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How China Became a Scientific Superpower in Just 25 Years | Silk and Steel · UK Column Radio

0:01
Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Silk and
0:04
Speaker 1: Steal podcast. I'm your host Carl Za. Today I brought
0:08
Speaker 1: back the crowd favorite Doggy a ka Hanphates, who is
0:14
Speaker 1: a columnist at Asia Times who write prolifically on China
0:20
Speaker 1: related issues.
0:22
Speaker 2: Uh.
0:23
Speaker 1: First of all, welcome back to the show, Doggie.
0:26
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you, thank you, thanks for having me back.
0:30
Speaker 1: I the reason I brought you back is I saw
0:34
Speaker 1: your latest article on Asia Time which talk about, you know,
0:40
Speaker 1: the ranking of Chinese universities. Do you want to talk
0:43
Speaker 1: about that?
0:45
Speaker 2: Yeah? Sure. So lately there has been kind of a
0:50
Speaker 2: a I don't want to say revolution, but a recognition
0:56
Speaker 2: that some of the old ranking systems are just uh,
1:00
Speaker 2: nonoperable anymore because every year, things like US News and
1:05
Speaker 2: QS and the Times Higher Education ranking system, they've split
1:10
Speaker 2: out the exact same collegies for the top ten or
1:13
Speaker 2: twenty year after year after year. The positions might change
1:16
Speaker 2: a little, but the same schools get spad out and
1:21
Speaker 2: the world has been turned entirely upside down by China
1:25
Speaker 2: and it is not reflected anywhere in the university rankings. However,
1:31
Speaker 2: there are a few other ranking institutions, like Leading based
1:39
Speaker 2: out of a University of Netherlands, and what this article
1:43
Speaker 2: concentrated on was the Nature Index. They are absolutely or
1:49
Speaker 2: try to be absolutely objective, as in, there is no
1:53
Speaker 2: goofy stuff like reputation, teaching quality, class sizes, number of
1:59
Speaker 2: international students, count of Nobel winning professors. They don't care.
2:04
Speaker 2: They just look at published articles in top journals. That's
2:10
Speaker 2: the Nature Index or in Leaden. There's many rankings they
2:16
Speaker 2: pure scientific paper count or top ten percent by citations
2:23
Speaker 2: or top one percent by citations. If you look at
2:25
Speaker 2: those in the last ten twenty years, China, well, in
2:29
Speaker 2: the last twenty five years, China came from absolutely nowhere
2:33
Speaker 2: as not a single university in the top twenty or thirty.
2:38
Speaker 2: To this year, China has seventeen in the Nature Index
2:43
Speaker 2: of the top twenty and nine of the top ten.
2:48
Speaker 2: And Harvard, for the first time since the Nature Index
2:52
Speaker 2: was instituted, was datethrown by Zia Young University. So according
2:59
Speaker 2: to index, it kind of reflects, you know, rubbery as
3:03
Speaker 2: it may, it kind of reflects China's economic growth over
3:08
Speaker 2: all these years, where you know, uh, the number of
3:13
Speaker 2: college grads went from five percent twenty five years ago
3:16
Speaker 2: of the eighth cohort nows, you know, sixty five Sunday percent.
3:22
Speaker 2: And this is what we have been seeing. This is
3:25
Speaker 2: what has been driving China's growth. This is what has
3:28
Speaker 2: been driving China's ability to take over industry after industry
3:33
Speaker 2: from you know, solar, evs, wind power, you know, all
3:40
Speaker 2: kinds of stuff. So anything that China competes in, with
3:43
Speaker 2: a handful of exceptions like aerospace, advanced chips and parts
3:50
Speaker 2: of biotech, you know, China leads and everything else, it's
3:53
Speaker 2: pretty much because of you know, it's human capital, human
3:59
Speaker 2: capital all the way down. When China invest the most
4:03
Speaker 2: important thing is the human capital. A lot of people
4:05
Speaker 2: focus way too much on China's investment in you know,
4:09
Speaker 2: high speed railroads and bridges and nowhere or whatever. But
4:14
Speaker 2: it's the thing that has really driven China is really
4:17
Speaker 2: the fact that they took college grants from five percent
4:23
Speaker 2: circa two thousand to around seventy percent today.
4:27
Speaker 1: I I okay, I'm going to push back on you
4:30
Speaker 1: a little bit because you know, a lot of people.
4:32
Speaker 1: I know, there's a lot of a lot of people
4:34
Speaker 1: in particularly in the United States, that will say, well,
4:37
Speaker 1: what about like hundreds of thousands of Chinese students that's
4:42
Speaker 1: still coming to us to study. You know, why would
4:45
Speaker 1: these Chinese people choose to use US universities? You know,
4:49
Speaker 1: if the Chinese university is so great, why are they
4:52
Speaker 1: coming to America?
4:54
Speaker 2: Well, one hundreds of thousands. It's about two hundred and
4:58
Speaker 2: seventy thousand total grad an undergrad every year, probably about
5:02
Speaker 2: seventy thousand our grads, about two hundred thousands are undergrads,
5:05
Speaker 2: about fifty thousand a year. You know, there's about thirteen
5:10
Speaker 2: million Chinese students graduating per year, so fifty thousand out
5:14
Speaker 2: of that is a slipper. It's not even when I'm
5:19
Speaker 2: trying to do my math here. It's a few percentage,
5:22
Speaker 2: you know, it's a few percent you know, low single digits.
5:26
Speaker 2: So it has and it has been changing over the years.
5:31
Speaker 2: As in at one point it was, you know, it
5:35
Speaker 2: was if your family had money, you would just have
5:38
Speaker 2: to go to the you know, the only the best
5:40
Speaker 2: thing you can do is go overseas for school. It
5:42
Speaker 2: didn't matter what school. The better, of course, the higher
5:46
Speaker 2: the better. Now overseas education has developed a bit of
5:53
Speaker 2: a nasty reputation. There are now two types of students
5:59
Speaker 2: who go overseas undergrad one type. If you're you know,
6:03
Speaker 2: you're basically a total bone heads who would never do
6:06
Speaker 2: well in the Galcum. They just and they go overseas
6:08
Speaker 2: to whatever school would accept them, some party school, like
6:12
Speaker 2: I mean not to mention aning names, but you know,
6:15
Speaker 2: not particularly not particularly uh elite or rigorous and in admissions.
6:23
Speaker 1: And there's a term on Chinese internet for those schools.
6:27
Speaker 1: It's called literally wild chicken school universities.
6:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so in Chinese students have to have a
6:37
Speaker 2: kind of somewhat of a bad reputation on campus as
6:39
Speaker 2: people with a lot of money to throw around driving
6:41
Speaker 2: their sports cars and never going to class. You know
6:45
Speaker 2: when when when I went to university, this is like
6:47
Speaker 2: thirty some years ago, so I was pretty much the
6:51
Speaker 2: only Mainlander in my campus and I didn't have a
6:54
Speaker 2: winter coat. Yeah, so at different times, the rich people
6:58
Speaker 2: back then were the honky who drove the sports cards
7:02
Speaker 2: and didn't go to class. So that was years ago.
