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HasanAbi

SF🦎US ECONOMY TANKING?🧑‍🎨NATALIE HARP UPDATES🖌️TRUMP SIGNALS ECON NUKE OVER IRAN🖌️STRAIT CLOSED 🦎

08-21-2026 · 5h 15m

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[00:09:00] All right, all right, all right. Let's move on from this.
[00:09:03] Because you might be wondering what the distraction could be about and this is definitely something
[00:09:09] that is an ongoing incident and ongoing bag and forth. Here it is, ladies and gentlemen,
[00:09:15] the big booty cheeks bill. Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill. Big booty
[00:09:20] cheeks bill, booty cheeks bill, booty cheeks bill, booty cheeks bill, booty cheeks bill,
[00:09:22] Let's get into some of the meat and potatoes of this big booty bill.
[00:09:42] I call it chik booty bale because his booty is booty cheeks
[00:09:45] um, fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck
[00:09:57] You say please, please
[00:09:59] It's too much winning
[00:10:01] We can't take it anymore
[00:10:02] More, more, more, more
[00:10:12] It's Big Booty Bill.
[00:10:19] Don't worry, I'm going to talk about the Big Booty Cheese Bill.
[00:10:33] What's going on everybody?
[00:10:41] I hope everyone's having a fantastic evening, afternoon, pre-noon, no matter where you are
[00:10:46] in the world.
[00:10:47] I'm a son piker in this house and I'm broadcast coming to you live from somewhat gloomy San
[00:10:57] Francisco, California folks were alive, we're alive.
[00:11:01] And I hope everyone's having a fantastic one because today's a beautiful day.
[00:11:04] Today's a wonderful day.
[00:11:05] I am not on a yacht.
[00:11:07] Yes.
[00:11:08] The camera is as we are going to solve it.
[00:11:11] It's just as currently because I am coming to you live from
[00:11:19] We've I'm not in the home station. Okay. I'm not a home base. I'm not a home base and
[00:11:26] This fucking tour has ruined my life
[00:11:29] And we're on tour. We're on fear and tour and it is the case always with
[00:11:35] with you know anything that we do with the
[00:11:38] With the whole team, with the whole crew, there's just like a million moving parts and therefore a million
[00:11:47] ways to
[00:11:48] to break the setup.
[00:11:52] So yeah, this is the part of the broadcast where I tell you about my personal news. Obviously it's 821.
[00:11:58] Very special day on the broadcast in 2019.
[00:12:08] you
[00:12:38] you
[00:13:08] you
[00:13:38] you
[00:14:08] you
[00:14:38] you
[00:15:08] or if his campaign is led by like, you know, old school, main, Democratic Party consultants,
[00:15:18] they are going to lure me into Maine just to shoot and kill me.
[00:15:22] They would probably bring me into Maine just to assassinate me and put me out back
[00:15:27] and be like, yeah, come, let's do this.
[00:15:30] Let's do this Troy Jackson rally and then they would take me out back and put a bullet
[00:15:34] the back of my head and end the DNC battle, the DNC struggle once and for all. They would probably
[00:15:40] ice pick me Trotsky style, like I'm exiled in Mexico, because like, let's be real,
[00:15:50] Maine might love me, the voters might, you know, enjoy my presence. But if his team is run by,
[00:16:00] as I suspect, an OG like Biden campaign person, they would rather assassinate me. They would rather
[00:16:08] ICE pick me in the dome than to ever allow me or to ever, you know, ask for my services.
[00:16:18] I feel like you've given this bit a little bit too much thought. Yes, I think, and I mean this
[00:16:22] I think that the Democratic Party consultants and members of the DNC, not lower-ranking
[00:16:31] members, people that are in this community that are obviously a part of the staffer class,
[00:16:35] a part of the campaigns, but like old Democrat consultants would literally want me assassinated,
[00:16:45] 100 hanged before before even the Republicans do.
[00:17:00] So yeah.
[00:17:02] Is SF a city or an HOA?
[00:17:05] We're in America.
[00:17:06] Everyone is a everyone is a home.
[00:17:08] I'm not in any with Mr. Who is this Kiki Palmer talked about.
[00:17:12] And would you want him to campaign with you?
[00:17:14] I don't really know who Mr. Piker is. I've heard about him.
[00:17:18] I hate to say it. I hope I don't sound ridiculous.
[00:17:20] I don't know who this man is.
[00:17:22] I mean, he could be walking down the street. I wouldn't-
[00:17:24] No, dude. It's a meme, Chatters.
[00:17:27] It's a- this is a classic Kiki Palmer meme.
[00:17:30] From a vanity fa- God, you guys are- you guys got duped.
[00:17:38] He hates black women? Question mark, question mark.
[00:17:40] I'm not even sure why it's a question.
[00:17:42] Yeah, no, definitely.
[00:17:57] Your outfit is the perfect for the latest Wall Street Journal.
[00:18:01] Americans, Socialists or China Maxing Now, the online left
[00:18:04] gox of the Chinese industry at scops of progress at home.
[00:18:08] I'm literally wearing the same suit that I'm wearing in this photo. So yes
[00:18:19] Playlist related thank you to Macias
[00:18:21] Anyway, we got we got nothing else going on
[00:18:24] In my life. There's nothing in my personal news. I ended the broadcast. I ended the broadcast
[00:18:30] At a reasonable hour yesterday. I went in what I watched American doctor. I wasn't a shut-ass loser
[00:18:38] I
[00:18:40] Went and I watched
[00:18:45] American doctor and it was exceptional it was
[00:18:52] Emotional it made me so angry at times. I am I
[00:18:59] Could I can't believe that I just like in my career I get to meet such impressive
[00:19:05] such heroic individuals like for rose tire mark as well I met him last night mark
[00:19:12] pro-mutter so it was it's maddening for sure especially there's like a final
[00:19:23] credit sequence there's a final credit sequence in the end where it's like a
[00:19:29] But it's masterfully done, where it definitely, right here, what are you, HDMI is here and
[00:19:42] the chargers here, our camera is here, chat, right, this has to be the charger, I suspect.
[00:19:47] Hopefully it'll work.
[00:19:49] I see David has swapped some things around.
[00:19:56] But yeah, I don't know what this requires a it's a it's a rail.
[00:20:05] Does it have the rail underneath it?
[00:20:07] Okay.
[00:20:08] I don't think that that is okay anyway.
[00:20:20] Are you in heaven?
[00:20:21] Why are you shooting me from clouds of paradise?
[00:20:23] Yeah, I'm in heaven.
[00:20:24] So, you getting surgery done?
[00:20:30] Yeah, I'm going to become the ultimate mogular.
[00:20:35] I'm mog maxing.
[00:20:39] But yeah, so I, Kate, you know, I had interviewed Dr. Thayat Ahmed and Ahmed and also for O'Seedwa
[00:20:48] a couple of days ago.
[00:20:50] Yeah.
[00:20:51] All right.
[00:20:52] hopefully coming to a theater near you.
[00:20:54] Oh, and it's on, sorry.
[00:20:55] But you have the backing of all of the doctors
[00:20:58] and nurses that went to Gaza.
[00:21:00] Anyway, we can support you.
[00:21:01] Your voice is so important.
[00:21:02] Please keep doing what you're doing.
[00:21:04] No, it's vice versa.
[00:21:05] I should support you guys.
[00:21:07] I'm good.
[00:21:07] I'm doing all right, you know?
[00:21:09] But thank you.
[00:21:10] We're doing a lot of work for each other.
[00:21:11] Thank you so much for coming on.
[00:21:12] It's really good to be back.
[00:21:13] And I'll probably see you guys at the,
[00:21:15] you're gonna be at the screening, right?
[00:21:17] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:21:18] So yeah, we went to the screening last night.
[00:21:21] watched it. There was like a little Q&A and an interview afterwards and it was, it's an incredible movie.
[00:21:29] I said the last like ending sequence, the clip compilation in the ending sequence was so maddening.
[00:21:37] I basically, I said, watch American Doctor, even the end sequence alone and tell me you don't
[00:21:43] want to dismantle the apartheid state and punish the perpetrators, the genocide. It's good,
[00:21:48] It's powerful. It's got white people in it as well, you know
[00:21:52] It shows you three varying perspectives that all obviously unite under the banner of
[00:22:00] Of anti genocide, so I think that's also
[00:22:04] Very valuable
[00:22:05] And I think it's like it's one of those one of those movies that like you can show white people and they'll watch it
[00:22:11] It'll be like this is this is terrifying like this is I had no idea what it was like
[00:22:16] This is unbelievable. I can't believe this kind of violence is going on this bloodshed that we've contributed to
[00:22:26] In any case
[00:22:29] The doctors get asked if they condemn a Samp Iger yeah, I don't think doctors who have
[00:22:35] you know experienced the
[00:22:39] Genocidal ambitions of the Israeli occupying forces are ever going to turn around and
[00:22:44] and condemn someone like myself.
[00:22:47] So no, good joke though, I get it.
[00:22:52] In any case,
[00:22:58] so where was I?
[00:23:05] The three blue sky house and I,
[00:23:06] my heads are going crazy.
[00:23:08] Wait, really?
[00:23:09] That's just you.
[00:23:22] Where was I?
[00:23:26] You are so bright.
[00:23:27] I know.
[00:23:28] I know.
[00:23:29] I know.
[00:23:30] The fucking camera is going to be, the camera is going to switch in a second, okay?
[00:23:37] Shut the fuck up. How about that? How about shut the fuck up shut your stupid fucking face up?
[00:23:44] Shut your stupid fucking mouth up and just enjoy the show before I fucking turn it off. Okay. How about that?
[00:23:52] Jesus Christ dude any any little tweak any little goddamn tweak and everybody fucking loses their blows a gasket
[00:24:00] Okay, I'm in heaven. I died. I killed myself. Okay, because I'm gonna stand
[00:24:05] The micromanager in the motherfucking chat
[00:24:15] Anyway
[00:24:21] Today's the first day of the tour it's great great so far fucking great
[00:24:27] Anyway, yeah, I went I watched the American doctor
[00:24:32] it was it was
[00:24:34] remarkable it was very good and and it's very emotional and
[00:24:40] I highly recommend you guys go check it out. I highly recommend you guys go watch it
[00:24:44] and then
[00:24:47] After
[00:24:49] After that I went to sleep. I woke up early 5 a.m. Got on a flight
[00:24:55] Blue out here to San Francisco. I had enough sleep. It's not that it's just like but when we when we move shit around
[00:25:02] round. And we have like a whole crew for the tour. And we have all this is it connected?
[00:25:11] All right, let me try to. It's not connected to the computer, though. You didn't connect
[00:25:20] into the, it's not, well, it's not working.
[00:25:48] Gonna be okay, all right, we'll figure it out.
[00:25:50] Um, the Magewell is not reading it at all.
[00:25:56] I don't know.
[00:25:58] No it's not.
[00:25:59] Hold on.
[00:26:00] Well, it might, it might now.
[00:26:06] Hold on.
[00:26:07] Let's see.
[00:26:08] Nope.
[00:26:09] Nope, I keep activating and deactivating it, it's not.
[00:26:21] The lighting is not that bad, all things considered, no, it's ass, you don't have to say that.
[00:26:28] You don't have to lie.
[00:26:29] We're going to fix it right now, eventually.
[00:26:39] You're streaming through approximate BRB screen and restart OBS?
[00:26:49] No. That is not an issue.
[00:26:52] So it's all connected?
[00:26:54] Where's the Magewell?
[00:27:00] Close to G. Directly connected.
[00:27:05] And the camera's on and everything?
[00:27:09] Why is not fucking working? Here. I'll just disconnect it one more time.
[00:27:26] I'm gonna see you tonight. Hell yeah chatter.
[00:27:30] No, it's just it's there. I just deactivated reactivated. It's just not showing up. It's
[00:27:41] just when I turn it on it doesn't turn on. There's no way because he Yeah, it's supposed
[00:27:50] to be on movie mode. Okay, you have to call David. You have to call David and ask him
[00:28:06] what the fuck he did with this. Otherwise, I'm just gonna, yeah, just route it directly
[00:28:13] to the four, to the, yeah, fuck this magewell bullshit.
[00:28:21] That's the one on the left.
[00:28:27] Let's see if this is even.
[00:28:31] Of course, it's not working.
[00:28:32] Of course, it's not fucking working.
[00:28:35] The
[00:28:43] Magewell does not, I mean, the Magewell is there, but it's just not showing up when we connect the camera.
[00:28:50] And then do what?
[00:28:57] Alright, reconnect it.
[00:29:02] What? What is he saying?
[00:29:12] It's there. It's been there. I can always find it. It's just it doesn't it doesn't activate.
[00:29:21] It doesn't show anything.
[00:29:24] Yeah, it's integrated camera USB capture for HDMI 4k plus
[00:29:37] It's just not reading it
[00:29:54] Okay.
[00:29:56] Oh, so we just have to read it as a source every single time. That's crazy.
[00:30:05] Okay, this is not framed properly.
[00:30:08] I guess it's fine.
[00:30:12] No, it's fine. I can do it on my own. All right, thank you.
[00:30:17] Oops.
[00:30:23] Oops.
[00:30:26] Wait, what?
[00:30:30] What's happening?
[00:30:35] Where'd it go?
[00:30:37] What?
[00:30:40] Oh, okay.
[00:30:44] Um, okay, we're fine.
[00:30:46] We'll just use it like this.
[00:30:49] Uh, we'll just use it like this.
[00:30:51] Fuck it.
[00:30:51] Who cares?
[00:30:52] Fuck it, we do it live every time, you know?
[00:30:56] We do it live every time chat.
[00:30:58] Every goddamn time.
[00:31:00] Okay.
[00:31:07] Okay.
[00:31:12] Okay.
[00:31:15] All right.
[00:31:16] We're good.
[00:31:20] You need that on the soundboard?
[00:31:21] Yeah, sure.
[00:31:22] Need I need a lot of things. Yeah, let me bring a fucking soundboard here when I go on
[00:31:30] What let me let me let me bring a soundboard with me everywhere I go
[00:31:34] So there's another thing that I can freak out over is that's another
[00:31:38] That's another point of failure
[00:31:42] Okay
[00:31:44] You may get a little bit brighter. I'm gonna ban you for the day
[00:31:57] Why are you being sarcastic this a great idea
[00:31:59] Okay, for as parasocial as you guys are I don't think a single one of you understands the the
[00:32:07] Did the technical know how required to make this fucking thing work?
[00:32:11] okay and also on top of that the the camera frame rate is off and that's why
[00:32:22] when I move around it's ash cheeks so I have to fix that myself as well because
[00:32:27] Hannah doesn't know how to do any of that stuff I do but doing it live is
[00:32:32] is very frustrating anyway
[00:32:41] It's the shutter speed. Yeah, you're right. You're right about it being shuttered.
[00:32:51] Basically, what happened is, for those of you who are wondering why it's so ash cheeks
[00:33:05] up in here. I'm fucking out of focus now Jesus Christ dude nothing is working why is it like this
[00:33:14] God is punishing me every fucking day God is punishing me every goddamn day I
[00:33:21] I have been it I am a sinner I deserve nothing I deserve to I deserve everything I get okay I am
[00:33:29] I'm just a fucking horrible person who deserves it.
[00:33:32] I'm a piece of shit.
[00:33:33] All right.
[00:33:35] Oh my God.
[00:33:36] I don't know if this is like autism.
[00:33:38] I don't know what it is.
[00:33:39] I just like...
[00:33:59] I
[00:34:06] Toward day one going well. No, you don't understand like I I I want to I want to die
[00:34:12] It's it's like every every minor tweak
[00:34:17] every minor tweak that just like
[00:34:21] Every every little thing that is just like a
[00:34:23] a every little thing that goes wrong is a disaster is it's an absolute unbearable
[00:34:31] disaster that makes me go fucking insane it makes me go goddamn insane why did
[00:34:42] you agree to the tour of y'all we're gonna complain I lost a bet dude it's
[00:34:46] not a secret I lost a fucking bet it was very public I very publicly got
[00:34:53] got duped by Austin as you guys know. What what do you mean?
[00:35:05] Anyway, all right let's continue. I lost the you know name the gay game that we
[00:35:16] did the gaydar game that we did and that's it that's why we're doing the
[00:35:20] tour. Everything still looks better than most room set up
[00:35:34] flaw. Okay, whatever. All right. All right. You in my city,
[00:35:40] you need to check in with me or else Daniel Luri's bodyguards
[00:35:42] will find you. Yeah, maybe they'll find me in fucking and my
[00:35:45] life okay um day 24 of reminding him
[00:35:52] Hassan Abbey he still owes his gaming
[00:35:55] from franchise the stream friends Lop
[00:35:57] doesn't count okay take a day off one
[00:36:00] day for you 24 hours I have done
[00:36:04] numerous gaming streams since then
[00:36:06] So, um, anyway, where, where do we begin?
[00:36:20] I didn't even, I didn't even blast off yet.
[00:36:23] Yeah.
[00:36:23] Personal news wise, that's it.
[00:36:24] I'm here.
[00:36:25] Everything that could have gone wrong in the process, as is the case, usually has gone wrong.
[00:36:32] But I'm in San Francisco nonetheless.
[00:36:34] I think the most beautiful city in California, or like the coolest city in California, which is unfortunately inhabited by, I mean, it's populated by some of the worst
[00:36:48] uh neo fascist tech feudal warlords every god damn every god damn aspect of the city is caked with
[00:37:00] uh ai ads it just feels like you you enter a totally different environment you know how like
[00:37:07] everybody has tremendous amounts of anger towards data centers and flock this is the city where
[00:37:11] it's like no flock is awesome data centers are the best i love data i'm data center david
[00:37:18] Yeah. But yeah, that's where we're at. Now it is, it was the exact opposite right up until
[00:37:34] the 2000s. Yeah, the tech boom has won, given this city tremendous, given this state tremendous
[00:37:40] amounts of revenue, but at the same time has like absolutely destroyed the beauty and seeks
[00:37:46] to eradicate what remains of the beauty of this of this state and the city as well.
[00:37:53] It's of interesting predicament because it's cool. It's cool. San Francisco is
[00:38:00] really cool. It's like a real city. If you visit you're like wow there's so much
[00:38:06] culture here. There's so much community here. There's a robust public
[00:38:11] here, which is fantastic, but then you're like, oh, it's inhabitants. It's current new inhabitants
[00:38:28] have slowly pushed out, slowly pushed out the previous inhabitants and have turned this
[00:38:37] into a feudal tech dystopia.
[00:38:47] Anyway, fear and tour begins. I'm in San Francisco.
[00:38:55] Throughout the tech, bros, shout out the Loris Park Real Third Places. Yeah, sure.
[00:39:02] And a lot of our iconic cultural spot spots have been forced out of business because the landlord sold to the land developers and build condos
[00:39:11] Yeah, and now you have Daniel Lurie and
[00:39:14] People love him and he is a billionaire and a puppet of the tech feudal overlords and yet
[00:39:22] Seemingly the libbed up new
[00:39:25] San Francisco loves the shit out of him
[00:39:32] That to me shows like where the, where the current attitude, like what the, what the current San Francisco population has become attitude wise.
[00:39:50] Does it feel good to be close to Nancy Pelosi? Yeah, this is Nancy Pelosi town. It makes total sense why Nancy Pelosi runs the show around these parts.
[00:39:59] They never give us cool futuristic stuff is all dystopian trash. Yes, it is everything and I mean everything
[00:40:13] Here is designed for the almighty dollar
[00:40:19] Everything is designed around maximizing profits
[00:40:24] maximizing super profits or
[00:40:26] parasitic capital
[00:40:28] It's not, you know, it may be, it may give you a modest improvement in your life, in the interim.
[00:40:43] But that's it.
[00:40:47] I said beings, oh God, what am I doing?
[00:40:51] When you're always on, and when you're always on camera, you have to be on all the time,
[00:40:58] and it's so fucking annoying that sometimes I'm just not on.
[00:41:04] You know?
[00:41:08] Sometimes I'm simply not on it, and it kind of sucks when you're not on it, because you're
[00:41:13] not on it in front of tens of thousands of individuals, any of which are praying for
[00:41:18] your downfall.
[00:41:25] I would love to pay attention, but you're wearing that suit reminding me of how Mao killed millions
[00:41:28] of people.
[00:41:31] Yeah.
[00:41:35] Crazy close-up of Trump's hand, I saw.
[00:41:38] I saw.
[00:41:39] It's a trigger warning.
[00:41:42] This is a necrotic flesh withering away.
[00:41:49] Pull up the DSASF headquarters and squash the beef please.
[00:41:54] I don't have any beef with DSAS San Francisco.
[00:41:58] They are forced to live in San Francisco in its current iteration.
[00:42:04] They have experienced a modest amount of success and then watch it get ripped away from their
[00:42:13] hands.
[00:42:15] I understand how traumatic that is.
[00:42:19] It's like the SA San Francisco is what it feels like in a localized version of what it
[00:42:25] feels like to get Bernie Sanders elected as president and then have the fascist takeover
[00:42:32] like right after.
[00:42:33] They remove them from office and then the fascist plot works like FDR style.
[00:42:40] And then everyone around them is like, this is actually awesome and we love that the fascists
[00:42:46] have taken over.
[00:42:48] So no matter what kind of beef they might have with me, I don't think they do.
[00:42:52] I don't think many of the rank and filers do.
[00:43:02] I will say this I
[00:43:09] Can't get mad at them
[00:43:12] Your lip slob video is doing well. Oh, yeah, of course Natalie Harve family is concerned for her 151,000 views in 15 hours
[00:43:20] Goddamn we are pumping them out. She's switching sides to stop universal health care
[00:43:27] Jesus Christ one two three four five six videos
[00:43:31] We've uploaded in one day. No seven eight
[00:43:36] Eight videos in one day. What the fuck we are going crazy mode
[00:43:40] Lipslop is great. It brings the new lips in. I agree. We're going to keep doing lipslop.
[00:44:03] don't you worry um lip slop is always lip slop is always good
[00:44:23] um where was I what was I talking about
[00:44:33] More 2004 era dem slob please. I've never heard anybody say we want more libslop. That's actually crazy
[00:44:46] BDBD reacts to your reaction to the Chinese movie
[00:44:54] Talk political commentator on BDBD. You want to collab during your China trip
[00:44:57] Do you now understand what I mean by the neutral path is the blood of your path that we take a sounds view seriously
[00:45:01] We need to find a way to shut up this person who thinks being pro-china gives him the right to criticize and offer advice to China
[00:45:05] If we can't do that, it'll be hard to stick to our current path, which is more rational and compassionate
[00:45:09] To make the Iraqi speak up. We need to make the American white left and white right shut up
[00:45:14] This is already filmed with restraint to ensure it could be released. There's hardly any direct depiction. Yeah, the netizens are mad at me
[00:45:21] If we actually make you Chinese food you'll say it's too salty both sides want China to understand them
[00:45:26] But who's gonna understand us it's too hard for us. Okay every day
[00:45:29] We're being watched smeared stabbed in the back and then when something happens you come to hold court say something
[00:45:33] I've reached the age where I can understand both the director and a son
[00:45:36] The only flaw in this movie is that it feels a little bit like attack on Titan it describes everything about our war
[00:45:41] But avoids offering about war but avoids offering answers if you just want to go to the cinema and spend money on the experience is great
[00:45:47] To be fair Chinese anti-Japanese war films that are occasionally individual Japanese soldiers
[00:45:52] Portrait in a relatively positive light, which is a very normal narrative technique
[00:45:55] Anyway, as China's national power rises, the whole world will inevitably look up to draw
[00:46:02] closer to and want to analyze and learn from China's path to becoming a stronger nation.
[00:46:06] It's funny that this guy is like, we need to shut this guy up.
[00:46:09] He just because he's pro-China doesn't mean that he is allowed to criticize China.
[00:46:13] It's like, no, it, you know, I'm allowed to have my opinions that's so funny.
[00:46:23] Asan's own country is one of the parties involved.
[00:46:25] He definitely has a stance.
[00:46:26] And then the trend on foreign websites recently
[00:46:28] has been hoping we target Benjamin and Yao.
[00:46:29] The old videos of Wang Yi and Benjamin and Yao
[00:46:31] keep resurfacing and going viral.
[00:46:34] Asan is this bloodthirsty.
[00:46:35] I don't think the movie intends to conduct a moral trial
[00:46:38] or take a political stance.
[00:46:39] It simply expresses a common person's desire for peace.
[00:46:43] I'm bloodthirsty.
[00:46:46] I'm bloodthirsty for saying that in a story
[00:46:53] that you can in a story about American TikTok comments be like TSAF, Rose Will,
[00:47:04] Demoji, and Chinese beauty-beauty comments are like,
[00:47:07] to be fair, the critique is the same as with regards to the affirmation matter.
[00:47:11] Yeah, Chinese netizens are still goaded at posting.
[00:47:15] They're so verbose.
[00:47:20] To seek truth from facts, old China is now achieving the greatest development
[00:47:22] through trade. So I hope everyone will enjoy the benefits of China's economic growth by
[00:47:26] minimizing the cost of maximizing the gains of trade cannot achieve significant development
[00:47:29] due to external interference. The traditional grand narrative of a small folk perspective
[00:47:32] is indeed hard for foreigners to understand. The background for me is that a lot of these
[00:47:42] post-Wolf Warrior blockbuster Chinese movies kind of suck. There are still great Chinese
[00:47:45] films that are being buried under these kinds of overproduced stuff. Well, we'll
[00:47:49] see I'm gonna I'm going to watch it and then I'll give you my honest take
[00:47:56] your opinion about the movie was pretty libbed up to be honest wait what libbed
[00:48:01] up American style or libbed up Chinese style because the Chinese liberals think
[00:48:06] the movie actually criticized America too much remember liberalism in China is
[00:48:10] right wing Chinese liberals watch that movie and thought it criticized
[00:48:16] America too much. I'm saying it didn't criticize America enough. If anything, I'm closer to
[00:48:22] the Chinese left position, not the Chinese right position.
[00:48:31] I mean, I guess liberalism in America's right wing too technically, but I guess adjusted
[00:48:35] to our current conditions, adjusted to where the masses are politically and how they
[00:48:40] self-identify. Liberals are unfortunately seen as communism in this country.
[00:48:48] Maybe they're just mad because you're criticizing China at all. Yes, of course. Of course, that's a
[00:48:52] big part of it for sure. You have to remember Chinese netizens learned Marx and Hegel in
[00:49:04] second grade. Yes, it makes you fucking bullshit game. How are these players allowed to keep
[00:49:10] their account fucking useless this game is so stupid is jungle versus jungle just
[00:49:16] fix your fucking game Jesus Christ how does Chinese right compare to us moderate
[00:49:25] okay one thing that you guys have to understand okay one thing that you guys
[00:49:30] have to understand is this no matter which government formation or which
[00:49:35] ideology you exist under you're inevitably going to you know grow
[00:49:39] somewhat resentful or be very critical of it in either direction. Okay, it's normal.
[00:49:45] We are not unique here in the United States of America with our attitude
[00:49:51] towards our government. Like if you grew up in a communist country under single
[00:49:57] party communist rule, all of the economic struggles that you experience,
[00:50:02] you are going to inevitably blame communism for. For example, the reason
[00:50:07] I'm bringing it up is because it's like Cuba. There are plenty of young Cubans that have
[00:50:12] only known poverty, isolation for the rest of the world, and they, you know, lay the
[00:50:20] blame squarely on the hands of the government and the Communist Party and also the economic
[00:50:26] system. There's always a wanting for something else, a wanting for something more, unless
[00:50:32] You are the hegemonic superpower and you are able to give
[00:50:37] bountiful treats to your citizens unconditionally
[00:50:43] because you are exploiting the rest of the world
[00:50:46] in order to keep up a quality of life
[00:50:49] for even some of the poorer citizens in your country.
[00:50:54] And of course, I'm referencing America, right?
[00:51:01] My Cuban dad is like that.
[00:51:02] I'm also Cuban native and as soon as I stepped into the U.S.
[00:51:04] I got tremendously radicalized.
[00:51:05] Yeah.
[00:51:14] Cause, yeah, it's all, it's, it's not dissimilar to why
[00:51:19] DSA is rising in prominence here in the United States
[00:51:22] of America right now.
[00:51:24] It's not shocking to me that it's ironic because the
[00:51:27] Wall Street Journal article and like many other,
[00:51:30] at least like somewhat clever thinkers have identified why there's so much
[00:51:33] china maxing going on america because they look at china's trajectory is a
[00:51:37] positive one and they look at the american trajectory
[00:51:40] and their own current conditions and they recognize how negative it is
[00:51:46] you understand
[00:51:49] and that's the that's
[00:51:51] the reality no matter what happens no matter what happens no matter where
[00:51:54] you are in the world
[00:51:55] If your economic conditions are getting worse,
[00:52:02] if your material circumstances are worsening,
[00:52:07] then you are eventually going to seek out alternatives.
