 Let's see. We're going to start with TikTok. And, you know, I'm tired of this topic. I'm sure you guys are tired of this topic, but there's news. There's news. Every day there's news. So the first news I saw this morning was that a judge had blocked the administration from banning the apps of both WeChat and TikTok, and that was done earlier today. So that applies to both WeChat and TikTok, the two apps that the administration had banned from being downloaded from app stores today. But then, later in the day, later in the morning, we heard that Donald Trump had approved, approved, the president of the United States himself had approved a deal for TikTok, whereby Arikall and Walmart will be purchasing 20% of TikTok USA launching a new company, supposedly an American company, owned 80%. By the way, by ByteDance, the Chinese company, but that turns out the Chinese company is owned 40% by Americans. If you had the 40% that owned ByteDance plus the 20% that owned TikTok directly, it has a majority US ownership and and that President Trump had approved the deal. Now, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but I just want to point out a few of the absurdities that are associated with this. One, why is the President of the United States approving M&A deals? Why is the President of the United States determining the corporate structure of companies? Why is the President of the United States involved in such decisions? You know, the only other example of this was Obama with the other companies and then he had a whole, he had assigned a whole group to deal with this and it was, but and that was a travesty and awful and a violation of rights and horrific. But why is the President of the United States in a position to approve a disapprove of a deal to purchase a company? I mean, we have, I mean, this is supposed to be a country of laws, not of men. This is supposed to be something that we should have a due process system to decide whether TikTok is a national security threat and if so, what to do about it and that there should be some kind of objective process to do this by not the decision making of one guy who happens to be the President. It is nutty and absurd and insane and suddenly, suddenly, statist. So here's this company TikTok. And if you've ever been on TikTok, I haven't, but I guess it has short videos and a lot of young people like this and accusation is that, you know, there's a lot of personal information that is entered into this and that good information could be transferred to China. Okay, so sue them, tell them they're violating privacy laws or restrictions and create some way to block the information being transferred to China. But why is the President of the United States negotiating deals? Plus, I think he said that as part of this, TikTok will pay the US government $5 billion. It turns out that what really is happening is that the assessment is that over the lifetime of this new company, they will pay taxes with $5 billion. But that's typical Trump, you know, you know, Mexico will pay for the wall that was never built and the TikTok will pay the US government $5 billion. Yeah, and taxes, which they would have paid anyway. But here's some other information that I found really interesting. Why did Donald Trump, the President of the United States, or we could say the central planet in chief of the United States, why did he, why did he turn down the deal with Microsoft and approve a deal with Oracle? Oracle and Walmart are teaming up together. Originally, the idea was Microsoft and Walmart were going to team up to do the deal and they were negotiating and Donald Trump said, no, why Walmart? I'm sorry, why Oracle? Oracle is the big database company that also has servers. Why Oracle? Well, it turns out, I mean, and maybe this is a complete accident. Maybe this is just irrelevant. But the fact is that it turns out that a number of Oracle executives are quite close to Donald Trump. Indeed, the CEO, Safa Katz, served on Trump's 2016 transition team. And Oracle's executive chairman and founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, one of the, one of the giants of Silicon Valley, is among the few tech leaders in Silicon Valley who support the President and Larry Ellison has hosted a fundraiser for Trump. It is a state in Rancho Mirage in California. So I wonder if Larry Ellison just called up his buddy, Donald Trump, and said, hey, can you, can you do me a favor? Don't let Microsoft buy this. You know, we'd like to be on the deal. And by the way, you know, you wanted a U.S. company to buy it outright. Let us just buy 20% because, eh, you know, that's good enough. Do us a favor. Because none of this deal is consistent with Donald Trump said he was going to do with TikTok. I mean, to me, this looks like cronyism up the Rezoo. It looks corrupt completely. You're worried about Biden's son sitting on boards of Ukrainian companies here, right under our nose, right under our nose. We're forcing a Chinese company to divest an asset and we're letting that asset be bought by friends of the president. I don't know. Maybe it's irrelevant. Maybe it has nothing to do with anything, but it just seems weird. And again, are we calling Walmart only buying 20% of the sentencing? 