The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - How China Captured Apple — with Patrick McGee

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

Patrick McGee, an award-winning journalist who spent years covering Apple for the Financial Times, joins Scott to discuss his new book, Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company.  They get into Apple’s entanglement with China, the geopolitical risks tied to its supply chain, and whether a post-China future is possible for the company. Follow Patrick, @PatrickMcGee_. Scott starts the episode with thoughts on what makes someone a compelling communicator and storyteller. Algebra of Happiness: you're not your kid's friend. Help us plan for the future of The Prof G Pod by filling out a brief survey: voxmedia.com/survey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, the show about what happens when media and tech collide. And this week I'm talking to Katie Drummond, who runs WIRED. She's found a way to breathe new life into that publication by covering news. We started covering Doge, like several stories a day, every single day. And after like a week, I sort of looked around and was like, where is everyone else? That's This Week on channels, wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. Support for the show comes from Trynet. Trynet can help empower your small and medium-sized business with industry-leading HR solutions, from payroll to compliance to access to benefits.

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Even in a stable democracy, people are gonna be fighting all the time about what kind of values do you want in there, rich and poor, you know, how much should people get taxed? That's an eternal problem of democracy. And he says, you need to have institutions where everyone can debate that and checks on people getting too powerful.

Listen to The Grey Area with me, Sean Elling. New episodes every Monday, available everywhere. Episode 350, 350 Zereka covering the Central Valley region of California. In 1950, the first TV remote was sold. Sad news, the inventor of the TV remote just passed away. He's being buried between two couch cushions. Okay, too much of a dad joke. What's the difference between a remote and the G-spot? A man will search for a remote. Go, go, go!

["Romantic Music"] Welcome to the 350th episode of the Prop G-Pod. What's happening? I am home in London. What have I been up to? It says Scott, what have I been up to? So Scott, what have you been up to? I went to Portugal, came back, went to my son's, he has this thing called speech day. And then back here Memorial day. You know, I'm done a lot.

I've been incredibly unproductive. I'm finishing up my book notes on being a man. First, let's talk about me. Let's talk about me. I was going to write a book on masculinity. Then I realized this who has no domain expertise in adolescent psychology or endocrinology or gender studies that I'd rather just write about where I have fucked up and what it means about being a good man or a bad man. And ended up 420 pages later with a book on,

is it not masculinity? Oh, anyway, it's called Notes on Being a Man. I'm excited about that. The book, a lot of you write in and say, I want to write a book. Let's talk a little bit about communications. I think that if I could give anyone any skill, if I could give my boys a skill, it wouldn't be Mandarin. How stupid is that? Remember, I lead private schools in Manhattan. We're offering Mandarin courses because the Chinese were taking over and you needed to

understand Mandarin pretty soon. You're going to put your iPods on, hit Apple intelligence. You're just going to say, okay, Siri, I'm speaking understand Mandarin pretty soon. You're going to put your iPods on hit and you know, Apple intelligence. You're just going to say, okay, Siri, I'm speaking to somebody's Chinese. And you don't need to understand other languages. Now, does that mean you shouldn't take other languages? No, you should. And you should also take music because it's been shown that your ability to play music or your ability to learn languages kind of opens a part of your brain,

which is beneficial for all sorts of problem-solving but practically you do not need it. When I first started going or doing business in Europe the French who were the worst at this would like speak in French and be upset that you were speaking English and then by the time I sold my last company everyone at LVMH Chanel was speaking in English and even in Germany by the time Harriot was a client, by the time, just in the 10 years I worked with them from beginning to end,

all of a sudden they started speaking in English. Anyways, the skill you do want, other than languages or music, communications, hands down. The ability to be a great storyteller, to develop a narrative arc and use data and charts and visuals and inflection in your voice and body language to try and tell a story because without a story you've got nothing.

And that is your ability to move from idea to action or your ability to inspire people from moving from idea to action is how strong the story is in between connecting those things. And I think storytelling or great storytelling starts with, in terms of your ability to be a great storyteller, I think it starts with a written word. And that is, I believe that when I started teaching, I hadn't written any books. I'd done a decent amount of writing in my consulting firm,

but I wouldn't call myself a great writer. I'm still not a great writer. I'm good verging on greatness. Am I verging on greatness? I don't know, I don't know. But having written a lot over the last 20 years, I think has really improved my communication skills, both verbally on texting, just the way you think about things. And I hate referring to big tech CEOs, but Jeff Bezos makes everyone write out long form memos in terms of any recommendations around capital allocation.

So if you want to be a great storyteller, it starts with learning how to write well. And I couldn't write well. I got a C in English in high school, which looked really good on my college applications. But I over time spent a lot of time practicing. Strunk and White. Is that what it is? Strunk and White? Elements of Style? That should be next to your bed. Read that thing like five fucking times. Really strong grammar is key, absolutely key to presenting yourself as both educated and smart, which are really, really wonderful brand associations. Anyway, anywho, you want to learn how to write well, and then you want to choose your medium.

What do I mean by that? There are so many mediums now. There's LinkedIn, there's texting, there's speaking in front of groups, there's Substack, there's visual presentations with PowerPoint, there's one-on-one meetings, there's phone conversations. Find your medium, do an analysis. What mediums am I good at? What mediums am I not so good at?

I am very good in front of large crowds. I'm a, yeah, no, I'm a great orator. I'll give myself that. I can speak, I got a lot of practice. I've spoken in front of 160 plus students. Since 2002 when I started teaching, I was chosen to be the commencement speaker at my graduation at Berkeley.

Little bit of a flex, little bit of a, I'm kind of a big deal, kind of a big deal. So I knew I had some natural skill there and really wanted to develop it, but it got much better as I learned how to write well. Anyways, there's so many platforms and different forms of communication you want to figure out what you're really good at. I am not good on the phone. I try not to have very important phone calls on the phone, especially one-on-one. I come across, and this isn't easy, as both insecure and aloof. I'm not especially good one-on-one in person.

And I hate to admit that, but if it's important meeting, I like to bring someone with me. I'm better at sort of listening and playing off people than I am at sort of engaging people. See above insecure and aloof. But as the crowd grows, I get better. And so I try to find environments and it's not easy where I can speak to a large group of people.

I also think I'm pretty good in terms of the written word. So any, I force myself because I'm fundamentally a lazy person to start or to have deadlines. I write a newsletter every week, not because I enjoy writing every week, but because if I didn't have that deadline, I probably write one every six weeks. And then it serves as the Petri dish or the kind of beta testing or the hot house flowers or the greenhouse, whatever the right metaphor is for my books. But if you could develop any one skill and this skill has to be at average or better.