[00:52:15] So for example, in places like China, the right wing,
[00:52:19] the Chinese liberals, not in the rural countryside,
[00:52:21] usually the liberals that live in big cities that might have a problem with job attainment
[00:52:30] because there's a lot of educated youth in China and there's a significant amount of
[00:52:36] youth unemployment in China and they live in these big cities and they get frustrated
[00:52:40] and they're like, oh, we should liberalize further or they might be frustrated in many
[00:52:46] instances with like some of the more repressive elements of the state, you
[00:52:53] know, social issues, things of that nature. Yes, China also is running into elite
[00:52:57] overproduction problems right now. Do I have faith in the Chinese
[00:53:02] government to overcome this problem? Absolutely. But lazy-ass kids, come on man,
[00:53:11] and you think that's the problem
[00:53:18] that's so funny this is this is such a funny attitude to have to be like to be like a chud but for to be like a right wing chud but for China
[00:53:31] toast, but Chinese, they're all out there spending their money on avocado toast.
[00:53:39] Let me say I know, come on you don't think this is a real take, I don't know.
[00:53:43] Some people do that, but the point I'm trying to make is, is the best possible way to overcome
[00:53:51] these sorts of issues, the best possible way to overcome these sorts of issues is
[00:53:56] good policy, okay?
[00:53:59] That's how you do it.
[00:54:01] You design a system that will identify these problems and seek to solve them.
[00:54:14] I have faith that the Chinese government is very responsive to issues like this because
[00:54:24] they are very sensitive to anything that breeds rebellion.
[00:54:30] So I suspect that they are working on, I don't know how, but that is a real problem.
[00:54:38] In any case, we will be talking a little bit about China in a little bit.
[00:54:47] But I wanted to show you that the brain rot, the Fox News Boomer brain rot has reached
[00:54:51] the tick-tock debates.
[00:54:53] Here's Dean Withers having to deal with someone whose brain has been rotted by what
[00:54:59] they see on Fox News.
[00:55:01] I think that democratic socialists or Muslims in a Trojan horse plain nicer than hijacked
[00:55:07] the nation.
[00:55:08] Well, to me, I haven't seen any democratic socialists.
[00:55:12] I've been told so long on Donnie, which is ruining my city that I love.
[00:55:17] Explain how I wish I could understand what like, what a person like this means when
[00:55:24] they say this.
[00:55:26] I'm
[00:55:28] Yeah, this people like Abdul E. Said who's running with some
[00:55:31] Abdul E. Said
[00:55:33] Abdul E. Said
[00:55:35] Who's running with somebody who said America deserve not 11 like as though I'm his like vice senator or something as though
[00:55:42] There's a new position unlocked
[00:55:45] It's called vice senator when someone's running for senator. You have a a
[00:55:51] A compatriot
[00:55:53] America deserved 9-11. I mean, do we agree with that? Do we hear that?
[00:55:59] We're talking about Hassan Piker. He's not really a Piker, that's false.
[00:56:04] Huh? He's campaigning with next to him. And I mean, it worked. I mean, look at...
[00:56:10] Yeah, it's so funny that these guys are... Like, at a certain point, I've come to
[00:56:18] the recognition that most Americans are totally checked out of politics. They don't pay close
[00:56:24] attention to it at all. Everyone at the end of the day is a low information voter, every
[00:56:30] single person. And those who we assume are like higher information voters aren't actually
[00:56:38] demonstrating coherent thought, but instead are regurgitating what they saw on television.
[00:56:44] For the Republicans, it's of course what they see on Fox News, what they see on Twitter,
[00:56:49] what they see on their timeline.
[00:56:51] And for the Democrats, it's not that different either.
[00:56:54] Obviously, Democrats, by and large, liberals, by and large, have a much more diverse media
[00:56:57] diet.
[00:56:58] But even then, they are still totally, totally malleable to media narratives, especially
[00:57:06] if it's overbearing, especially if you hear it all the time.
[00:57:10] Um, yeah, and yes, this is more proof of the process.
[00:57:15] How many times have we seen this? How many times have we seen someone on TikTok?
[00:57:22] Um, say, oh, well, Fox News told me a Sompiger is running.
[00:57:28] I have to be angry about this because Fox News told me this is something that is worthy of anger and frustration.
[00:57:36] It's incredible. It is an incredible set of circumstances that, you know, no matter what
[00:57:46] happens, this is like the most educated Republican voter, okay? The most educated Republican voter
[00:57:53] is just regurgitating what he saw in New York Post headlines like, oh, well, Zoram and
[00:57:59] Abbey he's destroyed my city that I love and also Hassan Abbey is running alongside Abdul Isayee
[00:58:08] Asayee and they're doing 9-eleven they're running on a pro 9-eleven platform
[00:58:12] It's like dude. What the fuck are you you are not living in the same plane of existence as us?
[00:58:17] You you're just out of your fucking mind. I think now he won the primary
[00:58:22] This this this three stages on how the Muslim gains of power right price Crawford said it runs stage one right now
[00:58:27] Do you want me to repeat that to you?
[00:58:29] Like this guy thinks he has a fully fleshed out thought process on this.
[00:58:33] Like he is going to describe Abdul Asaib Bol's process of doing Islamic taqedos.
[00:58:42] He has been successfully fear mongered.
[00:58:45] Last election cycle, it was transgender panic.
[00:58:49] This election cycle, it is Islamophobia.
[00:58:52] Muslims are the new transgender.
[00:58:54] Now, of course, the transpanic hasn't gone away.
[00:58:57] Make no mistake, these guys can walk and chew gum at the same time.
[00:59:01] I would never make that argument, but it's pretty obvious that like the most salient
[00:59:06] enemy of American narrative is now moving against, you know, Islamic-style Sharia enjoyers
[00:59:15] that are doing ninja taquitos, also known as taquia.
[00:59:21] And we are also simultaneously, you know, trans-gender-fying, transmogrifying your youth
[00:59:26] as well.
[00:59:27] It's Islamic-style woke Sharia, because at the same time they're like, these guys are
[00:59:33] unbelievably conservative, it's not American at all, but they also are pro-trans, which
[00:59:37] is also not American, and that's far too woke.
[00:59:40] And none of it makes sense.
[00:59:44] None of it makes sense.
[00:59:46] Like, are we too woke?
[00:59:48] And we want to transmogrify the children?
[00:59:51] Or are we too conservative?
[00:59:54] But it's also bad.
[00:59:55] It's like brown conservatism, not white conservatism, which is good.
[01:00:00] The reason why I'm bringing this up, this inconsistency, this idiocy, is because I
[01:00:06] brought it up earlier as well.
[01:00:08] I brought it up last night because I was getting attacked by Katie Britt.
[01:00:14] Katie Britt is a GOP politician who said this.
[01:00:21] Hold on. Here's Katie Britt on Fox News last night saying this.
[01:00:29] That's what these candidates are talking about. They're jihadist sympathizers.
[01:00:32] We're seeing that there with El Sayed. You're seeing Hassan Piker become the voice
[01:00:38] and the spokesperson there for the Democratic Party.
[01:00:41] we have to highlight it because America needs to know what we're up against and I think this
[01:00:45] is going to make sure that in November people turn away from that.
[01:00:50] So yeah, stepward wife Katie Britt says, they are jihadist sympathizers, referencing myself
[01:00:56] and Abdu'l-as-a-ebole, okay, and then Vance said this too, I'm going to get to that
[01:01:01] as well, don't worry, to which I responded with, we are for pluralistic secular democracy,
[01:01:08] You are not.
[01:01:10] You're conservative.
[01:01:11] You're a reactionary.
[01:01:13] You do not like that we live in a diverse pluralistic secular democracy.
[01:01:18] You want to change that.
[01:01:20] We want to defend it.
[01:01:21] We want to preserve it.
[01:01:22] And yet you call us, you know, Islamic jihadists, right?
[01:01:25] And it's ironic because, um, it's ironic because there are the Islamophobia is directly
[01:01:33] attacking pluralistic secular democracy. So I said, yet you call us jihadist sympathizers
[01:01:42] because we oppose genocide being funded with our tax dollars and our weapons.
[01:01:47] And what's crazy about this process is like, these guys are y'all Cata, okay? They are literally
[01:01:54] y'all Cata, which is a far greater threat to America, American democracy, what the United
[01:02:00] States of America is. Who is this? Did you see ADL for Catholics is up your ass? Oh, Bill
[01:02:06] Donahue. I love that guy. Yeah, he's awesome. Yeah, it's funny because I love Catholics.
[01:02:17] It's my favorite. It's my favorite type of Christianity. Like no, no joke. I'm being
[01:02:22] sincere about this. I think Catholics are awesome. But this guy hates me. Bill
[01:02:28] Donahue, president of the Catholic League, fucking hates my ass. And he hates Zoran as
[01:02:32] well. He's the one who's like, Zoran Mabdabi shouldn't actually participate in 9-11 because
[01:02:38] he already participated in it in 2001. The League under Donahue's leadership is criticized
[01:02:47] for its conservatism and for its combat of response to high-profile media stories besides
[01:02:50] education campaigns, group issues, condemnations, initiates boycotts and protests, defense
[01:02:55] priests against accusations of child sexual abuse. Yeah. I'm with the Pope. I'm with the
[01:03:11] woke Pope. Okay. And then the case where was I so yeah, what I was trying to say is these
[01:03:20] guys are trying to do what they perceive Sharia is right they're trying to do
[01:03:25] Christian Sharia or at least like what they unironically claim is Sharia right
[01:03:33] when they talk about Sharia law what are they talking about they're like oh
[01:03:35] well it can range it ranges from like lowering the age of consent to I don't
[01:03:45] know did treating women as property like I'm not saying this is what Islam is
[01:03:49] about either. I'm just saying like their association with with Islam is like
[01:03:54] unbelievably conservative, right? It's like fundamentalists, it's conservative,
[01:03:58] and it's very funny because like American Muslims have always been pulled on
[01:04:04] this stuff and and Muslims in the United States of America are more woke
[01:04:07] than the people advocating for Christian Sharia. While simultaneously
[01:04:12] decrying Sharia laws coming to the United States of America they actually
[01:04:15] trying to literally do Yalkata style policies. So that's what's so interesting about this process,
[01:04:24] but that's just how racism works, right? There's nothing you can do about it. It's just like,
[01:04:29] we're white. When white folks are advocating for conservatism, it's good. And when a brown person
[01:04:35] exists, that's bad because they're, you know, doing conservatism, but brown style.
[01:04:39] So, beyond the lookout for this kind of initiative, a lot more frequently, because obviously this
[01:04:50] is going to be base boosted by a lot of conservatives because it's very successful in targeting some
[01:04:59] less educated people and like leaning into their fears, especially because, you know,
[01:05:06] you have an upwardly mobile minority population that many people are not
[01:05:10] privy to many people have not actually been around and it's it's very easy to
[01:05:15] fear monger against this upwardly mobile somewhat isolated minority
[01:05:20] population especially when the last 30 years of propaganda has made the the
[01:05:26] Muslim population out to be the number one enemy of the Western world and the
[01:05:31] United States of America in an effort to justify the global war on terror.
[01:05:37] So that's what the conservatives are leaning into, and of course if the liberals do not
[01:05:42] across the board, the anti-Trump forces do not across the board oppose this kind of
[01:05:46] racism, it's going to get completely out of hand.
[01:05:49] And I would go so far as to say it is already completely out of hand.
[01:05:55] Have you heard about that?
[01:05:57] Alright, stage one, the Muslims are minority, little political power.
[01:06:02] They are preaching, they're persuasing people that they're good, you know, they're dealing
[01:06:07] with the LGBTQ and the Jewish people, which they hate.
[01:06:12] Stage two is that they grow political power, we're slowly getting there, you know, as
[01:06:15] these more democratic socialists come in and they're letting these people in, they're
[01:06:19] gaining, they're gaining more and more influence.
[01:06:21] And then stage three is the Muslim, you know, when they have majority of the society.
[01:06:26] Yes, he I mean are you shocked at the guy who's who thinks that like every muslim on us soil is trying to
[01:06:33] Do fifth column style infiltration is a functional illiterate
[01:06:39] persuasing
[01:06:48] It's funny because it is rebranded protocols of elders I on shit
[01:06:54] Yeah
[01:06:56] It is what Nazis and what fascists use, what anti-Semites use as the Jewish problem and the Jewish question in the 21st century is now the Muslim problem and the Muslim question. That's what we're doing.
[01:07:13] Okay?
[01:07:17] That's it.
[01:07:26] So, man, where's the suit I'm wearing it I'm wearing a suit right now
[01:07:35] Yeah, Muslims control the media Muslims control banking Muslims control the world
[01:07:41] Muslims are infiltrating the democratic socialist movement Muslims are trying to Islam a Islamify the United States of America
[01:07:50] and
[01:07:52] Muslims have a
[01:07:54] a policy of being a policy of lying in order to accomplish their agenda
[01:08:02] They're gonna start killing Christians on the street. They're gonna start killing gay people on the street
[01:08:06] They're gonna start slaving women making women their slaves just like how they do in every other Muslim country
[01:08:11] If you go on to a shipping Gaza and you say you're gay, they're shooting you on site
[01:08:14] Yeah, check this out. This will be a really good question that will explode expose
[01:08:18] use the low IQ droid you are. Convince me that it's reasonable to believe these things about
[01:08:23] Zoran Mundani and Abdul Al-Said. What? Convince me that it's reasonable to believe these things
[01:08:30] about Zoran Mundani and Abdul Al-Said. Well, I told you one about Abdul Al-Said is that he's
[01:08:36] running for somebody who said that and I considered that 11. Dude, it's so like saying that about
[01:08:42] Abdul Azoran is funny. Saying that about me I think is even funnier. Like I want to enslave
[01:08:47] Women and like destroy the white race and shit like that is like so stupid one because I'm fucking white myself and
[01:08:53] to
[01:08:54] Like which one is it? Are we too woke or are we too conservative and are you conservative?
[01:09:02] like this
[01:09:04] This cognitive bias problem
[01:09:06] This cognitive dissonance is impossible to overcome for the average chud
[01:09:13] Yeah, Democrats is grabbing a Sompiker is right. This is how they
[01:09:17] And it's kind of sack is like you know we joke about stuff like this like Islamic Robespierre right but
[01:09:40] Islamic Jihad Robespierre, but what's crazy about it is that these guys actually take those jokes seriously
[01:09:49] One example I can go back to as recently as like a couple weeks ago is when Elon Musk lost his damn mind
[01:09:57] The unearthed tapes of a son piker
[01:10:00] From when I was making jokes about the the great replacement and how stupid it is and I was like, yeah
[01:10:05] uh, Latiners with their salsa hips were coming, you know, we're gonna we're gonna
[01:10:09] consensually steal your girlfriends and your moms and your sisters and then you
[01:10:14] know we're gonna eradicate the white race and they were like dude what the
[01:10:18] fuck he's admitting it is like no you dumbass I'm making fun of you but what
[01:10:22] do you do what do you do when the opposition sincerely believes this
[01:10:29] is fear mongering. Is secular Islam a thing outside of race's projection? Never paid you
[01:10:38] for a very religious person? No, not. That's why it doesn't make any sense because the very
[01:10:43] same people that have called me a homosexual who paints his fingernails, who like dresses
[01:10:49] up transgender style are now saying, we are trying to make America, like make every
[01:10:56] American woman wear a burqa it just doesn't make any sense but it doesn't
[01:11:02] have to because you know sucks for all of us that have to involve ourselves
[01:11:08] these people they're just dumb as fuck and I told you the house and I want to
[01:11:13] critique a son if you want to get it if you want to crit if you want to
[01:11:17] critique a son piker that's probably like like the like the worst thing to
[01:11:21] critiquing for okay like listen there's a lot of things as son piker has done and
[01:11:26] said that I disagree with but as it relates to that comment for years now
[01:11:30] he's been outspoken that what he was saying was that there were particular
[01:11:35] like foreign engagements involved in by the United States of America that
[01:11:39] descriptively led to said retaliatory attack 9-11 was an attack of terror
[01:11:44] 9-11 was an atrocity 9-11 was unjustified yeah link back to Islam
[01:11:48] our absolute terrorists
[01:11:52] But I mean he's even apologized for wording it in the way that he did
[01:11:56] If you want to hold of course you didn't now. Yeah, no cuz you got caught right? It's like no I did at the time I
[01:12:04] Did at the freaking time dude
[01:12:07] Anything against us on I just feel like that's one of like the like more difficult things to hold against them
[01:12:14] Because like that's one of the things that he's explained in context and held himself accountable for saying
[01:12:19] But obviously I still disagree with the wording
[01:12:22] But does this mean that all Christians are pedophiles because Donald Trump was pictured standing next to Jeffrey Epstein?
[01:12:29] Yeah, by that logic
[01:12:32] Christians of the Holocaust. Yeah, I mean, it's just it's fucking ridiculous. How does he know it's the anniversary?
[01:12:38] I think this was a couple weeks ago, but
[01:12:44] He says stuff that I disagree. Why is it something every fucking person says because I have been so successfully
[01:12:52] Tartan feathered that it's like virtually and I talk so much and I also have a a robust
[01:13:00] I have a fairly aggressive
[01:13:04] group of
[01:13:05] motivated cyber stalkers
[01:13:07] Who will be all up in your replies as soon as they see?
[01:13:11] anybody defending me that they have to do the throat clearing all the fucking time that's it
[01:13:21] That's it
[01:13:23] Like there the Republican Party's clip chimping initiative and and manufactured out raid initiative isn't new
[01:13:30] It's not new at all. People have been doing this to me online for almost a decade at this point
[01:13:35] And that is the reason why anyone who defends me has to do the throat clearing of like well, you know
[01:13:42] Hasan piker is the is a grave threat
[01:13:46] But you know, this is the worst reason to go after him and that kind of thing like
[01:13:52] Immediately they'll be like he's a dog abuser. He fucking murders dogs
[01:13:58] Islamic style a dog murderer, of course and also he is a jihadist
[01:14:03] He's a Maoist. He wants the American countryside to do the Great Leap Forward.
[01:14:09] He wants to do the Pest Campaign here. He wants to kill all the sparrows.
[01:14:14] That's what a Sompiker wants.
[01:14:20] I have a fairly insane...
[01:14:25] I don't think that kid said anything like that.
[01:14:28] No, not that kid. That kid just knows the edge.
[01:14:32] He knows all the most like he knows only what Fox News has shown him
[01:14:41] I'm talking about like
[01:14:43] But even Madeline who came on the broadcast yesterday is getting lit the fuck up on the timeline
[01:14:48] If you were to go under her replies, right? If you were to go under her replies
[01:14:53] You would see the Dan Stalkman sex Pestini brigade in action being like how dare you defend this person?
[01:15:00] He is Adolf Hitler. He is literally Adolf Hitler. He is the modern reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.
[01:15:10] I was adding context to a bunch of clips on Twitter and I was reported as a bot and my account is invisible when I post replies now.
[01:15:21] Sparrows are invasive birds and not native to the U.S. A.C., there's a slender iceberg out there.
[01:15:35] Anyway, it is what it is. We just have to deal in this misinformation environment forever. What
[01:15:48] has made me so attackable and so easy to attack, which is my accessibility and the fact that
[01:15:58] I'm constantly on and constantly live is also what makes me so accessible to show people
[01:16:07] what the actual context is.
[01:16:09] All I need to do is redirect them to a YouTube video.
[01:16:12] There's a million of them out there.
[01:16:14] The first time I think people watch a video of mine directly or a podcast appears directly
[01:16:21] is when they realize like all of this is just nonsensical slander and that I'm a fairly
[01:16:26] reasonable person that is very agreeable.
[01:16:34] You know?
[01:16:39] That's it.
[01:16:43] The exact same reasons as to why I'm endlessly fucking, ContraPoint's been piling on you
[01:16:51] on her Patreon and claiming you love Mt. I know.
[01:16:53] There's also a lot of like petty vindictive people in this space that have decided that
[01:17:00] I am the most significant threat.
[01:17:04] the White House with the latest good morning, Rachel. Michael, good morning to you. USS Abraham
[01:17:23] Lincoln has spent more than 270 days at sea after a nine month long deployment. They are
[01:17:29] finally, making their way back home. They were only supposed to be out on that aircraft carrier
[01:17:34] for about six to seven months, but that mission was extended the longer this war with Iran
[01:17:39] has continued to drag on. And of course, all of it comes amid new reporting about the worsening
[01:17:44] conditions on board that aircraft carrier with the military times reporting they spoke to families
[01:17:49] of service members who said at least two people on board tried to jump overboard.
[01:17:54] President Trump dismissing those concerns, brushing it off, saying those Marines and
[01:17:57] sailors had not been on that ship long enough, but this war with Iran is that a virtual standstill
[01:18:03] oil prices are continuing to rise gas right now is about $4 and 10 cents a gallon over
[01:18:09] on Wall Street. The Dow plunging about 700 points. President Trump now trying a new
[01:18:14] strategy threatening severe consequences for any country that tries to help Iran evade
[01:18:20] sanctions and help them. Great strategy sir. I love it.
[01:18:26] Great strategy sir.
[01:18:33] Thank you. This is, it's going to surely work this time.
[01:18:42] So this means the U.S. is Washington has to leave the Pacific right? Yes, the U.S. is
[01:18:45] Washington has already left the Pacific. It's on its way to be deployed in the region.
[01:18:50] uh... to to relieve uss lincoln
[01:18:54] even though donald trump was claiming the other day that the u.s. is lincoln has
[01:18:58] not been deployed long enough
[01:19:00] well it turns out it has been deployed long enough
[01:19:03] u.s. is lincoln is leaving
[01:19:06] financially but notably the administration is not saying whether
[01:19:10] china iran's top trading partner will face those severe consequences that
[01:19:14] president trump is talking about we know the white house and president
[01:19:17] Trump, well they are now preparing for Chinese President Xi Jinping to visit here at the White House.
[01:19:22] Yeah it's actually really funny that their third way consultant trying to say you're homophobic
[01:19:26] is this clip okay we're done we're done we're done we're done we're done it's enough enough enough
[01:19:30] enough just you know if you're in the trenches and fighting keep fighting I don't want to fucking
[01:19:34] see every like random DC consultant and beltway moron that's like that has like eight followers
[01:19:44] being like this is why he's homophobic this is why he's transphobic this is why
[01:19:47] he's Islamophobic well I guess none of them say I'm Islamophobic because
[01:19:51] they're that's the one phobia that they all entertain and enjoy
[01:19:58] like how can I be hyper woke and also hyper conservative at the same time why
[01:20:03] is no one ever fucking asked that question you know
[01:20:08] how is that possible how am I both weak and strong how is the enemy both
[01:20:12] weak and strong. How is the enemy both conservative and also hypersensitive and hyper-woke?
[01:20:23] Just a few weeks are back up. Yeah, an important conversation ahead and China's a big trading
[01:20:27] partner with the U.S. as well. All right, Rachel, thank you. The Trump administration is overhauling
[01:20:32] its strategy in the war with Iran. Again, instead of trying to wipe out Iran's military,
[01:20:36] the new goal is to crush their economy. That's something the president is now branding.
[01:20:39] Economic D-Day Treasury Secretary Scott Besson says the US is reaching out to you yet new goal, which is I
[01:20:46] Looked it up same as the old goal
[01:20:50] When was this not the goal?
[01:20:52] This has been the goal for the last six months and as a matter of fact, it's been the goal for the last 47 years 48 years
[01:21:01] Okay
[01:21:03] This has always been the goal and it has reached
[01:21:06] tremendous success
[01:21:08] At certain points right we were able to successfully destroy the Iranian economy
[01:21:15] We were able to successfully
[01:21:17] Moment instability volatility in the country
[01:21:21] cause mass uprisings
[01:21:23] This isn't new at all. This is the exact same goal that we've had with Iran as a matter of fact
[01:21:28] It's the only thing that we can do to Iran successfully
[01:21:32] but now
[01:21:34] When you pair that up with the military campaign
[01:21:38] Iran has actually gained tremendous amounts of leverage, okay?
[01:21:48] So for Donald Trump to turn back into, to turn the faucet of sanctions up once again on Iran
[01:21:56] is very stupid.
[01:21:57] He's, he's saying it's going to be an economic D-day, the military D-day failed.
[01:22:01] So now he's going to do an economic D-day.
[01:22:05] Not sure exactly how, considering that Iran relies, Iran's economy as it exists, is entirely
[01:22:14] propped up by Russia, China, countries that are outside of the American secondary sanctions
[01:22:24] orbit or countries who are always threatened with American sanctions anyway.
[01:22:30] You can't really sanction China.
[01:22:33] You can't, at its current phase, sanction Russia any further, or additional sanctions
[01:22:37] on Russia will only cripple the energy markets further.
[01:22:43] So what are you supposed to do?
[01:22:45] Now the foreign minister, Seyed Abbasarakshi, also had something to say about this thread.
[01:22:52] He said, 14 years ago, most crippling sanctions in history failed, eight years ago,
[01:22:55] maximum pressure failed, five months ago, unconditional surrender failed.
[01:22:59] Today, most crushing economic operation ever, bound to fail. We have seen this movie before. Same bull, different bullies.
[01:23:17] True. VP Biden on Iran. These are the most crippling sanctions in the history of the sanctions, in the history of sanctions, period.
[01:23:29] And it's crazy because like the sanctions only brought about economic volatility to Iran.
[01:23:41] It made regular Iranian lives much harder.
[01:23:48] It created a lot of struggle, a lot of issues for everyday Iranian citizens.
[01:23:59] Sanctions always have been an active collective punishment, and they are infinitely more successful
[01:24:06] when those threats are directed towards our allies whose entire economies are designed
[01:24:11] around continuous trade and normal relationships with the Western world.
[01:24:17] That's why they would work on apartheid South Africa.
[01:24:20] That's why they would work on Israel, apartheid Israel.
[01:24:25] when directed against our foreign adversaries on the other hand turn into a weapon that obviously
[01:24:35] harms regular citizens is to express purposes to create so much instability by engaging
[01:24:43] in collective punishment that regular ordinary citizens in the foreign adversary in the society
[01:24:50] of our foreign adversary end up rising up in arms and you know they riot, they rebel
[01:24:58] and then that rebellion has to be put down violently which is what has happened over
[01:25:02] and over again obviously with Iran and that breeds even more instability and more chaos.
[01:25:11] All of that, of course, was reversed when Donald Trump directly attacked Iran.
[01:25:21] Not only did it harden the position of the hardliners, this direct assassination and murder
[01:25:29] of children in the first day in the opening salvo of Operation Epic Fury, Epstein's Fury,
[01:25:36] whatever you want to call it.
[01:25:39] But the assassination also cleared the field for some of these hardliners to seize control
[01:25:44] over the Iranian government.
[01:25:48] It also hardened support for the IRGC and the Islamic Republic by many elements of Iranian
[01:25:55] society that might have been on the edge of joining the rebellion or had joined the
[01:26:04] masses that were experiencing tremendous discontent against the repressive state.
[01:26:12] They rallied around the flag, as one does.
[01:26:16] And not only that, but they established primacy over the Strait of Hormuz.
[01:26:20] They now control this choke point that is responsible for 20% of the entire world's
[01:26:24] energy supply.
[01:26:27] Global markets are in a state of panic.
[01:26:31] All born out of Donald Trump's idiotic attempts to lean into what Israel wanted in the region,
[01:26:37] which is to create a failed state.
[01:26:42] Create a failed state?
[01:26:43] Yes, Obama.
[01:26:44] Yes, Obama is an 11-month subscriber.
[01:26:47] Barack Hussein Obama is in this community for those of you who don't know.
[01:26:52] He watches.
[01:26:53] He's a big, he's a big fan.
[01:26:56] Yeah, across official rhetoric, Sina 2C reports, military signaling how many new appointments
[01:27:03] Iran is consolidating a more aggressive deterrence posture as hormones in the blockade war becomes
[01:27:08] a test of attrition that Iran may counterescalate more sharply ahead of midterms to maximize
[01:27:12] costs for Trump.
[01:27:15] That is where we're at.
[01:27:18] So Iran is taking a more aggressive posture against America, against Western allies.
[01:27:25] All the while Donald Trump is complaining about Iran's refusal to back away when they
[01:27:33] have maximum leverage, maximum leverage that we gave them with our missteps.
[01:27:42] And now we're threatening Iran with more crippling economic sanctions.
[01:27:49] because we already have the maximum sanctions package on Iran, because we have the maximum
[01:28:03] economic sanctions package on Iran, all we can do is sanction other countries. But considering
[01:28:10] that the other countries that Iran relies on for normal economic activity are either
[01:28:16] untouchable by the united states of america like china
[01:28:21] have already been victim to america's maximum uh... sanctions package like
[01:28:25] russia
[01:28:27] not entirely certain how this will go well i am certain how this will go it'll
[01:28:31] be a failure
[01:28:32] all of its allies to put together the greatest coordinated economic isolation
[01:28:37] in the history of the world
[01:28:40] if you insist on
[01:28:42] the uh... doing business with them but can you imagine
[01:28:46] iran has maximum leverage over the street of hormones
[01:28:50] iran has already caused enough iranian proxies or or you know other
[01:28:55] uh... parts of the acts of resistance have already
[01:28:58] uh... caused instability for saudi arabia and continue to do so
[01:29:02] and also their uh... you know
[01:29:04] lasering some of the ship's transiting through the bubble monday straight
[01:29:09] and then on top of that america
[01:29:11] has no leverage against china
[01:29:15] america has no military deterrence against china america has no economic
[01:29:19] deterrence against china and as a matter of fact china has endless amounts of
[01:29:23] leverage over
[01:29:24] uh... over
[01:29:26] uh... creating
[01:29:27] complete global chaos
[01:29:31] they are the reason why
[01:29:33] they are the reason why the oil prices have remained uh... stable relatively
[01:29:37] stable or have increased
[01:29:40] and and haven't spiked to uh... normal
[01:29:43] conditions
[01:29:44] have not been adjusted the normal conditions of like
[01:29:47] diminishing twenty percent of the uh... the the uh... oil shipments coming out
[01:29:51] of the state of or mose
[01:29:53] because they cut down
[01:29:55] their oil imports
[01:29:57] china could literally turn around and say okay we're purchasing oil at the
[01:30:00] normal rate that we were supposed to we're going to refill our strategic
[01:30:03] petroleum reserves
[01:30:06] virtually overnight
[01:30:08] china could collapse the oil markets
[01:30:13] if they were to increase their uh... demand
[01:30:16] if they were not to increase the demand necessarily but if they were to start
[01:30:19] purchasing
[01:30:20] uh... start importing oil back to regular levels
[01:30:25] all of a sudden
[01:30:26] all of a sudden
[01:30:28] america's position would be worse
[01:30:33] so iran maintains the military leverage in the region china maintains the
[01:30:37] economic leverage globally, and America's talking about offering a D-day of sanctions to, I guess, China?
