Long reference view

This page embeds the entire package so it can be searched or exported as one note. For normal reading, start with Eric Hovagim on America and the West.

Complete argument and talking-point map

Eric Hovagim - Complete Argument and Talking-Point Map

Scope and attribution

This catalogs the substantive claims made or clearly endorsed by Eric Hovagim in the original interview and nine directly relevant long-form videos from his public channel. Host-only and guest-only claims are separated where necessary. Jokes are included only when they carry a political premise. Timestamps identify where he makes a claim; they do not prove it. Public captions were auto-generated, so the wording below is paraphrased rather than quoted.

A. His master thesis

1. China reveals that American stagnation is a political choice. Visible construction, transit, electrification, safety, and improving cities show that a state can still change material life.
2. The U.S. system is oligarchic rather than meaningfully democratic. Elections change personnel but leave capital, policing, foreign policy, and the two-party structure substantially intact.
3. Private capital cannot be trusted to plan for national development. It seeks the fastest return; foundational innovation and infrastructure require public direction.
4. The American Dream has become entry into the exploiting class. Success means owning assets, extracting rent, or profiting from other people’s labor rather than universal security.
5. Western hostility to China is partly manufactured. Media, intelligence, foreign-policy institutions, and identity pressure make positive statements about China socially suspect.
6. Europe’s moral superiority is illegitimate. Its wealth and borders are inseparable from colonial extraction, yet Europeans still lecture former colonies and China.
7. Socialism is becoming thinkable because capitalism is visibly failing younger people. Rent, prices, war spending, automation, and elite impunity are making systemic explanations more plausible.

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B. Arguments against America

1. Elections and democracy

• The presidential choice is artificially narrow. Americans repeatedly choose between a centrist Democrat who supports almost all of the same destructive foreign policy and a worse Republican. (2:08)
• Even reform politicians are captured by existing institutions. He uses Zohran Mamdani’s relationship to the police establishment as an example of structural constraint. (2:36)
• Electing an occasional good Democrat does not produce meaningful progress. (3:13)
• America is an oligarchy, not a democracy. Wealth holders and entrenched institutions exercise the decisive power. (12:49)
• Presidential blame personalizes systemic failure. Americans blame one president because admitting structural defects is more threatening. (21:27)
• No U.S. president has been morally good. He argues that every presidency has upheld some combination of slavery, colonialism, racial hierarchy, war, or labor exploitation. (22:45)
• The two-party system cannot lock in lasting reform. Republican governments reverse civil-rights and social-policy gains, while Democrats do not alter the underlying structure. (24:31)
• Left–right conflict is partly manufactured. The real divide is “up versus down”: oligarchs against everyone else. (1:26:03)
• Equal application of law sounds radical in America. Elite impunity has made ordinary accountability seem unrealistic. (1:25:30)

2. Elite capture and authoritarian danger

• The larger danger is a durable oligarchic and white-nationalist project, not Trump alone. He names Peter Thiel, JD Vance, and Tucker Carlson as nodes in that project. (19:39–20:36)
• Repression will intensify as the system weakens. He fears laws targeting socialist, communist, anti-fascist, and Muslim political movements. (19:39)
• Technocratic billionaires can fuse private data power with the state. Palantir is his emblem of an oligarchic surveillance state. (25:00)
• Congressional stock ownership symbolizes a separate rulebook for elites. He singles out Nancy Pelosi’s household portfolio and alleges privileged information. (1:22:41)
• Elite speculation teaches the public that exploitation is normal. Workers see officials profit from information and mimic the same gambling logic. (1:23:37)
• Corporate landlords—not immigrants—are the structural cause of rent extraction. Culture-war blame diverts anger away from owners and collusion. (1:26:27)

3. Industrial policy, innovation, and state capacity

• America lacks a coherent industrial policy. It should deliberately build advanced manufacturing in semiconductors, solar, wind, hydrogen, and other strategic sectors. (3:35)
• Successful East Asian development was planned. South Korea’s industrial upgrading required state discipline and U.S. geopolitical capital; China’s development also required planning. (4:06–6:05)
• China’s poverty reduction was not a spontaneous market miracle. He presents it as the intended result of state strategy. (5:38–6:20)
• Venture capital is structurally short-term. Investors prefer fast returns over projects that may take decades or benefit the public diffusely. (15:02)
• Private capital does not independently create transformative technology. Public R&D supplies the foundational science and risk-bearing behind technologies later commercialized by firms. (15:38)
• American engineering talent is diverted toward weapons. Students are funneled into defense contractors rather than civilian development. (18:37)
• The Hyperloop was a spectacle that displaced a workable train. California should have built conventional high-speed rail instead of indulging futuristic distraction. (16:20)
• Government is judged impossible because Americans have stopped seeing competent delivery. China’s visible action changes what citizens imagine the state can do. (42:39)

4. Regional abandonment and infrastructure

• Small Chinese cities visibly improve while small American towns decay. He contrasts Chinese urban development with Kemmerer, Diamondville, and Cokeville, Wyoming. (8:57–14:30)
• American coal and rural towns are abandoned once extraction is no longer profitable. Neither federal nor state government supplies a durable replacement development strategy. (11:46–14:30)
• Investment arrives only when outsiders can extract value. An AI data center may appear, but it can increase residents’ power costs without rebuilding the town. (13:02)
• Capital forces migration into a few expensive metros. Workers cluster in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, Denver, and Florida while Appalachia and rural regions lose opportunity. (13:28)
• California high-speed rail represents incapacity, not technical impossibility. (16:20)
• Americans have no lived memory of continuous improvement. This produces nihilism and disbelief that collective projects can work. (1:42:29)

5. Cost of living and material insecurity

• Rent, food, and wages make ordinary life feel like regression. Young people watch prices rise while pay and public services fail to keep pace. (31:45, 41:15)
• Taxes fund destruction abroad instead of lower rent and better services at home. (31:45)
• Healthcare is absurdly expensive and mediated by insurance. His $8,000 per month line is a rhetorical extreme, not a population estimate. (42:21)
• Tipping turns routine consumption into another compulsory surcharge. (42:21)
• **Food affordability is worse than the surface abundance suggests.** (42:21)
• The American Dream is not universal stability but ownership of other people’s work. The aspiration is to become a landlord, shareholder, or capitalist. (1:24:49)
• Automation will deepen insecurity under private ownership. Productivity gains become job loss and owner profit rather than shared leisure. (1:39:44)
• Workers spend eight to twelve hours enriching remote owners they never meet. (1:40:27)

6. Financialization, gambling, and predation

• America’s everyday economy feels like a scam. Telemarketing, predatory loans, reverse mortgages, and financial products target vulnerable people. (45:33)
• Prediction markets and betting applications are socially destructive. (1:18:59)
• The stock market is fundamentally speculative gambling. He says the New York Stock Exchange should be abolished. (1:19:44)
• Meme stocks and crypto reward dopamine and short-term bets rather than production. (1:20:16)
• Investing in defense companies creates a material interest in war. A portfolio is not morally neutral when it finances weapons. (1:22:00)

7. Social trust, community, violence, and policing

• Americans live with ambient fear of mass shootings. A loud noise in a theater becomes a possible attack. (2:59)
• Low trust is built into ordinary transactions. People expect to be cheated. (45:33–46:31)
• Suburban life is atomized. Neighbors lack durable ties, while Nextdoor-style discourse magnifies paranoia and racism. (47:17) → comparative fact-check
• America feels more dangerous because of guns and political division. (48:32)
• Political identity fuses with personal ego. Disagreement becomes an attack on the self. (50:18)
• Road rage is more threatening when strangers may be armed. (50:52)
• American police encounters feel armed, adversarial, and corrupt. He contrasts them with his benign interactions in China. (51:13, 55:58, 59:08, 1:04:11) → comparative policing assessment
• The collapse of trust makes conspiracism normal. Even conventional Democrats no longer trust official narratives. (27:12–27:41)
• Institutional spectacle crowds out serious priorities. He treats UFO politics as distraction from wars and elite wrongdoing. (28:51)

8. Foreign policy and the American historical narrative

• U.S. foreign policy is bipartisan violence. His “99% versus unlimited genocide” language frames the parties as differing by degree, not kind. (2:08)
• The U.S.-led global order is coercive. China developed by maneuvering within a system backed by American force. (6:05)
• South Korea’s rise was part of Cold War containment. U.S. capital supported it as a rival to North Korea. (5:07)
• Obama’s drone war and the Kunduz hospital strike discredit liberal moral superiority. (24:18)
• U.S. support for Israel exposes the bankruptcy of establishment foreign policy. Younger Americans see civilian suffering and reject bipartisan alignment. (29:21–31:45)
• Israel is an expansionary ethnostate committing genocide. He calls for sanctions and war-crimes accountability and invokes Nuremberg-level punishment for leaders, including Netanyahu, Biden, and Trump. (30:35–31:13)
• The United States is itself a settler-colonial state. Americans condemn modern colonization while living on land acquired through conquest and Indigenous dispossession. (34:44–36:37)
• The U.S. has never fully confronted Indigenous destruction. His “99%” figure conveys enormous demographic collapse but is too precise for a disputed historical baseline. (35:15–36:37)
• American place names normalize conquest. Colonial names make dispossession feel natural and invisible. (36:37)
• War and sanctions are linked to domestic corruption. Officials and insiders can trade around military action against Venezuela, Cuba, or Iran. (1:24:06)
• Development should uplift people without bombing them. (1:37:25)

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C. Arguments against Europe

1. Cultural arrogance

• Europeans are more condescending than Americans. Americans may be ignorant, he jokes, but they know it; Europeans assume their own brilliance. (1:29:37–1:30:14)
• French visitors treat Chinese people as culturally unsophisticated. He describes French attitudes as stuck-up and arrogant. (1:29:51)
• European expatriates lecture China more readily than Americans do. (1:35:30)
• The Paris, French-food, and British-food lines are ridicule, not evidence. Their political premise is that former imperial powers should not be protected from “punching up.” (1:30:14, 1:31:23, 1:32:21–1:32:43)

2. Colonial wealth and denial

• Parisian/French wealth is partly built on African extraction. His phrase “paved with blood” compresses slavery, colonial taxation, forced labor, resource extraction, and postcolonial influence into a moral indictment. (1:31:09)
• France has not adequately reckoned with its African and Indochinese empires. (1:31:09)
• Britain’s prosperity and global position cannot be separated from empire. He uses the spice trade as a joking shorthand for global extraction. (1:31:23)
• Western European countries are historically privileged colonizers. Therefore ridicule of them is “punching up,” not symmetrical ethnic hostility. (1:32:43)
• Europe did sufficiently grave harm that he half-endorses the Nation of Islam’s Yakub myth as allegory. This is racial mythmaking, not history. (1:33:08)

3. Borders and continuing conflict

• France and Britain drew arbitrary Middle Eastern borders whose consequences persist. (1:34:23)
• Britain helped manufacture the India–Pakistan division and Kashmir conflict. (1:34:41)
• European states lecture former colonies on governance shortly after colonizing them. The moral posture ignores historical responsibility. (1:36:29)

4. Europe in Africa

• European diplomats offer lectures where China offers infrastructure. He endorses the slogan: “the Chinese leave a hospital; the British leave a lecture.” (1:36:02)
• Western governance conditionality often sounds paternalistic. Former colonizers retain a teacher–student posture toward African states. (1:35:30–1:36:29)
• Europe’s critique of China in Africa is partly status competition. The implicit argument is that former imperial powers resent losing influence to a non-Western state.

5. Europe is not immune from American-style decline

• European workers face the same oligarchic contradictions. They work long hours to enrich owners and face deteriorating material conditions. (1:40:06–1:40:27)
• Europeans wrongly imagine that their welfare states or culture make them immune. (1:40:06)
• European fear of digital surveillance blocked super-apps such as WeChat. Hovagim treats this as excessive suspicion, though the privacy concern is substantive. (1:48:26)

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D. Arguments against “the West” as a bloc

• Western narratives select China’s negatives: censorship, control, and lack of freedom dominate, while ordinary competence and improvement disappear. (7:20)
• A visit to China breaks the inherited narrative. Direct visibility is treated as corrective knowledge. (8:57)
• If China is merely “state capitalist,” Western capitalists have no excuse not to copy its planning capacity. (8:45)
• Western institutions manufacture anti-China sentiment. He cites the NED, USAID, and CIA as sources or funders of hostile narratives. (34:15)
• Positive speech about China carries a ritual demand for condemnation. People must add a disclaimer about censorship or human rights before describing anything favorable. (1:11:12)
• Western moral comparison is asymmetrical. China is condemned for restrictions while U.S. bombing and war are treated as background. (1:12:02)
• The West’s information environment has destroyed its own authority. Official denials no longer settle anything. (27:12, 1:12:38)
• Western surveillance fears are exaggerated by dystopian imagery. Hovagim and the hosts portray Chinese camera systems as more reactive and less omniscient than “Black Mirror” stories imply. (1:01:25–1:06:41) → institutional test
• The Western developmental model has stopped offering visible progress. Younger people compare stagnation at home with construction abroad. (1:42:29)
• Travel deterrence preserves the narrative. Fear keeps Westerners from visiting China and testing what they have heard. (1:49:05)

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E. China as his positive countermodel

• Planned poverty reduction: roughly 800 million people left extreme poverty during the reform era.
• State capacity: public institutions can coordinate land, finance, industry, construction, and long time horizons.
• Regional development: cities outside the famous coastal centers can still receive infrastructure and investment.
• Transit and electrification: trains, metros, EVs, and dense urban services are visible measures of competence.
• Public safety: he experiences less gun fear, less police tension, and more usable public space. → who encounters which face of policing
• Community and convenience: food, delivery, street life, and neighborly interaction feel less atomized.
• Surveillance as a safety tool: cameras and integrated identity systems helped recover property and identify events in his anecdotes. → full counterargument
• Lower-friction daily life: less tipping, inexpensive food, and integrated platforms feel more humane to him.
• Different political consciousness: people appear less likely to fuse partisan identity with personal ego.
• Proof of possibility: the key psychological effect is not any single policy but the experience of seeing things improve.

F. Socialist conclusion he draws

• Capitalism subordinates long-term public needs to private return.
• Oligarchs own productive assets, media influence, housing, and political access.
• Elections without control of capital cannot deliver deep change.
• Planning can redirect technology and investment toward social goals.
• China and Vietnam demonstrate that socialist-led systems can raise living standards.
• U.S. decline will make socialist language increasingly acceptable.
• Intensifying contradictions—rent, automation, war, and inequality—will force systemic change.

Logical gap

The diagnosis does not uniquely entail his cure. Public investment, industrial policy, social insurance, labor power, anti-monopoly rules, electoral reform, and limits on finance all exist in mixed economies. China can establish that planning matters without establishing one-party rule, comprehensive surveillance, or socialism as the necessary solution.

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G. Host claims that should not be misattributed to Hovagim

• German/European clients resist fully AI-generated video more than Chinese clients. This is introduced by a host around 1:15:07; it is not an Eric talking point.
• Western propaganda creates the fear response to Chinese police. The host states the strongest version around 1:02:20; Eric participates in the framing but does not originate every formulation.
• Chinese surveillance is mostly reactive, not real-time. The detailed “Black Mirror” rebuttal around 1:06:41 is host-led.
• Europeans lecture more than Americans. A host introduces the comparison around 1:35:30; Eric agrees and extends it to Africa and colonial history.

H. The shortest fair summary

Hovagim’s serious argument is: a rich society that cannot build, house, care for, or protect its people has a power-allocation problem, not a resource problem. China makes that failure visible. His overreach is to let that insight excuse asymmetric comparison, weak speaker evidence, romanticization of Chinese institutions, and the dismissal of inconvenient criticism as Western conditioning.

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I. Additional arguments from his wider work

How to read this section

Each source is folded by default. Open only the video or subject you want. These are argument maps, not endorsements. For evidence checks, use Eric Hovagim - Evidence and Fact-Check.

Abstract

1. “America failed, so I moved to China” — America as a violent corporate order

Video

• The United States has entered an “American century of humiliation.” Its institutions cannot provide safety, dignity, affordability, or confidence in progress. (0:00–1:47)
• Everyday American violence is systemic rather than exceptional. Shootings, aggressive policing, political kidnapping, war, and elite impunity belong to the same social order. (1:47–3:13)
• America is “six corporations in a trench coat.” Consolidated firms control prices and politics while presenting private extraction as free choice. (2:08–2:51)
• Taxes finance violence abroad while needs at home go unmet. He specifically connects U.S. revenue and arms to Israel’s destruction of Gaza. (2:30)
• Housing has been converted from shelter into an investment vehicle. Ownership interests therefore profit from scarcity and rising rents. (2:51)
• The country’s elite culture is sliding toward neo-Nazi aesthetics and rule by force. He calls the emerging order an “American Century of Lead”: bullets substitute for political solutions. (3:13)
• American abundance rests partly on hidden extraction from the Global South. Consumer goods conceal the labor, resource, and military relations behind them. (3:33–3:54)
• Postwar U.S. prosperity depended on public planning, not laissez-faire. The state capacities built during World War II contradict the myth that markets alone created abundance. (3:54)
• American leaders became “warmongering robber barons.” U.S. power preserves favorable foreign governments and weak opponents rather than democratic self-determination. (4:16)
• Short-term individual return defeats long-term collective development. The economy has no coherent national project because private incentives cannot supply one. (4:37)
• The fundamental conflict is labor versus ownership, not culture-war tribes. Billionaire-funded political messaging redirects class anger toward symbolic enemies. (4:58)
• China provides a material counterexample: cheap food and transit, walkability, public safety, inexpensive healthcare, and freedom from school-shooting anxiety. (5:41–7:25)
• GDP per capita is a poor proxy for lived welfare. He contrasts Mississippi’s higher nominal output with Shanghai’s more functional public environment. (6:44–7:25)
• U.S. anti-China narratives convert disputed territories into instruments of American power. He depicts Uyghurs as CIA pawns, Taiwan as trapped by U.S. militarism, and Tibet as liberated from a slave order. (7:47–8:09)
• Western schooling launders intelligence and conservative-foundation narratives into common sense. He names the CIA and Heritage Foundation as producers of revisionist history. (8:09)
• Europe shares responsibility for China’s historical humiliation. He singles out Germany, France, and Britain for occupying or colonizing Chinese territory. (9:53)

Abstract

2. “What Johnny Harris gets wrong about North Korea” — media, sanctions, and Cold War history

Video

• Polished Western explanatory media can hide propaganda more effectively than crude state media. Professional graphics and an investigative tone can make cherry-picking feel neutral. (0:03–1:53)
• Western storytellers omit U.S. motive and historical causation. He accuses Johnny Harris and Sam Ellis of selectively framing Afghanistan, the Armenian genocide, Brazil’s Operation Car Wash, and Korea. (0:44–1:53)
• Defector testimony is vulnerable to state and media incentives on both sides. He argues that South Korean institutions pressure, confine, pay, or script some North Korean defectors while suppressing pro-DPRK material. (2:31–3:55)
• The “flourishing democracy versus irrational dictatorship” frame erases how the two Korean states were made. (3:55)
• The United States imposed the division of Korea and protected Japanese colonial collaborators in the South. (4:39–6:04)
• The U.S.-backed South Korean state committed massacres and disappearances before and during the Korean War. (5:22–6:04)
• The early North Korean revolution had genuine social achievements. He highlights land reform, labor protections, women’s rights, and welfare rather than reducing the state to the Kim family. (6:04–7:09)
• The Korean War was a U.S.-led genocidal assault. He cites mass civilian death, the destruction of infrastructure, MacArthur’s nuclear proposals, and bombing greater than the Pacific theater of World War II. (7:09–8:56)
• The United States protected and recruited Japanese war criminals, including personnel connected to Unit 731. (8:56)
• Sanctions are collective punishment. They immiserate ordinary North Koreans and Cubans while corporations evade them whenever profit is available. (9:39)
• Think tanks launder elite interests into neutral expertise. His Wilson Center example links U.S. government funding, fossil-fuel and weapons interests, anti-communist foundations, and a foundation associated with a Japanese Class A war criminal. (10:23–13:14)
• The United States is the regional aggressor in the Korean security dilemma. It destroyed the North, maintains troops and invasion exercises nearby, and then treats North Korean deterrence as unprovoked. (13:36–14:43)
• Washington violated the 1994 Agreed Framework. He says it failed to build the promised reactor, normalize relations, lift sanctions, or provide security assurances before demanding compliance. (15:24)
• The National Endowment for Democracy performs openly work once associated with covert CIA intervention. (16:06)
• South Korean billionaire and family-owned media filter criticism of the chaebol system. He treats this as analogous to U.S. billionaire media. (17:09)
• Western consumer culture commodifies women while claiming moral superiority. He contrasts advertising and commentary about female political figures in the two Koreas. (17:31–20:03)
• Western analysis applies a sexist gaze to women in enemy states. Experts discuss appearance, lineage, and propaganda value rather than political agency. (18:37–20:03)
• The U.S. and South Korea also undermined rapprochement. He cites exercises and propaganda leaflets when contextualizing North Korea’s destruction of the inter-Korean liaison office. (20:44)

Abstract

3. “Why America is Waging a Secret War in Central Africa” — Congo, resources, and Western institutions

Video

• The new U.S.–China cold war is a struggle over strategic minerals, with Africans absorbing the violence. Copper, cobalt, coltan, and lithium are the material stakes. (0:02–1:47)
• Belgian terror established the extractive order, and the United States preserved it after independence. (2:07–4:58)
• The CIA and Belgium destroyed Congolese democracy when Patrice Lumumba sought national control of resources. He says Eisenhower ordered Lumumba’s killing and the West installed Mobutu. (2:50–4:58)
• Western anti-communism functioned as protection for resource access. Lumumba did not need to be a Soviet agent; requesting Soviet help after Western abandonment was enough to justify removal. (3:33–4:36)
• Commodity deregulation and IMF/World Bank intervention helped create the material crisis surrounding the Rwandan genocide. He links a coffee-price collapse, currency devaluation, lost savings, arms purchases, and political scapegoating. (5:41–7:04)
• Belgian racial classification hardened Hutu–Tutsi divisions. (6:22–7:04)
• The United States covertly supported post-genocide Rwanda, whose government then used moral immunity to justify intervention in Congo. (7:04–8:06)
• The World Bank and IMF are instruments of Western power, not neutral referees. Their austerity and privatization weakened Congo’s state mining company and opened assets to foreign acquisition. (8:06–9:10)
• Western mining firms profited from war by purchasing Congolese assets at fire-sale prices. (9:31–10:14)
• Rwanda is a Western proxy that launders stolen Congolese minerals. He links Rwandan support for M23 to coltan exports and French military/economic interests. (11:39–14:06)
• The “resource curse” is politically selective. Resource wealth enriches Norway but impoverishes Congo because ownership and power—not geology—determine the outcome. (14:28–15:09)
• China offers infrastructure where the West offered bullets and blackmail. (14:48–15:09)
• “Debt-trap diplomacy” is a lazy and dangerous frame. It ignores concessional lending, resource-price risk borne by lenders, renegotiation, and African agency. (16:34–17:57)
• China is not altruistic. Chinese entities hold stakes in much of Congo’s mining and seek control of the complete battery and electronics supply chain. (17:57–18:38)
• The relevant distinction is what extraction builds locally. He points to Chinese-financed ports, hospitals, dams, fiber, grids, roads, and rail. (18:18–18:59)
• Washington tried to derail China–Congo deals while supplying Rwanda and seeking its own mineral access. He connects the timing of NGO reports, diplomatic meetings, Western mining bids, military aid, and mineral-for-security negotiations. (19:19–21:48)
• A U.S.-linked coup attempt fits a longer pattern, though he concedes the connection is unclear. (21:26)
• Western-funded transparency NGOs can launder the interests of the firms they monitor. He argues EITI is funded by mining companies, the State Department, USAID, and the EU but has failed to punish Western corporate wrongdoing in Congo. (22:09–24:13)
• Western corporate fines are merely a cost of doing business. He uses Glencore and Dan Gertler to argue that penalties leave the underlying loot intact. (22:30–23:53)
• IMF aid turns NGO standards into economic sovereignty constraints. (23:53–24:33)
• The deepest continuity is extraction backed by force. He is cautious about proving one coordinated conspiracy, but argues that the structure predictably makes the West richer and Congo poorer. (24:33–25:13)