I'm not saying you gotta be a great speaker or a great communicator, but if you have aspirations to punch above your weight class economically or even romantically, you wanna, if you're a dude and you wanna get dates, boy, your ability to tell a story, your ability to be funny, your ability to kinda talk about what you're up to or at least be somewhat politically aware

or at least be able to frame certain things, to listen, to tell stories, that is the key. And what's the key to becoming a great writer? I've gone from an awful writer, see above, see in 11th and 12th grade English, to a decent writer, to a competent writer, to a fairly awful writer, see above, see in 11th and 12th grade English, to a decent writer, to a competent writer, to a fairly interesting writer. And now I write books that sell a lot of copies

because I practiced a lot. And it's all about the edit. And what's the key to being a good writer? Starting, starting. How do you write a book? You start, you open your computer and you start writing and you think, oh, that's shit. But it's all about going back and having something to edit.

It's all in the edit and start editing shit. I think Google Docs is just amazing and going through and tracking your changes. And when you're inspired, and also you don't need to go in order. I like writing sometimes the end of the conclusion. I think I'll have a great emotional ending to wrap it all together.

I'll write that first. Also find out when you can write. I write, I'm unusual. I write between the hours of like midnight and 3 a.m. that first. Also find out when you can write. I write, I'm unusual, I write between the hours of like midnight and 3 a.m. We're gonna one, ensure that we can write at least competently, we're gonna practice over and over and then we're gonna write fearlessly.

We're gonna communicate fearlessly. We're never gonna be mean or mean-spirited, but if you really believe something and you can find the data and it goes, it contradicts the current narrative or goes against the grain, That is what really breaks through. That's what moves the species forward. That's when people say, this is the Atlantic article or the substack article that gets

published in the Atlantic that gets read more than anything else. When you sign up for what has already been said, if you get just a ton of likes, so you didn't get pushed back on things you're saying, it means you're not fucking saying anything. Be courageous, be fearless. Cause let me give you a hint and some insight here. None of us gets out of here alive. As Mel Brooks said, we're all going to be dead soon. Great communicators understand their medium, can write well, and are fearless. Okay. Anyways, before we get started, I want to ask a quick favor. We're planning for the future of the Proficy Pod, and we want your input.

Head to voxmedia.com slash survey to let us know how we're doing and how we can make the show even better. What a thrill! Please go to voxmedia.com slash survey and tell us what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong, and how we can improve, and I will surround you with white light. Okay, moving on to today's episode, we speak with Patrick McGee, an award-winning journalist who spent years covering Apple for the Financial Times.

We discuss with Patrick his new book, Apple in China, the capture of the world's greatest company. So with that, here's our conversation with Patrick McGee. Patrick, where does this podcast find you? San Francisco, I just got back from sort of a two week book tour in New York and London, but this is where I live, San Francisco. So let's just dive into it. Your new book, Apple in China, tells the story of how China

essentially was built as a country by Apple. Well, let's start there. I've seen you cite some incredible statistics. Of course, I discovered you on TikTok where I discover everything now, where you cited some just amazing stats. Give us some of those stats and tell us how intertwined Apple has become with China. So just before I give you the numbers, I should just very briefly say that the sort of pushback I'm getting is the line that Apple built China, right? The book doesn't sort of so stridently say that. It says it was the biggest contributor to the high tech electronics industry, which has been described by scholars like Barry Naughton as Xi Jinping's most important thing.

So obviously I'm not claiming that like they built everything. It's just that their efforts in China really are that of a nation building effort. No, I'm going with China owes everything to Apple. I think that's more dramatic. Anyway, go ahead. Okay. The numbers are phenomenal, right? So, and it's worth knowing what the numbers mean as well. So since 2008, Apple has trained 28 million people in the supply chain.

Apple would push back and say that that's not all in China, but they also won't tell you which percentage is in China, because they know that it's very, very high. Maybe it's 27 million, maybe it's 26 million. The numbers are astonishing. It's a bigger labor force than all of California. In 2015, Apple is sort of on the back foot with Beijing and provincial officials. They're trying to demonstrate how influential they are to the country, largely as an effort not to have to do joint ventures, which is what Beijing has

wanted from Western companies for decades. So they do their own supply chain study and realize what Beijing has wanted from Western companies for decades. So they do their own supply chain study and realize that they're sitting on like real political capital. So what they realize is that they're investing $55 billion a year and that they basically go to Zhang Nanghai, Tim Cook and two top deputies. That's the citadel of Chinese communist power in Beijing, Forbidden City. And they pledged that they will spend that amount for the next five years, totaling $275 billion. This is mostly training costs and wages, in addition to really sophisticated machinery that they put on other people's production lines. So if the 28 million workers line sounds like dramatically high or too high, Tim Cook's own estimate for how many workers they have in any given year is 3 million. And the churn in Apple's supply chain is ridiculous.

And the other interesting thing to know about this is Apple does not work like other companies where they're just hoping that component makers innovate on their own initiative, you know, come up with lighter materials, more durable materials. Apple is sending people by the plane load to engineer those materials, invent those materials, you know, do the production processes behind the parts. And so they take dramatic control of their supply chain on a level and scale that I don't think any other company in the world matches at all. Essentially, Tim Cook is caught between two lovers, if you will, between she and Trump.

Describe the relationship to the best of your ability or knowledge between Cook and Xi and Cook and Trump right now. So when Xi Jinping comes into power in 2013, he doesn't understand what Apple's contributions to the country are. And we know this because within 36 hours of him being appointed president, CCTV, sort of state-sponsored CNN of China, attacks Apple. And there's many reasons to think of Apple as an exploitative power in the country. For instance, their margins go from something like 1.1%, I think in 2003, to above 25% by 2012. And yet from Beijing's perspective, this massive success is all on the back of China,

right? In two respects. One, they know better than anybody that Apple wouldn't have another place to ship the quality and quantity of products that they're shipping at that point. And two, it's the Chinese market, the Chinese buyers that are accounting for a dramatic, you know, Tim Cook's word is mind boggling, share of Apple products. There's this dramatic narrative in the book where Apple really does not think China is going to be a market in 2008. They build their first retail store there purely because of the Beijing Olympics. Then without really even trying in a certain sense, the iPhone becomes this spectacular

success story in 2010 and it continues forward to such a degree that hardliners in Beijing are upset with Apple because it sort of represents the materialism, the individualism of Western culture, and that's not really something they're in favor of. So the relationship with Xi and Cook begins on a really rocky patch because, uh, you know, Apple represents so many things that Xi Jinping doesn't like. And Apple begins this effort, two or three year effort really, to appoint or hire this group of people that call themselves the gang of eight. I understand you went to, you taught with one of them.