[01:30:46] Because who could they actually deploy the economic D-day weapon on?
[01:30:55] Because Iran has already carved out of the international trade design for years now.
[01:31:02] So who could you possibly deploy the sanctions package on?
[01:31:09] You can't do it to Pakistan because Pakistan is an American ally.
[01:31:15] You can't do it to, like, who are you supposed to sanction?
[01:31:18] Yemen?
[01:31:20] And you definitely can't do it to, like I said, you definitely can't do it to China.
[01:31:43] So my question is, you know, who are you going to do this to?
[01:31:48] either transferring money buying their oil they're doing seaborn ship
[01:31:53] transport first then the US Treasury and the US government it will put its full
[01:31:59] might and force toward enforcing against you. So the US is also imposing new
[01:32:05] sanctions against Hezbollah and disemnaying the Lebanese militant group
[01:32:08] is an Iranian proxy joining me now Edward Fishman former different man
[01:32:11] in international relations scholar he's the author of the book Choke Points
[01:32:14] American power in the age of economic warfare.
[01:32:17] It's nice to have you with us this morning.
[01:32:18] So, you know, I should point out there are some signs here
[01:32:20] that this economic approach is having some impact,
[01:32:24] but we're also dealing with a brutal regime,
[01:32:26] which we know is not necessarily moved
[01:32:28] by the plight of its citizens when they are suffering.
[01:32:32] How long do you think this regime will and can hold out?
[01:32:37] In your mind, is it months?
[01:32:38] Could it be years?
[01:32:40] Well, look, Erica, the track record of economic pressure bringing about regime change is very
[01:32:47] poor.
[01:32:48] So I don't think we should expect the Iranian regime to collapse under economic pressure.
[01:32:52] I mean, go back even to Trump's first term, when Trump launched a maximum pressure strategy
[01:32:58] against Venezuela, the Venezuelan economy declined by about 75%.
[01:33:02] It was one of the biggest peacetime collapses we've seen of an economy, and Maduro stayed
[01:33:07] in power until Trump launched the Maduro raid earlier this year.
[01:33:11] So I don't think we can expect the Iranian regime just to collapse under economic pressure
[01:33:15] alone.
[01:33:16] There's also what I find interesting is we heard from the Treasury Secretary from Scott
[01:33:22] Besson saying that it's unlikely that the U.S. is going to resume any large-scale fighting
[01:33:25] here.
[01:33:26] The reality in making those comments, while in some ways they may have been meant
[01:33:30] to soothe perhaps certain parties, Iran is listening to that as well.
[01:33:36] 100%, right? I think the Iranians understand that Trump doesn't want to fight a war. And
[01:33:43] this economic D-day just sort of strikes everybody as Trump trying to seem tough and
[01:33:48] showing that he's doing something when he doesn't actually want to go back to the battlefield.
[01:33:53] What I'd also note, and a very important point here, is that Iran has been under comprehensive
[01:33:58] sanctions for decades. So really the only thing left to do on sanctions is to target
[01:34:03] Iran's trading partners. And really their top trading partner by far is China. And with
[01:34:08] Xi Jinping set to come to the White House in just about a month, it strikes me as pretty
[01:34:13] unlikely that Trump wants to ignite an economic war with China right now.
[01:34:18] Which is fascinating.
[01:34:19] Yeah, not only, not only is, is it the timing makes it so stupid. Not only is the timing
[01:34:27] may be so goddamn stupid because Xi Jinping is coming to America, but America has no economic
[01:34:34] leverage over China, which Donald Trump learned the hard way. Where's Hassan? Well, Hassan
[01:34:42] already gave his analysis and now this expert is repeating it. That's why Hassan doesn't
[01:34:48] need to be on camera all the time, because I was pissing. Okay.
[01:34:56] And it's always cope. It's always unbelievable cope from these
[01:35:01] guys. Well, they'll be like, Oh, well, it's because like
[01:35:03] Iran can withstand these sanctions because they have a
[01:35:05] repressive state. It's like, no. That's, I mean, that's,
[01:35:11] that's not the real reason why Iran can withstand the
[01:35:15] the sanctions now, the real reason why Iraq was saying the sanctions now is because it's
[01:35:20] withstood the sanctions for 47 years. They've designed their entire economy. They've been
[01:35:27] forced to design their entire economy around survival, around the sanctions.
[01:35:35] Okay?
[01:35:45] Once you deploy the sanctions nuke, the trade nuke, on a foreign adversary for a decade plus,
[01:35:54] they have to survive.
[01:35:55] So they find ways around it.
[01:35:57] It's that simple.
[01:35:59] And you can't do it to China because Donald Trump tried to do it to China.
[01:36:03] Donald Trump tried to decouple the rest of the world from China.
[01:36:09] That was the whole purpose of Liberation Day.
[01:36:13] If you recall, when Donald Trump tried to do Liberation Day, one element of Liberation
[01:36:18] Day that was at least smart, but at least there was a logical reason behind it.
[01:36:26] There was something motivating it beyond Trump's personal animus towards countries
[01:36:31] like Brazil for prosecuting Bolsonaro. With China, there was a broader goal, and that was
[01:36:42] to decouple by force the rest of China's trading partners and pry them away from the manufacturing
[01:36:49] hub of the planet because that gave China, and it has consistently given China, tremendous
[01:36:54] leverage. Tremendous economic leverage, tremendous power over negotiations, and America wants
[01:37:03] to, one, reinstall a robust manufacturing base on U.S. soil. Not sure how they're going
[01:37:08] to do that without central planning. But basically, what Liberation Day was supposed
[01:37:22] to do was bully our allies, Canada, Germany, EU, India, and our allies or countries that
[01:37:33] we have normal trade relations with in the Asian region, in the Asian continent, Asia-Pacific
[01:37:42] region, to move away from China and to develop more extensive trade relations with the
[01:37:51] United States of America by force, they wanted, you know, they wanted these
[01:37:55] countries, including places like Cambodia, to purchase American things that
[01:38:00] we're making. Okay. And it failed because China turned around and said,
[01:38:08] fuck you. China turned around and refused to bend, as I correctly told
[01:38:16] you was going to happen at the time, said, we're not going to, we're not going to bend,
[01:38:23] we're not going to buckle under the maximum trade, the maximum sanctions package. You
[01:38:30] need us more than we need you. And they were right. China has already created secondary
[01:38:38] markets for this exact purpose. Africa is now flourishing for this reason, right?
[01:38:45] It's one of the areas that China is selling to.
[01:38:49] First China worked to develop Africa, as it continuously does, it continues to do so,
[01:39:00] and then China started selling to Africa, Mexico, Latin American countries, in an effort to
[01:39:08] to withstand some kind of, in an effort to withstand
[01:39:12] some kind of, you know, American sanctions package.
[01:39:19] And then also on top of that, when Donald Trump tried to,
[01:39:23] tried to renege on the agreement that they were,
[01:39:28] the agreement that America and China were negotiating,
[01:39:34] China then said that they would,
[01:39:38] Institute, strategic export controls over rare earth minerals and magnets.
[01:39:46] These are incredibly important for defense.
[01:39:49] This is what we make our missiles with.
[01:39:51] So when China actually floated the idea of doing strategic export controls, America
[01:39:58] had to back away.
[01:40:00] This was America waving the white flag.
[01:40:02] Varifakis said China needed more of the US than the other way around, because China
[01:40:07] is the net exporter.
[01:40:08] I don't think Verifocus is right on that. Does China still need the U.S.? Absolutely.
[01:40:14] But does America need China more than China needs America? That is absolutely correct.
[01:40:23] The U.S. is about 15% of China's customer base. For China, this is very tiny compared
[01:40:32] other countries? No, but 15% is still ginormous. I think Yanis is obviously much smarter than
[01:40:43] I am, understands is much better than I do, but my estimation, of course, China still
[01:40:48] wants global stability, China still wants to continue selling products to the United
[01:40:51] States of America, but does China have more leverage over the United States of America?
[01:40:57] I think yes, I think China has, and Yanis wouldn't disagree with that either. China
[01:41:01] has more leverage over the United States of America. It can eat some economic pain as it did,
[01:41:09] right? But also, simultaneously, it can present a far greater threat to American manufacturing
[01:41:18] than vice versa.
[01:41:27] But the reason why I'm bringing this up is because we already learned this lesson last
[01:41:31] time around. I know Trump learned this lesson last time around.
[01:41:35] Right, and I'm so glad you brought that up because as we look at this, right, when that
[01:41:39] visit looming, how could even just this announcement, how could that impact those discussions and
[01:41:47] the visit itself?
[01:41:48] Oh, could impact the visit completely, right? I mean, I think let's see what Secretary
[01:41:54] Besin actually announces in terms of sanctions on Monday. But if you actually took Trump
[01:41:59] at his word, and this is going to be unprecedented economic sanctions, economic e-day, there's
[01:42:04] no way for that to be true unless there's aggressive sanctions on Chinese banks, Chinese
[01:42:10] energy companies, all of the Chinese companies that basically provide Iran with a lifeline
[01:42:14] to the global economy.
[01:42:16] If Trump actually were to do that, I think it would totally blow up the Trump sheet,
[01:42:20] is it?
[01:42:21] And I would expect that that visit wouldn't happen, and you may even have Chinese
[01:42:23] retaliation, right?
[01:42:25] You will absolutely get Chinese retaliation in this process. America has already tried
[01:42:31] to float this idea in this last iteration of the conflict. The United States of America
[01:42:37] tried to say that Chinese companies that are still engaging in trade with Iran and banks
[01:42:44] that are processing this trade, Chinese banks, will receive sanctions. This was a couple
[01:42:49] months ago. And China's retaliation was, suck my dick. China turned around and said, we are
[01:42:56] not abiding by American sanctions, we are going to continue doing what we're doing.
[01:43:02] China since then has created even more leverage. Because not only does China have the leverage
[01:43:10] that it showed it had during the Liberation Day back and forth tariffs battle that Donald
[01:43:18] Trump lost, that was two years ago. China also has another unbelievable volatility nuke
[01:43:27] at its disposal now. Not only do we no longer have the capacity to threaten China militarily,
[01:43:37] that died in the Gulf of Persia, but we also did not have a sanctions threat against China
[01:43:48] as we saw with the uh... liberation day uh... back and forth uh... struggle
[01:43:54] that we lost but now on top of that
[01:43:56] china could just increase imports of oil
[01:44:00] into the country
[01:44:01] and if they were to do that
[01:44:03] uh... liberation it was only a year ago shit sorry okay i was wrong
[01:44:10] my apologies
[01:44:14] it feels like a lifetime ago it feels like it was ten years ago i'm gonna be
[01:44:18] honest
[01:44:21] i can't believe it's been only a year
[01:44:32] once again
[01:44:33] china could explode
[01:44:36] the global energy markets
[01:44:42] and that's part of the reason why
[01:44:45] this region when besset was asked about china directly
[01:44:49] he kind of shot away from naming the the player here
[01:44:52] but does it include china because that's the primary economic partner of
[01:44:56] of iran
[01:44:58] again many conversations are best to have
[01:45:02] and private
[01:45:03] and we we are confident that everyone wants these freight reopened
[01:45:08] and for energy prices to come back down
[01:45:11] So keep in mind that the Chinese get 50% 5.0
[01:45:16] the other energy from the Gulf.
[01:45:20] So it would do them a big service to get with the program.
[01:45:33] I suspect that if they try to sanction
[01:45:38] If they try to sanction China, if America tries to sanction China, China will say, okay, well,
[01:45:48] it turns out we got to rebuild our strategic petroleum reserves, big dog.
[01:45:53] Sucks to suck, but sorry, we're going to have to do that.
[01:45:57] Now this will create short-term pain for China and major pain, possible irreparable
[01:46:04] damage, cause possible irreparable damage to their immediate trade partners in Asia.
[01:46:12] But it certainly will not be great for the United States of America.
[01:46:15] So it's not in China's best interest to nuke the entire planet.
[01:46:23] And that is the reason why they've maintained price stability by nuking their demand for
[01:46:28] oil and not the man necessarily but nuking their imports of oil.
[01:46:40] But if they were to open up the faucet, this would not be beneficial for America at all.
[01:46:51] Remember last year when China cut off our access to rare earth minerals, it really upended
[01:47:00] supply chains here in the United States.
[01:47:02] So that's to say, if we could take Trump out of his word, it would significantly impale
[01:47:06] the visit.
[01:47:07] But I'm skeptical we're actually going to go in that direction.
[01:47:09] I also found interesting some recent comments from Chris Christie when he was talking
[01:47:13] about the war recently and the way-
[01:47:16] Look, here's the calculation from the Chinese side versus what America is doing.
[01:47:21] Okay, China is behaving as the adult in the room as it has over and over again.
[01:47:29] They're bailing us out one more time.
[01:47:32] But at some point, they're going to, at some point, they're going to have to recalculate.
[01:47:38] Is it appropriate, is it appropriate to keep bailing out America?
[01:47:43] Or is it important for everyone to, you know, suffer a blow here?
[01:47:50] In the short term, if that means that America learns the hard way, a long-term lesson, it's
[01:48:01] kind of like when you're a kid and you sneak in a cigarette and you find a Lucy and you
[01:48:07] smoke it and then your father catches you and then he makes you fucking smoke the entire
[01:48:11] carton.
[01:48:12] For the longest time, China has been like, cigarettes are bad for you.
[01:48:18] Don't smoke it.
[01:48:19] Here is a sugar cigarette, like a fake one, if you want to play around with that instead.
[01:48:32] Trying to get turned around and go, all right, you have to smoke the entire carton of cigarettes.
[01:48:39] Unkass analogy?
[01:48:40] I don't know.
[01:48:41] I just, I feel like I had to come up with something and that's the only thing I could
[01:48:44] think of.
[01:48:47] didn't happen to you a son that was bobby hill i know i'm i'm using a common story
[01:49:00] and ministry for an affair says china poses unilateral sanctions that like
[01:49:04] basic international law and u.s. security council mandate military force and
[01:49:08] pressure tactics will only lead to escalation that serves no one's interest
[01:49:12] we call on parties to act responsibly and solve disputes through dialogue and
[01:49:16] negotiation.
[01:49:26] The problem with your analysis is that America would learn the wrong long term
[01:49:29] lesson. No.
[01:49:31] No, I don't think so.
[01:49:35] Because whether they want to admit it or not,
[01:49:38] they've already learned a devastating lesson in the Strait of Hormuz,
[01:49:43] right?
[01:49:44] I'm sorry. Here's the thing. Okay. Here's the thing. Here's the thing.
[01:50:11] We are like a spoiled child, okay?
[01:50:14] We're like a bad baby.
[01:50:17] America's like a playground bully.
[01:50:21] But even a playground bully will sometimes meet a force
[01:50:26] that is more powerful than the playground bully, okay?
[01:50:32] The playground bully will sometimes go up against
[01:50:36] another bully that's bigger than they are.
[01:50:39] Maybe someone who is from an upper class, right?
[01:50:42] Like an upperclassman that beats the fuck out of them.
[01:50:46] And maybe the bully goes back home, licks his wounds,
[01:50:50] comes back around and continues to, you know,
[01:50:53] engage in more evasive maneuvers,
[01:50:56] but will still bully some of the weaker kids,
[01:50:59] some of the more vulnerable kids, sure, right?
[01:51:03] America received a bloody nose in the Strait of Hormuz.
[01:51:09] It destroyed its capacity to engage in force projection.
[01:51:15] America can no longer engage in force projection
[01:51:18] in the Asia Pacific theater for this reason.
[01:51:22] It is now 100% the reality.
[01:51:25] It's impossible to avoid said reality.
[01:51:28] We went in to the Shredivore Moose.
[01:51:31] We went into Iran thinking that we would destroy
[01:51:33] the Iranian government with ease
[01:51:36] through an aerial bombardment campaign
[01:51:38] decapitation strike and it didn't work. Okay? So now we can't do that in the Taiwan Strait,
[01:51:49] in the Taiwanese Strait. So whether Donald Trump postures as though he has the smoke,
[01:51:56] as though he still has the power, as though he still has the upper hand here, it doesn't really
[01:52:01] matter. Most military analysts understand the reality, right? And the same goes for Trump's
[01:52:10] trade posture. He views this moment and Donald Trump. Take a listen to that.
[01:52:18] Donald Trump is about to become what he never, ever wanted to be, Jimmy Carter.
[01:52:25] He is being held hostage by Iran. They are holding the Strait of Hormuz hostage.
[01:52:30] As a result, they're holding the world economy hostage and it's focused at Donald Trump and
[01:52:35] I know from talking to him over the last 24 years, the one person he would never want to
[01:52:40] talk too much about Jimmy Carter.
[01:52:43] And here we are, and it was all voluntary.
[01:52:46] Right, to the point of Iran watching how all of this is playing out here, that is very
[01:52:52] much a focus, right, to see how things are playing at home and to understand what
[01:52:56] it would be like to have that Jimmy Carter moment or to be in the midst of it right now.
[01:53:01] Is Iran fully exploiting that? What more do you think could come?
[01:53:06] Oh, certainly. I mean, I think the Iranians, I've understood now, since March, right,
[01:53:11] since the very beginning of the war, that their control of the Strait of Hormuz,
[01:53:15] the world's most important energy choke point, gives them a huge amount of leverage over.
[01:53:19] How much do you think the midterms factor into this? Oh, huge. Everybody is
[01:53:23] is a lasered in on American elections.
[01:53:28] Iran is,
[01:53:39] Iran is lasered in on,
[01:53:42] Iran is laser focused on American elections.
[01:53:45] China is laser focused on American elections.
[01:53:47] Of course, everyone makes these sorts of decisions
[01:53:50] by thinking about like domestic pressure,
[01:53:54] by thinking about the potential domestic pressure
[01:53:56] that could be applied to the United States of America,
[01:53:59] it's normal.
[01:54:03] It seems that Asia is a J Street back candidate.
[01:54:06] Yeah, as opposed to the A-Pack back candidate chatter,
[01:54:09] what the fuck do you want?
[01:54:10] Yeah, Ana Lillia-Mahio was as well,
[01:54:12] what do you want me to do?
[01:54:17] Like I'm sorry,
[01:54:18] Just because J Street backed the issue will hop doesn't change the doesn't
[01:54:22] change the reality that APAC dumped $6 million into that race over the course
[01:54:27] of 17 days.
[01:54:29] Okay.
[01:54:31] We take what we can get Bernie is a J Street back candidate.
[01:54:39] The United States, because remember, in any sort of economic standoff,
[01:54:43] what matters isn't so much who inflicts more damage on the other side's GDP.
[01:54:48] What matters is which side has the capacity to withstand whatever pressure they're under.
[01:54:52] And I think the Iranians have assessed that even though their economy is certainly suffering
[01:54:56] much more from a sort of quantitative standpoint than the United States, that America's tolerance
[01:55:01] for economic pain is a lot lower than theirs is.
[01:55:03] And I think that's just going to be Iran's strategy moving forward.
[01:55:06] I, where Fishman, really appreciate your time and your, and your viewpoint this
[01:55:11] morning.
[01:55:12] Thank you.
[01:55:13] Beijing's foreign ministry said, quote,
[01:55:15] sanctions and pressure tactics are not the solution.
[01:55:19] That's vis-a-vis Iran.
[01:55:21] This, as President Trump declared what he called
[01:55:23] an economic d-day on Iran.
[01:55:27] And this is how Treasury Secretary Scott Besin said
[01:55:30] that the economic activity would affect
[01:55:33] the military operation.
[01:55:36] If we are doing the maximum economic pressure,
[01:55:39] then that means that likely there will not be
[01:55:43] a large-scale kinetic restart.
[01:55:45] But I would emphasize that is for now.
[01:55:49] Well, this now is Congressman Richard McCormick,
[01:55:51] a Republican from Georgia.
[01:55:52] He is a member of the Armed Services Committee.
[01:55:55] Congressman, great to see you.
[01:55:56] So economic D-day, but the Treasury Secretary there,
[01:55:59] did he just tell the Iranians that likely for now
[01:56:02] no more military strikes?
[01:56:06] It kind of sounds like that.
[01:56:08] I really don't know.
[01:56:09] I don't want to interpret what he's trying to say,
[01:56:11] it didn't sound like he wanted to, although he doesn't make that decision.
[01:56:16] That's the Secretary of War and the President, directly, the Commander-in-Chief gets to make
[01:56:19] that decision at him.
[01:56:20] Hell, I get that interview, of course, sir.
[01:56:23] Weren't we already sanctioning them to hell?
[01:56:24] What else can we do to them?
[01:56:25] No, it's literally the point.
[01:56:27] Yes, we have, we've already been sanctioning them to hell.
[01:56:33] There's not anything else that we can do in terms of sanctions.
[01:56:37] We already hit them with the maximum sanctions package for decades now.
[01:56:41] The only thing we could technically do is maybe sanction some of Iran's trade partners,
[01:56:47] but because there have already been secondary sanctions on Iran, because there's like two
[01:56:53] different kinds of sanctions, right?
[01:56:56] You one, you directly sanction the country and therefore they can't conduct normal
[01:57:02] trade, right?
[01:57:03] They can't sell to the United States of America, but then you can apply secondary
[01:57:07] sanctions as well, a process in which they can't do trade with other American trade partners,
[01:57:14] right? Secondary sanctions are not against Iran directly, but against, you know, Iranian
[01:57:22] trade partners like France or Germany, if they were to conduct normal trade with Iran,
[01:57:27] then they get hit with American sanctions, and therefore they can't do it. They don't
[01:57:32] want to, they don't want to trade with Iran because they're fearful that America
[01:57:35] will sanction them instead, right?
[01:57:43] Arnaud Bertrand says, pretty confident any country won't include China. Hard to imagine
[01:57:46] the US declare economic delay on China and a painful weeks before she's visit. Back
[01:57:51] in May, the US tried to sanction some Chinese refiners are buying or hunting oil. Yep.
[01:57:55] And China's commerce ministry issued a formal prohibition order stipulating that
[01:57:59] US sanctions shall not be recognized enforced or complied with effectively putting a line
[01:58:05] in the sand, the US then basically blinked and never meaningfully enforced the sanctions.
[01:58:09] It would have meant sanctioning major Chinese financial institutions are probable consequence
[01:58:12] for the entire global financial system, which they were obviously not ready to do, which
[01:58:17] means this is what I was talking about, which means that any country literally means
[01:58:20] any country we can actually coerce, which is a shrinking list precisely because the
[01:58:24] more you coerce, the more countries build antibodies against it.
[01:58:35] America is not not only seen as a paper tiger it with its military supremacy.
[01:58:48] America is now an economic paper tiger as well or military pilot yourself who helicopters
[01:58:54] and as we say always thank you for your service there but it is their Treasury Secretary there
[01:58:58] and if you are among the Iranian leadership and you heard the Treasury Secretary of
[01:59:03] the United States say, you know, it means likely no more kinetic actions as long as
[01:59:07] these maximum economic pressures are in place. How would you feel about behaving in the
[01:59:12] Strait of Hormuz?
[01:59:16] Well, first of all, we haven't seen any good behavior from Iran anyways. They've been
[01:59:20] defiant the entire time, whether they had the MOU or any other time. I've never
[01:59:25] had any rhetoric come out of them that showed me that they had, that they had any
[01:59:29] intention of being good actors. They've done nothing but threaten us for years, for decades
[01:59:34] really, this entire regime. They've killed about a thousand Americans, including three
[01:59:39] Georgians a couple of years ago with a drone attack through poxies. They've attacked us
[01:59:43] about 40 times. This is before the war. Since the war, they've been even more defiant.
[01:59:48] They've even talked about raining fire down from heaven. We are the great Satan
[01:59:51] to them. There is no real good solution except for regime change and unconditional
[01:59:56] I don't think we're going to get to that by economic sanctions, but realize that things
[02:00:01] change very rapidly over there.
[02:00:03] And I think that even though he's talking about no kinetic actions right now, that can
[02:00:07] change literally within an hour.
[02:00:09] So, so the president, you say you do not think we will get there by economic actions
[02:00:13] because that's the stage the United States appears to be in right now.
[02:00:17] He's talking about maximum economic activity there, economic D-day, full scale, like
[02:00:22] the world has never seen, but you don't think that will be enough.
[02:00:25] I don't see any time where this country has shown anything but defiance.
[02:00:32] I think we should have put that on them from the very beginning.
[02:00:35] Of course, I'm also one of those people that thought we never should be at peace with these
[02:00:37] guys until they came to unconditional surrender, until they came to regime change because
[02:00:42] this regime will threaten your ch-
[02:00:45] This is- I think this is all hot smoke, okay?
[02:00:48] It's nothing.
[02:00:51] just blow and smoke up one another's asses over and over again. What matters is the reality
[02:00:58] on the ground. Okay. I, I expect Americans to engage in this like militant posture.
[02:01:06] They're all war hawks who gives a shit. Okay. You got our military and tatters. You got
[02:01:14] people trying to kill themselves on u s s lincoln
[02:01:19] you have
[02:01:20] american bases that have been
[02:01:22] thoroughly dismantled and destroyed you have american assets moving further
[02:01:26] and further out west
[02:01:28] or further away from the golf
[02:01:31] by force because iran destroyed these bases
[02:01:35] iran is capable of
[02:01:37] sufficiently threatening
[02:01:39] the remaining american assets
[02:01:41] that are on
[02:01:42] uh... uh... golf bases around the region
[02:01:48] it doesn't matter it doesn't matter what we say here in the united states of
[02:01:52] america word
[02:01:53] we're basically just lying to ourselves lying to one another
[02:01:56] making it seem as though uh... we have any kind of of military posture here
[02:02:01] that will will
[02:02:03] somehow magically carve out a victory
[02:02:06] it's not going to happen
[02:02:08] everybody in the region understands that
[02:02:11] most american military analysts understand that
[02:02:14] most american intelligence assessments recognize that reality outside third
[02:02:18] party
[02:02:19] think tanks understand that reality
[02:02:22] it's a declining empire
[02:02:24] that can no longer establish military supremacy
[02:02:29] so to say all we can just do this we could just hit him hard we can hit him
[02:02:32] hard issues pure cope
[02:02:34] we are delaying the inevitable but we're not even delaying it
[02:02:37] We're just delaying our recognition of the inevitable.
[02:02:42] Children, they will threaten your grandchildren.
[02:02:44] They will be always trying to develop nuclear weapons
[02:02:47] and ballistic missiles.
[02:02:49] They will be stabilized the entire Middle East
[02:02:51] and the entire world geopolitical scheme
[02:02:54] as long as they're in existence.
[02:02:56] This would be absolutely transformative
[02:02:58] to get rid of this regime, which is very evil.
[02:03:00] And by the way, don't forget.
[02:03:01] Yeah, yeah, it'd be transformative.
[02:03:03] Yeah, of course.
[02:03:04] It would be, you're right.
[02:03:06] But is it possible? Is it probable? Is it likely? The answer is no. It's not. And the more we lean into this kind of thing, the worse the situation gets.
[02:03:19] Okay? Mark Ames says if Trump means what he writes here is threatening economic warfare on Russia and China, among other countries, unless they join his siege warfare on Iran, it's like the final act scarface shit is always the trick of sorting the bluster and bluff from the kernel of intent.
[02:03:34] It's nothing.
[02:03:41] The nuclear aircraft carriers took the space that would have been occupied by a fuck ton
[02:03:45] of fuel and turned it into extra freezer space so the guys aboard the carriers are used to
[02:03:49] eating really good.
[02:03:50] Them living on rice and tortillas right now, yeah, it's kind of amazing things haven't
[02:03:54] gotten more haywire.
[02:03:56] It appears to have reconciled with one of his most outspoken critics.
[02:04:02] His name, Michael Cohen.
[02:04:04] You may remember he turned on Trump after working as his political fixer.
[02:04:08] This week, he interviewed the president who suggested that Cohen was forced to testify
[02:04:12] against him.
[02:04:14] Ed O'Keefe is at the White House with him.
[02:04:16] Yeah, this is Trump, not Trump, but another former Trump fixer turning back to Trump
[02:04:23] once again.
[02:04:25] Anyway hold on before we get into the Michael Cohen story friend of the show
[02:04:29] Michael Cohen shows us his shows us what he's really about but before we get
[02:04:36] into that let's let's continue let's let's wrap this up okay
[02:04:50] Allied scale the notion of historic US Cold War studio allies will cooperate to
[02:04:54] cut China out of global markets is a fantasy we really need to move away from, says Marcus
[02:04:58] Stanley from Quincy Institute.
