America, China, and the Tech Cold War with Chris Miller

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the weekly show.

Podcast. My name is John Stewart. It is a lovely day. It is May 19th. It is Tuesday. I'm actually on co-bear tonight, so if any, oh, well, this will be airing tomorrow.

I'm actually on co-bear yesterday. That's a strange way to promote that. It's my sadly final appearance on the late show. And I just can't wait to spend some quality time with my friend, hopefully to the pleasure of the audience that we'll be watching.

And so I urge all of you if you are within the sound of my voice. Please do watch and not just that. Watch on Wednesday and watch on Thursday. And you know, enjoy, celebrate what has been a remarkable run of a person. And remove it from the melancholy circumstances by which it occurs because his career in broadcasting.

And it's not over by any stretch of the imagination, but it deserves to be separated from

whatever black hole of perverse corruption snuffed it out in the first place.

“And I think that's what I'll be going there to do tonight.”

And that's what I hope that everyone will be doing over these next few days. It just truly, once in a lifetime, broadcaster, performer and can't wait to see him and give him a big old hug. But on the way to that, I would be remiss if I did not also discuss the Taiwan ship war. This may be the worst, I've ever done in the history of this program.

But it is an important, the President of the United States has just returned from his historic trip to China, where he got, what's the Chinese word for "buckus"? We got "buckus". And we don't really know we got into a trade war with no real plan, so out of character for this administration.

And we're going to see what ends up happening. And who better to help us understand the parameters of what might possibly happen? And someone who's written about it for many years. So we're going to get to that. Our guest today is Professor Chris Miller.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are delighted to be joined by a gentleman by the name of Chris Miller. He's the author of "Ship War", not Doritos, my friend.

It's the fight for the world's most critical technology in American historian, economic history,

international relations. Chris, you're a professor, yes, international history. That's right. Tough university. That's right.

Beautiful. And this is not your first go-round as an author, Putinomics, and the struggle to save the Soviet economy, and we shall be masters. Thank you so much for being here to talk to us. You wrote "Ship Wars" in when 2022?

That's right. Four years ago.

“And that came out, and then like a month later, chatGBT launched, yes?”

That's right. And it's been a wild ride in some of the conductors since then. I mean, the chips almost became even more seminal and more important to the world economy. 100% because as we roll out AI, we need bigger and bigger data centers full of the most advanced semiconductors that we can make today.

And so the basic premise of "Ship Wars" kind of, it talked about how Taiwan and in combination with, I guess, some Japanese technology and some Dutch technology became the leading edge, the cutting edge of all of the most specialized chips that are used in this technology today. Yeah, that's right.

So the key chips are designed still in Silicon Valley by companies like Nvidia or AMD, but when it comes to AI in particular, they're almost all manufactured by one Taiwanese firm, a company called TSMC, which has the vast majority of its manufacturing capabilities in Taiwan. And so it's this partnership between Silicon Valley and Taiwan that makes the most cutting

edge chips possible.

“And what does Silicon Valley, what do they give to Taiwan?”

Is it the software that they give to them? With really the designs of the chips, so if you take a piece of silicon like you'd find inside of your smartphone or in a data center, they've got billions and billions of tiny switches called transistors that are etched into the silicon. And different designs produce different capabilities.

So an Nvidia chip's designed differently from a AMD chip. And these designs are what enables progress in the semiconductor industry. And so these design files are essentially emailed over to Taiwan and the Taiwanese do the manufacturing of these designs and put them into the silicon.

and in terms of sort of epoch.

“So how did you reason that I think it's important to talk today, especially to somebody”

with your expertise? President-in-ighted states has just come back from China. China obviously has designs on Taiwan and island that is very close to their mainland.

They always have felt that it is part of, you know, since I don't know when it's split

49 was a Shanghai check in 49. That's right. Yep. Okay. So they split off from China.

China has always had designs to get it back. And the same way I guess that Russia would have with Crimea. The President-in-ighted states has always been sort of the implicit and sometimes explicit protector of Taiwan. The President-in-ighted states came back and said, "Maybe I'll use our military support

and weapons to Taiwan as a bargaining chip with China." I guess saying like if they would agree to buy more soybeans, we would let them have Taiwan. What was your read on the President's messaging and the future of Taiwan as this on the Vanguard of 21st century technology?

Well, I would say first off, the U.S. has been getting more and more nervous, not just

under Trump, but over the last decade about China's capabilities. So China's wanted to seize Taiwan as you said since 1949, but it's only in the last couple of years where Chinese military capabilities have grown to the point where they might now be able to succeed in doing so. If there was a war right now, nobody knows how it would play out.

And that's increased concern in Washington about the China have both the intent and the capability to do something around Taiwan. That's happened just as Taiwan has gotten more and more important as a partner in enabling Silicon Valley to produce all of the chips that we need in data centers, in smartphones, in computers.

So right now, Taiwan is really at the absolute center of the AI industry and the U.S.

can't do AI without chips from Taiwan, which means that on the one hand, we've got to treat the Taiwan question very carefully to make sure that we defend Taiwan. On the other hand, we also got to be ready for China looking very carefully at Taiwan. Both in terms of achieving its long-term strategic aim of seizing Taiwan, but also in terms of realizing the more pressure China puts on Taiwan, the more pressure it puts on us and

our AI industry because we're dependent on important chips from Taiwan too.

“Now is the idea, so the chips that are made in Taiwan?”

Are they also, is that where we're just China make their chips? Well, that's a great question. China would like to import the most advanced chips from Taiwan, but the United States doesn't let them. So for the past couple of years, we've said to the Taiwanese, "You can't sell the most

cutting-edge AI chips to China and China can't produce these chips domestically at any scale that matters." So for cutting-edge AI chips, China's in a bind. The most advanced production is in Taiwan. China thinks it owns Taiwan, but it doesn't, and the U.S. does not let Taiwan sell to China

because we want our companies to have access to the most advanced AI chips, not China. What is the relationship politically between the leaders of Taiwan and China? Is there a world where this isn't a military operation, but a transactional operation, where Taiwan cuts a deal with China to do just that in a change for not, you know, militarily invading them?

Yeah, the short answer is no. That is the short answer. The Taiwanese have been very clear. They've repeatedly voted for presidents that have said they don't want to be integrated into China that they want to be an autonomous country, ideally even independent, pull after

pull of the Taiwanese populations, says that they think of themselves as a separate political entity.

“And I think what's key here is that if you do the pull of generation to go into Taiwan,”

you would have found a lot of people who had said they're part Chinese, but part Taiwanese, if you do the pull today what you find is that as the generations change, Taiwanese think of themselves increasingly as a separate country, a separate society. And so there's not much interest at all in any sort of integration with China. And even economically, forget about political independence or integrating in that way.

They have no interest in saying to the United States, look, we love your chips. We love your sweet, sweet Silicon transistors by the billions.

We think it'd be beneficial for us. We think it would ease the pressure on us in terms of them threatening to invade us. Is that even a possibility? There's more nuance there. There are some people in Taiwan, especially in the business community who make that argument

and say if we have close economic ties with China, the political situation will be more stable.

