TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #269: Hollywood, the NBA, China and Bitcoin with Chris Fenton

Episode Date: September 2, 2021

Join Marty as he sits down with Chris Fenton, author of Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, & American Businesses, to discuss: - Chinese propaganda in Hollywood - China + the NBA - How interconnected are the US and Chinese markets? - What is needed to combat the CCP at the business level? - much more Follow Chris on Twitter Check out Feeding the Dragon Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app. Compass Mining. Compass wants to democratize bitcoins hashrate and give everyone the ability to strengthen the network while mining bitcoin profitably. Thanks to Compass, it’s never been easier to mine bitcoin. Check them out at compassmining.io Braiins. Braiins are leaders in the mining industry; running Slush Pool, creating firmware to make miners more profitable (Braiins OS+), and building out Stratum V2 to help further decentralize mining and make Bitcoin more robust. Check out their mining profitability calculator.

What is up, freaks? It's your boy, Marty Ben, here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. Interesting ending to this one. We got cut off abruptly on Zoom, considering the discussion we had. It revolved around Shina. Sat down with Chris Fenton, author of Feeding the Dragon, which is a book. We didn't get to pitch the book at the end, so I got to pitch it here. Feeding the Dragons, a book about his experience interacting with China

as part of working in Hollywood and how like propaganda was fit into some movies. And beyond that, we talk about what happened with the NBA in the fall of 2019

when Daryl Morey came out and supported the people of Hong Kong vocally on Twitter and got a lot of backlash from the members of the NBA due to the fact that the NBA has considerable revenue streams coming out of China.

I think it's a fascinating story. Chris is an interesting perspective and this is what you like to see from individuals. They contemplate and think about what they do, their career path. I think Chris is an incredible example of that. You can find him on Twitter.

Go follow him at TheDragonFeeder on Twitter. I'm going to link to it in the show notes. I'm going to link to his book in the show notes, Feeding the Dragon, Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma, Facing Hollywood, the NBA, and American Businesses. I think it's a very important conversation. Again, it was cut off multiple times throughout our conversation.

In the middle, there's a bit of a glitch. I don't have time to edit it, so I say don't just, don't just, don't just. um you have to muddy through that and then at the end it just ends abruptly so beware freaks beware this rip was brought to you by our good friends at the motherfucking cash apps i want you stack sets send sets receive sets and sell sets if you so please we're saying sets sets sets sets sets because sets are the standard you don't buy a whole bitcoin you want to buy a fraction of a bitcoin you can stack whole stats instead cash app makes it very easy you can dca in the stats by daily weekly or bi-weekly set it and forget it uh they

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so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be probably should be do it what is up freaks it's your boy marty bent here we are recording and now we are live we are live on social media youtube as well wasn't expecting to do a live stream for this one but you know what the topic is so juicy and my guest chris fenton was explaining to me that he's trying to get more in tune with the bitcoin world and the audience particularly i think it's a it's a good um good narrative forces to join up in this

battle for liberty in the digital age so chris welcome to the podcast hey it's a pleasure i'm a big fan and and yeah i love your followers they've been really active since you announced uh that we're talking today which i which i love oh well i am very fascinated with the topic that we're going to discuss today which is china you've written a book feeding the dragon inside the trillion dollar dilemma facing hollywood the nba and american business And you have a very unique perspective in the sense that you were working for a Hollywood production company that worked very closely with, would you say, Chinese propagandists to dictate what is and isn't allowed in movies that are being funded by Chinese money? Yeah, I think that's relatively accurate. I mean, one of the reasons I wrote this memoir was to try to get people up to speed on how we got here to this really sort of tenuous place between the U.S. and China.

It wasn't a bunch of greedy capitalists, per se, that were trying to sell the soul of America off to China. It was a lot of people like myself who actually were under this, you know, spell or this mission that globalism was great. The more we opened the China market to the products and services, the United States of America, the better it was for Americans. It would grow GDP. It would create jobs. It would disseminate, you know, essentially Western democratic principles and values into a communist country. All that stuff was the mantra that I lived by and I believed in it. And I worked really hard to try to succeed at my little cog in the wheel level to get the job done. And it wasn't until October 2019 where I really sort of woke up to the problem.