[02:05:01] The analytic core of this proposal is basically just adding up GDPs of the U.S. NATO, traditional
[02:05:06] Asia Pacific allies, noting that it's significantly larger than China and applying a liberal
[02:05:12] dose of wishful thinking.
[02:05:14] These countries lack incentives and in many cases the capability to cut economic
[02:05:19] China. Recent moves by the US to coerce one-sided economic benefits from allies don't help.
[02:05:26] They hear at all. That doesn't mean countries want to be dependent on China either. We need
[02:05:30] to innovate forms of cooperation that make sense for a global economy that maintains
[02:05:33] significant interdependence, and where China continues to be a major player.
[02:05:39] Yeah, it wouldn't be called against China, but it would be effectively an alliance
[02:05:45] to create a bigger market outside of China.
[02:05:48] The world that Ezra Klein, oh, that's why, that's where this is coming from.
[02:05:54] Brad Setser, CFR Senior Fellow, went on Ezra Klein's podcast, The China Shock 2.0, and
[02:06:02] I guess explained Trump's thinking.
[02:06:07] That makes sense, explained like Trump's, it's so funny, these guys all used to
[02:06:13] to get mad at Donald Trump for taking this like militant trade posture against China.
[02:06:18] And now every single one of these people are just like, no, Trump is actually not doing
[02:06:22] the wrong thing against China.
[02:06:24] It's actually a good idea.
[02:06:27] Yes, Trump does have a unique trade design, Chatters.
[02:06:36] So there is thinking driving.
[02:06:38] There is something motivating Trump's decisions against China is just, it's a failure.
[02:06:43] It's just, it's, it failed.
[02:06:45] That's the problem.
[02:06:49] You understand?
[02:06:50] I know it's, it's fun to say Trump is thinking, Trump's thinking about burgers.
[02:06:55] Trump doesn't think like, yes, you're right.
[02:06:57] But there is, there is definitely a, a different attitude with Trump's trade policy and trade
[02:07:05] posture against China versus the previous American trade policy with respect to China.
[02:07:21] And I guess this CFR fellow went on Ezra Klein and explained the second China shock, its
[02:07:28] causes, its consequences, including for American workers, it wouldn't be called against China,
[02:07:34] would be effectively do we have a video I would love to watch that video by the way
[02:07:43] wouldn't be called against China but it would be effectively analyze to create a bigger market
[02:07:46] outside of China with sometimes common barriers to China that would have allied
[02:07:51] allied scale would be big enough that it would easily support competitive EV industry that
[02:07:56] didn't rely on Chinese power and a competitive magazine industry that didn't rely on China and
[02:08:02] and so on and so forth.
[02:08:07] Where should we have gone? I think we should have moved in that direction.
[02:08:09] There are ways to do better coordination of industrial policies too,
[02:08:12] but basically extend our security alliances and the economic alliances,
[02:08:15] try to compete with China, don't give up.
[02:08:18] Don't accept that every EV in the world is going to be made in China,
[02:08:21] which is a realistic outcome right now.
[02:08:23] China can expand its EV production capacity,
[02:08:25] and has enough spare capacity to meet all global demand.
[02:08:28] So the entire EV industry could be Chinese production.
[02:08:31] China is supplying 10% of the European auto market. There's a future where it could supply 70%.
[02:08:39] What is this? Help? At some point during COVID, I came up with the scheme to create a
[02:08:44] a captains account where I lure men with thirst traps.
[02:09:00] We said no more Magdy Jacobs posting and we are standing by that.
[02:09:10] We are standing by the hard stance.
[02:09:13] There is an economic blockade against Mag DJ posting.
[02:09:18] I feel like it's sad.
[02:09:24] You're kicking someone who's like very clearly going through a long and extended mental health
[02:09:33] episode.
[02:09:34] Okay?
[02:09:35] Yeah, it's not funny.
[02:09:38] She's just not all right.
[02:09:40] She is not well.
[02:09:41] She is not mentally doing alright.
[02:09:45] Yes, I have already delivered a FATWA.
[02:09:48] Yeah, high-key low-cal farming, but leftistly is right.
[02:09:54] Yes, I have already issued a FATWA.
[02:09:59] Does Ezra not want you on?
[02:10:01] No, he does.
[02:10:01] We're going to link up.
[02:10:03] He in the world right now.
[02:10:04] Is China's growing dominance across advanced manufacturing
[02:10:08] sector after advanced manufacturing sector?
[02:10:11] from electric vehicles, batteries, to solar panels,
[02:10:15] to things that aren't even traditional manufacturing
[02:10:17] that are software like AI and open models
[02:10:20] where they become a world leader.
[02:10:23] What is happening here is very different
[02:10:25] than what we call the first China shock
[02:10:27] where China became a big exporter
[02:10:29] but of things that were not that important
[02:10:32] to advanced economies.
[02:10:33] Things that mattered maybe for particular communities,
[02:10:35] mattered for many, many jobs,
[02:10:37] but weren't the frontier of economic growth.
[02:10:41] But now it's different. China is very much at the frontier and they're dominating it.
[02:10:46] And that is going to transform geopolitics. It is going to transform the politics of countries,
[02:10:51] many say in Europe, where China is pushing them out of manufacturing that has been
[02:10:56] the absolute cornerstone of their economies. And so I think understanding it is about as a-
[02:11:02] Dude, Ezra Klein is, by my estimations, much more interested in movements on the left,
[02:11:13] even if it's to co-opt it, even if it's to, like, liberalize it, it doesn't matter.
[02:11:19] I think there's a real opportunity, and I know people will always, you guys hate him, I know.
[02:11:26] But I put Ezra Klein in the same category as I put the Podjohns.
[02:11:30] Perhaps I'm wrong about this, but
[02:11:37] That is my that's my assessment
[02:11:39] Essential to understanding economics and geopolitics in the coming era as literally anything else
[02:11:45] I also am an unashamed unapologetic
[02:11:48] Ezra Klein watcher Ezra Klein reader. It's very important to understand
[02:11:53] Uh a a leading thinker of liberalism. Okay. He's the king of the libs
[02:11:58] Let's be real. It's important to understand where liberals are going. We used to jokingly watch
[02:12:04] SNL every Sunday
[02:12:06] Why did we watch it because we wanted to understand how liberals think what liberals laugh at what what motivates liberals?
[02:12:14] He is the king of the the liberal intelligentsia
[02:12:20] And it's it's really important when the king of liberal intelligence
[02:12:24] Agency it turns around and says stuff like mom Donnie would be just like any other liberal mayor
[02:12:30] He's not actually talking about Andrew Cuomo he's saying like other liberal mayors would do similar things mom Donnie
[02:12:36] I disagree with him on that but it doesn't matter
[02:12:38] He's trying to take ownership over the left flank and then say no no no
[02:12:42] This is what liberalism as a big tent looks like
[02:12:47] Okay
[02:12:49] Rod Setzer is a person who follows his about as closely as anyone on earth.
[02:12:54] He is a senior fellow at the council forum relations.
[02:12:57] He has served in top trade roles and economic roles in the Biden and Obama administrations.
[02:13:04] And so I want to hear his perspective on it.
[02:13:07] He joins me now.
[02:13:14] Rod Setzer, welcome to the show.
[02:13:15] Oh, thanks for inviting me.
[02:13:17] So, you've been arguing that the world economy is going through a China shock 2.0.
[02:13:22] I mean, okay, right off the rip.
[02:13:25] I don't even disagree with this assessment.
[02:13:28] It is true.
[02:13:30] It is true.
[02:13:32] China is the domineering manufacturing power of the entire planet is the manufacturing
[02:13:37] hub of the entire planet.
[02:13:39] And it's no longer just like light industries or, you know, forever 21 fast fashion clothing.
[02:13:46] It's also very important, very important industries that in the past were kept for national security
[02:13:55] concerns in the hands of domestic manufacturing.
[02:14:01] We allowed this to happen.
[02:14:05] And yes, this is a very important point of leverage for China.
[02:14:14] It's a very important leverage, a point of leverage for China, okay?
[02:14:21] And it also complicates the rest of the world's relationship with China, because if they don't
[02:14:27] have, if we don't have any domestic manufacturing, and China is always capable of out-competing
[02:14:33] us in terms of manufacturing, okay, shouts out the NAFTA, shouts out the neoliberalism
[02:14:40] for that by the way.
[02:14:42] But if we can't, if we don't have any sort of domestic manufacturing, we have nothing.
[02:14:47] It's not even just like a national security problem at that point.
[02:14:50] It's a major issue overall, okay?
[02:14:55] Because then we're just not producing anything.
[02:14:58] We don't have any jobs.
[02:15:02] So, for people not familiar with us, what was China Shock 1.0?
[02:15:10] 2002.
[02:15:12] What happens is there's a big jump up in China's exports.
[02:15:19] And at the time, it's mostly in relatively low-end manufacturer goods, furniture, household
[02:15:27] appliances, clothing.
[02:15:31] And as you can see, there was a sense in the US that these were not the industries of the
[02:15:35] future.
[02:15:37] And I think what the China shock 1.0 academic literature shows is that even though these
[02:15:43] weren't the industries of the future, they were still employing a meaningful number of
[02:15:48] Americans, often in the South, often in the Midwest.
[02:15:52] And the China shock is how that impacted local, not national, local labor markets
[02:15:58] that had the most overlap with China.
[02:16:01] And this has sort of a short run negative effect
[02:16:04] on parts of the economy.
[02:16:06] You know, when the local factory closes down,
[02:16:09] local real estate prices turn down.
[02:16:11] And so, and the people who sell lunches
[02:16:16] to the factory workers have fewer people to sell to.
[02:16:18] So it becomes a generalized downturn in those communities.
[02:16:22] That was clearly underestimated.
[02:16:25] And then people have done all sorts of further studies,
[02:16:28] which correlate the areas that have the most exposure
[02:16:33] to the Chinese export wave to deaths of despair,
[02:16:39] to political realignments.
[02:16:42] Voting for Donald Trump.
[02:16:42] Voting for Donald Trump.
[02:16:44] But the basic idea here is that you have a bunch of places
[02:16:47] in the Midwest and the South primarily
[02:16:49] that are manufacturing towns.
[02:16:51] That their factories are outsourced China
[02:16:54] or the goods are competed by China.
[02:16:56] and basically the community goes into sharp decline.
[02:17:00] Correct.
[02:17:01] And we never have a very good policy answer.
[02:17:03] I mean, I think at the time,
[02:17:04] we didn't even try to have a policy answer,
[02:17:07] but it is actually conceptually difficult
[02:17:09] to deal with the decline of a small town
[02:17:11] when it's big industry.
[02:17:13] Let's live in that debate for a minute.
[02:17:16] What is the argument about whether or not
[02:17:19] this rapidly accelerating level of trade with China
[02:17:23] is good or bad for America?
[02:17:24] Yes, I have a wig on. I have a two-pack.
[02:17:28] Thank you.
[02:17:28] The overarching view at the time was that China's integration into the global
[02:17:36] economy was more or less inevitable.
[02:17:41] And that the negotiated terms of entry into the WTO provided a reasonable
[02:17:48] framework for China's entry full integration into the global economy
[02:17:52] that trade was fundamentally good, that there would be shifts across industries, people would leave their jobs and import competing parts of the economy, but generally moved to exporting parts of the economy or into the services sector,
[02:18:10] in that we had a fairly flexible labor market.
[02:18:14] And by the way, integration would be a positive force
[02:18:19] for China's political development.
[02:18:22] It might lead to some forms of liberalism within China.
[02:18:29] It might moderate China's global ambitions.
[02:18:33] It would sort of, the commerce would tame the dragon,
[02:18:36] so to speak.
[02:18:38] And the other dimension of the argument, as I've heard it and remember it is, if China
[02:18:43] wants to make cheap goods for Americans, people like low prices, they like low inflation,
[02:18:49] like why would we fight this gift?
[02:18:52] I mean, in particular, because the industries that were going to China were not the source
[02:18:58] of top cutting edge technology at the time, not generating a lot of high wage jobs.
[02:19:04] So there was indeed a sense that consumers would benefit and did benefit from cheap goods
[02:19:10] and the adjustment would not threaten the core strengths of the American economy and
[02:19:19] that was the belief.
[02:19:20] I would put a little tiny asterisk around the cheap prices thing.
[02:19:26] Unambiguously China's explosion of exports lowered the price of manufacturers.
[02:19:32] If you look at the overall evolution of consumer prices during this period, there's not much
[02:19:37] of a change.
[02:19:38] China's integration into the world economy led in huge amounts of investment, ended up
[02:19:43] putting a lot of upward pressure on commodity prices.
[02:19:46] So you see oil prices really take off during this period, and that's an offsetting change.
[02:19:53] So you got to always look at both sides of the ledger.
[02:19:55] Yeah.
[02:19:56] So when you're going to Target or Walmart and you're buying clothes and toys, I mean,
[02:19:58] they really are cheaper.
[02:19:59] Oh, yeah.
[02:20:00] from when I was a kid. But you're saying that, you know, what we're not seeing there is, you know,
[02:20:04] the price of oil, the price of... It cost you more to fill up your car and get to target.
[02:20:10] But once you got to target, it was cheap. Okay, so trying to shock the reason we use this term is...
[02:20:17] It's so funny because like this was America's grand trade design because it benefited the goals
[02:20:25] of American capital. It benefited the short-term goals of American capital because labor is
[02:20:32] the most malleable aspect of production, and it's the only movable aspect of production.
[02:20:42] And therefore, the easiest way to reduce labor costs was to move it instead of engaging
[02:20:49] in like suppression of unionization, which we were doing, right, which American capital
[02:20:56] had never led up on, they were able to move it to an entirely separate low cost labor
[02:21:07] force altogether. And the problem, and this has always been the biggest issue with China
[02:21:18] in general, is that China, by way of redistributive policies and through central planning, right,
[02:21:28] the, you know, small C communism of China, was able to take that foreign investment
[02:21:36] and turn it into internal development. The problem, the issue with China is that China
[02:21:42] developed and became a competitive power and gained sovereignty. Okay? Or always was invested
[02:21:49] in developing sovereignty for itself. That's the issue that we have with China. That's the problem
[02:21:54] with the grand China design. If if China developed in the same way that like India developed,
[02:22:05] we would have no issues with China. No disrespect to India. Obviously, it's a different story.
[02:22:11] Maybe it's much more complex, but the reason why we hate China and see China as a foreign
[02:22:22] adversary is not even because of the ideological battle that we have with China at secondary.
[02:22:32] The real issue with China is that China was able to take the foreign investment and
[02:22:37] not circulate the foreign investment in the same way that capitalist countries do.
[02:22:50] India literally has similar levels of economic planning.
[02:22:53] No, India is far too diverse, wasn't capable of dealing with or wasn't as invested in
[02:23:03] even development in the same way.
[02:23:06] to say that india has the same level of central planning is crazy
[02:23:12] india also has separate uh... separate issues
[02:23:16] that were greatly elevated initially by
[02:23:19] colonial powers it's not a one-to-one comparison is a very
[02:23:22] it is a very
[02:23:24] reductive comparison
[02:23:27] it's not
[02:23:29] uh... it's not an appropriate comparison
[02:23:33] I'm just looking at it specifically from the perspective of like what's that guy's name,
[02:23:38] the Noah guy, Noah Pinyon, like he loves India.
[02:23:41] He always presents India as this bulwark against China and a much better alternative.
[02:23:48] Like I'm just flipping that script on its head.
[02:23:59] And it's not like China did not liberalize, they did.
[02:24:03] But even through the marketization period, even through the liberalization of the Chinese
[02:24:07] economy after the Denguist reforms, there was always still a hyper-focus on development.
[02:24:16] And especially in the Xi period, now they're cracking down on some of the concentration
[02:24:21] of power that exists within the party system after they brought in the billionaire
[02:24:26] class.
[02:24:27] They developed a billionaire class, the national bourgeois, as they call it, and then they basically stamped out some of the national bourgeois that had maybe a little bit too much power, okay?
[02:24:40] So there's a push and pull there, and China, for all intents and purposes, has been able to manage that,
[02:24:48] manage that, that friction,
[02:24:52] and has kept capital under control.
[02:24:54] whole. India never did. Also, the Indian history of colonialism is different than China as
[02:25:12] well. That's why it's not a direct comparison that you can make. Yeah, China was never
[02:25:22] completely colonized. But again, ultimately, the major difference between China and India
[02:25:34] is capital controls. That is the main function of the government and the main difference between
[02:25:41] the government. The only reason why people still in some way shape or in some way shape
[02:25:47] still consider the Chinese governance to be a version of some level of proletarian governance,
[02:25:55] regardless of the repression, regardless of, you know, the Marxist-Leninist formation,
[02:26:01] one party state, one party communist state, is because at the end of the day,
[02:26:07] there is still some level of control over both flows of capital
[02:26:12] capital and control over the capitalists, okay?
[02:26:16] They still serve the interests of the party and the party is supposed to serve the interests
[02:26:19] of the masses.
[02:26:24] That is a huge difference.
[02:26:26] That's a major difference in Chinese development as opposed to development in India.
[02:26:31] And that is the major difference as to why we see India as a reliable trade partner
[02:26:35] and ally at times, even though they have their own sovereign interests in the region.
[02:26:40] They have their own sovereign interests as an economic power.
[02:26:43] They play both sides, like Russia, for example, as opposed to in China.
[02:26:48] We see China as a major foreign adversary, if not the most consequential foreign adversary
[02:26:52] of the 21st century, is because China took all of that foreign investment, and that
[02:27:01] foreign investment came into China.
[02:27:04] And then what they did with that foreign investment was to develop the country and
[02:27:08] and make it a behemoth, a competitive superpower.
[02:27:17] In some respects, if you were to look at this as global capitalism, the capital-owning class,
[02:27:24] the bourgeois class in China, is still beholden to the interests of the party, is still subservient
[02:27:30] to the interests of the party, as opposed to the Indian capitalist class is a part
[02:27:37] of the global capitalist class. So they play ball. They're not unpredictable. They're not
[02:27:43] they're not a force that I don't know, like a French capitalist is ever going to be fearful of.
[02:27:50] Does that make sense?
[02:27:54] And if it wasn't for Xi Jinping, by my estimation, if the party had moved in the
[02:27:59] opposite direction and continued liberalizing, the Chinese capital class, the Chinese bourgeois
[02:28:07] would probably also be in the same category, and therefore we would not be looking at China
[02:28:13] as this scary behemoth as we do right now.
[02:28:20] Because it's not just about improving the living standards of as many Chinese people as possible.
[02:28:28] It's also about whether or not our international capitalist class can
[02:28:33] look at the Chinese capital owning class and and see them as allies the problem at
[02:28:48] least for my assessment is that is the element of I guess nationalism is a
[02:28:55] scary words dangerous word it's it's not entirely correct to say that the the
[02:29:02] Chinese bourgeois class are nationalists, but it is a national bourgeois class to a certain degree.
[02:29:10] So is the connective tissue communism or is the connective tissue there nationalism?
[02:29:16] That's where things get a little bit more tricky.
[02:29:22] But the reason why China was allowed into the World Trade Organization,
[02:29:27] The reason why China was allowed to participate in the global markets as a regular force, as
[02:29:33] a regular manufacturing hub, initially was because of that liberalization.
[02:29:40] Because that liberalization created this major force within Chinese politics that was then
[02:29:46] brought into the party, right?
[02:29:50] And that these folks, the Chinese bourgeois, were now a part of the party apparatus, and they were gaining a lot of power within the party until Xi Jinping.
[02:30:07] Ping. That's why if you look back at China from the perspective of our capitalist media,
[02:30:18] from the perspective of our capital owning class, if you go back to like the 2000s, our
[02:30:29] media are super wealthy. They didn't see China as this like major threat at all. I mean,
[02:30:34] There were obviously nationalist elements in the country that did.
[02:30:39] There are plenty of people who've been complaining about Chinese manufacturing for decades at
[02:30:44] this point.
[02:30:45] Initially, it was the left, and then it turned into somewhat of a right-wing position.
[02:30:52] Trade protectionism has moved from the left to a right-wing position at this point in
[02:30:59] some weird ways.
[02:31:01] There are still elements of the left that engage in trade protectionism.
[02:31:05] I believe in trade protectionism as well, as long as we have some kind of trade to protect.
[02:31:24] This is the reason why we see China as a major threat.
[02:31:27] This whole argument got reevaluated.
[02:31:29] Which parts of it would you say panned out and which didn't?
[02:31:32] I think the extent to which China would become a big export market was overestimated.
[02:31:41] China never was fully open to U.S. exports.
[02:31:46] I mean, one of the more striking things is that after 2004, so two years after China's
[02:31:51] WTO entry, China's imports as a share of its GDP start to fall.
[02:31:57] And then it was not expected in a sense that China would succeed as much as it did while
[02:32:03] retaining the core aspects of its different economic system.
[02:32:08] There were the sense that China would have to converge, have to become more like...
[02:32:12] It's so funny.
[02:32:15] Because he's basically describing the exact same thing that I tried to also shittily
[02:32:20] describe us.
[02:32:21] politically, but certainly economically. You know, the state would wither away. So
[02:32:27] it stayed on enterprises. We privatized, you know, 20 years after China's going to WTO,
[02:32:32] China's economy was, you know, the thinking was it would kind of look like the U.S. or maybe
[02:32:36] look like Europe. It wouldn't be distinctively Chinese. And that didn't pan out. What is
[02:32:42] distinctively Chinese about the Chinese economy? That's a hard question. You know,
[02:32:47] No, it's not. It is small C communists. That was distinct about the Chinese economy. It still, it still has central planning, although it's not central planning in the Soviet understanding of it.
[02:33:08] Okay? It's not centrally planned in the way that you would see is this like vulgar Soviet meta. It's not centrally planned in the way that the Cuban economy is centrally planned.
[02:33:22] It's much more dynamic. Okay? But ultimately, capital is subservient to the party. Capital is subservient to the government.
[02:33:30] And the government is run by a party that is supposed to be subservient to the interests of the proletariat.
[02:33:36] period. Okay? If you want the honest assessment of it, that's what it is. Cuba isn't centrally
[02:33:52] planned anymore. No, I'm not talking about Cuba now, brother. I'm talking about Cuba
[02:33:56] for the longest time. Cuba for the longest time was literally the last remaining real
[02:34:02] Soviet-style economy on the planet. Like down to rations, down to the specific allotment of food
[02:34:11] that you could get. That was a USSR-style economy. The Chinese economy is much more fluid, much more
[02:34:24] dynamic than that. However, as I like to say, China uses capitalism like a sleeve.
[02:34:31] Okay, if they have an iron fist they put the sleeve of capitalism over that iron fist
[02:34:37] Okay
[02:34:38] We're ultimately we're ultimately there are strict controls
[02:34:44] It's still a centrally planned economy and
[02:34:48] the the
[02:34:49] Way that the central planned economy is designed is around control of capital control of capital flows
[02:34:57] Okay
[02:34:59] They still absolutely control which way they will pour money into.
[02:35:05] There's also obviously, yes, corporate accountability and things like that, but ultimately they
[02:35:13] even allow some level of corruption or some level of exploitation as long as that means
[02:35:19] boosting trade, as long as that means improving the GDP.
[02:35:24] So they're just state capitalists.
[02:35:26] One could say all socialist formations run by communist governments have always been state
[02:35:32] capitalists.
[02:35:33] The whole point is it's a transitional socialist state.
[02:35:36] Put the door man.
[02:35:38] Yeah, I did.
[02:35:41] One thing that is distinctly Chinese, which is not what you would normally think about
[02:35:47] in a communist-led society is that China actually has a rather thin system of social insurance.
[02:35:56] It doesn't actually collect that much tax. Personal income tax collections are like 1%
[02:36:03] of China's GDP. It's 8% here. If you're not collecting personal income tax, you're not
[02:36:08] going to be not going to have the resources to be very generous and helping low-wage work.
[02:36:14] There's nothing like our earned income tax credit where you get a subsidy, basically.
[02:36:19] Money back from the government if you don't get paid that much.
[02:36:22] The taxation system relies heavily on taxes on consumption.
[02:36:26] It's really quite regressive.
[02:36:29] It hits poor Chinese workers much more heavily.
[02:36:34] It also does not have a unified national...
[02:36:39] He's not wrong.
[02:36:40] This is not wrong. Yes, their tax structure, they have, they have a welfare state, but it is marginal.
[02:36:52] It doesn't mean that their system is failing, mind you, but he's not wrong.
[02:37:01] And this isn't to say that like, welfareism is the only solution. I'm just saying it's a different,
[02:37:08] It's a different system.
[02:37:38] The so-called hookah system basically means, you know, you're supposed to work where you
[02:37:53] were born.
[02:37:54] You can migrate and leave, but when you migrate and leave, you give up certain social rights.
[02:37:59] You got a financial system that is fundamental.
[02:38:02] Yes, it's not necessarily a robust welfare state, but there are a lot of social provisions
[02:38:09] that you get as long as you stay within the area, but this used to be far more rigorous
[02:38:17] back in the day.
[02:38:18] It's not as stringent, it's not as strict, it is nowhere near as strict as it used
[02:38:27] to be.
[02:38:29] But yes, in a central planned economy, the original Chinese system had strict controls
[02:38:37] over, I guess like internal freedom of movement, not necessarily freedom of movement, but just
[02:38:43] like moving and like living and working in a different area in general.
[02:38:48] Obviously, it's not, that wasn't always the case, because they also are very experimental
[02:38:53] and have always been very experimental.
[02:38:55] So I think like one of the most unique facets of Chinese development and Chinese governance
[02:39:01] is how they treat, because they're so big, they're such a massive country, 1.4 billion
[02:39:11] people, that they treat different provinces like different laboratories.
[02:39:16] Like there's constant, it's very fluid, there's constant experimentation going on.
[02:39:23] And the Hucco system has been reformed.
[02:39:31] But basically, what it currently operates as is, like, let's say you are born in California
[02:39:40] and you grew up in California, you went to school in California and the school is paid
[02:39:45] for by California state taxes, not your local tax, not your property taxes.
[02:39:51] and all of the amenities are paid for by the state taxes.
[02:39:56] If you were to move from California to New York, there's a process where you have to
[02:40:00] apply and there are restrictions.
[02:40:04] You can move to New York, you can visit New York, you can even live in New York, but
[02:40:07] you won't be able to get the same free healthcare, for example, that you would get in California.
[02:40:12] Now in America, we don't even have free healthcare, so it doesn't fucking matter.
[02:40:16] But that's what the current form of the Hukou system works as.
[02:40:22] You can go and fucking live wherever you want in China, you can work wherever you want in
[02:40:26] China.
[02:40:27] It's just you won't have the same social benefits that you would have in the state that you
[02:40:32] or the province that you were born into.
[02:40:37] One version of the Hukou system in America, if you want to call it that, is kind
[02:40:41] of like in-state tuition versus out-of-state tuition.
[02:40:44] Right?
[02:40:45] right? We don't really have additional amenities in our welfare state, so it's hard to make
[02:40:52] this comparison in colleges expensive regardless of whether you're paying in state tuition or
[02:40:57] not. But that is one version of the American hookah system. That's what's so fascinating
[02:41:08] about it, that Americans will be like, what the fuck, that's crazy. They're just like,
[02:41:12] kill you if you move away from your state. It's not, that's not the case.
[02:41:16] Entity, state controlled, heavily banked, not so much, you know, like the Wall Street part of
[02:41:23] the Chinese economy exists, but it's much smaller. The old fashioned put your money on deposit in a
[02:41:29] state bank, very much the dominant mode of savings. And then the state banks intermediate
[02:41:36] so they can direct credit towards the goals of the party, towards the goals of the government,
[02:41:43] sometimes under the direction of the local government, sometimes under the direction
[02:41:47] of the national government. The commanding heights of the Chinese economy are still primarily in the
[02:41:54] hands of centrally owned state-owned enterprises. So this is why it's sometimes difficult to sell
[02:42:00] to China. You want to sell soybeans. Actually, you have to...
[02:42:03] But that's a state incentive, not a federal incentive.
[02:42:05] Why would you want to encourage people not to move in keeping
[02:42:10] in industrial labor force in certain areas in the country
[02:42:14] by incentivizing them to stay at home?
[02:42:20] Like what do you mean?
[02:42:22] Think about how cities develop.
[02:42:27] The Hukou system has always been very porous anyway.
[02:42:29] Back in the day, people would just pay off a couple of officials
[02:42:31] and get their kids in a better school in another area,
[02:42:33] For example, my parents did that for me.
[02:42:35] Lull, the bride was just a couple hundred Yuan.
[02:42:42] There's also a lot of testing, as I said.
[02:42:44] It's like a laboratory of governance,
[02:42:48] like different forms of governance,
[02:42:49] different modes of developing the economy.
[02:42:53] And you need people for that.
[02:42:59] In the United States of America,
[02:43:01] there's like freedom of travel, but then again,
[02:43:04] we don't really have a functioning welfare state anyway.
[02:43:07] So people make those decisions on their own.
[02:43:09] Like for example, you got MediCal,
[02:43:12] but you could technically move to a state like Wisconsin
[02:43:15] where there's badger care,
[02:43:16] but it's much more restrictive than MediCal, right?