Is that right by the way, Doug Guthrie? Yeah. Yeah. I know Doug well. Good friend. Yeah. So I would love to hear about that. So he's, Doug Guthrie is the guy that's leaving China University,

sorry, Apple University within China. And so they come up with this narrative that flips the narrative on its head of saying, we're not exploiting China, we are actually contributing in a great way by having our engineers work in hundreds of factories hand in glove, training them, auditing them, supervising them, and installing machinery on a totally epic scale. And this is where some of the numbers are just astounding.

That really changes the relationship. So Tim Cook basically goes with this message to Zhang Nenghai, the citadel of communist power, and tells the Chinese leadership about this. And aside from content, let's say, having to ban VPNs, having to ban WhatsApp in the New York Times, Apple really hasn't had any problems in China since then. We can maybe unpack that a little bit, but

that was the winning formula to get over Xi Jinping. This is my language, not Apple's, of course, but Apple realizes it's the biggest supporter of Made in China 2025, which is Beijing's directive in 2015 for the company to become self-sufficient in robotics, in automation, in high-end electronics. And so Apple ends up being this massive supporter of that and gives rise to Huawei, Oppo, Xiaomi, et cetera, because when Apple is training hundreds of their suppliers, they basically say go forth and multiply to them so that they're not so dependent on Apple. And so they basically give birth to the Chinese smartphone market, and those numbers too are

pretty astounding. So that in a nutshell I would say is the the Cook-Xi relationship. The Cook-Trump relationship is really quite different because when Tim Cook is telling the Beijing government how much they're investing, it's real substance. I mean, there's ways that they're calculating the figures and one could question them on accounting basis or whatever, but the result, the reality is that, you know, Apple is doing 90% of their production in China. ways that they're calculating the figures and one could question them on accounting basis or whatever. But the result, the reality is that Apple is doing 90% of their production in China. So when they say we're investing this much, we're training this number of people, these are accurate figures, right?

When Apple is conducting the same lobbying effort with Washington, the numbers are pretty fanciful. So, I mean, if your listeners don't really agree with me or think it's a number that's too high when I say they're investing $55 billion a year, just remember that in February, Apple said that it's going to put in $500 billion investment and spend into America over the next four years. So just sort of suspend your disbelief here for a second. I'm saying they're investing this crazy amount in a country where there's 90% of their production and Apple's own figure that they're trying to convince everybody of is even higher in

a country where 0% of their production takes place. So something is amiss here and it's not me being bad with the figures. It's that Apple is making a lobbying effort that's based on sleight of hand and sort of magician trick misleading information. So what I'm saying there is that Cook's relationship with the Trump administration is based on a lack of substance and a sort of political window dressing because they know what a threat Donald Trump is. I mean, Xi Jinping is not as big a threat as Donald Trump is. And you could just sort of see that in a common sensical way,

which is that broadly speaking, Xi Jinping and Tim Cook have their interests aligned. If they can both have Apple producing in China, that works wonders for both of them. That does not work wonders for Donald Trump. He does not want production to be in China. And so the push to make iPhones in the US, which is fanciful for all reasons we can get into,

is really what puts Tim Cook in a buy-in tier. I think fanciful is the right word. The estimates that I've seen is that a US-produced iPhone would be $3,500. Is that accurate? I would just push back on that number because that itself is a fanciful figure. I mean, the problem isn't that they'd be more expensive.

The problem is that they couldn't be built. We have no idea how much an iPhone would cost if it were built in America. It's more that we just completely lack the capability. The line I like to use is an iPhone has a thousand components in it being produced and, you know, like the logistics, the production, the just-in-time manufacturing for those phones, up to a million a day. So that means a billion parts a day. And good luck finding an American corporation that can do one of those components at a million a day, let alone hundreds of factories that can do all of it.

We're just 15, 20 years behind. And that even is assuming that we would have the sort of Nietzschean will to power that China has for its manufacturing sector. I mean, we can go into it, and I keep getting asked the question, but it's sort of a useless exercise. I mean, there are at least 15 to 20 reasons why iPhone manufacturing en masse is never going to happen in America.

It really just is a fantasy. So in sum, at any price, it's just not feasible. The thing that people don't get is just the volumes that are involved. So Tim Cook is under such political pressure that I could see some final assembly taking place in America just because it makes such a great press release, but it's never going to be in consequential numbers.

It's certainly not going to be cost competitive. And frankly, if you think of who would have to work in these factories, it's totally antithetical to the MAGA crowd. In other words, it's the people fleeing Honduras that would be ripe for these factories. I mean, those are the sort of people that could work a 12-hour day and have the sort of desperation because you're trying to find the equivalent of, you know, what does America have in terms of labor support that would be equivalent to people working 14 hour days in the hot fields in Western China that go find a life in Shenzhen instead. You know, it's not going to be American born people. It's going to be the people that are trying to get over the Trumpian wall, if you will, to get into the country. So there's a contradiction in terms, even if you really wanted to fulfill the scenario. the Trumpian wall, if you will, to get into the country. So there's a contradiction in terms, even if you really want it to fulfill the scenario.

The message I got from your book was that there was eye opening was not only the sheer scale of Apple training 25 million people and making what you described as Marshall plan like investments in China, but just how good Apple's presence has been in China, that it has planted acorns in terms of human capital and manufacturing prowess that has just infected and given rise to this manufacturing juggernaut, or what I'll call advanced manufacturing. I think in the US we have a tendency to think of

Apple is a bunch of, you know, low end manufacturing, or excuse me, China is the host to a bunch of low end manufacturing. The reality is their manufacturing on many levels much more sophisticated than ours is. All along with a way of saying, or prelude, speaking purely as what's best for, or would have been best for America, the rail politic, if you could go back in time,

would American interests have been best served if Apple, and no one can predict the future, but if Apple, if we could go back 30 years and Apple could make a similar investment in say, Mexico, which doesn't have the low cost back then of a China, but has much lower costs, but isn't seen as an adversary or competitor, would we do it over?

Would we do it differently? So let me give you the answer I've gotten from a very senior person who used to work at Apple, and then I'll sort of give you my answer. So his answer, and I'm sorry I can't name this person, but he's someone that you would know. He said, what else would you have us do? Like if we knew in 2008 that Xi Jinping was the next leader and was going to take China in an authoritarian direction. Okay, that's harsh, but there's still no place to build at the quality scale, et cetera, that we needed to build at. So sort of just saying, don't make the iPhone in such numbers.