And the book sort of walks us through how we got here. And then I start to lay out ideas of how to move forward. And so October 2019, is that Daryl Morey, Houston Rockets, LeBron James, that whole saga, correct? Yeah, as sad as it is, it took me until then to wake up to it. I'm convinced that there's nobody in the business or the interaction between the US and China from the American side that doesn't understand how bad it is long term for the United States to continue what we're doing the way we have been doing it. Now I'm not for war and I'm not for a really prolonged cold war like we had with the Soviet Union. There needs to be some engagement, but it absolutely cannot be at the same sort of level of engagement or with the same complicity that we've had up until this point. And it really was that Daryl Morey tweet that, um, I happened to see it was for, I wasn't even on Twitter at

the time. And somebody forwarded it to me. And I saw it. And I immediately thought, oh, my God, the NBA screwed in China, because this guy tweeted out his support for Hong Kong protesters. And the soccer dad next to me who was standing on the sidelines, we were watching our kids play soccer, said, Well, why is that? And I said, Well, because I don't even know who this Daryl Morey guy is, but he's the GM of the Houston Rockets. And they're the largest branded team when it comes to China for the NBA because of Yao Ming and anything affiliated with that team in that kind of sentiment towards pro-democracy movement and something that the Chinese Communist Party believes is their territory, their jurisdiction is going to cause major problems.

And I was 100% right. But what I didn't see, and I never even thought about it, was the reaction that the NBA would have, the players would have, that the partners would have in regards to not protecting Daryl Wright's freedom of speech rights that he had being in the West. He happened to tweet that out in Japan. And that bumbling and fumbling made me sort of analyze it a little bit. And then it was when politicians and journalists and critics and consumers started to voice their discontent over this weird hypocrisy that was going on, where i looked at myself and i go oh my god i've been doing that my whole career what the fuck you know like that was that moment that was the waking moment and as terrible as it is it took until

october 2019 to get there i mean i'm gonna call it terrible if you if you recognize it or willing to admit that maybe hey what the hell was this should i rethink this i think that the sign of a a mature, competent, reflective, contemplative adult who's actually trying to do good things. And with this particular debacle, Daryl, the Rockets, the NBA, and LeBron, just as an outside observer and somebody who's probably more attuned

to the quiet ways in which China has influenced the American economy and American culture, uh it was a sort of a mask off moment for me watching this is something that you sort of understand behind the scenes like they're they're pushing movies that push a certain narrative that lightly nudge the american public to have certain connotations about certain things and it's very subversive if you will however with the daryl morey instance when lebron came out it was like you're attacking our paychecks and stuff like that was just overtly like i don't care about any of the human rights issues over there we're making so much money from the chinese market that

i'm willing to stomach the trade-off of the destruction of human rights for my bottom line and then similarly you had adam silver and the nba as an organization actively kicking individuals out of arenas across the country as they try to avoid support for for hong kong in the aftermath of that, that Maury tweet. Well, it was, it was interesting because that, that week after I happened to be going back to New York to pitch publishers the book. And I got a bunch of calls from press outlets because I had just come back from China with three U S congressional delegation on a U S congressional delegation trip to China. I took three, um, uh, house reps, uh, Titus from Nevada, Kirkpatrick from Arizona, and Lowenthal from California. I was co-hosting it with the