[02:43:20] So technically that's a version of the Hukko system.
[02:43:23] If you're moving to Wisconsin,
[02:43:24] which is a lower cost site, a lower cost state in general,
[02:43:29] but all of a sudden, or you move to Texas,
[02:43:31] where you're not paying income tax, as you would,
[02:43:36] in the state of California,
[02:43:37] but now you're paying much higher property taxes.
[02:43:40] So that's just, that's like one version of, I guess,
[02:43:45] the upside down Hukou system.
[02:43:49] And really sell to the state oil seeds monopoly.
[02:43:53] You're not selling to an individual soybean crusher.
[02:43:58] Selling airplanes to China.
[02:43:59] you're selling to the big three-state airlines who act as a coordinated block,
[02:44:04] telecommunications, you're selling to three state-owned companies whose executives
[02:44:09] are picked by the party, who take direction centrally. And then on top of
[02:44:15] that when the government sets a policy direction, you know, say we want to have
[02:44:18] a semiconductor industry, ambitious provinces will say, well we should be
[02:44:25] the province that builds up China's national champion. Here's an ambitious guy or girl.
[02:44:32] Looks like they got a good idea. Here's a whole bunch of money. We're going to subsidize
[02:44:35] your factory. Maybe we're going to take equity. We're going to make sure you get bank loans.
[02:44:41] And so a whole bunch of different firms spring up in that sector with support and they
[02:44:47] start competing very intensely. So it's a mix of state directed and intensely competitive.
[02:44:54] I want to draw something out in the description. I thought was great of affected by family relationships guys
[02:45:00] No, you it doesn't work that way anymore. You can't just like you're not region-locked in China any longer, okay?
[02:45:06] I'm talking about one of the most like back in the day when the when the country was developing
[02:45:13] It was far more restrictive
[02:45:15] The the Hukou system itself now exists as as the way I explained it to you like you can go you can go to a
[02:45:22] different province. You can work in a different province. Many people do. A lot of people do actually
[02:45:27] in China. Ironically enough, because of the youth unemployment crisis, many youths are actually going
[02:45:35] back to the rural countryside, which is developing at a much more rapid pace now and trying to
[02:45:42] to work factory jobs more than ever before.
[02:45:51] Another aspect of Hukou is land rights for rural Chinese land reform gave land to rural
[02:45:54] farmers and the right to live in big cities without everyone piling in on one city, yes.
[02:46:00] Because, remember, through the growth period, post-revolution, through the growth period
[02:46:08] in China, even with the Dengue reforms, before Dengue reforms, or certainly after Dengue reforms
[02:46:13] as well, there is rapid industrialization taking place. There's rapid urbanization taking place,
[02:46:19] but it's not even. They're always trying to get to even development, but of course it's
[02:46:24] not going to be even development because you have the countryside that's massive,
[02:46:27] right? And they're obviously always going to be, they're obviously always going to
[02:46:32] fall behind the major cities. So then in an effort to make sure that the rural side, the
[02:46:41] country side is also industrializing or the rural side is also developing, they have to
[02:46:49] keep people there. You get social insurance when you work now. The Hukou system isn't
[02:46:59] entirely defunct, but it's mostly been decoupled from social insurance. Yeah.
[02:47:07] How their economy is different. China has gotten a lot richer and less of that
[02:47:12] wealth than you might have thought has gone into things like a universal
[02:47:16] healthcare system, a social insurance system for the elderly. America got
[02:47:20] richer. We built Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, earned income
[02:47:24] tax credit, child tax credit. China's gotten richer because it has not allowed a lot of that,
[02:47:31] because also you have such power over the financial system. It has just been able to move much more
[02:47:38] of that money into subsidized. I love hearing liberals react in awe to the power of a centrally
[02:47:49] planned economy. Okay? Because like, look, every economy on the planet is a mixed, every
[02:48:00] economy on the planet is a mixed economy. Okay? There is some capitalist elements in
[02:48:05] everyone and then there's socialist elements in every single one. Okay? Obviously, social
[02:48:11] democracy is still a capitalist formation because capital owners still get to make decisions
[02:48:18] decoupled from the rest of society and sometimes actually capital owners make decisions that
[02:48:26] are antithetical to the needs or antagonistic to the needs of the working class in their
[02:48:34] countries that don't have any sort of like national ambition.
[02:48:38] Okay?
[02:48:41] I guess the truest sense of capitalism would be something as decentralized as Somalia
[02:48:46] or maybe i guess like the current formation in argentina but even then it
[02:48:50] doesn't
[02:48:51] uh... it doesn't make a whole lot of sense
[02:48:54] but they're obviously uh... higher degrees of socialization in nordic
[02:48:57] countries as opposed to united states america but there's still some level
[02:49:01] of socialization
[02:49:03] the problem is
[02:49:06] the problem is
[02:49:07] with china
[02:49:09] we treat it like
[02:49:10] uh... they're cheating
[02:49:12] why are they cheating
[02:49:14] well because
[02:49:16] They have subsidies on steroids.
[02:49:18] They deploy state subsidies to make their production
[02:49:23] more competitive, to artificially reduce costs,
[02:49:27] to make sure that they have plentiful, cheap alternatives,
[02:49:32] much more cost-effective alternatives
[02:49:34] to whatever Europe is manufacturing.
[02:49:38] The other problem with China is that
[02:49:40] They're cost-effective alternatives are now also better, technologically better than our
[02:49:50] domestic manufacturing.
[02:49:52] At least back in the day, when Chinese commodities were talked about, we were like, oh, it's
[02:49:58] cheap, it's just fucking shitty.
[02:50:01] Like for the, I remember, look, I was born in 1991, I'm old, I'm 35, but I remember
[02:50:06] like leading into the 2000s, the meta, the idea, the trend was that, you know, Chinese
[02:50:12] goods are shitty. They're nowhere near as good as stuff made in Europe. Right? A lot
[02:50:19] of Zoomers do not understand that that was the outlook. Okay? That was the outlook.
[02:50:30] Nowadays people don't say that no more. And it's ironic because, well, you know, still
[02:50:36] some people believe that and it's wrong. What matters not is how people approach the subject.
[02:50:44] What matters is what the reality is. And if you look at business owners, for example,
[02:50:51] now American titans of industry will look to Chinese commodities and Chinese cars
[02:50:56] like EV, for example, and they look at it in admiration. They say like, if these
[02:51:01] cars were to come into the American market, they would destroy us. We'd never be able
[02:51:04] to sell another car again that was the that was Farley what's his name the the
[02:51:13] CEO of Ford who went to China and his daily driver is a Chinese car who
[02:51:19] should have came back to America before it's CEO and said if Chinese vehicles were
[02:51:26] to enter the American market we would never be able to sell another fucking
[02:51:29] car ever again
[02:51:34] Back in the day, they also used to say, oh, China is stealing RIP.
[02:51:44] He briefly mentioned this as well.
[02:51:48] That was a handshake agreement.
[02:51:49] It's not like American capital owners were oblivious to the fact that the Chinese manufacturers
[02:51:56] We're also taking our IP our patents and and recreating them
[02:52:03] Recreating like cheaper alternatives to it we know and we still know to this day. It's not like they're fucking delusional that was
[02:52:12] that was absolutely a
[02:52:15] a
[02:52:16] handshake agreement
[02:52:18] from American capital
[02:52:20] You get to
[02:52:22] Manufacture our goods we get to displace our labor we get to
[02:52:26] You know we get to manufacture our goods in your factories and you get to you know take the patents and
[02:52:32] Make the exact same cheap alternative and and slap a Chinese sticker on it
[02:52:40] Nowadays
[02:52:42] Nowadays that's not even happening nowadays the the Chinese innovation has actually
[02:52:46] has actually gained a stronger foothold where Americans are purchasing Chinese goods to try
[02:52:55] to retool their vehicles with the Chinese bells and whistles. We're stealing from them.
[02:53:03] Not that it matters because we will never have a competitive edge in manufacturing because
[02:53:12] we've destroyed our productive capabilities.
[02:53:16] And therefore in order to rebuild
[02:53:18] domestic manufacturing, we would have to spend decades.
[02:53:23] This is decades of training, decades of proficiency.
[02:53:27] Chinese manufacturing is superior
[02:53:31] to the American manufacturing as Tim Apple,
[02:53:35] Tim Cook openly admits,
[02:53:37] because they have decades of experience as well.
[02:53:41] high-position manufacturing is not easy to recreate.
[02:53:49] I think production innovation
[02:53:52] in like new economic areas wants to dominate.
[02:53:55] You know, the basic retirement benefit
[02:53:59] that anyone in China gets,
[02:54:01] no matter what your residency status
[02:54:05] is like tens of dollars a month.
[02:54:07] It's really, really trivial.
[02:54:10] The health insurance system, you know, people aren't confident and they walk into the hospital
[02:54:16] that that cost will be covered and frequently there's a lot of upfront payments.
[02:54:22] Some people also say the one child policy in an incredibly competitive marriage market
[02:54:28] has made it a requirement for young men to save if they want to get married.
[02:54:33] All this has produced an economy that just saves an incredible share of its national
[02:54:39] income.
[02:54:40] percent of GDP uniquely high. And that means the state financial sector is just flush with money.
[02:54:47] So part of it is that China has the capacity direct investment through the state.
[02:54:52] Part of it is just it can finance out of its own. This is not entirely true as well.
[02:55:00] As far as the only aspect that this is true is the saving side.
[02:55:05] He's not wrong about that. China is a saving nation. America, on the other hand, is a nation in debt.
[02:55:13] China is the exact opposite. And the only other thing that I would point to that he's not entirely
[02:55:22] correct on, but he's not entirely wrong on, is the health care system. Because health care is
[02:55:27] an area that needs a lot of improvement in China. This is true. So it's still state run,
[02:55:40] but it is one aspect of, it is one area where they have to improve dramatically, and they
[02:55:51] are improving.
[02:55:52] savings, levels of investment that no other country has matched.
[02:55:57] So this, I think this is all true through China shock 1.0.
[02:56:00] The view is maybe more of it would change as it went on, but it didn't.
[02:56:05] So what is China shock 2.0?
[02:56:07] When do you date it?
[02:56:08] How do you describe it?
[02:56:10] So I date the start of China shock 2.0 to the collapse of China's property
[02:56:18] market in 2021.
[02:56:19] Now, we all know there's an awful lot going on in 2020, the pandemic.
[02:56:24] She gets concerned that there's too much investment in property, probably rightly so, that there
[02:56:32] were empty buildings piling up.
[02:56:35] He introduces a policy, three red lines, which sort of restricts finance for the property
[02:56:40] sector, and it succeeds too well.
[02:56:44] And the property market basically tanks.
[02:56:47] And then in order to offset the economic impact of this fall, she more or less gives the banking
[02:56:54] system guidance to lend, to finance a new wave of manufacturing investment, and particularly
[02:57:03] manufacturing in more cutting edge sectors.
[02:57:07] So electric vehicles being the leading example.
[02:57:13] But in general, it's investment in any sector where China has import dependence.
[02:57:20] And for Xi, that's a vulnerability.
[02:57:23] And so he really directs the state's financial sector and the party to throw money into building
[02:57:31] out sectors where China has an import dependence.
[02:57:34] The effect is China moves back to growing on the back of that exports.
[02:57:40] China's domestic economy is growing three, four percent.
[02:57:42] But you're getting one and a half to two percentage points of growth from that exports.
[02:57:49] That's a lot of statistics.
[02:57:50] What it basically means is China is exporting eight ton of cars.
[02:57:54] China is supplying the entire world with batteries.
[02:57:57] China is now the leading exporter of tunnel boring machines.
[02:58:02] You name the category of machinery, China's exports are growing.
[02:58:07] It's no longer just consumer electronics.
[02:58:11] So China starts getting a growth, big part of its growth, from an expanding trade surplus.
[02:58:18] Imports stop growing.
[02:58:20] This is, you know, I think one of the key factors around the second China shock.
[02:58:26] Normally you would say imports would grow with domestic demand.
[02:58:29] Chinese import.
[02:58:30] The reality of the matter is, the reason why we say China is cheating is because
[02:58:34] they are capable of
[02:58:38] do to centrally planned uh... central control and centrally planned economy
[02:58:42] do their central plan economy
[02:58:44] they're able to do
[02:58:46] well i like to call like nuclear levels of
[02:58:50] of subsidies
[02:58:52] and they also have complete control over how those subsidies are utilized
[02:58:56] as opposed to the united states of america
[02:58:59] when we offer subsidies uh... some of that goes to uh... price control
[02:59:05] It's a crude way to look at it, but much of that still goes back to executive salaries and
[02:59:12] Sure and in crew improving shareholder value
[02:59:17] That's it so we look at it and we go that's fucking cheating you're cheating
[02:59:29] It's not they're not cheating we're just not competing with them appropriately
[02:59:34] And then we're calling it cheating
[02:59:45] What is this
[02:59:48] Dog did you just send me
[02:59:51] Wait, this is from August 27th
[02:59:55] 2025 this is a Taylor Lorenz article about chorus
[03:00:00] from a
[03:00:01] a year ago, like exactly a year ago, that that was very controversial at the time. That's so funny
[03:00:08] that you're posting that right now saying David Pakman caught as hilarious.
[03:00:14] Of course, basically aren't growing. And in case kind of selling ever more to the world, and then
[03:00:20] Chinese are not buying more from it. And ultimately, ultimately, look, look, they are
[03:00:25] a version of this is what Amazon does, right? Like at a, at a more localized scale at the
[03:00:31] the domestic scale, this is kind of what Amazon does, right? It's called predatory pricing,
[03:00:35] right? Amazon, due to its tremendous industrial capabilities, due to the fact that it owns
[03:00:45] the marketplace and can create much more cost-effective forms of the same exact things
[03:00:54] that are selling well on its own. Marketplace, they can artificially cut prices, right?
[03:01:00] and outcompete other smaller businesses that are relying on their marketplace, okay?
[03:01:12] So basically, China is doing that on an international scale.
[03:01:21] From the perspective of, what the fuck is this?
[03:01:24] Dude, what are you sending me, man?
[03:01:30] China is capable of creating unbelievably low-cost alternatives with virtually every
[03:01:41] kind of good, and therefore, China has been able to gain a competitive edge and become
[03:01:49] the global manufacturing hub and he who controls the entire globe's manufacturing controls
[03:01:56] the fate of the entire planet.
[03:01:58] This is what he's talking about when he says that this is the second China shock and it's
[03:02:02] terrifying.
[03:02:03] Exactly.
[03:02:04] And Chinese exports, particularly in the years right after the pandemic, after the currency
[03:02:09] is depreciated, start growing at two times or three times the pace of world trade.
[03:02:14] So China's imports of autos used to be about a million cars a year.
[03:02:20] That's now down.
[03:02:21] It's now under half a million cars a year.
[03:02:24] And over this same period, China's exports of cars have gone from little under a million
[03:02:31] to now 10 million in the space of five years.
[03:02:35] Just a stunning shift in a range of industrial sectors and heavily industrial sectors that
[03:02:42] compete with Japan and compete with Europe.
[03:02:46] And so you sort of see bad economic performance in the manufacturing heart of Europe in
[03:02:51] particular, a little less so in the US.
[03:02:54] I think this point about the Europe versus US is really interesting. In one of the pieces
[03:02:58] you wrote about this, you wrote, the US share of global output has been remarkably constant
[03:03:03] over the last 40 years. China's rise has come at the expense of the other G7 countries.
[03:03:10] Can you talk about what that looks like? I mean, I know you've, let's use maybe Germany
[03:03:14] as an example. I love watching liberals talk about this without identifying what the problem is.
[03:03:20] By the way, it is my favorite type of conversation is my favorite type of back-and-forth
[03:03:26] Because at the end of the day you just go back to it while they're cheating
[03:03:30] Because their systems design is better than ours, but they will never admit that because then they would have to take the L on capitalism
[03:03:38] Because that's what it comes down to
[03:03:41] Like they can say oh, it's because these you know initially these were low-cost labor sites because
[03:03:48] Because the Chinese labor force was much poorer overall, the Chinese conditions were much worse overall.
[03:03:56] Oh, they did this at gunpoint.
[03:03:58] They put nets outside of the Foxconn factories, whatever the fuck you want to call it, right?
[03:04:04] Like, oh, they were forcing people to do this.
[03:04:06] You know, idle hands go starving.
[03:04:12] But at the end of the day, the reason why China was able to develop is because of
[03:04:16] how they redistributed, how they redistributed the foreign capital that was flowing into the country.
[03:04:24] And now they've developed to a degree where they are able to compete with the rest of the world.
[03:04:33] They're able to move their weight around.
[03:04:36] I will say it's, you know, not lost on me that virtually all of the liberals used to say China's
[03:04:49] gonna fucking fail next year. China's collapses imminent. All those liberals are now making,
[03:04:55] you know, China is actually dominating us style videos.
[03:04:58] Germany didn't move as heavily into, you know, kind of software platforms. They
[03:05:09] retained a more traditional manufacturing sector and focused on exports, including
[03:05:16] China. So, you know, Germany after the global financial crisis is exporting
[03:05:21] close to 3% of its GDP to China. That reflects the fact that Germany remained
[03:05:27] a very manufacturing centric economy, the tunnel boring machines, the high end sedans, a lot
[03:05:38] of fancy SUVs, also aircraft, the 320s made in Hamburg.
[03:05:44] All these industrial sectors tended to be industrial sectors which had a lot of overlap
[03:05:50] with China. And then you throw in the fact that the EV industry just took off in China.
[03:05:59] A lot of government support. And the German companies, they were made their own efforts
[03:06:04] to make EVs in Europe, but those never took off globally.
[03:06:07] Mike, the reason why I don't think it's an apt comparison with predatory pricing that Amazon
[03:06:14] does, with respect to China competing with other countries around the planet, is because
[03:06:22] Amazon is destroying mom-and-pop shops that have to rely on the Amazon marketplace.
[03:06:28] America is also a equivalent competitor to Amazon at that point.
[03:06:36] That's why the analogy doesn't fully work.
[03:06:39] You can say, oh, China is actually engaging in predatory pricing.
[03:06:43] artificially lowering their costs. We can't compete. They're destroying us. But we
[03:06:50] also have, objectively, throughout this period of Chinese development, have had
[03:06:55] far more power than China. Far more power than China. And still, to a certain
[03:07:01] degree, have far more power than China. We just fucking destroyed ourselves. We
[03:07:05] destroyed our industrial base at the behest of capital. International capital,
[03:07:12] international parasitic capital that has no investment in national boundaries or its own people,
[03:07:19] its own neighbors, and the well-being of its labor force doesn't care. It's just for profit.
[03:07:25] Yeah, the United States is not a mom-and-pop shop, and China is the Amazon. It's not a great
[03:07:31] comparison for that reason. The United States has its own competitive Amazon-style platform,
[03:07:37] And China is also another Amazon style platform is just destroying the the major competitor
[03:07:44] Hype train is here ladies and gentlemen at level 10 hype train. We carry the motherfucking flame
[03:07:48] I haven't carried it in a couple days. We're at level four hype train right now
[03:07:53] In the way that china's EV industry has nor are they cost competitive
[03:07:58] So what you see is german exports to china have fallen by about a percentage point of german gdp
[03:08:05] And what was a strength? Germany benefited from selling to China right after the global financial crisis became a weakness.
[03:08:13] I want to focus in on another dimension of this. It's kind of inside the story you're telling, which is...
[03:08:19] So China Shock 1, it's lower on the value chain of manufacturer goods.
[03:08:26] you know, clothes and consumer calculators and all these things that the story that was told was
[03:08:34] We don't want these industries in the long run
[03:08:38] what happens in
[03:08:41] The challenge up to is that China is starting to dominate industries on the technological frontier. I mean you mentioned
[03:08:50] Electric vehicles you mentioned batteries, right? You could talk about solar panels
[03:08:54] we could talk about AI, where they're basically neck and neck with us, how did they go from
[03:09:03] kind of low to mid-level manufacturing to the absolute frontier in batteries, solar, etc.
[03:09:12] That quickly.
[03:09:14] There was certainly something in the air in China around manufacturing.
[03:09:20] The critical mass was built up and the foundations were laid.
[03:09:26] And I think it's a complicated story.
[03:09:28] So if you think about...
[03:09:29] Honestly, this might be it for me.
[03:09:31] I'm tired of waiting around for a song.
[03:09:33] Like I don't have anything better to do.
[03:09:34] Clearly, he doesn't respect our time.
[03:09:35] Why should we respect his?
[03:09:36] This is a mutual relationship as far as I'm concerned, but it's beginning to seem
[03:09:40] very one-sided.
[03:09:41] I think this is where I unfollow in us of 420 months, by the way.
[03:09:45] Thanks everyone, but I can't take it anymore.
[03:09:48] Oh god, we haven't seen copy-pasta in the chat in a minute. You know what I mean?
[03:09:59] Paralyzed pendant plug, thank you for the 25 get the says level six hype train ladies and gentlemen level 10
[03:10:05] We will carry the freaking flame
[03:10:08] Electric vehicles being the like one of the famous
[03:10:11] Sector's what do you need to make an electric? Well, you actually need to be able to make a car
[03:10:15] It is you know a smartphone mix with a car. So how does China learn how to make cars of good cars?
[03:10:21] Well, a lot of foreign companies come in and Ford and GM and VW all had to partner with generally Chinese state companies
[03:10:29] To produce in China. That was just the rule and they didn't
[03:10:34] Have a really much of a choice because in China had a 25%
[03:10:38] Honored. Oh, I'm sorry. They didn't have much of a choice. You say well, there was one choice
[03:10:43] Which was to keep manufacturing at home
[03:10:48] But no our capital owners wanted to our capital owners wanted to do everything in their power
[03:10:55] To depress wages. They wanted the cheap labor alternative that China offered
[03:11:01] So they moved their fucking manufacturing there
[03:11:06] Sorry, but that's exactly what happened. That's exactly what took place if you want to get mad at someone get mad at capitalism
[03:11:13] Get mad at the capital owners who made this decision
[03:11:17] Why are we acting like?
[03:11:19] Capital owners are you know these factories went to China at gunpoint like they were killing you if you don't go and move your
[03:11:25] Factory to the China and partner up with the government
[03:11:30] No, it was it was part hubris and
[03:11:34] part greed
[03:11:36] Okay, it was the greed of a low-cost labor alternative
[03:11:40] And it was the hubris because they wanted to maximize profits again, like I said labor most malleable element of
[03:11:48] production
[03:11:50] And it was part hubris the hubris that these Chinese folk would never be able to make
[03:11:57] Competitive products
[03:11:59] Hubris also known as racism, right. Oh
[03:12:02] Oh, they're Chinese they could never comprehend our brilliant Western minds. They would never for years and years
[03:12:10] For years and years they said
[03:12:13] Chinese products that they're making our dog shit. They're nowhere near as good as the superior Western quality products
[03:12:26] Well, some of us don't think it was very hubris we literally lost our jobs dog
[03:12:29] at what point do you think I'm making a sympathetic plea for the Warren Buffets of the world here?
[03:12:37] Okay, yes, I'm on your side on this story.
[03:12:40] Like, yes, that's what I'm describing.
[03:12:50] Unless you are a factory owner or a business owner, I'm not criticizing you.
[03:12:56] You're the worker. You lost your job. Industry moved away from your hometown.
[03:13:04] Here I'll give you one example. Gary Indiana. Gary Indiana is a high black
[03:13:12] density town. Used to be a place where industry thrived. Gary Indiana, factories
[03:13:21] closed down. Gary Indiana is in a dire situation. Gary Indiana for the last 10
[03:13:26] days has not had any electricity. Okay. United States of America. We're talking
[03:13:35] about the United States of America. There for the last 10 days in Gary
[03:13:40] Indiana there has not been any electricity. Think about that. No
[03:13:45] power was so ever. It's fucking insane. We don't even talk about it in the news.
[03:14:05] That's what happened. Because the bosses wanted to ship manufacturing
[03:14:10] overseas because it was much more cost-effective for them.
[03:14:18] They could justify sky high profits and for years and years consumers would in exchange
[03:14:26] for that would get cheaper consumer goods.
[03:14:33] And yes, Gary, Indiana, 85% black, which is why it's not being covered at all right
[03:14:37] now.
[03:14:39] to be a steel town. Home to US Steel's Gary Works, the largest steel mill complex in North
[03:14:45] America. That's Gary Indiana. Now, it's it's devoid of power for 10 days, and it barely
[03:14:58] makes a fucking blip on anybody's radar. Part of that is because it's in experiencing
[03:15:03] abject poverty part of that is because it's very black
[03:15:11] it's unfathomable this is the wealthiest nation on the planet that's why i say
[03:15:14] third-world country with the gucci belt
[03:15:17] big example in nineteen seventy nine gm domestically employed about six hundred
[03:15:20] twenty thousand jobs
[03:15:22] now gm employs about a hundred and fifty thousand employees worldwide
[03:16:03] very long time. So in order to, you know, if VW is on the other side of the tariff with a JV partner,
[03:16:09] you're talking about general outsourcing, but he's talking about how Chinese auto manufacturing,
[03:16:12] which he mentioned, started with tariffs on imports in China that pushed those auto companies to
[03:16:16] manufacture. They're a good example of targeted tariffs. They're going to have a big cost
[03:16:20] advantage. So GM had to also jump the tariff. Toyota had to jump the tariff. Everybody
[03:16:26] does the JVs to inventors. And then you want your parts suppliers to come and produce
[03:16:31] high quality parts. So they come to China. Well, guess what? They probably, once they
[03:16:35] learn how to make parts in China, they are making parts at a much lower cost, relatively
[03:16:42] cheap. And you're starting to use them.
[03:16:44] Oh, never mind. I'm trying to dive at level seven.
[03:16:46] And China and then local competitors spring up. So China ends up having world-class
[03:16:52] automotive parts production well before its company suddenly master EVs.
[03:17:02] At a certain point in China was sort of, they liked the results of the joint venture, but
[03:17:07] they didn't completely like the fact that for a while most of the Chinese market was
[03:17:11] being met by auto markets being met by joint venture output, the indigenous Chinese owned
[03:17:17] companies were not all that competitive.
[03:17:19] There was a sense that the auto manufacturers who had a JV were fat and lazy because they
[03:17:25] were too happy producing through their JVs.
[03:17:27] So there was a sense that, okay, well, this sector was so little too foreign dominated.
[03:17:34] And then there was a correct sense that, well, we should try to take advantage of
[03:17:38] the transition to EVs.
[03:17:40] So China makes it a priority.
[03:17:44] When China makes something a priority, credit is available to local firms that want
[03:17:49] enter the EV market. The state banking system gets mobilized, local governments start throwing money
[03:17:56] at it, get a lot of small companies springing up. China supports the development of an indigenous
[03:18:02] local battery industry. Then your Tesla's market entry is also viewed as significant when Tesla
[03:18:08] enters. So all I'm getting from this is that China is an opt to American labor on the same
[03:18:13] level if not greater than capital wait what no what do you mean there would be
[03:18:22] there would be no manufacturing of of you know competitive like Chinese labor is
[03:18:30] only outsourced like Chinese labor is only an op because our capital owners
[03:18:38] brought the fucking labor there or brought the manufacturing there.
[03:18:54] crazy. It's not their fault that they actually were able to develop with all the foreign capital
[03:19:12] coming in. They were experiencing abject poverty. They had extreme poverty. Like, yeah, they
[03:19:32] should have just kept that. They should have just been relegated to the peasant class.
[03:19:37] They should have never have been able to develop.
[03:19:40] They should have never been a competitive labor force capable of precise manufacturing.
[03:19:49] Bucked up that they did is the argument at that point.
[03:19:54] What matters now is how do we recreate our industrial base?
[03:20:08] The Chinese the Chinese working class are not our enemies chatter
[03:20:13] China as a state is not even our enemy
[03:20:17] If you want to understand who's responsible for the situation look to look no further than those who own capital
[03:20:25] Yeah, why would the why would the Chinese state guarantee us labor welfare
[03:20:32] Why would the Chinese state think about anything other than the the
[03:20:37] Other than improving the material conditions of their citizens really get mad at someone get mad at our state
[03:20:43] If you're gonna get mad as I won't get mad at our capital owners get mad at capitalism
[03:20:48] That's why I always jokingly say like if you want to beat China, that's like your goal that you kind of have to be China
[03:21:07] That's what I'm saying. Yes, American capital is collapsing. One channel will remain. I don't see a resolution for American labor. That's what I'm saying is that we can't, we can't recreate our industrial base. It's all downhill for Americans, no matter what. That's not true.
[03:21:20] I'll give you an example. For the last decade, we have been begging America to create a domestic manufacturing hub for solar panels.
[03:21:35] This was one of the the major demands from the Green New Deal and our fucking
[03:21:42] animal
[03:21:43] reactionary corporate media and our right-wing Republican Party and many of the right-wing centrist Democrats
[03:21:50] Aggressively postured against it. We had a fucking decade. We had all the wealth on the planet
[03:21:55] We could have just fucking designed these goddamn factories
[03:21:59] We could have made cheap solar panels
[03:22:02] But we didn't do that. We talked about how England blew a 13 colony lead. We blew complete
[03:22:15] global control. We didn't do it because solar is obviously antagonistic to the
[03:22:34] needs of the fossil fuel industry. So now we're heading down climate disaster
[03:22:40] and also simultaneously have no foothold in the next generation of energy around the globe
[03:22:48] because at the end of the day solar panels and renewable energy in general
[03:22:56] reduces reliance on fossil fuels.