Abstract

4. “I Attended America’s Last Slave Rodeo” — prison, policing, and the afterlife of slavery

Video

• American slavery was only partially abolished. The Thirteenth Amendment’s punishment exception permits coerced prison labor. (0:41–1:25)
• Angola prison preserves plantation relations in literal form. The institution occupies former slave-plantation land, requires new prisoners to pick cotton, pays cents per hour, and profits from inmate art and spectacle. (0:41–5:20)
• The rodeo turns captive danger into entertainment. Inmates accept severe injury risk because a small prize can equal a year of prison wages. (3:35–4:59)
• Convict leasing reconstructed slavery after emancipation. Criminal law supplied forced Black labor when chattel slavery became illegal. (5:20–6:24)
• U.S. policing developed as class and racial control. In the South it pursued escaped slaves; in the North it protected owners against striking workers. (6:24–7:06)
• Modern police retain paramilitary power and weak accountability. The Baton Rouge “Brave Cave” is his example of abuse, fabricated charges, invasive searches, and failed internal review. (7:06–8:30)
• White supremacy is a strategy of extraction, not only prejudice. Race is a convenient boundary through which wealthy and powerful actors divide and exploit, but the same logic targets religious, sexual, and gender minorities. (10:56–12:40)
• Oppressed people may internalize the punitive worldview of their oppressors. Individual discipline feels realistic when structural change seems unimaginable. (10:36–11:58)
• Louisiana’s non-unanimous-jury rule was designed to neutralize Black jurors and its victims remain imprisoned. (15:50–17:12)
• The prison system neither prevents harm nor rehabilitates. He argues that abolition must change the conditions and culture producing harm rather than create a gentler cage. (17:54–19:20)
• ICE detention, U.S. prisons, and El Salvador’s mega-prisons belong to one transnational punitive order. (12:40–13:21, 18:58)

Abstract

5. “How American Politicians Weaponize the Super Bowl Against You” — spectacle and militarism

Video

• The Iranian hostage crisis cannot be separated from the CIA overthrow of Iran’s elected government and U.S. protection of the Shah. (0:48–1:29)
• Reagan’s campaign allegedly delayed the hostages’ release for electoral advantage. Hovagim presents the “October Surprise” claim as increasingly corroborated, then treats the Super Bowl welcome as a manufactured victory lap. (1:51–2:57)
• Mass sport converts political narratives into emotion. Presidents use football to package national unity, distract from culpability, and celebrate military power. (2:57–4:41)
• The post-9/11 Super Bowl helped normalize the Patriot Act, surveillance, and war. (3:18–4:41)
• The Pat Tillman story shows how the military uses heroes and conceals inconvenient dissent. He emphasizes Tillman’s opposition to the Iraq invasion, death by friendly fire, destruction of evidence, and the military cover-up. (5:03–6:48)
• Israel attacked Rafah under cover of the 2024 Super Bowl spectacle, using U.S.-funded weapons. (7:09–8:12)
• The Pentagon directly pays sports franchises to stage patriotism. (8:33)
• The Super Bowl is “bread and circuses” for a declining empire. Entertainment can be a victory lap, a recruiting device, or a diversion from war. (9:15–10:18)

Abstract

6. “The Dark Connection between Luigi Mangione and Shinzo Abe” — healthcare, anti-communism, and elite impunity

Video

• U.S. healthcare is designed to profit from denying care. Medical bankruptcy and homelessness coexist with enormous insurer profits. (1:25–2:09)
• Popular sympathy for political assassins indicates broad recognition that institutions do not serve working people. (0:00–1:02)
• Postwar U.S. policy rehabilitated Japanese war criminals to defeat socialism. He names Ryōichi Sasakawa and Nobusuke Kishi and links CIA money to the Liberal Democratic Party. (4:20–7:07)
• Japan became a U.S.-supported near-one-party state. Elections exist, but decades of LDP dominance and American influence make many voters feel powerless. (6:23–7:07)
• Anti-communism fused political, religious, and economic power. The Unification Church, conservative elites, and CIA-supported politicians converted spiritual manipulation into a weapon against labor and social provision. (7:07–9:34)
• Japan’s prosperity was built atop empire, mass killing, and Cold War impunity. Attractive trains and consumer life do not erase the regional human cost or U.S. protection of perpetrators. (10:36–13:05)
• The United States established a global Cold War order with nuclear violence and anti-left intervention across Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. (11:19–12:01)
• Japanese austerity and work culture are outcomes of class power, not deficient masculinity. Reactionary cultural diagnosis distracts from money, time, housing, labor, and social safety nets. (13:05–14:31)
• Both the U.S. health-insurance system and Japan’s conservative order worked as designed. Individual suffering is not a malfunction but collateral damage from systems organized around elite wealth. (14:10–14:53)
• Individual violence cannot substitute for mass organization. He explicitly rejects reliance on lone assassins and calls for collective anti-fascist action. (14:53–17:00)

Abstract

7. “Why Kim Jong Un Loves This South Korean Town” — South Korea as an American-backed neoliberal state

Video

• South Korea emerged from U.S. imperial war, dictatorship, and chaebol domination. He describes the modern state as “three chaebols in a trench coat.” (0:02–0:44)
• American military occupation shaped South Korean sovereignty and political economy. He notes U.S. operational control and the historical servicing economy around American troops. (0:23–0:44)
• Global spectacle displaces poor residents. Guryong Village was created by people removed without compensation before the 1986 Asian Games and 1988 Seoul Olympics. (2:29–4:36)
• Extreme poverty beside Gangnam luxury exposes ownership, not national income, as the central question. (4:36–7:47)
• Residents built and maintain their own utilities while the city withholds land rights and services. (5:19–7:47)
• Liberal democracy can collapse quickly into military rule. The attempted declaration of martial law reveals how thin procedural safeguards can be. (8:07–10:30)
• Workers, feminists, and queer groups—not elite institutions alone—defended democracy. (10:05–11:11)
• Anti-feminism is a governing distraction from material failure. It did not solve rent, wages, healthcare, or the birth-rate crisis. (10:50–12:15)
• Unions can win material gains through organized leverage. He notes a subway settlement raising pay and staffing before a planned strike. (11:11)
• South Korea’s neoliberal model was historically subsidized by U.S. military power and is becoming unstable. Concessions to the far right point toward authoritarianism rather than renewal. (12:15–12:35)

Abstract

8. “What Happens When AI Replaces 80% of Workers?” — technology under capitalism

Video

• Automation is politically distributed, not inherently liberating or destructive. Society chose long work and unequal profit during earlier automation and can choose differently with AI. (0:00–1:23)
• A large share of modern employment is socially pointless. He treats insurance administration and financial engineering as jobs created by dysfunctional institutions rather than human need. (1:23–1:44)
• AI should produce shorter work, not mass insecurity. He calls for universal healthcare, basic income, rent control, land reform, and time for relationships and art. (1:44–2:26)
• Without redistribution, AI produces “techno-feudalism.” A few owners control productive systems while the majority perform precarious or meaningless work. (2:06–2:47)
• Wall Street is organized crime with legal status. Its actors start wars, destabilize economies, appropriate wealth, and escape punishment while laid-off workers bear the cost. (2:47–3:28)
• Finance workers often cannot imagine institutions outside capitalism, even when their own jobs are threatened. (7:22–8:24)
• Extreme wealth is detached from contribution. His David Solomon example contrasts falling firm profit, rising executive pay, and extravagant private consumption. (8:24–9:29, 14:13–14:57)
• The question is ownership of productivity. Technological progress only becomes social progress when workers share control and gains.

Abstract

9. “I debunked the CIA’s narrative about China’s Uyghurs” — Xinjiang and weaponized human rights

Video

• The dominant Western “cultural genocide” explanation lacks a coherent motive. He points to Hui Muslim life, minority exemptions from the one-child policy, Uyghur-language education and signage, Uyghur local officials, and state-funded preservation. (1:27–4:41)
• Western coverage misdescribes development as erasure. Kashgar’s earthquake-proofing project is his central example. (2:54–4:20)
• Xinjiang’s crackdown must be placed in the history of ETIM violence and transnational Salafi militancy. (4:41–6:51)
• U.S. policy helped create the militant ecosystem it later omitted from coverage. Through FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, he alleges CIA/Turkish networks trained and organized Uyghur militants after the Afghan war. (6:51–9:40)
• The United States revived the threat by removing ETIM from its terrorism list in 2020. (11:46–12:06)
• China’s strategy combined poverty reduction and vocational training with detention of suspected militants. (12:06–13:07)
• The local government cast too wide a net. He concedes that some people were compelled into programs and that community and faith leaders could have been used instead. (13:07–13:50)
• Adrian Zenz’s estimates are ideologically and methodologically compromised. Hovagim attacks the sample size behind mass-detention estimates and the construction of an IUD statistic. (13:50–16:18)
• U.S. officials and think tanks accept weak claims because instability serves energy and defense interests. He links Xinjiang’s oil, gas, minerals, and Belt and Road position to Jamestown Foundation funders and former intelligence officials. (16:18–18:04)
• Sanctions on Xinjiang products can undermine the material improvement they claim to advance. (18:04–18:47)
• “Human rights” language is selectively weaponized to justify control of strategic regions. (18:26–19:09)
• China’s desert-restoration program represents development with rather than removal of Indigenous residents. He contrasts it with Zionist “making the desert bloom” rhetoric. (19:09–20:52)
• U.S. and Israeli mass violence make Western moral comparison radically asymmetric. (20:52–21:35)
• He does not claim Xinjiang is free of harm. He acknowledges compulsory participation, a heavy-handed crackdown, diaspora distrust, tight security, and scars left by state policy. (13:07–13:50, 21:56–22:39)

J. Public-interview and public-post additions

Statements found outside the nine videos

• In a 2026 interview, he described moving to China to escape the “American Century of Humiliation,” called himself a socialist, argued for revolutionary change, and said China restored his sense that collective progress is possible. This overlaps heavily with the original interview rather than adding a separate doctrine. Apple Podcasts episode
• In an interview published by Tianshannet, a state-affiliated Xinjiang outlet, he said Uyghurs had been used as a CIA pawn, that Western think tanks and war- or oil-linked interests fabricate Xinjiang narratives, and that reflexive references to Uyghurs, Taiwan, or Tibet prevent Westerners from observing ordinary Chinese life. Treat the wording cautiously because the outlet selected and framed the quotations. Tianshannet interview
• Recurring public-post themes include: the Pentagon’s repeated audit failures; U.S. sanctions and bombing of nonaligned oil states; police violence contrasted with Chinese technological development; and the claim that imperialism is capitalism’s mature political form. These are compact restatements of the arguments above, not separate evidence for them.

K. His recurring anti-West doctrine

Recurring premise	What it explains in his framework
Capital seeks extraction, not welfare.	Housing scarcity, healthcare denial, finance, useless work, prison labor, colonial mining, and AI inequality.
Empire is capitalism operating internationally.	Coups, proxy wars, sanctions, military bases, support for authoritarian allies, and control of resources.
Race and culture organize class domination.	Settler colonialism, Jim Crow, prison labor, Islamophobia, anti-feminism, and hostility to migrants or foreign enemies.
Media and expertise are ownership institutions.	Think-tank narratives, NGO reports, war coverage, sports patriotism, and anti-China consensus.
The West hides coercion behind procedure.	Elections coexist with oligarchy; markets with monopoly; NGOs with donor power; sanctions with civilian punishment; law with racial and class control.
China breaks the spell of inevitability.	Infrastructure, industrial policy, safety, transit, and long-range planning show that American stagnation is chosen.
Organization—not individual heroism—is the remedy.	Socialism, unions, public planning, mass politics, anti-fascism, and collective ownership of technological gains.

L. What is strongest, and where he overreaches

Strongest recurring arguments

• Ownership and incentives matter more than national wealth. His best examples compare abundant resources with weak public outcomes: U.S. healthcare, housing, Congo’s minerals, prison labor, and AI productivity.
• State capacity is real and politically constructed. China does not prove every claim he makes about socialism, but it does rebut the idea that large infrastructure and industrial programs are technically impossible.
• U.S. anti-communism repeatedly supported authoritarian and colonial continuities. Korea, Japan, Congo, Iran, and Latin America form a coherent historical pattern even when an individual causal claim needs checking.
• Nominally independent institutions carry funder and ownership incentives. Think tanks, media firms, sports leagues, NGOs, and foundations should be evaluated through their financing and institutional role as well as their language.
• Technological gain has no automatic social distribution. AI, automation, and industrial productivity can yield shorter work or greater owner power depending on institutions.
• American racial hierarchy and class extraction are historically entangled. Angola is his clearest case because the legal, geographic, and labor continuities are visible.

Recurrent analytical weaknesses

• A conflict of interest is not proof that a claim is false. Oil, defense, or government funding warrants scrutiny but cannot by itself refute Xinjiang research, an NGO report, or an expert’s evidence.
• He frequently infers coordination from timing and aligned incentives. “This benefits Washington” is weaker than evidence that Washington planned it.
• His comparisons are asymmetrical. He foregrounds Western crimes and historical context while often treating Chinese or North Korean coercion as reactive, exaggerated, or secondary.
• Eyewitness normality cannot settle hidden-abuse claims. Seeing ordinary Uyghur life, bilingual signs, or renovated homes is relevant but does not test what happened to people outside the itinerary.
• Development is not a complete human-rights answer. Infrastructure, poverty reduction, safety, and cultural display do not automatically disprove detention, coercive assimilation, censorship, or political repression.
• He sometimes collapses distinct actors into “the West.” Governments, firms, media, NGOs, intelligence services, and publics may share structures without sharing one intention or command.
• Rhetorical precision exceeds evidentiary precision. “Genocide,” “puppet,” “one-party state,” “slavery,” and large death figures often compress real harms into claims requiring much narrower definitions and stronger sourcing.

M. Source boundary

This expansion covers the original long interview plus nine public videos with sustained arguments about America, Europe, Western institutions, imperialism, capitalism, or China. Short campaign videos and personality-focused pieces were not treated as separate ideological sources when they only repeated themes already mapped. No transcript upload is currently needed: public captions were recoverable for every video used here.

Handwritten Notebook Pages

Source

Open Pro-China talking points — Eric Hovagim notebook pages — start at notebook p. 122 (file not included in this release).

Link to original

Evidence and fact-check

Eric Hovagim - Evidence and Fact-Check

Verdict key

• Supported: the central factual claim survives ordinary qualification.
• Partly supported: a real pattern is compressed, overgeneralized, or causally overstated.
• Misleading: important omitted context changes the apparent conclusion.
• Unsupported / rhetorical: the interview gives no adequate basis for the claim.
• Normative: a moral or political judgment, not a fact that data can settle.

Executive assessment

Hovagim’s best-supported claims concern Chinese poverty reduction, the role of state planning and public R&D, American regional and infrastructure failures, the influence of affluent interests, the burden of housing/food/health costs, congressional conflicts of interest, colonial legacies, and the reality that Chinese infrastructure finance has appeal in Africa.

His weakest claims are the totalizing ones: America is simply “not a democracy,” all presidents are bad in the same relevant sense, China criticism is commonly a CIA/NED product, the CIA invented “conspiracy theory,” surveillance can be judged by one helpful encounter, Europe primarily lectures while China builds, and personal visibility in Shanghai defeats evidence about repression elsewhere.

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Claim-by-claim matrix

Claim	Verdict	What the evidence supports—and what it does not
China lifted about 800 million people out of poverty.	Supported	The World Bank credits China with close to 800 million people escaping extreme poverty over roughly four decades. It also ties the result to reform and opening, rapid growth, structural transformation, infrastructure, urbanization, effective governance, and targeted poverty policy—not to planning alone. World Bank overview · full report · Full poverty fact-check
The reduction was “100% planned.”	Misleading	Deliberate policy mattered enormously, but “100%” erases household incentives, market liberalization, foreign investment, export access, migration, private enterprise, favorable demographics, and global integration. It also blurs the sharp break between Mao-era planning and post-1978 reforms.
Ordinary Chinese people receive the lowest share of GDP in modern history; “the state is rich, the people are poor.”	Directionally supported; universal superlative unsupported	Household consumption was only 39.9% of GDP in 2024 and the NBS reports 40.0% in 2025, among the lowest shares of major economies. But this is not the same as household income: the IMF reports labor income at about 58.6% of GDP in 2024. The other 60% does not simply go to the Party; it includes government consumption, investment by public and private actors, corporate saving, and net exports. Dikötter’s later wording—“among the lowest of any major economy”—is defensible. His book’s exact saying is “The state is rich, the people are poor” (国富民穷), not “the temple is rich, the monks are poor.” [[China’s Poverty Reduction - The 800 Million Claim#“The state is rich, the people are poor” is a distributional claim
America behaves like an oligarchy.	Partly supported	Gilens and Page found economic elites and business groups had substantial independent effects on U.S. policy in their dataset, while average citizens had little or no independent effect. That is powerful evidence of unequal responsiveness, not proof that elections, parties, courts, movements, and mass opinion never matter or that the U.S. is literally non-democratic in every dimension. Gilens & Page, 2014
The American Dream means joining the capitalist owners and oligarchs so one can exploit other people’s work.	Insightful as a critique of one status fantasy; misleading as a definition	Some Americans do imagine success as passive ownership, insider access, or escape from exploitation by gaining power over others. But the American Dream can instead mean independence from arbitrary power through a home, savings, education, secure work, or a small business. Ownership is not synonymous with oligarchy, and employment is not inherently exploitation. The proper target is concentrated and unaccountable ownership, monopoly, rent extraction, and unequal bargaining power. [[Eric Hovagim - Philosophical and Rhetorical Framework#Counterargument: The American Dream as independence rather than domination
Elections offer no meaningful choice.	Unsupported as an absolute	The parties overlap on some elite and foreign-policy commitments, but they produce major differences in taxation, labor regulation, abortion, climate, immigration, judges, health policy, voting rules, and civil rights. “Constrained choice” is defensible; “no meaningful choice” is not.
Public R&D is superior to private capital because venture capital prioritizes short-term returns.	Partly supported, but falsely framed as a choice between communism and capitalism	Public funding is indispensable for basic research, broad spillovers, and long-horizon missions: the federal government funded about 41% of U.S. basic research in 2023. But venture capital is only one form of private finance, VC funds are normally structured for at least ten years, and businesses funded about 75% of total U.S. R&D while specializing in applied research, product development, commercialization, and scaling. The evidence supports a complementary public–private pipeline, not the claim that private capital cannot innovate or that public research is intrinsically communist. NSF/NCSES · SEC on venture funds · [[Eric Hovagim - Philosophical and Rhetorical Framework#Counterargument: Public R&D and private capital solve different problems
California high-speed rail demonstrates American incapacity.	Partly supported	GAO documented incomplete assumptions, weak traceability, right-of-way and environmental risks, financing uncertainty, and threats of delay and cost growth. It is a valid state-capacity example, but one project cannot establish incapacity across all American government. GAO-13-304
Hyperloop displaced a conventional California train.	Misleading / disputed causality	Hyperloop rhetoric may have distracted public debate, but the California rail project’s problems also include land acquisition, governance, phasing, litigation, funding, and cost control. “A billionaire killed the train with a fake idea” is too monocausal.
Small American towns are abandoned by capital and government.	Partly supported	Rural population loss, hospital closures, limited transit, deindustrialization, mine closure, and uneven broadband and investment are well-documented. But outcomes vary widely, and federal transfers, reclamation, infrastructure grants, and development programs mean “no investment” is an overstatement. His town comparison is illustrative, not representative sampling.
AI data centers can increase local electricity costs without broadly rebuilding a town.	Plausible, case-dependent	Large loads can require costly grid expansion, and rate design determines who pays. The effect is not automatic; tax revenue, jobs, utility regulation, and negotiated infrastructure matter. The interview gives no evidence for the specific Wyoming example.
American engineers are funneled into weapons.	Partly supported	U.S. defense and aerospace absorb substantial technical talent and public R&D. “Funnel” implies exclusivity and ignores large civilian technology, energy, biomedical, academic, and manufacturing sectors.
U.S. cost-of-living anxiety is real.	Supported	Food, shelter, medical services, insurance, and utilities experienced large cumulative increases after 2020, even when annual inflation later slowed. BLS data support the pressure; they do not support every anecdotal price. BLS 2021 inflation review · BLS June 2025 CPI
Health insurance costs $8,000 a month.	Unsupported as a general claim	Some older families, small-business plans, or unusual coverage could face extreme total premiums, but this is not a defensible typical monthly figure. Treat it as rhetorical emphasis unless tied to a specific plan and household.
Congressional stock trading creates a serious conflict of interest.	Supported	The STOCK Act applies insider-trading rules and requires transaction reporting, while recurring bipartisan proposals seek ownership or trading bans because disclosure alone does not remove conflicts or appearances of self-dealing. CRS: Taking Stock of the STOCK Act · CRS proposal analysis
Nancy Pelosi personally used inside information.	Unsupported in this interview	Suspicion based on returns, timing, or her husband’s trading is not proof. A defensible claim is that members and spouses can hold and trade assets affected by public decisions, creating actual or perceived conflicts. The allegation of a crime requires transaction-level and informational evidence.
The New York Stock Exchange is merely gambling and should be abolished.	Normative and reductive	Secondary markets contain speculation, rent-seeking, manipulation, and gambling-like behavior. They also price assets, supply liquidity, diversify risk, and lower capital costs. The harms support regulation; abolition does not follow without an alternative allocation system.
Prediction markets and betting apps are destroying America.	Rhetorical overstatement	Addiction, financial harm, pervasive advertising, and gamification are legitimate concerns. “Destroying America” is not measurable and substitutes moral intensity for causal evidence.
American suburbanism produces atomization and low trust.	Partly supported	Car dependence, separation of uses, long commutes, weak third places, and residential sorting can reduce casual interaction. But trust varies within suburbs and dense cities, and urban density does not automatically produce community. His Nextdoor anecdotes cannot settle the general question. → Full comparison
China is simply safer than America.	Partly supported but hard to compare	America’s firearm homicide and mass-shooting risks are real, and many Chinese cities have low visible violent crime. Cross-national crime data differ in definition, recording, transparency, and accessibility. “I felt safer” is valid testimony about experience, not a complete crime comparison.
Chinese police are less corrupt or threatening than U.S. police.	Unsupported from his evidence	A handful of polite encounters can show that ordinary interactions need not match Western stereotypes. They cannot assess corruption, due process, coercion, political policing, treatment of citizens versus foreigners, or regional differences. → Full policing assessment
Chinese cameras are mostly benign tools used for safety.	Misleading by omission	Camera networks can deter and solve visible crime; recent causal research finds crime reductions in Chinese cities. The same infrastructure also expands state capacity for identification, compliance, censorship, and political control. A safety benefit does not answer the civil-liberties question. Economic study of cameras and crime · Full surveillance assessment · Full policing assessment
Western reports falsely imply that every Chinese person has one national social-credit score.	Largely supported as a correction	Popular “Black Mirror” accounts often collapse fragmented blacklists, regulatory databases, commercial credit, local pilots, and court enforcement into a single universal number. But correcting that myth does not make China’s real data integration, blacklisting, or surveillance trivial.
Negative thoughts about Chinese surveillance are evidence of Western propaganda.	Circular / unfalsifiable	A belief cannot be validated by defining disagreement as conditioning. The proper test is institutional: legal authority, oversight, remedies, error rates, target groups, uses, retention, and evidence from both beneficiaries and victims.
The CIA invented the phrase “conspiracy theory.”	False	The phrase appears decades before the CIA’s 1967 dispatch about criticism of the Warren Report. The document used the existing plural phrase; it did not coin it. The CIA may have influenced a particular political use, which is a different claim. Google Ngram corpus
U.S. institutions have lost public trust.	Supported	Long-run polling shows major declines and sharp partisan variation across government, media, and other institutions. The existence of distrust does not make any specific conspiracy probable.
Obama was responsible for the Kunduz hospital strike.	Supported at the administration/command level; rhetoric needs precision	A U.S. AC-130 struck the Doctors Without Borders trauma center in 2015. The Defense Department investigation attributed the strike to human errors, process failures, and equipment problems; MSF rejected the adequacy and independence of that account. Saying the Obama administration conducted the strike is fair; implying Obama personally ordered a hospital attack is not. Defense Department investigation briefing
Carter’s moral reputation is compromised by U.S. aid to Israel.	Factually grounded, morally interpretive	Carter brokered the 1979 Egypt–Israel peace treaty and U.S. commitments supported the agreement; U.S. aid to Israel long predates and outlasts him. Whether this nullifies his other achievements is a moral weighting, not a factual deduction. State Department history · CRS aid history
Every U.S. president has supported slavery, colonialism, or an exploitable underclass.	Rhetorical generalization	U.S. presidencies are embedded in institutions with histories of slavery, conquest, exclusion, labor coercion, and war. But treating every president as morally interchangeable prevents causal and comparative judgment.
European powers drew arbitrary borders that still shape Middle Eastern conflict.	Supported with qualification	British and French wartime agreements, mandates, and post-Ottoman state-making deeply affected borders and institutions. Present conflicts also reflect local actors, later wars, nationalism, state policy, external powers, and decades of change. Colonial causation is real but not exclusive.
Britain created the India–Pakistan and Kashmir conflicts.	Partly supported	British rule, rushed partition, and the institutional design of decolonization were central. The choices of Congress, the Muslim League, princely rulers, communal movements, and the new Indian and Pakistani states also mattered. State Department historical summary
France became rich by “emptying out Africa.”	Directionally grounded, too totalizing	French empire imposed coercion and costs on African taxpayers and shaped trade, labor, infrastructure, currency, and postcolonial influence. France’s total modern wealth has many sources; “Paris is paved with blood” is a moral metaphor, not an economic decomposition. Journal of Economic History
Europe lectures Africa while China builds hospitals.	Partly supported and selectively framed	China has financed and built hospitals, clinics, transport, energy, and other infrastructure, and its style can be attractive to African governments. European states also finance infrastructure, health, education, trade, and humanitarian programs. Chinese projects can create benefits, debt, elite bargains, environmental costs, and dependence. The slogan captures a perception, not a balanced ledger. PLOS study of Chinese health funding
Criticism of China commonly comes from NED, USAID, or CIA manufacture.	Unsupported as a general claim	U.S. institutions fund media, civil society, democracy, and strategic communications, and intelligence agencies have conducted propaganda historically. That cannot explain away independent journalism, Chinese documents, satellite imagery, academic research, court records, exile testimony, or criticism from Chinese citizens. Funding provenance is relevant to evaluate; it is not a refutation.
Physical travel to China defeats the negative narrative.	Useful but insufficient	Travel can correct stereotypes about ordinary life, infrastructure, safety, and prosperity. Short-term foreign visitors have limited language, social position, geographic reach, and exposure to coercive institutions. Visibility is data; it is not representative sampling.
China proves socialism works.	Unsupported as stated	China combines Communist Party rule, state ownership and direction, markets, private firms, wage labor, global trade, land finance, and capital accumulation. Its success can support particular claims about state capacity and industrial policy, but the label “socialism” does not identify which mechanism caused which outcome. Comprehensive communist planning also has recurring calculation, incentive, soft-budget, information, corruption, and accountability failures. Full counterargument and reading list

