10/29/25: OpenAI Whistleblower, US Detains Israel Critic, Food Stamps Blocked By Trump, US China Trade Deal

26:26So what you're talking about is the fundamental inalienable right of any American citizen, which I absolutely do agree with you. And now the British and us, many countries, Australia and others do have policies where you are allowed to deny entry based upon any criteria that you want. And I actually do support that because you shouldn't necessarily host somebody who – let's say that this person did, quote, hate America. Now, what I think is very telling about this entire thing is that the ICE detention is justified entirely for Hamdi's views of October 7th. And that's why I do think that this is the most objectionable forum because it's specifically about censorship and detention on the issue of Israel itself.

27:09Now, at the very same time that Hamdi is being detained at Los Angeles Airport or – no, I forget. Some California airport. He's being detained by airport. There are members of the IDF who openly celebrate the murder of children who fly here. Some are not even dual citizens and are vacationing, let's say, in Los Angeles, in coffee shops. So to draw like a moral line about what someone can and cannot say on a foreign conflict and then to detain and deny entry based singularly on that issue, I do think it's telling that the one clip that they put out had nothing to do with the US, right? Because it is actually different if what you're saying is if somebody said they deserve 9-11, right?

27:56I actually do think that's different. If you said that, I don't know. We actually do have the right to deny your visa. I'm not saying you should be detained and put into ICE or whatever, but I'm saying, yeah, maybe you shouldn't come here. And we do get the right. We have an absolute and unabsolute right to deny who can and cannot enter. So with that context, note that the only clip they did put out was specifically about October 7th, which didn't happen here. It didn't happen to our people. It's entirely based on something that happened elsewhere. Let's take a listen. Netanyahu did not envisage that for the first time since 1948 the Palestinians would actually retake land back from the Israelis.

28:36Netanyahu did not envisage that for the first time since 1948 the Palestinians would be able to hold those territories for more than 72 hours. We are pitying a people who brought a huge victory since 1948. Don't pity them. They don't want your pity. celebrate the victory Allah has shown the world that no normalization can erase the Palestinian cause when everybody thought it was finished it's roaring how many of you feel it in your hearts when you got the news that it happened how many of you felt the euphoria Allah, how many of you felt it why did you feel it because in despair vanished you said this Umar is alive so that's what they're claiming that he said I actually don't know entirely if that's been clipped or anything.

29:24Well, I mean, yeah, what he's saying there is that, look, it brought the cause of Palestinian liberation back onto the national stage. And you should remember that, even as you feel so terrible about the response. And he has previously, and other times, said that it was a catastrophe and that it was a, I forget his exact terminology, that he, so, you know, he has a more nuanced view of it. Sure. But the point is he should be able to think whatever he wants. Listen, I'm with you. You think what you want about Palestine, okay? And if you have a problem with it in Britain, that's your problem. You guys can figure it out for yourselves.

30:02I think he's getting a little close to the line there if you ask me. But, and this is kind of where I get to, and this is where the nanny finger wagging from a lot of people starts to bug me. It's like, guys, how many times do I see these people cheering on Israeli murder? I literally saw, you know, there are people here who I saw tweeting about this, and they have past statements being like, I don't feel the Palestinians deserve to watch their children starve. I'm just like, okay. Like, I'm going to take a moral lesson from you about what's acceptable. Rhetoric and not, sorry. You know, I'm out.

30:33I'm out on this stuff. Randy Fine. Right. Yeah, exactly. Randy Fine says it all the time. Will Chamberlain. Yeah. Not to be confused with a basketball player who, you know, will say, you know. He's been on the show many times. Deport. Yeah. deport him, deport, deport, deport, you know, five times a day. He's trying to get, you know, he's circled around on this one. He's a Randy Fine Republican. Like he's, he will, he will say things that are, you know, far more atrocious than anything that Sammy has said. And to me, and that's okay. That's the whole, that's the strength of the country. There, there's a, there's a patheticness and a weakness to a country that can't allow somebody to speak at a small gala because they said something that you didn't like about October 7th.