[03:23:00] Our entire economy is also anchored around the petrodollar and we had no investment
[03:23:05] whatsoever in diversifying our over reliance on fossil fuel.
[03:23:10] So now when Iran shuts off the straight of hormones, we have to dump into our strategic petroleum reserves and
[03:23:21] Our our oil and gas industry is booming right now. Oh my god their profits are doing so well
[03:23:28] But are you doing well?
[03:23:30] No
[03:23:33] We didn't build a robust manufacturing hub here for
[03:23:37] solar panels, those could have been millions of new jobs, millions of forever jobs.
[03:23:57] So it's not like we, it's not like we don't have the opportunity or we didn't have the
[03:24:01] opportunity.
[03:24:02] There's always a, there's always a way to turn this around.
[03:24:05] just that unfortunately, let's be real, we're too fucking stupid. Like right now as it stands,
[03:24:13] and I have hope that we can change the American trajectory, but we are too reactionary and
[03:24:20] too fucking stupid to change it at the moment. Because people who see the writing on the
[03:24:27] wall, who are smart enough to recognize what changes are taking place around the globe
[03:24:32] are constantly warning
[03:24:34] about the imminent crisis
[03:24:37] but unfortunately the majority
[03:24:39] is chock full of reactionary propaganda
[03:24:43] and our our sophisticated corporate media apparatus
[03:24:46] designs propaganda in a way to to make those smart people intelligent people
[03:24:51] thoughtful people look crazy look silly
[03:24:55] the green new deal is the best example of this like the the
[03:24:58] The fear mongering around the Green New Deal is the best example of this.
[03:25:04] We have a crisis in stupidity.
[03:25:09] Not required to do a JV, but in order to qualify for Shanghai government,
[03:25:14] local support has to meet a lot of local content requirements.
[03:25:18] So a supply chain that serves Tesla can also serve others.
[03:25:22] And when China sets up their consumer subsidies in order to qualify for
[03:25:27] for that subsidy. The car initially had to be made in China. The battery had to be made in China.
[03:25:35] That supported not just the Chinese battery industry, but the Chinese-owned EV industry.
[03:25:44] And then you get the EVs kind of just taking off. And so all of a sudden you just get an
[03:25:51] an explosion, which has been built on a foundation from the migration of Western parts makers,
[03:26:00] copying, emulation, and then an awful lot of industrial policy.
[03:26:05] So something people may have heard is this argument that China is overcapacity,
[03:26:10] that that overcapacity is a crisis, is a sort of related maybe to trade imbalances.
[03:26:15] I don't think that makes a lot of intuitive sense. Like why is that a problem if they
[03:26:19] produce more cars than they buy. So how would you describe what the overcapacity issue is?
[03:26:28] To me, the most coherent way of defining the concern about Chinese overcapacity
[03:26:35] is a set of sectors where China produces more than a domestic market can absorb,
[03:26:41] And where globally, China's adding capacity in a sector that in aggregate already has more capacity than there is global demand.
[03:26:52] So in batteries, for example, China's ability to make batteries is a multiple of current global demand.
[03:27:01] So there's just no scope for anyone else to enter the market.
[03:27:04] I think the concern in a sector like autos, where there is overcapacity globally, there
[03:27:13] are more auto factories in Europe and in the US with capacity than there is demand.
[03:27:21] Many factories are operating at low levels of capacity or being underused.
[03:27:26] And there is overcapacity in China.
[03:27:27] A lot of Chinese factories are not being fully used.
[03:27:30] China is adding to its capacity.
[03:27:35] So China has the ability to make 55 million cars,
[03:27:38] which is well over a half,
[03:27:41] close to two thirds of world demand.
[03:27:44] And that is growing.
[03:27:46] And so China's expansion necessarily means
[03:27:49] the exit of capacity elsewhere
[03:27:51] when there's already spare capacity.
[03:27:53] Now you can say that's just the operation of a market.
[03:27:57] New entrance, gonna displace old capacity.
[03:28:00] But it does feel different when a closed market suddenly is adding capacity to an industrial
[03:28:09] sector where in aggregate there isn't plenty of capacity and there are squeezing margins,
[03:28:16] squeezing production out of the rest of the world.
[03:28:18] One thing I've heard people ask is, how is this different than America?
[03:28:21] America rises as a manufacturing juggernaut from being a much more modest economy.
[03:28:25] the country has founded. It does, over time, displace great companies from other countries.
[03:28:31] It does lead to competition that is harder for other countries. But I do think economically,
[03:28:38] America's rise is not in every respect. I mean, that is what happened. That is literally what
[03:28:43] happened, accelerated by World War II as well, especially because America, due to its distance
[03:28:50] from the conflict was able to recover far better than the rest of the world did, far better than
[03:29:02] the rest of the competitive Western industries did. But yeah, that is a big part of it. That's a big
[03:29:09] part of why America was such a dominant force. He who controls manufacturing controls the world.
[03:29:20] I just don't understand how you look at key periods of time like I like the point of America's war economy or and it's like post-World War two war economy as
[03:29:36] The closest America's ever gotten to like full-blown Chinese style central plan central planning
[03:29:42] That's what it was during the war and even after that. There was still a the residual impact of the
[03:29:50] of the central economy, the centralized economic planning.
[03:29:59] And that's part of the reason why we fucking dominated.
[03:30:01] What is median strategies, fake pulses with the fuck?
[03:30:04] What do you want?
[03:30:05] Why do you keep spamming?
[03:30:08] I don't know what you're talking about.
[03:30:09] I don't care.
[03:30:16] Probably considered to have been win-win in a lot of ways.
[03:30:19] So what is different about the rise of America as a manufacturer, like the rise of Detroit,
[03:30:25] the rise of all these dimensions from what China is doing?
[03:30:29] So our story is much more one of industrial investment for our own rapidly growing internal
[03:30:35] market, and we only really become a big exporter after World War II when the world's
[03:30:42] on its back, and that doesn't last that long.
[03:30:45] as industrial rise is much more tied to exporting, and it's a much bigger exporter than we ever
[03:30:53] were.
[03:30:54] Yeah, I know.
[03:30:55] I know.
[03:30:56] It's the one that had the Hong-Pole.
[03:30:57] It's the one that had the Karen Bass-Pole.
[03:30:58] I know.
[03:30:59] For that brief period after World War II.
[03:31:02] So one argument here is simply China's winning, their out-competing the world in
[03:31:08] a pretty fair...
[03:31:09] Interesting.
[03:31:10] Interesting.
[03:31:11] gotta be tough to say as a liberal. I don't know how much as we're leaned into the China
[03:31:17] is going to implode any day now type narratives. I don't know if he did that himself, but many
[03:31:23] people on the liberal side for years said over and over again, China's economy is about
[03:31:31] the implode. China's economy is about the implode China's economy. Any day now on the
[03:31:35] on the verge of demise, on the verge of demise, on the verge of demise.
[03:31:39] Remember?
[03:31:41] What did we say?
[03:31:43] That's not the case.
[03:31:45] What did they say when we said that's not the case?
[03:31:47] Oh, you just love eating China's dick.
[03:31:49] Oh, you're a communist.
[03:31:51] You love Mao Zedong.
[03:31:55] You're wrong.
[03:31:57] And you will see filthy commie.
[03:31:59] Enjoy your tofu-dreg housing in ghost cities.
[03:32:03] And, and sewer lard, based food substitutes. Enjoy it.
[03:32:19] And square here in the world doesn't like it. It needs to build better cars, build cheaper solar panels, create stronger supply chains.
[03:32:26] all this talk of China shocks and a China problem, not sewer, lard, gutter oil, whatever.
[03:32:33] It's just kind of a way to whine and keep China down. And that there's no problem here, like it
[03:32:39] would be great to have cheap Chinese electric vehicles. It's good for the world. And the
[03:32:42] climate transition to have cheap Chinese solar panels. How do you take that argument?
[03:32:46] Look, if your only goal is maximizing benefits to consumers in the short run, you should
[03:32:59] certainly import Chinese EVs, Chinese solar.
[03:33:07] Why not?
[03:33:08] Open economics, say buy from whoever is cheaper, and then the competition will raise everyone
[03:33:14] else up. I think that misses a few things. One, it misses the shock that happens to our
[03:33:28] economies if traditional, even like traditional but still kind of cutting-edge sectors disappear.
[03:33:37] China could supply out of capacity that it has already built the entire European
[03:33:44] auto market all of it 10 million cars no problem that's just giant compared to
[03:33:51] the global market if an industry suddenly goes away you have all the
[03:33:57] China shock 1.0 type effects communities that grew up around building
[03:34:03] cars will just kind of disappear. Now, in the China shock 2.0, you're not going to be moving
[03:34:10] to an export sector because there are no one's exporting to China. So you're going to move to
[03:34:15] necessarily a services sector. So you're going to become less focused on producing traded goods.
[03:34:22] Now you might say, I mean, that already happened. So he's just basically saying America's going to
[03:34:25] be even more service sector oriented. Who cares? On the other hand, in Europe,
[03:34:32] an awful lot of research and development, an awful lot of innovation actually has emerged
[03:34:40] out of their automotive sector. So it's not clear these people are going to jump to a more
[03:34:44] innovative sector. They may jump to less innovative, less well-paid sectors. And in the interim,
[03:34:51] your economy is going to suffer. And then I think there is a sense that people have discovered
[03:34:59] that supply chain dependence can be weaponized. China dominates magnets, rarers. If you want
[03:35:07] those magnets, you want those rarers, you better not tire of China. You better not,
[03:35:10] you better see nice things about China. You better not do what Japan did and say you're
[03:35:15] going to come to Taiwan's defense if something were to happen. You kind of need to respect China.
[03:35:23] It's so funny that they're coming to terms with the fact that China is a superpower.
[03:35:27] Like this conversation is basically the bargaining stage of liberals recognizing China's place around
[03:35:35] the globe as a superpower that is not only competitive with the United States but actually
[03:35:40] out competing the United States and perhaps maybe even the hegemon, the future hegemon.
[03:35:48] Like, because everything that they're talking about with respect to like Chinese,
[03:35:53] With respect to Chinese soft power with respect to like you know what you have to do because China has so much power now
[03:36:01] It's like yeah, this is what the United States did for the last 100 years, okay?
[03:36:06] Not a hundred but almost a hundred years for the last century or so almost a century. This is what the United States did I
[03:36:14] Mean even down to like Afghanistan Iraq you think if another country were to behave that way that the rest of the world wouldn't fucking react
[03:36:20] Look at Russia. Russia is doing America's shit in Ukraine. Look at the reaction from the rest of the globe to Vladimir Putin.
[03:36:27] Look at the reaction from the rest of the world to Russia itself.
[03:36:31] If Russia didn't have China in its corner right now, and if it wasn't a fucking major energy provider itself, it would be destroyed.
[03:36:39] So why is it that America gets to do that kind of stuff, but Russia can't?
[03:36:44] Well, because America was the hegemon for the longest time.
[03:36:48] And America still has tremendous power at its disposal.
[03:36:56] The Swift system, the Petrodollar, these are things that are withering away partially due
[03:37:02] to this administration's acceleration, this administration's incompetence.
[03:37:08] But the reality of the matter is, yes, China is a major power and therefore we have to
[03:37:14] treat it as a major power.
[03:37:16] We can't just say, no, we get to do whatever we want and you can't do anything about it.
[03:37:23] I would go so far as to say that we are very fortunate that they are not doing to us what
[03:37:30] we've done to the rest of the world 100 percent.
[03:37:35] Okay?
[03:37:36] Can you imagine if China moved like America does like at most we complain because China
[03:37:43] China has built like artificial islands, right?
[03:37:48] Oh, they take over coral reefs and they build artificial islands and they put military bases
[03:37:52] on it.
[03:37:53] Okay, that's in their backyard.
[03:37:55] We do that in their backyard.
[03:37:57] Okay?
[03:37:59] Like people complain about the 9-line and how much China is just like dominating the
[03:38:04] South China Sea.
[03:38:05] Meanwhile, they have their own separate security cooperative agreements with one exception,
[03:38:10] obviously, Taiwan and also the Philippines, but that's literally their backyard.
[03:38:17] At the end of the day, we do that to their backyard.
[03:38:20] Why the fuck won't the Philippines do a separate security cooperative agreement with China?
[03:38:26] You think it's in their best interest?
[03:38:28] No, of course not.
[03:38:29] It's because we won't let them.
[03:38:36] So the point I'm trying to make is we should be thanking God every day that China, at least
[03:38:45] in this stage, this might change.
[03:38:47] I don't think they will, but we should be thanking God every day that they don't behave
[03:38:51] in the way that we do.
[03:38:52] Can you imagine doing joint military, Chinese Navy doing joint military exercises in Hawaii
[03:39:14] with Russia, okay?
[03:39:16] with Mexico. Chinese Navy doing joint military exercise with the Canadian Navy or the Mexican
[03:39:23] Navy off the coast of California. That's what we do to them. Chinese naval exercise with
[03:39:33] the Cuban Navy off the coast of Miami, Florida. You know, what would we do? We'd lose our
[03:39:40] our fucking minds.
[03:39:52] Now if you want access to their supply chain,
[03:39:54] that's kind of the argument that they are making.
[03:39:56] That kind of dependence scares people.
[03:40:00] Like imagine China,
[03:40:02] greatly investing into a free Hawaii
[03:40:04] from a colonialism campaign.
[03:40:07] after years and years like boosting, you know, Polynesian Samoan culture initiatives, like
[03:40:14] setting up NGOs, setting up NGOs in Hawaii for Polynesian culture, Samoan culture, and talking
[03:40:23] about restoring the Hawaiian kingdom, and then utilizing the global network of NGOs to say,
[03:40:31] you know, I was really fucked up how America has so many colonies, including Hawaii technically,
[03:40:37] I'm not even talking about Guam. Before we get to Hawaii, there's Guam. There's obviously military base all around the world, Puerto Rico, you know, Radio Free Polynesia, Radio Free Puerto Rico, NGOs, NGOs that they design, liberation movements or separatist movements that they arm, right?
[03:41:02] Like there's so much that that China could be doing that they don't do
[03:41:14] Like a like a free Tibet well for Puerto Rico, you know what I mean free Tibet, but Hawaii
[03:41:20] Fuck it free Tibet for Mexico for for Texas
[03:41:25] As an even more app comparison free free
[03:41:28] Texas, Texas is Mexican, California is Mexican.
[03:41:48] I mean I wouldn't hate the California one honestly.
[03:41:51] I would love to exist under the complete control of my glorious queen, Laodia Shime Bomb, but...
[03:42:02] Finally, I would just say, look, if you want to emulate China, if you admire China, you want to emulate it.
[03:42:08] You like the way China's electric vehicle industry has developed. It did not develop.
[03:42:14] Just doesn't Chinese poverty started look a little worse than the US when you use US poverty standards even after accounting for Chinese of station subsidization
[03:42:22] Yes, China is still objectively a much poorer nation in the United States of America. This is true
[03:42:28] But you have to look at their living circumstances. There's like still very poor areas
[03:42:34] Holy shit I
[03:42:37] Am EU you go Paul they leaked it
[03:42:41] I thought they were going to I thought that they were going to reveal make this poll revelation on my stream
[03:42:47] But I guess they leaked it already
[03:42:51] This was gonna happen next week, but I guess they released it ahead of time. I will be talking to someone from IMU
[03:43:02] Percentage who say Israel's committee get genocide against Palestinians Michigan 80% Nevada 78% New Hampshire
[03:43:08] 78% New Mexico 76% Virginia 72% South Carolina 57%
[03:43:28] By throwing the
[03:43:31] Doors open it did not develop without industrial policy
[03:43:36] China's EV industry developed behind some of the highest tariffs in the world at the time, 25%.
[03:43:42] Huge local preference. You know, Chinese made battery ideally from a Chinese company.
[03:43:48] Chinese made car could be a Tesla, but it's going to be Tesla made in China with 90% Chinese content.
[03:43:54] And then an awful lot of local government support. There are stories of entire
[03:44:01] factories being built not by the company but by the local government to the
[03:44:05] specifications of the company. So there's a story of protection and industrial
[03:44:13] policy that leads to the creation of this sector. You throw your doors open to
[03:44:18] China, you're going to get the cheap cars, but you're not going to get the EV
[03:44:23] industry and I think many countries are are reluctant to just seed more
[03:44:27] industrial ground to China. So for a long time the critique that you heard in American trade debate
[03:44:35] most often of China is that they were a currency manipulator. Then you stopped hearing that as
[03:44:41] much. I think your view is that that has actually become a bigger part of the story again.
[03:44:46] So let's do this in two parts. What is currency manipulation? Why does it matter?
[03:44:50] And then what has been the sort of roller coaster or where are we on the roller coaster of Chinese currency manipulation?
[03:45:00] Sometimes currency manipulation is just like a currency whose value we don't like
[03:45:05] Which is I think how the president sometimes uses used to use it he hasn't been talking as much about it
[03:45:10] but the the
[03:45:12] More accurate way of defining it would be a country that has an undervalued currency
[03:45:17] You can quantify that and so you look for
[03:45:20] Genium question is a fellow train lover. How do you deal with the contradiction when China wants to export cheap cars?
[03:45:24] However, we'll leave tomorrow car center infrastructure because it's so cheap. What are you talking about?
[03:45:29] China literally has high speed rail
[03:45:32] China in many respects is very similar to America
[03:45:37] Except much better in terms of its public transport alternatives
[03:45:41] Yeah, they got trains too, buddy. They could export cheap train cars as well or fuck it. We could make them here. I
[03:45:51] Know we forgot about this, you know, it's like oh, we can't go back to the moon
[03:45:55] We the scientists forgot how to get there, you know, we lost the ancient recipes
[03:46:00] But like we kind of didn't lose the ancient recipes. We could just make this shit here, you know, I
[03:46:09] Wish I
[03:46:11] Or a surplus that's bigger than you would expect given the underlying characteristics of the economy.
[03:46:19] Factor one. And factor two is government or quasi-government intervention in the foreign currency market.
[03:46:26] So it's not just the outcome of differences in monetary policy.
[03:46:31] There's a government with its finger on the FX market buying currency to hold the currency down.
[03:46:38] China met both of those definitions unambiguously from 2003 to 2012.
[03:46:47] There was a political decision not to call them a manipulator.
[03:46:50] Now during the latter part of their period, they're letting their currency appreciate
[03:46:54] so they're kind of correcting the undervaluation, which is part of the reason why they weren't
[03:46:58] named.
[03:47:00] China is now back through its state banks buying a lot of foreign currency in the
[03:47:04] market, 50 billion a month, 600 billion a year. So there's a much clearer case that China is
[03:47:11] manipulating now than there was in the past. Trump hasn't taken interest in this. The Europeans
[03:47:17] though have. And so I think the what you're seeing is that this become shifting from being
[03:47:22] an American debate to being a global debate. When we were preparing for this conversation,
[03:47:28] something I found myself thinking about a lot was the question of whether or not it
[03:47:34] matters if the competition is fair. Let's say for a long time, the narrative that at
[03:47:40] least we were comfortable with in this was a very procedural narrative about China betraying
[03:47:46] the principles of free trade. They are a currency manipulator who is keeping their
[03:47:50] currency artificially cheap in order to make their exports cheaper, or they're doing
[03:47:56] all these industrial subsidies, and are you really supposed to do those under the
[03:47:59] World Trade Organization. And it's a very sort of liberals who believe in the system way of
[03:48:05] thinking about the problem that the problem is China's cheating. And I'm not saying cheating can't
[03:48:12] be a problem. But there's clearly quite a few places now where China is just winning or they've
[03:48:17] got into a place where they can win. And so I guess my question is, is the problem that
[03:48:25] some of China's advantages are unfair, right? They're back to currency manipulation,
[03:48:28] that currency seems artificially cheap, or is just the problem that from a national interest
[03:48:34] perspective, from an interdependence and weaponization perspective, that Germany, Europe, the United States,
[03:48:42] it would be a mistake to just allow their industries to get wiped out. That the question
[03:48:49] here is not an abstract commitment to free trade. It is what creates a kind of healthy
[03:48:54] the national ecosystem.
[03:48:57] Look, I increasingly lean towards the, look, we just want these kinds of industries.
[03:49:07] We don't want full-on dependence.
[03:49:10] We don't have to rely on arguments about procedural violation of rules, which feel
[03:49:18] a bit dated in a world where we ourselves are clearly not following the most basic
[03:49:24] of the rules. And the rules have a lot of complexity. You're allowed to subsidize under
[03:49:28] the rules. You're not supposed to subsidize if it's to substitute for imports. Well, if
[03:49:34] you subsidize a sector and everything in that sector previously was imported, are you
[03:49:39] import substituting or just subsidizing that sector? Is a government-guided fund
[03:49:44] that puts money into private equity funds and venture funds to invest in chip manufacturing?
[03:49:51] Is that a subsidy?
[03:49:52] Yes and no.
[03:49:53] It may not be a subsidy under the rules.
[03:49:54] So the rules themselves are contested
[03:49:57] and not uniformly followed.
[03:49:59] And to some degree, in certain sectors,
[03:50:03] I think we care much more about outcomes
[03:50:07] than about the rules.
[03:50:08] That's obvious in sectors of national security importance.
[03:50:14] So a lot of the rarest famous sector
[03:50:17] have very, very direct and important military applications, we should probably not, even
[03:50:24] if China played completely fairly, one-on-one to be 100% dependent on China for the supplies
[03:50:31] of those key materials.
[03:50:35] And then you kind of have to work further from that.
[03:50:37] Where does the line come about what do you care about, where do you just care about
[03:50:41] the outcome. And where are you going to rely more on arguments around procedural fairness?
[03:50:49] And then I think on the flip side, China itself clearly cared about the outcome, not the procedural
[03:50:56] fairness.
[03:50:57] What would you say the Trump administration across its two terms, and I realize have
[03:51:03] been different in important ways, has gotten right about China? I mean, if Trump has
[03:51:09] been disruptive on how America has thought about anything that has been China, and what
[03:51:13] you think they've gotten wrong in their either China orientation or their China policy.
[03:51:19] There is something a little strange about Trump's first term, because the first term
[03:51:27] 2017-2018, it's like the US political system reacted to the China shock, five to ten years
[03:51:36] after that first China shock happened. So the timing was maybe strange, but a lot of the
[03:51:44] policy direction I would agree was more or less right. I think it was right to broadly
[03:51:52] say that the WTO rules, which were thought to be constraining China, had become a constraint
[03:52:00] on ourselves. China was really good at finding ways of achieving outcomes by living on the
[03:52:07] edge of the rules. I think the targeted first wave of tariffs were actually sort of in sectors
[03:52:16] where it was reasonable, generally speaking, to have tariffs. And you're talking here
[03:52:21] in the first term. Yes. So like in the first term, the tariffs were basically on China.
[03:52:26] And the second term, the tariffs are basically on everyone.
[03:52:29] And I am much more comfortable with putting tariffs on China, particularly now because
[03:52:33] you know, China's a con...
[03:52:37] Trade protectionism only works if you have trade to protect.
[03:52:43] I am not a free marketeer.
[03:52:46] I never have been and I never will be.
[03:52:51] Okay?
[03:52:53] But if you were to actually do trade protectionism, you have to ensure that you have some kind
[03:53:03] of trade to protect.
[03:53:05] This is why as much as I would love low cost and beautifully designed Chinese electric
[03:53:11] vehicles, I understand why America engages in broad tariffs against such things to stop
[03:53:20] temperamentary in the American market so that we have some semblance of an automobile industry.
[03:53:30] The problem is, free market is fucking bullshit. It's not real, right? Obviously, America's never
[03:53:37] abided by that standard. There's no such thing as fairness in capitalism. It doesn't work that way.
[03:53:46] But what's frustrating about this
[03:53:50] Is we don't even fucking have any industry man. We don't have any industry
[03:53:56] We and we cannot because it's a it's at this stage
[03:54:04] Without a command economy without central planning we will never be able to keep up with China
[03:54:10] It will forever remain the the global manufacturing hub of the planet and it will only grow in its power
[03:54:18] and it will do whatever the fuck it wants to as we slowly but surely continue
[03:54:25] experiencing more Gary Indiana style situations all around the country.
[03:54:33] And now China's already moved into the realm of entertainment as well. They're
[03:54:39] gonna start dominating us there too. There's just no way to solve this
[03:54:46] problem without solving capitalism without fixing capitalism as long as
[03:54:51] capitalism remains as long as capital is the domineering force we will never be
[03:54:57] able to compete against China we will never be able to do anything is that
[03:55:02] simple second thought video on China to China is beating the US by every
[03:55:11] symmetric and
[03:55:13] When we say that you know, it's crazy by the way, you know, it's really frustrating about all this
[03:55:18] They never stop yelling at us for being right, but too early
[03:55:26] People never stop yelling
[03:55:28] About the fact that we were just right all along about China
[03:55:32] Now they're coming to that conclusion, but they won't stop. They won't stop punishing us from being right
[03:55:41] They won't stop punishing us for being right, but too early like oh dude, how dare you when I was saying China was on the
[03:55:47] Virgin Collapse and you were telling me no and I yelled at you and said you're a fucking CCP dick writer. You love Mao Zedong
[03:55:54] Well, guess what you were you were right about that. I'm arriving at the conclusion now, but fuck you anyway
[03:55:59] It's like dude. Well, if you think if you recognize that now if you recognize my conclusions
[03:56:04] now
[03:56:06] Then you have to then you have to fucking your dog. I look I know you like collars. Yeah, this shirt is crazy
[03:56:12] He's a yoji. I'm a motor shirt got collars upon collars
[03:56:21] But my point is
[03:56:23] Then listen to my warning now not that you ever will no one ever will everyone's like oh, you're fucking dummy
[03:56:29] He's stupid socialist fuck you but
[03:56:31] but enemy has shifted dramatically
[03:56:35] and become much more export oriented,
[03:56:37] much more of a competitive threat now than it was then.
[03:56:41] I've never understood what to do with these collars,
[03:56:43] by the way,
[03:56:46] because like you got the normal collar here.
[03:56:50] Yeah, the Japanese have gone crazy.
[03:56:52] They got, they put collars on collars.
[03:56:56] You got the normal collar here
[03:56:59] and then you got one additional,
[03:57:01] You have two additional collars here.
[03:57:04] And they got buttons on them as well.
[03:57:05] And I have no idea what the fuck you're supposed to do with it.
[03:57:08] You can double pop it if you want.
[03:57:17] Bro, you got to flip the inner one up.
[03:57:21] I mean, it's not like strong enough.
[03:57:23] It's not hard enough to stay in place.
[03:57:25] You know what I mean?
[03:57:26] It's in the lookbook. I've never seen it. I've never seen the lookbook. Undo the top button, why?
[03:57:38] You only double pop if you went to, you stack them, they're designed to be stacked.
[03:57:51] Yeah, let's continue with this.
[03:57:58] So I think Trump won got that bit right, like Bob Lighthizer, the United States trade representative
[03:58:06] under Trump's first term, was sort of the first step of moving us from the WTO consensus
[03:58:12] to a world of reciprocal interdependence, supply chain vulnerability, supply chain
[03:58:17] and warfare concerns about, like a world where everything is using a more militarized vocabulary.
[03:58:24] The whole world is rooting for Iran. What is it? I've been stunned by the many
[03:58:28] member officials from a wide variety of countries who while hardly favoring Iran are feeling
[03:58:32] much empathy for the Islamic Republic have privately expressed to me a huge sigh of
[03:58:35] relief over Tehran's success in thwarting the US-Israeli aggression.
[03:58:38] Yeah. I mean, it makes total sense. America is a fucking behemoth. America is a fucking
[03:58:54] behemoth. Us receiving a bloody nose in the shit of Hormuz is a good thing for us as
[03:58:59] well. Okay? It's good for us as Americans. If it forces American restraint and it
[03:59:08] It forces us to recalculate how we operate, then it's good.
[03:59:15] An important point by Eli Clifflin and Ian Lustig, the biggest cost of the US's relationship
[03:59:19] is not in dollars but in opportunity costs and path dependency.
[03:59:22] In other words, closing off Americans' freedom of action.
[03:59:30] It's not just good for the rest of the world if we are no longer this like towering
[03:59:34] behemoth that's dominating the rest of the planet in a moment's notice, whenever we fucking
[03:59:40] feel like it, but it's actually good for us in general. It's good for Americans as well.
[03:59:46] Because the current, the current modus operandi for the United States is not beneficial for
[03:59:52] the rest of the world. It's certainly not beneficial for them, but it's not beneficial
[03:59:56] for those who are living in the United States either. You know, we don't get to see any
[04:00:08] of the benefits anyway. Fucking bullshit.
[04:00:19] around economic exchange. Trump one was still pretty unilateral. There was a famous story
[04:00:27] I think in another newspaper where, you know, President Macron asked like, well, maybe we
[04:00:35] should negotiate something together. So they're negotiating phase one, the deal. And President
[04:00:40] Trump was like, no, no, no, no, we've done the tariffs. All the benefits should go
[04:00:44] to us. This has to flow to us. And so there was an element in the first term of unilateralism,
[04:00:53] which obviously becomes unilateralism on steroids over time.
