American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - China: UFOs, Nukes, TikTok & The Purchase Of America (ft. Michael Pillsbury & Josh Rogin)

Episode Date: October 5, 2024

Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code AMERICANALCHEMY at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: http://incogni.com/americanalchemy As the country with the fastest growing GDP in the world, China has been a mounting concern for western officials and citizens alike for decades now. But have you ever wondered to what extent the US is being co-opted, undermined, and compromised? How is TikTok being weaponized? How are elites like Hunter Biden, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Neil Bush in bed with agents of the Chinese Communist Party (for the latter quite literally)? Why are the Chinese putting rovers on the dark side of the moon? What about the “Chinese spy balloon” that was shot down over the US last year? Is the Chinese military preparing for an all-out cyber war? And why is the CCP allowing an overtly anti-communist themed trilogy of books in that of The Three Body Problem (now a massive hit show on Netflix) to be widely distributed in their highly-censored country? Are these books acclimatizing the populace to alien life and/or is it soft recruitment for the Chinese Space Force? This is what my friend and UFO Whistleblower David Grusch speculates while claiming that China, the US, and Russia are all in a Cold War-style arms race for reverse engineering alien craft. If World War II was about who controls the skies, would World War III be about who controls outer space? To try and get the full picture, I sat down with these two experts: Michael Paul Pillsbury is a foreign policy strategist, author, and former public official in the United States. He is a senior fellow for China strategy at The Heritage Foundation and has been Director of the Center on Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., since 2014. Josh Rogin is an American journalist currently serving as a foreign policy columnist for the Global Opinions section of The Washington Post and a political analyst for CNN. He is author of the book Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century. *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. We bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7eOJzNRWY4l2UTDvIquxYg?app=desktop - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Xi Jinping to Chinese, as I understand it, they see him as the guy who's going to restore China to its rightful place. I am so angry. We've now reached a point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours. Didn't you find that unusual? Yes, I don't know that. If you're a fan of this channel, you know that most of the videos I make are about the nature of reality. Asking forbidden questions, engaging with heretical ideas, and getting slightly closer to seeing beyond the veil.

But indulging this existential curiosity is a luxury of living in a free society. There are two systems here. There's the free and open societies, and then there's the psychotic dictatorship. Our freedom is under threat internally in the United States with big tech, mass surveillance, big pharma, and big agriculture. But it's also under siege externally. Today, I'm talking about a country that transcends all others and its ability to do damage to our fragile 250-year American experiment. I'm talking, of course, about China. More specifically, I'm talking about its government.

Chinese Communist Party. If you live in a major American city, you've probably been bombarded with ads for a new Netflix series called The Three Body Problem, a new hit show based on a Chinese science fiction trilogy about scientists grappling with an imminent extraterrestrial invasion. The books put the violent brutalities of the Chinese Cultural Revolution on full display, along with its clampdown on scientists and free thinkers. At times, the trilogy almost reads. as an anti-government polemic.

And yet, the CCP and its education officials have been recommending the three-body problem to students across China. The book involves some crazy ideas, like physics is more of a fickle, arbitrary, and human construct than we think, that aliens meddle intensely with human scientific discoveries, and that the universe is teeming with alien life

that hides itself for fear of being destroyed. So does the Chinese Communist Party, or the CCP, believe in it? aliens? Do they have their own UFO reverse engineering programs? I don't know. Maybe that's a way for the Chinese government to climatize the populace. When my friend David Grush went public to whistleblow about legacy UFO programs last year, one detail of his testimony was frequently overshadowed by the sensational headlines about recovered bodies and craft. He said that

there was an ongoing Cold War to reverse engineer the non-human technology found, and that the The U.S. was competing with adversaries like China and Russia to see who could make the first modern superweapons. You'd have to be willing to reveal your ace in the whole tech, because once you use it, then you burn it, and then now everybody knows. So who knows what the CCP thinks about UFOs? But they are sending rovers to the dark side of the moon, a move that's even befuddling to NASA administrator Bill Nelson.

Why do you think they made that decision? I'm curious. I have no idea. Perhaps the simplest explanation for the CCP's unexplained tacit endorsement of alien life in the three-body problem is simply that they need as many young Chinese people interested in science and engineering as possible as the Cold War boots back up. And speaking of objects in the sky that are hard to identify, what about that innocent Chinese spy balloon spotted over Billings, Montana in January of 2023?

