Clay Travis

And because of the snowpocalypse that Clay went through, we had to reschedule that.

But otherwise, we were going to be talking to him, I think, today.

I think the challenge for any long-range plan, you know, I have a particular view of this as well because I tend to lean very pro-Taiwan.

I actually met with the president of Taiwan.

I was out there in September and met with the national security advisor and spent real time on the ground to get their sense of the China threat and also talk to them about TSMC, supply chain with America, all these things.

I mean, it was a

It was really incredibly worthwhile and eye-opening to sort of get that first-person perspective from the very top.

And I'll tell you how that pertains to the US-China relationship is

A deal with China is not really a deal.

You always have to wait and see how they implement and how they respond because whatever they sign, whatever they agree to is not, and this is even recent history.

In fact, the Trump administration from the first administration, China has violated some of the things that it agreed to.

And so on the one, the broad vision of confronting China for the nonsense that it was getting away with

In terms of the US, and I mean, from the America first perspective, this is not even, well, I'm not even getting into the human rights stuff, which China is obviously terrible on and is a problem all on its own.

But just from a US interest perspective, they've screwed us over and they've screwed Trump over in previous deals.

so you know trump is always trying to you know wheel and deal and negotiate on this stuff and besant has to operate in that framework um i think what we want to see is china having to abide by a more even playing field in trade and just in all relations with the with the us and with regional partners the problem is china gets a tremendous amount of advantage from not doing that and so it's going to be carrots and sticks all along the way so when you say long-term vision

The long-term vision is that China – actually, that's a really good question because I'm not sure there is a long-term vision beyond the economic side of things.

I wonder if we've just given up on political reform from within China because the economic was supposed to lead to political reform for 40 years, and that was an abject failure.

But in the next few years, yeah, they want to get a deal done.

They want China to stop the shenanigans.

So I spoke I it's funny, Mark, of all the meetings that I got and a credit to my friend, Steve Yates, who has been he speaks fluent, fluent Mandarin and has been going to China since this rather Taiwan, pardon me, and China, but Taiwan mostly since the late 70s.