China vs. the Oil Crisis: Stockpiles, EVs, and a Strategy America Wishes It Had

Hello everybody and welcome to Geopolitical Trends, where truth matters. As you know, Iran is on fire, right? And just oil just cracked over $100 a barrel, only to drop recently. And the country with the most to lose, it's not the US, some say it's China. Really? Well, Beijing quietly imports more Iranian crude than anyone on Earth. And now that supply is vanishing overnight, some argue. So why aren't the Chinese leaders panicking? The answer reveals a decade-long energy strategy that Washington never saw it coming and may never be able to match. So with us today to answer these questions and more about different other topics is my dear friend Dr. Warwick Pao. Hi, Warwick.

How are you, David, and hello to all of your community.

Well, they are excited to see you here. For those who might be here for the first time, let me just introduce Warwick. Warwick, uh, Dr. Warwick Pao is an adjunct professor at Queensland University of Technology and a senior fellow at the Tahi Institute in Beijing. His recent book, let me put a cover for it because we're gonna be addressing. You need to know some stuff about that book. Uh, the recent book is Thermo-Economics in a Time of Monsters: Rethinking Theory, China, and International Geopolitical Economy. He also wrote a book about China Trust and Digital Supply Chain. He's the host of the TIO Talk Show, and he's also on Substack. I'm gonna put the links for you in the chat box in, in, in a second here. So let me start, uh, Warik. I would like to get on— first of all, Beijing has sort of, uh, grown more assertive now in words, in warning Washington, uh, about its, uh, sort of plans so forth to send the troops and so forth. And this came through by, uh, Mr. Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister who really warned against any attempt of regime change per se in Iran. How significant is this statement coming out of Beijing, in your opinion?

Look, I think it's very significant, David, because China is making it very clear to Washington that this kind of behavior, um, is no longer going to be tolerated, not only by China, but I think by the broader international community. And whilst Washington may believe that it can thumb its nose up at the international community, as it has been doing in recent times. At some point, there is a day of reckoning where countries and groupings of countries ultimately will come together and express a collective position to Washington about, uh, their concerns and why it is that Washington, in not only its own interest but in the interest of other countries around the globe, needs to think harder about its behavior and ways in which it goes forward. Wang Yi, I think, has been very clear for a long time, and this reflects the position of the Chinese government as well, that the world as it is, is one characterized by an emerging multipolar or a multinodal setup. There is no longer room or capacity for a single country, in this case the United States, to conduct itself as if it is the global hegemon. It might want to think it is, and it might have a whole bunch of ingrained learned behaviors both in thought and in action, but reality has moved on. And Wang Yi is trying to, in in diplomatic terms, explain to Washington that its particular modus operandi is no longer fit for purpose. The times have changed, and the United States needs to get with the times.

Well, indeed. I mean, some, uh, Warwick, have been arguing what this is, uh, just, uh, Chinese being assertive, uh, because they are concerned about losing energy. I'm saying it other way. The way I see it is that the concern for China is not only about its own economy, but rather the world economic stability and energy security. Will I be wrong in this assessment, Warwick?

No, look, David, I think you're absolutely right. I think China obviously will be affected by the events in the Persian Gulf like everybody. But it has a broader view, and that view is one that a responsible large nation, great nation, needs to have. It needs to understand not only its own interests but also how it can play a role in securing the environment for smaller countries that struggle to assert their own interests. And in this particular situation with significant disruptions to energy supply chains. China is making it very clear to the global community that it stands as a stable partner and one willing to progressively use all means available to bring the situation back down to earth and to take the heat out of the conflict. Now, conflicts, once they erupt, can't be switched off easily. This is the thing that I think countries like China, with a long history, including a history with plenty of its own conflicts in centuries past, understands. And so even when social media and a whole lot of mainstream commentators kind of want a social media time frame on addressing these issues, you know, intervene today and it's all over tomorrow kind of thing. China understands that once you let the genie out of the bottle or open up these Pandora's boxes, that bringing the pieces back together again is an arduous and time-consuming process, and it can't be unfortunately brought to a halt with the click of the fingers. So It has an approach. Some people are frustrated with it because it is often a very deliberate, diplomatically anchored approach, but it is one that seeks to enable a scaffold, a scaffold of responses that hope to shape the conditions that enable the parties in the dispute to ultimately find a way firstly to temporarily halting the dispute and then create the conditions by which they can transcend the reasons for dispute and get to the other end. So China's sort of firm approach is not a black and white approach. I think a lot of people, uh, kind of just want things to be over with. They want it to be clear. But that's not possible. And this kind of firm but deliberate and methodical approach is really the only way that you can approach the work of statecraft and the work of diplomacy. Um, I wish you could bring the war to an end like this minute, right? Thousands of people are affected, many have died, and I think anybody would wish that you could just click a finger and and put it all to end. But, um, no, look, I think China, together with other countries, will be working behind the scenes as much as they do through public utterance to try to shape the conditions that will at least open up the possibilities of reducing some temperature and finding pathways to détente.

So where is this fear coming from? Or sort of the, the, the— I've read some analysis coming out of both sides of the Atlantic. And the argument is that, well, the Chinese are panicking, that's why they are more assertive. And even if we are to ask, panicking about what? They're saying about energy, but they forget that China had a strategy. To my knowledge, Warwick, for about a decade or so, they've been planning for an eventuality in case and put about 1.4 billion barrels of oil just in reserve, just in case.