This stuff is a big deal. God knows what kind of information they sucked up. First off, the reporting on this object never made any sense. Satellites would theoretically have the same spy capabilities as this balloon. And if it served no functional value in optical reconnaissance, was it just a random provocation right before Secretary of State Blinken was supposed to visit Beijing? That doesn't make much sense either. A possible clue for the purpose of the balloon was its flight path.

Before hitting Montana, it flew over the Aleutian Island chain in Alaska. This is the U.S.'s first line of defense. An ICBM radar system meant to detect foreign missiles. Modern spy balloons can now travel up to 200,000 feet. Could this spy balloon have been testing the limits of U.S. radar detection capabilities? And maybe it wasn't a spy balloon at all. Maybe it was a delivery system for an EMP,

or an electromagnetic pulse. An EMP is basically a small nuke without the explosion. If an EMP exploded in the atmosphere, it could shut down the grid and wipe out electronics and large swaths of the U.S. In fact, if the eastern grid were hit, 75% of the U.S.'s electricity, electricity that supports most of our population would be affected. Millions would die. Basic staples, like water supply to your home that runs on electricity, unless you have access to a well, would immediately cease. And this could go on for close to a year before the grid. grid is back up and running again.

But let's back up. Grid failure is the worst case scenario here, but it's one our national security apparatus needs to be prepared for. What about more mundane methods of Chinese sabotage in the US? In 2022, it was revealed that BytDance, the parent company of TikTok, planned to use the social media app to monitor the location of specific American citizens. The company weaponized an investigations team to collect data about the location of a U.S. citizen who was simply a TikTok consumer and had never worked for Bite Dan's.

Let that sink in for a moment. A Chinese company wanted to use TikTok to spy on an American citizen on American soil. It could have been an outspoken journalist or a government official. Maybe it was someone who works at a charity advocating for the human rights of the oppressed weir population. That's not the point. The point is that when you hear Bite Dance, you should be hearing Chinese Communist Party. Because the only reason that TikTok exists is because the Chinese Communist Party views it as an extension of itself.

Let me explain. In the West, TikTok is full of mindless garbage, pranks, nudity, salacious content that sucks up our attention for hours on end. The Chinese Communist Party knows this perfectly well. That's why China's version of TikTok, called Duyan, is very different. In fact, it's full of science and engineering content. It's a lot of science and engineering content. It's celebrates educational and athletic achievements. It also has a youth mode, which has a five-second weight between videos, limiting kids younger than 14 from using the app for more than 40 minutes a day and doesn't let them use it after 10 p.m. The Sultan Saladin once said, in order to destroy a nation without war, all one has to do is make nudity common among the younger generation. TikTok has done just this. Countless failed attempts have been made in the U.S.

to stop TikTok from storing the personal data of U.S. citizens on Chinese servers. Trump even forced the sale of a proposed American TikTok spinout to Oracle. But the Oracle buyout never happened, meaning the most widely consumed media platform among young people in the United States is still, as of today, de facto run and managed by the Chinese Communist Party. This should change soon because on April 22nd of 2024, President Biden finally signed into law of Biden. bipartisan bill passed by Congress that forces TikTok to shut down in the U.S. unless it is sold

to an American company within a year. But as of the making of this video, TikTok still contains these insane data tracking stipulations in its terms of service. All of this led to FBI Director Christopher Ray's recent statements about TikTok, where he expressed extreme concern. We collect certain information about the device you use to access the platform such as your IP address, user A.P. model of your device, the device system, network type, device IDs, screen resolution, operating system, app and file names, and keystroke patterns or rhythms, and where you log in from multiple devices.

We will be able to use your profile information to identify your activity across devices other than those you use to log into the platform. And the dangers of TikTok don't stop at data collection and tracking. The app divides the U.S. based on specific social fractures the CCP is acutely aware of in American culture, stoking tensions in areas like race, gender, and identity to demoralize Americans along issues the CCP already knows are a grievance for them. But none of this is a coincidence. China has made similar attempts in the past, like when Chinese gaming giant Beijing Koonloo bought the gay dating app Grindr for $93 million in 2016. only when security concerns were raised in 2020, where they forced to sell it.