7:07
Speaker 1: I'm speaking from my personal experience because I also uh
7:11
Speaker 1: came to United I went to the United States in
7:14
Speaker 1: the nineteen ninety went through the public school system, and
7:18
Speaker 1: I I test into cal Tech and back then in
7:22
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties and even early two thousand, the reputation
7:27
Speaker 1: of Chinese students there heart, heartworking, heart studying. You know, yeah,
7:33
Speaker 1: no money, very poor, but very hardworking, very studious. But
7:37
Speaker 1: somehow from two thousand to twenty tens, like it's that
7:44
Speaker 1: that stereotip type image of Chinese, a hard working immigrant
7:48
Speaker 1: Chinese students became like these uh, these rich Chinese kids
7:53
Speaker 1: driving those rice buckets, those rice rocket cars, you know,
7:56
Speaker 1: like those uh those a modified cars. And yeah, it's
8:01
Speaker 1: it's getting so out of hand. Uh When when I
8:04
Speaker 1: was in school, like some some honky kid had a
8:06
Speaker 1: BMW and everybody was so impressed. I'm talking to people
8:10
Speaker 1: who graduated from U C l A. And they said
8:11
Speaker 1: they Chinese crowds there. They dried like Ferraris and Lamborghinis.
8:15
Speaker 1: And I'm like, okay, different crowd from the crowd. So
8:19
Speaker 1: there's one type these uh, these these you know, party
8:23
Speaker 1: animal dumbbocks, and then there's another type, which go to uh,
8:28
Speaker 1: you know, the big city high schools that offer somewhat
8:30
Speaker 1: of an international program, either I D or AP, mostly
8:36
Speaker 1: because they're.
8:36
Speaker 2: Trying to attend an elite university without being the GAUCU.
8:41
Speaker 2: Because the gau coll is just you know, it's pretty
8:44
Speaker 2: soul destroying and it's and it's just it's extremely heavy left,
8:48
Speaker 2: it's brutal.
8:49
Speaker 1: It's a very brutal competitive college exam in China.
8:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, so even those guys today at the you know,
8:58
Speaker 2: Chinese public have learned to mock because they kind of understand.
9:02
Speaker 2: Now at one point they worshiped the Ivy League in
9:05
Speaker 2: their admissions process, but now they understand that it's it's
9:08
Speaker 2: it's just a big game of bullshitting and making up
9:13
Speaker 2: activities and writing and as kissing essays.
9:19
Speaker 1: And I want to say something like, I think the
9:21
Speaker 1: Chinese university is the top Chinese university Chinquapei Da there
9:26
Speaker 1: actually have always been pretty good. But you know, you
9:31
Speaker 1: know because back then, even twenty years ago, twenty five
9:34
Speaker 1: years ago, they back then when only five percent of
9:38
Speaker 1: the you know, college graduate goes to college, and then
9:43
Speaker 1: only a sliver of that goes to the top Chinese universities,
9:48
Speaker 1: and they're literally cream della cream. And I remember even
9:53
Speaker 1: up to early two thousand, those graduates from China's top
9:56
Speaker 1: schools hin Huapei Da, they would still come after the
10:00
Speaker 1: graduate it still come to United States working like companies
10:04
Speaker 1: like Motorola, right, I mean, like today you you know,
10:08
Speaker 1: think much of Modorola. But but back then that was
10:10
Speaker 1: desirable job for a Chinese top university graduate.
10:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, my father's bed down. He worked at Xerox, you know,
10:20
Speaker 2: so a bit of waste of human capital if you
10:24
Speaker 2: ask me. But but hey, you do what you have
10:28
Speaker 2: to do in that time. So anyway, so so you know,
10:32
Speaker 2: kind of going back to the topic, all of this
10:35
Speaker 2: can kind of be modeled out as in China's number
10:40
Speaker 2: of college graduates has been pretty much a straight line
10:43
Speaker 2: up that hasn't plateau yet. It's going to plateau right
10:46
Speaker 2: about now. Is all of this is straight line up.
10:49
Speaker 2: So if you model it out, the number right now,
10:55
Speaker 2: the number, the percentage of college grads in the workforce
11:01
Speaker 2: is something like twenty percent. In about twenty five thirty years,
11:05
Speaker 2: that will get up to sixty seventy percent. Wow, So
11:11
Speaker 2: because you have to be sixty thirentyd because right now
11:13
Speaker 2: sixty seventy percent go to college. Right so at one
11:15
Speaker 2: point you're going to assympodically approach that and we'll approach
11:19
Speaker 2: that in the year two thousand and forty five to
11:21
Speaker 2: fifty issues. So Basically, China still has its number of
11:28
Speaker 2: college you know, working age college people. College grads will
11:35
Speaker 2: about not exactly trible, but maybe increase two point five
11:40
Speaker 2: times from today. So we are still in the beginning
11:43
Speaker 2: phases of China reaching its human capital plateau.
11:51
Speaker 1: And I want to say, I want to point out,
11:54
Speaker 1: you know, like one of the phenomena of China's deepening
11:58
Speaker 1: human capital pool is that in fact, right now, there's
12:01
Speaker 1: so many college graduates the Chinese economy cannot.
12:05
Speaker 2: Absorb them all.
12:06
Speaker 1: This is actually why there is a high youth employment
12:11
Speaker 1: problem in China right now, is because all these college
12:14
Speaker 1: students who have invested like their youth to studying hard
12:19
Speaker 1: for galcou for the brutal college insurance exam, then then
12:22
Speaker 1: plow through the full year undergrad When they graduate, they
12:26
Speaker 1: want office jobs. They don't want to go working for factories.
12:29
Speaker 1: I mean, there's still plenty of factory jobs in China,
12:32
Speaker 1: and in fact, there's plenty of high paying jobs that
12:36
Speaker 1: that just nobody wants. Like there's like I read a
12:41
Speaker 1: report on Chinese ship industry for example, Like right now,
12:45
Speaker 1: the Chinese shipping industry is the global leading the seventy
12:49
Speaker 1: percent of the new orders of new ship this year
12:53
Speaker 1: is you know, goes to China. You know, China built
12:57
Speaker 1: most of the world ship right now, but the the
13:00
Speaker 1: core of China's workforce in shipbuilding, the average age is
13:05
Speaker 1: forty one because they the young and don't want to
13:10
Speaker 1: go work in a shipyard because even though it's high paying,
13:14
Speaker 1: but you you work outside every day. I mean, it's
13:17
Speaker 1: like they don't want to.
13:19
Speaker 2: They don't they don't even want.