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Important Chinese counterevidence omitted from the interview

These omissions do not erase China’s achievements. They matter because Hovagim uses China as a whole-system comparison.

• Property and local-government debt: the investment-heavy model has produced a prolonged property adjustment, weak homebuyer confidence, high corporate/public debt, and local-government financing risks. IMF 2025 Article IV
• Uneven development: wealthy coastal cities are not representative of poorer inland areas, shrinking northeastern cities, villages, or migrant workers’ access to urban benefits.
• Hukou and migrant labor: household registration can separate migrants from equal access to education, health, and social services where they work.
• Youth employment and work intensity: graduate underemployment, youth unemployment, and “996” work culture complicate the claim that the system reliably offers progress to young people.
• Political censorship and coercion: media restrictions, digital censorship, detention, and limits on organizing are not answered by friendly routine police encounters.
• Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, and Tiananmen: a systemic assessment must include the places and events where political control is most visible, not only safe and affluent urban consumption.
• Foreigner selection effects: a Western visitor in Shanghai is often wealthier, more mobile, and less exposed to household registration, labor discipline, political organizing, and local administrative power than an ordinary citizen.

Overall scorecard

Layer of his case	Assessment
Diagnosis of U.S. infrastructure, costs, regional inequality, elite conflicts, and low trust	Often strong
China as proof that more state capacity and long-term planning are possible	Strong but requires symmetric costs
China as proof of socialism or a superior total system	Not established
Europe as historically implicated in colonial extraction	Strong
Europeans as a uniform arrogant type	Stereotype, not analysis
China-versus-West media critique	Some selection-bias insight, weakened by unfalsifiability
Personal anecdotes about safety and police	Valuable experience, weak general evidence

Link to original

Philosophical and rhetorical framework

Eric Hovagim - Philosophical and Rhetorical Framework

The worldview underneath the talking points

Hovagim is making a materialist, anti-oligarchic, socialist, and anti-colonial argument.

• Materialist: judge systems by housing, wages, trains, safety, food, healthcare, and visible improvement—not by constitutional labels alone.
• Class-first: apparent cultural conflict conceals the decisive conflict between owners and everyone else.
• State-capacity socialist: markets do not plan adequately; coordinated public power must direct capital toward long-term needs.
• Anti-imperialist: American war and European colonial history disqualify easy Western claims to moral superiority.
• Developmentalist: legitimacy comes partly from the demonstrated ability to improve ordinary material life.
• Epistemically populist: seeing streets, trains, shops, and police encounters is treated as more trustworthy than elite media narratives.

The strongest version of his reasoning

1. The United States is enormously wealthy.
2. It nevertheless fails to provide reliable infrastructure, affordable essentials, regional opportunity, and equal accountability.
3. These are not primarily technical failures; they reflect who controls investment and government.
4. China shows that large-scale construction, industrial coordination, and poverty reduction remain possible.
5. Therefore Americans should stop treating stagnation as inevitable and restore democratic control over capital and planning.

This argument is powerful even if one rejects Hovagim’s view of China. Its conclusion can support social democracy, developmental liberalism, democratic socialism, labor republicanism, or other mixed systems.

The hidden bridge in his argument

Hovagim moves too quickly through this inference:

China built and improved rapidly → Chinese planning caused the success → the system is socialist → socialism is the remedy for America.

Each arrow needs a separate demonstration. China’s outcomes reflect a mixture of:

• party-state coordination;
• post-1978 market reform;
• household and private-enterprise incentives;
• foreign capital and technology;
• export access to the U.S.-led trading system;
• large-scale internal migration;
• land and property finance;
• infrastructure investment;
• demographic conditions;
• political coercion and limits on opposition.

The label does not isolate the causal mechanism.

The comparison asymmetry

America	China
Worst towns and broken projects	Prosperous, visible cities and successful projects
Structural explanation for failure	Anecdotal explanation for success
Police judged through violence and corruption	Police judged through helpful tourist encounters
National history foregrounded	Repression and political history backgrounded
Costs treated as systemic	Costs treated as Western narrative or omitted
Elite propaganda assumed effective	Chinese state messaging rarely analyzed

The right comparison would pair:

• Shanghai with New York and Hegang with postindustrial American towns;
• Chinese high-speed rail with successful U.S. infrastructure and China’s underused or debt-heavy projects;
• U.S. police violence with Chinese routine policing and political policing;
• American surveillance with Chinese surveillance under the same standards of law, oversight, remedy, and coercive use;
• American housing costs with Chinese prices, incomes, vacancies, mortgage losses, hukou access, and the property downturn.

Recurring rhetorical techniques

1. Counterexample by spectacle

Trains, skylines, electric vehicles, cheap meals, and safe streets carry more persuasive force than tables. Visible competence turns “America cannot” into “America chooses not to.” This is effective rhetoric and sometimes good evidence—but it selects what a visitor can see.

2. “Touch grass” epistemology

Travel is framed as a direct cure for propaganda. Firsthand experience should update belief, but a short visit samples consumer-facing normality, not the whole distribution of institutional power.

3. Motive substitution

Instead of answering a claim about China, he sometimes asks whether NED, USAID, CIA, or Western status anxiety produced it. Source incentives matter; they do not determine truth. A compromised messenger can still present true evidence.

4. The unfalsifiability seal

If skepticism about China is itself evidence of Western conditioning, contrary information confirms the theory. A sound claim must state what evidence would change the speaker’s mind. Hovagim’s explicit refusal to self-check at 1:38:53 is the interview’s largest epistemic warning sign.

5. Whataboutism with a legitimate moral core

He answers Chinese censorship or surveillance with American bombing, policing, or data collection. The comparison can reveal hypocrisy and inconsistent standards. It cannot tell us whether the original Chinese practice is justified.

6. Moral leveling

By placing all presidents and Western states inside one long structure of conquest and exploitation, he prevents symbolic innocence. The cost is loss of scale: reform and reaction, peace and war, and different degrees of harm become morally flattened.

7. Anecdote-to-system inference

A recovered item, a polite officer, an affordable meal, or a clean station becomes evidence about national governance. Anecdotes are strong for refuting “this never happens” and weak for estimating prevalence or institutional limits.

8. Punching-up asymmetry

He accepts ridicule of French, British, European, or white people because they belong to historically dominant groups. This distinguishes power-sensitive satire from symmetric etiquette, but it can also convert historical analysis into ethnic essentialism.

9. Shock humor as coalition sorting

The Yakub myth, hanging leaders under a Nuremberg analogy, abolishing the NYSE, insulting European food, and “history will absolve me” reward an audience already inside the moral frame. They create clarity and energy while driving away careful distinctions.

10. Prophecy through contradiction

He predicts rent, automation, war, and elite extraction will intensify until history vindicates socialism. This is rhetorically resilient: worsening conditions prove the theory, while improvements can be credited to pressure for planning. Without disconfirming conditions, it is prophecy rather than testable social science.

Where he is genuinely strongest

• Possibility: another country’s visible competence can expand the American political imagination.
• Power analysis: wealth and ownership constrain what elections alone can accomplish.
• Time horizon: markets routinely underprovide public goods, basic research, infrastructure, and place-based development.
• Moral consistency: Americans and Europeans should apply standards on war, surveillance, colonialism, and civilian harm to themselves as well as rivals.
• Trust: a society saturated with scams, impunity, and failed delivery will eventually distrust true statements along with false ones.
• Colonial memory: European lectures are received in a world where empire is recent history, not an abstract preface.

Where he is weakest

• No symmetric audit of China. The causal and moral costs of the countermodel are underexamined.
• No clear falsification rule. He explicitly rejects self-correction at the end.
• Labels replace mechanisms. “Socialism,” “capitalism,” “oligarchy,” and “propaganda” do too much explanatory work.
• Low-resolution grouping. America, Europe, and the West contain major institutional differences; China contains major regional and class differences.
• Status and truth are conflated. Western hypocrisy does not make a Chinese claim true, and Chinese success does not make Western criticism false.
• Visitor privilege is invisible. His ability to opt in and out of China’s institutions differs from the position of citizens subject to them.

Counterargument: The American Dream as independence rather than domination

At 1:24:24–1:25:05, Hovagim characterizes the American Dream as the working class aspiring to join the capitalist owners and oligarchs so that they can exploit everyone below them. At 1:40:53, he returns to the image of a worker spending ten or twelve hours making money for an owner he has never met.

This identifies a real corruption of the dream: a society can teach people to respond to hierarchy by seeking admission to the exploiting class rather than abolishing arbitrary privilege. Insider trading, rent extraction, inherited wealth, monopoly, and the fantasy of passive income at someone else’s expense fit his criticism.

But it does not follow that this is the meaning of the American Dream itself.

Independence is not the same as domination

The stronger historical and moral ideal is not “become the master instead of the servant,” but become less dependent on any master. A home, savings, education, a profession, a farm, or a small business can give ordinary people protection from arbitrary employers, landlords, inherited status, and government patronage. That aspiration seeks autonomy rather than subjects to command.

Ownership is not automatically exploitation

Creating a useful enterprise, investing savings, assuming risk, coordinating production, and paying agreed wages are not morally equivalent to monopoly or political capture. A labor relationship becomes exploitative through coercion, severe power imbalance, suppressed alternatives, unsafe conditions, or compensation disconnected from contribution—not simply because an owner exists.

“The capitalist class” collapses important distinctions

A self-employed plumber, family restaurant, worker cooperative, pension fund, employee shareholder, competitive manufacturer, absentee landlord, and monopoly platform are different kinds of ownership. Calling all of them oligarchs allows the class label to replace analysis of scale, power, governance, rents, and social contribution.

Workers and owners can overlap

People can earn wages while owning retirement funds, homes, shares, or parts of their workplaces. Cooperatives, employee stock ownership, profit sharing, unions, and codetermination can spread capital income and workplace authority. The alternative to concentrated ownership need not be the abolition of all private ownership; it can be broader and more accountable ownership.

Employment is not necessarily zero-sum

Labor, capital, entrepreneurship, public infrastructure, accumulated knowledge, and consumer demand can jointly create value. The distribution of the resulting gains may be unjust, but it cannot be settled by assuming in advance that workers created the entire surplus and owners merely took it. The relevant questions are contribution, bargaining power, risk, alternatives, and who governs the enterprise.

“Invisible owners” names a governance problem

Remote shareholders and asset managers can exercise power without personal responsibility to workers or communities. That supports criticism of shareholder primacy and concentrated finance. It does not describe every employer or prove that productive ownership is inherently exploitative. Possible remedies include unions, antitrust enforcement, worker representation, transparency, profit sharing, progressive taxation, public goods, and limits on rent extraction.

Strongest counter

The American Dream should not mean escaping exploitation by becoming an exploiter. It should mean acquiring enough security, property, bargaining power, and civic equality that neither employers nor owners can arbitrarily control one’s life. The problem is not aspiration to ownership itself; it is an economy that concentrates ownership so severely that independence for some requires dependence for everyone else.

Hovagim’s argument is strongest against oligarchy, monopoly, rent extraction, inherited privilege, and impunity. It becomes reductive when it treats every business owner as an oligarch, every wage relationship as exploitation, and every desire for economic independence as a desire to dominate others. See also the evidence matrix.

Counterargument: Public R&D and private capital solve different problems

At 14:30–15:58, Hovagim argues that venture capitalists seek the fastest possible return and therefore cannot produce long-term developments such as electric vehicles, smaller semiconductors, the internet, or components used in smartphones without state-funded programs.

He identifies a genuine market failure but draws the wrong institutional conclusion.

What the argument gets right

Basic research often creates knowledge that is difficult for one investor to own, may take decades to mature, and can benefit competitors and the public. Private investors therefore tend to underfund research with large spillovers, uncertain applications, or no foreseeable customer. Government can accept longer horizons, fund work across disciplines and regions, and pursue public missions whose benefits cannot be captured through sales.

The evidence supports this division of labor. The federal government funded about 41% of U.S. basic research in 2023, compared with an estimated 35% funded by business. Public funding is therefore indispensable, particularly at the uncertain, foundational end of the innovation process. NSF/NCSES, Discovery: R&D Activity and Research Publications

Public research is not communism

Tax-funded universities, laboratories, grants, procurement, and mission-oriented agencies exist inside mixed capitalist economies. They do not by themselves establish collective ownership of production, abolition of markets, or rule by a communist party. Calling public R&D “communism” makes any government activity communist and prevents meaningful comparison among social democracy, developmental capitalism, industrial policy, and command planning.

The relevant question is which institution should fund which stage of innovation, not which ideological label can claim the laboratory.

Venture capital is not all private capital

Hovagim generalizes from encounters with venture capitalists to the entire private sector. Private innovation is also financed through retained corporate earnings, established research laboratories, strategic partnerships, foundations, banks, angel investors, long-term shareholders, and customer revenue. These sources have different risk tolerances and time horizons.

Even venture capital is not literally an immediate-return instrument. The SEC describes venture funds as normally structured for at least ten years, with early years devoted to investment and later years to monitoring and eventual exits. VC remains exit-driven and can neglect infrastructure, regional development, or technologies with slow regulatory and manufacturing paths, but “seeks a return” does not mean “incapable of financing long-horizon risk.” SEC, Early-Stage Investors

Private R&D is empirically too large to dismiss

In 2023, U.S. businesses performed approximately $722 billion in domestic R&D. About $43 billion was basic research, $110 billion applied research, and $568 billion experimental development; most of this spending came from the companies’ own funds. NSF/NCSES business R&D survey

Across the entire U.S. system, businesses funded roughly 75% of R&D in 2023, while the federal government funded about 18%. The business share is concentrated in development closer to usable products, whereas public funding is disproportionately important to basic research. This is evidence for specialization and complementarity, not proof that either sector can replace the other. NSF/NCSES indicators

Discovery is not the same as deployment

A government may fund the scientific foundation of a technology without designing the final product, discovering consumer demand, building reliable supply chains, reducing manufacturing costs, or distributing it at scale. Private firms frequently perform those later functions. Conversely, a private product may embody decades of publicly funded knowledge.

Assigning the entire achievement to whichever institution acted first commits an origin fallacy. The internet, semiconductors, biotechnology, aviation, GPS, and modern computing are better understood as cumulative public–private systems: public science and procurement reduced early uncertainty; universities and firms supplied researchers; entrepreneurs recombined technologies; capital financed development; and markets tested, selected, and scaled applications.

Public institutions also face short-termism and failure

Government is not automatically patient, competent, or public-spirited. Election cycles, annual appropriations, agency turf, prestige projects, lobbying, contractor capture, military priorities, and fear of visible failure can distort public R&D. Markets can terminate bad projects too quickly, but governments can preserve them too long. Both systems require feedback and accountability.

The strongest model is a pipeline, not a winner

The federal SBIR and STTR programs illustrate the hybrid model: public awards finance risky technical development by small firms, while later commercialization uses government procurement, private investment, customer revenue, or some combination. In FY 2023 these programs issued about $4.5 billion in awards, explicitly combining federal research goals with private-sector commercialization. GAO, 2025

Strongest counter

Public R&D is often superior for basic science, broad spillovers, national missions, and technologies whose benefits cannot be privately captured. Private capital is often superior for product selection, commercialization, manufacturing discipline, and scaling. Venture capital’s return pressure is a real limitation, but it does not make public R&D communism or establish that private capital cannot innovate. The most productive system socializes part of the early risk while preserving competition, decentralized experimentation, and accountability over who captures the gains.

The policy implication is not laissez-faire. It is to increase stable public research, use procurement and prizes intelligently, prevent monopoly capture, attach public-return conditions where taxpayers absorb major risks, and preserve multiple private and public pathways for turning knowledge into useful products. See the evidence matrix.

Counterargument: Communist planning concentrates the failures it promises to abolish

Hovagim treats visible Chinese construction, public R&D, and poverty reduction as evidence for socialism while treating corruption, debt, shortages, and misallocation as incidental or comparable to problems under capitalism. The stronger institutional comparison asks whether a system can discover errors, expose corruption, close failures, and replace decision-makers.

Comprehensive communist planning performs poorly on those tests for four linked reasons:

1. Productive assets lack reliable market prices, making alternative uses difficult to compare.
2. Local knowledge must travel through a hierarchy whose members are rewarded for pleasing superiors.
3. State firms and politically important projects expect rescue, weakening bankruptcy and loss as feedback.
4. One-party control restricts the independent press, opposition, courts, unions, auditors, and whistleblowers that could expose abuse.

This creates a recurring cycle of ambitious targets, distorted reports, preferential allocation, shortages, informal favors, bailouts, and anticorruption campaigns controlled by the same hierarchy. Soviet archival research documents false accounting and political protection; China’s own 2024 statistics report 877,000 disciplinary cases opened and 889,000 people punished, although those totals include many noncriminal violations. The scale shows both extensive enforcement and the implausibility of treating communist party discipline as a substitute for outside accountability.

China is the most important complication, not a refutation. It achieved extraordinary growth while retaining Communist Party rule—but its post-1978 acceleration followed household contracting, market prices, private and mixed enterprise, foreign investment, export competition, and the closure or reform of low-productivity SOEs. Research attributes more than three-quarters of an early post-reform agricultural-productivity increase to strengthened household incentives. The evidence supports state capacity plus market reform, not the assertion that poverty reduction was “100% planned.”

Strongest counter

A state can be patient without being wise, powerful without being well-informed, and capable of construction without allocating capital efficiently. Communist planning concentrates economic discretion in the same institution that controls political truth. The remedy for capitalist short-termism is therefore not an unaccountable planning monopoly, but public investment disciplined by plural information, competition where possible, transparent accounts, independent review, democratic removal, and the ability to terminate failed projects.

Full research, case studies, qualifications, and linked reading list: Communism - Inefficiency, Corruption, and the Accountability Problem.

Does his critique really connect to feminism, race, or other Western disputes?

Only indirectly. His master framework is class and state capacity, not feminism. Race enters through settler colonialism, white nationalism, empire, and the “punching up” standard. Gender is largely absent. Many of the problems he names—housing, regional decline, concentrated ownership, weak public goods, isolation, elite impunity—are deeper features of Western political economy that different ideological movements interpret in competing ways.

A better version of his thesis

China should be neither romanticized nor dismissed. Its development record shows that coordinated public power, infrastructure, industrial policy, and long time horizons can transform material life. Its censorship, coercion, surveillance, debt, and unequal citizenship show why state capacity must also be constrained by rights, accountability, and truthful feedback. The American task is to combine capacity with freedom—not to choose stagnation because the strongest alternative is authoritarian, or to excuse authoritarianism because it can build.

Questions to keep open

• Which Chinese outcomes come from planning, and which from markets, trade, demographics, or catch-up growth?
• Can democratic institutions build as quickly without suppressing vetoes that protect rights and property?
• Which vetoes are legitimate safeguards, and which are elite rent extraction?
• How should public investment be disciplined when elections, markets, and independent media are weak?
• What evidence would distinguish a real anti-China propaganda campaign from independent convergent criticism?
• Can America recover state capacity without militarizing it?
• Can Europe reckon with colonial history without treating present-day African and Asian states as passive objects?