U.S. Asian Institute, which I'm a trustee for. And what was interesting is I got back from that trip and I really had a different outlook towards China in a way because we actually got down to Hong Kong. We met with Carrie Lam, who runs Hong Kong. We actually sat down with protesters in Hong Kong. And then we also went through Beijing and Xi'an and Chengdu and even Macau. And you got all this different sort of party lines on one side, and then you got the protester lines on the other, and then boom, this tweet, and then the reaction. And then I got pulled into the press to talk about sort of the hypocrisy of LeBron James. And I didn't really want to go there and call him out on the soapbox, right? Like there were plenty of people doing that. My problem is that I saw it

from my point of view, right? Which is it's easy to call people out when you don't have skin in the game, right? Ted Cruz doesn't have skin in the game. These journalists don't have skin in the game. LeBron James has $50 million a year, whatever it is coming out of that market. He has true skin in the game. So for him to stand up and say something that causes that 50 million to vanish. That's a huge sacrifice, right? And yes, he's worth a billion dollars. I get all that, right? And people can criticize whatever, but that's a big sacrifice. He's got skin in the game. And then the question is, what happens then, right? Because if no one else backs him, including the US government, then he just gets sacrificed to the wolves. And then he's replaced

by another basketball player or celebrity or premier league soccer player or whatever it is, Right. And we just go back to the same thing. So to me, it's like if somebody is going to take a stand and lose all that revenue, like essentially lose their skin in that game, then we need to have a plan to back them so that it's not in vain. It actually causes a sea change, which is what we need. Right. And and that was the big thing that I was on Bloomberg, you know, a couple of days after that tweet. And I said that and I said, you know what, Senator Ted Cruz, I love the fact that you're calling out the hypocrisy on this because I'm seeing it now, too. And the American public needs to see it. But what are you going to do as the U.S. government to back LeBron James when he takes that stand? Right. Like, what is it? Are we going to rally around him with other celebrities, with other partners of the league, of the U.S. government and say, if there is retaliation, then we are doing no more business with you. right? What is going to cause the change other than just somebody sacrificing themselves as a lone wolf? And that's just not appropriate. We got to figure out how we fix the problem

rather than just calling people out and getting your tweets retweeted. Well, even before fixing the problem, let's identify exactly what the problem is. So how would you define or describe the problem and the path via which it got to its current state, which it seems its current state is such that we have an economic and somewhat tenuous cultural connection with the chinese economy at this point and we're very interconnected and maybe codependent to a certain extent on each other and how did it get there what did china do with industry in the u.s to carry favor and and how we're going to identify that problem then how how do we fix it in your opinion yeah well first of all the only way to fix it

is to use the leverage the full leverage the united states of america and quite frankly our allies it can't be a unilateral you know push to to to affect this change and that's why i've actually been very vocal and written a bunch of op-eds with one of the professors at the National War College on the potential use of the upcoming Winter Olympics as a leverage point. There's so much face on the line for the Chinese Communist Party there that if we suddenly don't show up to this fancy dinner party, they have a lot to lose, not just on the global stage, but with their own people. There are 1.4 billion people that they've got to keep just happy enough that they don't revolt. So if you look at where we are today, one of the things that I'm super, super,

you know, as far as like really cognizant of is trying to make this a nonpartisan issue. There's a lot of polarization of everything out there, politicization of every problem, right? And you can't solve it unless you can get red and blue and everybody else united on it. So for me, I look at the things that unite red and blue and libertarians and the Green Party I avoid climate change because people don't agree on that. But I like national security issues, economic security issues, human rights issues. And essentially, the fact that all of that stuff is what makes us part of being human. And if you look at economic security issues, one of the things that we did do is we looked at China and we said, here is a market that's untapped and we can create jobs and grow GDP. But what the Chinese government saw was this opportunity not only to use their leverage to make companies do what they needed them to do on behalf of keeping their 1.4 billion people just happy enough that they don't revolt, but they also used it as an opportunity to create imitations of what we do so well here in the U.S. So an example of that is in the movie business, right? In 2008, we ended the Summer Olympics were everything that the government cared about for like two years. And then they finally finished. And then the goal of the Chinese Communist Party over the next 25, 50, 100 years was set with certain industries they wanted to make world class.