Grindr includes the HIV status of many of its users. I'd imagine that all of this is sitting on a Chinese server somewhere, along with your unfinished TikTok drafts, to be unleashed as Compromot in the event of an all-out cyber world. This is all part of China's long-term strategy to displace America as the world's superpower and remake the world in its own image. In this video, I lay it all out. What is the CCP's strategy?

Why did American elites willingly trade away its national security and middle class for cheap consumer goods and personal enrichment? How did China use American decadence and consumerism against itself? And what should the West do about all of this? This episode is going to be absolutely crazy and we're going to reveal a lot of new information. But before we talk about Chinese and American cyber warfare, it's important to point out that governments are hardly the only threat to the security of your personal data online. You probably don't realize just how exposed your personal information is on the web.

There's an abundance of people search sites all over the internet with personal data on millions of American civilians. These sites get their information from sketchy data brokers who collect and sell detailed profiles of your online activity, your phone number, home address, family details, even your financial information that anyone can access. And when you try to fix this yourself, you discover how many data brokers will still keep collecting your information, even after you've removed it manually. Meaning you have to make repeated removal requests if you really want to stay safe.

This is where our incredible sponsor Incogni steps in. They make it super simple to remove your data from these online brokers and keep it removed. All you have to do is sign up and they handle the rest working tirelessly to deal with data brokers on your behalf, to make sure you're going to make sure you're going to do. your information is removed and pays off these sketchy servers. Your personal data can be used for identity theft, financial fraud, or even showing up at your home. Someone has a vendetta. So if you value your privacy, which if you watch this channel, you probably do. And you like the idea of keeping personal data secure like I do.

You'll want to check out incognity. So don't wait until it's too late to protect yourself. Check the link in the description below to take control of your personal data. Back to the show. Where did all of this tension with China start? We were supposed to be tight allies, and many American elites acted like that was the case as recent as a few years ago. Let's go back to 1971. Knowing a President Nixon's expressed desire to visit the People's Republic of China,

Premier Cho and Lai has extended an invitation to President Nixon to visit China. Since even before he was elected president, Richard Nixon was in his president, interested in improving relations with China and siphoning them off from the Soviets. He thought that he could exploit a Sino-Soviet split to undermine the global communist threat. So his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, went to China to meet with Premier Zhou Enly. And Zhou basically told Kissinger to his face about China's plan to displace America. America is the Ba, Zhou told Kissinger. His translator told Kissinger, Ba' meant leader.

But the word Ba doesn't exactly mean leader. Joe wasn't complimenting the United States. He was telling us that the Chinese saw America as a tyrant, and that our days as the global hegemon were numbered. The U.S. didn't listen carefully enough, and this sort of tongue-and-cheek double speak has run rampant in China's communications with the United States since then. You seem to understand this sort of double speak that's sort of constantly in play on the Chinese side in a way that other U.S. foreign representatives, it just doesn't even dawn on them.

And it's hidden in plain sight in many ways. Michael Pillsbury is an experienced foreign policy strategist who's been thinking and writing about China for longer than I've been alive. And he's been a part of presidential administration since Nixon. Do you think that other foreign policy representatives sort of understand what's going on at all in terms of China's orientation towards us? I think the key is how many years of preparation are needed before someone is named to be an authority on China. I learned the proverbs that the Chinese use today to describe strategic situations.

I learned those proverbs as part of a language training program. In my second year, we used to have dinners and lunches inside the Pentagon for Chinese generals. We would go to their Pentagon to have lunches and dinners. You can't discuss top secret stuff with a potential adversary, but you can't and discuss ancient history. So you could say, who's the smartest emperor? The Tang Dynasty or the Han Dynasty. And you get a debate going among the Chinese generals.

Why? What makes a good strategist? And then you're dealing with very fascinating insights. What does make the best strategist? But you can't do that unless you're conversant with their history and culture. Hillsbury believes the warring states period is key to understanding the CCP's strategy.

In Pillsbury's book, The 100-year Marathon, he even writes that Chinese strategy is at its core a product of lessons derived from the warring states period. He cites a Chinese government document from 1991, which used a warring state-era proverb, Tauguing Ying-Wi. When the document was leaked, Beijing translated it as, Bide your time, build your capabilities.