Link to original

Original technique analysis

Pro-China Narrative Techniques - Eric Hovagim Analysis

⬅️ China · Source transcript: What China Shows Americans About America Eric Hovagim · Network context: Leftist China Network (file not included in this release) · Foreign Influence in the Campaign against American AI, Part II The Singham Ground Game · Ideology: Woke MOC · Communism

What this note is

A technique-level breakdown of the Honest Drink #190 interview with Eric Hovagim — an American socialist content creator who moved to China. The goal is not “he’s lying.” Much of what he says is true. The goal is to isolate how true premises are routed to conclusions they don’t support, and which moves make the position unfalsifiable.

⚠️ Fairness note up front: this is open advocacy, not covert propaganda. He states plainly that he is a socialist and wants to “communize the United States of America.” The propagandistic quality is structural — selective framing, unfalsifiable defenses, motive-delegitimization — not concealed identity. Attacking him as a secret agent is the weak line; attacking the argument structure is the strong one.

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👤 Provenance — who is speaking, and for whom

This matters more than usual, because the network is already mapped elsewhere in this vault.

Fact (stated by him in the interview)	Why it matters
Produces content for Hasan Piker	Largest left political streamer; the distribution channel for this framing
Worked on Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 NYC mayoral campaign	Electoral-left pipeline
Ex-New Consensus think tank (wrote the Green New Deal)	Industrial-policy provenance; explains the developmental-state framing
Wrote a chapter for a Code Pink book titled China’s Not Our Enemy	⚠️ The load-bearing link — see below
In China ~8 months, girlfriend studying at Fudan	Total time in country is under a year
Self-described “socialist”; “I’m very interested in the various communist nations”	Not a neutral observer, and doesn’t claim to be

The Code Pink connection is the thread worth pulling

Code Pink is a documented node in the Neville Roy Singham network — the Shanghai-based American millionaire whose funding of PSL, ANSWER, and allied media is the subject of Foreign Influence in the Campaign against American AI, Part II The Singham Ground Game and your Leftist China Network (file not included in this release) canvas. You also hold clips of Singham addressing Chinese nationals as “comrades” and Hasan Piker naming Singham, PSL, ANSWER and Code Pink in one breath.
Publishing a chapter in a Code Pink volume literally titled China’s Not Our Enemy places this interview inside an existing, funded messaging ecosystem rather than treating it as one man’s travel diary.
Be precise about the claim: this establishes ecosystem membership and message alignment, not that he is paid by Beijing. Overstating it hands him the win.

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🧱 His actual argument, stated fairly

Reconstructed as a syllogism so it can be attacked at the right joint:

1. American material conditions are visibly decaying (forgotten towns, unaffordable rent, no high-speed rail, healthcare costs, gun violence).
2. Chinese material conditions are visibly improving everywhere, including tier-3/4 cities.
3. The difference is systemic: US capital allocation is governed by short-horizon private return; China’s is governed by long-horizon state planning.
4. Therefore the American system, not any particular president, is the problem — “I don’t view America as a democracy, I think it’s an oligarchy.”
5. Therefore the correct response is socialism, and China/Vietnam are the models to study.
6. And Western hostility to China is manufactured (NED, USAID, CIA), so criticism of China is evidence of propaganda rather than evidence about China.

Steps 1–3 are arguable and partly correct. Step 6 is the trapdoor — it converts a political argument into a closed system. Everything below is about how steps 4–6 are made to feel like they follow.

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🎭 The Technique Catalogue

1. Asymmetric comparison (the master move)

He compares China’s best against America’s worst, consistently and in both directions.

• China: Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chongqing, and a booming “tier-4” Zigong of 8 million with cranes and a preserved ancient town.
• America: Kemmerer, Wyoming (pop. ~2,000), Diamondville, Cokeville — friends in single- and double-wide trailers, “abject poverty,” a dead coal town.

Never compared: Shanghai vs. Manhattan or Houston. Never compared: rural Gansu, Guizhou or the Henan countryside vs. rural Ohio. The Chinese equivalents of Kemmerer — depopulated northeastern rust-belt cities like Hegang, Fuxin, Yichun — do not appear in the interview at all.

Counter: “Name the Chinese Kemmerer.” The comparison only works because one side is sampled at its frontier and the other at its tail.

2. “Just go outside and touch grass” — visibility as epistemology

“It’s literally just like go outside, go touch some grass here in China, go see the fruits of the labor.”

Presented as the ultimate proof, and repeated by both hosts. The problem is that visible infrastructure is exactly the variable an authoritarian developmental state optimizes, and it is the cheapest thing for a visitor to observe. The method by construction cannot detect: censorship of citizens, the hukou system, 996 labor norms, local-government debt, the property developer collapse, youth unemployment, or anything happening to people who are not standing on a boulevard in Shanghai.

Counter: a metric that can only return good news isn’t a measurement. Pyongyang has a very nice metro.

3. The unfalsifiability seal (the single most important move)

Delivered by the hosts, not by Eric, which makes it more persuasive:

“No matter how progressive or open-minded or traveled we feel we are… there is still this stain of propaganda that we still haven’t washed off… once I’m in like a fearful state all the worst thoughts rush in.”

This converts any negative instinct about China into evidence of Western conditioning rather than evidence about China. It is a textbook thought-terminating structure: the theory explains its own disconfirmation. Note the built-in status reward — shedding the “stain” marks you as more awake than your peers.

Counter: ask what observation would count as evidence against the thesis. If none exists, it isn’t a claim about the world.

4. Motive-delegitimization / poisoning the well

“The criticism of the Chinese government oftentimes comes from a place of American propaganda, whether it’s the NED, the USAID, the CIA itself.”

Once critics are agents or dupes, no criticism has to be answered on the merits. This is what lets the interview run 110 minutes on Chinese governance without once addressing Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Tibet, Tiananmen, or the disappearance of Chinese citizens.

Counter: the sourcing of a claim is not its truth value. Uyghur testimony doesn’t become false because a US agency also criticized China.

5. Anecdote generalized into system (n = 2)

Two stories carry the entire surveillance section: the airport scammer, and his friend’s counterfeit banknotes. Both end warmly — police give him sausage on a stick and lychee juice; he’s allowed to edit the police report to be more favorable to the accused.

Three problems:

• Sample of two, both trivial property matters.
• Category error. He is a white American foreign national in tier-1/tier-2 cities reporting petty fraud — structurally the least likely person in China to encounter coercive state power. Nothing here tests how the system treats a Uyghur, a labor organizer, a metoo activist, or a citizen journalist. The host himself flags the parallel limit: “I’m speaking as a man here.”
• The anecdotes prove more than he thinks — see below.

6. Surveillance minimized via incompetence framing

“I thought this was a surveillance state, bro. I thought you had the master AI telling you.”

Because officers manually scrubbed camera footage for an hour, he concludes the surveillance state is a myth — and jokes he wishes they had a social credit score to punish sidewalk e-scooter riders.

The counterfactual he skips

In the second story, the state took under 24 hours to link a counterfeit banknote at a jewelry counter → the specific tourist who paid → the hotel she was registered at (passport registration) → her companion’s room, and produce her face on video. That is integrated identity–transaction–location tracking working quickly. He experienced a demonstration of the capability and reported it as evidence of its absence, because the officers were polite.
The design point: a mature surveillance system doesn’t need real-time watchers. Retrospective total recall is more efficient and is exactly what the hosts describe (“all of it is reactive”). Conceding “it’s only reactive” concedes the architecture.

7. Whataboutism as a formal template

The hosts explicitly build the deflection into a reusable rule: any criticism of China should be met the way “yeah, but we have iPhones” would meet a criticism of the US.

“Oh no, China’s not even communist anymore, it’s state capitalist.” “Okay, then implement that in the United States.”

Every China question is redirected to an American failing. The US failings are real — that’s what makes it work.

8. Explicit endorsement of asymmetric standards

The host runs the test himself. After ten minutes of mocking French and British people, he asks: what if we said this about Chinese people?

“Push back would come out… Why is that?” — “Because they haven’t been the privileged.” “So it’s fair game to punch up but you shouldn’t be punching down.”

This is the whole epistemology stated out loud: the acceptability of a claim is set by the group’s position on a power hierarchy, not by its accuracy. It is the same structure catalogued in Woke MOC and in the critical-theory material under 60.3 Politics — and here it is applied to a nuclear-armed great power with a $18T economy cast in the “punching up” role.

This is the most quotable self-indictment in the transcript.

9. Moral leveling / atrocity symmetry

“There has never been a good president in US history.” — Obama the drone president, “the only Nobel laureate to have bombed another Nobel laureate”; Carter quadrupled Israel funding.

If every US administration is irredeemable, then no comparative judgment between political systems is possible, and the CCP cannot be worse. Flattening removes the measuring instrument.

10. Racial origin myth, endorsed with a laugh

He raises the Nation of Islam’s “Yakub” doctrine — that an evil black scientist bred white people as a race of devils to plunder the world — and says:

“And I kind of ascribe to that… they kind of had a fair point.”

Hedged in comedy and immediately followed by colonial history, but the frame endorsed is racial essentialism about a hereditary character defect. Worth flagging plainly: if a right-wing commentator “kind of ascribed to” an equivalent myth about another group, it would end their career.

11. Conspiracy permissiveness as recruitment

“I will entertain any conspiracy about Charlie Kirk.” · Epstein/UFO files as deliberate distraction · his lifelong-Democrat father texting “false flag.”

Institutional trust collapse is presented not as a problem but as an opening. The pitch is: everything you were told is unreliable, therefore consider the alternative system. Cross-reference Demoralization and Subversion & Demoralization — this is precisely the “loss of shared epistemology precedes ideological substitution” pattern.

12. Revolutionary allusion, probably deliberate

“I think that history will absolve me.”

“History Will Absolve Me” is the title of Fidel Castro’s 1953 courtroom defense speech — a foundational text of the Cuban revolution. Combined with “communize the United States of America, brother,” this is in-group signaling, not a stray phrase.

13. Refusal of self-correction

Asked directly and generously — do you ever check yourself for echo-chamber drift? — the answer is a flat:

“No.”

Followed by the claim that vindication will arrive when American conditions deteriorate enough. This is accelerationist: worsening conditions confirm the thesis, so there is no state of the world in which he updates.

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✅ Where He Is Actually Right (steelman — don’t skip this)

Attacking these makes you look uninformed and costs you the strong points:

• American infrastructure decay and small-town abandonment are real. Kemmerer is a real place with a real story.
• VC short-termism vs. long-horizon public R&D is a legitimate, mainstream economic argument. The internet, GPS, touchscreens and core semiconductor research really were state-funded (cf. Mazzucato). He’s not inventing this.
• Hyperloop really was a bad idea, and his engineering reasoning is correct — heat dissipation in a vacuum is a genuine killer, and “just build the train” was the right answer.
• Congressional stock trading is a real, bipartisan scandal. The Pelosi point lands.
• Chinese urban safety, transit, and EV adoption genuinely do exceed most US cities. Visitors aren’t hallucinating this.
• US political identity-fusion is real — his contrast with Chinese depoliticization of daily identity is a fair observation.
• Institutional trust collapse is real and the establishment response to it has been poor.

The right posture

Concede all seven. The argument isn’t that his premises are false — it’s that a correct diagnosis of American dysfunction does not license his conclusion about Chinese governance, and that step 6 (all criticism is CIA propaganda) is doing work the evidence can’t support.

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🎯 The Strongest Counters

1. “Name the Chinese Kemmerer.” Forces the comparison to be symmetric. Hegang, Fuxin, Yichun; ghost cities; the rural left-behind-children population (~60M).
2. The poverty reduction has a date. 800M lifted out of poverty is real — and it began in 1978, after Deng abandoned Maoist economics for market liberalization and export access to the US-led order. He praises the outcome while advocating the ideology the outcome required abandoning. He even concedes the mechanism unknowingly: China had to “play within the confines of this really violent system the United States had implemented into the global order.”
3. Who created the poverty? “It was 100% planned” cuts both ways — the same party’s planning produced the Great Leap Forward famine and the Cultural Revolution. Selecting the post-1978 window is the entire trick.
4. The eight-month problem. Under a year in country, no Chinese language (“I barely speak Chinese”), living in tier-1 cities, socializing with expats and English-speaking neighbors. He is describing the expat surface of a country while making claims about its system.
5. Ask what’s missing. In 110 minutes on Chinese governance: zero mentions of Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, Tiananmen, hukou, 996, censorship of Chinese citizens, disappeared executives/journalists, or the property crisis. The omission is the finding.
6. The unfalsifiability test. “What would change your mind?” There is no answer in the transcript, and he says so directly.
7. Foreigner privilege. Every positive anecdote is an experience available specifically to a foreign passport holder. That is the population the state has the most incentive to treat well and the least need to control.

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🔗 Where this connects in the vault

• Network / funding → Foreign Influence in the Campaign against American AI, Part II The Singham Ground Game · Leftist China Network (file not included in this release) · Red-Handed- How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win
• Countervailing China analysis → Empire of Illusion Frank Dikötter on Why China Isn’t a Superpower Uncommon Knowledge (the “China is weaker than it looks” case) · Ep 237 Toshi Yoshihara on China’s Subversive Strategies · The Miseducation of Xi Jinping · China Industrialization
• Ideology & method → Woke MOC (the punching-up/punching-down standard) · Demoralization · Subversion & Demoralization (trust collapse as precondition) · Communism · Marxism
• Israel/US settler-colonial equivalence (his §“reckoning with one means reckoning with the other”) → this is the same argument mapped and answered in Zionism Debate - Anti-Zionist Arguments & Zionist Responses §6–8 and Colonizers. His “Greater Israel project,” “genocide,” and Nuremberg-gallows claims are addressed in Genocide · Emotionally Charged Phrases · Israel is Racist.
• Rhetoric & epistemics → How to Have Impossible Conversations - Peter Gregory Boghossian James A Lindsay (technique for unfalsifiable belief systems)

📌 One-line summary

A fluent, likeable, partly-correct indictment of American decay, welded to an unfalsifiable defense of Chinese governance — where the weld is the claim that all contrary evidence is CIA propaganda and all contrary instinct is internalized conditioning.

Link to original

Transcript

What China Shows Americans About America - Transcript

Source

Eric Hovagim on The Honest Drink, episode 190. This note contains the transcript only. For analysis, use Eric Hovagim - Complete Argument and Talking-Point Map.

Transcript

Intro

0:00 · The next day, the police came to our door in the hotel we were staying at. I was like, “Oh my god, we’re going to prison.” “Oh, okay. Easy, bro. You have the face surveillance technology. Use the use the fucking fingerprint scanner or whatever you got going on in this shit.” Yeah, no problem. And we sit there and we literally go through it like frame by frame. He’s like, “Which camera do you think it was? Do you think it was one over here?” I’m like, “I thought you were supposed to know this.

0:23 · I thought this is a surveillance state.

0:25 · Believe in the social credit score?” No, not before coming here. But I now that I’m here, I’m like, I wish they had it.

0:30 · Like you want, dude. Those those people on e- scooters running down the sidewalk almost driving me over. I’m like, they want them to be penalized. They need it. [laughter] So now only you got like cashy like shit like whatever whatever those like poly market shit, you know, like shit of the world companies.

0:45 · What’s more dystopian than that?

0:47 · They see videos every day on Twitter of little kids being bombed and they’re thinking, “What the fuck are we doing?

0:53 · What if we just didn’t fucking bomb them? And what if we just reduce my fucking rent? I think it’s become much more permissible, [music] at least in America, to describe yourself as a socialist defense contracting company like Lockheed.

1:05 · Friend of the show, Rathon.

1:07 · Friend of the show. [laughter] Sponsor of the show. We offended a lot of people on this, by the way.

1:10 · Let’s go.

1:13 · [music] [music] I mean, look, you you seem to be in a very Chinese time in your life.

Why Eric moved to China

1:22 · [laughter] I don’t What are you What are you talking about?

1:25 · Yeah. Where is this going?

1:26 · I want to see my Chinese rings that I’m wearing. [laughter] I mean, you’re all get up. The fact that you moved here, right?

1:32 · Um, yeah. So, you’re in early Chinese time in your life, I guess. Why, I guess, is the question. Like, why did you move from the United States to China? Um, what was it that you were seeing happening back home? Why why this move, I guess?

1:46 · Yeah, I think uh it’s a couple reasons. The the easy answer is my girlfriend wanted to come to China and uh study at Fudon University, get a master’s degree at Fudon, learn more about international public policy from the Chinese perspective. And I think that’s like the very easy like, oh well, my girlfriend dragged me here. But I think the real answer at least in in my my heart was

2:08 · living in the United States, you every 2 to four years are in this constant battle of okay, which annoying centrist Democrat do we have to support against the guy who wants to do unlimited genocide on the world? And like the centrist Democrat’s like, I only want 99% of genocide on on the rest of the world. And it’s like you have to do this silly little dance back and forth and then every so often it’ll be like a glimmer of hope and it’ll be like, you know, maybe you’ll have a Zoron mom Donnie come into action and and give people a glimmer of hope.

2:36 · But even then Zoron gets into office and as a consequence of the systems that are in place. He still has to keep on the billionaire Zionist police commissioner Jessica Tish or else the entire police force is going to turn their backs on him like what happened with David Dinkens, like what happened with Bill Delasio. And it feels so frustrating, so claustrophobic.

2:59 · And at the same time, I go back to my my home state of Arizona. I go to a movie theater and I hear a loud bang outside and I’m afraid that there’s like a mass shooter in the theater as well. Like there are so many like little material issues that just feel unsolved and that you cannot trust your neighbor.

3:13 · Politically there’s no meaningful progress even though every so often like a good Democrat gets into power and starts to push back against the establishment. And I before working in politics like this, I was working at a think tank called New Consensus that was writing climate policy. It was doing it wrote the Green New Deal and it was trying to write the successor to the Green New Deal called the mission for America.

3:35 · And it was laser focused on figuring out what sort of industrial policy America could implement so that it could be a leader not just in in generic manufacturing but manufacturing like the highest quality goods, the semiconductors, the solar panels, the wind turbines, the hydrogen fuel cells, like the highest level of manufacturing we have in this current day. And during that time, the folks running the think tank were really laser focused on studying the production model of the South Korean dictator Park Chungi.

4:06 · And you know, he he had his issues. Um he and I’m not I will never defend him because he had a lot of issues, but he did a really good job getting the sort of like effectively the oligarchs together, the capitalist class of South Korea and saying, “Listen, right now you’re a billionaire as a consequence of doing speculative trading. You are are trading on like rice futures or something.

4:32 · I’m either going to throw you in prison or you can start making toasters. you can start making like I don’t know radios, something a little bit higher than just speculative assets, speculative trading. And they were like, okay, well, I don’t want to go to prison. I guess I have to do that. And they started doing this over and over again until they got higher and higher and higher up the supply chain and eventually started making some of at the time the highest quality goods in the world with the Samsungs, the LGs, the Hyundai’s. They started making these really high quality products.

5:01 · At the think tank, we studied this model relentlessly.

5:07 · However, once you dig down a little bit into it, you realize a lot of the capital that was invested into these companies was simply from the United States. And the US wanted to make sure that South Korea could develop as a counterpart to rival the North, which they just split up during the Korean War. And so they injected literally like billions, tens of billions of dollars into this effectively a breakaway state to ensure these industries popped off, that they did the this this manufacturing miracle. And I thought this was really cool. This was neat, but like you can’t always do that.

5:38 · So it it really it inspired my curiosity to look beyond the the four walls of uh the South Korean state and look a little bit west to what China had done and try to learn more about how China went from I mean a lot of like rural villages, an incredible amount of poverty and through the miracles of the the revolution through of course a horrible civil war and eventually into like the reform and opening up era. how it managed to play

6:05 · within the confines of this really violent system the United States had implemented into the global order of the world and figure out how they could gain that and make sure that they could not only like access like global capital markets but also make their own residents so much richer. And we like to say it’s like a miracle that they pulled 800 million people out of poverty and hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty. But like you know it was planned. That was all 100% planned.

6:31 · That that took decades and decades of of coordination between all of these these various entities. And I wanted to come here to learn more about that in person.

6:42 · I would love, you know, to go to the factories and see the fields, see the farm workers, see what it takes to produce the world’s best electric vehicles, to understand how they went from producing basically no cars to like almost all of the cars in the world in like a decade, which is insane. It is insane. Yeah. And that that really drew my ass in here. I was like, “Oh my god, they’re doing something right. I got to figure out what’s going on.”

Rethinking the China narrative

7:04 · So hopefully I can glean a little bit of wisdom, learn a little bit from the Chinese development model and bring at least some bits and pieces back to America and hopefully civilize those goddamn Yankees a little bit, you know, like figure out a little bit of manufacturing prowess from that.

7:20 · Yeah.

7:20 · I think you [clears throat] kind of made a really interesting point that I think is getting a little bit more popular these days, which is you’re pushing back a little bit on the the narrative of China, which is of course skewed in a negative way in in mainstream media and you have the your normie who thinks of China as this uh communist country with uh you know censorship and and lack of freedom and control.

7:48 · Yeah.

7:48 · But you got the flip side being like, well, they’re doing something right. Right. So if you if you even if you accept that, yeah, you have to look at the other side. It’s like, well, it’s not like they’re just, you know, head down walking around the streets like and crying every day and, you know, with like sandals and no shoes kind of thing. Like [laughter] it’s not like that. It’s walk around.

8:09 · Just just walk around, right? Something is going right.

8:12 · It’s not perfect. There’s a lot of negative sides to this as well that we can probably talk about even more living here for so long. But but that’s everywhere. There’s no perfect there is no um harmonious place in the world. There’s not one, you know, that’s just perfect.

8:26 · So yeah, I think that that’s the narrative that I I I I see getting more traction these days, which is being like, okay, yeah, yeah, you you you might believe the whole the negative side of it, but there’s going to be a flip side. So let’s look at the flip side and just see what it is. My favorite new thing is like people are like, “Oh no, China’s not even communist anymore. It’s like state capitalist.”

8:45 · It’s like, “Okay, then implement that in the United States.” If you love capitalism [laughter] so much, but do that in the US then, bro. Let’s do that. Let’s run that up. That’s a pretty cool way of developing things. No, I think I think that’s the easiest way of like dispelling myths.

Small Chinese cities vs America

8:57 · It’s literally just like go outside, go touch some grass here in China, go see the fruits of the labor of the last like hundred years of of Chinese development or the last 5,000 years of Chinese development, you know? That is so cool.

9:08 · We always talk about that a lot on the show actually cuz um you know we we have a lot of people come on the show that’s from abroad or the states and they come they say the same thing. There’s always like whoa this is mindblowing but then you also see a lot of content a lot of content creators that say the same thing. So it’s not like it’s news to anybody that is watching or or or or just experiencing this type of content. It’s not news. It’s not like a surprise.

9:31 · But I think the one thing that it sounds like where you you you plan on doing is okay let’s what’s the next step after that? Yes. you get to the first tier cities of Shanghai or Senzen or even Tongqing uh second tier where you it’s the wow, you know, it’s like amazing, right? But then kind of go next level, go to third, fourth tier, go a little bit deeper in, find out what’s behind the curtain and see what it’s like. It’s going to be different, but how different? What’s the negative? What’s the positive that you’ll have to dig in, but you know, that’s I think that’s something that’s interesting that that that’s worth talking about 100%.

10:02 · No, recently I was in I went to what was it? Zigong, uh where they make all the lanterns. I I thought it was going to be a sleepy little village. And then I I went there and it was like I I don’t know how many millions of people. That That’s not my new running joke.

10:17 · Like, oh, I’m excited to go to this like tier 4 Chinese city. It’s going to be a sleepy little village of 8 million people. Like, what the hell? [laughter] There’s so many people here. This is crazy. And then you show up and it’s like it’s not just like a village. It’s they’ll have like an a little ancient town like next to like the river or something. It’s very beautiful. It’s preserved. It’s gorgeous. And then they’ll have like Oh yeah. And then here’s like the downtown area and it looks newer than Shanghai. It looks newer than Chongqing. It’s like oh my god.