13:21
Speaker 1: To take the hardship pay, even though it's it's pretty
13:24
Speaker 1: paid pretty well. And or or to be a merchant mariner,
13:28
Speaker 1: you know, like like the you know, it also pays
13:31
Speaker 1: pretty well to be a merchant mariner, but you are
13:34
Speaker 1: you're you work on a ship like eight months of
13:36
Speaker 1: the year. Basically you are you are in prison on
13:39
Speaker 1: a ship. And so so a lot of the college
13:42
Speaker 1: grads they rather sit in an office, a seed office
13:46
Speaker 1: with much less pay than those type of jobs. But
13:49
Speaker 1: they're not as much those office jobs right now that
13:53
Speaker 1: could absorb all these huge cots coming out.
13:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a mismatch. It is a problematic mismatch. It's
14:03
Speaker 2: not I'm pretty sanguine about all this. It's not as
14:05
Speaker 2: problematic as the numbers we suggest where you know, fifteen
14:09
Speaker 2: to twenty percent. You know, every every month, it wabbles
14:13
Speaker 2: back and forth in that range. Because once you get
14:15
Speaker 2: up to the you know, the next age bracket up,
14:19
Speaker 2: it's twenty five to twenty nine year olds, I think
14:21
Speaker 2: the unemployment rate drops down to seven point two percent.
14:24
Speaker 2: So what it just means is that these people, you know,
14:26
Speaker 2: they fus around for a few years. They say, this
14:29
Speaker 2: job not good enough. That job's not good enough. This
14:30
Speaker 2: job is working as an engineer in the shipyard. I
14:33
Speaker 2: don't't do that. I want to be in a design studio.
14:35
Speaker 2: And then they end up, Okay, I'm taking the engineering
14:38
Speaker 2: job in the shipyard. So I'm pretty sanguine about that.
14:45
Speaker 2: One of my theories about the high youth unemployment is
14:50
Speaker 2: it's it's a it's a feature, not a bug, as
14:53
Speaker 2: in it shows that in China people can do can
14:59
Speaker 2: fux around and and do not much in travel on
15:03
Speaker 2: because we travel around China, we see tons of these
15:05
Speaker 2: young people who are like backpackers all over China for
15:07
Speaker 2: a few years before they get their act together and
15:10
Speaker 2: start working. So it's a feature, not about twenty five
15:12
Speaker 2: years ago. They would not be allowed to do this.
15:14
Speaker 2: They don't have that.
15:15
Speaker 1: I'm years ago. They have to earn money for the family,
15:20
Speaker 1: and now the family are wealthy enough to support them
15:24
Speaker 1: to bummer us a few years.
15:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they do. And they do like ad hoc
15:28
Speaker 2: work and deliver food. They work in youth hostels, you know,
15:31
Speaker 2: they work in these hotels. So they get make some
15:32
Speaker 2: pocket money and be unemployed in travel another six months.
15:35
Speaker 2: Sooner or later, these guys get their act together. It
15:38
Speaker 2: also leads to situations like you know, a lot of
15:41
Speaker 2: these success cases that you've seen in recent years, like
15:43
Speaker 2: the the maker of uh, you know, come video games.
15:48
Speaker 2: He was a complete freaking loser after you know, he
15:50
Speaker 2: failed out of grad school. He was a video game addict,
15:54
Speaker 2: you know, bumming off friends, you know, borrowing money. And
15:56
Speaker 2: then and then he became a very astute theoretician of
16:02
Speaker 2: video games on the discussion board. So and then Tencent
16:05
Speaker 2: hired him, and the rest is history. The other guy
16:08
Speaker 2: is the the the director of nutsa mm hm. You know,
16:12
Speaker 2: he fused around uh uh. He was supposed to be
16:16
Speaker 2: a pharmacist and he futs around making animation and then
16:19
Speaker 2: he won some animation contest and then the rest is history.
16:23
Speaker 1: For people who don't know nutsa Too is like the
16:26
Speaker 1: highest grossing animation film of history, and and and and
16:31
Speaker 1: and he was you know, started by a guy who
16:34
Speaker 1: was considered like a kind of fail guy.
16:40
Speaker 2: And then and then then recently that that motorcycle entrepreneur,
16:43
Speaker 2: you know the story about that, mostly the ex moto,
16:46
Speaker 2: the x Moto, and he was like just just a wild,
16:50
Speaker 2: weird motorcycle junkie. And then you know, he willed this
16:55
Speaker 2: motorcycle company into existence. And this is a second motorcycle
16:58
Speaker 2: company that he willed it to existence. So so so anyways,
17:01
Speaker 2: you get these now that you're in kind of a
17:04
Speaker 2: higher stage of the economy, you're able to you know,
17:10
Speaker 2: create these uh you know, you're able to nurture these
17:13
Speaker 2: more creative you know, entrepreneurs. Of course, not all of
17:19
Speaker 2: them will turn out that way. A bunch of them
17:20
Speaker 2: will continue to be total losers. But you know that
17:23
Speaker 2: we are seeing a lot of examples of things like
17:26
Speaker 2: this happening. Yeah, so if you do a comparison of China,
17:34
Speaker 2: you know a lot of people try to figure out
17:37
Speaker 2: what why Japan ran into its decades of of uh uh,
17:43
Speaker 2: you know, the lost decades, And they say China might
17:46
Speaker 2: be doing the same thing. Japan hit its human capital
17:50
Speaker 2: plateau in the early nineties right when it's right, when
17:56
Speaker 2: it's uh, it's lost decades began, so they were not
18:00
Speaker 2: going to be doubling or tripling their's stem workforce, and
18:05
Speaker 2: you know, over the next couple of decades, they just
18:07
Speaker 2: had what they had to work with it. So it's
18:10
Speaker 2: not a surprise even if none of the you know,
18:14
Speaker 2: the Plazzaive Cords or the Japanese bubble didn't If there
18:17
Speaker 2: was no Japanese bubble it was handled correctly, growth would
18:21
Speaker 2: not have been the same as it was of the past,
18:24
Speaker 2: you know, like of Japan, you know, twenty thirty years prior,
18:29
Speaker 2: because they were still leveling up at that time. So
18:32
Speaker 2: China still go ahead.
18:34
Speaker 1: And also Japanese economy, you know, it was playing catch up,
18:38
Speaker 1: was a Western economy up to that moment. And by
18:41
Speaker 1: by by late eighties and nineties, they have caught up.
18:44
Speaker 1: Their GDP per capita and their quality of living has
18:48
Speaker 1: already reached the same standard of other Western advanced economies.
18:52
Speaker 1: Whereas China today in twenty twenty six, I say, there's
18:56
Speaker 1: still quite a gap. There's still a lot of room
18:58
Speaker 1: for growth, you know, like, yeah, I agree.