31:20For me, it's the selectivity. For me, it's the selectivity, specifically on October 7th. But, you know, nothing new happening here in the United States of America so far. All right, let's get to Snap, shall we? As the government shutdown continues into likely November, food stamps are now on the chopping block. People's food stamps start getting re-upped on Friday or Monday. But because of the Trump administration decision, we can put up E1, or this is an arguable point, according to Democrats, because of a Trump administration decision not to use funds that are available in an emergency for SNAP benefits, they will be lapsing for the next month.

32:06You put up E1 here. This is New York's hunger and cold looms as shut down imperils funding for anti-poverty programs. And, you know, so you have this now bipartisan push to, and, you know, a bipartisan push to save the SNAP benefits because, you know, over 40 million people rely on this, these benefits. And many of those people, you know, we're now at the, as many of our viewers will know who, who scraped by to get to the end of the month. We're at the end of the month now. And so people are kind of holding their breath, hanging on, waiting for the, waiting for things to come in on the first of the month.

32:48And when that doesn't happen, that, and you can't catch a breath, you then, your only choice then becomes like hitting these, you know, food banks, which are now, you know, massively overstretched as a result of - Well, especially where we are, where we are in the DMV, because people have been out a paycheck now for 28 days, it's grim out here from what I have been told food banks and more. By the way, the federal workers are at least going to get their money back. There's all kind of downstream effects here in our economy. I mean, this is a super local story. It's always dicey for contractors.

33:23Oh, the contractors don't get paid. But then think about all the... I talked to my barber, right? I was like, hey, how's business? He's like, it's horrible. Nobody's going to work. They don't need a haircut. And he's like, I don't get back pay. Right. So he's not going to I mean, there's and there multiply that by like 20 across all kinds of different. I don't know the lunch places, small businesses, the guys at the Pentagon who sell hot dogs like everybody is taking a bath or not. I know most people watching this don't care, but it just locally. And it's not just you can understand. Federal workers are all over.

33:49Yeah, it's two million people. The two million people are getting paid. That's huge. I mean, banks, you know, mortgage payments like there's all kinds of cascading effects throughout the system. Let's go and put the next one up on the screen because this does highlight some of the bipartisanship around this. Senator Josh Hawley wrote this op-ed, no American should go to bed hungry. Here he proposes the federal government's been shut down for 28 days, 28 days too long. Congress must not let that happen. And he is now co-sponsoring or has now introduced a bill, Ryan, which would kind of one-shot funding immediately for the SNAP program, which actually itself has a ton of Republican co-sponsors.

34:28Let's put that one up next, please. So you can see here wide variety. James Lankford, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, Marsha Blackburn, Bernie Moreno, Kevin Cramer, Bill Cassidy, Katie Boyd, John Cornyn, John Hunstead, and Peter Welch. So you have one Democrat there. But I believe many other Democrats would support at least some sort of snap immediate funding. It doesn't, though, appear as if that's going to make its way through Congress. And there seems to be some brinksmanship right now between the congressional leaders where Mike Johnson and others, they want SNAP not to go out because they want pressure to go on the Democrats to fold.

35:05Vice versa, by the way, from the Democrats is they don't want it to come out because they want the Republicans to fold to them. I don't know. I mean, we're coming up on that November 1st potential deadline. What do you think is going to happen? Yeah. So on the Senate Democratic side, you're seeing you've you saw an interesting kind of political tactical shift where just last week, John, Senator John Thune, a Republican, was saying, well, let's selectively just open a few pieces of the government. Wouldn't that be fair so that and then we continue hashing this out? And Schumer at the time said, no, all or nothing, you know, just, you know, expand, extend the subsidies for Obamacare, do a CR for the end of the year and then and then we're done.

35:44Schumer has now flipped and Schumer is now pushing for these individual votes around things like this to say because they think that they for whatever reason Schumer now thinks that that's to their tactical advantage to that. And then I think he also probably assumes that Republicans are now going to be on the blocking side of it because Mike Johnson has been has, you know, if you remember, he adjourned the House so as not to have to. And no votes, no Epstein vote, no swearing in nothing. So it's not to have an Epstein vote, and so it's not to swear in Adelita Grijalva, Roald Grijalva's daughter, who won her seat in a special election.

