5/14/26: Trump Glazes Xi At China Summit, Fox News Shocked By China Tech, China Plans Arms Sales To Iran

This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. Good morning everybody, happy Thursday. I have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have for someone? Indeed we do. We've got breaking news this morning on Trump's big trip to China. We've got statements from both him and President Xi, the competing readouts, what we can read into, what, if anything, is coming out of this meeting. We're also going to take a look at what it all means for the war in Iran, which obviously a very significant topic there as well. Another key inflation rating came in very hot as signs of trouble in the economy continue to mount. American test scores of American children at the third grade level have significantly fallen over the past decade, very troubling trend. We'll take a look at what is going on there. Maha is in shambles after Trump makes a corrupt deal with Big Tobacco that I'm kind of low key on the side of Big Tobacco on this one, I think, we're all on the tobacco side. We'll explain. For this one. Yeah, and it was very corrupt and disgusting. The way it was done. It was a good outcome, bad way that it went down, but it is revealed. What you were saying about Maha is the most important thing is Maha has just taken L after L. Yeah, completely irrelevant at this point. And we've got a great guest on to talk about AI, who is a former aide to AOC and has really made developing some sort of a new AI consensus, a major part of his thinking. And we're going to get him to react to this clip of Tucker Carlson versus Kevin O'Leary on data centers that you guys are going to really enjoy it. At least I really enjoyed it. Certainly something from Mr. Wonderful. Thank you to everybody for subscribing to the show, BreakingPoints.com. If you're able to support us, if you're listening or listening to this on a podcast, please share an episode with friend and please hit the subscribe button on YouTube, if that's who you are watching this. Let's go ahead and start, as you said, with President Trump's arrival in China. So a lot of this happened overnight while we were asleep, so we're reacting to what we have so far. They're actually sitting down at dinner. And if anything comes from that, we will bring some of that to you. So here is Trump's first meeting with President Xi in the hall of the people in China, where he gives him just a real tongue bath. I think it's no other way to describe it. It's proper glazing here. A true glazing here from Trump to President Xi. Let's take a listen. You and I have known each other now for a long time. In fact, the longest relationship of our two countries that any president and president has had, and that's to me an honor. We've had a fantastic relationship. We've gotten along when there were difficulties. We worked it out. I would call you and you would call me. And whenever we had a problem, people don't know. Whenever we had a problem, we worked it out very quickly. We're going to have a fantastic future together. Such respect for China, the job you've done. You're a great leader. I say it to everybody. You're a great leader. Sometimes people don't like me saying it, but I say it anyway because it's true. I only say the truth. And I just want to say, on behalf of all of the great delegation that we have, we have the greatest businessman, the biggest, and I guess the best in the world. We have amazing people, and they're all with me. Every single one of them. We asked the top 30 in the world, every single one of them said yes. And I didn't want the second or the third in the company. I wanted only the top. And they're here today to pay respects to you and to China. And they look forward to trade and doing business. And it's going to be totally reciprocal on our behalf. Trump's opening statement there, a key theme of the show yesterday with Professor Pape and with Andy Brown over at SEMIFOR was his wanting a deal. That's what a lot of this is about. Now, so far from the readouts, we haven't gotten anything very specific, but it's not an accident to have Jensen Wong to have Elon Musk to have the CEO of Goldman, the CEO of Citi, the CEO of Cargill, all these people that are there. This is a trade mission. This is a 19th century trade mission. The oligarchs and the capitalists accompany the monarchs along to experience and to plunder the riches of the Orient. That's really, except we're probably the ones getting plundered in this scenario. So that's, I mean, it's pretty clear. Trump needs this to go smoothly. And more importantly, he needs some sort of economic win. Now, usually the way that this would work in a traditional administration is that for months leading up to this, American envoys would be in China and they'd be working out these memorandums of understanding and then Trump and Xi go to the Forbidden City and they shake hands and they sign a piece of paper. That's not how this president operates. A lot of this is actually gonna be discussed face to face, vague, you know, oh, China has agreed to invest $9,000,000 trillion into our economy. So it is a little bit of a wild card, but so far the obsequiousness and the level of respect that Trump is offering to Xi, this is, it's not just negotiation. Like he really does need a lot from him. He needs him to save his economic skin. He wants to stock market and all these other things to continue to go up. And it's also becoming clear they really need them on China. And our sorry, on Iran is that there are multiple statements now from the Secretary of State and Donald Trump about how Iran, while they claim was not gonna be a significant part of this, it absolutely is. So 100% because we're screwed in Iran and we're hoping that China's gonna bail us out and they're not going to, by the way. And so so far, what you can say about this trip is there hasn't been much that came out of it. China issued a warning over Taiwan. We're gonna show you in a little bit. Trump was asked a question about Taiwan, didn't even respond. You've got dueling readouts here. It can actually put A0C, it looks like AOC. A0C up on the screen, this is the White House's readout, at least the sort of key details discussed, ways to enhance economic cooperation, expanding market access for US businesses. This is gonna be the best basically that Trump is able to get out of it, which is why he brought all of these oligarchs along with him. So it's, oh, Elon gets a deal and Jen Sen Wang gets a deal and Tim Apple gets a deal, et cetera. Discussed increasing Chinese purchases of US agricultural goods, if that happens, that would be very important. We've had those agreements before though, where China's just like, yeah, we're actually not gonna follow through on that. Ending the flow of fentanyl precursors, again, this is something that has long been negotiated, to agreed the Strait of Hormuz must remain open. Now, that is very interesting language, because according to the Iranians, they say, hey, it is open, from our perspective, you just have to follow our procedure. So the fact that language is left very vague does not mean there's an actual meaning of the minds over the Strait of Hormuz. She made clear China's opposition to the militarization of the Strait and a toll. Xi expressed interest in purchasing more US oil and both agreed Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. No mention, you note there, of Taiwan. Nick Schifrin, who's a foreign affairs and defense correspondent for NewsHour, pointed out some of the differences between US and China's readouts. So China's readout does include a stark warning over Taiwan, as I just mentioned, US readout doesn't mention Taiwan whatsoever, emphasizes business, saying China will buy more agricultural products and the two sides discussed ways to enhance economic