“But I think the dominant view in Taiwan is to say, look, our population is at tiny fraction”

of China's. There's no hope of an equal economic relationship. And in fact, a lot of people in Taiwan worry that the closer the economic ties, the more China will smother them, given its size. And so if you look at where Taiwan's been investing, where Taiwan's been diversifying its trade over the last decade, it's been trying to turn away from China because it's afraid that

economic ties are a beachhead for political influence. What are the other?

So in Taiwan, you've got this incredible chip industry that is dominant.

They are the monopoly in terms of this kind of, what else do they do? Is it a Saudi Arabia, oil economy situation? And now they've suddenly decided to diversify what is it all electronics and circuitry? What do they do there? Yeah, there's a whole range of manufacturing from machine tools to plastics, but the electronics

industry is by far the dominant player. And it's not just chips. It's the chemicals that go into the chip plants. It's once you take a chip, you put or not a printed circuit board, you wire it together with other devices.

You can make almost anything electronic in Taiwan, and they're the leader, not just that the chip segment of the supply chain, but at many other segments too. And it's been a great business for them. It's why they're one of the wealthiest countries in Asia, despite that two generations ago, they were a country doing nothing but farming.

“It's an incredible story. Where are they getting the materials for this?”

Well, the materials are easy to get out of the ground. They're silicon everywhere. The challenge is getting the materials refined to the level of purity that you need. And so when it comes to manufacturing chips, you're manufacturing, and essentially the atomic level.

And so your materials have to be purified basically to the atomic level as well.

And so in the chip industry, they talk about eight, nine's of purity. So 99.99, 99.99 is the level of purity. You'll need for certain types that chemicals or gases. Well, that's like dial soap. That might be the only other substance as pure as that.

How, so when they talk about, because there's all these things floating around. So they say that silicon valley provides the silicon, which is embedded with the billions of transistors, what are the Japanese do in this supply chain? Yes, so today, silicon valley doesn't do much silicon at all. They just do the designs first and foremost.

Oh, they're just doing, they're sending out blueprints. That's right. They're emailing you. Here's how you want to draw your little maze, because they'll, they seem to look like little mazes.

That's right. That's right. That is most of what silicon valley does today. They're used to be actual silicon in silicon valley. That's why they named it.

silicon valley, but not now. And it was a valley. And it was a valley. That's right. That's right.

So today, it's actually the Japanese that are the world's leader in making the wafers,

“ultra pure silicon wafers, and many other chemicals that you need to manufacture chips.”

And then what the Dutch do something, I don't know if it's the icing, what are the Dutch bring to this process?

Because that's the third leg, yes?

That's right. I want to pattern where each of the transistors goes on a chip, so put your design file actually into silicon. You need a tool called a photo lithography tool. And the Dutch have the world's leading company, really, the world's only company that

produces the most cutting edge versions of these tools. I have to tell you, as I hear it described, I can't help, but feel the sense of pride for humankind. But anyone, I can remember Professor, my father worked at RCA. This is in the '60s, late '60s.

And he brought home in 1969, maybe '70, a calculator. And the calculator that he brought home was the size of a desk, and it added and subtracted and multiplied and divided. And we played with it for hours. But it was the size of a desk.

And I imagine it's the exact same principles as what is now going into these super-computer

Is it all the same principle? Pretty much as you're carving little circuits into silicon.

And the difference is that compared to the 1960s, you're carving a billion times more circuits

than it was possible then. And that is what gives it the ability to make as many calculations as it does at the speed that it does. Yeah, that's right. So if you think of all your files, all of your text messages, all your Instagram likes,

or all just long strings of 1s and 0s, that's an entire digital world. And each of those has to be reflected by a switch in the silicon turning on and off.

“And that's why for the most cutting edge chips like those inside of your phone, you need”

10 billion or 20 billion of these tiny switches all carved into a chip the size of your fingernail. And doesn't this sum up the human experience? It is our expertise and scientific advancement that allows for this technology. And it is our, I want to say, conceitedness that is that we use it for Instagram likes. I think it's almost shocking.

Hey, folks, you know, I asked you this question a lot of times, where do you get your news from me? I'm a town cryer guy, I like to go outside in the street. See if there's a, you know, a young person in knickers with a giant bell telling me what's happening.

But I know that dude. He's in front of my neighborhood. You don't know where it's coming from. You don't, you don't know the bias as involved with these people. That's for ground news to, you know, ground news.

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Don't forget to get 40% off groundnews at groundnews.com/stuart. But I want to get back to, so you've got this little supply chain. What is China's role in all of this? Why do we care if they're not involved in this or is it what are they providing into this chain that we need them for?

It's a key question, if you look in terms of dollars, almost all of the money goes to companies outside of China, US, Taiwan, Japan, Netherlands, but the thing that Chinese do provide are some of the basic materials that go in. So rare earth elements, for example, are needed in certain parts of a chipmaking process. And those are mind and processed largely in China.

In some cases, almost exclusively in China.

And so for the past couple of years, China has been choking off the export to these critical

materials, which is caused problems for the entire semiconductor supply chain. Now when you say rare earths, because you just said silicon is the main ingredient and that's not rare. That's everywhere. It's sand, I guess.

It's sort of, it's everywhere, it just needs to be purified. Are they actually rare or are these materials everywhere, but we just haven't dug for them? They are everywhere. What is rare is deposits that have enough concentration to make it economically viable

to mind them and to process them? What kind of materials are we talking about? Let's. Well, you got to take out your period of table and rewind. I haven't hold on, so they get pretty obscure pretty quickly.

Yetrium, dysprosium, terbiom, things you would never think about.

Just make it upwards. Well, you know, a lot of these materials were only identified in terms of how do you actually mind and process them in the last half century. So they are pretty new materials in terms of manufacturing, but they become critical to the entire electronic supply chain.

“So you have detailed in your book, and I think brilliantly, and it's so interesting, how”

Taiwan became the leader in these kinds of chip assemblages and chip production.

of complete that Taiwan was going to be the leader in that.

There was a gentleman from Texas Instruments who had that expertise and took it to Taiwan. Yes. Yeah, that's right. So the chip manufacturing industry started in Silicon Valley and in Texas with Texas Instruments being one of the key players, including the calculator industry, like your father was working

on. And for a long time, it was the US that was the dominant manufacturer of chips. But in 1987, this gentleman Morris Chang was passed over for the CEO job at Texas Instruments, one of the greatest mistakes in American history. And he went to the Taiwanese government and said, I'd like to start some I conductor manufacturing

company that'd be different than any other company that came before it. Because before that point, companies designed and manufactured chips in house. You did both the design and the manufacturing. He said, I only want a manufacturer. I want to be sort of like what Gutenberg was for books.

Gutenberg didn't write any books, he only printed them. Morris Chang didn't want to design any chips, he only wanted to manufacture them. And that's the origins of Taiwan's dominant position in chipmaking today. So he went over there to do that. Why was it that in the United States with this at their hand that they weren't able to

do both? Was it that they just didn't see the future? They didn't see it coming?

“Yeah, I think that's the primary explanation.”

You had these big companies like TI like Intel at the time, which were doing well. They believe they're existing business model of both design and manufacturing made sense. And there was this pretty disruptive idea that Morris Chang came up with. At first, it wasn't clear. It was going to work.