You know, he, he, this person just said there was really no alternative. I like the Mexico question. So if we go back 30 years, I mean, one thing that people don't quite understand about NAFTA is it's quite successful between 1993 and signing and 2001. And in America, we have this parochial view and we talk about the China shock, right? And what's the China shock? It's the impact of China entering the WTO on American jobs and so forth. But the China shock is even bigger in Mexico, right?

Because Mexico is more of a competitor in terms of, you know, actually being a mass producer of things than China was, producer of things than America was. So, you know, Mexico gets hit harder by this than America. But when you are building something in Mexico, right, politically this is a taboo thing, right? Politically, if you can shun a factory or shame a factory, rather, because they're going from Ohio to Mexico, it's a politically winning strategy.

But if that factory goes to China instead of Mexico, it's actually far worse because the intermediary trade, think of something like the automotive industry, cross borders between Mexico and US, is quite substantial. So when you have a product, quote unquote, made in Mexico, it's often 20 to 25% made with American support in terms of the intermediary goods, right? The content that's actually in that product. Once it's in China, there's basically no intermediary goods, right? The content that's actually in that product. Once it's in China, there's basically no intermediary trade, right? It goes down from like 20 to 25% to 5%.

So I'm really a supporter of what we used to call NAFTA because when jobs go to Mexico, you're actually leveraging the sort of low wage competitiveness of an allied nation that's on our border and then there you would do so in such a way that there's still trade with something like the aerospace sector centered around San Diego for higher value add. When it goes to China it all goes. So I think there's a substantial difference there and therefore I'm a big advocate of friend shoring or near shoring but reshoring

isn't gonna happen for a company the size of Apple. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for PropG comes from Built Rewards. Attention renters, if you haven't heard of Built Rewards, you're about to thank me. You already earn reward points on groceries, travel, and nearly everything else. But there's a crucial expense that you should be earning points on too. Your rent. With BILT Rewards, now you can. Paying rent with BILT Rewards earns you flexible transferable points and unlocks exclusive

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We believe it's possible to extract enormous amounts of critical minerals and rare earths, which you know we need for technology and high technology in the process. In South Africa, Ukraine, China, Greenland, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the ocean, what exactly is going on right now? On Today Explained, every weekday afternoon. Support for the show comes from Quince. Finding the perfect Father's Day gift can be tough. Dads are notoriously hard to shop for. Quince makes it easy. That's because Quince has

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I ordered my dad a European linen shirt in deep navy for Father's Day. Dad, if you're listening, you're gonna hear this ad way before you actually get your present. Hate to ruin the surprise, but you're gonna love it. So to all the listeners out there looking for a Father's Day present, go to Quince. Their products are so good.

High quality, reasonable prices. Love them, love Quince. For the dad who deserves better than basic, Quince has you covered. Go to quince.com slash propg for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash propg to get free shipping and 365 day returns. quince.com slash propg. You've made a really interesting connection here that by empowering or kind of upscaling Chinese manufacturing base, we've increased unwittingly, I would imagine, the likelihood of an invasion of Taiwan.

Help make that connection for us. Let me back up a little bit. What everyone knows about Apple is industrial design. That's Johnny Ive creating the look, feel and substance of a product. But Apple operates in a pyramid structure. And as the pyramid goes wider, the more and more employees you have.

I mean, it's been described as an upside down funnel rather than a pyramid. So the very top two dozen people maximum is Johnny Ive's team coming up with the translucent iMac, coming up with multi-touch glass for the phone, that sort of thing. They sort of throw it over the fence to product design or PD. These are geniuses of a different sort

who have to sort of respond to Johnny Ive's godlike demands and make sure that all the components and everything fit into the very thing that he is dictated, right? And so that's its own problem. What we don't know is sort of the next level of the pyramid. This is manufacturing design or MD. These are the people who then make sure that that prototype can actually be built at scale. And so in order to do that, they go to Asia, primarily China today, but historically Asia,

to work hand in glove with dozens and later hundreds of factories to actually build the capabilities that are there. So in a sense, a key contention of my book, and it's really demonstrated rather than really argued, is that China doesn't have the tech competence in the early 2000s to respond to what Johnny Ive Studio is coming out with. That's not a knock against China. Nobody had that. Nobody had the tech competence to respond to what Johnny Ive Studio is coming out with. That's not a knock against China. Nobody had that. Nobody had the tech competence to respond to what they were doing.

And so Apple had to go build it there. And because volumes of the iPod go from a few million to dozens of millions, and then you get the iPhone where you go from 5 million in 2007 to a quarter billion by 2015, the numbers are just staggering. And Apple is maniacally obsessed about quality in a way that really no other company is. So you've got that combination of insane world beating quantity with insane world beating quality and in order to actually execute the plans coming out of Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive's mind, you need someone like Tim Cook to operationally scale it, right?

So my line about this is like Johnny Ive and Steve Jobs are what make Apple products unique, Tim Cook is what makes Apple products ubiquitous. And this manufacturing design element of the pyramid is a part of operations, which is in the product cycle, the fourth element of the pyramid. So then someone like Tim Cook and his team take what MD has created in Asia, and they get other factories involved to build resiliency and to push down costs and drive competition between suppliers. So they have this huge, huge impact. Okay, now here's where this goes. Once you are teaching a supplier how to do advanced electronics in any number of degrees, they're not necessarily going to stay with building smartphones. I mean, first of all, that is what they do in the first stage.

And so you see this huge, you know, localized smartphone ecosystem build up, not just for Western companies, but for Chinese companies. So Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo now have 55% global market share. I mean, really the only companies in the world doing smartphones are Samsung's, Samsung from Korea, iPhone from America, and a bunch of Chinese companies. Pixel and everyone else is so small that they get categorized as other. But once you have those skills, what else do you do with them? Well, you do the most sort of obvious adjacent tasks in electronics.