19:02
Speaker 2: Yeah. So so there's there's there's a you know, quantitative
19:06
Speaker 2: and qualitative differences between China and Japan. And I mean
19:11
Speaker 2: everybody's talking about lost you know, China lost decades and
19:15
Speaker 2: growth is still five percent. Guys, growth is still five percent.
19:19
Speaker 2: It's Japan hadn't had you know, five percent for Japanese
19:23
Speaker 2: growth in the eighties was still considered it's miracle years.
19:28
Speaker 2: So it's it's sometimes these discussions get a little ridiculous
19:32
Speaker 2: when when you look at you when when we look
19:37
Speaker 2: at actual growth in China, it's still five percent. You know,
19:40
Speaker 2: household consumption is still growing about it was growing four
19:44
Speaker 2: and a half percent last year, is probably somewhere around
19:46
Speaker 2: three percent right now for the first half. I think
19:51
Speaker 2: a lot of that had to do with Iran War,
19:53
Speaker 2: where a lot of investment was was put on hold. So,
19:57
Speaker 2: you know, I I don't buy into much of this
20:02
Speaker 2: discussion about how China is at the end of its
20:06
Speaker 2: growth cycle.
20:08
Speaker 1: Well what about okay, people will say, well, what about
20:11
Speaker 1: the demographic crisis. You know, Chinese people are not having children,
20:14
Speaker 1: so they're they're they're they're they're the population of the
20:18
Speaker 1: collapse and.
20:19
Speaker 2: That that that is problematic, But nobody quite knows what's
20:22
Speaker 2: going to happen because the demographic kind of slide down
20:27
Speaker 2: for all countries started sometime around twoenty fifteen. Issues, we're
20:33
Speaker 2: all kind of just collassed for every single country. Now.
20:38
Speaker 2: I have a theory of specifically why China slid down
20:43
Speaker 2: faster than others. One is they push college attendance from
20:49
Speaker 2: five percent to seventy percent, so automatically you're taking out
20:52
Speaker 2: four years of family formation right there of young people's eye.
20:57
Speaker 2: So a lot of these this family formation be delayed.
21:00
Speaker 2: You're seeing some of this in South Korea. South Korea
21:04
Speaker 2: had three years of pretty high birth rate increases because
21:10
Speaker 2: they are kind of past that point in their education
21:15
Speaker 2: where for many years they were pulling everybody they can
21:19
Speaker 2: into higher education, and now those people are graduating, they've
21:24
Speaker 2: had jobs for a few years, and they are now
21:26
Speaker 2: starting forming families in their thirties. A lot of it
21:29
Speaker 2: hasn't delayed into their thirties. And Korea it was in
21:34
Speaker 2: a population ditch, which is climbing out of there is
21:38
Speaker 2: a little echo population. So that's one reason why birth
21:41
Speaker 2: rates in Korea are climbing. China as well. I mean
21:45
Speaker 2: China is also in a population ditch of the twenty
21:48
Speaker 2: five thirty year olds, which there's a hump coming of
21:53
Speaker 2: where it gets higher. So birth rate should birth and
21:58
Speaker 2: not birth rates. Births should climb in the next you know,
22:03
Speaker 2: five ten years, because there's this hump of a young
22:06
Speaker 2: population that are currently somewhere around twenty years old. So
22:12
Speaker 2: in the next five ten years that twenty year olds
22:14
Speaker 2: will cross into their child bearing years. So all this
22:19
Speaker 2: gets but you know what will really happen is the
22:25
Speaker 2: working age population will be pretty much steady, falling a
22:28
Speaker 2: little bit until around twenty and forty six and it
22:31
Speaker 2: drops off the cliff. So then the question is what
22:36
Speaker 2: happens when it drops off the cliffs in twenty years?
22:39
Speaker 2: We don't know. There's so much going on in Ai,
22:43
Speaker 2: in Productivia and robotics that will that solve the problem?
22:47
Speaker 2: Will we have bigger problems to worry about than just
22:50
Speaker 2: a demographic crisis twenty years out And it only becomes
22:53
Speaker 2: problematic not in twenty years, but it becomes problematic in
22:58
Speaker 2: thirty forty years. So China have something like a fifty
23:03
Speaker 2: year time frame to figure out what to do. Other
23:10
Speaker 2: countries also aren't the same problem. They have a seventy
23:13
Speaker 2: year timeframe, so you know, they're they're they'll be okay
23:15
Speaker 2: for seventy years, whereas Kryda will be okay for fifty years.
23:19
Speaker 1: So well, I mean, I think I think we also
23:24
Speaker 1: have Japan. You know, Japan is the Japan is going
23:27
Speaker 1: to get there a lot faster than other countries. Japan
23:31
Speaker 1: figure this thing out.
23:33
Speaker 2: Jan's already there, I mean, is already there. It's it's
23:36
Speaker 2: already reached its human capital plateau, which has been you know,
23:41
Speaker 2: winding down. So I mean a lot of people blame
23:44
Speaker 2: Japan about this and that, you know, it's not all
23:47
Speaker 2: that innovative these days, just because it just ran out
23:51
Speaker 2: of people. You can't keep you know, running at that pace.
23:54
Speaker 2: You're no longer adding, you know, it's no longer added,
23:58
Speaker 2: you know, the people graduating university is no longer adding
24:02
Speaker 2: to your STEM expertise pool. You're just replacing, You're in
24:06
Speaker 2: a replacement cycle. It's it's, you know.
24:11
Speaker 1: It's just actually declining. In Japan's cases, declining.
24:14
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, so yeah, so yeah yeah.
24:17
Speaker 1: In China's case, because relatively fewer people twenty years ago,
24:23
Speaker 1: thirty years ago, that had them college education. Now with
24:28
Speaker 1: the human capital is still deepening, even though the population
24:33
Speaker 1: decline has already started, but more people are getting better educated.
24:38
Speaker 1: So from here on, for another twenty thirty years, China's
24:43
Speaker 1: human capital is actually growing until it's gonna hit the people,
24:48
Speaker 1: like twenty fifty or something.
24:49
Speaker 2: All those trend lines of manufacturing, scientific papers published of
24:55
Speaker 2: you know, power electricity production, all those trend lines have
25:00
Speaker 2: two and a half three decades a run. Yeah, so
25:03
Speaker 2: you know people, you know a lot of people are hoping.
25:06
Speaker 2: I don't know why, a lot of people who are
25:08
Speaker 2: hoping that kind of crashes and burns or flattens out. No, sorry, no, no,
25:12
Speaker 2: it's it's it's it's it's human capital all the way down.
25:15
Speaker 1: So it's it's not gonna happen. Sorry, China collapse is
25:21
Speaker 1: not gonna happen for at least another twenty thirty years.
25:24
Speaker 2: Yes, now, twenty thirty years out, I make no promises. Yeah,
25:28
Speaker 2: but that's when I would start worrying about it.