Look, there's a few layers to this, and, uh, and, and this goes back 20, 30 years. In the late 1990s, early 2000s, Chinese leaders at the time were actually very explicit in acknowledging the risks to China's energy security by way of American interdictions and closures of not only the Strait of Hormuz, which was a possibility, but also the Strait of Malacca. And so there has been a very deep sense of sensitivity to the global interconnectedness, but also as a result of that, the risks to national energy security. That's the sort of security backdrop. At the same time, there is an economic development and technology transformation dimension as well. And over the course of this last 25 years, whilst this security issue has sat in the back of mind, we have seen an economy progressively expand. And as economies expand, they become more energy intensive. Mhm. So China's had to do a couple of things at the same time. One is to continue driving economic development in the interests of alleviating poverty and raising living standards of you know, 1.4 billion people. But in doing so, it's also had to engineer a strategic reorientation to the structure, the energetic structure of its own economy. So 25 years ago, China's energy was principally conventional oil. And by the way, China itself is a significant oil, um, uh, producer, producer, as well as derivatives. But it had to import oils import refined products. It imported coal to supplement the coal that it had, and that of course had to do the same with gas. That was the mix. Come 2025, that mix has changed substantially. China's exposure to imported oils now, from an energetic point of view, is somewhere around the order of 20% of its national economic energy needs. And of that, of course, the oil from, uh, Iran and other places is just one part. So in a sense, China has firstly diversified its overall structure. It's done that through the development of a whole bunch of new technologies and systems that go with that— renewable clean energy, increasingly energy storage., nuclear technologies and new generations of that, as well as sort of next-generation energy solutions, which we might touch on a bit later. So China's been working around all of these issues so as to achieve economic growth whilst reducing its overall strategic dependence on external energy sources, and it's been able to accomplish that reasonably well. In terms of the reserves, of course, China does maintain substantial reserves. And during the course of the, the second half of 2025, it was actually boosting those reserves. So yes, it does have reserves of at least, um, 6 months' worth of materials. And in fact, I wrote a paper about this last June after the cessation of the 12-day war, which explored the issue of the extent to which China is energetically exposed to the closure of the Hormuz Straits. And what I argued then was that is far less exposed than many people think. But importantly also, I flagged the prospects that in fact the closure of the Hormuz, the Strait of Hormuz, would not necessarily involve the cessation of flows of oil to China itself. And in fact, that's exactly what we've seen, is that Iran has demonstrated an ability to wield the so-called, uh, Hormuz weapon It has been able to control movement through that, and, uh, and in doing so, it's enabled oil to continue shipping to countries that it deems to be friendly. So you put that package together over the course of the last 25 years or so, you've got a national economy that has been acutely sensitive to energy supply risks through exposures internationally. As well as a recognition that it needed to develop its own energy sovereignty to a greater extent than it had in the past to mitigate risks, number one, but also, as we'll discuss later, um, lay the foundations for the next generation of energetic efficiency, which is necessary to propel the nation forward in terms of the services that it can provide and the material welfare that it can provide to its people. So China today is far less exposed to what goes on in the Persian Gulf than it was 25 years ago. It's not unimpacted, nobody is. But anybody who talks about this as really either a, um, an attack on China or a significant exposure to China, in a sense, uh, have not really caught up with the events over the last 20 years. The last point I'll make on this front, David, is many analysts will point to the American interdictions in Venezuela and what it's done in Iran as part of a concerted effort to cut China off from energy. That may well have been part of the strategy 15, 20 years ago. And in fact, there are plenty of documents from the time from think tanks and others who talked about that. But what it tells you is that American thinking has also been trapped in the past. It has not maintained a sensible strategic understanding of the transformations that have been taking place in the energy world, and in particular how China itself has not only been contributing to global energy systems transformation, but in the process has also transformed its own energetic structure.

That's an interesting insight, uh, and we're gonna delve deeper into once we talk about your book because you address some really key, uh, themes into that book. I, I don't want to get ahead of myself of this because I still have two main questions I would like you— I would like to ask you because I want the community to have a better understanding. The first one is, uh, what do you make out of Aaron's request, not request rather, but condition. If any oil tankers passing by will have to pay in the Chinese yuan. Is this an indication of why the fear in Washington about the down of the petrodollar? Because the yuan will take some sort of or replace the petrodollar in the long term.

The, the request or the insistence on payment with RMB, I think in part is because Iran recognizes that payment in other currencies, particularly the US dollar or euro, would expose Iran to the risks of those funds being frozen by the Americans or by the Europeans, right? So I think first and foremost, it's just a recognition that, uh, that, that they don't want to be leaving themselves in that position. This is why Scott Besson's lifting of the sanctions is in many regards quite meaningless. There's another reason why it's meaningless as well, which I'll mention in a moment. The, the other thing about, uh, the, uh, the payment in RMB, yeah, is that you've got to remember that for all intents and purposes, Iran has been a severely sanctioned country by the United States. And by the Europeans, and has been essentially disconnected from many other parts of the global economy. And so whilst it has also developed incredible domestic capabilities and all sorts of things, uh, it remains connected to the Chinese economy for all sorts of stuff. And to pay for that, it needs RMB. So in a sense, it also makes sense for Iran to accumulate RMB because it uses RMB to purchase things from China. It can probably also use RMB to purchase things from Russia too, by the way, because the Russians would find increasing their reserves of RMB quite useful as well. The, the issue of Scott Bessant— and then I'll touch on the, the petrodollar question— is that he lifted the sanctions, you know, claiming that they would do jiu-jitsu and use the the, the Iranian oil against the Iranians and all this sort of, you know, bizarre rhetoric. The reality is that Iranian oil has been part of the global market for a long time, but it has been part of a section of the market that the Americans have forbidden people from dealing with. But it has actually been part of the global market, and because it's been part of the global market, it has serviced important needs, principally China's, right, where China has taken the vast bulk of them of Iranian oil now, uh, and it will continue to do so. So there's no spot market, by and large, for Iranian oil. Most of the Iranian oil on ships is already spoken for. This is the point to remember: it's going on the tankers because it's been contracted long-term by Chinese refineries at fixed prices, by the way, or within, um,, you know, price ranges that are not subject to these wild fluctuations. It suits both parties historically for this to be the case. So almost all of the oil that supposedly is now sanctions-free is actually now, um, it continues to go to China regardless because it was contracted to go to China anyway. So broadly speaking, it doesn't have any material impact on the market at all. Um, in terms of the petrodollar question, I think that this is just another layer or another piece of the, the, the process by which the US dollar's centrality, uh, to global financial affairs and global trade continues to dilute. And I'll say again that people who are looking for a de-dollarization moment, you know, one day where everyone wakes up and no one uses the US dollar for things, um, they will be waiting a long time, mainly because the US economy is one of the world's largest, um, depending on how you want to measure it. Other countries will continue, and countries generally will continue to interact with the American economy in different ways, and for that they will actually either receive or use US dollars. So US dollars will remain part of the global landscape. What— and of course, one of the main reasons it was part of the global landscape is that, um, accumulating US dollars was useful for countries because they needed them to purchase oil in the past. The fact that you don't need US dollars to purchase oil going forward simply means that countries are less of a need to hold as much US dollars as they once did. Now, what that will mean over time is that the world trading environment will start to see the emergence of a lot— a greater range of currencies being used for cross-border transactions. We're not going to see the RMB replace— replace the US dollar on a one-to-one basis, as if the system remains the same, but we're just literally changing guard. We're actually seeing or witnessing the unfolding of a systemic change, and the systemic change is one in which multiple large national currencies will be important foreign exchange reserves for countries around the world. No single currency can or will dominate, and that this will open up greater channels and possibilities for national currency-based trade, within particular regions and across regions as well. So we're witnessing the, the systemic evolution of global finance and trade. This will have implications for the United States over time as the dollar is less useful, uh, for countries to hold. Obviously, external demand for dollars will decrease, and that will impact, uh, on, uh, the value of the dollar. And because it impacts on the value of the dollar, it will ultimately affect the living standards of Americans in terms of the things that they purchase from overseas. But it will also affect the way that the American economy works as well, because not only does it affect the cost of goods for households— let's not forget that the United States economy continues to import lots of intermediate goods and also purchases capital goods and raw materials for the purposes of its own national productive system. And if the dollar, or as the dollar's value, relative value declines, the cost of importing will increase. So America is heading towards being, compared to today and compared to last year, a higher-cost, lower standards of living system.