10:43 · Well, because it probably is newer to recently. It’s unbelievable. It’s so cool though when you go to like these otherwise rural areas. And like if you do that in the United States, for example, every summer in uh throughout middle school, high school, my parents and I would take a road trip from from Phoenix, Arizona, which is where I was raised, up to this tiny little town in the southwest corner of Wyoming called Keer. And it’s right next to another town called Diamondville. Then there’s Cokeville right next to tiny little town. It’s literally like 2,000 people in it. And it’s the fossil fish capital of the world.

11:15 · And it’s like it’s genuinely it would be like a I don’t know tier seven Chinese city or something. I don’t know. But if you go there and you see the level of development in what were otherwise very wealthy towns, like this is literally the town where JC Penney started. Like it is a multinational corporation now, a big clothing manufacturer, a big a big distributor, a big logistics company now. And it it used to be one of the biggest producers of coal in the world.

11:40 · It was this bustling coal town. And it’s been completely forgotten. All of our friends who lived there lived in either single or double wide trailers.

Forgotten American towns

11:49 · literally like in trailer parks. They lived in in effectively what we would see as abject poverty. And they made okay money all things considered because selling buying and selling fossils or like digging fossils and selling them was like a fairly lucrative business for them. But even with a little bit of money in these tiny little towns, they were completely forgotten, not just by the federal government, but also by the state government, too.

12:11 · They had just completely left them to rot. and seeing that decay firsthand feels so jarring to me when I go to these smaller Chinese cities of a million people or whatever and be like, “Oh my god, no, there’s like stuff going on. There’s cranes.

12:25 · There’s cranes building entire like skyscrapers and stuff in this like this sleepy village.” That’s wild to me. I can’t and it is to use the word you said, it is jarring because these a lot of these towns in the United States are just being absolutely gutted, right? And there is no intention to revitalize or rebuild these places. there’s there’s no appetite for that.

12:45 · Why do you think that’s the case?

12:47 · I don’t know. I don’t know.

12:49 · Like I’ve said this before. Um I don’t view America as a democracy. I think it’s an oligarchy right now. I think that I think that is more descriptive of the actual system.

12:59 · Yeah.

12:59 · And so I think there’s no incentive.

13:02 · There’s no financial incentive for these people to build infrastructure in these places unless unless maybe they’re building a new data AI data center there now. And then now the poor money and and all the residents there are like rising up and be like we didn’t vote for this. It’s making our electricity bills all this higher.

13:20 · So it’s like unless that’s the case I don’t think there’s any incentive for any of these powerful people to actually pour money into these places.

13:27 · Yeah. Incentive that’s the word.

13:28 · There’s no capital incentive for them to go in and invest in the material conditions of the people. It makes a lot of sense to have your labor force concentrated in small pockets of the country. I am usually the the tier one, tier two cities of the United States, the New Yorks, the Los Angeles’s, the San Francisco, the big towns where they can concentrate a labor force.

13:47 · And then uh as we’ve seen during co I think it it they found a lot of the the capital owners the the company owners found it increasingly more uh profitable more easy to have these labor forces in newer

14:03 · developing markets but still urban city centers such as like Austin, Texas, Denver, Colorado, parts of Florida as well. um where they were able to buy out very cheap offices, get people to relocate and pay them still decent salaries while making a ridiculous ungodly amount of money and they didn’t have to pay their workers as much anymore. And I think that that really incentivizes development in these higher tier cities if if you want to call them that.

14:30 · Um but in in sort of forgotten like smaller towns, the villages of America in like Appalachia for example, if there are no natural resources to extract, what’s the point of the the capitalists going in and and sort of investing any money in that? And actually before I got into any of the the political stuff, I think a radicalizing thing for me was towards the end of college, I founded a startup and I I raised some capital and one of the most jarring things for me was meeting with venture capitalists in the United States.

15:02 · And seeing firsthand that they were not interested in a meaningful long-term vision for the United States.

15:11 · They were simply interested in whatever could net them the highest investment or the return on investment as soon as possible. Which makes sense, right? Like that’s like that’s what they’re supposed to do. That is like the name of the game. Supposed to throw in 100 bucks and pull out a 100 million. Like you invested in Palunteer on day one sort of thing. You made your bag, you get out, you go live your life on Miami Beach or whatever. Like that’s what they’re supposed to do, which is all well and good, but there is no scenario in which that leads to like EV development.

The Hyperloop problem

15:38 · There’s no scenario in which that leads to semiconductors becoming smaller and more affordable. There’s no scenario in which that leads to meaningful long-term technological process with the exception of using state funded programs to bolster the the existing tech apparatus such as even like the the components in our cell phones, the components that that led to the internet.

15:58 · Like these were all governmentmandated programs that ended up being used by uh private individuals, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, oftentimes for bad to then have the treats that we know today, like the cell phone. And if there’s no financial incentive for immediate gain, of course, they’re not going to invest in smaller regional towns.

16:20 · Hence, we see the failed high-speed rail project from LA to what? San Francisco.

16:24 · Bro, you know what’s really sad?

16:26 · Actually, in college, this is really embarrassing. viewers, please feel free to make fun of me. Um, I in college I was part of the Hyperloop team.

16:34 · Oh, were you?

16:35 · Where in I was I was an engineer, so I was God, bro, this is I I feel I feel pain even bringing this up, but I was part of the the Hyperloop team at my university and we were so bought into that thing. We were like, we’re going to go San Francisco to Los Angeles 27 minutes or whatever like that, 700 mph.

16:53 · We’re going to vacuum out the air from a tube. we’re gonna shoot that train down that thing and it’s gonna get there so quickly. And [snorts] we realized probably about a year in I was like this isn’t this isn’t viable. We’re not this is such a waste of energy. Let’s just build the train because it takes so much energy to suck out all of the air from the tube in the first place and then and then keep it out.

17:15 · And not only keep it out, but then once you deal with building things in a vacuum, you realize that nothing makes any sense. Because if you vacuum out the air, there’s no place for any of the heat to go. So if you have batteries, if you have electrical components, if you have uh any sort of air air conditioning units, anything of that nature, you run into really really hard problems with heat dissipation. If you’re talking about like thermal expansion of tracks, often times it relies on the natural dissipation of the heat into the air. If there’s no air, the heat has no place to go. Same thing with batteries.

17:45 · Same thing with anything electrical that can produce any amount of heat. So once you start sucking out the air, you run into so many problems that you wouldn’t have otherwise had if you just had air as a medium to release and dissipate that heat. That was a huge problem that we faced. And it was fun. Like we would go to Hawthorne, California. I never ended up going, but the the team ended up going to Hawthorne, California. They shot things down tubes. It was a good time. It was fun to like mess around and do like cool little engineering projects. But we realized very quickly it’s like you can’t scale this.

Did Eric leave America?

18:14 · This isn’t unless unless you give it to like a team of like Chinese superstar engineers. I’m sorry. A couple of like dipshit 20-year-olds from UC Berkeley are not going to solve this problem. Like this is not it.

18:25 · Wait. So, but you said about a year end the engineers started realizing this wasn’t really viable.

18:31 · Yeah.

18:31 · Um what happened after that? Was that like was there like any sort of decision made? Like how did they reconcile that?

18:37 · No, bro. This was this was literally just for like our resumes. This was not like a serious this was a a college club program that we had. This was not a meaningful like we’re going to make a billion dollars from this. This was like let’s do this for fun so we have like a little bit of real world engineering experience before we go off into Rathon and hopefully build the more like the most efficient missiles we possibly can for spreading democracy. And that I mean it was it was simply to do that.

19:00 · So, we kept going and we kept doing it for I think I was on the team for probably two years before I think they ended up pulling funding and then it changed into I think it was like electric formula 1 or something. But by that point, I was working on my startup and I I was busy uh uh rubbing shoulders with all the the most brilliant venture capitalists I’d ever met. [laughter] Oh god.

19:24 · No. Okay. Well, talking about like so, so you move here, you kind of see you’re not so happy with what’s going on back home. You move here cuz ultimately you’re not moving here just to escape. You’re moving here ultimately to try to learn something to bring back home.

19:39 · Maybe. I mean, I think if I’m being honest, I do think there’s a real world scenario in which the United States does actively fall apart and they enact very meaningful legislation to ban like any meaningful socialist or communist groups. I mean, even in this past week, literally like two or three days ago, I believe they uh they just put forth a new piece of legislation that designated uh anti-fascism as a terrorist ideology.

Who is more dangerous than Trump?

20:06 · Like these are these are the the directions. Anything that associates with like any sort of like Islamic movements or anti-fascist movements are now designated as terrorist groups in the United States, which right now, you know, we’re seeing that. It’s like, okay, man. Yeah, sure. you’re going to use that maybe sparingly, but if there is someone with any meaningful willpower to go in, like maybe I’m sorry, I know we said we weren’t going to make fun of Palanteer, but maybe like if Peter Teal gets his way, then maybe JD Vance gets into power and or even worse, I think Tucker Carlson has a real shot.

20:36 · Like any of these real like white nationalists get into power. I do think there’s a very real scenario in which the United States simply stops being a tenable place for anyone on the left, anyone who’s not like a perfect like model like white like civilian to go and and live in this country. And I am genuinely very afraid of that. So if if that happens, I’m going to go back there. I’m going to join them. I’m going to join the likes of Peter Teal and and bring about the rightwing.

21:06 · No, I [laughter] I don’t know if I would go back. I don’t know if I could I I could actually go back to even like New York City with Zor Mandani in power.

21:14 · Well, um, so you you brought up Peter Teal. Is there somebody I don’t know because this is a very American frame in the sense that you you put the blame onto someone versus the system?

21:27 · I think Americans don’t like to think about their own systemic flaws because that calls into a lot of uncomfortable questions about the system they live in.

21:36 · the idea of is this really a democracy blah blah blah it is is a whole rabbit hole just reality in general yeah reality in general right and a lot of people don’t want to question the matrix that they’re in right it’s very uncomfortable and I understand that so instead what they do is usually they point to the easiest person to point to which is the president at the time because we know after four maybe eight

21:57 · years that person hopefully will be [laughter] a different person right and so it’s so much easier to point out oh that’s a bad guy there’s a face So in that frame though, is there someone in your mind that poses the most danger? I think most people would point to uh Trump, right?

22:18 · Everything’s Trump. Everything’s Trump.

22:20 · Understanding maybe from your perspective of how you believe the system is and how you view it, is there someone that is more dangerous than Trump? Um, I think, you know, I I’ve had this conversation a lot with like my my liberal friends who and and my parents as well where they they say that exact same thing where it’s like, “Oh man, we only have to get past the next two and a half years and then [clears throat] hopefully the Democrats will take over in the midterm and then maybe they’ll take over after that.”

22:43 · It’s like amnesia they have every four years.

22:45 · Yes.

22:45 · Every four years. And it’s like, “Oh my god, bro.” No. I’m of the opinion there has never been a good president in US history. And if you look at every single president throughout American history, every single one has been by and large, like up until fairly recently in favor of slavery, in favor of like Zionist colonial states.

23:04 · They’ve been in favor of keeping this massive underclass of people who they can exploit as cheap labor. oftentimes that took the form of uh offering like easy temporary protected status to get immigrants to come in so they could exploit their labor, offering loopholes for like undocumented people to come in and exploiting their labor. And more recently, I think we’ve seen this sort of manifestate manifest in Donald Trump being just overt about it.

23:28 · But even under the most progressive progressive presidents of modern American history, whether it’s Barack Obama or even Jimmy Carter, I mean, bro, Jimmy Carter quadrupled funding to the state of Israel. Like, he is not it. When he got out of office, he was very much so like, listen, Israel is a an apartheid state.

23:52 · We really need to curb their influence in the region. What they’re doing is horrible. But it’s like, bro, when you were in power, you [laughter] gave them a pretty big check. Like I don’t know if if when you were in power I wish you would had the same train of thought. You know that’s kind of an insane thing to do in retrospect where you’re going around building homes in the impoverished areas of the country that you could have used your pen to fix while you were in power. Same thing with Obama. Think people think like oh wow his biggest scandal was the tan suit.

24:18 · It’s like okay tell that to the doctors without borders he bombed in the Kundus hospital. Bro he’s the only Nobel laureate to have bombed another Nobel laureate.

24:27 · Weren’t there like the most drone attacks? He authorized the most drone attacks of any US president.

24:31 · Yes.

24:31 · So, it’s like we have to evaluate this like earnestly and honestly and and realize like whether they’re blue or red, the system that the United States has put into power is simply it does not give room to people to offer meaningful long-standing change. You might get a little bit of incremental change here and there and then Republicans get in and they not only squish that but then they roll back like civil rights protections and stuff and it’s like what the fuck are we doing? It doesn’t have to be like this.

25:00 · I think in terms of people who I’m most afraid of right now in the United States. I think I’m most afraid of Peter Teal, a guy who was literally raised in a Nazi colony in Namibia. A guy who the the town Wait, is that true? Yes. How do you How do you know that though?

25:15 · You can look it up. in I think it’s Swakupmund I think is the name of I might be mispronouncing it but up until fairly recently this was a town well after World War II where they would greet each other by saying hail Hitler like this is a town where you go around you go they cuz Germany had colonized Namibia it was a German colony they still often times speak German there’s a lot of German expats who escaped World War II World War II and you can imagine the kind who live in Namibia and one of

25:43 · these towns I mean there’s a number of these towns But one of the towns was effectively like this little Nazi colony that Peter Teal was raised in. You go to the the antique shops there. You can look on Trip Adviser right now and you can see, you know, there’s Nazi memorabilia in these towns in these in these little antique shops in these towns in the middle of Namibia where Peter Tal was raised, where he gathered where he gained consciousness. Like this is the framework in which these psychopaths are operating.

26:06 · And that to me is terrifying. as someone who is is proud of one of the only cool accomplishments of the United States, which is aiding in the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, like it sucks to see that we’re now propping up those same Nazi descendants who are profiting literally billions or trillions of dollars from these these very institutions that we thought were going to be eradicating Nazism around the world. I thought that was something we could all get behind.

26:32 · So Peter Tal I’m terrified of as well as the propagandists who try to sell his vision to the world without people even knowing like Tucker Carlson. I was also extremely critical of Charlie Kirk.

26:46 · Well, wasn’t there speaking of Charlie Kirk, wasn’t didn’t like uh I saw some headline. I don’t know how true it is, but like they were saying they they found that the weapon didn’t match the bullet.

26:55 · Bro, that is my Listen, at this point I I’m not a big conspiracy guy. I will entertain any conspiracy about Charlie Kirk because the FBI put out so many conflicting statements within like 48 hours. They’re like, “Well, there was a gun. There wasn’t a gun there. He broke apart the rifle. It didn’t match it.”

27:10 · It’s like, “What the fuck? What is going on?”

27:12 · That’s That’s the thing. Like, I I think the word conspiracy theory now, at least in America, holds no weight anymore.

27:17 · Zero. zero weight anymore because there’s been so much like damage to actual real information versus misinformation that nobody literally nobody not even the president knows like what the fuck is going on anymore. No one can decipher what is true versus what is untrue. It’s only about what camp do you fall in, what camp do you fall in that most align with your already, you know, already held beliefs, right? And that’s all it is.

27:41 · The other day after the the Trump assassination attempt at the the White House correspondent dinner, my parents called me. My dad is like 71 years old. He’s blue no matter who. He will vote Democrat no matter what at this point.

Young Americans losing faith

27:52 · Um he loves like Rachel Matto and like uh uh like CNN sort of thing. He called me. He’s like, “Eric, it was a false flag.” I was like, “Dad, [laughter] you’ve never said this before. What are you?” He’s like, “No, I know. I know it was a false flag. Sounds like Alec Jones.”

28:04 · I’m like, “Dad, when do you turn [laughter] to Alex Jones? What’s going on?” No, but like my parents were convinced instantly they texted me false flag. It’s like, “Oh my god, something is changing.” where even like the the boomers who otherwise would be like, “No, come on. We don’t entertain.” Now it’s like, “No, yeah, it’s all fake.

28:20 · They made it up.” I would love I I really wish we had some like monumental event like the moonlanding or something right now so that 80% of society in the United States could just be like, “No, it’s fake.” No, Hollywood said, “No, I don’t believe the UFO files just got released.”

28:36 · What the fuck is that about? [laughter] It’s that’s been going on for years.

28:39 · It’s like little like things like like what I’d be interested what you think about that. Do you think that’s just a scop? [laughter] What? What is that?

28:46 · Why is the government and the FBI like in the Pentagon releasing UFO [laughter] files?

28:51 · No, it’s important, bro. They said, you know, they were Jeffrey Epstein was trafficking the kids to the aliens. No one else. That was it. It was just the aliens that were coming down. We shouldn’t prosecute anyone here on Earth. It was No, I I think it’s 100% a distraction from like actual crazy shit that’s going on. [laughter] And my favorite thing too, the Democratic leader right now, Chuck Schumer, is talking about this like it’s a very serious thing. Being like, “Guys, they just released the Alien Files. This is awesome.” It’s like, “Chuck, bro, we’re in a war.

29:21 · We’re spending a billion dollars a day bombing little kids in Iran. Can we please focus on that for 5 seconds of this?” Maybe that’s why they’re releasing these things, right?

29:30 · It’s insane. No one’s even been charged on the Epstein files. Where who are they trafficking kids to? Why is Gain Maxwell in prison? Were they trafficking into each other? Like, what? what the fuck’s going on? So, okay. So, kind of I think the core of what we’re talking about and the kind of this like absurdity and this frustration with this absurdity in your opinion having been living in the States, does this reflect the younger generation and their sentiment?

29:55 · Like, do your thoughts and opinions and your perspectives reflect at all maybe a larger population of people there or do you think maybe you’re just an outlier?

30:04 · Like what do you what would be your commentary on the younger generation back in the states?

30:08 · 100%. But the issue is right now 100% you’re an outlier.

30:12 · No no 100% like the the vibe is shifting.

30:15 · The main issue right now is whether or not you can trust the institutions in place. And the the biggest litmus test for that is whether or not politicians support the state of Israel. The problem is no young people support Israel anymore. It’s like fucking I don’t know 20% or something. It’s nothing. It’s going down. No one. If you say Israel, it’s like, “Oh my god, you’re a villain.”

30:35 · And the problem is the establishment Democrats have been so poor at reacting to this that it has been entirely captured by folks who uh I I think I’m aligned with folks who say like Israel is an ethnostate. It’s committing genocide. It has committed genocide not just in Palestine, but in states all around the world. It needs to not only uh be sanctioned, it needs to be punished. There needs to be war crime trials.

31:01 · If we had a Nurburn trial right now, uh, Benjamin Netanyahu, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump would all be, frankly, they’d probably be hanged at the gallows if we’re being realistic, because that’s what they did in the Nuremberg trials.

31:13 · And this is not just an ethnic cleansing, but an outright genocide of like multiple populations. Israel wants to do the Greater Israel project. They want to expand into Syria, Iraq. They want to go down even into Saudi Arabia, into Egypt, into Jordan. They want to expand their territory as now they’re openly stating they want to do. Like this is a project that’s been in the works for decades. Ever since its inception in 1948, ever since the UN vote in 1947, ever since Theodore Herzel wrote about this shit, like they have been trying to expand into this region as much as possible.

31:45 · And young people see this and they see their own material conditions worsening. They see their rent going up. They see egg prices going up. They see videos every day on Twitter of little kids being bombed and they’re thinking, “What the fuck are we doing? I paid for that bomb and then I’m [clears throat] paying for the food that’s going to the people being bombed.

32:04 · What if we just didn’t fucking bomb them and what if we just reduce my fucking rent? How does this make any sense? They pose no risk to me as a person 8,000 m away. That’s insane.” And I I think that’s very divisive for some people because if you know history, if you understand the material conditions that led to this point in time, you’re going to be like, “Israel is the problem. We have to stop Israel. We have to stop this idea that there can be a settler colony just genociding, obliterating populations, expanding belligerently in the region.”

32:33 · But if you don’t know much about history, probably the biggest event you do know about is the Holocaust. You probably know about Hitler. You probably don’t know anything that happened with Japanese imperialism. You probably barely know anything about even Mousolini aside from knowing the name Mussolini, [snorts] but you do know about Hitler.

32:50 · But that’s where the waters get muddied because you do have some people kind of spouting some pretty anti-semitic things, of course.

32:57 · But and but that’s also like the conflation of a criticism on the state of Israel or the government of Israel and conflating that with being like, yeah, the people. If you’re critical of the Chinese government and the state of China, does that mean you’re racist against all Chinese people? Of course not. you know, and so there is people who conflate the two or there are journalists who try to force you to conflate the two to kind of twist that narrative, but at the same time, there are real issues with that.

33:23 · I mean, I I have a lot of my closest friends back in uh America growing up were were Jewish people. I mean, I couldn’t tell you how many bar mitzvah and bach mitzvah I’ve been to growing up. Yeah.

33:36 · Oh, they were the best. The best. And so I feel for them because I can only imagine like if this wasn’t if the context wasn’t about Israel but let’s say it was about China which it has been before I kind of Israel I think kind of took the yeah the front stage.

33:52 · I was feeling very kind of like self-conscious about that and like unnerving and frustrated with that in terms of people conflating like Chinese people with you know their criticisms of China which I have on its face I have problems with a lot of those criticisms just to begin with but even if I thought those criticisms were fair I would still feel really uncomfortable because I know how the mob can get right

34:15 · and mob mentality and all that stuff and so I don’t know I it’s a delicate issue but at the same time it’s like kind of so obvious like what’s going on and there are more and more outspoken people like yourself and I think I I would push back a little against the the analogy to to Chinese criticism because I think a lot of that is and I think you were saying this too isn’t necessarily fair. I think the criticism of the Chinese government often times comes from a place of American propaganda, whether it’s the NAD, the U, USAD, the CIA itself.

34:44 · The CIA now releases a monthly video in Mandarin saying like, “Come defect to the CIA. We love it’s like Jesus Christ.” Um, and I I’ll say I think this is maybe the hardest part for Americans to understand because the second you start reckoning with the idea of the state of Israel’s existence, you have to start reckoning with the existence of the United States itself where it has a fairly similar founding story.

35:15 · Obviously, it’s not the same, but it has this group of folks who came who came across this body of water. They sealed in from some ships. They landed on some far far away land. There was an indigenous population and they said, “Well, we kind of we kind of want this land ours.

35:33 · We read about this a while ago. We kind of want this.” And the people there were like, “Okay, yeah, welcome. Come hang out. Just, you know, be chill. Be normal. Don’t be dickheads.

35:43 · Just if your vibes are chillird, just don’t fucking be weird. And that’s okay.” And they’re like, “We’re going to be a little weird. We want We’re [laughter] going to be a little also we have guns. It’s like god fucking damn it, bro.

35:55 · We’re going to be really weird. This deserves to be a film right now. Like this type of [laughter] language like at that time just guys talking in like 21st century like Jen Jenz slaying bro your vibes are mad chalk.

36:07 · That movie about the caveman year one with Michael Sarah Jack. I love that movie. Yeah. And that’s I mean that’s effectly it’s a very there’s a lot of parallels between those stories. And if you start reckoning with one, you got to start reckoning with the other. The only difference was the United States was successful. They were 100% successful in destroying the indigenous population, eradicating almost 99% of that indigenous population, stealing the land, taking over large swats of the land that did not belong to them or any of the colonial occupiers at the time.