one of them happened to be the film business and in their eyes they don't want fish they want to be taught how to fish so they fish themselves so what did hollywood do well we figured out a couple different things that would make them happy enough to let what we make best in the world get into that market and one of them was the ability for them to message how amazing china is not just internally to the 1.4 billion people but to the rest of the world right and if you look behind me you see the looper poster right and one of the ways we did that is we took a movie that was supposed to take place in the future in france did you ever see looper i think yeah i think looper would be a big hit with your fans like and your followers it's a really cool movie ryan johnson's

gone on obviously to do knives out and star wars and all that kind of stuff but um the movie was supposed to take place in the future in France. But in order to get that movie into China, we realized we needed to do something that brand integrated China into that film and showcase China and all its splendor to make the government feel really good about it. So we actually changed the future from China or from France to be China. And then we worked with the Chinese government to figure out how they wanted Shanghai to look in the future. We designed the cityscape 40 years in the future, not only based on fiction and ideas that we had just coming up from scratch, but also based on plans they had for the Pudong district that were like 50 years out. It was pretty

unbelievable. They had a lot of that sketched out on paper already. So we actually built that city in the backdrop with just Gordon Levin, Bruce Willis, and then we cast one of their big actresses named Summer Ching. And we created China to be the place where everybody wanted to live in the future. And not only that, there's a pivotal scene, if you remember, in Looper, where Jeff Daniels comes back to the present day and is telling Joseph Gordon-Levitt, you want to move to China in the future, not to France. And Joseph Gordon-Levitt's like, no, no, no, I want to move to France. And he goes, damn it, from the future, you want to move to China, right? And it was a huge testing moment for the United States of America when we tested that with audiences here.

They didn't see that as Chinese propaganda. They just saw that as a fun line in a movie, but the Chinese government loved it. And they gave us access to that market during a period in time where no imports are allowed into the market. We were designated as a local production. so we got 43 percent of all dollars that came in through the box office rather than at the time the 13 to 17 percent that studios got so we got a lot of the wind to the back for that so that messaging was crucial because it was a creation of messaging for the world to see China on a different stage in a movie but it was also messaging for the pride and nationalistic behavior of the people of the PRC. And then the second thing we did is we taught them how to fish. How did we do that?

We shot a lot of the movie over there. And not only did we not bring over all the crews to do that, we only brought over the key crew members that could work as mentors to protege members of their below-the-line crew, to learn how best-in-the-world craftsmen do their jobs. So we did that rinse and repeat for various movies over time, not just us, but other studios did it. And now what happens? Well, 2012, when Looper came out, Hollywood was dominating the market 80%. percent. Now, we're less than 10 percent this year. And the year before that, 16 percent. And the year before that, 32 percent. We are going straight down. Why? Because we taught them how to fish and we created our greatest imitators in competition. And it's rinse and repeat,

not just for Hollywood, but for every other business. You watch Tesla is another one where I love Elon Musk. He's fantastic. Thomas Mueller lives next door to me here in Manhattan beach his partner at spacex but if you look at what they're doing with tesla they're going to take that tech they're going to take that ip and they're going to imitate it over over over over and over again so that tesla loses market share and all the chinese imitators gain yeah it's actually funny with tesla as a specific example it seems like elon has been attempting to appease the chinese government over the last six months i mean obviously uh with bitcoin he's been outspoken about its energy usage and it just uh that messaging correlated very

very closely with china banning bitcoin mining um because it was stealing electricity and creating disharmony um from from local citizens as well as uh like china and tesla are going back and forth right now correct well i mean one of the things that uh a lot of experts and there's way bigger experts and better experts at china than i am i'm sort of a layman practical expert in the u.s china space but if you look at some of these crashes of teslas that are occurring in china they're heavily publicized, right? And there always seems to be all kinds of cameras on all those crashes. So you see them, the public's aware, and then Tesla has to be involved deeply in these investigations of these accidents. And my question for Alon would be, how much are we

giving them to investigate these accidents? I mean, my guess is there's probably a lot of blueprints and a lot of tech ip design work and so on so that they can look at it and figure out what happened in that accident but is that really what chinese government's doing when they investigate that or are they actually trying to investigate how the best in the world electric cars are made yeah it's fascinating i mean they've it's a lesson that should have been long ago china does not respect ip and that's what they're most famous for is just being an imitation economy i mean it feels like we're at this weird inflection point in history particularly around geopolitical power struggles that exist like a lot of people will argue that america