36:23Think about this. 700 ,000 people in this country elected a member of Congress in a special election, and Mike Johnson is just refusing to swear her in. Like, that's constitutional crisis level stuff. He's like, well, don't worry about it. We'll get to it eventually. you're starting to get pressure from people like mtg and others who are like why are we out of why what are we doing like why are we still out of session like get we're elected to be in congress like gavel us back in so if grijalva when grijalva is finally sworn in that will be the 218th vote they need to force an epstein vote and so i think schumer also sees like okay well they're not even in session.

37:06So there's no risk of them actually doing this. And if they go forward with snap benefits, that's good for Democrats because then we can last longer because there's less pressure on us. So Schumer has now shifted on that. But there's also a legal strategy underway. If we can put up E4, 25 states are suing the Trump administration because it's actually not obvious that the program's out of money. Like the way it's been reported in the press is like, oh, well, because of the government shutdown, SNAP benefits aren't going to be paid. Well, yes and no. There is a contingency fund that has been set up by Congress precisely for these shutdown scenarios so that payments keep going out.

37:48Russ Vogt, unsurprising to anybody who knows Russ Vogt, is interpreting it such that he doesn't have to give the money out. We can put up E5. So this is from Elizabeth Warren posted this. This has since been deleted from the government website. But, you know, as as as Trump's own government website said, OMB's general counsel provide a letter to USDA on May 23rd, 2025, stating that there is a bona fide need to obligate benefits for October, the first month of the fiscal year, during or prior to the month of September, thereby guaranteeing that benefit funds are available for program operations, even in the event of a government shutdown.

38:28So that is a very important fact of this conversation to understand. It is not, according to that reading, the shutdown that is preventing food stamps from getting doled out. It is an explicit decision by Russ Vod and by the Trump administration to withhold it in order to put extra pressure on Democrats. And also, I think Russ Vod just likes to withhold money, right? Right. That's a fair. Well, I don't know if you would. I think their pressure. I mean, if you statistically would look at it and who are going to be the most dependent on food stamps. I mean, I actually don't know, considering the way that things have aligned more recently.

39:09But traditionally, that would be more of a Democratic constituency. But not necessarily still the case. I was going to say, I don't think it's really the case anymore. What people need to understand is it's overwhelmingly people with children, like 90, well over 90 percent. These are. Well, yeah. Why don't you go into that, Ryan? I'm seeing a lot of right wing people. I can't believe 42 million people are on food stamps. These people are all bums and on welfare. Yeah, these are kids. I grew up on food stamps, raised by a single mom. So we would get we would get, you know, EBT. And, you know, there's only certain things you can buy at the grocery store with it.

39:42Actually, for my 18th birthday, I got to use the card. Here, I have the key. They have the eligibility criteria. Household grossly month income must be adderably one third, 30 % of the federal poverty level. House net income. Which for a family of four, that's good. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah. So then resources and asset limits. Households without a member of 60 plus must generally have assets at or below a set limit. Households with a member of 60 plus with disabilities may have higher resource limits. To be eligible, households must be US citizens, lawfully permanent non-citizens. Many able-bodied adults without dependents must meet work or training requirements.

40:18There are exemptions for people who are pregnant and elderly disabled. A household for SNAP means a group of people who live together, purchase and prepare food together. Some states have specific rules for students. So generally, it looks like 130 % of the federal poverty level. Which for a family of four is about$40 ,000. Okay. So that's not a lot of money. It's not a lot of money at all. And the assets, so yeah,$42 ,000 is the most you can make for a family of four in order to get these very modest benefits. We're not talking like huge amounts of money here that you can spend at the grocery store.