cooperation, mentions cooperation over fentanyl and says she made clear China's opposition to the militarization of the Strait. Those were not the things that were emphasized in the Chinese readout, but the most key difference here is on Taiwan, where Xi really wanted to push the US on our position with regards to defending, potentially defending Taiwan and arming Taiwan, wanted us to dial that back. He's in a position of strength right now. We are in incredible position of weakness, thanks to Donald Trump and especially thanks to his foolish war with Iran. So the best Trump could do is just not say anything about it whatsoever, but bottom line thus far is because of the weak position that we come in with, there doesn't appear to be a lot that is going to come out of this. And it's also worth remembering, this meeting was supposed to happen a while back and it got postponed because of the disastrous war in Iran. I think Trump originally thought the war with Iran would be over in a couple of days. He could come flying into Beijing saying, look, we did this with Venezuela, we did with Iran, yeah, we're great conquerors, we have all these natural resources now on our side, we can do what we want around the globe. Instead, he's having to come in with his tail between his legs, basically humiliated, and with the whole world having seen that the cupboards bear, having seen the wizard behind the curtain because we do not have the ability to protect power that most of the world thought that we did and have been completely checkmated with regards to Iran. Right, and it's not just us saying this, it's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well, but let's also take a very close listen to something that was put out by Xi Jinping from his official translation, a warning about the Thucydides trap, let's take a listen. The whole world is watching our meeting. Currently, transformation not seen in a century is accelerating across the globe and the international situation is fluid and turbulent. The world has come to a new crossroads. Can China and the United States overcome the Thucydides trap and create a new paradigm of major country relations? Can we meet global challenges together and provide more stability for the world? Trump's like, oh, yes. Trump's nodding, he said, there is the best spot, oh yes. Yes, the Thucydides trap, I remember reading about that. I thought deeply about this topic. For those of you who don't know, Thucydides trap, I think we had a whole unit on it back in graduate school. It's Graham Allison, it stems back to the war between Athens and Sparta and the idea was that Athens was like the rise, sorry, Athens was the established commercial power and Sparta, the rising war state and that eventually culminated in a war which weakened both powers and that's the trap. The trap, the idea that war was inevitable between the two states and that made it so that a war that was actually bad for both powers ended up becoming the trap itself. This has actually long kind of been part of Chinese strategic thinking and something they emphasize a lot. I also remember this, the Chinese are the master, not a double speak per se, but when they say things like, we oppose militarization of the Straits of Hormuz. There's two military powers in the Straits of Hormuz, there's a blockade of the Straits of Hormuz and Iran. So you may read that as, oh, well they oppose Iranian, they're like, no, no, no, no, that's not what we said. What we said is we oppose militarization in the Straits of Hormuz. They also, they love this language where they'll call it like mutual respect. Well, mutual respect means we don't tell you what to do, you don't tell us what to do. It's not as relevant now under the Trump administration, nobody's finger wagging over human rights in China. That's like very 1990s coded. But these days, effectively what it means is they'll say things like, well, you need to have mutual respect in spheres of influence. Well, what does that mean? It's like, well, sphere of influence includes the whole South China Sea, right? And so like that means an acceptance of the Nine Dash Line or South Korea and Japan, like they're, in the same way when we'll say things about the Donro doctrine or something like that, they have their own policy, right? So you just have to read between the lines. I actually thought the most unambiguous red lines came from the Chinese embassy. Let's put A3 up here on the screen. This was released ahead of Trump's visit from the US, or the Chinese embassy here in the United States and they put out this graphic. The four red lines in China-US relations, they must not be a challenge. Number one, the Taiwan question. Now remember, when they say the Taiwan question, what they mean is that their reunification is the policy, the actual one China policy. Number two, democracy and human rights, which means don't tell us what to do with Uyghurs, with Hong Kong or anything else. That's just how it is, keep your mouth shut. Number three, paths and political systems. So I asked a friend, effectively, and he's like a Chinese US kind of analyst, and what he said is that paths and political systems kind of links with democracy and human rights, as in there should be no criticism of lack of democracy or of basically like do not- Don't push us towards being a liberal democracy. Right, don't try to push us towards a liberal democracy. It kind of gets to that mutual respect. We have our system, you have your system, let's just keep it how it is. We're not gonna tell you what to do, we're not gonna tell us what to do. And then China's development, right? Similar, it's one of those where you shouldn't be messing with their internal affairs and the ability of them to conduct commerce. I believe, and this is what he said when reading between the lines, is that they are still very upset over many of the sanctions on Chinese companies. And remember, if you read between the lines of all of these things, it's about mutual respect, it's also about Taiwan, but the tertiary really thing that they really want is they're salivating at the entrance of the US consumer market for their goods which they're not currently able to sell here, which is auto. So that was a big, big thing that they've been trying to get into US markets now for some time. I think you put all those together and you could see very clearly what they want out of the summit, what Trump wants. I just think generally it's like you said, considering the position of the United States, we're really distracted because of what happened here with Iran and it's just created such a disaster for them in the ability to, it gives it such a disaster on the part of the United States to meet them at a time of such incredible weakness. Like I'm trying to think of a previous historic peril, I really can't, I mean, in term, maybe the only one would be some bilateral negotiations between the US and the Soviet Union at the height of the Vietnam War. That's really the last time that something of this level of consequence is happening in Iran. And I know something's not popping off every day, but look, the price of oil is where it's at and the defeat has happened strategically. It's over at this point. Now you may have to invade there may be some sort of escalation or maybe even some sort of a deal, but no matter which way you cut it, like from the day one of the war to where we ended up some 30 whatever days later with the announcement of the ceasefire, you can't say that it didn't fail. It is complete and total failure. Absolutely, I mean, you've got Neocon extraordinaire, Bob Kagan out there saying it's the worst defeat for the US in its history. See, I think Vietnam was worse. You think so? I do, because from the US perspective, not to get too bogged down, but it really ripped the country apart. Like in a, you know, we had the draft, it