[04:00:59] So maybe before then we get to Trump too, it's worth talking about Biden because, you
[04:01:03] know, there's a lot of democratic criticism of the way Trump talks about China to some
[04:01:07] degree of Trump's tariffs on China, but the Biden team comes in. They largely
[04:01:13] keep the tariffs. In some cases, expand them into new areas. They begin doing more to limit
[04:01:20] the export of what they consider to be strategically important technologies, like advanced chips
[04:01:25] to China. They put on higher tariffs on NEVs, and they do a lot of industrial policy that
[04:01:31] actually looks sort of like the way you're describing Chinese industrial policy. So the
[04:01:35] Inflation Reduction Act is trying to build domestic.
[04:01:38] This is bullshit. No disrespect to Ezra, but this does not hold a fucking candle to Chinese industrial policy.
[04:01:51] That is crazy, okay?
[04:01:55] No, it shows the limitations of capitalism.
[04:01:59] This is 100% a clear cut.
[04:02:05] The monster limitation of liberal capitalism.
[04:02:12] Those motherfuckers move mountains, dude.
[04:02:14] Sometimes literally, like sometimes figuratively,
[04:02:16] but sometimes literally, many times literally.
[04:02:19] They move cities, they move mountains.
[04:02:23] They have five year plans,
[04:02:25] they have growth targets in specific sectors
[04:02:29] and they deploy the flows of capital in that direction.
[04:02:35] Okay
[04:02:40] It is ridiculous
[04:02:52] The idea
[04:02:56] The idea that like, you know the the
[04:02:59] the chips actor, the IRA or build back better, it can hold a candle to that kind of mass
[04:03:07] scale industrial planning is ridiculous. And therein lies the problem. That's why I always
[04:03:15] say like in order to beat China, we want to compete against China and beat China, whatever
[04:03:20] that means, we have to be China.
[04:03:24] know, supply chain for things like solar panels and wind turbines. And now they're more okay
[04:03:30] with it being, you know, in friendly countries too. But there's a lot of bi-American standards
[04:03:38] on all of this. And they begin talking a lot in terms of strategic technological competition.
[04:03:43] AI is a big thing for them. AI competition with China. How do you think about the
[04:03:47] way the Biden administration approached this and both kind of tweaked but didn't upend
[04:03:55] like the Trump won approach.
[04:03:58] It probably in my view at least didn't go far enough.
[04:04:04] It wasn't just clean energy, although that was certainly a big focus.
[04:04:09] It also included semiconductors.
[04:04:11] And in semiconductors at the time the concern was dependence on Taiwan which was vulnerable
[04:04:17] to pressure from China, certainly vulnerable, you know, put the US in a difficult position
[04:04:22] if China were ever to put an embargo or attack Taiwan.
[04:04:28] And at a certain point, the US just made a decision that we did not want China to have
[04:04:34] access to the world's best, certainly not the ability to make the world's best chips.
[04:04:40] Too many risk associated with that.
[04:04:43] I think that was the right decision, but it unambiguously was viewed by China as a directly hostile act
[04:04:49] I think we if someone had done that to us we would have viewed it as a directly hostile act
[04:04:54] So it put us into a world unambiguous world of rivalry and
[04:04:59] Competition and in a position where we don't there is no way I think another part of the problem is like China is too resilient
[04:05:08] And and no matter what we do they just keep winning a lot of people will say oh
[04:05:15] do nothing when when they talk about Xi Jinping it's like those motherfuckers are
[04:05:18] never not they're never doing nothing they're always doing something like
[04:05:23] even with the chips America went to the Netherlands and told them that the
[04:05:32] Netherlands which which had had the technology for the latest lithography
[04:05:37] machines that are necessary for chip's production. Okay, we told the Netherlands
[04:05:44] you can't sell these to China. Okay, well then they went back to the, they went
[04:05:51] back to the drawing board and were able to make it themselves. They did. And while
[04:05:57] we thought we were stopping their productive capabilities, their production
[04:06:02] capabilities by at least a decade, they were able to move the timeline to a
[04:06:06] a year. Yes, the EUV lith...
[04:06:12] Lytograph? Is that how you say it? Like...
[04:06:16] Litography? Is that... I don't know how you're... I don't know how you say it. It's just a fucking machine. The extreme ultraviolet
[04:06:22] lithography. The machines that make the chips.
[04:06:26] Not the latest chips though, no? I... dude, it doesn't matter.
[04:06:34] The fact that they are still like they were able to buy the lower tier lithography machines
[04:06:55] and now they're capable of mass producing it means that the timeline has moved up dramatically.
[04:07:03] I
[04:07:14] Lithography
[04:07:16] Lithography, I don't know how you say it
[04:07:21] Fucking shit machine, man. I'm not smart enough. Okay. I'm not a goddamn nerd
[04:07:33] Yeah, then they write articles about how China built its Manhattan Project arrival to West
[04:07:43] and AI chips.
[04:07:46] Shenzhen team competed a working prototype of a EUV machine in early 2025.
[04:07:51] The lithography machine built by former ASML engineers fills a factory floor, sources say.
[04:07:57] China's EUV machine is still undergoing testing and is not yet produced working chips.
[04:08:02] is targeting 2028 for working chips, but sources say 2030 is more likely.
[04:08:09] UV is still far away, we need to stay humble.
[04:08:30] I mean even this was unforeseeable. Okay? This was unexpected and unforeseeable and they produce consumer-grade RAM please yes they will and then the American government will make it illegal for you to purchase it.
[04:08:46] They'll come to your house and break down your door with masked ICE agents and arrest you for purchasing Chinese goods.
[04:08:57] They already are making RAM.
[04:09:02] And yes, it is much more affordable.
[04:09:05] If there's one thing that China always does, it is exceed their benchmarks, their targets.
[04:09:32] They end up accomplishing those tasks far before people predict them,
[04:09:38] and we consistently underestimate their capabilities.
[04:09:42] It's not going to try to engineer us out of their chip supply chains.
[04:09:46] That's become a national priority.
[04:09:48] And so we are trying to reduce our vulnerabilities to Chinese economic coercion at the same time.
[04:09:54] But it didn't really go far enough in
[04:09:58] in critical minerals where there's plenty of talk about it,
[04:10:04] but there wasn't enough action,
[04:10:06] not enough on active pharmaceutical ingredients
[04:10:10] where either the medicine or the key chemical precursors
[04:10:14] are almost 100% sourced from China.
[04:10:17] So I think it was a step in a necessary direction.
[04:10:20] It was controversial
[04:10:21] because of industrial strategy, industrial policy.
[04:10:24] Yeah, we're number one in copian production.
[04:10:27] China will never catch up on that.
[04:10:28] That's true.
[04:10:30] Yeah, make no mistake.
[04:10:33] If there is a global force in copium production,
[04:10:40] in copious amounts of copium production, it is us.
[04:10:44] Okay, we're number one in copium.
[04:10:46] Long time, the thought was that was something
[04:10:49] other countries did.
[04:10:50] It wasn't something that America did.
[04:10:52] And it wasn't something we're necessarily very good at.
[04:10:54] and in some cases and it's crazy because
[04:10:59] they didn't mass produce copium elsewhere
[04:11:02] and then feed it to the american population in the same way that opium
[04:11:07] uh destroyed the chinese population which by the way
[04:11:13] love them or hate them shouts out the malzadeong they really nipped that
[04:11:16] shit in the bud that was huge
[04:11:19] One of the most successful rehabilitative recovery programs of all time, like historic improvements in that field.
[04:11:33] That was under Mao.
[04:11:37] Meanwhile, yeah, we're doing mass copium distribution, mass facilitation of copium.
[04:11:44] There's a real copium epidemic in America, rare earths and the magnets like active ingredients.
[04:11:58] It means finding ways to incentivize production in sectors where you know you can't compete
[04:12:06] with China on cost.
[04:12:08] So that then brings us to Trump too.
[04:12:11] So how would you rate what they have done and where it has hit the right balance and where it's been off?
[04:12:20] So in general, I
[04:12:22] Have noted on many times that I like Bob Lighthizer's trade policy
[04:12:27] I eat Trump's first term better than I like Donald Trump's trade policy. I eat Trump's second term
[04:12:35] Lighthizer was careful
[04:12:37] to only threaten things that the US economy could sustain.
[04:12:42] So, you know, the tariff level was set at 25%,
[04:12:45] which yeah, people didn't like paying it,
[04:12:47] but you could afford to pay it.
[04:12:48] He didn't cover all of trade.
[04:12:51] So there was always a little more trade
[04:12:53] you could bring into that tariff.
[04:12:55] Trump had a theory of the case in his second term,
[04:12:59] which worked for most of the world,
[04:13:00] but didn't work for China.
[04:13:02] And the theory of the case is,
[04:13:03] well, trades rigged against us.
[04:13:05] We need to raise our tariffs
[04:13:07] And you need to lower your tariffs, lower your barriers to US exports to put trade on a more fair footing.
[04:13:13] You shouldn't, in other words, retaliate for our.
[04:13:17] Yeah, except what are they to buy?
[04:13:22] Like, what is their, is their products that the Chinese population is like vying for that they simply cannot purchase?
[04:13:33] What is the what is the product that America creates that you know regular Chinese society's like I really wish I fucking have my hands on this shit, okay?
[04:13:46] F-35s I guess
[04:13:49] Like what is it we make burger porn and tanks
[04:13:56] Okay, we make guns burger porn tanks
[04:13:58] And when I say tanks, I don't mean like, you know, literal weapons war. I'm talking about the F 350
[04:14:17] That's what I'm talking about
[04:14:19] I
[04:14:24] What could we even sell to half of these goddamn countries, you know what I mean?
[04:14:29] Not even just China, but like what could we say NFTs did that's what we're gonna sell to China NFTs
[04:14:35] gambling
[04:14:36] Our our major growth sector of gambling and pornography
[04:14:44] Why won't China purchase our gambling apps
[04:14:49] Guns, small arms, small arms trafficking.
[04:15:07] Why won't China purchase Smith and Wesson weapons so they can give it to their citizens
[04:15:14] so people can shoot one another like we do?
[04:15:19] Why won't Cambodia purchase F-150s, a fleet?
[04:15:26] Why won't the UK purchase Salmonella chicken?
[04:15:31] Why is nobody purchasing our goods?
[04:15:34] We want to sell them.
[04:15:37] Yeah, fun fact, the US sells weapons to one or more sides in about two-thirds of the
[04:15:43] World's Active Conflicts.
[04:15:48] Yeah, National Cattlemen's Beef Association is mad. Trump is saying that they're going
[04:15:58] to, they're going to import cattle now to allow the American cattle industry to grow
[04:16:07] would supply again to improve the number of cattle that we have.
[04:16:12] National Cattleman's Beef Association says no cow, calf producer in America is asking
[04:16:16] for increased imports, undercutting American farmers and ranchers with inferior product
[04:16:20] from foreign competitors and nothing to create market confidence or encourage rebuilding
[04:16:23] the herd.
[04:16:37] We're also killing live horses. Yeah, I've heard wild horses. Yeah
[04:16:45] We're eradicating the wild horses
[04:16:50] That's on do not show to Navy Hassan Avi heads. What is this eat those on the Shandong the morale of the crew is
[04:16:57] Heavily influenced by the quality of food and drinks
[04:17:01] Well, they're not your average cooks these folks are highly skilled chefs
[04:17:05] Probably the kind you'd find in fancy restaurants.
[04:17:08] They've got the expertise to whip up delicious meals without any Gordon Ramsay-style drama.
[04:17:13] But it's not just about taste.
[04:17:15] The menu is carefully planned to ensure the crew gets the right mix of nutrition and calories.
[04:17:21] They focus on fiber and protein over fat, keeping everyone in top shape.
[04:17:26] And get this, they offer seven meals a day.
[04:17:29] Yep, you heard that right.
[04:17:30] What?
[04:17:31] variety accommodates the crew's different schedules and dietary needs, making sure everyone
[04:17:36] gets what they need.
[04:17:37] Bro, sources on the ground told me that there were some people on USS Lincoln that watched
[04:17:45] this video and that's the reason why they tried to kill themselves.
[04:17:49] Yeah.
[04:17:53] Yeah.
[04:18:00] Sources on the ground. Sources at USS Lincoln are reporting that this video was distributed
[04:18:07] amongst the regular ranks and as soon as they watched it, they tried to jump off the
[04:18:16] top of the ship.
[04:18:22] they need it. And here's the clever part. Spreading out the meal times prevents long
[04:18:27] lines and keeps the kitchen running smoothly. After all, you don't want half the ship waiting
[04:18:33] in line for food at the same time. It's all about efficiency here. One standout dish
[04:18:38] aboard China's aircraft carriers is the Carrier Chili Sauce, known for its robust
[04:18:44] flavor and reported nutritional value. It's a crew favorite, although some find it
[04:18:50] best enjoyed with rice due to its intense heat made from basic ingredients like
[04:18:55] beef mints chili pepper this is why you're so low on the fact meter on the media
[04:19:00] buys chart why because i'm making a joke
[04:19:06] is it legal for americans to join their army
[04:19:10] oh black beans garlic and chicken essence
[04:19:14] it's especially popular among crew members on night shifts
[04:19:17] as it helps stave off fatigue on board there's a convenient supermarket offering a variety of
[04:19:24] everyday did i just see starbucks wait stop on board bro they're eating doritos in their fucking
[04:19:33] in their on their uh aircraft carriers they're still selling doritos in starbucks coffee
[04:19:41] offer a variety of everyday items, personal hygiene products, and food at reasonable prices.
[04:19:55] While the crew gets their meals for free, they can purchase additional snacks or other
[04:20:00] items here if they wish.
[04:20:02] The Shandong features a library stocked with plenty of non-fiction books, offering crew
[04:20:08] members the chance to explore topics of interest during their downtime.
[04:20:13] For instance, there's a book titled The History of the War of Resistance Against America and
[04:20:18] Reinforcement of the Korean Peninsula, focusing on the Korean War.
[04:20:23] In their lead, sailors can also relax in recreational rooms, where they can indulge
[04:20:29] in activities like playing video games, watching TV, or connecting with loved ones on social
[04:20:35] media.
[04:20:36] Off-duty life is relatively independent on-duty hours are characterized by social collaboration on the show so funny
[04:20:45] Art US Navy sailors don't know how to read man
[04:20:52] All right, all right enough with this video what the fuck are we doing man, what are we doing?
[04:20:57] tariffs China retaliated China said this is coercive
[04:21:00] Plus China knew they were gonna be in the crosshairs that you know, she did a good job of getting ready
[04:21:04] He'd spent four years plotting this out
[04:21:06] So China retaliates we counter retaliate China retaliates more we retaliate again, and we pushed tariffs up to 145 percent
[04:21:14] You might think that gives us more leverage. We've completely cut off trade it turned out to be the opposite
[04:21:21] Our economy couldn't sustain a hundred and forty five percent tariffs on pretty much everything coming from China
[04:21:27] So the administration was in a position where they needed to negotiate a rollback in the tariffs
[04:21:33] You know there's a rare earth's component as well, but I try to work China was holding back rare
[04:21:38] It's China's was crippled manufacturing. Yeah, so that was real
[04:21:41] But it's I think even if China had not done that
[04:21:45] Even without the supply chain restrictions the administration knew it needed to roll back the hundred and forty five percent tariffs
[04:21:52] Yeah, yeah, okay. Well, what now libtard one US Army unit is offering four bonus days off to play grant
[04:21:59] They've thought over soldiers who reenlist
[04:22:03] That's right. How about that, dude? How about that? And they get free HRT. They get free fucking TRT.
[04:22:15] Abysmal. Abysmal. American military supremacy is so dead. Yeah, they need to commit to two years
[04:22:21] minimum to get the Grand Theft Auto time off, dude. It's crazy.
[04:22:33] Morale problems what morale problems?
[04:22:40] Yeah, if you want yeah, you get four paid days off if you realize so you can die for Israel sick
[04:22:55] That's awesome
[04:23:03] Yeah, what now dude a bit China doesn't have provisions like that the example that I like to give is that in the
[04:23:11] summer of Trump's first year with a hundred ish plus tariffs all
[04:23:15] The retailers who import artificial Christmas trees which like all come from China think Christmas tree ornaments think think holidays
[04:23:23] Well, those are things that are actually typically imported during the summer
[04:23:27] Now, if you're paying 150% tariff, you're going to have to triple whatever your retail
[04:23:33] price or something crazy.
[04:23:35] And the Christmas tree importers weren't sure, because they're building up inventory ahead
[04:23:39] of a future sale, that American consumers would be willing to pay that higher price.
[04:23:45] So they just stopped importing.
[04:23:47] And when there's a hole in there other places where companies were having to pay
[04:23:51] that price for a part, and that would render their ability to export utterly
[04:23:56] uncompetitive.
[04:23:57] So it was just too broad, too high, too fast. It was disrupting the U.S. economy. That was a mistake.
[04:24:04] And I think Lighthizer, in his first term, got it closer to right. Don't ever escalate to the
[04:24:12] point where you're put on tariffs that you aren't willing to maintain. The other side will realize
[04:24:19] that you are looking for a face-saving way to pull things back. That was, I would say, mistake
[04:24:24] mistake one. Mistake two was the breadth of the tariffs, not targeted reasonably by countries.
[04:24:36] Just everyone got hit with the Liberation Day tariffs, in some cases very, very, very high
[04:24:41] tariffs. That alienated a bunch of countries that themselves were worried about trade with
[04:24:48] China. So it kind of took away the possibility of building a broader coalition against China.
[04:24:54] So that's first problem with these very, very broad tariffs. Second problem with the very,
[04:24:59] very broad tariffs was they ended up being done in kind of irrational to my mind ways.
[04:25:05] We were terrifying at really high levels, Canadian aluminum.
[04:25:11] Canadian aluminum is not that it's this administration cares, but it's made in a
[04:25:15] a kind of greenway, trapped hydro power in Quebec.
[04:25:19] It has been part of our aluminum industry since World War II, you know, when the bombers
[04:25:25] were built with Canadian aluminum, there's no national security threat.
[04:25:28] It is essential to our market.
[04:25:31] The primary aluminum market doesn't clear in the U.S. without Canadian imports, which
[04:25:35] meant that this price is shot up.
[04:25:37] And then the final problem was like, hey, aluminum is electricity distilled, credibly
[04:25:43] energy intensive and electricity intensive. So it is competing with data centers for power.
[04:25:50] And so even with the really high tariffs, this guy's anti-China though, right? Yes,
[04:25:55] but he's also, he's also basically describing or at least recognizing China's rise in global
[04:26:05] prominence. China's rise to power and its impact on the American economy. But they're
[04:26:11] They're at least enlightened liberals who recognize that, recognize the downsides, but
[04:26:18] they can't identify how it happened, I guess.
[04:26:26] Because they're still giving credit to Trump's...
[04:26:30] They're basically giving credit, or he's basically giving credit to Donald Trump recognizing
[04:26:36] the dangers of China before other Americans moved, like before other
[04:26:41] electeds moved in that direction, which I think is silly, because they're also
[04:26:50] refusing to understand why China's rise happened. And if you can't comprehend
[04:26:58] why China's rise happened, if you just simply think, oh well, you know, they
[04:27:02] just one day they just got really good at making shit because we sent our
[04:27:10] manufacturing over there and that's it and there's nothing we can do about it
[04:27:20] then you're never gonna be able to solve the problem and there's a good deal
[04:27:27] of like they're cheating in this conversation as well it's not as bad
[04:27:30] as I thought it would be though. Mark Lynch wrote on foreign affairs, the end of the American
[04:27:39] Middle East, you're sure reporting on this first or looking at the first opening paragraph,
[04:27:43] the American Middle East has finished the regional order that has prevailed since 1991
[04:27:49] has been one that many casualties in the U.S. has really wore with Iran. The American
[04:27:52] and Israeli failure to dislodge the regime in Tehran has proven the bankruptcy of
[04:27:57] decades of sanctions of violence.
[04:28:00] More and more Americans are now coming to terms with this reality, which I really appreciate.
[04:28:06] But what will we do next is what matters most, and I don't think that Americans are going
[04:28:10] to wake up to this reality and then instead change our trajectory, change course.
[04:28:18] I think, I suspect we're just going to double down.
[04:28:22] US 30 year treasuries are raised gains from buyback announcement.
[04:28:25] Scott Besen, who made his billions helping Soros break currencies in the 1990s, should
[04:28:29] recognize what this sort of intervention failure signals.
[04:28:37] So now this is exactly the opposite message we've been getting from Warsh, who says the
[04:28:41] market price is a useful signal and that traders should be playing ball.
[04:28:44] Besen says buybacks can be bigger than the four billion we announced.
[04:28:49] And now he's saying US yields don't reflect underlying fundamentals.
[04:29:00] It has been kind of funny watching so many of these liberals though, who spent a good
[04:29:07] deal of time talking about China's imminent decline, imminent demise, turn around and
[04:29:11] be like, why is China such a fucking behemoth?
[04:29:16] President Trump appears to have re-
[04:29:17] Anyway, let's look at this, uh, picture Michael Cohen now.
[04:29:21] I can tell he's one of his most outspoken critics.
[04:29:24] His name, Michael Cohen.
[04:29:25] You remain, remember, he turned on Trump after working as his political fixer.
[04:29:30] This week, he interviewed the president who suggested that Cohen was forced to
[04:29:34] testify against him.
[04:29:36] Ed O'Keefe is at the White House with the latest on this ad.
[04:29:38] I have to say, I did not have this on my bingo cart.
[04:29:41] They were like the Taylor Swift song.
[04:29:43] We are never, ever, ever, ever, ever getting back together.
[04:29:46] I still, I don't.
[04:29:47] You know what to say.
[04:29:48] But to call another Taylor Swift song, Gail, the bad blood, if you will, between the president
[04:29:53] of his former fixer is legendary, and the two have spent years sparring publicly and in
[04:29:58] court about what Cohen did for Trump back in the day, but they appear to be moving on
[04:30:02] with a radio interview once thought unthinkable.
[04:30:05] You and I have obviously traveled a pretty rocky road together.
[04:30:10] A stunning, unexpected reunion between President Trump and his former fixer and personal
[04:30:15] attorney, Michael Cohen.
[04:30:17] The excerpts of the friendly interview released Thursday night made only passing reference to their turbulent history.
[04:30:23] They weaponized you, they weaponized a lot of people, and I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said, and that's a big thing that you did.
[04:30:34] Cohen began working for Trump in 2006 and once famously said he'd take a bullet for his boss.
[04:30:40] Cohen stayed with Trump through the 2016 election, but went on to serve time in prison for campaign
[04:30:45] finance violations related to payments he arranged.
[04:30:48] This is his maya culpa.
[04:30:53] It turns out he wasn't doing a maya culpa for about working for Trump, but instead was
[04:30:58] doing a maya culpa to Trump.
[04:31:00] So silence adult film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal
[04:31:05] who claimed they'd had sex with Trump.
[04:31:08] has consistently denied those allegations.
[04:31:11] After getting out of prison, Cohen testified before Congress.
[04:31:14] Mr. Trump is a con man.
[04:31:16] Oh!
[04:31:17] He asked me to pay off an adult film star with whom he had an affair and to lie about
[04:31:24] it to his wife, which I did.
[04:31:26] In 2024, he gave similar testimony in the so-called hush money criminal case against
[04:31:31] Trump, recounting how then candidate Trump had promised to reimburse him for those
[04:31:35] payments to Daniels and McDougal.
[04:31:37] was ultimately convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records and is actively appealing.
[04:31:43] Cohen hasn't recanted his testimony, but said he felt pressured by prosecutors.
[04:31:48] After years of sparring with each other in public, they reminisced and appeared to patch
[04:31:52] things up on Thursday.
[04:31:54] Boss, you remember when I was by your side, I literally used to analyze-
[04:31:58] Oh my God.
[04:31:59] Right, you got this.
[04:32:00] Oh my God, it's so fucking pathetic, dude.
[04:32:06] So I think liberals are doubly pathetic as well for like highlighting this dude, revitalizing
[04:32:14] his career, treating him like a hero.
[04:32:17] And just like the dog that he is, he went back barking for daddy.
[04:32:21] Exactly.
[04:32:22] Boss, you might be wondering why on earth is Cohen willing to do this?
[04:32:27] Well, he says he decided to reconcile with Trump quote for myself, for my health, for
[04:32:31] my family.
[04:32:33] He's also resubmitted an application for a pardon, and they've yet to hear back from
[04:32:36] the White House.
[04:32:37] The rest of this interview is set to be released on Sunday, so we'll be waiting to hear if
[04:32:41] Cohen raises it directly with the president.
[04:32:43] Kelly?
[04:32:44] Well, Ed, perhaps these two are in their forgiveness era.
[04:32:46] All right, thank you.
[04:32:48] So I want to go back to 2016 if we can, because you and I have obviously traveled
[04:32:53] a pretty rocky road together.
[04:32:55] Do you remember, sir, when I went on CNN with Breanna Keeler and she told me
[04:33:00] that you were underwater in the poles and I responded with those famous two words says
[04:33:05] who which became some worldwide meme and then they weaponized you like nobody's
[04:33:12] ever been weaponized like few have been well maybe just you and I sir yeah me too
[04:33:17] but I don't consider my mind is it a level that he's doing the desperate for
[04:33:27] pussy voice but instead desperate desperate for pardon voice nobody's
[04:33:31] ever seen before but they weaponized you they weaponized a lot of people and I
[04:33:36] respect the fact that you recanted everything you said and that's a big
[04:33:41] that's a big thing that you did so you may remember you may remember that
[04:33:47] following morning you called me into the office after and then you gave me
[04:33:51] one of those traditional Trump's slaps on the shoulder and he said to me F them
[04:33:56] you're stronger than them. We've got this. Now the funny thing is that CNN never
[04:34:01] apologized. They never retracted anything. And now years later, CNN, MSNOW, and the
[04:34:08] other left-leaning outlets, they're doing the exact same thing, constantly
[04:34:13] talking about you being underwater with favoritability numbers. Mr. President,
[04:34:18] what do you say to these people who keep bringing up polls when you're not
[04:34:23] even running for office again?
[04:34:26] Yeah woke one gave everyone who was remotely critical of trouble microphone
[04:34:33] No matter what they had done
[04:34:37] That's when the Lincoln project was designed that's where the bulwark came from
[04:34:45] If you were in any way shape or form critical of Trump, but in the past were Republican
[04:34:51] MSNBC would be like I will suck your cock on camera on television please let's talk to you and you only and no one else
[04:35:02] And it was crazy because they were not like this was not representative of
[04:35:10] A major constituency at all
[04:35:18] Yeah, they did it with John Bolton
[04:35:21] the
[04:35:23] so fucking dumb
[04:35:28] and I think that we're doing really well in the polls the real polls if I were running today I think I'd win by 25 points I think we'd win by a lot the economy has never been stronger we're doing numbers that nobody's ever seen before you take a look at what's going on with Venezuela it was a one day deal it was actually a
[04:35:47] Who's up Bolton, what do you mean?
[04:35:50] John Bolton is on CNN on a nightly basis, or was?
[04:35:56] The eight minute deal, it was an attack where we took a truly bad person out of the country,
[04:36:02] including the wife, out of the country in our standing trial.
[04:36:06] This was a very evil man, and the country, we are involved very much with the country,
[04:36:11] making out millions and millions of barrels of oil, and that goes right into our Treasury.
[04:36:17] We've done, and the Venezuelan was amazing, and now with Iran, they will never have a
[04:36:21] nuclear weapon.
[04:36:23] We're controlling, essentially controlling, and soon controlling the states.
[04:36:28] We're doing very well with Iran.
[04:36:30] The press doesn't like to say that, although a lot of the press does say it, because
[04:36:33] the Navy's gone, the Air Force is gone, the leadership is gone.
[04:36:38] the problem is so many of the leaders are gone. It's not easy to make a deal. Nobody knows
[04:36:42] who's leading, but I think the public sees what we're doing because Iran can never have
[04:36:46] a nuclear weapon. Very simple. And I think the public sees it and I think they appreciate
[04:36:51] it and they respect it. And I tell them, they'll be a little higher for your job.
[04:36:58] I've done this man's podcast. I went on the Michael home podcast energy cost, but
[04:37:05] There'll be a little bit higher for gasoline.
[04:37:06] And I had it down to a dollar 85 cents a barrel.
[04:37:10] And then I said, but we have to make a journey
[04:37:11] to the Middle East because we can't let a rent
[04:37:13] have a nuclear weapon.
[04:37:15] And that's what happened.
[04:37:16] And we've been very effective.
[04:37:18] We've wiped them out, militarily wiped out.
[04:37:22] Yeah.
[04:37:23] I've been on the Mayakopa podcast.
[04:37:25] This is my Mayakopa.
[04:37:30] Don't be a little loud to me.
[04:37:34] You don't have to do it every time, yes I do.
[04:37:51] Oh baby don't you lie to me.
[04:37:57] I love this song, it's so good.
[04:38:01] Yeah, it's fine by me.
[04:38:03] Yeah, see?
[04:38:09] Some of them went in and they're, they're hugging and kissing.
[04:38:12] Take this nation into the future.
[04:38:14] Really likely that's probably what's going to happen.
[04:38:16] You know, mansion and cinema are two immediate people I can think of that will play the
[04:38:20] role of the spoiler within the Democratic Party.
