Charlie Robinson (00:01.58)
Welcome to Macroaggressions. I'm your host Charlie Robinson. If you are watching us on YouTube, Band.Video, Rumble, Odyssey, or wherever podcasters serve, we hope you are, have taken the time to rate the show. Give us five stars if you think we've earned it. You want to connect with me, macroaggressions.io is the place to do that. Go to activistpost.com, start getting your news over there. Sign up for the email newsletter, it's worth it. We'll send you two emails a week, they're good.

Solution series on Wednesday and the Sunday post on Sunday a little wrap-up of the news. Are you coming to Mexico? I hope not a lot of time left, but you can still get there Puerto Vallarta an archipelago February 15th through the 20th I'll be on stage emceeing this year again excited to announce Jeff Berwick Curtis Stone Gareth Ike David Ike Max Egan dr. Andrew Kaufman Christian Yordnev Tim James Patrick Henningson

Greg Reece, Steve Falconer, Vietjad Lenka, Dan Dix, Mark Devlin, musical guest Iyame from Carmageddon. You know her, cute little Australian girl. She'll be there. I'm excited. And there's some other people too who haven't been announced. If you're interested, go to anarikapulco.com and use discount code MACRO for some savings there. Also, if you are thinking about...

getting your last will and testament done or something that you've been putting off for a while because you don't want to spend the money. I get it. I understand it. But it's a new year. Maybe you get this stuff done in the year. You can do that through LegalShield. It's the most affordable way to do it. I'll tell you that much. I know that you can do it in your first month. Go to don'tgetpushedaround.com. Check it out for yourself. See what's going on in the website. You can sign up for it and

get all kinds of things. have all the cart add-on features too. So if you're somebody that runs a small business, they have options for that. If you carry a gun, they have documentation for that. If you need ID shields and things like, there's a lot going on over there. The best thing to do is to go to don'tgetpushedaround.com and read up about it for yourself and see if you want to knock out some of these legal documents. Just right off the bat. Nobody wants to spend that money. Nobody wants to think about doing their last will and testament until you need it.

Charlie Robinson (02:13.952)
And if you don't have it, you're in a real bind. So don't put yourself in that position. It's easy. You can take care of it in the first month. It's like 30, a little over 30 bucks a month. It's very reasonable. It's the best money you'll spend. So go to don'tgetpushedaround.com, check it out for yourself. And I mentioned Tim James is going to be at a Narcopulco. I have to update you on my parasite cleanse that I did. If you guys listened to the episode with Sarah Andrew,

from Chemical Free Body and you were like, no thank you, that sounded terrifying and I don't want all the worm action going on. Well, I'm here to say that my experience was totally different. I did not have that trip. I talked to Tim James about it later and he said, 10 % of the people get what Sarah had, which was like worm galore, like a worm apocalypse, right? I'll tell you what it was for me. I had a mild headache the first 10 days or so.

Nothing, less than like any hangover, just like a dehydration headache. So was trying to drink as much water. And frankly, it was going on and on and on and nothing was happening until day 18. When day 18 hit, I knew it was working. I started to feel kind of not good. Had a real bad sinus headache. My nose was running like crazy and I needed to take a nap during the day, which I normally don't do. It culminated with me taking a hot shower, getting in bed, watching Thursday night football.

feeling like hell, going to bed, waking up the next morning, feeling about 80 % and the day after that I felt fine. So if you're interested in the Parasite Detox Cleanse, but you don't want all the worms, I didn't have that. I didn't have that experience. I did it for the month of December and it was fantastic. So if you're interested, go to chemicalfreebody.com forward slash macro and you can check it out. There's a Parasite bundle. It's a...

Nano Silver and Parasite Free, that comes together and you get the Gut Detox, Toxin Detox in a bag of Green 85 and they have a new apple flavor so it actually tastes really good. You do that for a month and then you talk to me. I lost, by the way, also lost 7 % of my body weight, which again, I don't have 1 % of my body weight to lose, but I lost it anyway. Just a lot coming out.

Charlie Robinson (04:28.876)
a lot getting leaned out. So if you're interested, look, no hard sell ever with any of this stuff. I just say go to chemicalfreebody.com forward slash macro, read up about it, see if it's right for you. If it is, and you're interested, then you know where to go. You know where to go. If you wanna get those parasites and worms out of your body and who doesn't, Tim's got a formula that will work and it's not overly harsh. Let's talk about China.