25:32
Speaker 1: Yeah. But I mean I think the difference is, like,
25:35
Speaker 1: you know, like this everything is assuming the current trend continues, right,
25:39
Speaker 1: I mean, like now the Chinese government is obviously already
25:44
Speaker 1: aware this is a problem. They are also trying to
25:47
Speaker 1: adopt policy and measures to fix it, and they have
25:51
Speaker 1: twenty thirty years, you know, to get it right.
25:55
Speaker 2: I suspect I suspect a lot of the work they've
25:58
Speaker 2: done with robotics encouraging them is an automation, is to
26:01
Speaker 2: fix that problem. Also, the Belton Road Initiative, a lot
26:05
Speaker 2: of it, you know, in contrast to what's in the
26:12
Speaker 2: public opinion, A lot of it is to industrialize the
26:15
Speaker 2: global South and to UH to have them do a
26:19
Speaker 2: lot of the uh, you know, more basic manufacturing so
26:23
Speaker 2: that kind would need less hands.
26:26
Speaker 1: Speaking of speaking of which, have you seen that recent
26:29
Speaker 1: article I forgot whether it's FT or economists that that
26:34
Speaker 1: they say Chinese Chinese UH industrialization for basically closed off
26:40
Speaker 1: the past for all.
26:42
Speaker 2: The that was a foreign affair that that's such an
26:44
Speaker 2: embarrassing foreign affairs article. It's just talk about that just horrendous.
26:52
Speaker 2: So that there's there's so many problems with that. One
26:57
Speaker 2: is well, one is there's a fallacy out there that
27:06
Speaker 2: there's only one way to the law, which is the
27:07
Speaker 2: Asian export model. The Asian export model is the worst
27:14
Speaker 2: development model you can ever think of and the only
27:18
Speaker 2: reason it works. I'm gonna be racist here is because
27:21
Speaker 2: it's been done by a bunch of East Asians. They'll
27:24
Speaker 2: get anything to work. So what it was is you
27:28
Speaker 2: will ighten your belts, you know, consume very little, tightening
27:33
Speaker 2: your belts, lend money to rich customers so they can
27:37
Speaker 2: buy your goods, and you eke out capital by retained earnings,
27:44
Speaker 2: bit by excruciating bit. Now to do that, you need
27:50
Speaker 2: to have run sweatshots for decades. You want other countries
27:55
Speaker 2: to run streatshots for decades.
27:58
Speaker 1: You need to require your population and to yeat a
28:00
Speaker 1: lot of bitterness you know which which which the Yeast
28:04
Speaker 1: Asian population has been, uh, you know they have been.
28:09
Speaker 1: I don't want to say prime to be able to
28:12
Speaker 1: eat bitterness for for a long time, I don't. I
28:16
Speaker 1: don't think any other people could do that, you know,
28:19
Speaker 1: I don't think he's racist to say that.
28:21
Speaker 2: I mean, like that upon anybody else. So what China
28:25
Speaker 2: is offering everybody else is you don't need to do that.
28:30
Speaker 2: We will lend you the money to build your assets
28:34
Speaker 2: and industrialized. You know you you don't have to tighten
28:38
Speaker 2: your belts to do it. You can skip the whole
28:41
Speaker 2: switch up face. So so de building or global seuth
28:48
Speaker 2: countries do not need markets right now, that's stupid. What
28:53
Speaker 2: they need is capital, you know, they need that capital
28:58
Speaker 2: to get them up to a basic level of roads
29:01
Speaker 2: and bridges and electricity production and healthcare and schools so
29:05
Speaker 2: that they can really know what they're comparative advantages. Because
29:10
Speaker 2: right now without all that stuff, you know what there
29:12
Speaker 2: comparative advantages. It's coconuts, it's it's it's uh, it's mind
29:18
Speaker 2: minding exudities, it's making making handy crafts that they sell
29:24
Speaker 2: the tourists. That what that is is it's eternal poverty.
29:33
Speaker 2: That's just eternal poverty.
29:34
Speaker 1: The only people labor arbitrage targe because they're they're cheap labor.
29:39
Speaker 2: About that, you couldn't even do that because the only
29:42
Speaker 2: people who can labor arbitrage and do it on scale
29:46
Speaker 2: are well eat stations. Right So so it just it
29:51
Speaker 2: just will not work. And so so you know what
29:54
Speaker 2: what China is doing with the Belton Road and all
29:56
Speaker 2: of that, it's the reverse what shouldn't ever have been,
30:00
Speaker 2: which is capital flowing from poor countries to rich you know,
30:04
Speaker 2: So now when China has finally become rich. You know,
30:08
Speaker 2: the economy, the global economy tend to work uh more
30:13
Speaker 2: naturally where capital flows from rich before where you know,
30:17
Speaker 2: China lens of developing economies, developing economies. So a lot
30:21
Speaker 2: of this, I suspect is the dirty work. And I
30:23
Speaker 2: have done this dirty work. I used to be an
30:26
Speaker 2: quote unquote aid worker for America. So a lot of
30:31
Speaker 2: this I suspect is the dirty work of these aid workers.
30:35
Speaker 2: What they don't give two ships about developing economies. What
30:40
Speaker 2: they're really doing is pooh poohing China's efforts to maintain
30:45
Speaker 2: capital flows Asian capital flows to the West. It's just,
30:51
Speaker 2: it's just, it's just, it's just it boggles mine. So
30:53
Speaker 2: when these articles come out about how China is, you know,
30:58
Speaker 2: destroying the the teak industry in Indonesia, I'm like, no,
31:04
Speaker 2: Indonesia doesn't need tea industry in Adonesia needs to triple
31:09
Speaker 2: its electricity production. Then they can really see what it's
31:12
Speaker 2: teque industry can do.
31:16
Speaker 1: China, Indonesia need a lot of things. You need you
31:19
Speaker 1: need more electricity, it needs more refining capacity, so it
31:23
Speaker 1: doesn't need to export cheap crude oil and import refined
31:28
Speaker 1: petroleum products, you know, like and most of the developing
31:31
Speaker 1: countries that export rock commodities and import process industrial goods
31:36
Speaker 1: at much higher price, so they need to do that
31:40
Speaker 1: in house.
31:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, anyway, So that's so. So the the the
31:47
Speaker 2: the development plan, the development uh path of the path
31:55
Speaker 2: you know, forty years was developed economies go to develop
32:00
Speaker 2: can Commonly they say it will cost you one hundred
32:02
Speaker 2: billion dollars to industrialize, which you don't have, and you're
32:08
Speaker 2: corrupt and you're not a democracy, so why don't we
32:11
Speaker 2: give you some peace Corps volunteers who can organize some
32:15
Speaker 2: take our daughters to work programs like I did. China's
32:19
Speaker 2: development model is, oh, okay, you're kind of corrupt, you're
32:23
Speaker 2: poorly managed, but we can industrialize you for fifty billion dollars.