36:37 · And if you reckon with that, if you reckon with Israel, you’re going to have to start reckoning with like why the fuck is it called New York? This wasn’t ever like a piece of like the Netherlands or like it it was through the the colonized history, but the people there, the indigenous folks, they didn’t look like a 6’2 Dutchman. Like what the fuck’s going on? That’s crazy.

Living in China changes you

36:56 · No, it’s amazing when you when you put it that way. It’s just because time so much time has passed that everything has become normalized and and like we were alluding to before the reality that we know of right now is easily destroyed if you start really putting the pieces together.

37:16 · Yeah.

37:17 · Right.

37:17 · and start questioning and asking questions and and digging deeper because the biggest difference between now and let’s say 15 uh 10 to 15 plus years before was this the dissemination of information and and with that comes a lot of power and and control. So, just like what you’re feeling right now, you’re saying is that, you know, you’re putting you’re asking questions. You’re putting two two together. You’re going to to see things to find out the truth or whatever, but not everybody has that access.

37:44 · And if anything, the majority of the people will never have that access or even want to have that access and they’ll just take things at face value, right, in terms of social media and and and what they’re fed. I think I think that I think that that speaks to the importance of like why it it’s so valuable to make approachable, easy to digest content around what the fuck’s actually happening in the world. You know, it’s not necessarily just covering like current events, talking about the news all the time, but I think it’s important to try to decipher like, okay, why are we here?

38:16 · Why are we sitting at this table? Why is China rich now? Why is China doing so much better than it is or that than it was 50 years ago, 100 years ago? What are the material steps to getting to where we are right now? And also, I think one thing I’ve I’ve been not maybe not shocked by, but very pleasantly surprised by is the talking with folks here with any political power, they are very inclined to um

38:42 · approach history from a very understanding perspective. understand what went right, what went wrong and what try to figure out what’s going on like right and wrong right now as well and how we can correct that so that tomorrow is better than today. And that that is as an American dude. I’m like what? You want to not only fix the potholes, but you want to like you want to learn from the past. You want you want to you want to study the coconut tree that you fell out of. That’s crazy, bro.

39:10 · You know, it’s crazy. I want to say something. Let’s see if Justin’s going to laugh at this. Uh, I’m actually really curious because you’ve been here what how long now?

39:16 · Uh, about eight months. So, I’m basically Chinese already.

39:18 · Yeah. [laughter] So, eight months in the grand scheme of things, it’s still not that long. It’s not long at all. You’re still fresh arrival.

39:25 · And I I’m so curious to fast forward another year or two and to talk to you and really ask you, Yeah. Uh do you see or maybe you even see it now? Do you see how one’s perspective is totally manipulated from an American system and when you come over here where it’s a totally different system, right? It’s a totally different culture. Everything’s different and you kind of have to challenge a lot of things that you know.

39:52 · Yeah.

39:52 · And you already already do because you’re much more progressive than the common person, I would say. But even then, like when we moved here, I I was consider I considered myself an ultra liberal when I first moved here. But I my eyes freaking opened up.

40:07 · Have you become more sympathetic to what’s going on here?

40:09 · No, I’ve become if anything, I’ve become more centrist. [laughter] You know what I’m saying? It’s just It’s crazy.

40:15 · Yeah, it’s serious. I’m not even joking.

40:17 · Um and and the funny thing is is like we don’t watch Chinese news. We don’t we don’t really buy the Kool-Aid here either because just in general, we don’t want to buy the Kool-Aid. But just through living and conversations and exploring the country and you know you kind of get the lay of the land from our lived experience.

40:33 · Lived experience.

40:34 · I think you guys need to start drinking the Kool-Aid a little bit. [laughter] It’s awesome.

40:39 · He’s going to start brainwashing us.

40:40 · Start turning you guys more than we have at this point. Man, [laughter] he’s like you guys have you guys have Chinese in your life.

40:47 · I’m going to make you guys Jesus Christ, bro. I’m the most I’m I’m the most annoying fucking white guy [laughter] who goes to China. You’re like telling everybody to be Chinese.

40:57 · Let me Let me lecture you about your own culture. [laughter] I’m so sorry.

41:03 · That’s crazy. I’m just I’m missing the Adidas jacket though. [laughter] I should be wearing it over this.

41:07 · We’ll superimpose a logo.

41:09 · Yeah. Photoshop it on [laughter] top.

41:10 · That’s crazy.

41:11 · No, but seriously though, I I Have you Have you seen that at all? Anything like that at all yet?

41:15 · Yeah.

41:15 · I think I I’ve been very lucky in that I’ve had a bunch of friends come visit who are like they’re they’re very politically inclined in the United States, but I don’t think they’re like they’re not reading the little red book and being like, “Yo, this this is awesome.” They’re just like, “I want things to be cheaper. Like, I want my wages to go up uh in accordance with like inflation, you know? I want my rent to come down a little bit. I want us to build some more housing. I want things to get a little bit better. I want trains to get nicer.” yada yada yada.

41:44 · And so they come here and they see that they see the subways. They see the mag lev train, the fastest in the world.

41:50 · They see the the bridges, the boats, the planes, the automobiles, the EVs. They walk around on the streets. They’re like, “Why is it so quiet? What’s going what’s going on here?” And it’s like [laughter] there’s EVs everywhere, you know? It’s crazy. And they see that. And for them, just like you said, literally just going outside, seeing the material reality of what’s around them just breaks something in their brains because a lot of them are from New York, a lot of them are from California, and they come here and they’re like, “Wow, I don’t have to own a car.

Eric’s China wake-up calls

42:21 · I don’t have to like pay $8,000 a month for like health care insurance, for health insurance. I I don’t have to uh pay an extra 20 or 40% for a tip on everything I I buy. food is affordable. Uh people seem like they’re living fairly dignified lives.

42:39 · Like things are, you know, things aren’t perfect, but it seems like they’re getting better. Like there’s construction going on. There’s cranes building new big buildings. And that’s so jarring to see as an American cuz you see progress happening in real time. And it goes to show like the state can do things.

42:56 · The state is able to actually affect meaningful change. whether or not you love every part of it doesn’t really matter that much because materially people’s lives have just gotten so much better in the last like 40 years and that’s so cool for people to see in person. So I don’t even have to be like yo here’s this book read read all about like this this big theoretical thing you just be like look around man here’s a photo from 30 years ago and look at this now it’s completely different. Yeah, it’s it’s interesting. We used to I used to always say this one thing. Um I moved here a while ago.

43:28 · It’s been uh what like 18 19 years. It’s been a long time.

43:34 · And uh we used to always say Shanghai or just China, but living in Shanghai, I always say Shanghai. Um the hardware, right, the infrastructure, in other words, um was developing at a an alarming rate. literally the next day you go out your you leave your home and it’s a different uh corner that crazy and then you can get a taste of it now but multiply that by 10 time I can imagine and um so that’s one it was like the the the hardware was getting upgraded but

44:03 · the software takes a little bit longer I yes yes I agree and and we felt very I felt very strong about it we’ve talked about this before the software meaning like society culture cultural norms behavior people’s exposure to things yeah because don’t forget uh there’s a very uh dark history uh you know that’s pretty recent and so yeah with that the software is

44:26 · going to take some time to to upgrade but now I feel like the software has been upgrading still still going you know it takes time it takes generations right but if you compare yeah 2016 or even 2006 night and day night and day where even where even me and you how we were like trying to catch up with like the young generation If now we’re trying to catch up to them, you know, [laughter] we’re like trying to catch up to them. They’re more much more progressive than even we are.

44:53 · It’s interesting. It’s it’s it’s actually really interesting and that’s that’s an interesting conversation.

44:56 · Maybe we can kind of like uh talk about a little bit because you you’re still pretty newbie here and uh you know, we’ve been here for a while, but it’d be interesting to to hear those type of perspective differences. And first of all, so you you you said you’ve been here for eight uh for eight months and you’re already uh feeling out that that change and stuff like that, but what’s the biggest thing that that kind of, you know, hit you in the face kind of?

45:17 · I actually made a list.

45:19 · I made I made a list and actually we I recently wrote about this in a book for Code Pink called China’s Not Our Enemy.

45:26 · And they they asked specifically they’re like, “What is like what have been the biggest like like wakeup calls for you?”

45:33 · And um it was something to the effect of like first and foremost, not everything is a scam. In the United States, it feels like you get a telemarketing call every day trying to give you a new loan that will ultimately lead to you losing your home. Like my grandma received this all the time. She would receive calls about a reverse mortgage. She was like 87 or something. You know, she started getting these calls. They’re like, “Oh, hey Rosemary. Uh you want to have $800,000 right now or whatever?” Like whatever nonsense. some sort of terrible term loan.

46:03 · And it ended up that they were trying to like take away her home, just predate on old people, like trying to take advantage of them. And here it feels like there is this constant like uh maybe not a buffer per se, but there’s this this idea that not everything around you is trying to scam you out of every single dollar that you have or every single uh R&B that you have in in your bank account.

46:31 · And that’s like a kind of refreshing feeling because it it kind of instills this degree of trust in the people who live around you. In my own case, I don’t I barely speak Chinese. I barely speak anything. And I’ve been shocked that even a lot of old heads who are in their 60s or 70s have come up to me and some of them actually speak perfect English, which is shocking to me. And are so welcoming from even my old head neighbors, my my uncle neighbors who who see me and like, “Welcome to our neighborhood.

47:01 · I know you’re from America. I know America and China have had a tumultuous relationship, but still welcome. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for seeing our culture and hopefully trying to enjoy it a little bit. And that’s been that’s been super cool for me.

47:17 · Would you not get that back in, let’s say, New York, Arizona, like I guess I can give you anecdotal evidence in Arizona.

47:26 · None of I lived in the suburbs. No one knew the neighbors. Maybe 20 years ago, people knew each other. But in this current day and time, like my parents don’t know their neighbors in suburban Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s really sad because everyone’s just in their own little homes. They all sit on Next Door every day. You guys know Next Door? What is that?

47:45 · It’s like a website where like based on your zip code, you can like talk about like what’s going on in your neighborhoods. And so everyone’s like, I saw someone on a bike the other day and they had dark skin. I think we might be getting robbed soon. It’s like what the fuck? Like it’s this terrible website where you can kind of just like talk about how scared you are to live in your home. which is crazy cuz Scottdale’s like a very low crime area, but my parents are like fairly reclusive. In New York, my only neighbors who I talked with were like my schizophrenic downstairs neighbor who would be like, I think they’re putting something in the drinking water and it’s turning us all gay. It’s like, okay, Alex Jones again, what’s going on?

48:16 · You know, but it wasn’t there was no sense of warmth between anyone who I talked with whereas here interesting. It completely anecdotally, I don’t know if this is your experience as well, but people here have been very warm and friendly to me. It’s like, hey, if you need anything, let me know, you know.

48:32 · Yeah.

48:32 · Yeah, I I think it speaks to just the overall level of perceived danger in different societies, right? I think in America, and you would know better than I do, it’s been a long time since I lived in America, so I’m I’m I could be speaking out of school here, but my feeling is that there is a heightened sense of feeling of threat

48:55 · and danger just in society in general, just in in America in general, whether it’s gun violence, whether it’s any sort of other types of I don’t think even just only physical, but even uh uh just political 100% political divide like you don’t know where the you don’t want to step on any toes sometimes. you don’t know where the red line is.

49:14 · So it’s like from like intellectual level but also physical there’s this heightened level of like feeling of danger almost where here it’s not like that doesn’t exist at all but it’s it’s it’s so much different. It’s so much lower and I’m speaking as a as a as a man here. I I don’t never felt any sort of like danger for like fear of my life.

49:34 · Yeah.

49:34 · And even if there is any type of political uh or any other that it’s a bit more divisive uh you know conversation between people that from my experience has never been like I will kill you because you know of what you think.

49:48 · Yeah.

49:48 · No conversation. It’s just conversation. Well because people here don’t identify the stakes are different. Yeah. The stakes are different and obviously there are barriers and hurdles to being very politically active in China like for the obvious reasons right. But by and large, people do not identify with their political beliefs here. It’s not like this is my identity. This is what I’ll live. Neither are there.

Surveillance and safety in China

50:11 · No, there are people who have strongly held political beliefs, but it’s another thing entirely to identify as like this is who I am.

50:18 · Yeah.

50:18 · Like I’m a Democrat or a Republican sort of thing. Of course, there are exceptions, but by and large, the majority of people, at least in my view, do not like buy into it and like are totally consumed every day by their political beliefs. And I think I think that’s a stark difference in America, which I feel, and again, I’m looking at America through a prism. I feel like people do identify like wholly like their whole identity their ego almost is is tied to the belief that they are in the right in terms of their political ideals.

50:50 · Yeah, 100%. I agree with that.

50:52 · And and so like I think going back to this level of danger, I think a lower level of danger makes you naturally just a more open society in terms of welcoming other people cuz you’re not in fear as much, right? So why wouldn’t you be friendly to your neighbor? I think in America, I was always terrified of getting into like a road rage incident because at least in Arizona, everyone has guns.

51:13 · Yeah.

51:13 · Every like [snorts] every night you see the news, cops killed another person. Cops killed fucking four people today cuz they’re going around, you know, there’s like, oh, there’s a suspect with a gun. Okay, well, we have to shoot and kill them.

51:26 · You get into a road ra road rage incident with someone, they whip out a lock and all of a sudden it’s like, okay, you know what? Maybe maybe you cutting me off wasn’t that big of a deal. Maybe those truck nuts, you know, they they really are intimidating. That I feel like is such a stark difference to hear where I see people argue. I see folks get into heated arguments all the time. They’re always, “Oh, what’s up?”

51:48 · You know, like all this, but it [clears throat] doesn’t feel like there’s a fear that someone’s about to whip out like an AR-15 or something [laughter] like that like do some crazy shit. And that’s so jarring. Like I’ve heard fights before here, but I’m not like afraid of them if that makes sense.

52:06 · The cuffs. You get some fist of cuffs.

52:07 · Oh, yeah. I’ve seen a little bit of like, you know, hand play here and there and uh you know, I’m like, okay, that’s that’s fine.

52:12 · Yeah, we do the old school way here.

52:13 · Yeah, do that. You know, but [laughter] no more, please. You know, and I feel like that is it it makes you feel like maybe like maybe this is corny, but it makes you feel like a little bit more human where you can have meaningful disagreements with people. Even if it gets really heated, no one’s going to like kill you. Like there is something to be said about that where you don’t constantly have to fear for your life and I do appreciate that and I’m sure people do have considerable differences of opinions here but at the end of the day I think people generally want prosperity for their country and that’s like a cool thing that I can get behind.

52:46 · I think in general just to push back a little bit I think in general the um it also still goes with economic situation for where you’re living. So, in Shanghai, you’re really not going to see too much of that. But if you start going a little bit further down to a little more rural areas, you might find uh killing crime or or something like that or fights that get a little bit overboard.

53:08 · I can imagine.

53:09 · Um these kind of stories come out and but I mean no firsthand experience of course, but uh yeah, they they do exist.

53:16 · Do you think that’s getting better though? Like do you think do you think because those cities are now getting richer, those fights are becoming less and less?

53:22 · That I don’t know. I would not be able to give a proper answer to that but I could give an answer of because of the infrastructure development and you know which is another thing I’ll be curious to hear your opinion on which is all the cameras everywhere and that’s uh not just in first year cities that you go to any other city and you’re going to see that um I mean that’s been I would say the biggest deterrent of of [snorts] crime.

53:44 · Yeah.

53:44 · And yeah, you sacrifice your quote unquote privacy by walking around town and you can get tracked. But um at the end of the day, it just depends on how you how you view it, right?

53:55 · I think I have I have two sort of goofy anecdotal experiences with the camera system here. Uh in what was it? I think December of 2025, last year, a couple months after I moved here, I was still under the impression that there was this big surveillance apparatus around us and that we were constantly, you know, there’s face tracking and there was this very sophisticated mechanism to determine where everyone is at all times.

54:21 · Like there’s a machine like did you believe in the social credit score? No, not before coming here, but I now that I’m here, I’m like I wish they had it. Like [laughter] like you want dude, those those people on escooters running down the sidewalk almost driving me over. I’m like penalized.

54:37 · They need it. [laughter] No, but [snorts] I I had flown back into PVG airport, Budong airport in Shanghai. And um as I was going to my DD, I I’d been flying the entire day. I was exhausted. And I I get [clears throat] to the spot where you call a DD and someone comes up to me. like, “Hey, do you want to do you want to ride home?” I was like, “Fuck.”

54:58 · All right. I here’s my DD. If you can match the price, let’s do it. And he’s like, “Okay, let’s do it.” So, we start going down to his car. And as I’m about to put my bags into the trunk of his car, a police officer walks over and he’s like, “Hey, do you know this guy?” I’m like, “No, he’s a taxi driver, I assume.” He’s like, “No, no, no, no. Come with me.

55:16 · Come with me.” [clears throat] And he’s like, “This guy’s a known scammer. He’s going to take you home. He’s going to drop you off in front of your place, but he’s going to say, “All right, now you owe me 10 times what I had told you at the airport, and he’s going to try to scam you out of this money that the original negotiated price that you had come up with.”

55:32 · I’m like, “Ah, fuck, man. All right, that’s fine. I’ll just like catch a I’ll catch a DD.”

55:37 · And he’s like, “Uh, actually, come with me. Can you cooperate with the investigation?” Mind you, it’s 1:00 a.m. at this point. I am exhausted. I literally been flying for probably 12 hours that day. I’m like, “Dude,” and I I had a flight at PVG at like 8:00 a.m. the next day. I’m like, “Dude, I really just kind of want to go home, man. I’m really tired.” But he’s like, “No, please cooperate.” I’m like, “Ah, fuck.”

55:58 · Okay. [snorts] So, I go to the police station inside Puong airport. And it’s this team. As an American, I’m terrified of police. I am. Every cop in America walks around with a gun at their hip. Every interaction I’ve had with a police officer in in America has been negative.

56:14 · There’s not been a single positive interaction in which they’ve been like, “I want to genuinely help you.” It’s like, “I have a gun. If you misspeak, I’m going to shoot you.” And it’s like, “Okay.” So, I go to this police station.

56:24 · There’s like, I don’t know, probably 10 cops and maybe six of them huddled around this little screen. and they’re like, “Okay, we need to find the right frame of him coming up to you in the security footage uh so we can use it in this case against him because there have been probably six or seven different cases against him at this point in time.”

56:44 · I’m like, “Oh, okay. Easy, bro. You have the face surveillance technology. Use the use the fucking fingerprint scanner or whatever you got going on in this shit.” Yeah, no problem. And we sit there and we literally go through it like frame by frame. And he’s like, “Which camera do you think it was? Do you think it was one over here?” I’m like, “I thought you were supposed to know this. I [laughter] thought this is a surveillance state, bro.

57:04 · I thought you had the master AI telling you.”

57:06 · Yeah.

57:06 · I thought there was some like Palenter, Chinese Palunteer going through and like determining where everyone is. What’s going on here? And he’s like, “Oh, no. We have to figure out what camera it is.” I was like, “Oh my god.” Okay. So, I think it’s this camera. And after like 30 minutes, we found the right camera. And then about another 30 minutes later, we found the right interaction. But we literally scrubbed through front to back, front, back to front.

57:27 · And I wanted to like whip out like old like computer science algorithms I had learned in college to like try to do like uh you know in like computer science there’s like algorithms to like determine how to sort sort data or like find specific numbers. You like start with the first half if it’s there.

57:43 · No, you go to the second half. And I wanted to try to explain these algorithms to them so they could sort through these frames more efficiently. And I was like, bro, this is taking so long. Mind you, now it’s like 2:30 a.m.

57:54 · and I’m like, I have to be back here at this very point in like six hour. No, like four hours. Like, I don’t even know if it’s worthwhile going home at this point. Can we please use whatever advanced surveillance technology you’re hiding from me to [laughter] just find these people already? But no, they were very kind. They ended up offering me like a sausage on a stick and they gave me like leuchy juice and everything.

58:16 · They were very sweet, but we had to manually scrub through hours of footage to find this guy who tried to scam me out of this DD. And I had to issue a police report. And same thing actually, when I issued the police report, they gave it to me and it was all in Chinese so I could translate it. And they were like, “Hey, if there’s anything wrong with this, let us know.”

58:33 · And I translated it. And like there were some there were some issues with it.

58:37 · They was saying like he came up and he wouldn’t let Eric leave without like getting in his car. And I was like, “Oh man, maybe they’re like trying to frame this guy for something. Maybe that’s not good. And so [snorts] I said to the guy, I’m like, “Hey, like I he didn’t do this part. I don’t want him to get into like more trouble than he needs to. I’m sure he’s just trying to pay the bills, you know, like it sucks that he has to resort to this, but I don’t want him to like, you know, serve time in prison for like that’s crazy.” And they’re like, “Oh, okay. That’s fine. What actually happened? Just tell us.” And so I revised everything and they just wrote it up on the spot and I signed it and it was totally fine.

59:08 · I I was shocked to hear that there was like there didn’t seem to be the corruption that I had grown accustomed to in the United States.

59:17 · And that was a very jarring experience.

59:19 · And it made me wish that there was indeed this sort of mythical surveillance technology that was actually monitoring everyone at all times. So I could have just saved that hour or two sitting in that police station. But there was that. And then there was one very recent, very brief thing where we were in Chongqing and our friend’s visiting from from the United States and she had received cash from her ex uh e ex-boyfriend’s grandmother who’s this little old 80s something year old Chinese lady in like Flushing, Queens.

59:46 · And she used this cash to buy jewelry from I think it’s like blackhead jewelry, something a very mainstream jewelry brand here. And the next day the police came to our door in the hotel we were staying at and they’re like, “Hey, your friend used fake banknotes. These are fraudulent. These are like scam banknotes. These were not real. And I was like, “Oh my god, we’re going to prison.” Oh, so you pay cash with it?

1:00:09 · She paid cash because she’s like a tourist. She She had received cash from like this [clears throat] grandma, you know, like the the old heads in the US. I guess they still have some like actual physical cash and she used it to buy this jewelry.

1:00:20 · So the cops came to the door and were like, “Hey, she bought with like fraudulent cash.” And I was like, “We’re literally we’re going to prison. We’re never getting out of Chongqing. I’m gonna die in this prison here. This is horrible.” And they’re like, “Can you just like pay them?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure. No problem. So, I scan their WeChat code. They’re like, “If you want to leave a voice message, you can send them a voice message.” And they held up the phone. I was like, “I’m so sorry. Like, I had no idea. It’s my friend. She’s visiting. I feel so bad.

1:00:41 · If there’s anything I do to make up for it, please let me know. I feel terrible for like potentially trying to scam you, obviously unintentionally.” And they were like, “Okay, she’s here.” And they left. I was like, “Oh my god, now what are is there going to be like a SWAT team that [laughter] comes on and like throws us into prison? What’s going on here?” And that was it. She she was already on a train at that point, so she wasn’t even in the hotel. And we told her like, “Andrea, there’s like there’s police here for you.” She’s like, “Oh my god, I’m gonna die in a Chinese prison.”

1:01:11 · And she got to Non Chong where she was going and she reported it to the police.

1:01:14 · She’s like, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.” And they’re like, “So why are you telling me that?

1:01:17 · Why are you telling me? It’s fine. You paid your debt. That’s it. Go away.” You know, like [laughter] it was this is them knowing you obviously knowing you’re American and all that stuff.