And that's a, that's an interesting perspective, Warwick. Uh, yesterday I had a chance to provide an analysis for the community, which leads me— the reason I'm mentioning this, because it's going to lead me to my second question before we move into addressing your book. And I addressed about the GCC countries, how they are now reconsidering their position vis-à-vis the US, of course their financial ties to America, but one of the key aspects has to do with their false sense of security in thinking that the US is there to protect them. How do you see the GCC countries, the one with the deep pockets, moving forward with this concept of now they are realizing that we can depend on the Americans for our security?

Well, David, you're the expert in the region rather than me, but I'll throw in my observations from afar and, um, and see whether or not they make sense and, and add to the picture. From afar, it seems to me that the GCC countries are now approaching what I call the, um, the opportunity cost decision moment. For 50 to 60 years, they have— the monarchs in that region have built incredible wealth off the back of oil under the protection of the United States. And that's been essential both in terms of ensuring that there are markets for the product and that Iran was contained, and of course maintaining stability within their own domestic polities themselves. Because I think it's also fair to say from a distance that many of these monarchs do not necessarily enjoy a, a deep popular legitimacy or mandate from the populations of these places. More, some more so and some less so. Now all of that's changed because it's quite clear that the United States is now no longer able or willing to provide functional security and protection to these states. And we know this because we have observed the destruction of American bases and American assets in these nations by Iranian missile attacks and drone attacks. These nations expecting American air defense capabilities to protect them are now experiencing an environment in which those air defense capabilities are simply not capable of doing what they claim to do. They're also watching, of course, the destruction, the attacks on Israel, which prior to the 12-day war and more recently the last 3 and a half weeks was believed to be protected by this incredible air defense system, you know, the, the, um, the Iron Dome. And it's also clear that the so-called Iron Dome is incredibly porous. And if you're one of the monarchs sitting there today, having observed the development of your economy and the wealth that you've garnered as a result of that, on the back of American protection. And you're witnessing the, the fundamental evisceration of the American protection system. And you are on the cusp of a regional war in which an adversary has the potential, the clear potential and capability of taking out the sources of your wealth. I would think right now they should be having serious second thoughts. I'm not convinced they are, and perhaps a couple of weeks ago I expected them to be a little bit more eager to reach out to Iran to explore détente, animodus vivendi, in the name of their own self-preservation. But so far it would seem that they haven't. And some recent statements, joint statements, suggest that they are doubling down on the American protectorate regime, uh, which clearly, I think, is not living up to its promises. How long they can sustain this for and how long they are willing to put at risk their very own wealth will be an interesting question. Of course, a large proportion of their own wealth is stored in the United States physically by way of gold reserves, but also held and controlled ultimately on American databases because much of this wealth is held in US dollars. And so whilst there is the risk of your assets, meaning your, your oil fields and your gas fields and loading facilities and processing plants being destroyed. The flip side is, is having all of your existing economic and financial related assets frozen, right? This is the invidious position that the Gulf state monarchies have now found themselves in. How this unfolds over the next little while, I guess, um, we'll literally have to wait and see. But I must say, I am a little bit surprised that they've been so slow in trying to find a backchannel pathway to having some conversations with Tehran. Because let's not forget that Iran's conditions include the permanent removal of American bases in the region. And so at some point, that either happens, um, or I would expect that The foundations of, uh, Gulf state wealth will be destroyed in the processes of trying to preserve the, the, the American bases in the area. So it's either American bases get destroyed or it's the foundations of Gulf state wealth gets destroyed. That's the position they're in.

Yeah, that would be very interesting, uh, to see how this will evolve. So we're gonna jump in into addressing your book because you address some key aspects on it. But before I'll do this, I'm gonna play a short clip here. And we'll jump into it. If the truth matters to you, hit like, subscribe, and tap that bell. No spin, no agenda, just the stories they don't want you to know. Don't watch from the sideline. Be part of the movement. Your support keeps the truth alive. Thank you. All right, let's address your book. One of— first of all, uh, just I want the community to know I'm very grateful, Warwick, that you provided me a copy. I'm one of the first, so it's a privilege, and thank you so much for that gift. So I had a chance to read a very, very interesting, very deep research book. So we're gonna get into the detail of it. Just for you, for the community to know, this book just came out about March 16th, if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah, that's right.

So that's already— I already checked, it's already online on Amazon. You can get a copy there should you decide to, and I'll provide you the link for it as we move forward here. The first question about the book, Warwick, is what is the book's premise? First of all, I would like the community to understand what is the book premise.

Look, the book's basic idea is that— and it's a very simple idea really— but it's the, the idea that every society must deliver food for people and fuel for machines. Um, and we having issues here?

Oh, you froze. Here we go.

Okay, I'm back.

You're back.

Okay. Um, look, the basic idea, and it's actually a very simple idea— how are we going? I think we're okay.

There we go. Can you hear me, Warwick?

I can hear you loud and clear. I hope I'm coming through as well. Um, the, uh, let's try again. Maybe the system doesn't want me to tell the story of the book. Um, the, uh, the basic idea of the book's actually very simple, uh, and it's because— and, and in a sense, it's the simple ideas that lay the foundations for how we can actually come to grips with they're more complex things. Um, and the idea is that every society must deliver food for people and fuel for machines. And on both fronts, we're talking about a question of energy. So without energy, societies actually don't work. And the book aims to explore the idea that successful societies and successful economies are able to master what I call negentropic interventions against natural tendencies towards entropy. So entropy is the natural tendency towards chaos. And the framework that I then developed, which is an, an integration or a synthesis of a number of sort of themes of thinking in economics, in ecology, and energy, in information theory, and monetary theory. I call it systemic exchange value, which is sort of a kind of a boring thing, but thermoeconomics is probably the, the, the way that I try and summarize the core idea. Now, in that sense, the thesis is essentially this: human economies and societies are open metabolic systems, and these systems are embedded in the laws of thermodynamics. So, laws of thermodynamics— the first law says that, you know, energy can't be created or destroyed, it just changes form. And the second law is that there is a tendency towards chaos.

