The Jordan Harbinger Show - 268: Robert Spalding | How China Took Over America

Episode Date: October 24, 2019

Robert Spalding (@robert_spalding) is a national security strategist and a globally recognized expert on Chinese economic competition and influence. He retired from the US Air Force as a brigadier general, and is the author of Stealth War: How China Took Over While America's Elite Slept. What We Discuss with Robert Spalding: The consequences the United States faces as a result of its economic connections to a totalitarian state that openly opposes its core values. How electronics and sensors are being created for American consumers that send data to China to feed the government's artificial intelligence systems. Why there can't be a global free market system when the second biggest economy in the world isn't participating. How US manufacturing suffers as a result of consumer demand for "cheap stuff" that China is more than happy to fulfill. China's fraudulent accounting methods, akin to a ponzi scheme, that actively erode the US economy with assistance from the very people this hurts. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/268 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Join entrepreneur, technology investor, and self-experimenter Kevin Rose as he explores new ways to reach peak personal and professional performance on The Kevin Rose Show -- listen here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFillipo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills

of the world's most brilliant and interesting people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Today, Brigadier General Robert Spalding,

he is the special assistant to the U.S. Air Force Vice Chief of Staff. Sounds kind of a big deal. All you need to know about that is that we did this show from a secure room in the Pentagon, which is kind of awesome. This is one of the scariest books I've read in a long time.

There's a big part of me that wanted this all to be some sort of exaggerated scare porn fiction. However, that belief is hard to maintain when you're talking to a China expert working in the freaking Pentagon. War looks a lot different than it did a century ago, and the Chinese Communist Party has an outline, literally has documents for economic warfare and subjugation of other countries and populations, and it is well documented. Both parties in the USA have really slept on this. The whole China trying to get the edge on everything, we have slept on this.

And today, we're going to explore some of the current and potential future consequences of this policy or this disastrous policy. We already know that U.S. manufacturing is being destroyed in part because of cheap stuff from China. There's no secret there. This is, of course, of our own making. And China is building electronics and sensors that send data back to China and using that data to feed artificial intelligence systems. and if you heard our episode with Kai Fu Lee, you know that AI thrives on data and that race will be one with data. Also, the free market system can't exist when the second biggest economy in the world is not really a free market. We'll talk about some of the market manipulation that's happening over there.

And we'll discover that China literally prints money and has a really bad balance sheet. We have no idea how deep the Ponzi skin goes and guess which economies will be left holding the bag. There's a lot in this episode and we go pretty quickly. I hope you enjoy this one and take it for what it is. This is a discussion about China and the Chinese Communist Party, the government, and the policy thereof. It's not about Chinese people. It's not about Chinese Americans or even Chinese people living in China.

I loved this book and I loved this discussion. I'm keen to hear what you think when you're done listening as well. If you're wondering how I get guests of this magnitude, well, it's all about that network, baby. Six-minute networking is where I'm teaching you how to generate connections for personal and business reasons. Anything you need can be found through your time. network and I want to teach you how to do it for free, not enter your credit card free, but free,

because the more people that know this stuff, the better. And it's all at Jordanharbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us and you'll be in great company. All right, here's General Roberts Baldwin. As I was saying before, this is one of the scariest books that I've ever read. And I, it's one of those situations where I hope you're wrong about a lot of this stuff, but obviously I don't think you are, and I'm pretty sure I'm just engaging in wishful thinking. I wish I was engaging in wishful thinking. You know, when I started digging into this and I thought, okay, at some point, you know, I'll get to the level where it stops and it just keeps going.

And you know what's funny? It's still going every single day. Like I was just out in Silicon Valley and I'm hearing more and more and more. And, you know, just you keep digging and you hope to get to the end of it and you don't. Yeah, it seems like a complete and total bottomless pit of problems. And the book is called Stealth War. What does this mean in the context of China? Just a 30,000 foot overview, because I've, of course, I've got a ton of specifics here, but I think a lot of folks need to understand what we're talking about in general before we kind of dive in. What it means is underneath everything that's going on in our peacetime environment, you know, our democracy is essentially being undermined at nearly every connection with the Chinese

Communist Party. And it's not because, you know, our democracy. And it's not because, you know, we have Americans that are treasonous or traitorous. It's because they've essentially been diluted into a vision of the world that actually doesn't exist. I remember sitting in my office in the White House and people would come in and they'd sit on the couch and they'd talk to me about the liberal, deprecratic order. And I would say, okay, explain me where that exists. As I look across the landscape, UNWTO, Bretton Woods, none of the things that we put in place to ensure the survival of democracy, not just at home, but abroad, works anymore. And so essentially, geopolitics that supported democratic principles had fallen apart. And it had fallen apart,

primarily because of economic and financial relationships between the Chinese Communist Party and, you know, the rest of the world. So the book, a lot of people will think it's alarmist and think it's sensationalist. I assume that you don't agree with that. And for me, of course, I have no idea. I trust your expertise as somebody who, who is on the front lines of this whole thing. Also, I think it's important to note, especially because we get into some down and dirty details here on the show,

and you do this well in your book. This is not against Chinese people. This has nothing to do with American citizens who happen to be Chinese. My wife is Chinese, this is Chinese Communist Party in particular. So I wanna say that out front because I don't want people to shut their ears

because they got offended because they're from Taiwan or China and they're upset about this. This is literally just the machinations of the Chinese Communist Party, right? Absolutely. And one of the things that the Chinese Communist Party does is try to convince you that when you're calling them out for things that they do, that you're really being racist against Chinese people. I mean, that's one of their talking points.

And so the first thing that I usually try to do when I'm talking to people about the challenge we face is please, in your mind, separate China, the Chinese people, and the Chinese Communist Party. Because each of them are different. China is a big place. You know, it's got a lot of different geography. it's got history. The Chinese people have fabulous culture. They're great people. They're heartworking. They're resilient. You know, and I lived there amongst them for almost three years and loved every minute of it, and they were such kind, generous people. But the Communist Party that basically sits over the top of that is another completely dark layer in that society. And unfortunately, the way that they constructed it essentially permeates

everything. And so when people say China, usually when they're talking about nefarious behavior, they mean the Chinese Communist Party. But the dialectic that the Chinese Communist Party uses is to say they represent all the people of China. They represent, you know, 5,000 plus years of culture and history of the Chinese people. And that's just not correct. It's not true. But if you don't know China and you don't know the Chinese people and you don't know the Chinese Communist Party, it's very hard in your mind to separate those three things. Yeah, I can imagine that's the case. Now, I would love to hear about some of the IP theft, right?