1:01:25 · So they essentially had used some sort of they showed us the surveillance footage on their phone like, “Hey, this is your friend.” and we’re like, “Yeah, that’s her.” And they found our hotel room because we had to register our passports with the hotel and it worked out fine. And so I think there is this like for sure there is surveillance. I think from everything I have personally seen, it’s been used for good. I’m you know I I don’t know if there are instances in which maybe it’s been used for not great things, but from everything that I have personally experienced, it has made my life materially better.

1:01:54 · And I do appreciate that because you know the shop owner got their money. we didn’t end up accidentally scamming them and the the taxi driver was able to have like a fair dignified case against him when he was trying to scam people of course and that so far has been a a fairly net positive in my life but I don’t have you guys had anything similar have you had to deal with any sort of crazy surveillance stories or camera stories uh no not in

1:02:20 · terms of surveillance I mean I had my runs runin with police I was very scared in the moment cuz it was like especially my first runins I was like oh I was like scared but it was like literally nothing happened. And that just shows like there is this no matter how progressive or

1:02:37 · open-minded or traveled we feel we are and this speaks to like how strong the propaganda is in America I guess like even us who are like even you like there is still this like this stain of propaganda that we still haven’t washed off and that influences us in the way we think especially in in times of fear right cuz then all the worst thoughts flow into mind right and times when I’ve felt felt afraid all

1:03:04 · like the worst thoughts of American or Western narrative about China start rushing in immediate. It’s so it it’s fascinating and almost ridiculous how fast those those thoughts rush into my mind even though I’ve been living here for like 17 years and I have the

1:03:22 · perspective of China that I have and it’s like once I’m in like a fearful state all the worst thoughts like oh this is authoritarian totalitarian I’m going to get arrested I’m going to be disappeared [laughter] right it’s like this like like all the worst thoughts and then like literally right after like nothing happened yeah it’s been like nothing but helpful and I’m And then I feel like an idiot again. [laughter] Fuck, man. I’m no better than I was when I first left America, right? And I don’t know. I think it just shows how deeply we have been propagandized that any moment of fear, all those things are still right there.

1:03:55 · Where were you guys before moving here?

1:03:57 · California.

1:03:58 · I was in New York. You were in New York.

1:04:00 · Yeah.

1:04:00 · I grew up in New Jersey, then I was in New York, and then I went to LA, and then I went back to New York, and I came here.

1:04:05 · I see. I see. Okay. So, I guess the NYPD, you know, they’re not they’re not a great squad of folks.

1:04:11 · I’m like living in America genuinely intimidated by police officers.

1:04:15 · Even if I’m doing nothing wrong and I’m just driving and there’s a police car behind me, I am like tense. I’m like, “Okay, fuck. What am I doing? Oh, my headlights on like right. God forget I pulled over, which I have been many times.” But like I getatically tense. I don’t I don’t feel tense around. I want to add something to this which might be an interesting point of view.

1:04:37 · Uh I don’t know if you noticed this um but keep your eyes open next time when you see a police officer talking to a Chinese citizen uh for any type of misdemeanor or anything like that.

1:04:47 · They’re basically yelling at the police.

1:04:49 · The Chinese aunties the Chinese are finger their finger in the police offic. And the police are just like no. Come on. Just come on. [laughter] So every time I see this in my mind I’m thinking in America that granny granny would be on the ground face ground on the pavement [laughter] knee behind her neck.

1:05:11 · Yeah. Cuz you’re escalating it, right?

1:05:12 · So yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

1:05:13 · Stop resisting. Yeah. Stop resisting.

1:05:15 · Exactly.

1:05:16 · It’s so meanwhile.

1:05:18 · Yeah. Yeah, same thing. And when at first I had the exact same feeling as Justin whenever I got stopped by for some stupid little thing, I’ll be like, “Oh my god, so tense.” But then now I’m just like not tense at all. I’m just like I’ll even sometime give a little Are you serious? You really really [laughter] you know? He’s like, “Come on, man. I was just sorry. I got to fucking do this.”

1:05:35 · Yeah.

1:05:35 · So it’s it’s interesting. And even at when you when we had gotten into fights uh and get thrown into the police station, you know, we’d be like pretty tense. And usually the the end result is is is sort of like, look guys, you guys got to work it out first. Like don’t give us any more trouble. Please work it out.

Talking positively about China

1:05:53 · Yeah. Figure it out. You know, pay usually just some sort of like financial fine.

1:05:56 · Yeah. Pay some of money. We think we’re going to get locked up. It’s like just you’re stupid. Just Yeah. You’re a fucking moron.

1:06:02 · So it’s a very different relationship.

1:06:04 · Here we are recording a podcast still.

1:06:06 · [laughter] Yeah. And and then uh to go back with the cameras, I lost my bag last year. Uh I forgot it on a bike. And you know, I was doing something. It was like an hour later or something. I’m like, “Oh my god, I forgot my bike. My my bag.” And I went back and it was gone obviously. And so I went to the police station and then they’re like, “Um, so we saw they pulled up the video.” They didn’t show me, but they pulled up the video. Like we got the video, we saw the bag. We saw the person who took it. Uh, we’re looking into it and we’ll call you back. I kept like waiting. I called back like, “Yeah, yeah, we couldn’t really track it.”

1:06:36 · You know, like really? You have so many cameras. You couldn’t really track it.

1:06:41 · It’s like, “Yeah, it’s just uh I don’t know. which is maybe when the cameras are down or something like he didn’t have a correct answer. He had an accident other people but they lost a guy but basically they lost a guy and um and I was thinking like dude your whole camera system like you what’s the point of all this then but how much of that is again like the western narrative of like Chinese society is like some sort of black mirror dystopian like everyone’s like face scan thing like they have like the the score and all the information you want every single person I mean yes this

1:07:11 · is not to say like they they have a lot of information on who we are and everything but the the idea a of like real time tracking across the entire society. I think the American perspective of like of a monitoring is the idea of like there’s an actively some person like sitting in front of like a screen or like hundreds of people sitting in front of you. Yeah. Staring at you, watching you live as you as you take a shit on the toilet. Yeah. As you live your life, right? No, all of it is like reactive.

1:07:39 · If there is a crime committed or reported, then they have to go back through all that footage to try to find something. And sometimes they’re successful, sometimes they’re not.

1:07:47 · See, it’s interesting though. I I have an inverse story sort of. I had a friend who uh had gotten on a highspeed rail. It was it was when I was in Zagong. Uh we went to uh I think after that we went to like Ebin, which is like where Wuang is from, the the Baiju.

1:08:02 · Oh, bro, that’s some good ass bou fuck.

1:08:04 · During that train trip, the lady had forgotten her bag on the train. And so it just kept going and literally within I think it was like an hour and a half, someone they had called the train station and been like, “Hey, I left my bag on the train.” They used whatever like uh cameras to find out where the bag was. They got it. They put it into some like I think it was like a DD delivery guy or something.

1:08:24 · He drove it like a town over and within like an hour and a half, she had the bag with her computer, multiple cameras, literally like tens of thousands of dollars worth of like not only like physical equipment, but also like footage she had shot from like different countries and stuff on hard drives and whatnot, like worth a fuck ton of money to her. All returned within under two hours.

1:08:46 · So, they were able to use whatever sort of like video footage to actually return her bag in that instance. And I hear that I’m like, “Oh, that’s awesome.” But then I hear this, I’m like, “Ah, maybe they need a little bit, [laughter] you know?”

1:08:56 · Well, it’s a hit and miss sometimes, right? I guess depending on maybe hit or miss the circumstances. But like, but honestly, where else in the world does this happen?

AI and trust collapse

1:09:05 · Nowhere.

1:09:05 · Like I’m not I’m an honest question. I’m not assuming rhetorical like where else does this happen?

1:09:09 · I don’t I you think maybe Japan like do they like you know are they you think what what is this? You mean like his example of like having all this stuff?

1:09:16 · I’m going to tell you a very personal story in Japan in a in a Japanese airport. Narita.

1:09:23 · Um, I took a shit and my wallet fell out and I didn’t realize and I went off and I remember it was like, like I said, 45 minutes, an hour later, I couldn’t find my wallet and I was like, “Oh, fuck. I’m in the airport.

1:09:36 · That shit’s gone.” Yeah.

1:09:37 · Right. In the bathroom, right?

1:09:39 · And uh yeah, so I went back to like the the the bathroom. It was gone. And then I didn’t know what else to do. So I just went to like a like a customer service like center kind of thing. I just went there. I’m like, “Yo, I lost my my wallet and stuff like that.” He’s like, “What would it look like?” And I described it. He’s like, “Was it this?”

1:09:55 · I’m like, “Oh shit, it was and not $1 missing.”

1:09:59 · Yeah, that’s incredible.

1:10:01 · But but that even that’s awesome. But even that’s still a little bit different because that’s the lost and found. You were still in the same general.

1:10:07 · It was like a customer service area like a customer. You were still in the location, right? What he’s talking about is they drove and back.

1:10:15 · But even still, there’s like a degree of trust. No one was enticed by the wonderful bet toilets they had sitting on the warm little seat with the little water hitting their butthole and looking down like oh wait there’s a wallet here for no cameras nothing you can easily take it nice but well I mean Japan maybe there are cameras in the bathroom sometimes in Japan it’s a big business over there someone offered to buy your underwear [laughter] but I do feel like if that happened in New York or something like that would be gone bro it would be no you would never see that shit [laughter] No, there’s no shot.

1:10:47 · New York is a different place.

1:10:50 · As we’re saying all this, and I think maybe what you were hinting at before, how he was also is like, well, if we’re talking about surveillance, we’re talking about the police here, you know, we’re talking about like positive interactions we’ve had. This is of course not to say that police here have never abused their power, [laughter] harass or any injustices. I disagree.

1:11:12 · Revisionist reactionary. [laughter] But but see this is like and and I was actually talking to Daniel about this, but I feel like whenever I we talk like positively about China, there’s like I I feel like condemn it. At the same time, [laughter] there’s this exactly there’s this social need for us because I know and I’m very aware of people that just want to hear you be critical of the country and so when you speak positively, they just can’t take it. Imagine if you had to do that about literally any other country on the planet.

1:11:44 · Like imagine when dumbass Americans were like, “Man, I really I I rode the high-speed train in Japan and man that uh that train was really cool. It was really fast.” You’re like, “Okay, but have you heard about the nonjing massacre?” It’s like, “Well, bro, like come on. I just want to talk about the train, dude.” Like, like, don’t get me wrong, I am very critical of Japan. I like maybe that’s not a great example.

1:12:02 · But even then with the United States, maybe you could make the inverse thing where it’s like, okay, well, it’s like anytime you talk about like a negative of the United States, it’s like we just bombed a girl school in Iran. It’s like, okay, yeah, but also we have like iPhones, you know, it’s like that would even be more fair than being like, yeah, but China had some bad problems. Um, yeah, you might have nice things now, but at what cost?

1:12:21 · Yeah, but at what cost? Exactly.

1:12:23 · Exactly. I think this goes back to where we’re where we were talking about how the idea of a conspiracy theory is a lot more diluted uh to many people especially the young people today.

1:12:35 · Do you know who coined the term conspiracy theory to begin with?

1:12:37 · Who?

1:12:38 · The CIA.

1:12:39 · Oh, really?

1:12:39 · Yeah. It’s well documented. They were the first ones to coin the term you cause confusion. You cause uh Yeah, it’s a smart move.

1:12:47 · You know, they cooked with that to be fair. They That was a pretty good one. They they I I got to give it to them. Like I hate that. They’re good. They know what they do in their branding department.

1:12:55 · Fuck. They’re real good [laughter] at what they do.

1:12:59 · But yeah, it’s just I don’t know. It just makes me think about how flimsy of a of a structure the governmental system or even the political and the legal system that the United States or probably most countries in the world I would say probably I mean without any truth in that but at least in the American system uh the more information that gets available and leaked out quote

1:13:24 · unquote the more you realize how flimsy everything is right it’s just it’s just such a weird thing to wake up to because we used to just live in a very bubble world. You know, we just live in, you know, you you have your Sunday paper, you know, back in the day, you know, read the Sunday paper, the headlines. Oh, that’s what’s that’s what’s happening in Europe. Okay.

1:13:43 · And then you got like, you know, you flip the page, it’s like, oh, this kid got the the the award in high school. That’s nice, you know, and then you go over here, it’s like, oh, the stock the stock looks good. Okay, good. Making some money. I can buy my eighth house, you know.

1:13:55 · And then you flip another page like, oh, the word puzzle.

1:13:57 · You got Calvin Hobs. Okay, that’s a nice comic. H the world looks seems okay right now. Oh, we got a little war going on. Oh, okay.

1:14:04 · That’s far away.

1:14:06 · It’s just you kind of lived in this little bubble and that’s the way they wanted it, right? But now that the information is so open, it’s just so hard to control. There’s no there’s no doubt in my mind with AI coming out and stuff like that that they’re going to utilize that.

1:14:22 · It’s going to be so much more fucked. I think the the bigger issue with AI right now is the video and and photo manipulation capabilities.

1:14:33 · We’re already living in in a world where you don’t you can’t trust what you see, right? And it’s it AI video and and photos and audio. It’s it’s pretty good. It’s not 100% yet.

1:14:43 · Like you can still catch it.

1:14:44 · You can still catch it. You can still catch it.

1:14:46 · It’s getting to the point though that like what happens when you can’t catch it?

1:14:49 · It’s getting close.

1:14:50 · There’s a lot of thing where I’m like I work in the video field. I’ve done AI work for clients and stuff like that. And they make you do AI stuff.

1:14:57 · Yeah.

1:14:57 · What do they do?

1:14:58 · So, so this is a different conversation, but it’s um I’ve had a recent conversation about uh AI use in videos uh commercially. Yeah.

1:15:07 · Uh from the west and China. I had a client uh from Europe in Germany and I was doing a commercial for them, a watch brand. And so we were talking about AI, right? And I was like, “So, so what’s it like over there?” So because AI is getting crazy over here in China.

1:15:22 · So, what’s that over there? They’re like, “Nah, yeah, we don’t really like to use it.” And, you know, it’s it’s it’s still a bit of a taboo, you know, and and I mean, it’s there. You got you got the slop, you know. I’m like, “Yeah, lot of slop.” Yeah, a lot of slop. Lot of slop.

1:15:36 · Like, you know, we don’t really want to use it and stuff like that. Maybe for like some VFX, but not like all AI video. No way. You know, [snorts] and I’m like, “Yeah, I get it. I get it.” You know, um they’re like, “How about you in China?” I’m like, “No, it’s the opposite here.” Um people are pretty welcoming of it. Um if anything, they’re like, “Wow, that was really well done.

1:15:52 · And you don’t get as much like push back, which is mind-blowing to me because as somebody who works in the field and and talking with other people that are creators and knowing that the job market is changing because of it, the budgets are getting slashed and the demand is getting higher. Uh it blows my mind that there’s not push back. Why do you think that is? Well, first of all, I think there’s a different there’s different levels to this. growing up in America, you know, I went to film school.

1:16:21 · So people around they’re all passionate about film and even non-filmmakers can understand the idea of passion with film and and you know and the the art of it. Um I would say the majority of the public here they don’t have as much of that type of relationship. It’s more about I need to survive so I needed to make money. Okay.

1:16:43 · And if I need if I’m so for example it’s very interesting for people outside the industry the a gaffer which is like a electrician or the person who controls the lights okay the gaffer and then the light lightning team a lot of them come from literally

1:16:58 · certain areas in China so you got like the the the situ crowd you got the crowd you got different crowd and they own like they there’s like a whole bunch of them own the equipment and like all the team members and they just come from these little provinces like little little little areas almost like gangs, right?

1:17:15 · Yes. [laughter] Like like they control that like and they’re part of the cartels. Yeah. Literally think Africa. [laughter] Everyone thinks it’s the Jews is actually this is one.

1:17:26 · So it’s very interesting and but what I’m trying to get at is uh cuz if you talk to some of like the the grips and stuff like that, you have some conversation, you’re not going to get to the level of being like what’s your favorite film or what you know what are some films you really like? They probably like I don’t know. I just do my job. Wow. You know, but meanwhile in the States or something like that, you talk to a grip, they’re maybe they want to be a gaffer, they want to be a DP, and so they’re they’re kind of like, yeah, I love this film. So, it’s a very different relationship to to film making.

1:17:55 · So, now I’m not now I’m not saying everyone’s like that. Of course, you’re going to have anomalies, but the general I would say the general consensus is that now the main roles like the DP or the director or something like that. Yeah.

1:18:06 · Yeah. They’re still they’re so passionate and stuff like that. You can have those kind of conversations, but not all of them. And so it’s interesting. So based off of that, when you have that type of relationship, you’re only thinking monetarily of is it going to solve the problem? Now, if [clears throat] the problem is from a brand perspective, I need to create a commercial to send to the public and the public already looks at commercials like it’s a commercial. It’s not a piece of art.

1:18:32 · It doesn’t matter to me. It’s just a commercial that they don’t care. So they’re just like whatever. It’s a commercial.

1:18:37 · No one cares. It’s just commercials are the devil anyway. So it doesn’t matter. But then you have you have push back in the in the west when McDonald’s or Coca-Cola came out and fully AI generated commercial. They hated that. There was a huge push back, you know? So now only you got like Cashy and like shit like whatever whatever those like uh poly market shit, you know, like those kind of fucking Oh yeah.

1:18:59 · shit of the world companies.

1:19:01 · What’s more dystopian than that? like being able to bet on everyday life and reality. Oh, it’s awesome. No, it’s horrible.

1:19:08 · [laughter] I love it. Anyway, use my promo code sign up Eric H. Check. No, [laughter] it’s crazy. It is great. It’s uh it’s really destroying America. If if you want America to fall apart, you’ll root every day for Poly Market, the Kashi, the every every betting app, the FanDuels, the DraftKings, you want those to do well cuz I think they’re ripping.

1:19:30 · But okay, I have a little bit of a contrarian view without knowing too much about all that.

1:19:35 · People who are critical of like polyark and cashy and and this this idea of like being able to bet on like you know everyday stuff.

1:19:44 · Why would you be critical of that but you’re not critical of like the stock market? Like you could stock market is basically gambling and you’re gambling against on on corporations and you’re giving corporations money and they’re profiting from your 100% agree. I 1 million% agree. Thank you. Look at that. Awesome.

1:20:00 · And so why is it all of a sudden a bad thing once these corporations can’t profit from your betting?

1:20:06 · Yes.

1:20:06 · But it’s okay when they can.

1:20:08 · I agree.

1:20:09 · Okay.

1:20:09 · Yeah.

1:20:09 · No, that’s awesome. We should ban the American stock market, too. The New York Stock Exchange should be abolished.

1:20:16 · We should destroy the American stock market. I think I think it is 100% speculative. I don’t believe any like average Joe person is like investing serious amounts of money into the stock market with the real knowledge that like someone who wants a a a long-term benefit to the entire world or the United States even has. I think it’s very much so I want short-sighted gains.

1:20:40 · I want to invest in the GameStop. I want it to go up 100x. I want to invest in the shitcoins. I want those to go up a millionx. I want to invest in the next Bitcoin. You know, like they’re not doing it because they see some sort of long-term vision for some worldchanging product that is being invented in the United States. They’re doing it for the exact same reasons. They are betting on things on Khi or Poly Market or whatever. And they want that short-term little monetary gain. They want the little dopamine hit. They want to be able to brag to their friends like, “Yeah, bro. I got into GME like 3 years before you.”

Socialism and the American Dream

1:21:11 · You know, there’s something to be said about that, but I don’t think it’s good for society. No. I was see I was coming at it from a different angle in terms of like like maybe not extreme as you like I wouldn’t be like wanting to ban the stock market but I’m saying like at least what I’ve heard is that most people who are critical of like poly market and stuff like that are it’s more for a moral reason you’re betting on like tragic events around the world if they happen or not right things with real life consequences and I and I totally get that argument but betting on

1:21:42 · a company especially a big one I I mean, there are what thousands and thousands of people that work under that company whose livelihoods depend on the ups and downs in that company. You’re hedging your bets on whether that company is going to survive or go down or profit or not profit, the ups and downs, right?

1:21:58 · Those employees, go ahead and lay off some staff, you know.

1:22:00 · Exactly.

1:22:00 · And so those those bets also have real life consequences and the people that directly work for those companies, not even to mention the things that are downstream effects of what that company does. So if it’s a big let’s say a defense contracting company like Lockheed Rathon friend of the show

1:22:18 · [laughter] sponsor of the show um if it’s them I mean what like the consequences of what they do around the world and you’re betting on that like why is that more morally just than betting on you know uh if you know the Iran war starts on this date versus not like I mean you know things like that like I just I I see it hypocritical to be like critical of one and not the other. That’s all I’m saying.

1:22:41 · I think I think I mean this is an important conversation to be had because I think this has been a criticism that people have had in the past. But I think the what someone will say is there is regulation to try to prevent that insider trading that has occurred over like the past few centuries. But the thing is, people have all of the trust people have had in government has been eroded because we’ve seen Nancy Pelosy’s stock portfolio go from a measly little, I don’t know, 10 million to now hundreds of millions of dollars, outperforming index funds by five or 10x.

1:23:10 · Well, like outperforming like the most famed investors like Warren Buffett or whatever. Like what the fuck are we doing?

1:23:16 · Like you’re the best investor in the world that the world has ever seen and you happen to also deal in policy that affects these companies. But that but that’s the thing. That’s that’s the disillusionment. Part of the [clears throat] disillusionment is like like there’s all the rules apply but don’t apply to people in Congress, don’t apply to people in government who actually have a material effect on the outcome of these things.

1:23:36 · So I think and the valuation of these things.

1:23:37 · Yes.

1:23:37 · So but I think I think like the American populace is at a point now where you have some folks who like okay we want to enforce these laws for everyone. Of course we don’t want to be in this class of people who exploit each other. And then there’s this other class, this other group of people who think, yeah, I mean, this is just the system’s always going to be this way. I want to be a part of that. I want to take advantage of this insider vision [clears throat] that I have. So, if I’m a product manager at OpenAI, I want to bet on when the next model is going to come out because I know when it’s going to come out.

1:24:06 · Of course, if I work in the Department of War at the United States government, I know when we’re launching these strikes on Venezuela, on Cuba, on Iran, on whoever. I’m going to use that insider information because like listen, Donald Trump Jr.’s on the board of advisers of Poly Market. I’m not going to get in trouble.

1:24:24 · Nancy Pelosi hasn’t been getting in trouble. Why the fuck would I, some random like product manager at Rathon get in trouble for this new weapon sale we just did when I know that we’re about to use these weapons on whatever country? So I think it’s it’s whether or not people in oftenimes the working class want to have this aspiration which is in many ways I think the American dream of joining the capitalist class,

1:24:49 · joining the owners, the oligarchs, the folks who own all of the means of production and they want to ascend to that level so they can exploit everyone else and be in this sort of like higher level class and and reap the rewards of these violent systems that we’ve put in place.

1:25:05 · And then of course there’s that other group of people the other contingency of folks who I think are probably against poly market probably against Kelie probably against oftentimes the stock market like myself at least the American stock market and say I don’t know I think it’s a much better society in which we just enforce all of these laws equally independent of whether or not you are a member of Congress or someone who’s just a an average like construction worker or something.

1:25:30 · That’s a crazy it’s a crazy concept. that people should all be held accountable to the same legal system that we put in place to hold us to a certain standard. Like that feels so simple, but as an American, it seems so outlandish. It seems so crazy. Yeah. I think that’s one of the I don’t know how to say it. Like maybe the biggest lies I think is that people in America have been conditioned to believe that the fight is left versus right and it’s not. No, it’s up versus down.

1:26:03 · Mhm.