Let's talk about this. I've been thinking about this for a while. So especially when I was over in Hong Kong and I was talking to some of these partners over at PWC and I was asking what they, you what their take is on it. And what's interesting is that they were Hong Kong Americans, right? They were the guys that grew up in America, but now we're living in Hong Kong. And so they had a Americanized perspective on China, which was interesting. But then they had that additional Hong Kong layer, which is that they're there.

in a way, and they're able to keep an eye on what is and isn't happening with China. so we were talking about, actually we were talking a lot about the car industry and how that's going. So I wanna get into that. I wanna talk about the future of China and the reason why it may, don't have to, obviously you don't have to live in China for the future of China to impact you as well, because some of these countries out there, they haven't,

disproportionate influence on the rest of the world. And then I would put, obviously, the United States is in that category, but China is too. So you may say, don't live in China, and I'm not going to China, so I don't care about it. You may be right to think about that. You probably don't care too much. But because they are such an economic powerhouse in the manufacturing facility of the world, it matters. And what they're doing and what they're tinkering with

ultimately matters as well. And so you have to kind of keep an eye on what they're doing. So I want to kind of do a deep dive on the infrastructure that's going on in China, in part because you can compare it. The contrast to the lack of infrastructure in America is staggering. Okay, so we want to talk about that for sure. I am going to get into the Chinese car market because it's really interesting what's going on there. And if you

Charlie Robinson (06:48.674)
haven't heard of BYD, the company BYD, and you're unfamiliar with their cars, you should check them out. Not that you could buy one in the US because they're not allowed here, but if you're in a country where you can get them, they're badass, they're a lot cheaper, and we'll talk about that. I also want to get into the rare earth minerals and China's export of rare earth minerals. This is hugely important. This is like...

We'll detail it, I'll explain why it's important, but it's the same reason it's important that Saudi Arabia has oil, or Venezuela has oil in this current case, right? So it's important to know what is going on in the ground and what that means for geopolitics moving forward. And then we'll talk, we'll wrap up with the future of China and the direction it's going, because the United States and

and China are tied together, whether they want to be or not. Culturally, they couldn't be further apart, but, and also ideologically too. I mean, there's not a whole lot of overlap in the way the Chinese system works and the way the American system aspires to work. Not that it actually really works the way it's supposed to, but there is a...

There is a concept that we've talked about on this show plenty of times. It's not new. It's an old concept called the Thucydides trap. And it talks about what happens when a rising nation challenges an existing superpower. So you can think of this as like America, the superpower and China as this rising, you know, little brother who's starting to...

gain market share and become a real problem for the unipolar world. And we're starting to see multipolarity break out with the China BRICS groups, you know, becoming a real counterbalance to what's happening with the American empire. Probably not the worst thing in the world, although the problem you run into in a situation like this is that you maybe perceive that you're in a bar

Charlie Robinson (09:06.058)
and the drunken bully America is in their starting shit and you think, you know what I need? We need our other insane friend. I wish our insane friend from China was here because he wouldn't tolerate any of this shit, you know? And the problem with that, you know, like the multipolar world is like, you wait for the other guy to come and what if he's an asshole as well? What if he's another drunken lunatic? Now you've got two of them. So there's no guarantee that they're going to fight each other. They may just both fight you. You know what I mean?

So the idea of a multipolar world sounds great on the surface because the current iteration is this Western New World Order batch of lunatics who are trying to take over the West and beyond. And you see that and you go, well, there should be somebody that should check them because that shouldn't happen. And if these guys are left unchecked, they will clearly eventually take over everything. So you go, we got to get somebody to check them. And you go, well,

That could be China. And you go, great, China's gonna check them. You go, well, be careful though. Be careful about how much you root for China. Because do they have the same sort of interests as you? Are they ideologically aligned? No, of course not. But are they a bigger threat later? I mean, the Americans are savage, but there's a method to their madness. What if you can't understand the Chinese method to their madness? Because they're savage too. I mean, you know.

We can look at the list of genocides in which 20 plus million people have died during a genocide. China's done it twice. So they are not above murdering their own people. So be careful in saying, I don't wanna live under this bloodthirsty American Zionist regime where they're murdering everybody. I would prefer to live under the bloodthirsty, insane Chinese regime which has murdered.

tens of millions of their own people, right? So they're all bad. And so this is not, this episode is not going to be some enthusiastic deep throating of China and say, we need the rise of China to challenge the American empire. I don't like the idea of China being involved because I don't think that, you know, let's say that they did check America, right? And subdued America, American influence and power around the world. Well then,

Charlie Robinson (11:32.148)
After you did that, the mentality would be, why stop now? We just took out the biggest threat. China's never been expansionist, right? They've never been the type who's like, well, we need to take over the rest of the world. But I'll tell you what, if your biggest rival, America, happened to go away, it'd be on the drawing board. You'd certainly take Taiwan. That would go without saying. You might not expand into Russia or anything like that, because they're strategic partners. But you may have your eyes on Central Asia. You may say, know, Kazakhstan and...