Okay, you know, something happened, Warwick. We want, we want dark here.

We did go dark. Um, I could see that I was live nonetheless, so I kept talking just in case. But I'm happy to go through the, the things again now that maybe we're not dark. I hope not.

That's surprising to me. But if that's okay with you, Warwick, if you would start again.

No, no, happy to.

Uh, thank you very much.

The, uh, you know, I'm sure the community's patience is being tested by technology, but hopefully hopefully, you know, we can bring something of interest and value to them. Look, the book's core proposition, the simple proposition, is that every society must deliver food for people and fuel for machines, and both of these are forms of energy. In other words, functional societies and functional economies are actually energetic systems, and the book then tries to explore The drivers behind successful economies— and successful economies, in effect, in abstract terms, are those that are able to master what I call negentropic interventions against the natural tendencies towards entropy. Okay, now let's break that down a bit. Human economies and societies are, in effect, open metabolic systems embedded in the laws of thermodynamics. So what I try and do is ground our thinking on societies and economies in fundamental terms of physics that we understand. And the two laws of thermodynamics of immediate relevance is the first and second one. The first being that energy can't be created or destroyed, it just changes form, in effect. And secondly, that, uh, there is a natural tendency for energetic systems to be entropic. In other words, they will tend to over time, uh, generate more chaotic or chaos outcomes. So if that's the natural order of things, if you will, the biological physical order of our material energetic world, what human societies and economies try to do is push back against that by negentropic interventions. So we have entropy, the tendency towards chaos, and we have negentropy, which is an attempt to slow down chaos or to, you know, bring an end to chaos, to bring order. And successful human societies are those that manage to secure and sustain the conditions of order whilst at the same time harnessing the energetic potential of the world. To do that, they must constantly, what I would say, is import low entropy energy and counteract energy through deliberate energetic renewal. Break that down again. What does that mean? Well, it means that a society needs to be able to capture and harness and store and use more energy than it used to expend to get that energy. Okay, so think of it as a hunting society where hunters go out and, and chase prey. The prey that they capture needs to have enough energy in that prey for that hunter to be able to replenish the energy that they've expended so that the hunter can do the hunting again tomorrow. So social reproduction is an energetic question, but not only does that hunter need the energy to replace what they used up on that particular successful hunt, that successful hunt needs to give them enough energy to cover the energy used up in the unsuccessful hunts as well. On top of that, a complex society, complex social system, has a bunch of activities that are necessary for that system to function properly, but which are energy users. And those energy users, dependencies and things like that, need to have energy from the hunt to be able to sustain them as well. So the surplus energy that must be captured through that process needs to be sufficient and adequate to replenish the needs of the participants to be able to do what they do again tomorrow, and also to enable a surplus of energy to be accessible for future activities. Now, the underpinning metric, if you will, of all of this is the idea of energy return on energy invested. A declining energy return on energy invested rate, EROI, is the, the mathematics of social economic entropy. A rising EROI is symptomatic of a society that is creating for itself more energy surpluses to sustain the complex requirements of civilizations. Now, what's going on historically is essentially a dialectic between entropy that is intrinsic to the thermodynamic forces of nature, of which human societies are intimately a part of, and at the same time human society's efforts to intervene, negentropic interventions. So that's the dialectic that underpins historical transformation and change, the rise and fall of societies, the emergence of innovation, um, the obsolescence of particular approaches and technologies. So in practical terms, what we're talking about is the ability by which societies can develop more energy-efficient energy systems They need to develop tighter supply chains, which are the ways in which energy itself is used in the system. They need actually more viable information systems because information is necessary as a way of dealing with the energy available and the technologies that you're trying to develop to access and harness and store those energies. And it's also critical to your capacity to coordinate efficiently. And of course, wrapping all of this together is the idea that in complex societies we actually have divisions of labor where not— not every unit is able to sustain its own requirements. In other words, where you have complex divisions of labor, you have the circulation and exchange of economic value or energetic surpluses, and those energetic surpluses will of course be exchanged in very particular forms. You know, whether it's a machine or a particular input factor or what have you. And to make all of that happen, David, to give all of this motion, it's the monetary system. So the monetary system is actually the means by which these energetic resources, the people and the resources of nature and the machines that we develop, etc., etc., are harnessed and mobilized to be able to go and create the things that societies find useful and valuable. So that's the underpinning, I guess, theoretical framework. I spend the first section of the book dealing with that, and in fact, it's probably the heaviest section of the book. It's, um, it's probably half, half of the book actually. Goes through these elements in, in quite a lot of detail. And in a sense, that section of the book was written in part to address an economic professional audience. It's also a way of trying to ensure for my own satisfaction that the synthesis of information theory, of endogenous monetary theory, of thermodynamics, and of material production systems, that that synthesis could be pulled together in a rigorous way, in a theoretically and conceptually, conceptually robust way. I hope I've been able to do that. I'm reasonably satisfied that for a first run through, if you will, that this framework at least gives us something to work with. And then the rest of the book then seeks to use elements of that framework to explore case studies, if you will. Yeah, so I explore in detail the Chinese development experience, which I think we'll discuss shortly. I also look at, by way of contrast, elements of the American experience, particularly in more recent times around the question of artificial intelligence and financialization. And lastly, I wrap the book up in a short concluding section which seeks to highlight, I guess, some threads or directions that I think firstly more research is needed, but also ways in which we need to be thinking about the challenges and the opportunities that we face as societies across this globe in the 21st century. So that's the big idea.

Yeah. Well, thank you for that. And I will ask a question later on as we move forward regarding the case studies, because I looked into Chapter 12, and when we get into that, I don't want to jump ahead of it. Uh, the second question I want to ask Warwick, the timing of it. Why now? Why now?