40:55And the asset limits that they're talking about are also incredibly draconian. so like if if let's say you inherit like seven thousand dollars from like you say your great great aunt dies or something boom you're out of the program just because you briefly went over it's it's it's kind of anti-american in the way that it or an un-american in the way that it like how so holds people back like you're if you if you if you try to pull yourself up by your bootstraps which people are always being told to do, and you have a successful couple of months, all of a sudden, because you now have$3 ,000 or whatever dollars in the bank, you lose everything.

41:38Lose whatever medical benefits you were getting. You lose your food stamps. You should phase out at some point. You might phase out at some point, but we don't have a system that really phases out at some point. We have this system of cliffs. No, you're going to lose your energy assistance, because you had this one good month or something. So you have a much greater risk of losing everything if you have a little bit of success. So a lot of people are like, well, I better just do nothing and just stay here underneath this thing so I don't. Kind of damned if you do, if you're damned if you don't.

42:13I don't disagree with you. I think there should be a phase out. Yeah, it should be a phase out. Clearly it should be a phase out so that you are incentivized. You earn$1 ,000 over this limit. all right you give it make it a tax you you give 50 percent back like something that still incentivizes you to go out rather than like a republican right now about how it incentivizes people to stay in the pocket fine it's like but no it is that's why i thought it was because i unfortunately i always see this happen it's like you get reagan era talking points around welfare and i think what people actually don't understand is how insanely poor you have to be to receive this.

42:53It's like$42 ,000 for a family of four. What do we talk about here on the show? By the way, the fact that there are 42 million people who are making less than$40 ,000 a year in California. And most of them with kids. To get it without kids is really hard. And you get $12 a month. If you're a single adult, 35 years old. You and I know the cost of diapers and any of this. Good luck, actually. Yeah, that is one where it is fascinating. I think that on the Snap, I mean around the discourse around Snap, originally if you'll recall, there was some Maha elements to try and to reform SNAP to get away from sweetened drinks and sugar and processed food.

43:32However, I recently also saw a study that many people who eat at home end up eating higher calorie food. And it's because they buy processed food from the grocery store in some cases and will binge eat based upon that. So our whole food system, everything is so, so screwed up. The only way to even get around it would be literally some authoritarian, we're about to do a segment about China, some authoritarian level. Actually, RFK Jr. at one point proposed that organic, healthy food be delivered to every American on Snap. I actually think that's a good idea. As long as you replace all of these subsidies to sugary soda, to goldfish, Lunchables, whatever.

44:14Kids aren't eating Lunchables now. They eat Logan Paul's. I don't know what it's called. But that's my prime energy drinks. You know, all this other crap that they're eating at the grocery store. Unfortunately, though, that seems to be a dead end. Now it's just whether they get food or not. Right. It's very sad. Yeah. No. And so, yeah, this is hitting for people like right now. Yeah. Yeah. So one more. What is it? It's October 29th. Their theory, by the way, I heard a theory yesterday I'll share with all of you. This is a little DC scooplet. There's a current theory from both the parties, apparently, that they want to make it so that Thanksgiving travel is as miserable as possible so that eventually people will care about the shutdown.

44:59So they're going to try and actually make the air traffic control situation go wild with TSA and everything. Because what we need is people getting killed in the air. Yeah, the busiest day of the entire travel year. Well, it's not that people would die. It's just there would be cascading delays. throughout the system, make everybody miserable, and then millions of people would rise up and theoretically would blame one party. Remember, that's what ended the last shutdown when - Which was 2018? Yeah, the air traffic control, the head of the air traffic control, not air traffic, the flight attendant union, Sarah, what's her name?

45:29Nelson. Fly with - Yeah, yeah. She came out and was like, you get a deal by Friday or we're going on strike. And they got - Do it again. And they got a deal. Sarah Nelson has - Sarah, where have you been? Sarah Nelson has been, I should not have forgotten Sarah Nelson's name. We interviewed her a bunch of times. She was being talked about as like a vice president, president. I know, I remember her. A couple years ago. We've been interviewed a million times here on the show. I remember her. Yeah, Sarah, come on, fly in and solve this thing for us. Yeah, please. Please, put pressure on the system.

