Robert Pape SCHOOLS Patrick Bet-David: China Is 20 Years Ahead of the US

[00:00:00] Pape: only 50 million people only 50 million people and we're gonna look down on that no i think they're [00:00:07] Speaker 2: 10 20 years ahead of us maybe even more wait run that back 20 years welcome back guys you know patrick beth david the podcast host who built his whole brand on the american dream the guy sitting across from him is robert pape university of chicago professor studies war for a living today i'm checking whether papes claim survives real numbers and what he says he saw at noon over [00:00:35] Speaker 3: beijing stopped me cold that's great so so let's talk china so you went to china last year i think last year june during the bombing of fordeaux yeah right during the bombing of further you're there for two weeks 18 hours a day yeah and you're in the factories you're in places what what what did you learn about where china's at that the rest of the world is not aware of two weeks 18 hours a day [00:00:57] Speaker 2: inside the factories during the bombing of fordo pape has studied war his entire career three years teaching air force officers how air wars are won he's no china cheerleader and you'll hear him say it himself when that guy tells his audience we're behind it costs him so here's his answer for why we've [00:01:19] Pape: never seen this what i learned is we're tracking about i would say from the newspapers that is wall street journal new york times even the business side probably about 10 of the real uh big picture of what's happening in china um what we are doing is taking a soda straw view of what's happening focusing on individual companies and i know because when i went i wanted to visit the companies byd xiaomi which [00:01:48] Speaker 2: a soda straw view everything you've seen about china this year fits in one straw one ai model one tariff headline the shop floors at byd and xiaomi the executive dinners none of it makes our feeds so when you talk scale he doesn't mean a company he means cities and he starts with his own hometown all these tool and [00:02:13] Pape: die industries here you know what the big industries in erie pennsylvania are hospitals where you're born and funeral powers where you die okay and this just breaks my heart here um and um uh and we just don't have any real approach like this but what china's doing is they're not just uplifting a um a deep seek or an alibaba they're they are creating webs of doing that but 90 of this is happening in a much broader context where they're taking say a st louis and they're uplifting the whole area they're taking a pittsburgh they're uplifting the whole city they're taking detroit and they're uplifting the whole city and uh they've done i went in that two week period i went to uh these four these four areas it's about [00:03:00] Speaker 2: 50 million people that are being uplifted quick reality check 50 million uplifted is pape's own estimate four regions he walked so here's a number nobody disputes by the end of 2024 china ran 48 000 kilometers of high speed rail xinhua's own figure roughly 70 percent of all the high-speed track on earth and that erie line born in the hospital buried from a funeral parlor now hear who pape says this [00:03:33] Pape: boom is actually for not because of their a couple months header behind on deep seek or chat gbt but because of uplifting the entire cities here and this is uh you know this is uh what digital china is is uplifting this whole area and quite a few of these um uh these business owners uh when i had dinners with them uh here they would tell me their personal story just like when we started out here and um almost you know many of them had a very similar story which was well in the 1980s or 90s i lived in rural areas and i didn't even have shoes and now look at me okay so this is this could be america there's [00:04:16] Speaker 2: the translation pape just put a face on the 20 years business owners who grew up with no shoes now running the factories he toured that's one working lifetime dirt floor to robot run factory floor and when he drops the line that stinks this could be america watch what it does to patrick so this [00:04:38] Speaker 3: is this could be america well this is america they kind of duplicated us without us china but where are we where are we right now you see i believe we are the juggernaut we are the greatest country in the world that everybody copies and duplicates and then let's get juggernautting okay get juggernautting [00:04:58] Speaker 2: two words when this clip went around the top comments wrote the thesis for me one 584 likes tbd is exactly where most us politicians are in deep denial another 512 usa is in max cope mode and look patrick's an immigrant who built a real company i'm not dunking on demand but pride is not a plan and pape says that [00:05:26] Pape: next politely get juggernautting okay so i am definitely i'm not i'm not going to become a salesman or you know sort of supporter of china i'm going and looking at this as let's get moving here and i don't think we're even getting to first base i don't know if we're really out of the batter's [00:05:44] Speaker 2: box here so we've got all these plans meanwhile in america tomorrow morning look at your own block the potholes the scaffolding the train that shows up when it feels like it our fastest train amtrak's acela tops out around 150 miles an hour on a few short stretches pape's word for all that wasn't anger it was a baseball not even out of the batter's box watch patrick fireback with names tesla spacex [00:06:14] Speaker 3: nvidia order spacex's headquarters have you been to nvidia's headquarters have you