32:31
Speaker 2: And for fifty billion dollars, it doesn't matter if you're mismanaged,
32:34
Speaker 2: because everybody's mismanagement, you're poor. So what China is doing
32:41
Speaker 2: with its over capacity, it's it's lowering that threshold of industrialization.
32:47
Speaker 2: You know, you don't need to be all bad as
32:51
Speaker 2: time goes on, you know, you you know, to to generate,
32:55
Speaker 2: to have cheap solar power so that everybody can have
32:58
Speaker 2: electricity that that's that's a huge win. That's a huge win.
33:02
Speaker 2: Doesn't cost that much anymore. So there's a lot of this. Uh,
33:07
Speaker 2: you know when the West poo poos China's exporting, you know,
33:11
Speaker 2: taking over markets. No, it's if you look at China.
33:16
Speaker 1: And the solar solar panel, once you install it, you know,
33:20
Speaker 1: if you don't need to burn continuously burn, burn few anymore,
33:24
Speaker 1: it's gonna be there for like a decade, in which
33:27
Speaker 1: case you are actually cutting your dependency. You're not dependent
33:31
Speaker 1: on people anymore. You can produce energy independently.
33:35
Speaker 2: Uh yeah, yeah, So I think a lot of this
33:39
Speaker 2: is uh there's been a full court press to try
33:45
Speaker 2: to get China to change its economic model from those
33:48
Speaker 2: ECD countries. So you know, it's coming out all over
33:52
Speaker 2: the place, from OECD reports to that article on the
33:56
Speaker 2: you know, in Foreign Affairs, and I just think it's
34:00
Speaker 2: just just just a ridiculous conspiracy that uh, it just
34:06
Speaker 2: wants these countries the West find that China is moving
34:09
Speaker 2: up the the technology ladder and it's no longer making
34:13
Speaker 2: shoes and it's making things that they want to make.
34:17
Speaker 2: Everything has to be shut down and they'll try everything
34:19
Speaker 2: that they can to uh, you know, to try to
34:22
Speaker 2: prevent China from overtaking them, which is which, to China's credit,
34:27
Speaker 2: they're not. They're not playing ball.
34:30
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, but what can those countries do though,
34:33
Speaker 1: I mean, like right now you is panicking because they
34:36
Speaker 1: thought they're gonna be get flooded with Chinese imports if
34:40
Speaker 1: they don't put additional tariffs like United States on Chinese uh,
34:45
Speaker 1: manufacturer goods because they fear like the the cheap Chinese
34:50
Speaker 1: imports are going to destroy their the European industries, well,
34:54
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean they're doing They're doing plenty to
34:57
Speaker 1: it destroy their only industries. Now putting the blame on China.
35:02
Speaker 2: I suspect there's not much they can do as in
35:05
Speaker 2: as in European countries can take even less pain than
35:09
Speaker 2: the US. You know, there's twenty seven countries hurting cats.
35:13
Speaker 2: I'm trying to pick them off one by one. Spain first,
35:16
Speaker 2: you know, it's uh and it can even threaten Germany,
35:19
Speaker 2: so it's it's empty threats. Now. I do feel for Europe.
35:23
Speaker 2: I do feel for them. They're losing their industry. Uh.
35:25
Speaker 2: The loss are cheap energy. There's a brain drain of
35:28
Speaker 2: the smartest people going to the US to do AI.
35:31
Speaker 2: So I do feel for them, but you know, to
35:34
Speaker 2: fix that, it's not to try to wall yourself off
35:38
Speaker 2: from China. That's not gonna fix anything. To fix that, well,
35:43
Speaker 2: you know, the education system sucks. Yeah, you look at
35:48
Speaker 2: the PiZZ of scores and you know they're barely newroth.
35:52
Speaker 2: So there's a lot of low hanging fruit. Guys. The
35:55
Speaker 2: low hanging fruit is you got lot.
35:58
Speaker 1: Are you talking about EU? Are you talking about Americans?
36:01
Speaker 2: Nouf EU and Americans and Americans if you want to
36:07
Speaker 2: there's a lot of low hanging fruit. I mean, Asian
36:11
Speaker 2: countries outperform European countries, but orders of magnitude, orders of magnitude.
36:19
Speaker 2: So they just have to increase their math proficiency by
36:24
Speaker 2: a little bit.
36:26
Speaker 1: Okay, Okay, not going to push you back. Push back again, sir,
36:31
Speaker 1: because there are people on Twitter who say, hey, you know,
36:34
Speaker 1: we don't want to work like slaves like all these
36:37
Speaker 1: yeast Asians. You know, we we don't need that yeast
36:40
Speaker 1: Asian grindset. We don't want to like working like work
36:44
Speaker 1: like nine ninety six, right, like like like working like
36:49
Speaker 1: like a wage slave. We want to we want to
36:51
Speaker 1: be able to enjoy work, live balance, you know, like
36:55
Speaker 1: like we don't need we don't need that East Asian
36:58
Speaker 1: experience here.
36:59
Speaker 2: More power to them, more power to them. But they
37:03
Speaker 2: just have to accept that they'll fall behind. You know,
37:06
Speaker 2: it's the industries will be taken from them and they
37:08
Speaker 2: will do whatever. Then they have comparative advantage and they
37:12
Speaker 2: will no longer be making cars, will no longer be
37:15
Speaker 2: making machinery. It will be making cheese and wine and
37:20
Speaker 2: I don't know, and being a tourist attraction or whatever
37:24
Speaker 2: lets them have a killed out lifestyle. I mean, it's
37:28
Speaker 2: called comparative advantage. Everybody benefits. China is not giving away
37:33
Speaker 2: goods for free. You know, they are trading something for it.
37:38
Speaker 2: So what are they trading? Well, none of their products
37:41
Speaker 2: will be competitive in the coming years if that's their attitude.
37:44
Speaker 1: But doggy, doggie. You know, the European politicians are saying
37:48
Speaker 1: China have an unfair advantage because they have cheaper energy
37:53
Speaker 1: and they stay give massive subsidies to their export industries
37:57
Speaker 1: and that's how they're killing everybody, hollowing out manufacturing Europe
38:04
Speaker 1: and America because China is direct massive state subsidies to exports.
38:11
Speaker 2: Now there's quite a lot of truth to that, as
38:14
Speaker 2: in China to twenty five. China twenty twenty five was
38:20
Speaker 2: that plan of upgrading all the industries, and there was
38:23
Speaker 2: a lot of subsidies given a lot of key industries identified.