80% will be still owned by a Chinese company that is supposed to be the devil. This is supposed to be all a national security threat to the United States. And nothing's being done about this national security threat to the United States. Why? Because Walmart's buying a percentage of it. Anyway, Walmart is saying, the same as Microsoft, by the way, said that they will host all the data in Oracle facilities and secure it, make sure it doesn't go anywhere, that it's not supposed to go. Right? Oracle is lagging on cloud services. Remember, TikTok is huge, right? TikTok is massive. And the amount of, you know, all this stuff is in the cloud. And the dominant players in the cloud services business are primarily Amazon. And then after Amazon, there's Google and Microsoft. Oracle is a pretty distant fourth. This will boost, this will boost Oracle's presence in cloud computing, in cloud storage significantly. It'll give them a huge foot in that world that is a growing world. Basically, all computing is going up into the cloud. And that's where Amazon makes most of its money. It doesn't make most of its money. And what we use Amazon for, which is, you know, what we know we use Amazon for, which is to buy stuff, the real source of Amazon's profitability is cloud services. And Oracle wants to compete. And therefore, Donald Trump has handed them this massive deal where they can compete and they can create. And this is, I mean, cronyism and corruption is all I can think of this deal. And of course, nothing's going to happen. Nobody's going to criticize it. Nobody's going to make a big deal out of it because nobody does. Nobody cares. These kind of things are ignored and accepted. And this is what happens when you have a mixed economy. And this is what happens when you have a president who, some people pretend is a free market president, but acts like, acts like a complete crony, a complete, an utter crony. Yes, there was a big, I don't know, Trevor, if you're relating to, yeah, I'm not sure what Trevor's referring to, jet air contract might have had what I don't know what effect. I mean, Microsoft was got a massive contract from the from the government to do cloud computing. And there was a lot of speculation that the Microsoft got it over Amazon, a lot of speculation that the reason Microsoft got it and not Amazon is because Donald Trump hates Bezos. And this was to punish Bezos for owning the Washington Post, which criticizes Trump. That's how politics is done in Washington DC today. And not just today. Today it's just evident. And today it's out in an open and no problem. Corruption has been around forever. Somebody's saying Billy Carter, Jimmy Carter's brother got a big job in the 70s, which I don't know. Sure. I mean, this has been going on forever. But it's more and more evident and it affects more and more decisions because that's the nature of the mixed economy. And it's more and more obvious. I don't think 20 years ago, a president would have gotten involved in one deal like this. I don't think people would have asked the president to approve or not approve. This is really, this is a Donald Trump type of phenomena. And it only gets worse from here. Right? We don't go backwards. We only go forwards. That is, we go towards more corruption, more cronyism, more government involvement, more central planning, more industrial policy, which is what, what, which is what both Democrats and certain Republicans would like for this country. And Donald Trump is certainly part of that wing of the Republican Party that wants industrial policy and is engaged and promotes industrial policy. All right. That, you know, so hopefully this ends the question of TikTok and we never have to talk about it again. That would be nice. WeChat still is up in the air. What happens to them? WeChat is owned by, I think, the largest tech company in China. It's going to be interesting. I think they're going to put up a fight again. They're going to do the station. They'll take them to court. It's going to be a legal battle. WeChat is a much more of an essential piece of software than is TikTok, which is primarily for entertainment. WeChat is, is used by business to communicate with, with a Chinese counterpart. WeChat is used by a lot of people to communicate. I have WeChat. And I've got, I used to have, I haven't used it in a long time. That's how I used to communicate with kind of the pro-free market people that I knew in China. There was a whole group on WeChat, a number of groups on WeChat where we would communicate about issues over WeChat that related to activism, publication of my books in China and, and lectures and, and just discuss issues regarding China and, and freedom. And, and so that's the context in which I know WeChat. And I've got WeChat on that, that would become impossible if Donald Trump has his way and we banned WeChat from the United States. And then the means of communicating with people in China become much more limited and much more easy to monitor, much more easy to monitor. So, I guess there's Telegram and there's some other encrypted ways in which you can do it. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist roads. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now. 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it. But, but at least the people who are liking it, you know, I want to see, I want to see a thumbs up. There you go. Start liking it. I want to see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this. And you know the likes matter. 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