The CCP has always insisted that the strategy never had any intent beyond encouraging China's internal development. But Pillsbury sees it another way. In his book, he says that in its proper context, the proverb actually alludes to overturning the old hegemon and exacting revenge once the rising power has developed the ability to do so. The old hegemon, the old ba? You guessed it, the United States. Nixon was right when he called his visit to China in that time, the week that changed the world. But it would change the world, in a way that only the Chinese Communist Party could have predicted. By the late 1970s, China's economic boom had begun.

The boom lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty and transformed China from a backwards agrarian economy into one that today represents a manufacturing base for the world. How did this all happen? Well, America kind of asked for it. Strong and prosperous China is America's strategy and goal. And the subliminal kind of theme is, we, the West, humiliated China. We did a lot of bad things to China for 100 years.

So now we have to make up these bad things by building a strong and prosperous China. So what does this mean? Foreign direct investment, technology, policy that's very relaxed. If the Chinese want to come to school, study physics in America, hey, 300,000 is not a problem. Yeah. If they want to have laboratory contracts, With all the major universities, physics and chemistry departments, hey, strong and prosperous China. So it's a conscious policy decision in documents signed by different presidents.

We will build China into a major power. But the only reason it made sense is they're not going to succeed very well. Yeah, maybe they'll be one of five, but we will still easily be number one. American elites believe the world is flat, not literally, but in the United States, but in the the Thomas Friedman sort of way. Friedman is a New York Times columnist who wrote a book called The World is Flat in 2005. The book's basic thesis is that economic liberalization creates an irresistible pressure for political liberalization. This essential tenet is the bedrock of both neoliberalism and in many ways, neoconservatism. Along with economic liberalization will

inevitably come political liberalization. And what actually happened is we might have gotten glass-noss, but we did not get parastroica with China. The problem is that that policy is still in effect today. It has not been changed. When it came to China, American elites drink Friedman's thesis like Kool-Aid. Take Goldman Sachs. It spent decades cultivating relationships in China. Goldman exploited these ties to win prime roles in major Chinese IPOs.

Petro-China in 2000. The Bank of China in 2006. D.D. in 2021. American elites believed that by helping China integrate into global markets and liberal institutions, they would get rich, and China would liberalize. It was a win-win, except it didn't work out that way. Instead, China's leaders noted America's decadence and used it against them, systematically flipping the script.

Just take this example. China invested $1 billion in BlackRock. BlackRock is the main proponent of ESG investing, or a three-letter acronym that represents how well accompany virtue signals and is willing to sacrifice value creation for pure optics around environmentalism and social justice. As Peter Thiel says, Whenever you hear ESG, you should just think CCP.

American leaders have shown a complete willingness to trade away security for money. And the Chinese installed the perfect person to further exploit that weakness, Xi Jinping. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boot

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that I had as a kid, that John Mayer has a kid. He made more use of it, apparently, than I did. Yeah. Josh Rogan is a journalist for The Washington Post. Yeah, so I, you know, fell ass-backwards into journalism in a failed attempt to become a scholar of U.S.-Japan relations, which is also why I'm addicted to Japanese ramen. His great book, Chaos Under Heaven, about U.S.

China relations during the Trump administration documents America's kind of ignorant and often schizophrenic orientation towards China very thoroughly. It also shows just how many greedy American bankers, politicians, policymakers, and businessmen have simply been bought off by the Chinese over the last two decades. I mean, what you're talking about is elite capture, and the way they do it is through something called the United Front. The United Front is like a massive parasite which burrows a massive parasite. its way under the skin of the host countries, laying eggs that hatch in the future.

And it's already here. Some of these are important people. Some of these are businesses, foundations. Anyone who has an interest in doing business with the party who has influence abroad. In early 2017, just weeks after his father finished his term as vice president, Hunter Biden flew to Miami to meet Yi Jiang Ming, the founder of the CEFC, China Energy Company Limited. private dinner, Ye offered Hunter Biden $10 million a year for a minimum of three years for, quote-unquote, introductions. He also presented him with a diamond worth $80,000. Here's a photo

of that diamond taken from Hunter's laptop. Like, why did he give me a diamond? My dad's not even vice president anymore. Well, maybe he'll be president someday. It's a good diamond investment in under Biden. It was an investment, not a gift, a seed planted in fertile soil. I'm cooperating completely. But the bribery and blackmail are bipartisan. Just listen to this story about Neil Bush, George and Jeb's younger brother. On his many business ventures in China, he admitted in his divorce deposition that women were sent to his room to have sex with him, who we didn't know. And he just did it. And his wife's divorce lawyer asked him in the deposition, Didn't you find that unusual, Mr. Bush?