38:28
Speaker 2: But what people don't realize is that that plan was
38:31
Speaker 2: a direct copy of Industry four point zero from Germany
38:36
Speaker 2: that they put in a couple of years before, you know,
38:38
Speaker 2: in two not thirteen, I think it came out and
38:40
Speaker 2: China twenty twenty five came out into the two fifteen
38:44
Speaker 2: I think. So the Industry four point zero that Germany
38:51
Speaker 2: put out had the exact same subsidies, exact same programs.
38:56
Speaker 2: The problem is they don't have the human capital to
39:01
Speaker 2: absorb it, so it went nowhere. So it failed. If
39:07
Speaker 2: you look at the subsidies the uh you know, the
39:11
Speaker 2: the purchased subsidies on evs, EU has the highest, the
39:14
Speaker 2: US has the second highest, China has the lowest. Now,
39:19
Speaker 2: now why did it succeed in China? They failed in
39:22
Speaker 2: all those places because they couldn't make the evs.
39:28
Speaker 1: And they couldn't put in the charging infrastructure in place.
39:31
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, they didn't let the people to do all
39:33
Speaker 2: that work, So no matter how much subsidies they had,
39:36
Speaker 2: they couldn't take advantage of it. So you know when
39:39
Speaker 2: people say, oh, China has all these subsidies, well, we
39:42
Speaker 2: have the subsidies because China knew that they were going
39:44
Speaker 2: to have all these engineers that they needed them to,
39:47
Speaker 2: you know, point in a certain direction. Europe tried it.
39:50
Speaker 1: They tried the objection doggie, objection doggie. Obviously there was
39:55
Speaker 1: someone who took advantage of the US subsidies. His name
39:58
Speaker 1: is Ela Musk is gonna he's a Troy in there.
40:01
Speaker 1: Well he wants what he did.
40:04
Speaker 2: What he did was he pocketed the subsidies and that
40:07
Speaker 2: went to test the stock price, but it achieved no results.
40:11
Speaker 2: So China put out these subjects and guess what China
40:14
Speaker 2: subsidy caused this Cambrian explosion of car of EV companies
40:20
Speaker 2: jump into the market, pushing EV adoption from like but
40:24
Speaker 2: whatever it was five percent to now sixty sixty five
40:27
Speaker 2: percent car sol where the US is still at I
40:29
Speaker 2: don't know what the US is at eight percent, whatever
40:31
Speaker 2: the hell it is some single number, Yeah, single digits
40:34
Speaker 2: is some of the number. So when China puts in
40:37
Speaker 2: the subsidies, it's it's people are confusing uh, the confusing
40:46
Speaker 2: outcomes with with UH with desires. So so you you
40:53
Speaker 2: want uh subsidies uh to achieve something, so you put
40:58
Speaker 2: him in and then Ela Musk just pockets it and
41:01
Speaker 2: produces no outcome.
41:03
Speaker 1: Well, actually, actually must did make TESL profitable by making
41:12
Speaker 1: the Shanghai gigafactor, which is produced sixty percent of the
41:15
Speaker 1: Tesla the world.
41:17
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, so Tesla is profitable by you know, producing
41:24
Speaker 2: in China. Tesla is not all that profitable by selling
41:28
Speaker 2: in China because the prices are so low in China.
41:32
Speaker 2: So it's it's it's it's it's collecting, it's a it's subsidy. Yeah,
41:37
Speaker 2: it's it's when when people say China is subsidizing, everybody
41:43
Speaker 2: wants to subsidize. Only China is successful at it. That's
41:47
Speaker 2: the problem. They put in these subsidy programs and they
41:51
Speaker 2: get no traction because either it gets stolen by some
41:55
Speaker 2: schmuck like Ela Musk, or they just aren't enough people
41:59
Speaker 2: to jump into the into the market. Like when we're
42:02
Speaker 2: trying to put in eb subsodies, they're just a feeding
42:05
Speaker 2: frenzy of companies. Four hundred e companies started. You know,
42:09
Speaker 2: well you know, ninety eight percent will die, but that's
42:12
Speaker 2: how that's how you know that. That's how markets are
42:15
Speaker 2: supposed to work, where your profits are competed away and
42:19
Speaker 2: everything becomes consumer surplus. Whereas in the West, everybody, everybody
42:26
Speaker 2: marvels at Tesla's profits and its market cap and they
42:31
Speaker 2: never wonder why, you know, ev penetration is five eight
42:35
Speaker 2: percent or whatever the hell it is.
42:38
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, it seems like in the West the
42:40
Speaker 1: business model nowadays is just build monopolies and then click rent,
42:46
Speaker 1: you know, like that's that's the whole AI model nowadays,
42:48
Speaker 1: the whole closed AI model is to be able to
42:53
Speaker 1: push the AI the option and then they will be
42:55
Speaker 1: sit back and click rent down all economic activity. And
42:58
Speaker 1: this is why they're so threatened by the open source
43:01
Speaker 1: Chinese AI. You know, you have the anthropic CEO saying, oh,
43:05
Speaker 1: the open source is dangerous because we will not be able.
43:09
Speaker 2: To control it.
43:10
Speaker 1: Control it people in the West.
43:14
Speaker 2: People in the West have been so brainwashed into just
43:17
Speaker 2: measuring value by market cap and company profits, Whereas that's
43:25
Speaker 2: at best half of it. Because there's producers. Anybody's taking
43:30
Speaker 2: economics one on one should remember there's this thing called
43:32
Speaker 2: producer surplus. That's your profits and marketcap and all that
43:36
Speaker 2: that goes to the producer. And there is this thing
43:38
Speaker 2: called consumer surplus. That's at least the other half, which
43:43
Speaker 2: the problem with consumer surplus in the West or anywhere.
43:46
Speaker 2: The problem consumer surplus is one nobody knows how to
43:51
Speaker 2: measure it very well, whereas producers was very easy. That's
43:55
Speaker 2: your profits there it is, there's your producer surplus, but
43:59
Speaker 2: consumers are it's your willingness to pay for a product
44:03
Speaker 2: versus the price you actually pay for it. Well, how
44:05
Speaker 2: do you measure your willingness to pay for probub We
44:07
Speaker 2: don't really know. We don't really know how to measure it.
44:09
Speaker 2: But so nobody quite knows how to measure consumer surplus
44:13
Speaker 2: very well. So it's not measured. And two, nobody is
44:16
Speaker 2: able to make any money. And consumer surplus the fact
44:19
Speaker 2: that everybody saved money by paying, you know, twenty five
44:22
Speaker 2: thousand dollars for a car in the US that would
44:24
Speaker 2: cost fifty thousand in China, which we call fifty thousand
44:27
Speaker 2: dollars in the US, they save twenty five thousand dollars.
44:30
Speaker 2: But that's an individual. Companies can't make any money off
44:33
Speaker 2: of it, so all of this is is not considered
44:37
Speaker 2: in the Western mind when they think of value creations,
44:40
Speaker 2: all they're thinking of is did the company make a profit? No?
44:44
Speaker 1: No, that is at best that is at.