Because that's what I think a lot of us are aware of. In fact, I interviewed the president or former president of Google China, Kai Fu Lee about artificial intelligence a few months or last year, actually. And some of the feedback I got from people was, how come you didn't bring up IP theft? One, the guy is Taiwanese and also lives in the United States most of the times. So it didn't make sense. But secondly, this isn't something you do normally with a guest who comes to your show

and start accusing them of what their government is doing. But IP theft is a real big deal. And it's, I mean, we've seen this. It's not just your iPhone cable getting made cheaply by a Chinese knockoff factory. I remember reading a story about how Volkswagen lost engine plans to a Chinese firm that then started making fake Volkswagen engines in cars for, I think, the Russian market. It's everywhere. The techniques that they use and the strategies that you use to acquire technology are so diverse and so widespread that, you know, it's hard to explain the breadth of it all.

You know, just one of the stories, you know, and really how this whole thing got started. I outlined this in the book, a relationship that I started while I was at the Council in Foreign Relations with a guy that had a hedge fund invested in China, sent me this briefing. And each briefing was a different vignette of a different company, how it had been put under duress, using some elements of cyber. But cyber wasn't the primary methodology. It was just an enabler. Or even some methodologies for human, what we would call human tradecraft. So they had essentially looked at the motivations of the individual that they had gone after using tools for cyber, say, to do fishing. You know, even deeper was the really intense knowledge of not just the technology they were going after, but the business model that the particular firm was employing. So in this one case, it was a chemical company that was essentially in year four of a five-year arc to IPO,

where the private equity company that owned it was attending the IPO the company in the fifth year. In the fourth year, they saw a slight decrease in logistics efficiency. They fired their sales manager. They got the team together. We need to pick it up to get back on target. And what they realized, you know, within a month, they got a unsolicited offer from a Chinese company that was 30% below the value of the company. And, of course, that 30% below offer, you know, exactly matched the performance decrease in the company. In other words, they knew what was going on in the company so that they could precisely value the offer for the company.

At this point, the private equity company that owned the company got suspicious because they didn't understand how this unsolicited officer could be so precise. They brought in an auditing company. They looked at it and they said, yes, not only is the company hacked, but the private equity company's hacked. The private equity company had targets for sales and logistics where they would know something was not right. The activity was happening just below those targets. And what they were doing essentially was in sales, every once in a while, they'd pull out a bid offer to to for a job so that the sales efficiency declined two to three percent, which was below the targets. So hackers are doing this, right? They're in the like CRM or whatever and they would just nuke or delete.

I shouldn't probably overuse that word. That's scary. They would delete an order. They would delete some communications so that something wouldn't go out on time or they wouldn't respond to a bid properly. Right, right. But what's so incredible about this is, you know, when everybody thinks about hacking, they think, oh, once you're in, you just take everything. No, these guys, were taking just enough so that the private equity company wouldn't know something was going on. In the logistics, say they got an order for 1,000 units of output. They would order 1,000 units, but what would show up was 900 units of input because they were changing the orders as they went out. Then they'd have to order another 100 units to make it work, and that would increase their

cost of goods sold. So it was people that understood not just, hey, what they were looking for in terms of the technology, but how the business ran so that they could put it under duress in a way that didn't trigger any alerts. Now, what they were looking for in this company was technology. You know, it was only a small part of the company, but they were willing to go through all this effort in order to make this look like, hey, it's just another business deal. And usually 99% of the time it works. And it was just because the private equity company in this case got suspicious about it that it didn't. Yeah, this is nuts, right? So the hackers are in there.

They're sabotaging the order system. They're sabotaging the bid system. And they're doing it in such a way that it's not like they're taking down the entire order-taking system. They lose a week's worth of sales and then they secure their stuff. This is like, wow, no pun intended. Chinese water torture, right? Just drip, drip, drip.

And they just go, what's going on? They're firing qualified people. They're blaming vendors. They're retooling the software. Whatever it is they're doing. And it turns out that there's just somebody in there. It's kind of like Stuxnet. Remember that with a centrifuges sponge is slightly too fast?

So this is kind of that kind of attack. But even that was clumsy compared to that because it just spread through the machines. This was a targeted operation that wasn't about cyber. It was really about how can we put this company under duress so that we can get this technology. I mean, you have to understand how business is done in the United States at a very fine level in order to conduct this. So it's not just hacking. You know how the people are doing business. So I would say, you know, at some point, somebody was either working in that private equity company,

they had done their research about the entire operation. So it sounds like what you're saying is somebody might have worked for this private equity company or even this chemical company and then went and worked with the People's Liberation Army in China or Chinese intelligence or whoever was doing this, destroyed part of the value of the company in an effort to buy the company and to, again, to be clear, they didn't just want the company. they wanted the technology that the company had. So they found the company that made this technology. They wanted to buy it or steal it, buy it at a super low value instead of paying what it was worth. And so they destroyed part of its operational capacity and then made an offer when it was really struggling.

That seems a little bit obvious, but maybe they don't even care about getting caught because at that point, they knew the private equity company would want to cut their losses. There's a couple things wrong. And first of all, they didn't go work for the PLA. What they did is they probably went and worked for a Chinese company. either a state-owned enterprise or a private company. And then that company paid them a bunch of money for what they knew. And they took what they knew and they went to the PLA and said, hey, help us. Can you help us with this effort? Or it might have even been somebody that works in the PLA, but they had their own side business where you could go and say, hey, I need, this is what I need. And they probably paid them a fee. And sure enough, this is what was going on. So yes, I mean, it happens every single day. The idea that economic warfare is warfare seems a little bit new, right? So we look at things like destruction of a company or damage to the economy and some of the other things we're going to talk about here. And we think, oh, well, that's kind of crummy. They're cheating on trade agreements.