rewrote the way that we had all of our military power, 50,000 Americans were killed. It also, it was a sucking of all of the, any of the potential promise of what the post civil rights era kind of could have been. The all the money that was wasted, the dividends that were being wrought from the post World War II era, which all could have been spent to make the 1970s actually a great period. Like it was bad, it really was bad. Yeah, I think that's in terms of the domestic effect. I mean, on the other hand, we're already like divided in the way that you could, it would be difficult to divide us further and create more sort of domestic political chaos than what we already have. I would say that his argument has merit simply because out of this, it really is sort of a nail in the coffin of the US empire and is changing the global world order. Whereas Vietnam obviously was a disaster for the US, at the end of the day, we did win the Cold War. It did fundamentally completely shift the dynamics of the global world order. Yes, it exposed weaknesses and vulnerabilities, but again, ultimately we were successful in destroying the Soviet Union and coming out on top there. Whereas with this, we're already this very clearly declining empire and we just showed our ass. We just really revealed to the world how weak we are but even with a middle income power like Iran that we could not succeed on the most basic level, we could not achieve literally any of our goals there. And in our ally, Israel also is exposed here too. So I think there is merit to the argument because of that. But we- I don't reject it whatsoever. In fact, if I look at it from a Chinese perspective, they're gonna care much more about what happened with Iran because of all of the naval power. In a sense, it's almost like parsing, you're almost like parsing two disastrous things in and of itself. They're both horrific defeats for the US. I actually think this is fascinating. Let's put A9 up here on the screen from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A new intelligence report from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs says that China has gained a major edge on the US amid the Iran war. Confidential US intelligence analysis details how China is exploiting the war to maximize advantage over the US in military, economic, diplomatic, and other fields. The assessment produced this week for the chairman has raised alarm within the Pentagon about the geopolitical cost of Washington's standoff with Tehran produced by the intelligence directorate. The report uses what's used as a dime framework, looking at diplomatic, international, military, and economic power. Officials asked about the finding, talked about the anonymity. Since the US and Israel initiated the war, China has then sold weapons to Gulf allies of the US as they struggle to defend their military bases. Beijing has assisted countries around the world struggling to meet their energy needs after the US-Israeli attacks prompted Iran to close the streets of Hormuz. The war has drained the US massive stockpiles of munitions that would be critical in any standoff with China over the fate of Taiwan. The Iran conflict, which has resulted in the damage or destruction of US military hardware, has allowed Beijing to observe how the US fights wars and learn how to plan its own future operations. And Beijing has now incorporated popular criticisms of the war into its public messaging, labeling the conflict illegal. China has long sought to undermine the image of the US as a responsible steward of the US real-space international order. I don't think they needed to seek anything. Whenever that for that, it views the Iran conflict as emblematic of Washington's cavalier approach to military hostility. So look, none of this is groundbreaking. If you watch the show, you've heard it every single day since the war began, but still for a Pentagon assessment like that to make its way up to the chairman to eventually be presented, at least technically, it's supposed to be presented in some form to the president of the United States, someday in the future, we'll have our own Pentagon papers. I'm sure they're gonna cover this shit up. But 10 years from now, we can go and we can read. I cannot wait until there's an actual declassification or leak for any potential Ellsberg out there. Please contact me about what those assessments in the middle of the war are on. Can you imagine? 10 days in, they're gonna be like, we have not been able to accomplish our strategic objectives. We've been hit at all of these bases. We've run out of this number of munitions. China is doing this, this and this. It is, and you know, I'm almost talking myself into my, out of my previous point about Vietnam. Like it is so stunning to see it all happen. And I know it sounds hyperbolic, but this really is a disaster. This is the greatest disaster of my lifetime. And Iraq, I never thought it would, I never thought we could potentially, you know, do something worse than that. And to a lot of people who are watching, they're gonna say, that's ridiculous. This has only been happening for 74 days, only 13 American side. I hear you, but at the end of the day, this, that was a conflict which did not rewrite the actual ability of the United States to project power. And you know, we did defeat Saddam. We did occupy the country. Yes, the insurgency and all that was bad and exposed a lot of problems about the military. In this case, we're talking about the highest most, you know, the high tech weapons of all time. The full force of the United States Navy, the full force of the US Air Force, and 70% of Iranian ballistic missiles still survive. I mean, nobody thought that was, me, I didn't ask me on February 27th, I would say there's no way that that's possible, right? And most people would not say. And yet, we- And that's based on what's being leaked to our press. Right. From our own intelligence community. And the Iranians are starting, actually we're basically how we were when we started and we've been able to during this period, restock, resupply, but there's no doubt. I mean, all this stuff, oh, they're completely military obliterated on day one, it's just utter and complete bullshit. I don't know. I mean, I just, you know, when I assess it, how it's such a grand strategic level, if you were to think about that, the meeting of these two superpowers, the defeat really that we've suffered, the inability to change the regime from the air. We knew that that was gonna happen. But at the very least, we thought we would be able to militarily wipe them out, didn't happen. It just did not happen. The drone threat, the asymmetry of these high tech weapon systems, the lack of our defense industrial base, the inability of our sanctions to properly be able to cripple this country. I mean, look, if we've been doing this now for so long, all the warning signs were there. The munitions problem, I've been talking about it literally for years, about whenever it came to Ukraine. Remember the Russia sanctions debate that we often had here on the show? I was like, hey, this is gonna be a real problem if we ever get into a conflict with China, because they are able to look and to study all what's happening. They did, they've been able to prove themselves. And then really, the more meta point is, we spent vaporized probably $50 billion so far. Take a look at that country. It's doing pretty well. And it's one of those where this is not, you know, I don't feel good saying this, but it's just unambiguous. Like the quality of life there from 10 years ago is not even comparable to the quality of life increase there. Not even comparable to any alleged S&P 500 gains that have happened here. If anything, it's gotten worse. I think it's gotten worse. I think it's gotten worse. Here in the United States, the last 10 years. I