been i have not [00:06:19] Pape: and with this show invite me with this show invite me show me that you're as least as a head now with the the other thing i want to say to your your audience is right away right now they're probably going to go and start to google oh okay professor pape is saying all this stuff i'm going to go see for myself you can't see it on google and the reason is because they won't let what they're doing in china yeah yeah i mean the actual shop floor right just like you go in the west wing they take the cell phone okay they don't want uh they could easily be talking smack and bragging and showing all this off they're just not doing that and and that tells me we're up against not just a competitor but we're [00:07:04] Speaker 2: up against somebody who wants to keep going under the radar you know it's interesting catch that flip pape's answer to the headquarters challenge with this show invite me then he tells patrick's own audience you can't see it on google they won't let the picture show phones taken at the shop floor door west wing rules braggarts show off pape says this is a rival that wants to stay under the radar [00:07:28] Speaker 3: and patrick still has one exit left it's interesting because when when you go to places like this they're only going to show you the good they're not going to show you the ugly the bad the fact that their population has decreased five years in a row and some people are reporting that the number of them being 1.4 billion is not the real number that it's a lot less than that because if you do the math from the moment they went to one child policy you know they're they're they're inviting you they only show [00:07:55] Speaker 2: you the good population numbers are fake patrick's claim on tape fine say the census is fuzzy robots aren't the international federation of robotics counts two million twenty seven hundred thousand industrial robots in china's factories doubled in three years their 2024 installs alone were 54 of world demand machines don't care whose senses is right and pape has seen this movie before give you a little [00:08:25] Pape: bit of background a little bit more so my first trip to china was 1979 79 i was a first year undergrad at the university of pittsburgh i heard about a trip that 30 of our professors were going on to study the economic industries in china a couple graduate students were going and i said well are there any undergrads going no so i wrote a letter to the chancellor his name was wesley posvar and two page letter brilliant idea you're going to be the first university trip ever too bad you don't have an undergrad going i got a free trip to try so i always tell that story to my students just write those letters what do you got to lose okay and so i get a five-week trip this was not a short five weeks 1979 1979 and what we did is we went um started in hong kong uh we went to can it's called canton 1979 [00:09:23] Speaker 2: he's been walking this ground since jimmy carter was president with photos scale check back then shenzhen was a fishing town of roughly 30 000 people today per cgtn and forbes it's 17.79 million more people than new york and los angeles combined but he's also seen china at its ugliest and he doesn't hide it remember patrick's exit here's the china pape actually got shown since 12 this is after the [00:09:55] Pape: olympics you're talking about they don't show you the best uh well this was during the aeros that's good olympics this is after the olympics well they did but this was during the air apocalypse which your listeners can also look up so the air apocalypse was the worst atmospheric pollution that we have had in any urban area probably here in about a hundred years that we used to have this in uh in say uh a london here long time ago in the 19th century where there was so much soot in the air from all of the uh the chimneys that were churning out all this coal driven energy the air apocalypse [00:10:33] Speaker 2: his phrase his trips patrick says they staged the tour papes answer is he kept going back through the worst city air in about a hundred years his words that's what makes his verdict expensive he's not describing a postcard he's grading a recovery he watched happen watch what noon looked like over [00:10:55] Pape: beijing or less pollution uh here and you know that because you go to the cities and they literally don't have like the air apocalypse i was there i physically was there uh where when you take off from beijing the airport in beijing at noon and it's totally pitch black once you're at 15 000 feet the sun okay this is this was this is real problems you know big problems not just poverty and so i i saw it but i also see china um they're cleaning things up and we got to get moving here patrick we we got to stop talking we're gonna get moving and just deciding that certain billionaires we're gonna fund their companies or help their companies get ahead that we need to do that's the image i couldn't shake [00:11:44] Speaker 2: noon over beijing pitch black sunlight only above 15 000 feet he breathed that and he says they cleared those skies with the solar buildup china's national energy administration puts at 277 gigawatts added in 2024 alone more new solar than the rest of the world combined that's 20 years ahead they met a catastrophe and fixed it in about 10 years full circle 10 20 years ahead maybe even more one number stays with me 48 000 kilometers of high speed rail he's right guys is patrick right that the juggernaut fixes itself or is paper right that we're not even out of the batter's box tell me below bring a source sources in the description every claim is cited catch you next time