We don't really see this as actual warfare, but it tends to be more effective. I mean, if you don't need to worry about blowing a hole in a wall if the company can't build the wall in the first place because they can't get supplies and the machines they got aren't working and the concrete they're using is causing the pieces not to stick together. I mean, you don't have to worry about a missile that's going to blow a hole in that metaphorical wall. So we're kind of slow off the ball here in realizing that this is the plan that the Chinese Communist Party has against the Western world, not just the United States, but against all of us out here. This is a deliberate plan. And according to your book, stealth war, you've seen these plans with your own eyes. This isn't like a hunch you got or

based on looking backwards and reconstructing facts. There's documents that say this. Yeah, I mean, And what you're seeing is the actual execution of a document called Unrestricted Warfare, and it was written by two PLA colonels back in 1999. Now, I read it when it came out, and I said, this is ridiculous. We're never going to go to war with China. They were talking about using tidal waves and earthquakes. You know, everything became an element of warfare. It was really dense reading, and it didn't pertain to the way at the time I thought about warfare. And that's part of the problem, because we think about warfare in.

very much geographic terms. In other words, you know, you use military forces to take territory. In fact, when I looked at that briefing, you know, and I was looking at what they were doing to the businesses, I realized, you know, here's a power company and here's a chemical company. And I was looking at that, and I was putting the pieces together in my head. So there's two things that I had going on here. I have a PhD in economics, and I was a B2 pilot. And so my B2 pilot looked at that and I said, okay, I can see the elements of the way I would conduct an air war over a country that we were trying to put under duress so that we could force them to do what we wanted to do. One good example is Serbia. We use B-2s essentially to take out key industrial and infrastructure targets in order to make

the leadership listen to what the U.S. wanted them to do. And so as I looked at this, I said, okay, these guys, you know, I could tell from my economics background that this was pervasive across the society in such a way that you could see the elements of an airstrike using bonds, except you were using essentially ones and zeros and dollars and cents, you know, data and finance to essentially do the same thing that we had done in the U.S. Air Force. So we're not just being paranoid here. Chinese Communist Party documents actually state they wish to displace the United States on the world stage and force us to submit, which is kind of terrifying because I don't

want to live under the Chinese Communist Party. say what you will about them being the best capitalists, because they are quite capitalists. It's still very authoritarian there. I don't have to explain this to you, but for the purposes of the audience, you don't have freedom of speech in China. Tiananmen Square, 10,000 or so people were killed there.

People I know that live in China, they don't even know it. They've never seen the photos that are so famous over here. They have no clue. And we got to shed this notion that capitalism will, quote, unquote, fix this totalitarian government and authoritarian rule. That was kind of a Cold War book.

belief, like, oh, bring them capitalism, give them a Big Mac, and they'll get rid of these notions. And that just hasn't worked with China. The problem with people, especially Sinology, seeing this, because they don't exactly say, hey, we want to take over the world. What they say is they want a harmonious world. But in their mind, a harmonious world is one where countries are led by strong leaders that essentially promise their people that they will deliver them economic freedom. And for that right, the people give up the right for freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from oppression. In other words, and furthermore, the leadership gets to take an extra slice of the pie for themselves because they are, you know, creating this harmonious world for their benefit. So they

almost look at like the people as, you know, innocent children that can't be trusted with freedom of speech, freedom, religion, and freedom from oppression. But unfortunately, what happens is they take from free countries that don't agree with that social contract. So in the West, it's you get all four freedoms, where in China you get just that one freedom. But because of the existence of the other three freedoms, the Chinese Communist Party has to constantly work to suppress those ideas so that they don't take root amongst their own population. Right. So this isn't like a paranoid delusion where freedom and our rights are an attack on the Communist Party. This is literally the plan. It's not just, oh, we hate freedom.

It's no, no, no, freedom is bad because it leads to all these other problems. Look at all the problems you're having. Let's get rid of this pesky freedom. What do they use the sunflower analogy? Every nation will face the sun, which happens in their opinion to be China. And then look, we're all living in peace because everybody that disagrees with us is dead or in jail. In 2013, internal Chinese Communist Party document came out called Document Number Nine. It was translated.

And essentially, if you read that, that's exactly what it says. it says, you know, universal freedoms are not really about that's the right way that people should live. It is really designed to destroy the Chinese Communist Party. And this was about the time, by the way, that Xi Jinping was taking power. So if you want to find somebody that truly buys in to Chinese Communist Party Maoist, Marxist, Leninist doctrine, the epitome of the good soldier is Chairman I'm going to go to a little historical perspective here for a second. Earlier on during the Cold War, China was allied with Russian essentially leached off their technology and their money during the Cold War. So do you think that China has then switched over to the United States since maybe Russia's

less useful these days? Of course, they use the Russians to get nuclear weapons to get, you know, essentially fighter jet technology. Most of it was military. But in reality, you know, they copied some of the economic models of the Soviet Union. Of course, we all know how that turned out. So in the 70s, Deng Xiaoping basically said we're going to open up and reform. He has a famous statement. It doesn't matter if the cat's white or black as long as it catches mice, which meant that we needed to be more pragmatic and how we organized ourselves economically. And the best way to do that, and he went on a famous tour of United States. And for almost every time that a Chinese chairman of the Communist Party would go to the United States, they would go to D.C.

of course, but they'd actually spend most of their time talking to U.S. corporations. So I think back then it was like Ford and I think one of the oil companies in Boeing that Deng Xiaoping went to. But every single time they would come, they would come to one of these big U.S. corporations and they would ask for help. And of course, the implicit guarantee would be, okay, you can have access to 1.4 billion Chinese. Just give us your technology when you do that. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Robert Spalding. We'll be right back. Don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode, so you can make sure you

solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Robert Spalding. That link is in the show notes at Jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger. com slash subscribe. Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all of the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player so you don't miss a single thing. And now back to our show with Robert Spalding.