And it was only over the last decade or two that it became obvious. It was the best possible way to manufacture chips because you can not just manufacture for yourself. You manufacture for the entire industry for Nvidia, for AMD, for Apple. And you have these huge economies of scale that resolved from that.

How is it, the story of manufacturing has always been sort of to create efficient assembly

line methodologies? How did they not, how did they miss this in such an advanced industry, if Ford is the one who figured it out for automobiles so that you could democratize this process and make a product that would revolutionize travel available to people at a scale that made the pricing make sense.

“How was that not obvious to everyone in this nascent computer industry?”

Well, you know, I think in hindsight, it certainly looks obvious. But if you go back to the time Morris Chang went to his colleagues at TI and said, let's make what he called a foundry, this company that would just manufacture not to any design. And they asked who your customer is going to be. And he said, well, there aren't any customers today because there weren't any companies that

only design chips then you had to have your own house factory. He said, if I build it, they will come and that was a risky bet at the time, but it proved right. And just as he was setting up TSMC, in part because he set up TSMC, you had companies like

Qualcomm or Nvidia founded at the same time that never manufactured.

They just designed and sent those designs to Taiwan. See, what I find so interesting about that professor and I don't know. So if you think about the creation of the industry at large for computing, it was founded on the idea that like Microsoft, we're not going to make the hardware, we're just going to make the operating system.

And if our operating system is embedded in everything, we have a monopoly.

“And if that's how they were viewing software, I'm surprised that they weren't also viewing”

that for the brain of whatever it was that they were going to create, that they would not only only operating system, but they would own the physical brain for all of these. Yeah. I think the other dynamic is financial, which is that the closer you are to the customer, the more you can charge.

And so in you look today, TSMC is a $2 trillion business in video, which relies on TSMC for almost every single chip manufacturers and video is a $5 trillion business. And so if you say would you rather be TSMC or Nvidia, the answer right now is clearly in video. And that's just one of TSMC's many customers.

And so here's the paradox is that Silicon Valley made the right choice financially. The US has by far the most valuable chip firms in the world and ecosystem that everyone is envious of. But it was only possible to get that because we had this reliance on Taiwan.

The only problem is that as we were doing that, China's military threats and capabilities were growing. So who are the companies, when you talk about Silicon Valley, you've got chip design.

“That's in video, who else is on the cutting edge of that intel?”

So it entails a bit of a different case because they still have some in-house manufacturing. But set them aside, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, Apple, Google, Amazon, all of these companies design chips and manufacturers almost all of them at TSMC. See this blows my mind because if you think about, you know, you're telling a story of specialization.

Yep. Silicon Valley was important for them financially and otherwise to specialize. So they're going to do that. We have a company like Amazon, who was saying, okay, yeah, we're going to specialize in that. But we're also going to send you books and energy bars to your house.

Like that almost seems antithetical to the entire premise. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that's been a big change the last five or ten years. Is that all of the big tech firms used to just buy chips from chip designers.

Now because they're running these vast data centers, which is a new thing, it's just the last decade that Amazon and Microsoft have become these massive cloud computing companies. They've realized that if you're going to own this many chips, you're better off if some of them are specialized to the specific types of calculations that you're undertaking.

“And that's why today the big tech firms are among the biggest buyers of specialized”

chips. So now let's take it back into sort of that geopolitical arena that we're talking about earlier.

We've got these firms in Silicon Valley who are absolutely crucial to the future of any

technology that's going to be utilized anywhere. And they have the greatest designs and the best Silicon transistor specs. And they're sending it out to this other places. Did anybody in the government or within those companies think, but you know, we're going to need a lot of your idiom and pull a idiom.

And all these other things that we are not in any way mining or refining, none of it. It sounds crazy, but the answer is not really. Everything. I like it how it's always in hindsight, yes, it does sound crazy. Yeah, I think, you know, two things happen.

One is that companies were late to really realize how problematic the US China relationship was going to get. They were constantly hoping, well, the next president's going to make it better or Xi Jinping

is going to change his mind and it never happened.

It's just been more and more conflict over the last decade. And companies were slow to realize that. But the second thing is that even if you're one of the biggest tech companies on your own, it's hard to solve a mining problem, since you are miles away from mining in a supply chain.

You're not buying yetrium or dysprosium, your suppliers aren't buying it. It's the suppliers of your suppliers, of your suppliers, which are often in different countries or different continents. And so these big tech companies often struggle themselves to understand how much yetrium is in their end product.

Oh, they don't even understand downrange what is required to make their product. They've been spending the last couple of years trying to get up to speed and it's a hard set of questions. You know what they should do is plug it into chat GPT and it'll just come out with a whole list of dysprosium where you can buy it.

And then did the first, because it's, I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around it because

it's so bananas to me, it sort of, it reminds me of, you know, we have cars, but you know we're going to need for those cars, tires and vulcanized rubber, oh yeah, but we don't have rubber. Oh, well, we better figure that out, imagine people going, no, hey, man, I just designed the cars.

I don't know what go, you know, I didn't realize we needed rubber. Yeah, it does sound like a total failure of supply team management.

“I think that's fair, I think in the defense of the tech companies, here's what's different”

from cars. So when Henry Ford was around, the number of suppliers he had was small and all of them were in Michigan. Right. Today, if you're putting the other smartphone, you've got thousands and thousands

of suppliers, both the ones you're buying from directly and their suppliers and they're on every continent in the world. And the number of materials that goes into a smartphone is in the dozens. But what I would say is, I'll almost give a pass to the tech company because I know, you know, they're focused on the one thing, who I won't give a pass to is the United States

How you have an industry that is so crucial to, I mean, right now, all the discussion

is we're not allowed to put any guardrails on AI. We're not allowed to regulate in any sense because if we slow them down for just a moment, they will be passed by China and America will no longer be a superpower. If that is the stakes that we're dealing with, their inability to plan this out in some measure is almost feels unforgivable.

“It's certainly led us to a pretty tough situation, and I think here's the real dilemmas”

that the government's no less than companies. If you ask the government, explain the supply chain for an AI server. Their first step is to call the companies that design the AI servers because how would the government know who are the components suppliers for this or that piece? And so you'd like to think the government should be in charge, but then you realize the government

knows less than companies do. They're not putting together a strategic planning board that reaches out to Silicon Valley and says, how can we make your industry more resilient and how can we safeguard your supply chains? When was the first supply chain disruption in this industry?

Was it 2010? Yeah, 2010 and 2011 China first started cutting off rare earths to Japan, which had implications for the entire tech sector, then China rolled it back and most of the industry basically forgot about it.

I hope they would never come again, and that should have been our wake-up call, but it wasn't.

But it wasn't wake-up call for Japan. That's right. That's right. And what was so, so how did Japan deal with when it first hit in 2010?

“So remember, this is 16 years ago, what did they do at that point?”

So they started investing in rare earth minds and processing facilities outside of China. So a big one in Australia, processing in Malaysia. They didn't solve their problem, but they took some meaningful steps to mitigate their risk. And in the United States, we did essentially nothing. I'm sorry, it's not funny.

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We did nothing, and so here's what I hear about doing nothing, that apparently doing something

takes a long time. And it's kind of expensive. They say, you know, for you to do any of the refining or even the mining, you know, it could be 20 years before something comes online and is really significant. So here's what's crazy about that.