Um, well, sometimes things are largely serendipitous, right? A bit of luck. Um, and this idea, or these sets of ideas, have been percolating for many years. In part, they stem from the work that I did for my last book, which focused on supply chains and the role of information, and how information connected the flow of finance on the one hand and the flow of physical goods, if you will, on the other. And that book really delved into how China is tackling this question of information systems. So I looked at a part of an economic circulation system that probably doesn't get as much attention as most of the other parts. But out of that, obviously, I began to think about a more comprehensive or systemic approach to addressing these issues. And for me, that brought together a number of things that have been of interest to me over many years, together with some areas of, I guess, professional and academic expertise. So this goes back some 30 years, actually, David, to when I was doing my postgraduate. As a young postgraduate student, there was a PhD student sitting a couple of cubicles away from me, and he came from the oil and gas industry, and he had a theory um, which was basically that when human beings talk about value, or when economic theory talks about value, what they're really trying to grapple with is fundamentally energy. And he was essentially saying that when we say value, what we really mean are joules or kilowatts or watts or what have you, right? Um, and that idea, I guess, always stayed in my mind, not always in an explicit sense, but one that was, was there because I was always interested in how human social systems actually reproduce themselves. And, uh, and whilst economic thinking tended to focus a lot on the monetary representation of value The idea that value itself was fundamentally physical and energetic never went away. So there was a background idea there, I guess. Then you add the book on the information systems, which then led me to think about the relationship between information systems and energy itself. And of course, information is energetic too, right? There isn't information that is not an energetic artifact. We need energy to collect information, process information, store information, distribute information, make it available, and use it, right? And that's no more clear than in the ways in which artificial intelligence have in effect made, made information a fundamentally energetic question. So I then had other sensitivities, I guess, which is from a tradition, a classical economics tradition, which was interested in a set of questions to do with production, the production of what they called surplus, a broad set of questions around this issue of value and how the production of value of surplus value circulated within the social, political, and economic body on the basis that this set of processes were objectively grounded in physical and natural properties, and which necessitated a sensibility to the extent to which these processes enabled reproduction or crisis. Okay, that approach to economics from the classical tradition, which goes back to, um, the French physiocrats— arguably it goes back to some Chinese thinking as well, actually, from many centuries earlier— this idea of physical flows. And, and, but also through Marx and David Ricardo and others, contrasted quite significantly with what has become the dominant question for modern economics. And the dominant question for modern economics is resource allocation and the price system. And that to me was the wrong question. To me, the question was about system reproduction. And so I dive back into all of this And what came out of this was this book, and this book ebbed and flowed between a deeply theoretical attempt to engage in these issues, but at the same time, because I'm also practically oriented, how does this thinking help us think about and understand some of the key phenomenon that we observe in the world— China's development experience, the American experience— how does this thinking give us a way of understanding what's going on? The fact that I published it in, in, in March, in the middle of, you know, an energy conflict, was a sad coincidence. Um, the other thing I should just say very quickly in terms of this production process, David, and people may or may not be interested, is that, yeah, this is an experimental process for me. So I chose to publish this through Amazon as a self-published work, and I did that because in my discussions with academic publishers about this work 2 issues kept coming up. One was the production time. My concern was that not getting these ideas out there and delaying this was unhelpful, and academic publishing, as I'm sure you know, is a very long process. The second thing that concerned me was the academic publishing model has become a very expensive one for consumers. So the academic publishing model has become progressively geared towards institutional and library markets, and books such as my last book, uh, are actually really, in my view, very expensive. And, um, and so I wanted to avoid that, so I decided— and I'm sure that there are other platforms available, but for this, this particular experiment this edition, um, I decided to explore the Amazon platform. And, and I did that in part because some colleagues of mine have also published some works this way, and the production quality has actually been very high. So the hardbacks and the softbacks have been very, very good, and I was quite happy with that. So I thought, well, let's see how this goes., and, and then, you know, I'll share the learnings with others. Perhaps we'll end up finding ways of making written work, publications, you know, more accessible again for people. So that's the timing of the book.

Yeah, well, just FYI for the community to know that the, the other book Warwick was talking about was published by Routledge. Routledge is an academic, it's, it's very well established and so forth. So I can see your argument to work for why going with the— I am in process of working on something and I have not decided yet how I'm gonna go about when time comes to publish it.

Yeah.

Uh, quickly before I'll go into another aspect of your book here, uh, you mentioned earlier energy. I just wanna share this with the community, uh, right here from the chat box. Here is, uh, Grizzly Martin. Here is what he wrote, Warwick. Energy, transportation, and communication, the three pillars. I found that very interesting and goes in line with what you talked about.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely right. So, so basically, if you think of energy as your, you know, what I call use value, right? So energy is, is the foundations of use value, which is how we produce things, transform things, and consume things. Transportation is how things flow.

Flow.

So it's either physical things moving from A to B, or it's also services that might flow in other ways, or in fact it could be finances that flow. So transport's actually about movement. And information, the third piece, is the bit that holds these two things together.

You got it.

So I often try to, in my, in my own mind, picture a triple helix, an intertwined triple helix, that is evolving through time. So it actually has a fourth dimension as well, which is time. And the fundamental economic substrate, which is use value, is constantly changing because we experience, uh, actual absolute constraints imposed by nature. Um, so, you know, we might have discovered a particular way of, uh, doing something, of making something. Yeah, but that particular way of making something, whether it's, say, a smelting process, um, we've optimized it over time. Uh, we, you know, human societies become very, very good at smelting something, so the input-output ratios have actually stabilized for a long time. The issue though is, is that the inputs are things that human societies don't necessarily fully control. Well, we don't control them. They are inputs that are available from nature. And so, and this goes to the, the heart of the energy return on the energy invested question, because as we harness materials and energy from nature, we tend to harness the easiest, most energetically efficient things first. But over time, the low-hanging fruit slowly gets used up, and we have to exert more and more energy to get the same stuff. And for a long time, we don't really notice that we're exerting more energy to get, you know, whatever it is that we've been getting. But at some point in time, it starts to catch up. And it catches up in a few ways. One is, is that it does catch up in terms of physical shortages, relative shortages. And we notice that partly through price effects. But we also notice that simply because if it gets really bad, we are physically short of things. So the inventory, the shelves are actually empty. We also experience this in time because we start to see alternatives emerge because shortages are driving this innovation process. So there is a constant effort to supplement and ultimately replace decaying energy systems. So these energy input/output systems are things that we're constantly looking to refresh. And going back to the main thesis of the book, if you will, is that historically successful societies are those that manage to successfully refresh energetically. And there's nothing in the system that guarantees success. And the reason is not only because of the distribution of endowments naturally, which may mean that certain places end up not having access to the things that made it possible for them to become successful complex civilizations, and that their attempts to garner those resources through conquest and colonization and imperialism, you know, failed over time. But they can also be because other places are discovering alternatives, um, because they can also see that there are constraints and And what— one of the risks that many societies run, and these are institutionalized risks, is that the vested interests associated with incumbent energetic systems will tend to hold on for as long as they possibly can. And by holding on for as long as they possibly can, they also create path dependency effects which can jeopardize the long run reproducibility of the system itself. And if incumbent systems hang on for too long, whilst those who own the resources will benefit, the system itself is actually being corroded from the inside out. So these are the issues that modern society— well, not just modern societies, but ones that I then look into, you know, when I look at China and America as case studies of how these energetic dynamics are being played out today.

Yeah, and we're gonna talk about the case studies in a minute here, but I want to go back to the title. I, I found it very— by the way, uh, for the community, uh, let me put the link to Amazon, uh, on the chat box here where you can go check it out. Uh, it's really affordable. I know, Eric, in comparison to your other book.