When you're not talking about a cell phone charger and you're talking instead about an intercontinental ballistic missile, it starts to get a little scarier or internet firewall technology and things like that, surveillance technology. Yeah, and, you know, they catch it in very benign terms. You know, we want the same thing you want. We just want peace. We want, you know, harmonious world. We are essentially like you. Everything that the Chinese Communist Party does is obfuscated. they have very little knowledge of what they do in terms of and what they believe.

It sounds, you know, wonderful. And in fact, you know, the Chinese Communist Party functionaries are probably some of the most professional liars that you ever meet because they're taught to lie. And in fact, you know, everything that they do in terms of their promotion is based on, you know, how well they are able to essentially tell that lie and believe it. And so, you know, Americans essentially get sucked in. and they believe that they're building a world that's better for the both sides, but in reality, they're promoting a world that actually has a completely different worldview than our founding fathers

did for the country. Can you explain how IP theft hurts us and not just some big company? Because I think a lot of people are going, wah, where, who cares? Apple gets some stuff stolen. I don't have stock in Apple. Who cares if they're making cheap iPhones, keeps them on their toes. I think there's a certain subset of people that really do think that way. Okay, fine, you lost your advantage, but look, people are still buying Apple products. What's the big deal? Well, let's just take it down to just an example that people would totally understand. Say you want to go start a business. You have a great idea for some new product that you think, well, everybody will love because it'll make their life more convenient. So you do, you pay somebody to do the engineering for you, you pay somebody

to do the marketing and the advertising, and you invest, you know, your own money in it, and you work you build a business. And say you build a business for a product and you begin to sell that product on Amazon. And you're selling it. And over the course of, you know, three, four, five, six months, you develop a great reputation on Amazon. Five star rating. The product's selling like crazy. You're doing well.

And then all of a sudden, you notice you got a four star rating. You got a three star rating. And then you get a return package and you open it up. And it's a broken thing that looks like the product that you made. but you can tell right away that it is not the product you made because you engineered your product not to break in the way that this did. And clearly the packaging is not what you sent out. And so you call Amazon up and you say, hey, I built this business and you're letting this counterfeit be sold on your website in my name using my same marketing and advertising materials. And Amazon says, hey, that's not my

problem. That's your problem. And you say to Amazon, you say, okay, but can you give me the name of the company and I'll call them up and say, stop it or we're going to file a lawsuit. And Amazon said, well, that's not our policy. So it not only hurts big companies, it not only hurts the United States economy to the tune of $300 to $600 billion a year. It hurts individual innovators that want to, entrepreneurs that want to start businesses in the United States. And as everybody knows, most of our new job starts come out of startups, entrepreneurs that are coming up with a different way to do things. That is being absolutely destroyed by this. pervasive ability to just steal everything.

Right. So this happened with the frywall from Shark Tank. This guy had this really good product and Amazon didn't care. They let Chinese counterfeiters run rampant damages business and also A.J. Kobani, the as seen on TV guy, he had a multi, multi-million dollar business and Amazon just didn't care. And it's disappointing because I like to think Amazon is one of these great American success stories and it's almost like they just don't care about other Americans doing. business, which is really disappointing.

Well, I think to them, it's really part of the cost of doing business. Like, you can't do anything about counterfeiting. I think what I try to explain in the book is that during the Cold War, there was a tight integration between democratic principles and free trade. In other words, these democracies all had rule or law. They all followed the rules. And that's how, you know, our international order was able to function. When the Cold War ended, we basically said, okay, all of you former totalitarian governments,

you're going to democratize now. So come on in. And even after June 4th, 1989, when you had Tiananmen Square, and it looked like, well, the Communist Party might be going the other way, we still said, we're going to keep you in because what happens is, over time, open markets lead to wealth. And if you get wealth, you're going to democratize. And so we know that you're not going to follow rules in the beginning, but eventually you will begin to follow rules. And even when I was living in China, you know, I lived there from 2002 to 2004 the first time, and all of my neighbors were building Fortune 500 factories in Shanghai Economic Zone. And what they told me is, oh, we are going to instill Western business practices into our Chinese employees. And, you know, I thought at the time, you know,

that was, that was hubris. But at the same time, they were very convinced and they believed that it was going to happen. So we believed that, you know, once they got to $6 to $8,000 meeting income, for the society, then all of a sudden the Communist Party would say, okay, we're going to open up and democratize. Of course, what the Chinese Communist Party said is, okay, you're going to let us have access to everything and you're not going to prevent us from doing these things. Well, we're going to take advantage of them. We're going to keep control of the society. And we're going to use all your technology, talent, innovation, and capital to increase the power of China and to fill our pockets. I know that U.S. manufacturing has been destroyed essentially because of cheap stuff from China.

I don't think that's controversial, and I don't think we probably need to explain that. But what's scarier is the Chinese-built electronics and sensors that end up sending data back to China. Can you tell us a little bit about, like, 5G networks? And TVs and phones are one thing. Having surveillance technology and your TV is scary. Obviously, the phone is scary. 5G makes it 100 times scarier because it's 100 times faster, and it's machine-to-machine. Well, I think the other thing that you need to understand about 5G is that in the 4-G world,

the network itself is a pipe, and the platform for the app services and business models of that world is the smartphone. So Android and iOS, Google and Apple were the two primary platforms of the 4G world. And that's because in 2007, the iPhone came out. And then, you know, the United States was the first to build, or actually second country behind, I think, Finland, to build a nationwide 4G network. And so the combination of the smartphone as a platform and the 4G pipe led to the Facebook. Apple, Netflix, Google, you know, the fangs that we talk about today, in a rapidly growing economy and all these unicorns like Uber and Airbnb. In 5G, the platform migrates to the network itself. In other words, the network blends the pipe and the computer all in the same platform.