1:26:03 · The fight has always been up versus down. And they’re the ones that want you to believe that the fight No, it’s not up versus down. It’s not the upper class versus you. It’s not the oligarchs versus everyone else. It’s No, it’s left versus right. You guys squabble about that.

1:26:17 · Yeah.

1:26:18 · While both sides, no matter left or right, are profiting from that.

1:26:21 · Yeah.

1:26:21 · And ultimately have the same goal. Some just disguise it better than the other.

1:26:25 · 100%.

1:26:25 · Well, that’s the poly market. The left and right.

1:26:27 · Hell yeah.

1:26:27 · Which side you going? Yeah. [laughter] No. Well, it’s crazy though. It’s like, bro, [clears throat] my landlord is not a Guatemalan immigrant who came here seeking refuge from like the Mayan genocide. Bro, my my landlord is some faceless, nameless corporation staffed by like three billionaires. Like, what the fuck are we doing? You know, like why are we trying to fun somewhere?

1:26:46 · Like, who gives a shit? And you can say that to anyone on the left or the right.

1:26:49 · If you get down to the nitty-gritty of it, it’s like, bro, the guy who raised your rent is not some dude from like trying to escape some terrible violent condition in like Latin America. The guy who raised your rent is some dickhead at the top of some board of CEOs who was like, “Well, actually, I think if we got all of these other landlords together, we can milk a little bit more.

1:27:09 · Raise it a little bit more.” What are they going to do? They live without a house. Fuck no. They’re not going to do that. Come on. So, okay. So, we’re we’re kind of talking about this idea of like runaway hyper capitalism in America, which is how I see it. Speaking to what we’re talking about in terms of the younger generation in society, they’re they’re kind of feeling the cracks in that. Yeah.

1:27:29 · idea. And they’re unfortunately paying the price for that.

1:27:34 · We’ve been dancing around this, but like I haven’t directly asked you like what what would you identify yourself as then um politically if you had to choose a label? I guess if we if we had to throw you into a bucket, right?

1:27:45 · Yeah.

1:27:45 · I I think it’s thankfully as a consequence of some of the new developments in the United States, I think it’s become much more permissible, at least in America, to describe yourself as a socialist. I think in recent time it’s been okay to say you’re a democratic socialist. Even very normal folks are well which is what Zoron which is what Zoron said. Yeah. Um I would say I’m a socialist. I would say I’m a socialist. I think I’m I am very interested in the the the various communist nations around the world that have uplifted so many people out of poverty.

1:28:16 · I would like to learn from them as much as I possibly can and um you know communize the United States of America brother. you know, but no, like genuinely I would like to learn as much as I can and and try to bring some of those lessons back to back to home, back to mom donastan um and and see if we can enact some meaningful change. I don’t know if it has to be incremental or if frankly the entire thing needs to be turned on its head and there needs to be a whole new system. But I think that’s a debate that um many people around the world outside of the United States have been having for a considerable amount of time.

1:28:48 · And I think recently I’ve been very sympathetic to the the movements that have successfully turned entire systems on their heads. So I’ve I’ve grown very sympathetic to the the systems that I’ve seen abroad such in place such as in places like China or even Vietnam.

1:29:04 · Vietnam say I went to Vietnam last month. I went to Lao last month and oh my god Vietnam is an exciting place right now.

1:29:12 · A lot of people moving there.

1:29:13 · Yeah. Yeah.

1:29:14 · They say Vietnam is now what Shanghai was like 10 years ago. A lot of people like that excitement level. Yeah.

1:29:20 · Too many tourists though. So many French people. Oh my god.

1:29:22 · Oh, that’s a no no then.

1:29:24 · Oh, that’s a no no then.

1:29:25 · So many [laughter] French dude. I Oh, I ran into I ran into on our previous podcast we were ripping on Italian people. We’re talking Italian people don’t know how to make pizza. Now we’re [laughter] like French people.

1:29:37 · Italian people. You know, honestly, before coming to China, I hated all Europeans. [laughter] After coming to China, I hate all Europeans more except Italians. I met a lot of Italians here. They’ve been very nice. French. Oh my god, bro.

1:29:51 · They’re so stuck up. [laughter] THEY’RE ALL OH GOD, DUDE. They’re like, “Ah, this Chinese, they need a little sophistication. We are going to the French concession. We will have the esgo. We have the snails. They have the snails.” But that was a betail. Shut the fuck up, Paris. Go back to more of that.

1:30:14 · Unshowered little bitch place. It’s disgusting. I The French people piss me off so much. They’re so arrogant. The thing is too, Europeans are very arrogant and they think that they are brilliant. Americans, I have to give it to us. We are very dumb. We’re maybe the dumbest country, the the dumbest developed country out there, but like we know we’re stupid. Like we know that we’re fucking morons. And like we’re kind of okay with you guys.

1:30:45 · [laughter] I’m okay. Like if if a Chinese person came up to me was like, “You’re an idiot. You don’t know anything about China.” I’d be like, “Yeah, you’re right. Fuck it. [laughter] I’m an idiot. I’m okay with that.” If they said it to a French person, they’d be like, “I cannot believe you are so unsophisticated.” It’s like, “MY GOD, BRO.”

1:31:01 · There’s something here that that’s deeper here. There’s [laughter] a deeper deeper There’s a deeper core anger here. Your hate for French people run.

1:31:09 · No, they haven’t reckoned with anything.

1:31:10 · [clears throat] They emptied out Africa. All the streets of Paris are paved with the blood of tens of millions of Africans who they enslaved and they have not reckoned with any of it and their food still sucks in my opinion. It’s like, bro, same with Britain, too.

1:31:23 · Britain, it’s like if you’re going to go around and colonize the entire world literally for the spice trade to get more spices. Why the fuck does your food suck so badly, bro?

1:31:34 · One of the biggest mysteries of human existence.

1:31:37 · It’s crazy. The only good thing they’ve ever produced, the only good thing Britain has ever produced is chicken tikka masala. I would die on that hill.

1:31:44 · Invented in England, thank God, by a wonderful immigrant invented. Invented in England by a wonderful immigrant who finally brought a little bit of culture and civilization, societ societal benefits to the British people. Oh my god. They’ve now produced a single other good thing. It’s I didn’t know that. I didn’t know chicken tikka masala was invented in England. Yes. Yeah.

1:32:04 · So it’s not even native to India then. That dish. Wow. Like General Charles chicken.

1:32:08 · Yeah, we we was talking about like Chinese American food.

1:32:11 · Wait, actually I want to bring up something orange chicken. [laughter] Am I off base on this? So So we were just By the way, we just lost all our European listeners.

1:32:19 · Sorry. Sorry. [laughter] My bad.

1:32:21 · I’ll come back a little bit on that. So um so yeah, we just went off on French, Italian, or whoever. But but we’re we’re obviously joking to a certain extent.

1:32:30 · You guys are joking about this.

1:32:31 · [laughter] And but what what I find interesting is what if we change those countries to China and we we’re joking like fucking Chinese people and just going off.

1:32:42 · Mhm.

1:32:43 · Push back would come out. Or if you say African countries or something like that, push back will come out because it’s much more sensitive to talk about it. Why is that?

1:32:51 · Well, because they haven’t been the privileged. Yes. Yes. And European countries and Western countries by and large have throughout at least modern history have been the privileged colonizers.

1:33:03 · And so it’s fair game to punch up but you shouldn’t be punching down I guess.

1:33:08 · Have you heard of the term Yakubian ape?

1:33:11 · Nope. I heard this. So in the idea like there’s a the Nation of Islam which is this definitely like it’s a radical bunch of folks. I I don’t really believe in anything they have to say. They are very crazy in many ways and they’re kind of a cult. Um, it’s like a black nationalist cult in the United States, but they have some interesting ideas and one of which is this idea of Yakub where the entire world leading up until recent history was black, brown, and then there was this evil scientist who’s this black dude with this massive forehead like looks like Megamind almost.

1:33:42 · And he was this evil doctor, this evil scientist who invented white people to punish the rest of the people on Earth. And he sent down all of these white people to inhabit all of these regions to colonize, to plunder. And I kind of ascribe to that. And I’m like, you know, they kind of had a fair point. A lot of the white folks in Europe did a lot of really bad things throughout history.

1:34:06 · I mean, I think the reason why we attribute is that we allow this sort of slander of dumbass French people is because they did so much damage to Africa, to to Indochina, to the rest of the world.

1:34:23 · But even the parts in the Middle East you’re talking about like Israel and Palestine. I mean, those lines were drawn by like was it the French or the British? The Brits. The French as well. They were all fucking getting together and being like, “Oh, we’re this white occupier. We can draw these lines.” knowing nothing about like the cultural history. They just drew lines arbitrarily and people are still fighting in those lands today.

1:34:41 · Like India and Pakistan is such a crazy divide like they should not have this tension. It was completely manufactured by the dumbass fucking British Empire who came in and split people up who had otherwise lived in a fairly borderless world for their entire existence until these dumbass fucking British came in and were like, “Well, actually, we’re going to split you up and now, yeah, Kashmir, good luck with that. I hope you guys figure it out. Bye. See you.” And it’s like now your food still sucks, dude. It’s like that’s the important thing about really understanding history. Like when you know these things, a lot of the dots start connecting.

1:35:12 · And and I can also say from our French friends here that whenever we rag on them, they love it.

1:35:17 · They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, we did it.”

1:35:19 · [laughter] They know, huh?

1:35:21 · Especially Especially British people, I say, like at least the British people I’ve met here, they’re very aware of like the atrocities that the empire has committed in the past. Yeah.

1:35:30 · Um, I appreciate that, but it’s like I don’t know. This is okay to your point, this is actually very anecdotal. I just This is just my personal observation. Europeans, especially Europeans that have lived here for a while, they are much more prone to lecturing you.

1:35:46 · Yeah.

1:35:47 · Where Americans don’t really lecture.

1:35:49 · They They have their opinions, but they kind of keep it to themselves or, you know, whatever.

1:35:53 · Europeans will lecture more. I feel they love a good lecture. Oh, [laughter] they love They’re all doing TED talks to everyone. all the time. It’s like, Jesus Christ, bro. Yeah, the Brits come and do that shit.

1:36:02 · 8 months. 8 months. He’s already feeling that. [laughter] They do it everywhere, though. They fucking Oh my god, dude. It’s not just China. They go around the entire fucking world. Even people the like diplomats in Kenya say this all the time or in Yeah, in Kenya specifically, but all throughout Africa, they’re always like, “Listen, man. The Chinese come to our country, they leave, we have a hospital.

1:36:24 · The Brits come to our country, they leave, we have a lecture left with us.”

1:36:28 · It’s like, bro, what the fuck?

1:36:29 · [laughter] We They They don’t come and bring infrastructure. They come and give us a fucking lecture about how to govern ourselves, dude. It’s nuts. It’s like, I wish you would had that same thought in mind when you were out here colonizing us a 100 years ago, sometimes even more recently. Americans were dumb, but we know that we’re dumb. You know, that’s so funny.

1:36:46 · But, [laughter] uh, that’s so funny.

1:36:47 · Going back to you for a second, obviously, you have strong opinions. Um, you’re you seem to be very politically active in your work both with Zoron and everything else and the content that you do. Does activist fit for you as like you’re kind of a political activist?

1:37:03 · Sure. I think whatever whatever title best like uh I guess like allows allows some of the ideas I say to enter into the hearts and minds of the people. If it’s activist, if it’s content creator, if it’s dumbass influencer who has to eat noodles and talk about the industrial development of rural China, I will do whatever the fuck it takes because I I I my only goal is to produce

1:37:25 · content that is interesting enough for people to watch to make them to keep their attention while also teaching them something about the material history of why things are the way they are, why some countries are rich, why some countries are poor, and how we can effectively move forward to make sure that, you know, the tide lifts all of our boats together without having to go out and bomb the boats in the Pacific Ocean who the Donald Trump says are drug trafficking or some nonsense like that.

1:37:51 · You know, that is the only thing I care about. So, activist, whatever title, I I I don’t really give a shit. I call myself a political commentator.

1:37:58 · Sometimes I call myself a video creator, but whatever whatever gets into the hearts and minds of folks. Is there a side of you that’s like telling yourself, “Well, look, look, I got to check myself sometimes.” Because I’m sure there are plenty of people who will hear you watch your videos or even hear this podcast or hear you speak on any other number of other interviews that you’ve done and be like, “Well, this guy is a radicalist.” Yeah. He’s a completely radicalized stressed because you are so Yeah. Because you are so far outside of that status quo norm and you are very outspoken about that and and you don’t you’re very unapologetic about that.

1:38:29 · Is there a part of you that’s like, “Okay, well, look, I’m a human being. We’re all human beings.” And like all human beings, we’re also very susceptible of drinking our own Kool-Aid from time to time. And we can get in this echo chamber and this rabbit hole of our own thoughts and we can go off the deep end.

1:38:49 · Is there that part of you that’s like, I have to kind of check that from time to time?

1:38:53 · No. I think the way I view things in my own personal life, and I I’m very lucky in that I’m able to say like, listen, as long as I’m able to just like have enough money to put food on the table, to have a roof over my head, I’m happy to do whatever the fuck it takes and say whatever the fuck I think is is useful in this moment in order to try to get to the hearts and the minds of the people because I think that history will absolve me. I think history will absolve people saying the same things that I’m saying right now.

1:39:21 · Because in 5 years, in 10 years from now, when things in the United States are most likely considerably worse than they are right now, people will be looking back and saying, “Man, there’s been a few people who have been saying this was going to happen the entire time and that there is actually a better world possible, but I don’t really know what that is.” What did they say about what we could be doing right now? Is it too late to start implementing that?

1:39:44 · And I think it will give the folks who are saying this exact same message credibility as things start to unravel, as things start to become more concrete, the contradictions start to sharpen around them, where rent starts to just increase at rates that it’s completely unsustainable, where um whatever form of automation starts getting rid of people’s work, even if it’s not that fucking good. Like people are going to see that.

1:40:06 · And in the same way that like you can change people’s hearts and minds by taking them to China and being like look at the material world around you, the same thing’s going to happen in the United States and the West and in Europe, dumbass Europe, and they think they’re like they’re not susceptible to any, but they are. It’s going to happen in Europe as well, where the material conditions will get to the point where they simply cannot ignore what is going on.

1:40:27 · And in that moment, people in America, in Europe, wherever in the developed world will look back and say, there’s been some people saying this is going to happen this entire time. They’ve been echoing this message about trying to create a better future not just for this rich oligarchic oligarchic class but like the actual people myself who goes to work 10 hours

1:40:53 · a day 8 10 12 hours a day making money for someone who I’ve never even met in person and I think as that starts to happen this message will resonate deeper and deeper with people and so even at the potential expense of alien alienating people right now. I do believe history will absolve some of the things that I’m saying. I hopefully all, but I’m sure I’m wrong about some things and I hopefully won’t be too arrogant to admit that in the future when I realize that I’m wrong about some things.

1:41:21 · But I think that is the the struggle that I I would like to think I’m going through right now. If that makes sense.

1:41:27 · It’s your faith in and that you’re on the right side of history right now.

1:41:31 · Conviction.

1:41:31 · Yeah.

1:41:32 · Yeah.

1:41:32 · And and I think my goal is to look at history, especially postw World War II history, and figure out why things are the way they are in this new world order. Figure out what countries have done well, what countries have done poorly, and try to explain that in terms that respect the material history, and also respect where people are in their own political journeys, their historical journeys, and try to figure out the best way of communicating that to people.

1:41:56 · And I know 100% sometimes I’ll probably use terms that are too too stupid or too broad, too ridiculous, too fucking pedantic, and maybe speak down to folks, maybe speak up to folks. But the idea of making these videos time and time again, trying to refine the craft video after video is trying to get to a point where I can communicate to as broad of an audience as is possible to like receive the message, if that makes sense. And I know a lot of people are really frustrated, at least in the United States.

1:42:26 · They’re very frustrated with the state of affairs.

1:42:29 · And like I was saying, there’s this creeping nihilism that’s seeping into their bones. I think that’s really scary cuz a lot of people want to do some cool shit. They want things to get better, but they haven’t seen that ever. And so if we shine a little light on some of the specs of history that have demonstrated that things actually can improve and sprinkle it with a little bit of revolutionary optimism, then I think, you know, we can actually get to them little by little.

1:42:54 · Is there anything about your impression of China or your experience in China so far that you don’t like?

1:42:59 · Yeah, of course. There are, of course, little quality of life elements that I’m like, you know, it’s always just like silly little things like people driving down the sidewalks on scooters and, you know, honking at me. It’s like, bro, this is a sidewalk. You’re not supposed to be driving your scooter here. That’s a little frustrating. Um, there’s there’s got to be some other things, too.

1:43:20 · I think maybe also the literal software of some platforms. I, as silly as it is, as an American, I’m very used to doing things on my computer. I this is like a really dumb like little thing, but it’s like a big quality of life things at at times where uh like if I’m trying to fill out a form, nine times out of 10 the whatever site is optimized for like WeChat or Alip Pay and like little things like that kind of piss me off or I’m like a fuck, I have to go to my my phone to do this rather than just being able to do it on my computer like I’m used to or even u everything is optimized for Windows and not Mac.

1:43:52 · Yeah, it’s just like like little silly things like that where I’m like I’m genuinely very surprised that it feels like hardware wise like like like genuine hardware like phones and stuff are so advanced. Cars are so advanced, but it feels like like actually like the software on them sometimes is not as polished as it is in America. And I think this is also a very interesting example of of what capitalist development looks like, which is like software, all things considered, is relatively cheap to develop.

1:44:23 · If you fuck up some software, if you mess it up, if there’s a lot of bugs, you can polish it fairly quickly. It’s a fairly low capital uh industry. Like you don’t have to have that much money to create pretty decent software. And as a consequence of that basically every company and why combinator now in the United States is some variant of a software firm. Now it’s all AI but you know historically over the past few decades it’s some form of software that has tried to polish various industries over over the decades.

1:44:51 · Whereas if you have more centralized planning you have the ability to dump large amounts of money into hardware development that take a lot of time to refine because if you fucking car changes are huge and costly. Yeah.

1:45:07 · wheels fall off, people die. You [clears throat] know, if you have a bug that breaks an app, it’s like, okay, you lose 100 bucks, who gives a shit. Even if you lose 100,000 bucks, like, it’s fine. It’s a shitty It’s a shitty bug, but you’re not killing people. It’s a big difference. And America, as a consequence of this rapid immediate gains sort of capitalist ecosystem that they’ve cultivated, has rapidly iterated on so much software that has made many of our online experiences very polished, very refined.

1:45:33 · And so for little things like that, I’m like, man, I do kind of like some American apps better than some of the Chinese apps. With that said, and maybe I’m doing the opposite of always having to condemn, you know, like maybe there’s like some bad things inside. I’m doing the opposite. With that said, I have faith in China as a concept, as a culture, as a state, and even just the companies in China to make sure that over time that’s going to get better.

1:45:58 · And I think that’s exciting. We’ve seen that with Alip Pay and WeChat. We’ve seen that with other apps that have come out. Even the recent AI like apps in China, they’re getting better. They’re rivaling American apps. They’re getting better than American apps like this.

1:46:08 · They look different.

1:46:08 · That’s kind of cool. So, it’s an exciting time to be here. I feel like I’m coming at the exact right time cuz I get all the treats, too, which is Have you noticed I don’t know if you noticed, but this is a big uh cultural difference. Uh speaking of software, email, nobody emails here.

1:46:24 · That’s true.

1:46:25 · No email.

1:46:26 · I hadn’t thought about that until right now.

1:46:28 · No email. What’s up with that?

1:46:29 · No email. I think China or Chinese people tend to adapt to technology much quicker.

1:46:35 · It’s the same way why infrastructure has grown so quickly here because the jump from dirt roads to you know wonderful 5G and you know it’s much easier to update than old uh existing infrastructure.

1:46:50 · Yeah.

1:46:51 · So I think those kind of ideas [snorts] are what makes somebody just use text messaging because they grew up on Q and which is uh something that is very [clears throat] was very big here um which is just like AOL or MSN you know messaging um but with much more functionality which is much very much like WeChat and so why go into email then?

1:47:13 · So, I’m I’m just making that assumption because QQ had this mailing function as part of it and people used it, but they probably just felt like why like it’s unnecessary and I think it just went directly to Well, I I remember there was an inflection point in which WeChat rolled out a lot more functionality very early on, more so than WhatsApp. And I remember there was a period I don’t know what WhatsApp is like now. I’m not on WhatsApp.

1:47:42 · I’m sure it’s better, but like there I remember there was a time when I was on both and there were so many more things like cutting edge things that at that time that you could do on WeChat that just wasn’t available on WhatsApp.

1:47:56 · And I remember talking to my friends in America who was on WhatsApp and they’re like, “Oh yeah, WhatsApp.” I’m like, “Why you use WhatsApp?”

1:48:01 · And they’re like, “Yeah, well it’s just the thing to use.” And I would tell them about WeChat and then like I would tell them all the functions you can do and they almost like didn’t believe me. [laughter] Yeah. At that point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:48:13 · There was a certain point in time that they almost didn’t believe me like it doesn’t do that. What fantasy world are you talking about that it could do that you know and and and it was like things that we would take for granted here like functionality we take for granted here.

1:48:26 · I remember when we chat was making a big push abroad as well and it just totally failed in America and Europe.

1:48:32 · No one outside of China.

1:48:33 · It basically I always got the same response when I spoke to my American friends back in the day about like yo you should you know use we chat we could do video chat. It’s really good, you know, it’s really strong.

1:48:42 · And um and we can conference people in.

1:48:44 · Yeah. Conference people in. And they’re like conference people in. Yeah. And um and and they were like, “No, I don’t want the government watching me.”

1:48:51 · Yeah.

1:48:51 · I’m like, “Okay.”

1:48:53 · Yeah.

1:48:53 · I mean, what do you say at that point, right? [laughter] It’s just it’s just the same thing as like, you know, we talk about in the beginning, very beginning of this conversation, we talked about like the biggest the best thing you can do is actually just travel and come here and see for [clears throat] yourself and make up your own mind.

1:49:05 · But then there’s so many people that like I would never travel to an authoritarian politician. I love the democracy of America.

1:49:12 · We see we see how the propaganda is working in terms of, you know, preventing people from seeing from themselves. But anyway, yeah, being a dead horse. [laughter] Um, Eric, once again, man, thank you so much. This was a lovely conversation.

1:49:25 · Thank you for had a great time.

1:49:27 · Yeah, we we went hard on this one.

1:49:28 · Making fun of the French a little bit. [laughter] We we we offended a lot of people on this, by the way.

1:49:33 · Let’s go.

1:49:35 · And that’s the point.

1:49:36 · Yes.

1:49:36 · Hey, as long as we get those hate comments, that drives up engagement. That’s all that matters. Leave your favorite or sorry, your least favorite French person down in the comments below.

1:49:44 · Least favorite.

1:49:45 · Um, if people want to find you, where’s where’s the best place to find you?

1:49:49 · They can find me on on YouTube, on Twitter, Eric Hovigam. It’s just my name. [music] Um, I primarily post on YouTube with my main content. I also post on Tik Tok sometimes.

1:49:59 · Cool.

1:49:59 · All right. Uh, one last. Cheers.

1:50:01 · Cheers, fellas. Cheers, guys.

1:50:05 · Eric, thank you for being here. Incredible talking to you.

1:50:08 · Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

1:50:10 · I’m Justin. And I’m Howie, not a French guy.

1:50:14 · And I’m Eric Hovian, also not a French guy. [laughter] All right, guys. Be good. Be well.

1:50:20 · Peace.

1:50:24 · [music] [singing] [singing] [music]

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