46:00Last thing, people like SNAP benefits. Put up E6. Most recent poll, Americans oppose cutting food stamp benefits by 66 to 23. it's an overwhelmingly popular thing because it's like these are people with kids who are poor they deserve to eat that turns out to be something that the american people generally agree with what's the least popular welfare let's see what do we got here um oppose sending 45 billion to build and maintain migrant detention camps Is that the least popular? Yeah, that's one of them. Reducing federal funding for food assistance to low-income households. So that's reducing federal funding.

46:47Extending tax cuts for single incomes above$400 ,000. That is definitely former welfare. That's true. Here's the welfare that he pows for. Extending tax cuts for business corporations. Extending tax cuts for single incomes above$400 ,000. Who supports extending tax cuts for people? The people making over$400 ,000. A single person making$400 ,000 a year? That's got to be what? In the top, that's easily a top 1 % income. I'm talking about W-2 annual income. That's a lot of money. That probably is. 29 % support. Statistically, 29 % are not even making top 400K. That's real solidarity for the rich.

47:25Yeah, that's like a 42K a year W-2. That's aspirational. It could be me. Those people plan to be. I mean, it could be you. It probably won't be. But anyway. All right. Let's get to China. Ben Smith, Sandy, bye. Very excited now to be joined by Ben Smith. He's the editor-in-chief of Semaphore and the host of the Mixed Signals podcast, which everybody should go and subscribe to. Good to see you, Ben. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. Ben, you wrote a fantastic story here, a very under-noted, in my opinion, of the US-China dynamic, which I think really hit the nail on the head.

47:59I've been involved in the space now for quite some time. Let's put this up here on the screen. Here's what you write. You talk specifically about how Trump is poised to end Washington's decade of the China Hawks. First of all, why don't you just tell us some of the things that you noted with the trade deal that's now taking form. President Trump and President Xi scheduled to meet sometime in the next 48 hours or so, I believe, in South Korea. But why is Trump, who ushered in the decade of the China Hawks, also the one poised to end it? What did you find? Yeah, I mean, you know, Trump ran in 2016 on, you know, a huge part, A huge part of that campaign, a huge part of his whole public career has been saying that when China joined the WTO in the early 2000s, that was the beginning of the end for American manufacturing and thus the beginning of the end for kind of America as we knew it and loved it.

48:47That was the original sin. And we have to totally remake the U.S. relationship with China, which really means remaking the whole world for which China has been, you know, has basically so much of global manufacturing has shifted to China. And, and I think, you know, and there was, and that came with a certain amount at times of, and we have to prepare to fight a war with them over Taiwan. And, you know, and they're spying on us. We have to throw out all their students. And there's a lot of very tough talk from him. And, and, and there was a group of very hardcore anti-China people who, by the way, have been around forever.

49:26This is an old American debate. There's an old who lost China debate. you know very intense support for Taiwan here for you know since Henry Luce was running Time magazine but they um but but that but basically I think what we've seen over the last two weeks is that that thing of that has basically hit a dead end the people the most hawkish advisors to Trump are out this term like a guy named Matt Pottinger former Wall Street Journal reporter um and Trump is looking to make a deal that is basically going to restore the status quo ante like he's going to drop the fentanyl tariffs. I mean, you know, the stuff that ultimately felt kind of made up is now going away in exchange for making tariffs go away.

50:09And the notion that we're going to remake the world economy into one where like all the dirt processing plants relocate to the US and, you know, China goes back to, I don't know, 1973 just does not seem like it's going to happen. Exactly. And was there a way you think that the Hawks could have played their cards better that and that if if Trump had approached the tariff conflict differently, it seems like it. It was destined to fail by the way that he rolled it out, attacking the entire world at the same time. Everybody gets these like arbitrary tariffs and we're going to put tariffs on things that we can't make here in the United States.

50:48and China's response at the time seemed to be, okay, well, we're not going to buy any soybeans and we're just going to wait you out because this is incoherent and it's not going to work. But it feels like we do have a lot of power. Like something could have worked. Like where did they go wrong here? Yeah, I mean, ironically, the thing that if you really wanted to do your best to damage the Chinese economy and kind of contain their technological development, you'd probably do what the Biden administration did, which was basically blockade certain key technologies and get the Europeans to do it too.