And so what China realized was that if they could build the platform for 5G, and they could be the first to build the 5G network in China, then they would own the... the 5G economy. So all that explosive growth that we got from the Facebooks, the Amazon's, the Netflix, the Google, the Uber's, the Airbnbs, they would have the 5G version of that. And the ones that would benefit are bydo, Alibaba, 10 cent, and they're essentially tech companies. More importantly, as that network, the 5G network blends computing and networking, that that platform would allow you to eventually move away from the smartphone. Because rather than needing to have that device to call an Uber that because of the cameras and the microphones that

were arrayed around the city that you could essentially walk out to the street and say, I want an Uber and an Uber would show up. And facial recognition would recognize you and charge your account, take you where you want to go, and that all this data would be available to these large tech companies so they knew everything about you so they could influence the way you thought about, you know, how to make money. What's interesting about this is all of the algorithms that Amazon uses, that Netflix uses, that Google uses to influence you, we're taking over to China and repurpose so that they can not just influence you for commercial purposes.

They can influence you to be a good citizen in the way that the Chinese Communist Party defines it. Wait, I'm going to be able to walk outside without my phone and just say, give me an Uber and something hears me and sees that it's me and then send something to my location. That's what 5G is about. I sound old, but I don't want that, right? I know I sound like an old person is like, I don't need one of them smartphones, but that is, I don't want that at all. That's really weird. I know I'll probably in 10 years be like, this is so convenient, but I don't really want that. And I certainly don't want that sending my data back to China. We interviewed Kai Fu Lee earlier on the show, as I mentioned before, he said one of the strengths that China has in AI and why

they're going to win that race, and his opinion is because they have more data, and data is the gasoline in the AI engine. So if they're taking our data from 5G devices and piping that back to China, I have to just trust that the Chinese Communist Party who treats their own people, almost like slaves, is going to treat me better and not do that to me. And Kai Fouli is absolutely correct, but it's not because they have more data. The United States has data. The government has data about you. Facebook has data about you. Amazon has data about you. But there are laws. There's privacy laws. There's silos around that data. The benefit that the Chinese Communist Party has is they have access to all of it. And so when you start to bring all of those pieces together, you get a

fulsome view of the person who they are, what their motivations are, what their weaknesses are, how they can be influenced one way or the other, who they surround themselves with, you know essentially everything about them. And then you can begin to put things in their life that are either impediments to them being successful because they are essentially an outlier. And that's why I call it Six Sigma Fascism. It really is about suppressing the outliers in society using automated algorithms based on all the data you're collecting on them. Now, if you're worried about ideas coming from afar and being interjected into your society, you need to export that. So that's what the Belt and Road initiative is about, that's what made in China, 2025 is about, so you own the technological fabric

of the whole world. Your tech companies ride on top of that technological fabric, and then you're able to influence people at the individual level to do the things you want. And here's an example, a very clumsy example of the 4G world. Roy Jones, I talk about it in the book, a guy that works in Omaha, Nebraska for Marriott Corporation, who's working for them, you know, looking at social media likes a tweet. Somebody in Shanghai sees it, calls the Marriott Corporation, says, fire the employee and apologize for liking that tweet. And what did Marriott Corporation do? They fired Roy Jones and they apologize. The kind of influence that I'm talking about that's pervasive throughout the 5G world is something that you will never see because your kid won't get into

the college that they had applied for. But nobody ever tell you why. And nobody will ever tell you why you didn't get that job. And you're not going to know that you pay more for your, you know, car insurance at your neighbor or you pay more for your mortgage than your neighbor unless you compare notes. And you're not going to know why you paid more because the entire system is built to slow you down and speed other people up. And it's all based on whether or not you're a good citizen in the way that the Chinese communist farty designs it or defines it.

This is like the social credit score that we have over there. And it makes sense. You know, when my Chinese teachers talk about this, I take Chinese. these lessons in the mornings usually. She'll say something like, oh, what happens if you shoplift in the United States? And I'll say, oh, well, you won't be able to shop at that store anymore. And she goes, what other negative consequences happen in your life? And I said, oh, well, you can get caught and arrested. And she goes, but what else? And I'm like, well, that's pretty much it. Right. She's told me that if you're a bad dog owner in China, you can lose your dog. They'll just

come and take it away. If you smoke on the train and you don't respect that rule, you can't ride the train anymore. And I was like, well, that sounds like a reasonable thing to do. But what I read, of course, in your book and what she didn't explain, because maybe she doesn't even know this, is that if you are related to somebody who spoke out against the government or who is an artist or who maybe is a free thinker, you just can't get into any colleges. And then you can't get any good jobs. And your kids can't get into any colleges and get any good jobs. And it just seemed, they might say, oh, sorry, the school's full. What they don't say is the schools full of people that did the right things. And 10 years ago, your dad did the wrong thing. And now you are never going

to get a break. You're always going to look like you have best. bad luck. And it's actually engineered that way on purpose. You think, wow, this is 1984. This is a science fiction movie. It can't be real. It can't people, you know, a country can't actually be doing this. And they can't be designing it. So it actually rides on top of the international economic and financial order. But yet there it is. I mean, when you look at, for instance, what Huawei has done and what the Chinese companies have done in terms of 3GP, which is the standards making body for 5G, they have, you know, so many engineers that are working in those standard-making bodies to essentially engineer the 5G technology. By the way, the tweet that Roy Jones got fired from Marriott for was he liked to tweet about Tibetan independence.

And it just had, I don't know if they tagged Marriott in there. He was just liking things that mentioned his company. It was literally his job. Right. Somehow they expected him to be an expert on the Tibetan independence Chinese political situation. And they fired him for that because it looked like Marriott then supported Tibetan independence. from China. It's ridiculous. Which is exactly what happens in the United States, you know, in diplomacy. When you're taught to do diplomacy for the United States on the China account,

the first thing you're taught is we never, ever, ever confront China in public about the things that they do. We only do it in private. And every time there's a dialogue between a U.S. leader and a Chinese leader, it doesn't matter if it's a State Department or Defense Department, usually the Chinese will put out a press statement right afterwards, and usually the U.S. side won't put out a press statement. And so what happens when you never confront the Chinese in public, and when you always decline to have your own version of what happened, is that they own the narrative.