The same skill sets will help build you drones. The same skill sets will help you build military weaponry. I mean, chips are the foundation of the modern world, and Apple helps these companies with chips. And to the degree that Congress has had to basically intervene, Marco Rubio a few years ago threatening them with fire and fury, essentially, if they continued working with a company called YTMMC, which was making memory and Apple wanted those chips to be

in its own smartphones for China. I guess just to simplify, once you understand how intolerant of defects Apple culture is and that they are not working with suppliers who are already competent and they are not going after price, they are going after quality and they are sending people by the literal plane loads to four different industrial clusters in China to do all of this. You'll begin to sort of understand how they have such an impact on the country and then they're not really in control of what the country does with those skill sets afterwards. And so of course China has funneled it into other things that they're interested in, which is electric vehicles,

drones, and military weaponry. I'll put forward a thesis and you respond to it. I think these Apple tariffs or threats of tariffs on Apple are nonsense. And the idea of the relationship between Apple and China somehow devolving and digressing to a point of no return, I don't think either of those are realistic. My sense is that Apple in many ways is bigger than China or the US right now,

or bigger than Trump and Xi. And that is, I don't know if Xi can afford to lose Apple. And I don't think Trump can challenge the cult of iOS. I think it's bigger than MAGA. Your thoughts? Well, I think you're getting really towards my thesis, which is that Apple is stuck here. I mean, there is no obvious move where they're going to move to India or move to the US, particularly because neither of the superpowers wants them to do that, right? Xi Jinping can

easily put up lockers for Chinese visas that would be required for people to go to India to sort of replicate this skill set in India. And he also put up lockers for Chinese-made machinery to go to the Indian production lines. Meanwhile, Trump has just made it clear and sort of less sophisticated sense of just, I don't want you doing that. So, you know, the thesis of the book is really that Apple is stuck. It's stuck in a quagmire of its own making to some degree. I wouldn't quite agree that Apple is sort of bigger than either of those companies. I think if it's a bargaining chip between them, it's Beijing's bargaining chip rather than Washington's, which maybe takes a moment to digest, but that's an astonishing state of affairs. It's not really an astonishing statement. It's a banal statement, but it's astonishing state

of affairs that America's greatest company is really more in the hands of our greatest adversary than anyone else. But I really don't know what the counter argument would be. I mean, 90% of the production is in China. But it strikes me that if we just start to game theory this out, the pivot point here, the fulcrum or the agent of chaos here is Trump. Apple's humming along, they have kind of a mutually beneficial ecosystem or relationship with Xi and China. Actually something that if I read yourself correctly has been enormously mutual beneficial.

It's kind of the probably the most productive, profitable form of capitalism in history is the one between Apple and autocracy. It's created the most profitable product in history that each brought unique skills to. IP design on the part of Apple and advanced manufacturing capability to scale we've never seen before in any other product. I'm not even sure World War II could match some of the production capabilities that have been demonstrated by Apple in China. And that

Tim Cook, let me ask you this, I'm getting into geopolitics right now, but we're talking about what is oftentimes or has been the world's most valuable company. Isn't Tim Cook's play here just to kiss his ass or pretend to kiss Trump's ass and wait him out and everything stays the same? So certainly, I mean, that was Trump's,

that was Cook's strategy in Trump 1.0, right? Trump sort of famously said that Cook had promised three big, beautiful plants in America. You know, it's been what, eight years? Zero, zero such plants have emerged. So he just ran out the clock on Trump's presidency. And I think that's what they're trying to do again, because, you know, if you're Cupertino, I think you realize to some extent that Trump is a press release sort of president, right? He likes the optics of things.

He doesn't necessarily need to be patient and wait for the reality of it. So in February, you know, getting ahead of the tariffs, Tim Cook and Apple put out a statement saying they were investing $500 billion in America. This is basically nonsense. I don't know how exactly it is nonsense, but my running theory is that what they are counting as $500 billion includes buybacks and dividends. So if you look at how big Apple is, they literally spend more than $100 billion of their own money each year on share buybacks. So you multiply that by four, you've already accounted for 80% of the investment. Now, maybe they have to do some math to figure out what,

65, 70% of shareholders are in America, so it doesn't count for that whole figure, but there's way less than meets the eye than the idea of $500 billion being reinvested in America to reshore jobs here. If that were a figure that was as clear as the White House has taken it to be, right? Howard Lutnick, Scott Bessent, the White House has taken it to be, right? Howard Lutnick,

Scott Bessent, the White House press secretary and Trump have all said that like, this is quite a coin of change. What's the change of coin? I'm trying to think of what the press secretary said. She said, chunk of change, chunk of change, she said. It's quite a chunk of change, right? For Apple to be investing in America. So in other words, they have very much taken it to be a half trillion dollar investment in the country for reshoring jobs. The press release is very careful. It never accurately says that, but unless you're reading it with an air of there's something off here, that is the message you would come away thinking. And it's not the first such press release.

A few years before that, Apple had said they would spend $430 billion on the same thing. So I'm just mentioning that because it's not a factor of, oh, we'll just give them some time. It's only been a few months. If this number was credible, you'd see Apple factories and entire industrial clusters being brought up here, there, everywhere, probably needing so many jobs that people would be like, you know, flooding into the country. I mean, none of this is happening. And so if my buybacks theory is wrong, fine. Tell me what the other theory is

because the math doesn't add up. My sense is that if you look at Apple stock, all right, since, uh, since the election it's, uh, okay. Inauguration. So it's off about 15%. I think it was about 20%. So it has taken a hit since Trump became elected. And some of that is the broader market, but some of it is also the existential risk to Apple.

But when you, if you really think about what would be, what would be involved, it sounds to me like almost near impossible for Apple to divest from China at this point. And that if they were forced to do that, or if his largest market, which I think is like half the revenue Apple's half the revenue is US. If I just don't think the market is taking Trump that seriously right now. For me, I look at the, I look at how the market's reacting and the market is saying, yeah, this is a pain in the ass. It's a distraction.

It'll cost them some share and some valuable management bandwidth. But we don't believe this is really an existential threat. That the economics here are so lucrative and that Trump has such a lack of focus and will given, oh, it's 145% on China. Just kidding. It's 30%. It's that the market seems to be saying, yeah, this is a nuisance and annoyance,

but it's not really an existential threat to, to Apple. Your thoughts? I agree. But you know, I quote someone saying the relationship Apple has with China could blow up any day. Well, good luck sort of pricing that into your models because we don't know when it's going to blow up. Trump's such an erratic character that, I mean, honestly, how do you put him into an

Excel sheet of what the value should be in a year? The scariest thing in a sense of Trump's tweet the other day or truth social when he talked about 25% tariffs on a specific product, you know, the iPhone, I don't think that's ever been done in history before was at least 25%. In other words, if Tim Cook isn't playing ball, then the figure could go up quite a bit. And obviously, you know, Trump is to some extent added credibility to that claim by, by playing with tariffs so much.

To some extent, of course, he's also destroyed that claim by offering 90-day reprieves and such. And, I mean, Tim Cook is in such a bind here because you've got to remember a couple things. Like, one, Trump has said that this will take place, I think, at the end of June. I mean, supply chains do not move at the speed of weeks. I mean, this is a ludicrous demand. Obviously, I mean, I assume the Trump administration doesn't actually expect the factories to be built by then so much as there's a concept of a plan to use Trump's language by then.