51:17and also, by the way, not buy their superior electric vehicles and force Americans to purchase inferior Ford electric vehicles, which the Europeans had been doing. Looks like now the Canadians are just going to go and buy Chinese vehicles. I mean, the Europeans, surprisingly, are really kind of much more inclined to take an anti-China stance, I think, than a lot of people here expect because for them the biggest issue is the war in Ukraine and China is on the wrong side of it. Yep. That's very important to note. I mean, one of the things, Ben, that I, you know, like I said, I've been in this space for a long time, kind of followed the discourse.

51:54What I noticed was that eight to 10 years ago in the China Hawk space, it seemed achievable, the idea of decoupling, the idea of industrialization. I mean, you and I have been around for a while. How many times have we heard about industrial policy? It's a bipartisan thing. It's 2025 now. You know, the Made in China 2025 plan actually did come true. I was just looking at their original goals from 2015 to 2025. They mostly accomplished all of them. If you compare the rhetoric of the industrial policy, how we're going to decouple from China, the progress of the CHIPS Act here in the U.S., almost none of that has actually materialized and is not really on its way to doing so.

52:30If anything, a lot of it is being cut by the one big, beautiful bill. So in material terms, it seems to me that the playing field itself is just different now because we didn't do any of the requisite things that would have been able to be done to actually have some grand decoupling in the way that Steve Bannon envisioned in 2016. Yeah, I mean, I think the thing is, if you had hung around Congress five or 10 years ago and you saw Mike Gallagher, this Wisconsin congressman, chairing the China Committee, kind of building this bipartisan consensus that it was just time for a radical break with China, a radical reshaping of that relationship.

53:05And with the support of a lot of Democrats, including very senior people in the Biden White House, you would have been plausible to think that that was going to happen. And it has absolutely not happened. And I mean, I do think one of the things that this administration has come up to face is basically, do we want to try to beat the Chinese at their own game, which is sort of scaled domestic manufacturing of very, very low margin goods? And, you know, when you talk about rare earths, what that is, is massive, massive plants processing dirt. And I think, you know, we've sort of walked up to that and it doesn't seem like there's a huge appetite to do that here, as opposed to very, very high margin service exports in AI, in all sorts of digital services where the U.S.

53:49is really totally dominating the world. And I think it's been sort of the notion that like the right strategy for the U.S. is to try to beat China at its game rather than at our game, you know, does ultimately, I think, give people pause. Yeah. And let me put another idea to you. And you tell me if you think it's totally crazy. You know, in the 1990s, when there was this push for permanent normal trade relations with China and then also and then eventually letting them into the WTO, the idea that was presented to the American public and to the global public was that opening up the Chinese economy would also, step two, step three, open up democracy and open China up politically, that they would see the virtues.

54:32of this Western liberal system, and they would adopt it. What seems to have happened is that the contagion went the other way. So we seem to be adopting their system. Like the two systems saw each other, and the leaders of this country, particularly Trump at this point, looked in the Chinese mirror and were like, oh, wow, this is interesting. I like the way that they dictate, you know, corporate policy by telling which companies that can merge with other companies. Like they're, they're now out publicly saying that, you know, who they want, you know, who they want Warner brothers to merge with.

55:13When it comes to TikTok, they're like, oh, this is pretty cool. And so we're just going to have a state run TikTok. And my friend, Larry Ellison will, will be the one that will run it. And he'll design an algorithm that will, that will work. Well, China can do their version of TikTok over there. And we're going to buy 10 % of this company. We're going to buy 10 % of this company. So it really feels like the analysts were correct that the merging of the two systems would persuade one of them to adopt the others, but they had the direction wrong. Am I crazy here? or witnessing? You're referring to, what do they call it?