And not only do they own the narrative, they're able to make it look like the United States supports everything that they're doing. It's almost like consent through silence, right? Well, you didn't say anything, so we're going to put out our version of events and just keep doing that. And that's the version of events that actually takes hold. But we're talking about a propaganda state that is very well-versed in telling people what they should think. So for us to not sort of counteract that version of events seems dangerous, we're slowly having our freedoms eroded by

our economic connections to a totalitarian state that openly opposes our core values as Americans. Right. When you negotiate with them for things, as I did for the confidence-building measures in the Department of Defense with regard to maritime issues, they went over every single. single word in the document and they would parse the words. And then finally, when we couldn't agree on the word that they wanted, they just went ahead in the Chinese version. They put the word that they wanted and then we had the word that we wanted in the English version. So even for their own people, what they are able to do. And then for all Chinese language speakers in the United States, in other places, their version of events, even in agreements, essentially is often at odds with

what the other party is doing. A lot of people, argue that, look, free market forces are self-regulating. So what's the problem here? This is the free market at play. This is what happens. There might be some externalities or negative externalities, but this is what happens in a free market system. Well, and that's exactly the point. You know, as I said in the beginning, it's not that people are traitorous or treasonous. It's that they believe in the free market system. The problem is that we've so allowed the Chinese Communist Party to hijack the free market system that it no longer represented. presents a market derived price for goods.

It is a China-derived price for goods. In fact, I was working on an effort to bring back micro-electronic manufacturing in the United States. And what you find out is one of the challenges we have is that China has negotiated component prices from all of our manufacturers, you know, chip manufacturers. And then when somebody from the United States says, hey, I want to manufacture a circuit board here,

they go to those component manufacturers and they say, well, I'm not going to give you the China price. And so if you want to do manufacturing here for circuit boards, you have to go to China to buy components that were manufactured to the United States because there you can get the China price. So essentially they hijacked the supply chain using the fact that, you know, the entire economy is driven by the Communist Party and they can force entire industries to do exactly what they say. This isn't free market then because China's market isn't free. And so long term, they're looking at long term gains or they can make something cheaper than it actually costs to make in order to drive U.S. manufacturers out of business or U.S. suppliers or foreign suppliers out of business, and then they can do whatever they want. And I guess you can't really have a free market system when the second biggest economy in the world isn't actually a free market. I mean, we know about currency manipulation. We hear about it in the news. What about things like ownership rights and IP rights? I know you mentioned that in the book as well. The Chinese Communist Party can just take your company.

and say, your company belongs to this other guy now because we like him better and we say so. Well, ownership right and property rights depend on this thing called the rule of law. And there is no rule of law in China. It is a Chinese Communist Party rule by law. So in other words, they use the legal system to get what they want. So for instance, if you're running a company and they don't like what you're doing, they can do essentially the Communist Party can grab you, put you, put you, you in detention for up to six months, and then they'll figure out what they're going to charge you with. Then they'll take you out of that detention. They'll put you into the legal system, and the

legal system will essentially prosecute you for whatever the Chinese Communist Party has decided if they want to prosecute you for. And, you know, of course, there's a 99.99% prosecution rate. Yeah, conviction rate, I would imagine, yeah. Conviction rate, yeah. Yeah, so the Communist Party controls all aspects of the economy, right? They control all the companies. They own all the companies in China. They control all the infrastructure, they control all the laws, they control all the contractual agreements. And I know that you even mentioned that Chinese attorneys take an oath to the Communist Party. So if you hire a Chinese lawyer to fight anybody, another company, that lawyer is loyal to the Communist Party before you. As an attorney here in the United States or former attorney here in the

United States, the idea that I might be loyal to the government before my client is absolutely insane. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Robert Spalulner. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. To learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, so you can check out those amazing sponsors, visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

Don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. If you're listening to us in the Overcast Player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really appreciate it. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Robert Spalding. Let's talk about Belt and Road a little bit, because this reminds me of this book I read a while ago, Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Right. I did read that. That was great.

Belt and Road sounds like great. China's investing in Africa and in Central Asia. This is good news. They need infrastructure. What's the real catch here? It's actually interesting. A consulting firm came in while I was in the White House and they had this presentation. And the first page of the presentation said, we have this great idea that the United States should partner with China in Africa to do development. And then they proceeded to explain how the Chinese had essentially had a six-step process for taking the authoritarian countries that are in Africa and bringing them into an IT-based authoritarian, you know, modern version of what they had. So you go all the way from dirt roads to 5G networks within a generation. And essentially, it's all connected to the Chinese Communist Party. And so what they would do is they would find a resource that China needed for manoeuvre. manufacturing, say like cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, they would build a mine,

and they would find a port where you could take that out. So then they would build the port, probably in a different country, because the Congo is in the middle of Africa. And then they would build the rail, and they'd build the road, and then they would put fiber and telecommunications and electrical power and water. And so now you had essentially the skeletal pieces of an industrialized economy. And then what was happening, and what this company said is the biggest investment in Africa right now is low value added manufacturing. So textile, shoes, the type of things that China wants to offload so they can have high value manufacturing like computer chips. Well, what happens after you have manufacturing? You need housing. So you have urbanization.

But what happens after that? Then you start installing the AI powered cameras and you started selling smartphone. So they had designed these $50 smartphones that they were selling to the African citizens. and they were so proud of themselves, you know, this consulting company, and they said, and they even made the picture app better recognize dark-complected faces. And I'm sitting there, you know, and I'm just amazed and horrified at the same time, because I'm realizing that essentially this thing is an entire engineering of exactly the society that China wants to have, and it's all under the auspices of, you know, doing good for other people. By the way, there were tens of thousands of, of Chinese working in these countries because there's excess male population in the country of China. So it was a win-win-win for the Chinese Communist Party. And it was interesting. And I looked at

it and I listened to the presentation and I asked the presenter, I said, okay, who did you interview? First of I said, you got a lot of Chinese speakers to do your interviews, didn't you? And they said, yes. And I said, who did you interview? And they said, well, we interviewed the owners of the companies, who were Chinese. And we interviewed the government leaders. I said, did you interview any of the citizens. And they looked at me strange and they said, well, you know, every once in a while I would talk to a taxi driver. And I said, you know, this is a problem because we look at the modernized world as a net, net win, but we don't understand all of the things that are going on underneath to actually continue to make, you know, essentially modern day slaves using this IT-based

authoritarianism. It's, it was incredible. Now that we're all thoroughly depressed, What are China's vulnerabilities here? I know that you've mentioned we can't audit China's books. So we actually have no idea if this is sustainable. And it sounds a lot like, in a way, a Ponzi scheme with all the construction and the loans and the fake bonds and the fake fundraisers and companies with no value that are trading on U.S. stock exchanges based on assets they just say they have that nobody's seen, these reverse mergers and things. Right.