But the other thing is that Apple doesn't manufacture anything themselves. So it's not only that you have to convince Tim Cook, it's that Tim Cook would have to convince Foxconn and probably hundreds of other suppliers if you genuinely wanted to build things here. And of course, none of them see the certainty of the Trump presidency lasting, of the tariffs on China lasting, or any number of things. And they would know that we're not going to be able to fill our factories if they're placed in Pittsburgh, because that's nothing like Zhengzhou or Shenzhen or Suzhou. So there's just so many complicated factors here that basically

favor the status quo, I suppose you could say. And I guess the timing of my book, which obviously not through anything I did, is sort of insane, is that I'm pointing out that not only are the business ties between Apple and China unbreakable, but the political ties are totally untenable. I mean, your average American just should not be happy with the idea that we are still sending

America's best engineers to hundreds of factories across the country to train them up on a host of electronics, which as we've already spoke about, can go well beyond the China's dominance in EVs and iPhones and a number of other things. So what are they supposed to do here that that's at all a good move? And if you'd like an analogy that I'm sort of stealing from Henry Kissinger, he points out the Westerners play chess. And when you play chess, you do something like Trump did about Huawei, right? He tried to go after Huawei, sort of take out China's biggest

company to deprive them of 5G access, deprive them of Google services, and that company nearly collapsed. But unfortunately, it came back with a vengeance for the current administration. But China plays a game called go. And in go, there is no final move. You instead encircle your enemy to such a degree that they're basically unable to make any meaningful moves. And that is where I see Tim Cook and Apple right now. They do not have any meaningful moves

other than digest a 25% tariff and hope that Trump doesn't raise it even further. You brought us something I hadn't considered and that is China might get or is getting in the way of a transition of any production to India. And my understanding is China sees themselves as a very strong ally of Pakistan, India less so. I would imagine that China and India see themselves as the same type of competitive threat as the US now perceives China.

I hadn't considered that. So China is purposely getting in the way of the transition of manufacturing capability to India and how real or illusory or jazz hands is Apple's statement that they're trying to divest out of China into India. So a couple of things to unpack there. So the reporting that China was putting up all these blockers came out of publications like rest of world and Bloomberg in January. So that's certainly happening. The line that I would use is that China wants technology transfer to be a one-way gate.

The information comes in, it does not leave. Insofar as it leaves at all, they want it to be Chinese companies like Luxair, GoreTech, BYD. Those are the companies that are doing some work in India, but even they are not really finding it all that easy to do. So there's that. And then when we're talking about iPhone assembly going to India, people are often conflating. And Apple, in a sense, I think, knows that they're going to conflate this and therefore it helps their PR. They're conflating assembly with genuine production. So if there are a thousand steps in building an iPhone and the final one is now happening in India, that is enough legally to say made in India on the box.

All you need is a substantive change to the product for that to be the case. But the phone is not any less dependent on the China-centric supply chain than any other iPhone you've ever seen or purchased. So this is really just about tariff reduction. And Apple has been doing iPhone assembly in India since 2017. That was always about tariff reduction. It was just about Narendra Modi's tariffs on products coming to China. And now it's about Donald Trump's tariffs. But if you're looking for real substantive moves that demonstrate

Apple understands there's a geopolitical threat in Xi Jinping and they've de-risked, honestly, there is nothing. There's tariff reduction and there's moving some assembly to Vietnam because it's cheaper and they face some labor issues a decade ago. But in terms of have they really de-risked because they see a threat, I don't see any meaningful moods anywhere. We'll be right back.

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When comedian Chris Gethard was growing up, he went to a place called Action Park. It was one of the first water parks in the country, and it was built by a man who had no experience building theme parks. Some people called him a berserk Willy Wonka. Phoebe Judge Anyone who went to Action Park understood you could get really messed up going there. Not only did we know that, it was a huge part of the appeal. Phoebe Judge I'm Phoebe Judge. Listen to our latest episode, Action Park, on Criminal,

wherever you get your podcasts. We're back with more from Patrick McGee. So I'm fascinated with the notion and it seems obvious in hindsight or in plain sight now that this incredible upscaling of the Chinese manufacturing base under the behest of Apple's incredible investment in an unbelievable complex product that we taught them how to fish, so to speak. I'm curious if and how you can make the connection between Apple or Apple's upskilling of the Chinese manufacturing base and what is, from what I understand, delivering on the promise of Tesla, but isn't in fact Tesla, it's BYD. Is there a direct connection between this upscaling and BYD? Yes, short answer. So when Tesla wants to expand manufacturing to Shanghai in particular, they propose, this is in the book, by the way, we'll build a factory in 24 months.

And the mayor of Shanghai says, essentially, make it 12. You know, we'll do whatever we can to accelerate this shift. This is all happening within 24 months of Tim Cook explaining to top leaders in China just how the Apple model works and why it is superior to the joint venture model. So Shanghai officials basically want Tesla to be the Apple of the electric vehicle world. Sometimes when people push back about this, they'll say, that doesn't make sense. You didn't need Tesla for the EV market in China. EVs go back to 2001 in China. And that's true. They do.

Not successfully. By 2012, 2013, there were something like 30,000 EV buses in Shenzhen alone. So one city has more EV buses than the rest of really the world. I mean, certainly there's not anything like that in North America or Europe at the time. But even by 2019, the share of EVs for the China market is less than 5%. So EVs might have a long history in China. They don't have a successful history. What really changes the game is that Tesla adopts the Apple model. I speak to someone that runs Capex for the Shanghai Gigafactory in the book,

who specifically says he hired Apple people to execute the same playbook. And they go to a whole bunch of factories to improve and localize the supply chain. BYD is one of those suppliers, CATL, Battery Giant, is one of those suppliers. And so they train them how to do everything that's necessary to build a Tesla. And then those companies use the upskilling that they've received to improve the rest of the Chinese market. So in China, this is actually called the catfish effect. It's sort of misleading, but it's interesting enough that I'll quickly go through it for you. So the idea, it's sort of based on a myth, is that a Norwegian fisherman realized that

catfish, no, am I getting this right? Have you read the book? Now I'm wondering if I'm getting it wrong. Catfish and no, sardines. Okay, so sardines, if they're kept alive when you catch them and bring them back to shore, are tastier and therefore more expensive if they're kept alive. The problem is they just sit in a tank and die as you take them back. So the catfish effect is throwing a catfish into the tank and then they sort of Darwinian style struggle for their own survival, keep themselves alive, and therefore they're a tastier bet. So the catfish effect in China is why don't we throw Tesla into the mix and through a sort of inspiration of doing a better job, they will improve the whole ecosystem.