“What was the year again that they disrupted the supply chain?”

2010. And what year is it now? We're almost there. We should by now have my lines ready.

That's right.

If we had in that moment said, oh, this isn't now.

And I don't know this, and maybe this is something that you don't know either. But let's just say geologically, surely there are places in the United States where these elements exist in a concentrated enough form that we would be able to mine them effectively. I don't know.

“I think refining them is is a much different process.”

And from what I understand, it's it's it's not particularly pleasant. That's right. Your intuition is correct. There are places in the U.S. as well as in South America and in Africa and elsewhere that you can find the materials you need. And the processing is not easy.

It's sometimes not that clean. It's not cheap, but it's also not rocket science. How much have the Chinese monopolize this industry? And is any of their forays into Africa also involved in in the rare earth industries? Any of their belt and road investments.

In other words, I guess what I'm getting at is, they very clearly have an industrial policy. Yep. How much is their industrial policy? We're still ahead in making the specs. But how much have we built this industry on the tenuous edge of a rock that's teetering

“and how much of the foundation of these industries did they now control?”

So for certain of the rare earths, especially what's called the heavy rare earths, their processing share is almost 100 percent, almost all processing today is in China. Of rare earths of certain types of rare earths, everyone is a different type of processing, but certain ones it's basically all in China. Now that's not true for the mining, in some cases and everyone is different, but there's

a literal monopoly for certain types of materials. So why, in God's name, would we start a trade war with them? I think the administration very clearly wasn't expecting, but should have expected trying to retaliate using it exactly this tool.

The one tool that our most important industry is based on.

What did you make up, did you follow, I thought it was really unusual that when they went to the summit, they brought basically our entire tech industry with them. I mean, Qualcomm Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, SpaceX, Boeing, and then obviously the financial guys from, I don't know, Goldman Sachsen, Blackstone and all that.

“What did you make up the presence of those companies and individuals?”

I can't wrap my mind around, was it a show of strength, or was it in some ways a show of difference? I think the dilemma we face as a country is that China is both our number one economic competitor, but also a huge market for our most important companies. And for companies, they are laser focused on keeping access to the China market.

So important to their sales and financial performance, which means they're constantly pushing the US government to make sure that China policy is made with the focus on company sales in China in mind. And so most of the CEOs that were visiting, they wanted to make sure they could keep selling in the China.

A that the US would let them keep selling and B that China would keep taking their products because they need the market. It strikes me as such a fundamentally backwards way then of demonstrating strength and

leverage is to bring with you the most powerful business leaders in our country to basically

genuflect as opposed to demonstrate resolve. And China knows that it's got a really powerful tool in terms of its ability to cut off access to our companies whenever it wants to and it's done that on our regular basis. So what what was the greatest strength then for America? It's clearly now not our materials, our manufacturing process.

What is it? Is it our allies? You know, even when you look at materials, I think it's a nuanced picture. So China produces a lot of the basic materials, but if you look at the high end materials that those basic materials are based on, a lot of that R&D still happens in the United

States or in friendly countries like Japan. So we're great at taking the stuff the China produces, doing R&D on top of it and selling it for a lot more money to the rest of the world. Like if you look at rare earths, there's China make any money off of rare earths no, almost done.

Wait, really? It's a tiny business, tiny industry.

is a bad business. It's a bad business.

“And the reason that China dominates it is because Chinese firms produce and then sell with”

little to no profit.

And so they undercut any other company that wanted to enter the market because you can't make

any money because China's producing at very low prices. So what they're understanding is this isn't a money maker. This is a strategic, sledgehammer, and it's worth it to us, you know, they used to call this in the business a loss leader, you know, they, it's like when you go buy the camera, what it was, hitory farms, and they'd have the little plate with the little cheese cubes.

And you go on to go, you know, making any money on this, you're just giving it away and they're like, right? But we got you in the store, didn't we? Is that their methodology for this? Yeah, that's 100% right.

And it's worth. It's worth.

Or it's made us dependent on their materials and right now in the position where even

our most expensive products, our most advanced ships, we can't sell them unless we can get these materials from China. Well, now let's, let's complicated a little more. Let's, let's get away from because right now we're just talking about sort of the advantage

“that China might have for the very beginning of our supply chain, right?”

They've got the mines, they refine the materials, and then they send them out for all our brilliant engineers and technologists to make the Dutch come in, they puff it up a little bit, the Japanese do their thing. What, what we've learned about manufacturing in China is they invited Apple in, let them pay

workers much less, let them take advantage of the, for your regulations and all that.

And all they had to do is bring their expertise, but what did the Chinese have them do? They've trained all their people on their expertise, and so now they have industries that are competing with that, are they doing the same with these chips? For a long time the answer was yes, and they were making progress in catching up, but then in 2019, the US and the Dutch and the Japanese began restricting sale of certain of these

advanced shipmaking tools to China, and so right now the ASML, the Dutch tools we were talking about, you can't sell them to China at the most advanced levels, and it's really cut off a lot of the progress that China had been making, and it's meant that for the most advanced ships, almost all of them, including all of the R&D is happening outside of China, in Taiwan, in Japan, in the US, and in Europe, and it's only because of these controls

that that's the case. But let me ask you, knowledge travels. I mean, it's one of the things that we're seeing now, you know, if we take it outside of a trade war and put it into a real war, it's one of the reasons why, you know, things are so fraught in Iran. We obviously have nuclear knowledge and technology that far exceeds theirs, but they're getting enough of it that they can compete and that they can make. They've got the centrifuges now, they've

got the other stuff. What is preventing China from developing the kind of expertise and knowledge of bringing in leaders in that industry to educate? I mean, I can't imagine that they're not planning for that. There's certainly trying, but I'd say different types of knowledge, travels at different speeds. And nuclear weapons, you mentioned, nuclear weapons were invented now in the 1940s. They're so straightforward even the North Koreans can make them. And so the

level of complexity in nuclear weapons is a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the level of complexity in one of these Dutch tools that's used for making chips. You've got the most complex engineering ever done hundreds of thousands of components, manufacturing happening at the nanometer scale. That's that's a virus sized and it's got to happen actually every single time. And so yeah, China's trying to copy it. Dutch media have repeatedly reported of different ways that Chinese

hackers have broken into the Dutch company to try to steal the blueprint. So that's all happening, but it's really hard stuff. And it's now been almost a decade that China's been trying to copy this machine and they haven't made a lot of progress. How much of a moving target is this expertise? In other words, if they were 10 years behind and they're slowly catching up, how much more advanced are we still disappearing past the horizon? Or is it a little bit more of a