is on the back end of its if it it's uh empirical uh rise to an empire status and and china is on the up and up but there's also other things like china historically throughout the history of its civilization and it always seems to be on the precipice of taking over as the global superpower only to to fuck it up in some way or another um which considering the human rights issues that exist in china and the shadow banking system which many would argue is probably very fragile on the back end it could be very interesting if the united states and other western powers identify china's human rights abuses and their overt theft of intellectual property of western companies will that perturb their growth moving forward and should we do it

I guess that's maybe what we can jump into. Why should we be afraid of this type of posturing from China where they're just going to come brain drain us and try to replicate everything? And then that's the one thing I'd like to dive into. Again, they're influencing economic and cultural decisions here in the United States. And is that light nudging via increasing economic power

because of the intertwining of of chinese and american industry is it pushing american culture in a direction that would potentially set up communism in the united states is it like a slow drip of these ideals via mediums like hollywood and the sports industry sports entertainment normalizing things that probably don't align well with the ideals that this country was founded on Yeah, I mean, I think, well, we talked about national and economic security issues, human rights issues, and there's obviously free speech issues, right? Those are things that all Americans can agree on, and quite frankly, the rest of the Western world. Um, you know, if I look at the most nefarious or pernicious or dangerous activities, uh, of the Chinese communist party, I would probably look to what they do outside of their borders, right? Um, yes, there's human rights issues inside of their borders. And that's something that, um, we need

to try to address and, and we're, you know, hopefully building a groundswell to do that. But even worse is the stuff that happens outside of it. So number one is, I mean, if you look at national security issues, obviously, we saw the encroachment of Hong Kong. Yes, granted, Hong Kong is part of China, but that was 27 years before that deal was supposed to be done, right? And then Taiwan is another one sitting there. And you see the bases that they're building in the South China Sea and an encroachment that they're making on Philippines and what they're doing in Southeast Asia and what they're doing with the Belt and Road Initiative throughout the Asian continent into Europe and also down into Africa. So those are a lot of beyond borders, national security issues that are going on. Free speech the same way, the way that they are trying to curtail the free speech rights of somebody like Daryl Morey, or the free speech rights of somebody like John Cena, who got caught up in the same. John Cena looking very weak there. Exactly. The free speech rights of Marriott to Delta to Burberry, H&M, you name it. They're all coming after those particular companies in regards to what they're saying about maybe human rights issues, economic, national security issues, and various other aspects of what might be wrong towards what the governance of the Chinese Communist Party is doing out there and its influence around the world. now one of the things that i like on a hawk scale dubbed a hawk i mean i used to be two or three on the dove scale right and dubbed a hawk scale now i'm at like six and a half seven which is more on

the hawk scale um the true hawks the nines and tens believe that china's you know sort of mandate the chinese communist party xi jinping wants to essentially take over the world right and they're going to do it hell or high water, and they're going to make it happen, and everybody's going to be subservient to the Chinese Communist Party. I'm not as much of a believer in that. I'm more a believer in human instinct and simplifying it, right? The Chinese Communist Party, their number one goal, and I talk about it a lot in my book because I really try to simplify the way I try to understand China because I'm not a PhD in Mandarin studies. I just happen to work with the country for 20 years, right? And if I always think about the top line sort of agenda of how to

get something done there, you always got to sell to the government first. And the government's biggest, biggest, biggest motivation is to keep 1.4 billion people just happy enough that they don't revolt. And that's really hard to do because you can't make them all happy. There's not enough resources on earth to make 1.4 billion people happy, but you can make them just happy enough. So we talked about messaging, which is crucial, which is the kind of stuff that we're doing with the brand integration of China and Looper. And then there's also the tangible stuff, which is creating jobs, bringing people out of poverty and into the middle class. So you're creating this ability for them to build their own lives to the point where they're