think most people would agree with you on that. And even we're gonna do this segment later about like American test scores falling off. I mean, that's part of it, right? It is. It's part of a trend of, you know, in previous generations, you could buy out, you can't buy a house in previous generations, you can't afford healthcare anymore. You know, in previous generations, kids were reading when they were in third grade now, not so much. It's on every metric, you just see this backward slide. And the stock market for most people is irrelevant. I mean, if anything, it's a slap in the face. Another reminder that, yeah, they're rich, they're getting richer and you're getting screwed and your kids prospects are being robbed every single day. I think probably the biggest outcome of this meeting is gonna be a lot of Fox News grandma's realizing just how behind we are technologically, how much more advanced China is at this point, because Bear is there on the ground, doing all this like on the ground reporting. One of the big thing, they made a big deal about the fact they illegally parked for two minutes and got a ticket right away, which, you know, for the law and order people, they should be happy about that, right? That is my dream. I knew you would like that. If Palantir was doing it here, they'd be celebrating this marvel of efficiency, but since China, it's the authoritarian. That is my dream is to ticket these illegal parkers, red light runners, some kid rang my doorbell the other day with no soliciting, I'm like this motherfucker. You know? It's like. It's funny. Such a crutchy old man, but in any case, he also went to one of these like just little, you said this is sort of like a 7-Eleven competitors and they have the humanoid autonomous robots there that are like serving the goods. And so this was all, you know, broadcast to Fox News audience, this is A-10. Let's go ahead and take a look at this from Brett Bear. This is the family Mark convenience store in Beijing. Inside is a Galbot robot, the dominance of AI. Beijing is trying to lead the way in AI and also in humanoid robots. Let's go inside. This is the first of its kind for this kind of interaction. If you want to order something, hello, can I get a sausage, please? Okay. This is the first of its kind, moving a little slow, but Galbot is actually in 50 different pharmacies, warehouses handling 300,000 orders around the country. This is the first of its kind here. And they say there are going to be many different iterations. The question is, it's the same thing that the US is dealing with. Will this replace human workers? So sweet. Yeah, I mean, this is an area where they are decidedly ahead of us on the humanoid robot front. And my understanding in terms of the attitude towards the population in China versus here on technology, they're much more enthusiastic in China. There's not the same level of reticence because here we see the way that these AI oligarchs are trying to screw us and bragging about how they're going to take all our jobs. They just have a different social contract. That's the thing. That's exactly right. And it's not just about the AI, but about the social contract. Yeah. That's the thing. That's exactly right. And they have really focused on a very different AI strategy, too, where, yes, they're trying to be at the leading edge and DeepSeek has been very successful in other models as well, and much more efficiently. It doesn't require the vast amounts of compute and electricity and water and everything that ours is like just this sort of brute force approach. But they've also focused a lot on how do we integrate the technology that we have right now into practical uses so that this is actually being deployed and it's not just some pie in the sky investment for the future, for some future prospect. So in any case, like I said, this is basically what Pape predicted with us yesterday. He's like, you know what's going to come out of this is all of these reporters and politicians are going to go, they're going to see the gleaming electric vehicles, they're going to see modern cities, they're going to see advanced technology, and they're going to be floored by it. And the American public, which has been so propagandized about China or any of our adversaries, will also see some of this on their television sets of like, oh, it's not the US that's leading the world on every technological front at this point. You go into these cities and you are seeing things that we do not have here. That is a very different dynamic than what most Americans have in their mind about China at this point. It's very true. And okay, so Family Mart. If you've never been, so it's a Japanese company, Family Mart. It's kind of like 7-Eleven if you've ever been there. I mean, I just want people to take a look. It's clean. It's nice. There's no like, you know, there's no coffee stains that are anywhere. When you order, you get what you want. They don't need a security guard. The idea that anybody would steal is preposterous, right? You know, it's like ludicrous that somebody would try to steal from something like that. And if they do, they're going to get caught instantly. Now there's a very different social contract. Like I was saying earlier, everybody there acquiesces to an immense amount of digital surveillance. So you were talking about the immediate ticketing that's happening. That's just like the tip of the iceberg. You know, the ability to cross the street, your face is all being scanned. People make a big deal about social credit, but it actually goes much deeper than that. Like the ability to transit even inside of the country, your ability to move between cities. Like that's all pretty restricted or at the very least like you need permission from somebody. Most Americans would have no ability to acquiesce to that. They have a different culture than ours. They came, a lot of the current people who are alive, their generation, they came from the chaos of the cultural revolution and then imagine what their grandparents and others people had to live through. Genuine poverty, civil war, Japanese World War II, like immense death and famine. So for them, like order is the thing that must be preserved above all costs because they have lived. I mean, do you know anybody who died in a famine? No. Over there, you probably do know at least somebody who has a relative who did or who was displaced through mass collectivization or who was bayoneted by a Japanese soldier or by a CCP soldier or by a, you know, I'm totally a KMT soldier, something like that. Their country has been basically was in chaos from the year, I don't know, 19, even earlier, maybe the 18 something all the way up until 1970 or so. So you really, I just feel like that sociological imprint of a generation for where they are today and why they value what they value. I'm not judging it. I can fully empathize and understand how they've come to the place that they are. Well, and I would also say there's no doubt the culture. There are cultural differences and different historical experiences that lead you to a certain place. But also, I mean, we've discussed here, people will put up, people in general around the globe, including Americans, will put up with a lot of limitations on their sort of libertarian version of freedom. If the government is delivering on, you know, improving the quality of life, improving the country, there is no country in history that has lifted more people out of poverty faster than China. It truly is an absolute economic marvel. And so people, to your point, can see over their lifetime just a dramatic increase in quality of life and cleanliness of the city, modernization, and so there's an incredible pride there as well at what they've been able to accomplish in a truly remarkably short period of time. I mean, the overwhelming bulk of