Kai/Kyle Risdell

speaker

241 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 4 Aug

Kai/Kyle Risdell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Marketplace · Manufacturing boomed in July. Thank all that AI money · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

All right.

I need you to spitball this for me because even though the Chinese aren't saying how they're doing it, you've been reporting it.

You've been talking to people.

How are they running the world's second biggest economy without importing the oil they did five, six months ago?

That is the real question, right?

What you would expect if a country slashed its imports by this much is they would just have to reduce their energy consumption.

But we don't see that at all right now.

And so, okay, well, maybe they're just using different energy sources.

China has invested a ton in clean energy and electric vehicles over the past few years.

But the country is still very heavily reliant on imported oil.

And that leaves one final theory, which is China's oil reserves.

But the weird thing about this explanation is that the best estimates we have of China's oil reserves are from these giant outdoor physical storage facilities that we're able to monitor from space.

And those haven't given any appearance of changing.

And so that has led to a sort of Occam's razor theory among a lot of analysts that the only plausible explanation for how this could be going on is that China is actually tapping into these sort of secret, possibly underground reserves that the world didn't even know about.

And when I talk to analysts about this, they say, look, I feel like I'm crazy.

I feel like I should put on my tinfoil hat when I start talking about this.

But it's basically the only plausible explanation we have at this point.

Why do you think – well, let me back up actually and point out that Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, does not hide his light under a bushel.

He's very nationalist.

He's very proud of what China has been able to do.

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