doing stuff that makes them just happy enough that they don't revolt and satisfied enough with that. And then you want to create that messaging that there's aspirational agendas for them if they want to rise further up the food chain. So if you keep in mind 1.4 billion people just happy enough that they don't revolt, one of the problems with that is just to keep them happy enough, you got to create resources for them in order to give them what they need and some of what they want. And China is resource poor in a lot of ways. And they have a lot of food scarcity. And quite frankly, they have water scarcity too. So if you look at a lot of the things that they're doing that is encroaching on all of us beyond their borders, a lot of that has

to do with food scarcity, resource scarcity, issues that they have to address. You look at what's happening in the Philippines, you look at what's happening off of Easter Island and down in South America or off of Antarctica with the fishing that they're doing, what they're doing in, you know, the Arctic now and surveying those, you know, that new open sea there that's not even contiguous to their, you know, country, but they want to lay claim to some of that resource up there. And it's one of the big issues as to why I'm covering on my Twitter, which by the way, is at the Dragon Feeder, if anybody wants to follow, the Afghanistan issue, because Afghanistan does have a lot of resources that China needs. So a lot of that Belt and Road Initiative,

a lot of the stuff where we're going, oh my God, they're trying to take over the world. I'd argue it's actually a bit of an act of survival. And by the way, that might even make it more harsh and more extreme and more severe of what they're doing. Because when you corner a raccoon, you know what happens versus somebody that just aspires to do something. When they're doing something because they have to do it that makes it quite scary if you're not thinking about it the right way yeah that is great i haven't heard it articulated that way there were the impetus behind the way they're posturing internationally and venturing into places like africa now afghanistan again it seems like too perfect that well i don't want to get

uh conspiratorial or anything but a lot of people would argue that afghanistan the united states was there to defend the poppy uh for the the opiate industry here in the united states big pharma's opiate push um and then within the last few years uh fentanyl out of china synthetic fentanyl sort of replaced those natural opioids and uh so no need some people are saying that's the reason why They were abruptly pulling out of Afghanistan, and then China's coming in, and they're able to take advantage of the rare earth minerals as they seem to be posturing. They want to have an economic partnership with the Taliban, it seems to be taking over Afghanistan after we left. Yeah, I mean, there's so many theories on the Afghanistan front, right? And for sure, there's rare earths there.

For sure, there's all kinds of mineral deposits. For sure, there's lots of different resources that are needed by every country out there. So that's there. It's there for the taking. I would argue a lot of nations, including going back to Alexander the Great, right, have tried to get in there and get access to that stuff and failed. I don't know if China is going to be successful at it, but I will say that they didn't sign that pledge to help, you know, evacuate certain people out of Afghanistan that needed to get out the other day. I think there were like 98 countries or something that signed it. China and Russia were not on there and China and Russia are still operating their embassies there. So obviously there's this belief that, hey, this vacuum is good for us as the Chinese Communist Party. yeah yeah it's crazy how all this works out and my mind's running crazy right now so the again going back to the the soft cultural influence that is being driven through the sports industry and the

hop in hollywood essentially china like having their ideas come to america via these media the mediums um and the influence that has and then beyond that even like economically just culturally virtue signaling like they care about climate change you're going to work toward paris accord goals uh but meanwhile in the back end they're they're spinning up coal power plants by the hundreds year on year uh sort of saying hey yeah like we're going to go down this road understanding that it probably isn't advantageous for anyone um but they're willing to to let the western countries embark down that path towards frankly more more weak standing in the geopolitical landscape particularly because you just have less reliable energy infrastructure at home i mean we're

seeing it in california decommissioning nuclear power plants natural gas power plants and rolling blackouts in texas energy capital of the of the united states uh had blackouts earlier this year potential brownouts in the beginning of the summer and that is due to the fact that they've overbuilt unreliable green energy uh capacity and wind and solar and underutilized natural gas coal and and nuclear and weatherizing those those sources and so like do you think there is that that soft like 3d chess mental jujitsu going on where they maybe like you mentioned they're going out and doing all this because they're worried about things at home and they have to posture to the 1.4 billion people like look how great it is here like as part of that also encouraging