improvement in poverty statistics around the globe has come just from China. They have been the primary driver of lifting people out of poverty over the past several decades. So, you know, that also changes the way you think about these matters. You're like, well, they're delivering on these fronts, though. Okay, you know. And look, I mean, dealing with getting a parking ticket, I can talk about Tiananmen Square or whatever. You're totally right. And that's where, look, I mean, this is where it's complicated. We did pay for most of that. A lot of that came at the expense of us, and that's why the Trump 2016 campaign was so invigorating to be like, because he was the first person to say, we paid for this. Like, because, you know, that neoliberal talking point was the one that we would hear all the time, oh, well, global poverty has gone down. It's like, yeah, but we're poorer. They're the ones who are richer, not us. But what we want, I think at this point, we've lived through this idea that China was like some backwards state. And I'm being honest, like, I even used to, I remember, so I first, my first year of professional politics was 2015. That is when the Made in China 2025 plan came out. We scoffed at it. There were commissions here and what? What a joke. All of it came true. All of it came true. And actually a lot more than it came true. Then 2020 happened. Remember, we would talk to Peter Zayhan and others, people predicted demographic collapse and there's some of that, or, you know, commercial real estate and I'm listening, it's a country of 1.4 billion. So to say that they don't have problems is ludicrous. Like they have plenty of problems on the intern. But we're saying from our perspective to see the life of the average citizen, especially the more upwardly mobile ones, if you were to call it the Chinese dream, they can generally own a home. Yes, there's a crazy commercial real estate market, but their day-to-day life is not so bad. And I would just say like ours, it's bad. Like we covered yesterday, people are working more hours for less pay, high gas prices in terms of your consumer experience. What's the last revolutionary product that you bought? For me, it was probably iPhone 4. Remember 2010? It was 16 years ago. All right. Actually, I have a Tesla. That's pretty cool. So Tesla 2, so I don't know that came out. When did it come out? Like 10 years ago, the Tesla Model 3? Yeah, but I mean, that's a great example because they're chicken or ass and even like they surpass Tesla in terms of what they can do. If you look at the past 10 years for them, you've got Greeley, you've got Xiaomi, you've got Tesla, you've got BYD, you have WeChat, you have Handpay, you have the high speed rail going 300 miles per hour. And then I'm not even talking about all these crazy infrastructure projects where imagine in the hinterlands of the United States, like some backwards-ass town in Nebraska getting brand new bridges and beautification and people coming from Washington being like, look at what we're doing for you. I mean, it's easy to criticize as a dog and pony show and some of it is more shoddily built. I'll grant you that, but we're not even trying over here. They've just got rust in the middle out there. The story in most of our country is year after year degradation and decline. Cities that were, like for people who are older, who they can remember what maybe Detroit was in its heyday. Yeah, I've only seen pictures. Yeah, we see and Detroit is doing a little bit better than it was at its worst, so I'm not trying to trash Detroit here, but you can see what our cities were and all of our infrastructure. You fly into an airport here, it looks shitty, right? You get on a train, you're going to have problems. Yeah, I mean, you go around this country and mostly what you see is decline. And for Chinese people, they go around their country, most of what they see is improvement. And that comes at certain costs as well, but you see a lot of change and positive improvement. To your point about them even surpassing the made in China expectations, if we could put A5 up on the screen, this was, I saw this from Arno's feed, he retweeted this, he says, one of the most consequential charts in my opinion, China will go from being almost completely reliant on chips from external sources to almost completely self-sufficient in just 10 years. So one of the things that we've really held on to is like, okay, well, we have the premier chips technology. And so we're going to marshal our resources, we're going to limit how many chips go and there's still a lot of dispute and debate over how much to sell chips to China, et cetera. And so while we were with trying to withhold this technology, especially under the vitamin insurance, and I'm like, all right, well, we're going to really push developing our own. And our AI products are going to really focus on what they can do with chips that we produce here domestically. And so on, you know, on a number of fronts, the thought with China previously in the past was always, oh, well, they can copy what we can do, but they're never going to be leading edge on anything. And that is just not the case anymore. You know, on deep seek is very competitive. But again, you saw the humanoid robots where they're kicking your ass, EV, they're kicking our ass, solar panels, they're kicking our ass. And the solar energy part, I would talk a little bit more about that in a bit. But, you know, the renewable energy piece, if you actually want energy independence, that is the way to go because oil is a global market. It doesn't matter that we produce more oil here, we're not exporter, et cetera, because we're still subject to the global price pressures of this global market. So when there is a constraint, like there isn't straight up formulas, obviously we're still affected. So in any case, this is just a long way of saying, on any number, and I remember seeing a report about all of these sort of frontier technologies, in many instances, they are leading the way at this point. Now there are some areas where we still have an edge. Silicon Valley still does incredible things. You know, there's no doubt about that. It's still a lot of American innovation. But the old notion that all China can do is steal technology and copycat with a poor quality product, that's dead and gone. That's 2008, 2015. There was a period where that was true. It is true, and a lot of it is built on their back. In fact, the story of Tesla, what they did, they see, they have to respect them. They're like, oh, Elon, come on over. You can build Gigashang High, and what does he do? He builds Gigashang High, and he builds the entire flywheel for EVs. And then what they do is they go, all right, now we're going to use that flywheel and all that supply chain for our stuff, and we're going to massively subsidize it. And then also, though, at the same time of massive subsidization, is we don't just pick winners and losers. We make it so that everybody gets to ruthlessly compete, which means that you rise to the top. That's how you get the best stuff. But they built the infrastructure. If you look at their energy sources, we shouldn't get too carried away. Like 50% of their stuff comes from coal. But they've got 14% hydro power, 10% solar, 10% wind, 5% nuclear. You look at the trajectory, though. And that's what's incredible. Exactly. And the thing is, is that China is kind of like what's happening in Texas right now. I'm not sure if you've seen where Texas has more new renewables than California. Why? No red tape, right? For them, they're like, build whatever you want. We don't care. They're not going to celebrate it, but you could build it if you want to. China is a little bit like that in terms of the red tape exists, but there's no ideology for whenever it comes to energy. If it turns, if you get