“fixed target and they're going to be able to find their way to it? Yeah, that's a key point and”

because technology moves forward so rapidly, it's a very, very fast moving target. And the reason

precisely because there are indeed is so capable every year they're delivering a much much better manufacturing process or a much much better design. And so if you're sitting in China, you're not trying to catch up to 2026 level. If you hit 2026, but it's already 2030, you're light years behind and you've got to catch up to this moving train. It's been very difficult to do. Will it be in your estimation? Is it easier for us to catch up on the raw materials and

or for them to catch up on the high tech refinement end? I would rather have our problem than their problem. Okay. Well, listen, I don't know how far it's in the podcast. We are. We could be an hour. We could be too hard. I don't really know. But I just heard a glimmer of hope. I just heard a little flash of sunshine that just came out there, you'd rather have our problem. How would you

attack our problem? Here's why. Here's why. First, the mining of the materials that can happen

in a bunch of different countries. Not easy, but we know the materials are out there. Is it happening in a bunch of other countries? It's starting to happen. It's starting to happen. So some of these mines are starting to come online. That's right. That's right. Yep. That's the first. The second is that the processing, it gets better over time. But the rate of improvement is nowhere near the rate of improvement in ships, which means that we can figure this stuff out. And a lot of the

key processing steps were invented in the US or in Japan or in Europe. So again, this is it's not simple, but it's not rocket science either. You talked about the refinement of the raw materials, the rare earth metals that they're pulling out. Exactly. We actually invented that process. For certain types of them, yes, invented in the United States. And then decided, but we don't want to do it, that would be too easy. We're not going to bother with that. Yeah, most of the key

rare earth magnets, for example, these chemistries were invented in the United States,

“often in US military labs before we got out of the business. And so can we learn that again?”

I think the answer is pretty clearly us. Right. Now, my understanding of the trade war is

to some extent, it's being levied to force the corporations to repatriate some of the manufacturing base that we lost when China joined the WTO and, you know, globalization sort of hollowed out our base. Would that be accurate? Yeah, I think that's that's right and that's how the president sees the dynamics. But I think I would say a lot has changed in the last 30 years. The way you make a car then versus now is totally different. You know, then we didn't have cars

that could drive themselves today or on the cusp of autonomous driving in a big way. And so we shouldn't be trying to rewind the clock to 1990, but we should be asking ourselves, how do we manufacture the things that will want to be producing at scale in 2035? And those are two very different questions. Now, is that what when they had passed the chipsac was that intended to address the issue that

“you're talking about? I think partly, but I think also the chipsac was laser focused on the Taiwan”

dependency that we started our conversation with, which is that if your entire tech sector relies on one provider and China keeps threatening to blockade or invade them, that's a huge challenge too. All right, Professor. This is where the rubber meets the road. I hate to come back to rubber again, broken by the way. The processing of the rare materials of rubber. You have the opportunity to be Silicon Valley for our manufacturing,

our manufacturing process or base in America in the sense that I want you to think about the specs, the blueprint. If you're designing a process between government and these companies and a strategy to make America more resilient and yet still remain at the forefront of these technologies, what would you do? How would you design that? Excuse me, I'd say our problem is not innovation.

Our problem is dependence on China for critical components. That's it. It's a simple as that.

Our companies are the most innovative in the world. We've got no problems on that front. It's that we're too dependent on Chinese inputs for all the innovative products that we make.

“And so I think that's a problem that's solvable. Part one is to say we've got these allies in Japan,”

in Canada, in Europe and Australia, they've got great geology, they've got great manufacturing capabilities. Let's work with them, not against them. That's part one. Okay, Professor. I've got some bad news for it. It's been a complicated couple of years.

and I hate to come back to the part where my brain hurts. But the first piece of strategy,

we'll get back to the rest of this strategy. But the first piece of strategy you laid out is our strength is in the alliances we have with these other countries like Canada, and we're absolutely obliterating those relationships. I would not have put that at the start of my strategy. Totally agree. So that's so so let's say that those relationships are good. Yeah. What are how are you

leveraging those relationships to make us stronger? So all of these countries have a similar version of an alumma. They're becoming more dependent on China too. Every single year, China's competing with their industries. They need Chinese rare earths and other inputs. And so we ought to work with them to lock out the Chinese from our market and say we can't have more Chinese rare earths. But we can source from among these friendly countries, whoever's got the best geology for this mineral,

that mineral, whoever's got the best component for this manufacturer, good of that manufacturer, good of that ought to be the strategy is banned together with your friends. Would you invest? How would you sweeten that pot for places that have, you know, for instance, in China because they're much more focused on central planning? They look at the future and say, well, the real problem here for us is going to be electrification. So we might have the rare materials and we might have that,

but if we move towards where everything is moving towards AI and cloud computing, we're also going to need in the way that, you know, they're trying to build data centers here. They're going to need giant data centers and they're going to need a ton of water. And they can just go out to the rural areas of China and go, we're doing it here. And the populist can't go, not in my backyard, you know, how are we going to, how are we going to do that? How do we incentivize these other countries

“keeping an eye on the electric, you know, with our, with our eye down the road?”

You know, I think there's a lot of different tactical ways you could target this industry or that industry, but we have one superpower that we having used enough. And that's the size of our market. Now, if you add up the US economy, plus the European economy, plus the Japanese economy, you're already at two and a half times larger than China. And companies, we're collectively

we're, we're much larger than China. The problem is we've been dividing ourselves into different

parts rather than aggregating it all together. And if you're a company that has to choose, you want access to that market or the Chinese markets, that's a small fraction, the choices obvious. Would how would China react to, would they see that as hostile or would they seek to come up with

“something that's a little bit more, would they seek a compromise in that scenario?”

I think they, they would see it as hostile, but they also need access to our market, because their entire manufacturing base is geared towards exporting to us to the United States to Europe, to Japan. We're buying all the products that they're producing. And if we threaten to close that off and cause immense problems for their entire industrial base, I think it's a lot more likely that they're in the coming of the table.

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four extra months. Do you think this gets back to something else? Do you think one of the unintended consequences of this trade war is not only have they in the way that Iran now recognizes the power they have over the Strait of Hormuz? China recognizes now the power they have in terms of rare earths, but almost equally as importantly they recognize that they can diversify their export base. Because when we left and I'm forgive me if this is a wrong information, but my understanding is

their exports went up after we levied those tariffs. Not to the United States. They just pushed them to they just developed more resilient supply lines elsewhere. Yeah and the exports went to Europe. They went to India. They went elsewhere and those are exactly the countries we should be trying to get on our team working with us to build one collective market that China has to negotiate access

“into. They just I think BYD just got into Canada. That's right and I think that's you know that's”

an error on the part of Prime Minister Carney up in Canada but I think that shows that if you're going to bully your friends they're going to diversify their partnerships. Why would you say it's an era error because you think it's going to crush Canadian electric car markets or just their car markets in general? I think both also it's going to be a major issue in the relationship with United States. Although I imagine at this point for them they probably feel like what else are

we supposed I mean they're so reliant on the United States. It feels like this trade war has forced everybody to look elsewhere. Yeah I agree with that I think you know we should be doing the opposite forcing them to look towards us, aligning their policies with us and tackling the Chinese challenge collectively. Now this is probably going to be outside your area of expertise but I'm going to ask you to weigh in on it like you're an expert anyway and I want you to talk with certainty

and just say that you know you can't be wrong because you're a professor. All right they know you have the diplomas. This is now this is the metaphorical nuclear weapon in the conversation. So our actions alienating our allies while not making inroads to our rivals in terms of the resilience of our supply chains has forced people to look elsewhere in the world but our one final card to play has always been that we are the reserve currency. Whether it's petrol dollars

or dollars or that that is our final weapon that we deploy is all of this weakening that that last

“bullet we have in our our gun as well. You know I think it's it's the right question to ask but”

I think the answer is not yet. Okay first if you look at the value of the dollar versus other

currencies you haven't seen a major move you'd expect the dollar to fall in value if everyone was selling their dollars not happening. hasn't it fell though in the past to you I think that's it's right. Currency's moving up and down and nothing. Okay that's suggested dramatic change. Okay nothing that you would think is like oh this is a permanent change. How much of it though besides the value of it is this strategic play that in the way that you know Canada may not look at bringing BYD and

as a great strategic move but they feel like it's their only move. Do you think other countries might look at it like if this is the way the United States is going to behave we have to do this.