And essentially, the Chinese Communist Party has the same vulnerabilities, that any totalitarian regime have. And that is that they don't permit basic freedoms for their people. Now, the way they get past that and the way that they have legitimacy is to essentially deliver constant economic growth. It's almost like a shark that has to continue to swim in order to survive. Their economy has to continue to grow in order for the Chinese Communist Party to have legitimacy. And so once you start disconnecting them from the Western capital markets, it's from Western innovation, from Western talent, and Western technology, then they have to essentially make it on their own auspices, and essentially they can't because at the end of the day,

they're a totalitarian regime. And so once you start to do that, and you begin to once again invest in the West, invest in the United States and other democracies, then you can have economic growth in those countries again. And essentially, you can say the model isn't better. it was just a parasitic economy on democracies. What happens when you've tried to run or ring alarm bells in Washington on this? Because it sounds like this should be really easy to fix. We just need to stop China from cheating within our economy.

What's the problem? The problem is really that a lot of people in the United States, a lot of very wealthy people got a lot more wealthy in the last 20 years because of what was going on. You know, all of the offloading of manufacturing took away, you know, millions of blue-collar jobs, but it increased the margins for the people that own those businesses. So look at Apple, for example. Apple has $265 billion in cash. Now, it has offloaded its manufacturing to a country that essentially exploits labor and pollutes the environment, and it did so in order to increase its margins. With that much cash on hand, Apple could have easily manufactured in the United States and made more of a normal profit. They didn't need to make margins in the manner that they did. So in essence, what the Chinese Communist Party did is co-op the rest of the world.

And the way they did it is the same way that America used to be successful. Individual profit motive was aligned with national interest. In other words, if you were getting rich, the country was getting stronger. What they figured out how to do is hack that and make sure that if you were getting rich in America, in Asia, then China was getting stronger because they had built the incentive system according to this model that said, you know, we can let China do whatever they want because they're a developing economy. Right.

So we have this massive influx of Chinese government money into things like hedge funds and securities brokerages that looks like China's investing in the United States. But those investment dollars to China, they're not invested in the United States. They're invested in China. and then the funds can't be repatriated to the U.S. So all these U.S. companies, banks and everyone who says, oh, yeah, we've got all this money, we've got all this money. It's in China and you can't get it out.

So it could overnight just go to zero. And then we as taxpayers, we might have to bail out these banks again. I was really concerned that the bank bailout money didn't just go to our economy. A lot of it was pushed overseas in the name of profits where it remains. And that's exactly right. We're $5 trillion in arrears in infrastructure, our spending on basic science research is at historic lows, our STEM education. You know, we used to send kids on federal grants, particularly during the space race.

Those were how we educated our scientists. And then our manufacturing base is decimated to the point where now you have essentially the Chinese companies manufacturing the circuit boards for F-35. What can we start to do about all this? I know you only have a few minutes, but where do we begin? So as I lay out in the book, it's fairly simple. Start talking about democratic principles and free trade principles as a complete package. In other words, we can't just, you know, open ourselves up to totalitarian regimes. We essentially have to pair ourselves off with democracies. Protect, you know, our financial system, protect our trading system, protect our investments, you know, particularly in technology, protect our schools. You know, we've got 400,000 students in our universities. Protect our media. You have to be. You have. All Chinese language media in the United States is run by the Communist Party. Protect our political system because a lot of our politicians get donations from these Chinese

individuals and companies. And then finally, most important, protect our internet, secure encrypted internet so that it's not so easy to influence the population or steal their data. And then invest in America, invest in STEM education, research and development, infrastructure, and the industrial base, use some of the $800 billion that we're spending. on defense to stimulate reinvestment in the United States in manufacturing. And then finally, get back together with other democracies, forge a new consensus around democratic principles, rule of law, civil liberties, and human rights, and enforce that at the UN and the WTO,

make the totalitarian regimes follow the rules by sticking together as democracies, not just in the security sense, but also in an economic and a financial and a trade sense as well, in a diplomatic and a cultural and political sense where we promote these foundational values. General, thank you so much. I know you've got to run. You've been very generous with your time and expertise. And after we close, I'm going to explain why it's even worse than we explained here on the show. But thank you very much for coming in today. So General Spalding had to go, but there's a lot more in this book. I've read this all weekend, Jason, and it was one of those terrifying things you just can't put down. and I am a little worried about how this might go.

I mean, the U.S. pays for world security. China does none of this. They instead focus on the Belt and Road Initiative, essentially building things in other countries that they then control. And we're talking about islands in the South China Sea. We're talking about seaports that are in Sri Lanka and next to India that they then own and control that could be used for naval purposes, right?

This is not just like them investing in telecom in Africa. there is more to the story. And all of these assumptions of free trade are flawed. People who lose their job in manufacturing can't just go do other work. That's a academic exercise that you learn in Econ 101. It's not what happens in real life. Some people become poorer, even if the country is richer as a whole, leading to addiction, leading to the public health crisis. This was all so surprising to me how deep this all goes. And China's GDP might be based on cooked books. And if that's the case, we are the ones who have funded this. So China, literally printing money, having this bad balance sheet, this would normally lead to gross inflation, right? But they peg and manipulate

their currency. And so, therefore, they don't necessarily suffer from this because they can control every industry inside the country. It's just absolute madness. And as their instability in China grows, they need resources like metals and chemicals and oil to keep growing at an unsustainable rate, they can't allow investment from abroad to be repatriated. And this seems like they're weak, but what it means is that they're unpredictable and they're potentially dangerous because they're not going to be the ones that take a hit. They're going to let our system take the hit. And that's scary. Jason, I read in the book as well that China can ship anything to the United States. There are only a handful of inspectors and there are 33,000 containers, those big

truck-sized shipping containers coming to the U.S. every single day. Almost none of them are inspected before shipping. I say almost none, but it's probably actually none because they're not allowed to open the containers. They're only allowed to look at the manifest. Wow. Yeah. That's going to keep me up at night. Well, this whole thing is going to keep me up at night.