And he said, yes, I found that quite unusual. I think I have a different perspective than most Americans because of my closeness to China. Or Elaine Chao, Trump's Secretary of Transportation and Mitch McConnell's wife. In her first year on the job, Chow held 21 meetings with Chinese state media, and she did zero interviews with American media. In more than a dozen of those interviews, she was seated next to her father, founder of a multi-billion-neutral. dollar privately held shipping company called the Foremost Group, with the Transportation Department's flags clearly visible in the background. And when she booked an official trip to China, she forced the State Department to include

her family members in meetings with key Chinese officials. The Chow family is a unicorn, American royalty and Chinese royalty at the same time. Their business interests and political activities are closely intertwined. Or take Wendy Dang Murdoch, Rupert's third wife. She's clearly the very least, a super important back channel, highly placed sort of non-official go-between, between the top leadership in Beijing and leaders all over the world. Yeah. Tony Blair.

Yeah. In early 2017, Wendy Dang Murdoch lobbied for the construction of a Chinese garden at the National Arboretum in Washington. The $100 million project was set to be funded by the Chinese government. Oh, and it also included a 70-foot-high white tower. that the FBI even thought could be used for spying. And Wendy Dang Murdoch lived in the same building as Jared Adonka. And the Sheridan Babonka babysitter. And she gave them their nanny.

That's why Jared and Ivanka's children speak Chinese. In March of 2013, a blog claimed that Wendy Murdoch had worked for the propaganda division of the People's Liberation Army, and that she'd been recruited as far back as 1986. In 2020, FBI director Christopher Ray warned that we've now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours. There are the Confucius Institutes, Academic Front organizations, completely controlled by the CCP on various American college campuses. Although many have closed, more than it doesn't, continue to operate today. The CCP also steals American intellectual property through its League of a Thousand Talent. program. In December of 2021, the chair of Harvard's Department of Chemistry, Charles Lieber,

was convicted of six felonies regarding his involvement in the Thousand Talents Program. It had been discovered that the Wuhan Institute of Technology had provided him with a $50,000 monthly stipend, more than $150,000 of living expenses, and more than $1.5 million to establish a laboratory back in China. Liber was one of the world's leading chemists, a pioneer or nanotechnology, and the Chinese just bought him. And why is nobody talking about the fact that the Wuhan Institute of Technology paid him off for years before the pandemic hit? I'm not suggesting there's necessarily a connection there, but I've never even heard

somebody broached the topic. Chinese influence in America extends well beyond just the United Front. Take another example you might remember from 2019. Darry was the general manager of the Houston Rockets, and On October 4th, dismayed by China's repression of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, he shared a seven-word tweet that read, Fight for Freedom, Stand with Hong Kong. It was a simple gesture of support for a society suffering under the weight of the Chinese boot.

China went crazy. This was to be expected. What was shocking was the NBA's complicity. The owner of the Houston Rockets quickly distanced the team from more. since the team from Mori's comments. The team's best player, James Harding, publicly apologized to China in the aftermath. Yeah, we apologize, you know, we love China, we love playing there. The NBA then released a groveling statement which recognized that Mori's tweet deeply

offended many of our friends and fans in China. A follow-up by the league's commissioner didn't improve matters. Meanwhile, LeBron James said he believed Mori wasn't educated on the situation at hand. I believe he wasn't educated on the situation at hand. China is the NBA's most lucrative overseas market. Threats to pull out of sponsorship deals and boycott the league were enough to make the NBA cave. It didn't work. The league still lost hundreds of millions of dollars because in the eyes of Beijing, it wasn't sufficiently apologetic.

He was not sorry at all. Shitbao. Shitbao. Shitbao. John Sina suffered the same fate as Derecton. Morrow, being forced to apologize in Chinese after simply calling Taiwan a country. I can easily name 100 other examples from around the world, but I'll spare you. The point is it's a systematic strategy.