This second question is if you're knocking a buy dollars what are you gonna buy? You know there's

only so many Argentinian pesos in the world Swiss francs small country. Well the the Chinese

“currency perhaps. Well and so this is this is the key question because one of the reasons that”

Chinese manufacturing is so competitive is that they control their currency by not allowing the free exchange of remin bee and other currencies and if they were to ever open it up it would create potentially a significant economic problems for them. So rather than internationalizing the remin bee they've been actually trying to lock down the flows in and out of China because they want control over that. And they I mean are generally accused also of manipulating the value of and the reason why I didn't

name that the Chinese currencies because I can't pronounce it. Remin bee I always I always add another

man. Remin bee. How does this in your mind? Result you know we have so many open ended

these different areas on different fronts. How does this unwind or are we all just white

knuckling it to kind of see where what what incentive does China have right now to do anything other

“than exploit their advantage? Well I think China's gonna exploit their advantage but I also think that if”

you're sitting in Xi Jinping's chair not everything looks perfect either. You're worried about the energy shock from hormones. You're probably worried about your economy slowing. You've done employment rising. You're clearly worried about your military. You've just purged all your top generals and who knows what other conspiracies are at works inside of the communist party. You're a paranoid guy.

And so yeah on this particular issue you look pretty strong but I think a lot of other

metrics. China doesn't look nearly as strong as it would like to look and Xi is clearly nervous about his domestic control, his his economic position and so he's not as strong as I think his position and where earth's might suggest. So you also obviously have a great expertise in Russia. I want to ask you when you think about Putin and Xi, you know, we were under the mindset that if we were to engage Russia in Paras Troika and they taunt and open up their economy that

they would be leading a more peaceful and cooperative and that they would join the nations of the

world and we would all live in a rules-based environment and he took that and invaded Crimea

and then attacked Ukraine. So we're clearly didn't understand the kinds of historical grievances that were occurring there and his vision of recreating whatever empire it is that he thinks is

“there birthright. How much of that can be also applied to Xi and China?”

It seems to me like a lot. Okay, okay. If you look at China's foreign policy, we think of just the US China relationship but look at the China Japan relationship. China's caused that one of its largest trading partners to turn increasingly anti-China because of the rare earth dispute in 2011 and a series of territorial issues. Look at the Korea-China relationship. Koreans have really turned against China over the last couple years because China's been imposing economic sanctions

on Korea. Look at the Philippines, China relationship. They're constantly clashing in the South China Sea with the Chinese Coast Guard and the Philippine Coast Guard ramming each other. Look at India, China launched a small war against India and Himalayas in 2020 over some disputed territory. You look around China and you find there's a whole lot of countries that have a bad and deteriorating relationship with Beijing and that's because China's trying to rewrite all those relationships

in China's favor. Does that give us a strategic opening? And look, I know this is all complicated. There was a summit between Xi, Modi and Putin and everybody was holding hands. So you can't tell how much of it is the two of them or three of them enjoying watching the United States squander, whatever international goodwill it had. But if you were playing the odds on all this, it sounds like that's a huge strategic opening for the United States.

“I think that's right. You've seen all of these countries take steps to build their military capabilities”

to defend against China to increasingly work together. Even if not working with us, it's that Philippines and Japan or Japan and India working together to try to constrain China's rising capabilities. And so even if we're not cooperating with them and the ways we probably should be they're cooperating with each other to try to mitigate the impacts of China's form policy. If we were to rebuild those types of Western alliances that we were more accustomed to having

and then including South Korea and the Philippines, and do you think that would be a successful bull work against whatever China's ambitions are and against whatever Putin's ambitions are, although he seems somewhat frozen in whatever quagmire he's gotten himself into. I go back to where we were a couple of minutes ago in our conversation. You add up the U.S. plus China, I'm sorry, plus Japan, plus Europe, plus India. You've got a huge share of global GDP,

a huge share of the economy, a huge amount of military power, China doesn't want all these countries

Look, these guys have been working together closely for years. They celebrated birthdays together. They describe each other. Are they really? Yes. Yes. Putin's birthday. What? Because according to Donald Trump, it's really a special relationship that he has with you. What is Trump? Is he trying to make us them? Is he trying to create, you know, I read something today that he had said that Russia, China, United States should get together and end the international

“criminal court at the Hague? You know, I think there are folks in the administration who have”

an idea that's not crazy to say you don't want China and Russia together so you're better off

splitting them apart. And in theory, that logic makes sense. But the reality is that if you move

closer to Russia today, Russia is still going to find China to be its most reliable partner. And so the likelihood that we split them apart and the short run seems to me to be pretty implausible. And so what I don't understand about that is he seems to be the era of trade and goodwill that we created this world order of the past 80 years was at our behest. The idea that any of this occurs without our patrolling of the seas and without our trade rules and without our dollar

sort of being the foundation of it all. And now we're saying no, that was exploitative of us. And so we have to become like Russia and China, a great power that takes things because we're great powers. Is that our plan now? Clearly Trump is going to be much more transactional in relations with allies.

“Now I think you know, two his, you know, two his defense, it's true that we're the Germans”

freewriting and defense absolutely wasn't necessary for the Japanese. It's been more in defense a hundred percent. But wasn't that again, that was kind of our design where the ones who said

you're not allowed to have those things anymore. Well, I think I think that was the design at first and

then over the last couple of decades, the series of presidents, Democrat and Republican have urged the Europeans to do more on defense. They haven't done much. So I think I understand the source of Trump's frustration, but I also think that the, you know, the medicine has been just as painful as the, as we're trying to cure. So do we now, is Europe still our greatest ally or are they now kind of just a another rival power? And maybe they are

maybe the the single largest liberal democracy block going because Trump seems much more comfortable wanting a situation more like what Putin has in Russia or what she has in China.

You know, I think five years ago, the answer to the question was obvious. Today, I think both in

Washington and also in Europe, there are people that really question whether the word ally makes sense. When I zoom out though, you know, this headliner that had lines it's easy to fix it on, you zoom out and say what are the interests, what are the interests of these blocks? And it seems to me there's still a lot aligned. Neither the US nor Europe want a stronger Russia that's expanding militarily. Neither wants a China that is threatening their industrial base and on those two core

issues, I still think that there's a lot of alignment despite all of the complicated and controversial headlines that we see. So in your mind, this isn't a game of risk where the United States of America rather than being the head of the allied powers is saying, look, there's three access powers. There's us, there's Russia, there's China, and we're going to divide up our spheres of influence. And if that hurts, if that hurts, I don't know, the European Union or Great Britain,

so be it. I think that I think the debate is really about what's the definition, what's in their interests. There's the short-term transaction. I want what I want tomorrow, and there's the long-term let's build a relationship that will last over decades, involve mutual trust, involve mutual

“development, and that's what we had built in Europe. Okay. NATO was in our interest and in Europe's”

interests, and we built it over time, not every single step of the way was in everyone's interest equally, but the net benefit was good for everyone. Do you still believe in NATO being a viable institution for kind of holding that alliance together and keeping Russia at bay? You know, I think that it's been a complicated 18 months for sure, but the key question is do the Russians think NATO is a viable institution, and I would say they certainly haven't tested it yet.