electrons, you're good to go. Well, and they have prioritized solar development in particular, which is why the top manufacturer globally. Yeah, and they have the whole supply chain. They have the industrial base. Another way the Iran war has benefited them, because now countries around the world, including Cuba, is actually doing like a whole renewables revolution in a remarkably short period of time, because they're like, OK, we can't be screwed over by these oil shipment embargoes anymore. So yeah, the Iran war has created an increased logic for people around the world of like, OK, well, we need to get in on this. Yeah. My last piece is just, this is the most novel situation in the United States ever been. The United States has never been, or at least even in terms of global politics, really for us, we have never been an apex power with a peer competitor, which is not only like a peer competitor in terms of military force, but in terms of economic and soon potential soft power force. We've never faced that. The Soviet Union was always a military juggernaut. It was never even remotely comparable in terms of, you know, in terms of their systems ability to produce like soft power elements or to produce like economic marvels or miracles. Really what they were great about was just their sheer size, weight and political control. Originally, that's what China was like, like you were saying, the 08 2015 period. It is not the same country. I would say that this is much more like the pre-World War One tides of a great, you know, the sun never sets on the British Empire being confronted by this new Germanic power, which is very similar in terms of its science and its economic might and not necessarily as militaristic, but its ability to be a genuine competitor if it wanted to be. That was a very novel situation for the continent. And I don't see, you know, that's as close as a parallel as I could get. There's not as many like surrounding empires in terms of multi polarity, but bipolarity itself is, it's not even really a connection, I think at this point. And Iran has really put the nail in the coffin. I mean, it's just fascinating to see it all come to a head. I did not think I would live to see, you know, I really, I didn't, I knew I would witness history, we've witnessed plenty here, but this really is a, I mean, it doesn't feel like it's not as sexy as bombs going off and all of that. But, you know, if you take a step back and you see this and this uniting the superpowers in the midst of Iran, it's a crazy situation. There are many books written about this 80 day period. Yeah. And we should mention Ukraine and Russia as well, where, you know, we embroiled ourselves in, and this shows you also it's not just Trump, although I think Trump has certainly expedited our decline and the Iran war really helped to tie the end of the empire here into a bow. But, you know, we went in thinking, okay, we're going to have this proxy war with Russia and they're weak and it's just a gas station and we'll be able to hobble them with our sanctions, et cetera. Obviously that doesn't work down either. And the Iran war has only aided Russia and we've actually eased some of the sanctions to ease the pressure on our own gas prices here and oil prices around the globe. That's a good transition to what came out of this with regard to Iran. And I just want to remind everybody that after Trump launched the Iran war, without really providing justification, one of the 5D chess rationales was, oh, this is really to hurt China because they rely on more oil from the Strait of Hormuz and so even though it's closed, it's a problem for them, it's more of a problem for them. And that's what this is really about. I think we can all see now, if that was a thought, that was an incredibly foolish thought because it is very clear that, well, yes, the Iran war is not great for China, they are paying some price for it as well. It is vastly, vastly worse for us. Now, we did get out of this and I think this is significant, Chinese government saying, you know, in their readout or coming out of these meetings, that they do not support a toll in the Strait of Hormuz, everything else, as we covered before, was sort of ambiguous about what they said about Iran. But take a look at this, but be one up on the screen. New report for the New York Times says that Chinese firms are plotting secret arms sales to Iran. It's according to U.S. officials who are talking to the New York Times, so keep that in mind in terms of where it's coming from. But I'll just read a little bit of this. Chinese companies have been discussing arms sales with Iran plotting to send the weapons through other countries to mask the origins of the military aid. U.S. has gathered intelligence that Chinese companies, Iranian officials have discussed the arms transfers, not clear how many, if any, arms have been shipped or to what degree Chinese officials have approved the sales. New disclosures likely to intensify pressure on President Trump to raise the issue while he is in Beijing this week. So obviously this would be a very significant development. We know China has already been assisting Iran. Iran is important to them at this point. And Professor Papro raised with us yesterday, okay, just imagine now all the advanced Chinese tech, like AI tech, also being transferred to Iran and the way that's only going to further strengthen their position, the Iranians' position as a world power. So you've really forced China, Russia, and Iran. You've really forced these three countries together via our own foolish foreign policy. It is also very interesting with China. You know, one of the things that they've been doing is they actually haven't been importing nearly as much oil as normal. That's one of the reasons why the price of oil actually isn't higher, is I believe that they've cut it by nearly a quarter. And I think one of the reasons that they're doing it is to tell other regional allies, they're like, hey, we've been using a lot of our SPR Strategic Petroleum Reserve. They have one of the largest in the world of Strategic Petroleum. And in effect, we're also getting you a discount by not bidding up the price even higher than where it should be. I also think it's very interesting about all of this stuff that China has access to, which we not previously, he talked about in the 08, 09 area. Now to say they didn't have spy satellites is ridiculous. But to say that they had cheap spy satellites which they're able to deploy on behalf of others, which then enable a great damage to the US is a very new phenomenon. So if you listen to this, since the beginning of the war, China has given Iran intelligence and access to a spy satellite that has tracked the positions of US forces in the region, they have supplied dual use components that they need to produce drones, missiles and other weaponry, providing these dual use components like semiconductor sensors, voltage converters, can also be used in civilian manufacturing, draw less scrutiny than arms sales. The reason why I thought that that was really important is let's compare it to the US industrial base. So for example, the UAE and all of these other countries are buying more Thads, more Patriots. Well, they have the supply chain to be able to support their industrial base, their civilian base and to be able to export. We don't even have the industrial base to supply ourselves for one year of production, let alone support the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Why do the UAE's, you know, doing all these secret shading meanings with baby because they need iron dome missiles, they need their drones. I mean, from the US perspective, our supply chain to build this stuff from the ground up, it's impossible without all these, you know, it's impossible to produce just what we need, let alone to be able to support