What can I shoot out? There's another way that China shapes the world order. infiltrating international institutions. For years now, China has been pushing its civil servants or those of its clients and partners to the top of institutions that set global standards for air travel, telecommunications, and agriculture. COVID-19 revealed the extent to which China has compromised the World Health Organization. Just look at what happened when a Hong Kong news outlet asked a WHO official

if it would consider admitting Taiwan as a member. I'm actually curious on talking about Taiwan as well, on Taiwan's case. China has used COVID as a weapon to weaken the rest of the world. It deliberately suppressed news about the virus, even as it knew it was circulating in Wuhan. It locked down domestic travel before it locked down international travel. Just think about that. China knew COVID was contagious and even deadly in many cases,

but it was still perfectly willing for it to circulate and kill people in other countries. If China had to suffer, the rest of the world had to suffer, too. How did China know so much about the virus? Because it appeared right on the doorstep of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab that possessed the world's largest collection of bat coronaviruses, and the closest known relative to SARS-COV-2. Oh my God! There's been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania.

What do you think happened? Like, oh, I don't know. Maybe a steamy. shovel made it with a cocoa bean, or it's the chocolate factory. Maybe that's it. That could be. When I learned about this, it reminded me of an old Mao quote. When a Yugoslav diplomat visited Peking in 1957 and asked about the threat of nuclear

weapons, Mao is said to have replied, we have a very large territory in a big population. Atomic bombs could not kill us all. That's a chilling quote. one that reflects a mindset totally alien to most Americans. It shows that China's leaders have always been committed to a dialectical materialism that sees conflict and even massive human suffering as inevitable costs of progress. It's why the CCP won't care at all after a stock market crashed caused by their clampdowns. They've cemented absolute power, and it's why COVID was confirmation, if anything, that the use of asymmetric, bio, cyber, and information work there is possible

against the U.S. as long as you get certain American bureaucrats bought in. Mr. Trump has spent a lot of time trying to understand China. The United States lost over 3 million manufacturing jobs, nearly a quarter of all steel jobs, and 60,000 factories after China joined the WTO. He had an instinctive view also that's one of his books that came out in 2000. He says, the Chinese are the best negotiators in the world. And if I were negotiating with them, the only way I could get leverage would be to be unpredictable. Before he ran for president, Donald Trump was doing business in China for decades,

so he always understood what it was doing, especially on trade. Trump had many of the right instincts when it came to do. instincts when it came to China. But in office, his administration was way too dysfunctional to implement a coherent solution. Trump never hired a Chinasar. He never empowered one person. I'm an eyewitness to what you're calling the Trump inner circle. The way it worked, it really was a circle. The president would sit behind the desk. He would array in front of him in a semi-circle, maybe eight chairs. And I was in one chair. Vice President Pence would sit over in his own chair, back on the sofas, Jared Kushner, the note taker, Matt Pottinger, General Kelly,

chief of staff, and this one meeting I'm thinking of, which just before Buenos Aires. And it functioned when what John Bolton has called a food fight, a freewheeling debate, if you want, to persuade the president who sometimes has his arms folded. Like, you know, I want to hear something really good. Looking back, the one China-related achievement of Trump's time as president was the president. was the so-called trade war. You know, we're the piggy bank that everybody steals from, including China. Six months after his inauguration,

Trump directed the Office of the United States Trade Representative to investigate China's economic practices. The subsequent report found that Chinese theft of American intellectual property cost the U.S. economy between $225 billion and $600 billion every year. As a result, Trump imposed about 50,000,000. billion dollars worth of tariffs on Chinese imports to complement earlier tariffs on steel and aluminum. Of course, Wall Street went crazy in protests saying that the tariffs would cause all sorts of inflation. In fact, the tariffs didn't cause any inflation. By all accounts, Trump had good intentions

with the tariffs, and they did bring China to the negotiating table when he signed the phase one agreement with Xi. In fact, Biden even ended up leaving the tariffs in place when she, miserably failed to uphold his commitment to increase Chinese purchases of U.S. goods and agricultural products, only purchasing 58% of what he committed to. What about foreign policy? In early 2020, the Trump administration issued its most comprehensive report on China. It was called the United States' strategic approach to the People's Republic of China, and it laid out all of the administration's China policy and more clarity in detail than ever before.