Oh, that's interesting. So in your mind, they would like it not to be, but they still feel that it's got enough teeth that they don't want to push. I know this is off topic in terms of the

quite a bit, but would Putin move beyond, if he had the opportunity, Moldova and Poland, I mean, would he reconstitute?

“I think if the opportunity presents itself, he's going to try to maximize his power and influence”

over the region, but that doesn't mean he's going to be reckless and dive into a war with NATO, but if the door's open, he's going to walk through it. Do you think he's as vulnerable as people are talking about? He certainly thinks he's vulnerable. He's certainly paranoid. He certainly, the last couple of months there's been a regular disconnections of the mobile internet in Moscow. You can't or Uber, you can't use door-dash, you can't check your email, because in it that's been

shut down for smart phones. That's a sign of just how worried he is. So as China in the United States battle for the supremacy over the 21st century AI and AGI technology, Russia is deciding to make it so you can't have an Uber. I think that it sounds like they're floundering

“and they're falling much further behind. And the Ukrainians have now fought them to a standstill.”

He cranes the third of the population of Russia. Most people would have said much much

weaker than Russia when the war started, but now it looks like on the question of who can win territory the Ukrainians are just as strong as the Russians. And in your mind, and this is sort of like as a wrap-up to put the whole thing, and I so appreciate your time, but also your expertise in all of these areas that it's very hard to get what I like to think you're providing, which is a nuanced picture of all these competing dynamics that are occurring. It feels very clear that

if cooler heads prevail and we get through these sort of turbulent waters, it's in everybody's

best interest. Look, even when we talk China and Taiwan, the idea that we always say like,

"Oh, China will just take them materially because they can." But as we see with countries like Iran and Ukraine, it ain't so easy. And Taiwan has certainly got the technology to produce drones and weapons and all kinds of other stuff. And if, as you said, the temperature on the island is much more nationalistic than even what it was 20 years ago, why would China risk putting its economic progress and technological progress at such harm to even make that move?

I think you're right that if you were solely focused on economic and technological progress, you'd stay away. I think where I worry is that it's not clear that's where Xi Jinping and the Chinese leadership are primarily focused. Their economy has been slowing the last couple of years and they've let it happen because they're thinking both about economics, but also about

“power politics. And that's why I think it's so important that the U.S. and its allies”

prevented front against China and say, "If you move on, Taiwan, the costs will be catastrophic." And you believe they might, they might understand it or is it as it was in the case with Putin and Ukraine? No, this is ours from a thousand years ago and that's where going to make ourselves whole whatever the cost may be. I think if Putin had known what the cost would be, he would made a different decision in February 2022. Oh wow, that's that's really interesting. Is he someone

that is reflective enough in a way that maybe our president is not to to understand that? To understand that mistake? Well, I would say, you know, he's now four years into the war. It doesn't look like it. Thank you so much for joining this. It's been absolutely fascinating. Thanks for all the insights. Chris Miller, author of Chip War, the fight for the world's most

critical technology and obviously a historian, economic history, international relations and the

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unless you're a scared. Let me tell you some about professors. You know, never bring a

sledgehammer to a nuanced fight. These professors, they don't want nothing to do with broad statements. Every time I jump in they were like, and then you got, you know, how to see United States not for, well, to be fair. To be fair to the United States. You know what, to be fair to China, to be fair to Trump. He was fair to a lot of people. Right? Imagine knowing so much

“that you have to be fair to everybody. I can't imagine that. Talk shit. I don't want to live in”

that world. Whatever happened in knowing just a little bit. And being fair to know what. Thank you. I think that's still in Vogue, honestly, not knowing very much is still happening. And I am on the leading cutting edge of not knowing enough to be fair to anybody. Somebody's got to do it. It's hard work. But somebody's got to do it. Why we love you?

Who's back quick, quick, quick question. Who's back and down first in the, I still can't figure

out the end game on any of this shit, Russia, China. None of it. Like, how is it in 2010? That was the thing that blew my mind the most was, you know, they talk about, well, you can't really start mining your own rare earths. You can't really do any of that stuff. Because the lead time is so long. Well, in 2010, they pull the plug on rare earths in Japan. And now it's 16 years later, if we had done something, then we would not be in the position we're in today.

And worse, we have a chip sack to that our current president thinks is horrible, horrible. He doesn't even want it. We have a plan now. We have something and he paints it. Well, because it's, it was signed by auto pen. Yeah, it was exactly. It's invalid in fact.

“Yeah, that's right. I think some of the details that have come out about the trip make me”

not so sure that there is a plan like the idea that she gave Trump these like rose seeds. And there was no real reaction to it. Wait, what did he give him? It feels like a burn. No, he gave him rose seeds. It just felt like, oh, did you just destroy your rose garden? Here's like some seeds. Oh, is that what he did? He's being shady. I don't know. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. But after King Charles gave him a bell, it was like something's going on here. I think

people are just making fun of him. I'm so fucking funny. I did see that the people's Republic bands played YMCA, which I was like, he's so easy. Guys, like, did he dance? I feel like we should be able to manipulate this man more easily for our own purpose. I actually was reading some of

“that like what some countries have done to make him feel at home. And I think it was Korea where”

they just served him steak with ketchup, a burger. I'm telling you, man, our problem is we're so disturbed by the cat that we can't do the things that would, like, the Republican Party has no problem kind of buffering his ego to the point where they can get some of the things that they want. Like, all China had to do was throw a couple of four-year-olds out in front of them to sing a song. He's like, this is our greatest rival on this. You know, and then the minute he shows

up they're like, these children, they're singing to me. Whatever you need. They love me. I think you're right, though, that they're, they're fucking with him. Like, I do think they're, I think the lack of respect that they ought, like, I think they are all privately enjoying this. They are enjoying seeing the United States, a country that, let's be honest, holds itself up in a slightly arrogant fashion as a shining city on a hill. I think they're, they're loving seeing a little bit of

Like, China had sanctions against Marco Rubio from the time he was a senator, and then in order

for him to attend this trip, they did some finagling with the consideration of his name to overcome the sanctions. So he could go on the trip. Wait, there are, there are sanctions against Marco Rubio to travel. To the enter China from his time as a senator, so they did some tinkering with his name.

“Oh, no. It's all hanging by nonsense. It is hanging by nonsense. Do you guys hear whistling?”

That's definitely the construction on my street. I'm very sorry. Wait, so the construction workers just sit outside your window whistling at you? I don't know. I feel like it's like a leaf flower. I sounds have been incredible. Lord knows, I have been around many construction sites in my life.

Even worked on a couple. We never had a whistle machine. I'm being cat called by first choice.