44:47
Speaker 2: Best half of it. And it's sometimes it's even negative
44:50
Speaker 2: because because of these monopoly companies, they have captured the
44:55
Speaker 2: political system. This political capture causes the these profits to surge,
45:01
Speaker 2: and it causes less innovation, less production. You know, you
45:04
Speaker 2: have many times I would suspect a lot of it
45:07
Speaker 2: is is negative value. These hugely profitable monopolies are actually
45:12
Speaker 2: creating negative value. So so when people accused of all
45:17
Speaker 2: of China's companies of being unprofitleng like, that's the greatest
45:20
Speaker 2: thing that that's That's exactly how Adam Smith's invisible handled
45:26
Speaker 2: market is supposed to work. It's it's companies competing away
45:30
Speaker 2: the profits uh with innovation, with production prices fall goods
45:37
Speaker 2: become uh, you know, better and higher quality and more innovative.
45:41
Speaker 2: And and that's the model that China runs on. And
45:43
Speaker 2: that's a model that I.
45:45
Speaker 1: Get start another pushback against you. So there are cases
45:49
Speaker 1: scenarios where the West use subsidies successfully data centers. There's
45:56
Speaker 1: a lot of tax incentive tax rate they given for
46:00
Speaker 1: building data centers. Now they're building a lot of data
46:03
Speaker 1: centers in the United States. Hey there, I got you.
46:08
Speaker 2: I consider that political capture. They're they're they're the the
46:12
Speaker 2: the cost they're they're they're putting on the public dole
46:16
Speaker 2: and then the profits will be will be privatized by
46:19
Speaker 2: you know, whoever's charging, whoever's collecting on open AI or
46:23
Speaker 2: anthropic or or whoever it helps. So you know, China
46:28
Speaker 2: doesn't as well trying to build data centers. But uh,
46:33
Speaker 2: China also rains in its companies. You know, it doesn't
46:37
Speaker 2: allow once a company starts making extra normal profits, some
46:41
Speaker 2: regular will come in to slap people around. I mean
46:43
Speaker 2: that that's that's that's what China does.
46:46
Speaker 1: That's what happened to Ali Baba space.
46:51
Speaker 2: Yeah. So so you know, China's Internet platforms are are
46:56
Speaker 2: highly usable, you know, they're they're they're they're much more
47:00
Speaker 2: user friendly all of US platforms and sid but they
47:05
Speaker 2: don't make any money. They have no market cap right
47:07
Speaker 2: because they're not you know, because you know US platforms
47:10
Speaker 2: are already it's political capture. Nobody can do anything to them.
47:15
Speaker 2: They brought a shitty product charge your arm and leg
47:18
Speaker 2: and regulators are powerless to bring them in.
47:25
Speaker 1: It's a feature, not a bug, sir. Yeah, it's a feature,
47:28
Speaker 1: not a bug. It's stock prices it's working as designed.
47:40
Speaker 2: Number go up.
47:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, well that's what well, I mean, you've you know,
47:47
Speaker 1: if according to Donald Trump UH as president, look at
47:51
Speaker 1: the stock prices it's at all time high.
47:55
Speaker 2: That should validate and the fools a whole bunch of
47:59
Speaker 2: men canoids. Fifty percent of the market cap of the
48:04
Speaker 2: US stock market is owned by one percent of the people.
48:07
Speaker 2: Ninety percent is owned by ten percent of the people,
48:12
Speaker 2: about forty percent own the rest of the ten percent
48:17
Speaker 2: and own nothing, nothing, nothing and you ff i and nothing.
48:24
Speaker 2: They own nothing. So when people there's all the cheerleaders
48:28
Speaker 2: to the US stock market, I suspect the vast majority
48:32
Speaker 2: of them are broke gas prolls only nothing. But then
48:38
Speaker 2: brain loss to cheer the US stock market because oh
48:41
Speaker 2: they're brainwashed. They should be out there telling the government
48:46
Speaker 2: to snap these companies around, lower prices and and have
48:52
Speaker 2: more competition so that not everything is a monopoly. Yeah,
48:59
Speaker 2: you know, brainwash. So what am I gonna do? I'm
49:04
Speaker 2: trying to brainwash people, But you know, just little only.
49:08
Speaker 1: Well that that's just still one industry that West still
49:11
Speaker 1: does very well, you know, marketing and propaganda that they
49:15
Speaker 1: go hand.
49:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then propagandas for the you know, the American
49:22
Speaker 2: deep state. That that's that was my job, my first
49:25
Speaker 2: job out of the university. I was sent to the
49:27
Speaker 2: third world to propaganda.
49:32
Speaker 1: But but I mean that that does benefit the West
49:35
Speaker 1: because they are able to charge arm and the leg
49:38
Speaker 1: charge of premium based on the brand you know, the
49:41
Speaker 1: branding about marketing and propaganda, right, I mean, but like
49:45
Speaker 1: that that's very that's that's that they're still you know,
49:48
Speaker 1: even Tesla still still commands a premium compared to you know,
49:52
Speaker 1: other Chinese brands.
49:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I'm not gonna piss on Tesla too much.
49:56
Speaker 2: It is a nice car. It isn't nice. I think
49:58
Speaker 2: it's fully outclassed in in China, but it does. It
50:02
Speaker 2: is well made, and it's solidly engineered. It's it's self
50:07
Speaker 2: driving is probably the best in industry. So I'm not
50:10
Speaker 2: gonna piss on Tesla all that much.
50:13
Speaker 3: But uh, you know it, they haven't done enough to
50:19
Speaker 3: Uh they're there trying to collect profits whereas and there's
50:23
Speaker 3: nobody raining and nobody.
50:24
Speaker 2: Actually, they could do a lot more. They could push
50:28
Speaker 2: h u.
50:32
Speaker 1: Mus is too busy for that right now, he's too too,
50:36
Speaker 1: he's busy ship posting on Twitter. I really care about Tesla?
50:43
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, wow. Is there any other topic you'd like
50:50
Speaker 1: to cover today?
50:53
Speaker 2: Any other topic? No? I think I think you know,
50:57
Speaker 2: we'll find other topics in the future. But I think
51:01
Speaker 2: we covered a lot of ground today.
51:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, we sure did well. If people want to follow
51:07
Speaker 1: you on a social media doggie or aka han Fads,
51:11
Speaker 1: where do they go?
51:12
Speaker 2: Oh, doggie is dead, so hamp Fads. You can find
51:14
Speaker 2: it at Asia Times. To just search on fates the Asia
51:17
Speaker 2: Times and you'll find it. And then you on Twitter
51:19
Speaker 2: it's a blue bear monkey. Doggie is dead, You're dearly deceased.
51:26
Speaker 1: Well there you have it, everybody, Thank you for watching.
51:30
Speaker 1: Until next time. Bye bye,