Tell me about it.

You know, you know, when I was at the university teaching, I, uh, sometimes those, uh, uh, the Publishers will come over and meet with the professors and so forth. And, and my first question to them, I said, do you think that a student here living on a very fixed income can afford a $150 book? You know, why should I get your book? I say, here is what we're going to do. If you go back to your company and tell them Dr. O says he will be happy to adopt your book, but you have to cut it 50% off. This way students can afford it. It was outrageous for those prices, but it was ridiculous.

It's a great approach, David, because another colleague of mine who's been discussing publishing with one of the very reputable publishers actually said, look, you can put whatever price you want on it out there, but my students get it for free. Smart way.

To me, that's, you know, it's kind of— especially students, you know how it is. Economically speaking, you can't charge them $180 for a book. That's ridiculous.

So, well, and, and it was— and that was sort of the baseline because a couple of the other publishers that I spoke with, um, you know, their end price points are over $300 for a book, you know. And it's, it's, um, yeah, no, it doesn't sit comfortably with me at all.

Yeah. So I'm certainly gonna circle back with you down the road when I'm ready to to when I complete the book I'm working on, and we go from there. As I said earlier, Warwick, I want to go back to the title first before I'll ask you about a specific case study. But what I want to ask in this particular part about the second part of the title, Rethinking Theory: China and International Geopolitical Economy, I found it very interesting that a lot of people don't understand the link between geopolitics and economics, as we all know. Now, in your opinion, could a part of your book reflect the current global geopolitical economic conditions that we are going— given the energy problems that is now we are faced all of a sudden?

Yeah, absolutely. And, um, and whilst I didn't write specific chapters, um, dealing with, you know, things like oil and stuff per se. I think that the sort of broad theoretical framework does give us a window into what's going on. And in part, what's going on is, uh, you know, I mean, we touched on it earlier, you know, the— I, you know, some, some people theorize that, uh, that the attacks on Iran is, is a de facto attack on Chinese energy, right? Yeah. And if that is the reasoning, then I think it's based on an assessment of the situation that's already outdated. But there's another reason, and that is that the United States itself is experiencing its own, uh, relative decline in available surplus energy and a declining energy return on energy invested system-wide. And so the United States is actually now functioning like a locust. It is seeking to gain greater control over inputs that it would find relevant and useful. So theoretically speaking, you could say that this is a political attempt to stymie others from accessing certain resources, but at the same time, it's actually also about ensuring that the United States has access to the resources that its own political classes and industrial classes believe that it needs. And oil has no doubt been central to the American economic model, its thermo-economic model, for the best part of the last 150 years. And I think this goes to the question of the, the role of incumbents and also the thinking that incumbents bring to the table. So they're defending a territory, they're defending existing balance sheets that have been built up through particular kinds of energetic activities, investing in oil, coal, and what have you, which have been historically incredibly successful. And they are seeking ways of prolonging that. Again, a very understandable response. But, uh, doing these sorts of things within a defined territory is something that most nation states can get away with, subject to their own rules and laws and expectations around, you know, ecological protection or what have you. But the idea that nation states in the 21st century go out there and conquer others to extract resources for themselves has come as a bit of a shock to people because in many regards after the Second World War, I think a lot of people assumed that the era of colonialism was over and that, you know, we've had this rule of law and, uh, you know, global international rules-based order and all these sorts of things, right? But clearly the post-colonialization has not completed economically or politically. In fact, I think one could argue that decolonization— decolonialization, sorry— has only materialized in formal terms, by which I mean the formal creation of discrete nation-states recognized by others in international jurisdictions. But notwithstanding the creation of discrete nation-states, of self-governing communities, the control over things like economic resources has never been decolonialised to varying extents across the world. In Africa, for example, there are many parts of Africa whose economic resources are still tethered to the French economy and the French political class through the French franc that continues to— or the African franc issued by Paris that continues to play a dominant role in some of those economies. So decolonialization, I think, um, has actually never really been completed as an historical process, certainly at a political level, finance level, and economically. But it's come as a rude shock to people because few have experienced the, the visual, uh, intensity of colonialization that we have now seen in Venezuela, the talk of Cuba, the talk of taking over Greenland, and of course the, um, the attack on Iran itself. So, um, it has brought home, I think, a realization that the politics of colonialization continue to cast a long shadow. That's the geopolitics part. And that much of this is anchored to the economic drivers of control of energy and other resources.

Very interesting. I just— because that was the first thing that got my attention, Warwick, when you emailed me And I looked at the title, really just caught my attention right there. And I said, I'm going to have to ask Warwick about the link here because the geopolitical economy is also reflective of what's going on right now on the global stage. And that's why the timing, the content, when you talk about energy and so forth, all of this, you know, sort of—

Look, David, there's a really smart guy that I know who says 'You might not care about geopolitics, but geopolitics cares about you.' That is true. And, and in a sense, you know, the subtitle of the book is in that spirit.

Indeed, indeed. Uh, we are almost top of the hour here. I still have one question about the book, but I also gonna conclude with a question separate from your book here. But let me talk about the book first, and I want to take you to chapter 12. That's where you had a case study, and this is something, uh, the reason why I wanted to focus on this, uh, Warwick, a lot of people in the West, me included, and I'm not denying that I know it's, it's only till I start to delve deeper into the Chinese history that it start to make more sense to me, but still majority here in the West do not understand. And something you address in chapter 12 Page 171, when you talked about, is China's household savings a puzzle? So what, what do you want the readers and the viewers need to understand about this particular aspect?

Well, there's a few things to understand. One is Chinese households do save a large proportion of their incomes. That's, that's the empirical data point that few disagree with. The question is, is how do we make sense of it? The mainstream interpretation is that Chinese household saving rates are high because they, uh, they have poor social services and that they have precautionary savings in the event of emergencies coming down the track. Some argue also that households are oppressed with low incomes and are therefore forced to save money again to, you know, cover future expenses. That's basically the mainstream argument. Now, the mainstream argument is flawed in a few ways. Firstly, and this is a theoretical proposition, firstly as a way of understanding savings, there's a belief, an implied belief, that savings, um, comes before, um, other things, right? And so, and yet what people forget is that savings is actually what you have afterwards. So when people talk about this savings rate, they actually need to understand this in a structural and dynamic context. Households can't save what they don't earn. Similarly, business savings which we call profits, cannot materialize without the business first doing something so that they can produce things and sell them. Businesses actually do this by investing. So investment actually precedes consumption and savings, and it does that because it is from investment and the activity that investment generates that households earn an income, and with that income they buy things later. And after they've bought all the things that they want to buy, they also have what's left, and what's left is savings. So savings is a structural residual. We don't need to overplay the idea that there's some psychology at work or that there's sort of Chinese culture and all of that. The reality is, is that The quality of life of Chinese households has been on the up and up and up for 45, 50 years, and a bit longer actually. Um, and that's taken place as real wages have increased, as— and real wages have been increasing at a substantial amount. And the reason why real wage increases are important is because that takes into account periodic bouts of inflation. So your buying power as a Chinese worker has has been increasing year on year on year, which means that if you're able to satisfy your needs and wants, um, with real income growth, yeah, of course you're going to have a residual. Now that residual then can be used for other things, and so the residual gets used for other kinds of purchases, but they're purchases that aren't necessarily written up in the books as consumption purchases.