So thanks for that one, Jordan. Really appreciate that. Yeah. So it turns out there are like five inspectors inspecting outgoing shipping containers. Each inspector would have to inspect 8,000 plus containers every single day. Obviously, that's not happening. Right. And again, they're not opening the container.

They're just looking at the shipping manifest. So if it says iPhones and it's heroin or just some other stuff, fentanyl, oh well, here it is, buy mail. Also, mail service is subsidized. So we spend about $170 million a year subsidizing packages and shipping that come from China. That's one reason why things you buy on Amazon can be so cheap because we're subsidizing that as a taxpayer. There's no reason it should cost $3.85 to mail something from China. It should be $23.85. So we're spending a ton so that somebody can counterfeit a good and ruin the livelihood of a U.S.-based businessman. It's horrible. This is really scary stuff. It is. Trying to wrap my head around the scope of it, and you can't. You just can't.

You can't. No. And the State Department, they can't do much about this. The military isn't mandated to fight this. even though often it's the Chinese army hacking these companies on behalf of the Communist Party. So in China, the government, the military, and business, they are all one thing. It's not like it is here in the West where we have separate interests. The Communist Party says what goes.

The military does it. If they need your technology that you invented, they're going to have the Army damage your business and then try to acquire you, potentially. That's what they did with that chemical company. It's just madness. And of course, I know what you're thinking, well, thank God that our military components

can't come from China because we have laws against this. Well, we have laws mandating that things come from the USA, but propellant for hellfire missiles comes from China. The glass in night vision equipment has a metal in it. It's a rare earth metal. It's mine from China. Cement, China, steel, China, fertilizer, China. China has these covered. They could restrict export. They could raise prices. Everybody is screwed if that happens. Everybody. And this isn't something that could happen. This is literally the plan. This has been written down to take over these key industries and then tighten the noose. This is on paper. China used more concrete in the past few years than the United States used in the entire 20th century. Wow. Right. Man, that reminds me of the

book on sand. Yeah, exactly. That show that we did about sand. Concrete needs sand. Often the sand is gained illicitly. Electronics require sand. China's got a complete monopoly nearly on that supply chain. And that plus our military components coming from China. I mean, we think we can do it here, but we can't. outsourced ourselves to the point where we have major battlefield vulnerabilities. And this is aside from the financial stuff, we didn't even get a chance to go into the financial stuff. There are a lot of instances in the book, in Stealth War, where investigators found that, here's one example I remember reading about this morning, one bond that was on the Frankfurt

Stock Exchange for $1 billion that was invested in by tons of people, including pension funds from patriotic Americans, people that are working to save, people that have nothing to do with China, they're buying these bonds for, let's say, a ship building company or some other company. Well, they hide the source of that deal. And investigators found that the Chinese were using this to build an aircraft carrier. What? And that aircraft carrier is state of the art. And that's a war machine. It's a war machine. And it's financed by European and American dollars. Wow. It's financed by a teacher's pension fund because they're hiding the source of that. And we have no way

of knowing that. So one of the things he recommended was saying, look, we got to investigate. how China's using Western capital and technology to strengthen its army, because we are actually financing the construction of the Chinese military, the government, all of their cities, and if we can't repatriate those funds, which so far we haven't been able to do,

they can just say, we're not giving you these back ever. We're never going to give you this back. And we just finance the construction of their whole country that they are now using to try to control the behavior of the rest of the world. It's just outright insane. So bonkers. Yeah.

It's just crazy. And again, this has nothing to do with Chinese people, American citizens who happen to be Chinese, et cetera. This is the Chinese Communist Party. People who live in China are just as much victims of this as anyone else. Man, the book was just nuts. There's blackmail going on, personal data going on. One of the things that totally makes sense to me,

hackers have been stealing a lot of hotel data, and people are like, why? Who cares? Well, they're thinking that intelligence agencies are analyzing who's staying where. So if I work for a defense contractor and you work for another defense contractor, they can tell we're working together on something when 200 employees over the course of the year are all staying at the same hotel. They can see who's working together. They can track the staff. They can track the employees. So he's saying we need a cyber command that isn't just part of the Air Force of the Army. We need a separate branch of the military that is as well financed and as strong as any other branch of the military because that's what China has. and we are not able to fight it at all. We're basically saying, hey, Apple,

buy a firewall and keep hackers out. We're not doing anything. There's no coordination. I mean, we are just totally, totally sleeping on this. So China does have vulnerabilities, and we didn't get to go through all of those, but he did give a nice outline at the end. I asked him before he left if this book was coming out

in Chinese, and no surprise, a publisher in Taiwan is going to be releasing this, and that should be interesting. I assume it's going to immediately be banned in China. There's just no way. You think? Yeah. Yeah, but interesting, I want to gift this to my extended family

because I have conversations with them and I'm like, why would you do this or vote that way or what are you thinking about this? And they're like, because China, because China, because China, they are very concerned about China. No surprise, Taiwan is under existential threat from China and has been for years. So my Taiwanese extended family is all very, very concerned. I mean, this is like at the top of their list that we've got to stop China.

And I thought they were kind of crazy and a little narrow-minded until I read this book. So Stealth War, we'll link to it in the show notes. A fascinating and terrifying read. We'll keep you up at night. Will be depressing. Will not leave you feeling too good about the future. But might be very realistic, unfortunately, in this day and age.

Big thank you to General Spalding. The book title is Stealth War, how China took over while America's elite slept. That link will, of course, be in the show notes. There are also worksheets for each episode so you can review what you've learned from General Spalding. Those will be at Jordan Harbinger.com in the show notes. We also now have transcripts for each episode, and those can be found in the show notes as well.

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even has photos so you know even the most bizarre stuff you're hearing is somebody's real life. Listen to what was that like on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever app you're using right now. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask,

and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not. The through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something You Should Know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work, itch, search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.