Great analogy, I think it's somewhat misleading because it's missing the fact that this isn't just inspiration. This isn't just people think EVs writ large are cool because Tesla is cool. They're missing the Apple playbook, which is that Tesla is literally upskilling all of the suppliers and then, you know, frankly for its own benefit, but then it benefits the entire ecosystem. So at what point do EVs really take off? It's within 24 months of Tesla setting up the Shanghai Gigafactory to such a degree that even before Tariff Man became president, Biden put 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs.

So in other words, the influence of Apple and Tesla on the EV sector, I think is, you know, deserving of academic scrutiny and so forth. And I would love for someone to be able to pinpoint it more, but I think it's extraordinary. I mean, it all comes down to this tension between short-term capitalism or believing in free trade and thinking that you want China to succeed and that if they can make products more inexpensively and we can focus on the IP, the average assembly worker, I think at Foxconn makes, I don't know, five or six grand a year or 10 grand and the average person at Apple makes 200 grand a year, that this is a mutually beneficial ecosystem with comparative advantage or, and I'm curious if you were advising US policy or we are trading

off long-term strategic advantage by upscaling an adversary and we should bite the bullet and have higher costs and maintain that IP and that manufacturing domain expertise domestically or at least amongst, as you said, French shoring. Like what would you advise? Because I can argue both, and I mean this sincerely. I'm asking this question to learn not because I have a viewpoint here. I see really solid arguments on both sides. So if you look back at the last 20 years,

it really has been the golden age where a company like Apple can work on the design, the software and outsource all of their hardware manufacturing to a company, sorry, a country and many companies ready and willing and able to do it. The problem is the Chinese and obviously, I mean, you can't begrudge them for this, have no desire to stay at the low end value of everything, right? So if people are familiar with the smiley curve of product development, this is where like the two ends of the smile are, um, you know, product

conception and design, and then you dip down into all the low value manufacturing stuff, and then it comes back up for, you know, retail and branding and so forth. Well, the Chinese don't want to just stay at those levels. And so they're not right. So that's why you have companies like Huawei that now do brilliant industrial design on par with, and perhaps, uh, better than, than what you're getting out of Apple. Um, and we can come back to that if we need to. And so if we are just doing the design and the branding,

but all of our manufacturing is dependent on a belligerent country who would rather be hosting the whole supply chain, the whole smile, if you will, it puts Apple in a really precarious position because, you know, if new roadblocks come uparious position because, you know, if, if new roadblocks come up for Apple production or, you know, things we've seen like Chinese officials aren't supposed to use the iPhone, like Apple, Apple is just in such a, a place where at any given point, if the Chinese leadership really wants their own companies to be dominant, not just in

China but globally, um, there's not a hell of a lot stopping them. And Apple really does have no Plan B. And if you think of India as Plan B, but understand that actually it's a bunch of subassembled phones from China just being put in for final assembly, that's not really a Plan B at all. Now, maybe that's the first step. And in five, 10 years, they have a Plan B,

except the problem, of course, is that Beijing knows this. And so Beijing is going to make it difficult for them to do it. So they're in a really difficult spot. I think I had a second answer to that, which is that, on the one hand, you've got the 20-year look back, and on the other hand, oh, yeah, this is where I get back to the integrationist world. I mean, I don't have an issue at all with Apple

or any number of multinationals working with India, with Taiwan, with South Korea, with Mexico. I mean, that's fantastic. I think it's a total fantasy that we're going to sort of vertically integrate all this stuff just in America. But America is a nation that has many allies and free trade is a great thing. The trouble is you're doing free trade with a company that sort of uses and abuses free trade, you know, exploits their own workers and treats these individuals as second class citizens. And Apple is sort of doing this for the benefit of its own company,

but yeah, at the absolute long-term loss of all these skills. I mean, I quote someone in the book, Michael Hillman, saying, Apple has done a tremendous job of maintaining the experiential know-how. I mean, they know how to build this stuff. They've got proprietary processes for it. The trouble is the only place to actually execute the plans are in China. So I don't think it's a big deal if the plans are sort of like resiliently based in India and Taiwan, sort of allied nations where we can use

Apple's presence as a sort of bargaining chip and hopefully get Narendra Modi to stop playing footsie with, um, with Putin, things like that. But when everything's in China, I mean, not only is it a deliberate nation, but it's so large that it doesn't participate in Pax Americana, it seeks to overthrow it. By virtue of this book, I would argue you have some domain expertise into US industry, Chinese industry, companies that leverage both to their advantage.

Generally speaking, and I don't want you to make a stock prediction here, but what do you, coming out of this book, do you feel more bullish or bearish on the U.S. or the Chinese stock market or business more generally? Oh, it's an easy question, except that you're throwing on stock market. Twenty years henceforth, are you bearish on, bearish or bullish on China? And then the same question on U.S. industry.

So I'm super bullish on Chinese industry. I'm super bullish on their market share, but they practice a form of capitalism that doesn't prioritize profits, they prioritize control. So BYD is actually collapsing its prices right now, even though they are at a point where they probably could be raising them. So what does that mean for BYD stock price long-term? I don't know. It fell on the news of them sinking prices the other day.

So, right. So what I'm saying is I'm bullish on the Chinese industrial sector taking more and more share. I'm bullish on Chinese taking share from iPhone within Apple. What I'm, from Apple. However, I don't know what that means for the stock price of Xiaomi, because it's, it's, it's different and it's not their goal. And in fact, I would say to sort of Western listeners, stop looking at industries, looking

at the share of American profit and saying, look at how good we're doing. You need to be looking at things like market share, because that's what the Chinese are trying to control. They're not interested in profit in the way that we are. They have a drive for indigenous innovation and control. And by offering cutthroat prices, they're effectively de-industrializing all national competitors.