Purchases.

And I mean by that people buying houses in particular. Um, so they actually end up on the national balance sheet as investment. Um, so, so a lot of Chinese savings ultimately end up in paying for lumpy assets. Chinese households don't put down a 10% deposit and borrow the rest. They either buy the place outright or they're paying 50, 60, 70%, um, deposit and borrowing the rest, right? So, uh, so savings are, uh, channeled or recycled back into the economic system in quite different ways. We've also, of course, had large amount of cash held at bank, um, and that perhaps reflects the absence of other outlets for for money being held, such as capital markets or wealth investment products and what have you. The restrictions around the property sector over the last 5 years has also acted as, as a, as a barrier, if you will, for the recycling of earned income, right? So the idea that Chinese household saving rates is high is because they're oppressed, or that they they're worried about the future is largely nonsensical. Yeah, in terms of worried about the future questions, this is an argument that leads people to say the Chinese state does not invest enough in Social Security, right? Basically, the reality is, and a recent study undertaken by the Peterson Institute of International Economics goes into this in great detail, shows that in fact, compared to economies of a similar level of development, China's social safety net is, um, comparatively generous, right? About the same or a bit more generous. Again, this is not an issue of the state not providing, and therefore people are petrified and therefore hoard all of this cash. Um, you know, so, so the, so the theoretical framework is flawed. Um, now where does investment come from? So this is the interesting— this is the really interesting question. Because the process actually is initiated by investment, people will say, well, surely, um, that comes from household savings. Well, it doesn't. Household savings is a residual. Yeah, investment comes first. So how does it come first? And this goes to the heart of understanding endogenous money and fiat money. Fiat money and endogenous money within economic systems is basically created by states or commercial banks so that those with these rights— because let's not forget, money and capital are rights to resources that you can use to exchange, to mobilize things. Take control and mobilize things. Um, these are in broad terms what you could call promissory notes. They are promises, they are claims against future value. And so as these promises get created through government expenditure or through commercial bank lending, those who hold that money capital are then able to mobilize other resources. In other words, money capital as investment comes into the economic system ex nihilo. In other words, from thin air. They are institutionalized promises, and once they enter into economic circulation, of course, we start to see what happens in the thermodynamic world of use-value creation. But we also start to see the creation of what I call fictitious capital circuits, which are things like stocks and shares and options contracts and other things that enable liquidity, money liquidity, to find a home. Because once money liquidity is released net into the system, it is— and, and it's mobilized resources to produce certain amount of use value. Those use value resources are consumed again, but the liquidity, unless a deliberate action is undertaken, remains within the system. So you can take liquidity out permanently, or you can take it out temporarily. Permanently, you take it out through taxation and by people paying back loans. That's what happens on balance sheets, basically. It's just permanently taking out liquidity. These are just liquidity management systems. Yeah. Or they get taken out temporarily by enabling people to swap highly liquid finance capital for instruments that are less liquid— stocks, shares, term deposits, insurance products, or what have you, right? So, um, so Chinese savings are a residual. They are a residual of an economic system that has been underpinned by expansive public investment through publicly— through government, and also through the policy banks which sit at the heart of China's commercial finance system. And these policy banks are able to issue credit to support activities that have both market rationale and which are also aligned to the parameters established at a policy level. So the classic experience of this is the recent change in the formation of capital in China between, say, 2014 and 2024, where in this period we saw a rapid expansion of capital formation in the real estate sector up until about 2021. At which point there was imposed deleveraging and an imposed constraint on credit growth, whilst at the same time, from roughly 2018 onwards, we saw credit expansion in other areas— high technology production, manufacturing, etc., etc. So the rotation of capital formation from real estate to non-real estate took place during the 2018 to 2024 period. And that's a classic example of how the institutional setup of China's political economy enabled it to drive what I call energetic renewal. Because let's not forget that a building that's built is embodied energy. That building and all the raw materials and the human labor that went into making it and creating it and then sustaining it through maintenance all involves the exertion of energy that was collected and harvested and stored in a previous time cycle. And so China's economic success, if you will, is because it is managing a continual process of energetic renewal that sustains the movement from lower to higher energy return on energy invested systems as old systems decline in their efficiency. So that's the household savings question. It's intimately tied to production, investment, the role of public finance, the role of publicly owned banks. And at the end of the day, it's a residual, and it's a residual that rises because household real incomes have been rising high. The last thing I'll say on this one, David, is when people talk about how, you know, China's savings rate is being somehow outrageously high, um, but at the same time want to tell you that Chinese households are being financially oppressed, that is illogical. Because if you're financially oppressed, it is impossible to have the reserves that you need as a residual to save. If you're financially oppressed, you'll basically be spending almost all of your income meeting your basic needs, and clearly that is not the case.

Well, you're absolutely correct. I was in China and I saw what I saw, uh, Warwick, and right away I put the two and two together and figured that the, the government policies, whether they are generous as far as the programs or whatever, it must be working given that I did not see homeless people in the streets. I didn't see addicts, I didn't see crimes. I walked at 2:30 in the morning safe, nobody bothered me, whatever. And that tells me an idea right there that the policies that the Chinese government was embarking on and implemented certainly works on behalf of the citizens.

That's usually— and so you can think about all of that in, yeah, sort of energetic entropy, negentropy terms, right? Think of that, that prey that has been captured. Yeah, the surplus energy that is captured through that process is able to be committed to ensuring that people have houses, have a roof over their head, that people don't go hungry. Now, why is this important from a social system stability point of view? Because if you don't do that, it actually accelerates systemic chaos, right? So if you don't have ways of mitigating social entropy through these negentropic applications of energetic surpluses, you will cause or allow to continue accelerating within your own social system the fragmentation of your society.

Very interesting. Once again, uh, guys, I'm gonna put the link, uh, to, uh, Amazon, uh, right here on the chat box where you can go and, uh, and check it out. It's affordable. I looked at the price for it. And by the way, Warwick, someone in the community is asking a question. Is it— let me show it here— is there an audiobook available?