Yeah. All right, Brittany, what have they got for us this week? Let's do it. Huh? Um, John, if you like to vote for one, Nixon or Trump. Nixon, if only to get the EPA. Yeah. I mean, Nixon at this point would be considered a gay communist in today's Republican party. Yeah. Watercase. Like, yeah. Like, wait a minute. You hired a couple of guys to break into a thing. That's adorable. I mean, Nixon and by the way, Spiro Agnew, Spiro Agnew went down

because of a slush fund. And it was just a little hint of a slush fund that Nixon was using to

“fund other things. And I think Agnew got into like tax trouble because of it. And I'm sure I'm”

mixing the realities of those things. But think about that, in comparison to $1.8 billion of

tax payer money, at least I think Nixon slush fund was donors. Oh, bribes. Yeah. It was all br-- At least it was straight up bribes. Yeah, it was bribes. This is fucking our money. I mean, do we even have a Congress? No. Or a court? Did you see that the actual amount, too, is $1.776? Well, it's because-- And they're too cute. It's all or well. It's all a fuck you troll. Everything they're doing is a fuck you troll to us. This is against the

weaponization of it. And it's patriotic. They're trolling us. His entire career is a troll. What do you think's going to happen? Nothing with that fund. They're going to give it to people that sprayed mace at police officers and pretend that they're rewarding patriotism. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The list of people centers chill at my spine. Yeah. By the way, it's not transparent. They don't have to tell you where they're doing it, how they're deciding it,

who's getting the money? None of it. It just feels like one of the more egregious things that's happened recently. And so I guess the faith in this system still exists somewhere in my body because I'm like this can't stand. Surely there will be a hearing at least. I don't know about that. No. You've seen those hearings, right? You know, it'll devolve into grandstanding that gets it nothing or they'll just bring Pam Bondi to come back with her book of

slams to be like, you know, you've got a lot of nerve. You're from Delaware, the small, you know, so dude, we're we're in the upside down and everything that you thought that there would be at some point. It really, you know what it reminds me of. You ever see those videos where like, a hoard of teens flies into like a CVS and it just starts taking shit. Smash and grab. Smash and everybody's just standing around like, is anybody going to call somebody or we just

“going to like, that's what we are. The Trump administration is a smash and grab on the American”

public on the taxpayer. It is the most corrupt, just utterly unleashed on us and they are just grabbing whatever they can and pretending that it's renumeration for some victimhood that they faced that's all fictitious. It's nonsense wild. Smash and grab. Yeah, it fills me with white hot rage. Doesn't it? It really does. It's like, this, this, this, this week, this news, like, I, like Lauren said, it's like sort of reminds you that you still have like a barometer because you're just like,

oh my god. I can still so, yeah, like the pace of news, you wind up pairing it with other stories. So today there's also the story about how many people have dropped out of the ACA,

like they're working to hand out a billion dollars to people for fun. You know how hard we

“thought to get 9/11 first responders, some healthcare for the thing and they always told,”

and that was not much more. Yeah. And these guys just drop it down and the thing that is stunning to me is like, I don't think we even know who to turn to, where you see this level of corruption and this lack of transparency and you really are looking around like, I don't even know who to call. There's no 911 for this. No one's coming to the rescue. This is all about electoral politics. These guys got to go electorally because it's totally legal and the people that the people that are supposed

to be gardening us against these interests have no responsibility. Congress theoretically, when people created these laws, they thought that Congress wouldn't allow a president to take advantage of it in this way and instead they bow at the altar of them. It's ridiculous. That's right. And you won't be able to go to the Supreme Court because they will find a way to twist if it's based on precedent that doesn't fit. They'll make it fit. If there's a precedent that

says you can't do it, they'll overturn it. They will just enable his corruption in the ball this way. He is a meme coin of a president. He is a pump and dump scheme of a president. So long as all the right people keep getting rich off it, they'll be fine with it. That's right. Yeah, guys, and in attempt to reach for some optimism. Yes. Yes. Today is a big primary day. Midterms are coming up. New people. New. I don't know. No. That was one of those. I'm going to

reach for some optimism. And then you just, you take the blinds and you just go. I opens the jar is just some dust puffing out. I feel you. What's the last one, Brad? All right, last question.

Yeah. John, what question do you always get that annoys you? I mean, none of them. It's always

nice to be asked questions. It's like, yeah, yeah, you get annoyed by questions. I don't, you know, I'm not asked that many. I'm trying to think, okay, okay, I've got one. I've got one.

“Will you make my bagel? I know who asked that one. Yeah, I get that at home. Did he live in your house?”

He does sometimes. That's the only one I get where I'm like, what? They're already made. Rolls are reversed. Yeah, that's exactly it. I can think of a couple for you. Yeah, me too. Oh, you got, okay, which one, which questions do I get that annoy you? Oh, well, that's the annoy me, but I think the one you probably get the most often is, well, are you going to run for president? How do you find hope? Oh, yeah, that's it. You know,

but I never get annoyed at that. People are genuinely, people that ask questions are almost always

invariably polite and kind and the interactions are quite pleasant. Even amongst people, quite frankly, that very clearly are not aligned with me politically or almost always. Unless they've been drinking and I'm out with my family, and then it gets a little taste of touch. Other than that, Brittany, how do they keep in touch with us? Twitter, we are a weekly show pod, Instagram, threats, TikTok, lose sky, we are a weekly show pod cast, and you can like, subscribe, and comment

on our YouTube channel, the weekly show with John Stewart. Fantastic. And as always, we couldn't do without you guys, and I just want to thank Producer Brittany McMedvik, Producer Gillian, Spirit Video Editor and Engineer Robotola, Audio Editor and Engineer Nicole Boyce, and our executive producer, Chris McShane and Katie Gray, and oh, I seem to have, uh, forgotten one person, our lead producer, Miss Lauren Mauder. Lauren? Yes. It is, uh, Lauren's final episode,

uh, with the weekly show pod cast, she is moving on to, to greener and greater, and I just can't tell you how much I've appreciated your, uh, your expertise and experience in the world of journalism

and news. Uh, I have always found so just grounding, you know, it's similar to how I feel about

Professor Miller, like I just want to go like black and white, two-dimensional, caricature, and you always bring a nuance and a shading and an experience to the conversation that is utterly invaluable. And I, I, thank you. No, thank you. Thank you for trusting me. It's been so nice shaping your

“really important work. It's an honor. And yeah, thanks for listening to my relentless opinions.”

That's, that should be the title of the book, relentless opinions, uh, by Lauren Mauder. So, uh, we appreciate it. We'll miss you. You'll stop by again for our, for our chats, uh, and, and we

And, uh, and other than that, man, onward. And, uh, we, uh, we, uh, do we have a show next week? No,

“no episode next week. We're back the following. And this is the last episode of season two for us.”

Oh, is that the case? And, sure is. Look at us. We were babies. Now, we're out of the terrible

twos. And, and we're, we're into the terrible threes. Um, all right, very cool. We'll see you guys later. Bye-bye.

“The weekly show with John Stuart is a comedy central podcast that's produced by Paramount Audio”

and Boss Boy Productions.

Bye-roll. My new episode of Apple and World Pool Flick. More on ourbuyroll.de.