outside states to it's basically the that's what i'm looking for to sabotage themselves with these idiotic policies and just sit behind them like yes do this do this do this it'll make you weaker and make us look stronger in a relative sense well look i mean they love well they love the show house of cards right i mean there was no uh there was no monetization by the studios here in the u.s of house of cards it was just all over the place black market wise but the chinese government party was a government uh the chinese communist party was fine with uh that proliferating essentially the populace there because it really that show um demonstrated the dirtiness and the muddiness and the and sort of the you know inefficiencies of democracy right and anytime

there's something that does happen that's bad in the west and they particularly love in the united states um they blast it all over television and different social media and platforms over there to make sure their populace sees, oh, my gosh, look at the alternative to this amazing government that you have here in China. I mean, I remember and I wrote about it in my book when we were shooting Iron Man 3 in Beijing. It happened to be during that terrible episode with the Sandy Hook massacre in Connecticut. And that you would normally think when you watch television in China, if you're watching a Chinese network like a CCTV network or Beijing television, or you're watching CNN International or Bloomberg or whatever, if there's something the Chinese

government does not want you to see, your screen goes black, just completely black. It looks like your TV broke. Okay. So a lot of times you might be on the treadmill watching TV or something and the TV goes black for five minutes. And you're like, oh, there must be some news thing that they're covering that they don't want anybody to see, including expats that are in a hotel. right well one thing that happened during sandy hook is you would think oh that's a terrible story they don't want their people seeing that it's you know it's so savage and terror you know tragic and all that stuff no they blasted it non-stop and not only did they blast it non-stop they also talked about how wild west and cowboy uh the chinese uh how the u.s system was and they were

warning people if you're ever going to go to the united states of america know that it's like gun-toting, violent country that you need to be careful of. And they were warning people against going. It was crazy, right? And they do the same thing when, for instance, that building collapsed in Miami. They had all kinds of programs about how terrible our infrastructure is. That Texas issue that you were talking about, New Orleans is now being covered quite a bit. I mean, think about the irony there. I mean, 95% of the U.S. capacity of offshore oil is right off New Orleans coast and New Orleans has no power right now. They love those kinds of stories. Lake Tahoe about to catch on fire. I mean, that's stuff that they love. And all that plays into the propaganda

organs of the Ministry of Propaganda and how they keep their people just happy enough that they don't revolt right because as long as you make you know i had a friend who said if a bear is chasing you you don't have to be faster than the bear you just got to be faster than your friend yeah right that's the slowest person running away from the bear exactly and just keep in mind like chinese communist party doesn't run the best government in the world i mean in fact there's a lot of problems with that kind of government it's definitely a government i would never want to have a part of but if they can make it look better than everybody else that's all they need to do yeah and keep those 1.4 billion individuals relatively happy and it's it's crazy how powerful

the propaganda arm is over there well think about this so you got yeah so xi jinping has consolidated his power right he's now essentially king he can take it for as long as he wants it used to be terms and then on top of it he's he's narrowed down the standing committee the seven standing committee members right which is a lot more concentrated than it used to be and then he's taken out a lot of the bureaucratic layers right so you got him you got the you know standing committee you got the politburo the chinese communist party and then the way they disseminated information to the public to keep 1.4 billion people just happy enough that they don't revolt and believing in the pride of their government, is they would feed it down to the Ministry of