[04:38:24] And I think Joe Biden needs to do more to whip the Democratic caucus in general.
[04:38:28] Oh my god, I've been saying the same shit for years dude. God, I fucking I hate this
[04:38:40] Nobody listens to me. Oh god
[04:38:48] It's the same shit
[04:38:50] Oh
[04:38:55] My god, why do you guys even fucking watch the stream just watch
[04:38:59] Just rewatch what I said ten years ago, and you'll probably hear the same fucking problems
[04:39:06] The same issues with the Democratic Party the same issues of the Republican Party
[04:39:17] I randomly clicked
[04:39:20] 12 minutes into this fucking podcast from five years ago, and I'm saying the same things that I said yesterday
[04:39:28] Let's do another one. Let's do it on it, and I don't believe he will be able to on on any of it
[04:39:32] I just I want the left of Joe Biden
[04:39:35] Wish they were more aggressive. I am certainly to the left of Joe Biden
[04:39:40] but I
[04:39:42] Just I want him to genuinely follow through on it, and I don't believe he will be able to on on any of it for that matter
[04:39:50] You know, what is what is shame because I'm looking at the first 100 days of this administration
[04:39:57] and I have to give him pretty high marks for what he has actually accomplished.
[04:40:04] But what he's accomplished is you've been saying the same shit for so long that you
[04:40:08] witness Michael Cohen go from pro Trump to anti Trump and now back to pro Trump.
[04:40:13] This is my mayor go by only in a certain number of areas, right?
[04:40:19] So the number of vaccinations that have gone into the arms of Americans, absolutely fantastic.
[04:40:25] Far exceeded.
[04:40:26] And to say, look, you're not going to do this job.
[04:40:29] You don't want to do this job for the prices that we want you to do this job for.
[04:40:32] So we're going to use these guys instead who are desperate.
[04:40:34] Agreed.
[04:40:35] Agreed.
[04:40:36] I'm talking about winning the war.
[04:40:40] Trump being candidates are taking over state government and pushed through these regressive
[04:40:46] voter legislation.
[04:40:50] I like to watch someone mutually going saying with me as a
[04:40:52] country crashes and burns. It just sucks. He's like, no one
[04:40:57] fucking listens, man. No one listens to me. I mean, you guys
[04:41:01] do.
[04:41:05] It's just annoying. It's annoying to be right and to be
[04:41:09] undermined all the time for being right. And then have
[04:41:14] people arrive at our positions but then refuse to listen to our current positions that are
[04:41:24] also right but too early once again.
[04:41:30] Like so many of these, so many of these goddamn liberals constantly yell not at what I'm saying
[04:41:38] but about what they assume I'm saying, and it's so frustrating.
[04:41:49] I feel like you're forgetting that you recently were just
[04:41:52] a part of a huge slew of electoral victory.
[04:41:54] So people who are in your corner law, I know,
[04:41:57] but is it still annoying?
[04:42:02] Now, they have some missiles.
[04:42:04] They have some drones.
[04:42:06] Their capacity to build them is very low right now compared to what it was five
[04:42:10] months ago. It was five months ago. They were not going to mount.
[04:42:13] Now they, it's very hard for them to knock out anything. They're in bad shape.
[04:42:17] They have inflation that's 300% there. Uh, their currency is
[04:42:22] valueless. You know, it's virtually value that military is not being paid.
[04:42:26] And so they're in bad shape, but, uh, the key that the reason I did it,
[04:42:31] and we had no choice and I would have done it again a hundred times,
[04:42:34] They cannot have a nuclear weapon and they won't be having a nuclear weapon
[04:42:38] And why not just then turn around and tell the American people you know the one thing that you may you may feel some
[04:42:44] Frustration going on right now economically the price of gas and so on but why not just turn around and say to the American people
[04:42:50] You know what you get to do you get to go to sleep at night with knowledge
[04:42:55] That there will be no
[04:42:57] Intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile being fired towards the United States because if they because they don't
[04:43:04] have the capability. And they've never developed that capability. That's the only reason why.
[04:43:13] It's just not like their ballistic missile range is, you know, maybe Eastern Europe. That's their
[04:43:23] maximum range. Oh my god. He had it with that's theocracy, sir. You know exactly what they would
[04:43:33] be doing right now. So I do tell that the press doesn't get it out and I say it often.
[04:43:40] I said at the other day, the big rally I had with the police out on Long Island and we
[04:43:45] have these unbelievable rallies, rallies are potentially bigger than ever. I mean, if we
[04:43:50] did rallies as an example, if we did rallies now, nobody have had rallies like this. They're
[04:43:55] potentially I think they're bigger than ever. There's a great spirit for what's
[04:43:59] going on, especially in light of what's happening with all these crazy theories and policies
[04:44:05] and lunatics that are running here, lunatics that would destroy the country. And they're
[04:44:09] being put in the Democrat Party. I think they'll be wiped out in the election because
[04:44:14] the people are too smart to allow that to happen. It's never worked. In a thousand
[04:44:19] years, that stuff has never worked and it's not going to work now, but they're
[04:44:22] not even smart people. You know, you watch some of them, half of them can't even
[04:44:26] think properly so i think we're doing very well we are letting people know
[04:44:30] about that we're letting people know that
[04:44:33] you know it's wonderful to say everything is good but you can't if you
[04:44:36] had a country like that and they're crazy
[04:44:38] if you had a country like that they would absolutely use the nuclear weapon
[04:44:42] without question and so i stopped that
[04:44:44] i stopped it cold with the b2 bombers i also stopped it
[04:44:48] the jcp away is there a single thing that the republicans the reactionary
[04:44:55] right, actually fear that they haven't invented.
[04:45:01] I think about it all the time.
[04:45:04] But like 99% of Republican fears are just completely invented.
[04:45:13] So real shit that they get afraid of.
[04:45:17] It's like, Oh, well, I imagined a scary.
[04:45:20] I imagined a scary future.
[04:45:23] And then that scary future I imagined has scared me so much that we have to take action.
[04:45:30] Literally, Iran developing a nuclear weapon capable of wiping out the United States.
[04:45:38] You just invented that reality. It's just you invented it and now you're scared of your own invention.
[04:45:44] Children are being transgendered. It's not the case. Again, you made that up. Not the case at all.
[04:45:56] It's not a real thing. Oh, they're making the kids gay. That's not how this works. Cuba is going to invade the United States of America,
[04:46:08] States of America or rather has already ideologically invaded the United States of America by way
[04:46:14] of DSA, Karen Bass and Hassan Piker. That's psychotic. Someone said, what? That's literally
[04:46:27] a thing that the State Department said. It's a thing that the State Department claimed.
[04:46:32] And I just don't understand.
[04:46:44] Like, there's enough, there are enough real problems
[04:46:48] in the United States of America.
[04:46:51] But these guys constantly make up new shit to get mad at.
[04:46:57] Your thirst vids doing numbers today.
[04:46:59] What is this?
[04:47:02] I thought I looked so fat here.
[04:47:07] Like I was so, in my mind I thought I looked so fat here, but I looked so brawly.
[04:47:13] I don't look like this anymore.
[04:47:15] Go to your shoulders.
[04:47:16] What?
[04:47:17] Go to your shoulders.
[04:47:18] Okay.
[04:47:19] Oh, it's cold.
[04:47:20] 56 is cold.
[04:47:21] You weren't lying.
[04:47:22] Yeah, it's cold.
[04:47:23] It makes your shoes hurt a lot.
[04:47:24] Oh.
[04:47:25] I literally looked like this.
[04:47:26] I looked like this.
[04:47:27] I looked like this.
[04:47:28] I looked like this.
[04:47:29] I looked like this.
[04:47:30] I literally thought I don't look like this anymore. I'll admit but I look I thought it looks so fat
[04:47:37] In my mind I was like I look so I look the fattest anyone's ever looked
[04:48:00] Oh, too nice.
[04:48:02] Oh.
[04:48:03] So you're fat now, less fat?
[04:48:04] Yeah.
[04:48:06] What'd you eat today?
[04:48:09] Chicken.
[04:48:11] Just chicken, huh?
[04:48:12] Just chicken.
[04:48:13] What does it sound like, chat?
[04:48:14] No rice.
[04:48:15] Everyone close your eyes right now.
[04:48:17] A little bit of chicken.
[04:48:19] You're fucked.
[04:48:20] Salad.
[04:48:23] Well, why is this shit?
[04:48:25] It's getting colder.
[04:48:26] No, it's not.
[04:48:28] It feels like it is. It feels like it's getting colder.
[04:48:33] Whoa!
[04:48:34] Oh, stop!
[04:48:36] You're a stone, dude!
[04:48:38] When did I get out?
[04:48:40] How'd you go out?
[04:48:41] I can't believe it.
[04:48:42] What if I say something?
[04:48:43] Oh, fuck me.
[04:48:44] Oh, we fucked.
[04:48:46] Wim Hof. Wim Hof, Stada.
[04:48:48] It's fucking gross.
[04:48:50] You're fucking trolling yourself.
[04:48:55] It's cold.
[04:48:56] Hands in there
[04:49:26] Are you ever gonna swim a Bradley again?
[04:49:28] No.
[04:49:30] No, I'm kidding. Maybe. I don't know.
[04:49:34] Why are you moaning? It's an ice bath, Chad!
[04:49:40] Yeah, look at that side profile, dude. That's crazy.
[04:49:44] Your boy was fucking shredded.
[04:49:47] Your boy was fucking peeled.
[04:49:52] Okay?
[04:49:54] I was.
[04:49:56] I don't look like that no more. I was Bradley feeling about Trump now. Not great. He hates me
[04:50:03] I'm pretty sure he hates Trump. It's cold. Bradley can I get a shirt too?
[04:50:17] Like an armadillo. Oh dude look I have fucking goosebumps.
[04:50:26] There it is. I think the bigger thing that I did today was at the cold plunge.
[04:50:32] It's the fact that I took my shirt off on my own stream on cameras.
[04:50:36] It's the first time I've done that.
[04:50:44] Now you just sit at home with your Dr. Peppers and you chud out on Twitter through.
[04:50:49] You got a thick butt, not gonna lie.
[04:50:56] You got severe body dysmorphia of my guys almost is always both sad and funny
[04:51:01] Bro, you guys don't understand how like this was my peak. I
[04:51:06] Was in peak physical tip-top shape and in my mind. I was like I'm such a I'm obese like I thought
[04:51:13] This was a huge deal for me. I was like, I'm taking my shirt off. I
[04:51:21] Thought I was like morbidly obese here like this was a this was a moment of
[04:51:26] of great courage for me.
[04:51:28] You understand?
[04:51:29] Meanwhile, it's just because of this,
[04:51:31] like a little bit of fat here, a little bit of...
[04:51:35] Scott Hannity's wife is watching, be careful.
[04:51:48] Take it off right now, fuck no.
[04:51:50] This is my may a copa. Always worse. What is this?
[04:51:58] This has gotten ridiculous. They're hate. Oh God. I have a shmoly.
[04:52:06] Every news headline now is like blueberries would kill you. Measles back. Measles back.
[04:52:10] Gas costs $6. Gwyneth Paltrow was selling a hydro and technology. You're being watched.
[04:52:15] Three billion more to Israel. Like I don't know. Did we do it? Did we make America
[04:52:19] great again? I did all of that by the way. I am responsible for all of those things just
[04:52:27] so you guys remember.
[04:52:30] That was the Obama deal that was such a disaster that he made years ago. Had that deal, had
[04:52:35] I not terminated that deal, Iran would have a nuclear weapon. And they would have used
[04:52:39] it very quickly. They would have wiped out Israel. They would have wiped out the Middle
[04:52:43] East. And you saw that because when this thing started, surprisingly to everybody,
[04:52:48] started shooting missiles at sort of semi-neutral countries. They were going after Saudi Arabia,
[04:52:54] Qatar, they were going after UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, and nobody really knew they were so involved.
[04:53:02] And they started hitting everybody. They had a nuclear weapon that would have used it on everybody.
[04:53:07] And look, there would be no Israel if there was not a Donald Trump president.
[04:53:13] I think there'd be no Saudi Arabia either.
[04:53:15] Right now, I believe the Middle East would have been entirely wiped out, but Israel definitely would have been wiped out
[04:53:21] There's no quite they would be they tell me that there would be no Israel if there was no Donald Trump
[04:53:26] You know what surprised me was how did they end up with a thousand pounds of?
[04:53:33] 60% enriched uranium when allegedly whether was under Biden was yeah, you're talking to the guy on the phone
[04:53:39] You literally worked with him
[04:53:41] You work with them at the time. That's how Iran got the 60%
[04:53:47] God's again, you know how we said like 99% of conservative grievances are just like made up is like shit that they invented and
[04:53:56] Then got scared of their own invention
[04:54:00] This is the other side of the equation where they always talk about like real problems they caused and then go how did that happen I
[04:54:09] I don't know man you were there you literally were there when it happened
[04:54:19] You were fucking in the room brother God he wants that part in so bad
[04:54:26] He wants that part in so goddamn bad. It's crazy
[04:54:31] There's under Obama when there was an every president
[04:54:34] But how did they end up with literally 1,000 pounds of nuclear grade?
[04:54:39] Well, it seemed to be made nuclear grade enriched uranium.
[04:54:44] So when we hit them with the B2 bombers, which was an amazing attack, amazing, deep into
[04:54:50] the moon with no moon, with no light, no nothing.
[04:54:52] And every bomb hit its mark and wiped their whole nuclear thing out.
[04:54:56] And it was in fact obliterated.
[04:54:59] But when we did that, people had no idea what to expect.
[04:55:06] No idea.
[04:55:07] You know, you're going in there, you're going into a very, very dangerous place for these
[04:55:10] incredible machines.
[04:55:12] And the job they did, the job those machines and those pilots did was really amazing.
[04:55:18] But Obama allowed that to happen.
[04:55:22] Biden allowed that to happen.
[04:55:24] Other presidents allowed that to happen.
[04:55:26] should have been done. This has been going on for 50 years and this should have been 47,
[04:55:31] but we talk about it for three or four years. It's actually the numbers 51 years, but we
[04:55:36] say 47 because that seems to be the standard number that everyone uses, but this was going
[04:55:40] on for 50, actually 51 years now. And it should have been taken care of by other presidents
[04:55:46] or other countries.
[04:55:49] It's kind of funny that this interview is the exact same interview that he has conducted
[04:55:55] a million times over but obviously it's significant for michael cohen is is
[04:56:00] vast
[04:56:02] because this is uh... his only way of of receiving a pardon
[04:56:08] i guess i can you in his shoes you do the same thing on a
[04:56:15] There are Laura Loomers everywhere for eyes to see how do multiple people look like this?
[04:56:26] Wait what the fuck?
[04:56:29] Dude what is up with MAGA bro?
[04:56:33] Why do they look like that?
[04:56:35] It's just so strange.
[04:56:42] What is happening?
[04:56:44] They all look like Laura Loomer variants.
[04:56:52] Is this Laura Loomer?
[04:56:55] There's Larry Loomer.
[04:57:07] BAM plastic surgery? I just don't know why this happens.
[04:57:11] All right, let's move on. We got to do the Natalie Harps thing again, because it's not
[04:57:19] just lip-slop, but I'm also invested because she is cuckoo for cuckoo puffs. What is this
[04:57:28] Florida drama stop gaslight in me, Florida, Democrat Senate nominee and party chair of
[04:57:31] heated call over socialism? Oh my God, whatever. I stand Angie Nixon. I stand with her with
[04:57:45] communications between President Trump and one of his closest aides now raising questions
[04:57:50] about the potential national. Oh yeah, I already posted this is my blast off me, but here's
[04:57:55] Natalie harp running after Trump's golf cart in 2023. She also sent a she writes letters to Trump.
[04:58:06] She writes letters to Trump. We're going to see one of those insane letters. Okay. She
[04:58:11] she writes like these long ass letters to Trump and she's like you are my light.
[04:58:15] You are my everything. You're my alpha. You're my Omega. She's smiling and she's chasing after
[04:58:20] this fucking golf cart by the way and what's wild to me is she wrote a letter
[04:58:27] after this as well she said I'm so sorry I embarrassed you by running after the
[04:58:33] golf cart it's like girl get on a golf cart why are you chasing him
[04:58:42] it's so crazy security ramifications letters published info for the first
[04:58:49] First time by the Daily Beast shows Stafford Natalie Harp writing to the president in 2023,
[04:58:55] and I'm quoting now, you are all that matters to me," end quote.
[04:58:59] And also this, I don't want to ever let you down, end quote.
[04:59:03] She also reportedly tells president she is quote, unworthy of him.
[04:59:08] CNN has not independently confirmed that Harp wrote or sent the letters to the president,
[04:59:14] but the contents are prompting concerns about the broader implications of the very
[04:59:18] close relationship between Harp and the president, viewed by some in the White House as a gatekeeper
[04:59:25] of President Trump and the most powerful man in the world. Let's go live right now to see
[04:59:29] an in White House correspondent, Elena Trin. She's working the story for us. What more can you
[04:59:34] tell us, Elena, about these letters and how the Trump administration is responding?
[04:59:40] Yeah, look, Walf. I mean, we've heard some details of some of these, you know, experts
[04:59:44] that have been reported by the New York Times and other outlets. But I think what's
[04:59:47] interesting about these is that we are seeing them in full for the first time I
[04:59:51] should note they are from 2023 and they're of course very personal I will
[04:59:56] read you some more of the excerpts from these letters that were published in
[05:00:00] the same bold reads quote I have to be human printer I could take time to enjoy
[05:00:05] good conversation and still get all my work done at the end of the day in
[05:00:08] fact I even had time to take long morning and evening walks to enjoy
[05:00:12] each sunrise and sunset though I did forget to eat and sleep another
[05:00:16] reads please when I fail will you tell me you have the absolute right to cuss me out if need be
[05:00:22] when I deserve it because no oh my god bro
[05:00:28] okay okay am I crazy or does she actually want to fuck him like I know that Trump doesn't have
[05:00:35] sex but like actually I don't even like she is like you are my everything
[05:00:42] I think she straight up thinks Trump is like hot as well as everything else like
[05:00:52] This might be
[05:00:54] This might straight up be like the the the most cultish I've ever seen someone behave around Trump
[05:01:01] No one knows or cares about me more to modify a classic it goes on to say
[05:01:06] I could not have parted with you to anyone less worthy and I will add it is I who is
[05:01:11] unworthy. So clearly very personal in these letters and I think what's important,
[05:01:16] some important context to note here, Wolf, is just how deep the connection
[05:01:21] between Natalie Harp and the president is. I'd remind our viewers that she has
[05:01:25] credited the president with saving her life. She has said in the past that she
[05:01:29] had suffered from bone cancer and that she believes that it was the
[05:01:33] president's 2018 legislation that he had signed that she credits with
[05:01:37] allowing her to receive experimental treatments. We don't know what
[05:01:40] those treatments are. She's never said what they are. But I think that gives you some insight
[05:01:44] into why she feels such total loyalty toward the president. Now, I will say the White House
[05:01:50] said in a statement earlier this week, this is from their spokesman, Davis Ingle, he
[05:01:54] said, quote, that Natalie Harp is, quote, one of the most loyal and hardest working
[05:01:58] aides on President Trump's team. I should note that was from Tuesday. We have reached
[05:02:02] out to the White House again for additional comment on these letters being published
[05:02:06] in full. But again, a very important, I think, relationship that we're really seeing come
[05:02:12] to light more so this week, ever since Senator John Offsoff, a Democrat, had made comments
[05:02:17] about Harp and how she travels with the president often. That spurred a lot of reaction
[05:02:22] from the White House, some again.
[05:02:24] I just don't understand how, like, I mean, I guess it goes to show this shows how
[05:02:30] narcissistic Trump is as well because like I feel like anyone with any fraction of
[05:02:37] power just like anyone in general but even like a like a bank teller if they
[05:02:42] had a subordinate behave this way towards them they'd be like this is too
[05:02:46] much please get the fuck away from me you're psychotic
[05:02:51] I
[05:03:00] Like this is beyond sycophantic this is an expression of of cult like admiration
[05:03:09] I feel like it's in your best interest to say the fuck away from people like this
[05:03:13] I don't believe it.
[05:03:20] Pointing out how loyal and hardworking she is, some of them that were far more aggressive
[05:03:24] and sharp in their defense of harp.
[05:03:27] And one thing I've actually picked up, well, some of my conversations with people here
[05:03:31] at the White House this week is that some of those more aggressive post-defending harp
[05:03:36] actually had the adverse effect of drawing more attention to this relationship and dragging
[05:03:41] the story out I think into the public view. Yeah I mean this literally became a major
[05:03:46] incident because of the John Osloff moment. Because like I had read a little bit about Natalie Harp.
[05:03:52] There was like some revelations about her being kind of weird. I remember because she is like
[05:03:58] somewhat eye-catching. She's always like creepily smiling behind every, because I remember watching
[05:04:03] that human printer video from when they're reacting live reacting to Kamala Harris.
[05:04:11] And like I remember her always being in the background
[05:04:17] Like it's she wasn't like an unknown entity
[05:04:20] but
[05:04:22] The John Assoff moment absolutely blew the shit up because of the
[05:04:27] Insane reaction to it where it was like whoa hold on how dare you say she's a psychopath
[05:04:36] This would have come this wouldn't have come to light if Ossoff hadn't brought it up
[05:04:40] And it is enough it is in fact a matter of public concern with the cognitive declining president
[05:04:46] The most proud question on earth is constantly followed around by someone who is like a political
[05:04:50] Scientologists and has made it their sole purpose to affirm and cocoon the president in his delusions
[05:04:54] Also, the most damaging leaks are now coming from the White House
[05:04:58] What you see is Trump's people on the inside taking this opportunity to attack Natalie Harp. He's right
[05:05:03] Pedro Gonzalez is right
[05:05:05] Like the only reason why we're getting this level of insight into Natalie harps madness is because other people in Trump's orbit are
[05:05:16] Sick and tired of her shit
[05:05:19] It's clear that they're like oh finally
[05:05:22] In a bigger way, and so I think anything else on her brother. Yeah, he's a Sandinista
[05:05:27] Kind of tried to move away from that and I think likely we're gonna continue to see kind of this one statement
[05:05:32] that's been circulating, be the word
[05:05:35] from the White House for now.
[05:05:37] All right, Elena Trina reporting for us.
[05:05:38] Elena, thank you very, very much, Pamela.
[05:05:41] All right, join us now in the situation room
[05:05:43] is Maggie Haberman.
[05:05:45] She's a White House correspondent for The New York Times.
[05:05:47] And the co-author of the best-selling book,
[05:05:50] Regime Change Inside the Imperial Presidency
[05:05:52] of Donald Trump with Donna Swann.
[05:05:55] Maggie, it's so great to have you on the show.
[05:05:58] Regime Change introduced us to Natalie Hart.
[05:06:02] For a lot of people it was the very first time
[05:06:05] they learned about her.
[05:06:06] So remind our viewers about her power
[05:06:08] in President Trump's White House
[05:06:10] and what the details from these letters demonstrate to you.
[05:06:14] So one of the things that Jonathan and I reported
[05:06:16] in the book was, yes, Natalie Harp,
[05:06:19] it was so devotional to him
[05:06:20] that she would write these letters.
[05:06:23] We had looked at the letters, we'd obtained them.
[05:06:26] They had and reviewed them.
[05:06:28] These were in 2023, as Elena said,
[05:06:31] but she was going into the White House with him,
[05:06:33] and he would tell people in the four years out of power,
[05:06:36] three, some odd that she worked for him,
[05:06:38] that she was the only person among his staff
[05:06:41] who loved him as much as his wife and children.
[05:06:43] And he would say, all of the rest of you
[05:06:45] will go off and make money, she will never leave me.
[05:06:48] And so that tells you about how much he values loyalty.
[05:06:52] It tells you how much that he values somebody who,
[05:06:55] he will be a constant supplier of good news.
[05:06:57] There is a reason that the human printer,
[05:06:59] Nickname that she refers to in her own letter that Elena just read that was coined by oh my god
[05:07:05] We're so back to resistance liberalism one moment of lips lob and jay mershawn is already linking me fucking Seth
[05:07:13] Abramson posts dude
[05:07:15] Feed note at approximately 9 p.m. Eastern tonight some of y'all are too young
[05:07:20] It's very clear that you weren't here during resistance liberalism in 2016 because I would clown on Seth Abramson all the time
[05:07:26] He is like a classic character from resist the hashtag resistance liberalism from the first Trump term
[05:07:34] Oh my god, we did one we did one fucking lip-slop story and Jay Mershawn is like dude look at this
[05:07:44] Yeah, Jeff T. Drake. Where's Jeff T. Drake?
[05:07:51] There were a couple of these guys
[05:07:53] Oh my god, is Rachel Maddow back too?
[05:08:00] This will be a very hard report to read, so it comes with a warning. If you're in anything like an emotionally fragile state, please do not read it.
[05:08:07] Yeah, Russia Gators are back, baby. I fucking love these guys.
[05:08:12] People working for the president because Natalie Harp has been a controversial figure inside his world for a while.
[05:08:18] a while and I understand the White House is upset now about focus on her but you know
[05:08:22] this is coming in part because of people around the president have been concerned including
[05:08:28] the Secret Service during those four years out of office but she does fill a role that
[05:08:32] he wants. She handles a lot of his social media. She is a channel by which outsiders
[05:08:37] can bypass existing systems to get to him and vice versa where he can reach out to
[05:08:41] other people that does include in some cases foreign leaders. That's the role she serves.
[05:08:47] Our colleague Aaron Burnett interviewed Natalie Harps, a strange brother, earlier this week
[05:08:54] and asked for a...
[05:08:55] I just feel like she's so insane that she does not have any capability of manipulating
[05:09:00] Trump.
[05:09:03] I guess she could filter, and probably does filter, what information Trump sees.
[05:09:10] But like, I think it's a relationship where like, she is the abuse victim and not
[05:09:15] Trump.
[05:09:16] Even though Trump is obviously the one experiencing cognitive decline, so who knows.
[05:09:22] The view of some of you reporting for-
[05:09:24] Anyway, on that note, I gotta go.
[05:09:26] All right?
[05:09:27] What do you think it is?
[05:09:29] On that note, I have to leave you guys early today because I have the show.
[05:09:34] I have to go and do a live show in San Francisco tour.fear.com.
[05:09:43] I will not be live tomorrow because we have to shoot the podcast
[05:09:48] So I will be back on Sunday from Portland
[05:09:53] From Austin's
[05:09:56] Dome Isile I
[05:09:58] Know it's only 4 p.m. But I my show is starting. I
[05:10:04] Have to go film the fucking we what time is it at 7? Yeah, but we have to be there early
[05:10:10] We have to do a run-through. We have to be there early
[05:10:16] But in any case
[05:10:20] Wait megafaunix is not even there what the fuck I mean I'm in your hood megafaunix and you're not even showing up
[05:10:28] What the fuck am I washed?
[05:10:31] It's over can we watch the show online anywhere. No, it will not be recorded. It will not be taped
[05:10:38] It's a it's a secret
[05:10:40] I have a personal training session bitch. You literally aren't showing up
[05:10:46] Because you have a personal training session. That's insane. Oh
[05:10:50] My god, you are dead to me motherfucker. You are I am taking away
[05:10:55] I am taking away your top chatter static. I'm taking away your VIP right now. I just on VIP you I
[05:11:02] Just on VIP you
[05:11:04] That's crazy on a Friday afternoon. I've revoked it. I revoked it. Yep. Yep is gone. See
[05:11:16] Yeah
[05:11:19] Yeah, you can't even spam it now, can you yeah
[05:11:23] Yeah, megafaunix losses VIP on this day a 21 a day that will be remembered
[05:11:30] permanently
[05:11:31] unbelievable
[05:11:33] unbelievable for a personal training session you could have fucking had done
[05:11:39] at any other time that's crazy yeah you deserve that anyway love you guys and I
[05:11:47] will see you tomorrow okay or Sunday all right bye bye
[05:12:03] I'll sell people, hey
[05:12:09] Sonny Los Angeles, California says her son
[05:12:17] Stunlock to the, stunlock to the top, it's just begun
[05:12:24] Cause there is again a sun is streaming, a sun is streaming
[05:12:34] There is again a sun is streaming, a sun is streaming
[05:12:46] Reave you in a Chinese train, town kind of place
[05:12:54] Son in a sminch and her love's giving grinnings grace
[05:13:02] Zoram winning and YC walked to back with the force
[05:13:10] The Rogan of the left to me, a dumb himbo, still on course.
[05:13:19] The Charlie Kirk assassination, the fear and online show.
[05:13:26] Eight full fucking years of this, and plenty more to go.
[05:13:32] Doing fun stuff tomorrow, throw PBS up on the screen A man-made whore reaction brought
[05:13:45] to you by this life's dream Cause there he is again, a son is streaming
[05:13:57] The sun is streaming, then there he is again
[05:14:04] The sun is streaming, the sun is streaming
[05:14:12] Cacked out of the DNC, I row and march the goat
[05:14:18] Committing the propaganda, the shop down people's throats
[05:14:24] CBS Israeli news, a coup, a regime falls
[05:14:32] A full blown fascist takeover and still the duty calls
[05:14:40] Total radicalization coming out to sea
[05:14:48] The system will always fail, it's up to you and me.
[05:14:56] All these daily streams, whether short or whether long,
[05:15:04] have helped millions of people.