So Apple seems to be the tip of the spear, at least from a perception standpoint, that when Trump wakes up with the wrong blood sugar, he goes after Apple and gets angry. It seemed like Biden was putting tariffs on Chinese EVs. We've talked a little bit about Tesla and some of that technology spillover or domain expertise spillover I think you've said is also occurring among the Chinese EV market. What are companies three, four, and five, or do you know them

American companies that have really developed a sophisticated supply chain in China? My focus has been so much on Apple, but I'm not sure. I mean, Tesla would certainly be one of them. Tesla's in a better position because they do build cars. First of all, they do stuff on their own, right? So yes, they have a supply chain, but they also have a lot of the IP. They actually do build stuff in a way that of course Apple doesn't. But you know, Gigafactory in Shanghai is their most important factory

and it accounts for 50% of output, but they do have a localized supply chain in the US. They do have a localized supply chain in Germany, so they're far less exposed. They're really the closest to Apple. I mean, A, they adopted the strategy, but B, they're a hardware company worth a trillion dollars. You don't really have any other examples of that, right? Amazon, Google, Meta, these are companies built on things like digital advertising. In the case of Amazon, obviously? Amazon, Google, Meta, these are companies built on things like digital advertising, in the case of Amazon, obviously just selling lots of stuff and being a logistics powerhouse, but nobody else rises to the level that Apple has, right? So when people say, why are you picking on Apple? Well, it's the only company with $400 billion of revenue.

80% of it is hardware and 90% of that is in China. Find me another company I should be picking on of that size. Make some predictions here. And we won't hold you to them, but if you were to say in one to three years, we make predictions every year. And by the way, we always say we get a lot of them wrong. But if you were to try and say, okay, I'm willing to make a couple of speculative bets here

about what happens. And this can be about Apple or any other companies, but I was saying, I've written a lot of books. At the end of the book, I feel like for about 10 minutes, I know more about one very narrow topic than anyone in the world. And then within 11 minutes, someone else has written something else that I didn't see. You right now are at the helm of the bobsled, looking at the intersection between the US and the Chinese economies and our most important companies. Any thoughts on how you see this playing out?

So the ones that I think are clearest, where I don't have to be too, you know, crystal ball-like, is that Apple's market share in China is going to fall. It already is on track for a third year of declining share right now. The reasons are actually more to do with AI than anything else because Apple is not allowed to use chat GBT. And Siri is to quote Sachin and Della dumb as a rock. So they need a local partner in China, but the local partners are like the likes of Baidu and Alibaba are going to work more sort of seamlessly and hand in

hand with the Chinese competitors. And the Chinese competitors with or or without AI, are really good. I mean, the best phone in the world today is a $2,800 Huawei Mate XT, and it's a little bit thicker than an iPhone, but it unfolds twice into a 10.2-inch tablet. Apple doesn't have a single foldable phone. Huawei's got a double fold, right? Tri-fold is called, but it unfolds twice. I mean, that's, it's just a marvel of industrial engineering. And the fact that it's $2,800 has led critics to say like, oh, like no one's gonna buy this thing. And like they're just missing the whole point. It was only 11 years ago when Johnny Ive was

complaining about Chinese mimicry. The Chinese have really gone from mimicry to doing a better job on both industrial design and manufacturing than Apple. That's a remarkable change in just such a short period. So Chinese market share for Apple will decline. That's prediction one. Prediction two, I mean honestly I think it's a status quo in terms of where Apple is building their stuff because the most obvious thing that Apple should be doing is doing more assembly in India and they need to be building out the quantities, the depth and breadth of the supply chain within India

and itself. I think Apple sort of pretending to do that rather than really doing it the way that people seem to think. But because Trump is against it, imagine what Tim Cook's options are here. It's A, like give up because you don't want the political backlash from Washington. Well, that's sort of a terrible idea.

Or contravene the president who has any number of things he can do against you, even if it's just, you know, tweeting bad stuff about you on truth social. So that's a bad decision too. So I think the status quo is most likely just in terms of everything will still be built in China and America will continue to be hollowed out and deindustrialized by lacking the sort of expertise here. Patrick McGee is an award-winning journalist who covered Apple for the Financial Times from 2019 to 2023. Previously, Patrick was a bond reporter at the Wall Street Journal. His book, Apple in China, the capture of the world's greatest company is out now. Patrick really enjoyed this conversation. Also, I got such a kick out of seeing you on The Daily Show and all the attention.

It's a nice moment for you. You seem like this really hardworking, super smart young man. It's just nice to see people like you succeeding and getting your kind of moment in the summer, or what is the first of many moments. Oh, thank you. I mean, that was absolutely my career highlight.

We had seven people with VIP tickets at the Dossel Night in Canada. I'm sorry, it's not this. This isn't your career highlight, Patrick. This isn't it, right here. Close second. Close second. Maybe it was in person or something.

Maybe that would change things. Anyways, Patrick, really appreciate your time. Congrats on the book. Thanks, Scott. Appreciate it. How's your happiness? You're not your kid's friend. I'm struggling a little bit with my boys. I should say I'm not struggling with them.

I'm struggling with me as it relates to my boys. And that is I had this vision of what fatherhood would be like that I'd be their best buddy and that they would come to me for advice. Kind of be like Phil and Luke on Modern Family. My boys are fortunately a little bit more clued in than Luke and I'm not nearly as likable as Phil. But I sort of imagine that kind of relationship where they would be fascinated by World War II history

and CrossFit and want to watch movies with me because it was a chance to hang out with dad. And my kids of 14 and 17, quite frankly, are just dramatically less interested in hanging out with me than they used to be or that I would like. And quite frankly, it's hurtful, it's upsetting. And what I've realized, and I'm trying to, the bottom line is I'm not their friend, I'm their dad.

I'm there to be a consistent source of comfort and security and love and to model good behavior and to provide discipline and hopefully some learnings. But the fact that they're venturing out on their own and into their own things and kind of rolling their eyes a lot at what I do and say, that's healthy. There's a natural instinct across kids as they start getting to the point where they're supposed to separate from the pack, where they start finding everything you do ridiculously fucking lame. And we have definitely checked that box, but what Michelle Obama said that you're

not your kid's friend, um, is really true. And I'm trying to take it to heart because it has been difficult for me. And what I would say to dads out there, as long as you're present, as long as you're a source of unconditional love, as long as you're a provider, it's okay if they're kind of finding their own gig and they find other things more interesting. You want that. You don't want a kid who is too dependent upon their friendship with you, the crowds out or that you're sort of the only person they're comfortable around.

I don't think that's, I absolutely don't think that's what you want. In sum, you're dad. You're not their best friend, you're their father. And, uh, I'm also hopeful that my kids, when they get a little bit older, we'll sort of come back, if you will. What I think what I'm struggling a little bit with is that I don't get as much garbage time with them because I don't take them to school or they're not as sequestered or trapped with me as they used to be. But in some, if your kids are quote unquote leaving you a little bit from an emotional

or present standpoint, that's probably a good thing. It means that they're developing into their own men and that's okay. You're their dad, not their friend. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our intern is Dan Shalon. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the ProppG Pod from the Box Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn.

And please follow our ProppG Markets Pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Bye.