The lead author was Matt Pottinger, the Deputy National Security Advisor. He told Josh Rogan that the report was the Trump administration's own version of NSC-68. NSC-68 was one of the most foundational documents of American foreign policy during the Cold War. It called for a tripling of the U.S. defense budget and an extensive military buildup

to prevent the Soviet Union from achieving world domination. But Pottinger's comparison between his memo and NSC-68 was useful but flawed. The main difference was in the strength of the economic ties between America and its adversary. The United States and the Soviet Union barely traded with each other. Meanwhile, U.S. trade with China was worth more than $600 billion in 2020. And currently, China produces 60% of the world's rare earth minerals, but processes nearly 90% of them. giving China a near monopoly on critical resources and materials the modern world relies on to function. This makes decoupling, the progressive separation of American and Chinese economies,

very difficult to accomplish. According to Michael Pillsbury, it's a fantasy. I think decoupling is really a rhetorical device. It's not happening. We're not decoupling at all. So the phenomena we face now is on TV you'll get a senator of congressman who has an idea. I'm going to, I don't want China to be number one in the world. My legislation will stop this in some small way and that they'll do an op-ed piece. But in terms of legislation or executive orders of the president that deal with important parts of China,

nothing has passed. Nothing has passed. Still, Trump was satisfied with what he achieved. Josh Rogan actually called him and they had a very interesting conversation. Well, what's the answer if China had attacked? Taiwan while you were president, would you have sent the U.S. military? And he says, well, Josh, I never speak about such things. I would never say. That's a matter of national security. I'm like, come on, just tell me. Just tell me.

He says, well, the truth is, it's not an issue. I'm like, oh, really? Why? He says, well, I had assurances from the very top that China would not attack Taiwan as long as I was president. He's like, all eight years of my presidency, they were never going to attack. I had assurances from the top. I said, from who? What do you mean the top? He's like, I can't tell you. I'm like, Xi Jinping, he's like, I can't say, but yes. What? That's what interviewing Trump is like. On the sixth answer, he tells you the thing that you wanted, sometimes he tells you a thing he wanted to know. Well, not only the thing you wanted to know,

but something even more mind-boggling. Yeah. Xi Jinping had promised President Trump that he would not attack Taiwan, and Trump believed him. Yeah, yeah. And that's crazy. That is crazy. Because Xi Jinping is a liar. That's right. And that might have lulled Trump into a false sense of security that could have undermined our response. But luckily, it didn't come to that, but in a second term, it just might. America is facing its biggest challenge since the Cold War.

In fact, it's bigger because China's elites have been carefully laying the foundations for conflict for decades. 30 years ago, a curious Chinese intellectual visited the U.S. He was here for business, not for pleasure. He took notes. Those notes turned into a book called America Against a book. America. That curious intellectual is named Wang Huning. He's the fourth-ranked member of the Politburo Standing Committee, China's top decision-making body. He's been instrumental in developing key parts of Xi's agenda, such as Xi Jinping thought, the Chinese dream, and the Belt and Road Initiative. And he was very inspired by what he thought were the beneficial aspects of American

capitalism that he could take back with him. But he's also been studying America's weak points. its little divisions, ruptures, and susceptibilities for 30 years, as outlined in this book. While Chinese elites have been preparing for war, American elites have been asleep at the wheel. Or worse, they've been actively collaborating with China in hollowing out the American middle class and weakening our defenses. China is richer, more powerful, and better organized than the Soviet Union ever was. The CCP is waging the world's biggest influence-building campaign to promote its own interests. And it's built the capacity to launch cyber attacks that can disrupt critical infrastructure assets in every major American city.

Just recently in April of 2024, FBI director Christopher Ray announced that Chinese government-linked hackers had successfully gained access to U.S. infrastructure and numerous American companies in telecommunications, energy, water, and other critical sectors, and are waiting for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow. So what should we do about all of this? First, America needs to develop real self-sufficiency. That means, in the near term, reshoring American jobs and vital industries like semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and even the production of basic manufactured goods like masks and vital equipment. And it requires recognizing that our national security is vital to our way of life.