the rest of the world. That's what we used to do when we were a global manufacturing powerhouse in the post NAFTA era. No, you made an important point earlier about Silicon Valley, but that actually is the great weakness of the US economy. It's the reason why our stock market is higher and our economy sucks is because we design things. We're very, very good at high end design. I mentioned yesterday this Apple laptop, when you open up the box designed in Cupertino, right? But where's the manufacturer in Shenzhen, right? It shipped to me from Vietnam, right? I attract the US, the UPS stuff whenever I got it. Well, what does that tell you? The components are here. The design is here in China. They're now have a system where they have both the design and the manufacturer. That's where you're a strong country. This is what happened to Intel and to many of these others. They stripped away their manufacturing capacity. They kept the design because the design is the profits. That's where the money rolls into the banks. But when push comes to shove to be Russia, you made a joke about the gas station and it was, I mean, it's kind of true, but does it matter if all you need is gas and bullets? It turns out you don't really need much else. Like when we pulled out McDonald's, they're like, okay, whatever. Here's what China, Iran and Russia all to obviously very extensive and these are very different countries. But the fact that you had this adversarial with relationship with the U.S. either with active sanctions or with the threat of sanctions hanging over the countries created a real awareness and necessity of a level of self-sufficiency. So even Iran has, you know, they are able to manufacture their own goods, right? They're able to spin up their drones quickly. And certainly, you know, Russia has a large industrial base. China is the largest industrial base in the entire world. And so another technology where they are head and shoulders above us is drones. So the concept of, you know, we played earlier the Thucydides trap comments from Xi where he's warning about the potential of war between a preeminent power and a rising power in the way that creates tensions and can lead to an inevitability of war if it's not handled properly. I mean, just think about how that would go for us. Even their manufacturing prowess, given the fact that in our war of, you know, 40 days against the middling power at best, that we're already running low on various stockpiles and can't help out our allies and are leaving them high and dry and our bases are obliterated and our soldiers are having to flee, etc. I mean, how do you think this would go? It's preposterous to think about it. And then the Chinese know that. We know it. That's why for Taiwan, I mean, the Chinese, they don't really have to do anything because the reality of the global power balance has become so manifestly clear. And Iran has been obviously a really central part of that. Let me go ahead and put up on the screen the second element here, which we mentioned before. And I think the Americans will see this as significant. You've got this agreement on opposing Hormuz toll. But as we discussed before, the rest of the language, very ambiguous. Okay, we oppose a militarized straight. Okay, well, who's who's the military? You know, that means they oppose our military being in the street as well. And I'm sure they do, right? It's very important. China is a trading nation. Very important that they're able to trade freely around the world. That's significant for their export economy. No doubt about it. So you have, you have that. And otherwise you had very little public discussion on Iran. And if Trump thinks that China is going to come in and bail them out because they're in such dire straits over the war, I think he's an absolute fool. And the very fact that he has to go to China to try to bail us out is humiliating to begin with. So it's quite an astonishing circumstance that we find ourselves in here. When we talked to Colonel Wilkerson earlier in the week, Emily and I did that interview. He said he was like, I'm 50-50 on weather. Trump even goes because of the weakness of the position going in. Now, Trump being megalomaniac obviously thought he could get in the room, sweet talk and get some kind of a deal. And he'll certainly be able to spin some sort of a victory narrative out of here. Right? Oh, we got this deal and he'll just make shit up too. He's not afraid to do that. But I think that's an indication of how much our position was damaged by recent moves by Trump. This meeting had to be pushed off already. That it would even be a possibility of, I don't know if we should even go forward with this thing. Yeah, it's nice. It's really not good. And I also think what's fascinating about all of this is what you can see with the arm sales, the movement, the way that they're even talking around Iran. They mentioned the militarization of the strait. They say they oppose the toll. Do they really? I mean, it's one of those where they may say it in principle, but in the status quo, would they do anything about it? Well, and it's like, oh, we're not charging a toll. We're charging a safety surcharge. Yeah, exactly. I've at least seen them and their public statements. They talk around in circles, which is why you have to parse what they say very, very carefully. All diplomatic languages like that. Oh, absolutely. And one of the things that I think you really do highlight in what's happening over there also, and this is, look, you have to contrast our internal systems. The internal system of China is one of near total power consolidation with Xi Jinping. Now, often that can go very awry. He changed the whatever the cost, not the constitution, whatever it is, you know, to be able to remain president for life. He's recently gone after the equivalent of the Secretary of Defense, who I think was just, I think he was just condemned to death. Like the internal repression within the CCP, I'm not even talking about, you know, for the Chinese people has immense, has gone up immensely under his reign. You would think often that makes somebody weaker. Right now it seems as if he's pulling things off. Remember, we're looking at things from afar, reading the Western press. Like it's not that easy to actually get any real sense. But what we can also contrast that though is our system where, look, one of the benefits of it is the openness and the challenge. But what we actually have is just an inability to resolve like the biggest questions like war. And this brings me to before, let's put this up here on the screen, where even though three Republican senators broke with their leadership and voted to announce, or advance the War Powers Act, that we had John Federman, who was the only Democrat to vote against the War Powers, bringing it to a 49-50 vote. If Federman had actually voted for it, it would have forced J.D. Vance to come to the chamber and to actually break the tie. Which would have been a political disaster for the administration and the vice president forced to come and to actually... Well, and it would be a real disaster for him too. Right. He's been trying to distance himself a little bit from this policy for his own political prospects in the future. Thanks, Federman. Look at that. Yeah, so Federman, I mean, yeah, wow, in terms of how he could ever explain that one. But I don't know, I just look at that, you know, this level of chaos in our country. Well, war is the biggest question. It could be the biggest one. It's what decides fates, literally, of nations. And to have it so that we can't even get, you know, our Congress and others can't even get their act together to force themselves to fulfill their own constitutional duty is just such a, just such a, like, I don't know, it just, it shows the deep weakness of our system. And it makes you