Um, well, it's available as a Kindle book, and I think that does have an audio part. Um, at the moment, the Kindle Direct Publishing platform, which I think Amazon purchased, um, a while back, supports 3 formats. So one's the Kindle ebook format, and the other is a soft paperback and a hardback format. So I don't think that there is an audiobook per se, but I think the Kindle version does have an audio function. Um, now, um, if people want an audiobook I think the most important thing to think about is what kind of voice they want. They certainly won't want this Australian accent. So that may be something we'll ask the community in the future.

For sure. I can conduct a survey, Warwick, and we get an answer for that.

To name the best voices for a Kindle.

That would be interesting. Before I ask you last question here, I want to just share on the screen with you, Warwick, some comments from some members of the community. Sammy McPhee says thank you, Dr. Warwick.

Cheers.

There is Kevin James, an avid supporter of the channel. Awesome talks with, with the— with you, Warwick. And, uh, who else is here? Is Sammy— well, you— I thank you. I thank Warwick. Credit goes to Warwick. I never, you know, I think Dr. David, right? Well, I want to ask you a last question before I let you go, which is of importance in in my opinion, given that the announcement that came out of the White House that all of a sudden Donald Trump is postponing the trip to Beijing.

In—

will it be fair to say, and I wrote an analysis about this for a particular entity, and I said, should he go to China? Because I start to think in terms of, is Donald Trump now exposed for a way that The Chinese are thinking, why should we even spend time with this guy?

I think he, uh, had put himself in between a rock and a hard place. The— by not going to China, it obviously raises all the questions that people have raised about the extent to which the Trump White House has actually lost its ability to shape global affairs, not necessarily dictate them, but at least influence and shape them. And the planned trip to China, of course, would have taken place at the end of March, early April, according to President Trump's own timetable, which, by the way, had never been confirmed by Beijing. But let's say that that was more or less when that was to take place, and the attack on Iran took place on the— in late February. Now, the idea that all of that would be done and dusted before the end of March, I think, well, it suggests a couple of things. One is, is that the White House either didn't think that the war in Iran would continue the way it has, so it poorly understood what it was doing, or it believed that somehow it could deal with things, or it actually didn't connect the two together until a few, you know, a couple of weeks later. So I think by not going, it raised all those questions about whether or not the White House has, in a sense, has left itself more exposed today than the United States has been for a long time. In terms of its ability to shape global affairs. But to have gone whilst this war was raging created other difficulties. I think on the home front, to have left the United States as Commander-in-Chief whilst the war was raging, and whilst, as it looks like now, there is a good possibility, tragically, of American troops on the ground. Yeah. Had the White House and had the commander-in-chief left the country at that time, I think people would be asking the question, you know, does he really have his priorities right? Now that raises other problems, because if in the middle of a visit to Beijing there was a raging war that was you know, not going according to plan, shall we say. What does that mean? You know, it doesn't— that doesn't further expose President Trump and the United States to, you know, whatever it is that they're concerned about in China. You know, people talk about, you know, whether or not he'd get a lecture, for example, addressing down. Um, and I think ultimately it, it begs, um, I think a deeper question, and that is that the White House seems to have pursued a policy regime that has been largely, um, emotionally driven and poorly thought out, lacking in coherence and considered deliberation. So much of the White House's and American policy seems to be driven by the sort of the politics of nostalgia, you know, making America great again, you know, the golden days are back, um, the politics of resentment, others are taking advantage of us, um, the, uh, the sort of sense of entitlement and exceptionalism. You know, we're going to show the world who's still boss. All of that seems to drive a very haphazard set of policies, actually, and decisions. And when you're dealing with China on what are actually structurally complex issues, from what I have seen and from what I've heard, there were deep concerns that the White House and the State Department really hadn't done their real homework. Yeah. And that there were too many loose ends, too many issues that literally hadn't been properly considered, which would have left a summit between President Xi and President Trump literally as something of a bit of, bit of theater but without substance.

Substance.

Yeah. So I do wonder whether Uh, and this is speculative, of course, but, you know, people do wonder if President Trump hadn't deferred the trip, would the Chinese side in the end have said, look, let's push it back further? I do get the sense, though, that China probably wouldn't have, notwithstanding concerns about the lack of preparations, etc. And it's largely because Chinese diplomatic strategy and general attitudes to the world is that especially now in the middle of the crisis, not only the crisis in Ukraine that continues to, um, you know, carry on, but the other crises in Latin America, Greenland, and now in the Persian Gulf in West Asia, and at the center of all of these crises is the United States. Now, having the United States at the table and being able to have talks and discussions is better than to not. So I think on the balance of argument, my, my sense is that the folk in Beijing ultimately, even though there's all of this mess going on would have ultimately accepted, uh, President Trump's visit.

Yeah, well, the word I got, uh, as of yesterday is that the White House is thinking about, uh, between 4 and 5 weeks from now, uh, whether it's going to move forward or not. It's specula— it's sort of tentative for now, but it depends again how things are going to evolve.

Well, look, a lot of water will go under the bridge in 4 to 5 weeks.

Indeed. Indeed. So that's why it's kind of— I want— we'll see how it goes. So, well, Warrick, I can't thank you enough, my friend, for first of all, uh, giving us, uh, the opportunity to be the first to address your new book. I mean, I know you're gonna be, uh, invited by so many. I'm very honored that you grant me here the opportunity for my community here to hear about your book. And by the way, just for the community, I'm gonna put the, uh, I'm gonna put the link to Warwick's channel, uh, you, in case you, once you read the book and if you have any questions for Warwick, you just go ahead and reach out to his channel and post your questions there and he'll be happy to answer them for you once you read the book. So, so I can't thank you enough, my friend, and I look forward to seeing you next time. On behalf of the entire community, We thank you very much for carving out time for us and look forward to seeing you next time.

It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

My pleasure. Uh, to the community, uh, just, uh, tomorrow I might be doing a live stream for you regarding the San Diego, uh, Garcia— oh, Diego Garcia, I'm sorry. Uh, that might not be exactly what's been reported, uh, so far. It's almost like a false flag. I'll decide what I'm gonna do tomorrow and confirm, or sort of let you know what's going on with that. In the meantime, I am working on another story regarding the, uh, uh, airport of Ben Gurion, and I will provide you updates on this. So once again, thank you very much for being here, uh, to share with us, uh, uh, we can share with Warrik here what he had to share with us regarding his upcoming book, and look forward to seeing you next time. As always, remember, geopolitics impacts your daily life in more ways than one. Till next time, guys. Bye-bye.