55:53State capitalism with American characteristics. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think, you know, that, that is superficially true. I mean, the difference is that the Chinese government, because it's a, you know, communist dictatorship is able to make extremely long-term bets and stick to them. And so the kind of, and sometimes with massive success, like the kind of infrastructure behind this kind of massively scaled industrial policy, whereas the U.S. on things like cars is changing its strategy so frequently that it's really destroying the domestic auto industry. Like it's just very, very, you like, maybe there's some future where people are driving internal, using internal combustion engines.

56:34And if the U.S. had kind of made that counterintuitive bet and stuck with it, we'd be the one selling those cars or at least we, but instead we've, the country has sort of flip-flopped a few times and just, it's very hard if you're running Ford or General Motors, It's just very, very hard to be competitive. And then the problem, of course, with being a communist dictatorship is you can't correct. And things like the one-child policy, which has created this horrific, and was both incredibly inhumane and created this horrible demographic crisis, are also a product of the same thing. So I'm not sure we should act.

57:04There is a moment right now, I feel like people are watching videos on TikTok of Chinese iPhone stores that have cars in them and getting really excited. But it's not like, things are not going great there necessarily. I don't know. I mean, things aren't great here either. So that's what causes people like me, like, it seems clean. It's safe and it's nice. I was in Chum Du over the summer with my kids and they were just like, oh, my God, we're so cooked. But I'm not sure it's that simple. Of course. It never is entirely that simple. At least we have our freedoms here, right? All right, Ryan. That sounds like a nervous laugh.

57:36Yeah. Ben, my last question here is on the security doctrine because key to the industrial side of all of this was always the Taiwan question. Strategic ambiguity, according to a White House official, is officially here to stay. Trump technically said he was going to talk to President Xi maybe about Taiwan sometime today. But even the discussion around Taiwan today seems very different than it was 10 years ago when there was an ironclad. I mean, frankly, even Biden said, I would defend Taiwan. He almost changed the strategic ambiguity policy. It doesn't seem like that is nearly as clear as it is today in 2025.

58:08Yeah, I mean, Trump is sort of an everything's on the table dealmaker. And so there's this slight sense that, wait, does that include Taiwan? And the U.S. just demonstrably in our domestic politics don't have a big appetite to fight foreign wars. I mean, I don't think there's something has radically changed, but the strategic ambiguity has shifted a little in the direction of the U.S. wouldn't engage. And, you know, although Trump, I think, is unpredictable enough that in some way he maintained, like there's just a level of ambiguity right there that, I don't know, that a lot of people think will deter the Chinese from sort of opportunistically starting a war.

58:46Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Allowing the creation of this semiconductor industry in this island right off the Chinese coast seems to be not working out as well as planned. I've heard a little bit. Is, you know, does this does that essentially require the U.S. to maintain some stable relationship? I mean, if because if it does go the way that we're thinking and there's some kind of mostly peaceful takeover of Taiwan, the American economy is then that much more in hock. No. Yeah. I mean, I mean, the U.S. economy is so profoundly dependent on many, many different things happening in China. And they're kind of just expression the other week.

59:26It was really pretty breathtaking to say any item made with these minerals that we mine, we get to control the use with a kind of global long arm forever. And don't worry, we'll issue permits swiftly. Like that's, you know, they have a lot of power of the global economy. That's part of, I think, why the U.S. climbed down. The chips are part of it. You know, our sort of announcement that we're going to reclaim the chip industry and our attempts to cut them off from chip manufacturing do not actually really seem to yet have created a booming American chip industry, but have created very strong incentives for China to build its own competitive domestic chip industry.

1:00:01And now the Trump administration has decided, like, wait a second, are the real way to prevent them from doing that is to sell them the NVIDIA chips that we were blockading? And it is another instance where I think these are all rational decisions. Like, these are smart people making very difficult policy choices. but flipping between the US strategy has really been defined by flipping between them. I think that's really well said. Everybody go and subscribe to Ben's podcast. Ben, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it. Thank you guys. Nice to see you. Thank you guys so much for watching.

1:00:30We appreciate it. Thank you for having me, Ryan. Crystal and I will be on tomorrow. We will see you all then.

1:00:50This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.