Propaganda that would orchestrate the narrative that would then go to the state administration of radio, film, and television. That was a bureaucratic layer. And then that bureaucratic layer would then feed it to the CCTV networks, to the print and digital publications, to china film group on the movie side of things they took out sarft so now it's the ministry of propaganda which directly you know responds to anything that xi jinping and the standing committee wants that is the direct layer that feeds out all information there's no more bureaucracy in the middle of it so it's super direct and super focused and again don't want to get political trying to state our non-partisan but obviously in the lead

up to the election there was the insinuation that joe and hunter biden were butting up with the the ccp to carry favor or maybe enact policy in a way that would be favorable for china not focusing on that directly, but how much influence do they have with individuals, departments, industries in the U.S.? Can the Department of Propaganda in China pick up the phone and call somebody here in the States and say, hey, here's something that I think would be worthwhile to portray China as? Well, it's interesting. In fact, there's a great expert named Bill Bishop who runs a newsletter called cynicism that talks about this a lot but the reciprocity of access for um the propaganda organs of of china versus journalists here in the u.s inside the china market is not there right so

the the china embassy different bullet bureau members different communist party members you know different outlets for for the chinese communist party like global times or uh the people's daily etc they all have access to anything they want social media wise or even to deliver a paper here in the united states of america whereas in china there's a lot of our journalists that are banned from there they're banned from being there there's platforms that are banned there we don't have access to go that way to spread you know essentially messaging that we want into that country but they have full access here okay so you have that propaganda device which is very strong but if they can't get messaging that's strong enough to coerce constituents towards building

momentum towards something that they want done like uh you know if for some reason they they want to trade to open up and they try to propagandize the U.S. citizen into believing that Chinese goods and services allow Walmart to have the cheapest stuff on earth, which makes your life better as an American, right? If they can't get that working, and remember the constituents then build the momentum to pull it up to our leadership and our elected officials to actually implement changes that the Chinese Communist Party wants. If they can't get it done that way, then what they do is they turn to the business lobby. And we're seeing a lot of that now. They'll go to the different big titans of industry, the different CEOs and say,

oh my gosh, this relationship is deteriorating. We need to bring it back. You need to go to Washington, D.C., all of you C-suites, all of you American Chamber of Commerce and fix all this. Right. And then if that doesn't happen, then they'll start to showcase their leverage with that market and start to clamp down on sort of the sugar high that we've gotten so used to as as companies in regards to our growth prospects and our revenues and our profits that are heavily derived from one of the last remaining massive markets on Earth that's growing really fast. So they have a lot of levers they can push in order to influence us to do things that they want done. Yeah. And it seems like Wall Street's a big lobby for them as well. You had Larry Fink from BlackRock come out, I think, in the last two weeks alone and say that we should be allowing the institutional funds here in the United States to directly invest in publicly traded Chinese companies. because he said despite the human rights abuses and all that, it's a massive economy with a lot of growth potential.

I think Kyle Bass from Hayman Capital pointed out this is a terrible idea because they don't even have to report anything accurately over there from a financial perspective, but there is pressure points from which to exert influence. It seems like Wall Street, obviously, always out to make a financial product that they can they can squeeze some yield out of in china certainly seems to be market i'm not anti-capitalism by any stretch and i have lots of friends on wall street right like to create profits to generate investment returns

i get it that's their job right but the the criticism i have not just for wall street but for every industry right now is that if we continue to chase the sugar high of china right like with hollywood it's slowly dissipating towards zero i mean we're below 10 market share when we're up at 80 right so like it's slowly dissipating anyway and it's going to happen with every single industry including that of wall street so the question is the longer we chase the sugar high that's going to eventually disappear anyway, the deeper and deeper we get indebted to that country in so many ways, right? I mean, the more we're allowing them to transfer tech IP, allowing them to understand processes, allowing them to imitate designs, allowing them

to build their imitators on U.S. capital because they have access to U.S. capital markets. So not only is the inevitable going to happen where we end up losing that sugar high anyway, if we just proceed down this path, but on top of it, we become more and more like China because they become stronger and stronger as an economy and as a superpower. And eventually, the foundation that allows capitalism to thrive under the principles and values that we hold dearly as Americans and as members of the West will completely disappear, right? And that's what I don't get about this continued chasing of the dragon, the continued feeding of the dragon, right? It's almost like an I'll be gone, you'll be gone mentality. Let's leave it for the next

generation. And we talked about skin in the game and I get it. Like if I'll be gone, you'll be gone. We don't have skin in the game, but there's a lot of people that do have skin in the game. And somehow we need to think about them.