remotely.
01:09:40.060It feels like to me, although I understand that Netanyahu is under a lot of pressure internally.
01:09:45.200So that may have been the main factor there.
01:09:48.860And I just guess it remains to be seen.
01:09:51.460I suppose I said this the day on, I did this thing with Stephen Bartlett on Diary CEO with Scott Galloway and Daniel Priestley, which is, I think, ultimately, the presidency is a reactive position.
01:10:03.260Like Donald Trump was on course to be reelected in 2020 and then COVID happens and it ruins everything, right?
01:10:11.460So the war in Ukraine is another example.
01:10:14.180There are lots of these things that will, October 7th is another example.
01:10:18.000There are lots of these things that happen that change the course of history and the president, all they can do is react to that.
01:10:24.380And that's what's going to be interesting to see because, as you say, there are internal dividing lines within the MAGA coalition.
01:10:33.460And when those events happen, that's when there's the propensity for that to start breaking apart because people are going to take different positions.
01:10:42.540I mean, one of the things about, you know, illegal immigration, are they actually going to be able to get rid of all the people that they promised to get rid of?
01:10:50.980Is the birthright citizenship executive order going to stand up in court?
01:11:47.820That's the, you know, that's the big question.
01:11:50.300Because U.S. military estimates by 2027, China will make a move on Taiwan.
01:11:58.080But if, who, why would you put out such a, you know, hard and fast kind of threshold on this?
01:12:05.500It's not like, has any war in history ever been, you know, preemptively predicted like that?
01:12:11.700No, these things kind of happen on the timeline of the perpetrator, right?
01:12:16.120So whenever actually China decides to move is when China decides to move.
01:12:19.300But it is intrinsically baked into Chinese, it's, it's, it's, the Chinese state has for the longest time said that reunification is almost like manifest destiny.
01:12:39.740The other question is how is Taiwan going to be taken militarily?
01:12:44.880Are we going to, you know, have paratroopers come in and storm the island, amphibious vehicles landing?
01:12:51.120Or is it just going to be something more like a soft coercion over time where you almost give Taiwan no choice, whether it's in the form of a naval blockade?
01:13:01.200If you can move ships and, you know, choke off certain points in the sea surrounding Taiwan and prevent oil, prevent food from coming in and out.
01:13:13.240Well, you've kind of choked Taiwan out and given it no choice.
01:13:17.120The worry about Trump specifically is that, you know, he is, has campaigned on being a anti-war president.
01:13:26.960And that's very much baked into his expectations as well.
01:13:35.180And one of the things that, unlike President Biden, who was very clear on, like, Taiwan, we will intervene if Taiwan is taken, which is, you know, actually Biden kind of defied U.S., what was the standard for U.S. foreign policy back then, which is strategic ambiguity.
01:13:57.820It's like, we will never say we will, but, you know, the understanding is kind of like, don't ask, don't tell, but for foreign policy.
01:14:05.780And then after Joe Biden says this, his national security people then come out and say, oh, no, no, no, he doesn't mean that.
01:14:13.960We still respect the one China policy.
01:14:21.760And so it's like a weird thing where for the last four years, we've had a situation where the official posturing of the United States towards the Taiwan issue was strategic ambiguity about strategic ambiguity because of this, like, seesaw thing going on at the executive level.
01:14:39.100Trump comes in and, you know, he's been asked a lot of questions about what do you think about Taiwan?
01:15:14.140And, yeah, and we, you know, we don't know what, you know, that's a thing about also, I think one of the worst legacies of the whole 20 years of war on terror is just the American appetite for any kind of intervention is essentially zero.
01:15:30.700So that's also precisely why we saw, you know, recently when you had this whole debate about the TikTok ban being that, well, Congress unanimously upheld it.
01:15:53.980And it's because of the hangover, I think, from, you know, the WMD fiasco leading up to the Iraq invasion.
01:16:00.200So how we are going to deal with this remains to be seen because Trump also is one of those figures where what he says and what he does, you have to have a lot of room for that.
01:16:11.860And that's why I'm, you know, not necessarily going to think it's the end of the world.
01:16:19.080Even right now when he's playing these games, he often does this where he'll say, he'll, you know, talk very sweetly to, you know, people like Kim Jong-un and the press has like a freak out over stuff like that.
01:16:34.560But then if you look at what he does, like he would praise C, but then he, you know, slapped massive tariffs on China and like becomes very assertive on trade issues.
01:16:46.240So it's like Trump, that's just always been his style.
01:16:49.860So when he says things like, oh, yeah, you know, anti-war, don't want to, we should minimize the chances of war.
01:16:55.780And I don't know what that really means in terms of it's, we're back in a way, if you really know how to read Trump, to strategic ambiguity and his unpredictability in this day and age with the chaos of the global war orders.
01:17:11.220Actually, I think it's a huge pro in our favor.
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