The export controls President Biden announced in October 2022 are a good start. The regulations are designed to prevent U.S. firms from exporting their best chips to China and prohibit American citizens from helping Chinese companies develop cutting-edge manufacturing capabilities. The second important thing is to go back to the true roots of capitalism, a version that emphasizes production over consumption, in other words, one that values auto and steel manufacturing more than banking and consultant. In decades since the civil infrastructure investments of FDR and Eisenhower, we've allowed our American cities to simply crumble.

Meanwhile, China continues to innovate and push forward in infrastructure, construction, and innovation. Biden has spent a lot of money here, but with few real results in major urban environments. All you need to do is go to any major American city to see that much of this money has just gone to grift. Next, the U.S. must invest in frontier science and technology. technology, not just business model innovation or modern defense companies, real breakthroughs in areas like free energy and anti-gravity. I realize that sounds extremely armed here and is easier said than done, but I do present some interesting historical frameworks in past episodes that could represent paths to progress

here. Still, the challenge vis-a-vis China is immense, and while the Middle East is escalating into a powder keg, the Chinese Politburo is using it as a distraction to sharpen its sword. The recent purge of high-ranking Chinese military officials shows that Xi Jinping continues to tighten his grip on power. He broke precedent and secured a third five-year term as general secretary. He's removed most of the more liberal and economically-minded leaders from the Politburo to pivot more towards hardline nationalists. He even had former leader Hu Jintao escorted from the Great Hall of the people. On the human rights front, the Chinese government

has entered millions of Uyghurs in re-education camps in an attempt to stamp out their identity. It brutally cracked down on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, and it's actively planning how to invade Taiwan. There was this senator who told me for the book, which I reported in the book, about Taiwan, for example, that Trump had told him, quote, we're 8,000 feet from China.

Taiwan's 200 feet away. If they attack, there isn't a fucking thing, we could do about it. Yeah. That's what he said. That's a quote in the book, yeah. That was in the book. So I asked Trump about that. So did you really say that? Well, Josh, I would never tell you. And meanwhile, the U.S. and its public health institutions reacted at best like a woozy boxer to the pandemic and then acted like a drug addict afterwards, resuming our national addiction to outsource supply chains and to gain a function research. For decades, our business and political

elites helped China grow into a world power. The boomers are like, they're, set to be the first generation that can't get the American dream to work. And because of the culture of personal responsibility, the idea of just failing at the American dream doesn't, it's like not an option. So China becomes the source of the American dream. Right. It's really the Chinese dream of getting wealthy Americans to sell things off to China so that they can pretend to live better than their parents. One of Xi's favorite books is Faust by Gerta. His father, Xi Shang-jun, was a CCP official and vice-chairman of the People's Congress before being sent to do humiliating factory work and then prison by Mao as part of his

re-education campaign during the Cultural Revolution. Xi's mother was even forced to publicly disown her husband. So by choosing ascendance in the CCP, Xi is making a Faustian bargain, acknowledging his indelible ties to Chinese materialist progress, or as he calls it, Marxism, with Chinese characteristics. The United States has made a similar Faustian bargain by selling out our middle class, security, and self-sufficiency for personal enrichment, favors, and cheaper TVs.

This show is generally about the fact that there are worlds beyond this one that hold repercussions for our earthly actions. So what will you do? Make a Faustian bargain and choose to stand idly by? Personally, I don't want war with China, and I love Chinese culture and people, but the U.S. must understand the extent to which it's being undermined and co-opted

if it ever wants an independent and free future. In many ways, the mass surveillance of big tech in the U.S. mirrors Chinese mass surveillance. Cancel culture is similar to social credit scoring. In the American schooling system where Ivy League elites or excellent sheep scurry about for gold stars and jobs in banking and consulting is simply America's modern version of the Chinese Confucian bureaucracy system, So we need to stop mindlessly competing with China at what they're best at.

These are lame accelerationist races that will destroy the U.S. from the inside out as much as they will help it become competitive with China. Perhaps if David Grush is right and were in a cold war with China to reverse-engineer non-human technology, we must look to more transcendent forces, perhaps in the dark forest, for a benevolent partner that can allow America to transcend this memetic lucidity's trap. I'm very, very, very, sorry to my wrong, sorry, I'm very sorry, I'm very sorry,

you have to know, I very love, and I very much, very much, and I'm very much of the people, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building,

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