really wonder, really, like, well, you know, you have a long timeline, authoritarianism usually doesn't go well, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. Like, maybe this one actually will. So, Iranian state media is apparently reporting this morning that Tehran has been allowing Chinese ships through the strait under Iranian managed protocols and no accident that that would be happening now. So again, to the context of like the double speak, it's like, oh, for China, they're like, it is open. What are you talking about? Our ships are getting through just fine. Just have to follow the Iranian protocols. So, you know, and I think it's meant to send a message and it's very significant coming at this timing. And one other point that I wanted to raise because I do think it's significant, you mentioned before how China, they don't have an ideological approach to like solar versus wind versus gas and oil. It's, it's all just like, okay, well, what's going to be good for our country. And they have calculated very much that renewable solar in particular is a huge development opportunity and also again helps to create that independence because then you're not reliant on, you know, oil from the strait of Hermos or buying oil from the U.S., etc. Now, again, as you're pointing out, it's not like they've completely transitioned their economy over, but they have already hit peak carbon emissions and are going in the opposite direction and are integrating solar in a rapid, rapid pace. I mean, the trajectory is really quite astonishing. Meanwhile, here in the U.S., Trump just has an ideological opposition to all renewables, regardless of, you know, whether it's good for the country, bad for the country, he just does not like renewables. Part of this is, of course, he's in the pocket of the oil and gas industry. He went, you'll recall on the campaign trail, had a big meeting with them and promised them billions of dollars if they help him get elected, etc. So he has a corrupt ideological commitment to that, but it results in, you know, sort of foolish moments like this from where Doug Burgum was being questioned in Congress yesterday and, you know, was spinning some nonsense about how, oh, well, solar only works when the sun is shining, which that's obviously when you gather power, but there's been a lot of advances in terms of battery technology to even out the power distribution. This is B3. Let's go ahead and take a listen to this. Could I respond quickly on one thing? The Lazzard analysis that suggests that this is the cheapest form of energy, all of these projects are describing in Nevada have one thing in common. When the sun goes down, they produce zero electricity. And this nation overrotated towards intermittent forms of energy. And the idea that we could add intermittent and shut down base load is what put our grid at deep risk. And the idea that it's the cheapest, if you want to add intermittent, you have to keep everything else. And so we have to have a discussion about the total cost of grid, not the cost of the incremental, because it's true on an incremental basis. You may have an incremental source, but it doesn't work. Chairman, I request unanimous consent to enter into the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of. It's a battery. China's figured it out. That's why they're cleaning our clock on clean energy, but I want to enter that into the record. It's battery. China's figuring it out. This very much reminds of Trump has a whole bit about imagining watching TV and then the sun goes down or the wind stops blow. I guess we can't watch our favorite show. Like this is not real. Obviously there's technological fixes for this. So his ideological opposition to renewables is foolish. And we talked yesterday about how men are actually suffering a lot in the Trump economy. One of the industries that was previously growing that is male dominated is renewable manufacturing and implementation. And they just have completely taken an axe to that, partly because I think it is largely because he's in the pocket of the oil and gas industry. My thing is I'm not ideologically on energy. I don't care where it comes from. I care if it's cheap and if it's abundant. And so if that's gas, fine. If it's refineries, which I look, we're not oils aren't going anywhere soon. I still think we need new oil refineries. That's fine too. If it's solar, cool. Yeah. We should, but let's be honest about, you know, how filthy it is to construct those panels. Same with wind. Sometimes we massively subsidize and it does have some issues. It's not as efficient hydropower, geothermal where needed. Good to go. Obviously I'm a nuclear guy. I think what I've really thought through though with regard to the Iran war is that if you actually want to have resilience and energy independence, renewables are actually the only option. Unless you're going to completely, you know, nationalize oil and keep it here domestically, etc. As long as you're participating in the global economic order where oil is a global commodity, then you're always going to be vulnerable to a supply shock. So if you're completely dependent on fossil fuels, it makes your country much more vulnerable. And much more fragile. Right. And that's what's really sort of set in for me with the Iran war. We have the worst of a fossil fuel system though. So for example, you know, the fact is, is that a third of California oil comes from the Middle East, even though we're a net energy exporter, because we're a net energy exporter to a global market. We never designed our country for resilience in the event that we would have to shut things down for a national export ban. That's, listen, in Russia, they didn't ever did that, right? They just refined their own oil. In China, it's a little bit differently, but, you know, they have it set it up for the, they have more flexibility within their system because they are relying on foreign exports. I don't disagree. I'm, look, I'm a thousand nuclear power plant guy. I think there should be a nuclear power plant in every garden in the United States. Seriously, I mean, what, there be, their energy would cost nothing. It's perfectly safe. It's definitely safer than natural gas and oil. It would cost, yes, hundreds of billions. We did just vaporize, oh, I don't know, 50 billion over Ron. So don't come bitching to me about the cost. Nobody cares whenever it's a trillion five for the Pentagon, as opposed to all of this new energy infrastructure, which by the way will last, oh, I don't know, 50 years before you even have to do anything to it. So, you know, my own personal diet tribe aside, that's the easiest way to just get it so that it's everywhere. It would be a great jobs program. I can't even imagine the Jetsons reality of what such cheap and abundant power would be like, it would be awesome. Revolutionary. No, it would be. Did you see this report about how there's like not enough money for army training? Like, where are you people spending all this? I know where it's oil because their fuel surcharges went up for all. It's ridiculous. Yeah. So they, because of the limited amount of funds that they have, they actually have had to, because think about it. I mean, do you know how much diesel, a tank and some of these other things consume? It's astronomical. So, because of the spike in fuel, they've had to spend vast amounts more on oil and other like diesel and other things. So that means they've had to cut training programs. Yeah. That's the punch line. I'm going to bet that the, you know, the military industrial complex, they're not facing any cuts. This isn't even a through tarant in me. I go, why are we paying market price for diesel? Fucking take it. All right. It's our diesel. What are we doing here? Anyway. All right. Let's move on. Inflation. This is an I heart podcast. Guaranteed human.