Tajikistan and all these places with a bunch of oil. Why are we buying oil from everyone else when we can just take these? So you could find yourself in a situation where China does take on imperialistic traits, but it's never happened. They don't behave like that. I think the United States, so by the way, the Thucydides trap as a concept has played out

16 different times throughout history where an existing superpower was was feeling threatened and they wound up going to war to sort out, you know, who's really the got the biggest swing and dick in this in this fight here and in the 16 instances where this could have happened, where they could have gone to war against each other, it's happened 12 times. So 75 % of the time you're going to get a war. I don't know.

the ins and outs of the four times in which this didn't turn into a war. But there's nothing that I currently see with the behavior of the American empire and its lapdogs and its controllers, the Israelis, to make me think that war is in some way, shape or form off the table. If anything, if I were betting on this, there was polymarket odds or if I could go to Caesar's palace and

lay money on whether or not there's going to be a war between the United States and China. would, unfortunately, my money would be on on saying that there would be and I would have 75 % of the the odds, historic odds on my side, which is not good. So I think the United States needs to make some calculations before they go to war with a country sitting on resources that they desperately need.

Charlie Robinson (13:58.786)
This might be something that you figure out before you fire the first shot. So let's talk a little bit about what's going on with China's infrastructure. They are planning for a Jetsons future. We in America are planning for a Johannesburg future. It's not great, but we have nobody to blame but ourselves. We've squandered the resources that we've had, the duty as the world's reserve currency. We've taken all those petrodollars and we've used them to buy weapons.

and reimagine the Middle East and overthrow leaders and propagandize people in Central Europe and, you know, pissed it away. So we could, we, the American, America, not me, but America could have used this money

to build out our infrastructure. We could have had, what, in the post World War II era, we had the interstate highway projects, right? We built roads, some of it. We needed to do that. And you put a lot of people to work doing, making these infrastructure projects. And, you know, it's a win-win. You keep the money in house, right?

It stays in the country. It's not going out the back door to another foreign country. It's infrastructure in your country. We need new ports. We need new waterways. We need them cleared out and expanded and all those things. We have the needs for it. You should read the controlled demolition book that we put out in 2020. I went through and broke down all of the components of the infrastructure and the grades that were given to them. Not a single...

Section of American infrastructure got higher than a C plus C plus was the highest score they got and that was generous Everything else was D's and F's so we could spend a lot of money on infrastructure and make America great again or great for the first time or whatever but But we didn't do that the the beginning of the 21st century started with a massive infrastructure Investment project inside of China China did America didn't right China enters

Charlie Robinson (16:16.354)
the World Trade Organization, right? They come in in 2000 and immediately what happened is in 2002, 8 % of the GDP of China was invested in infrastructure. 8 % of the GDP of China. China is, we're not talking about the GDP of Grenada. We're talking about the GDP of China. 8 % was used and invested in infrastructure in 2002.

But guess what? That's nothing compared to what they would do just a few years later. By 2016, 24 % of their GDP was being funneled into infrastructure. They were literally rebuilding the entire country.

GDP growth rate, 9.6 % during that period. So it works. If you want to get your GDP up, if you're the American empire and you wanna fuck with numbers and make it look like things are better, you could do that. If instead of taking these trillions of dollars and spending it with Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and building aircraft carriers and squandering all this money in the Middle East on bullshit wars, you could

have invested this in the United States and you would have watched the GDP grow through the roof. But of course, we're not run by people who wants what's best for America. We are run by people who are actively trying to destroy America, not just the American empire, which frankly needs to go where they're trying to preserve the American empire, but they want host country America to be gutted, a gutted wasteland with degenerates and moral bankruptcy.

not to mention financial bankruptcy on top of that. But that's not happening in China. That is not their experience at all. They are involved in the Belt and Road Initiative. We have done extensive work on that. If anyone is interested in doing a deeper dive, getting more information, you can just pull up previous episodes of Macroaggressions where we talked about Belt and Road Initiative. 150 countries are involved in that. Did you know 150 countries, can you?

Charlie Robinson (18:29.998)
You had a gun to your head and you had to write out 150 countries. Could you do it? They're all part of the Belt and Road Initiative. Not America, not the West. They're out, right? 75 % of the world's population, three out of every four people who are eating food on this planet are part of the Belt and Road Initiative. So if you're in the West and you're like, Belt and Road, never heard of it. that doesn't matter. That's some...

that they're doing. yeah, China's putting that together, but it's a bunch of nothing. No, it's a bunch of something. Half of the global GDP comes from countries that's covered by the Belt and Road Initiative. 21st century maritime Silk Road. It's a combination of maritime ports, string of pearls, through Southeast Asia and Southeast Asia.

and over land rail system, rail, road, ports infrastructure like that. They're spending a ton of money on this. It's become a priority. They've made it their priority. China has provided, this'll blow your mind.

China has provided $679 billion for infrastructure in the following three areas, transportation, telecommunications, and energy. Rough, this is two thirds of a trillion dollars. I'll say it again, $679 billion China has spent on infrastructure. Do you know how much the US has spent? 76.

679 billion to 76 billion.

Charlie Robinson (20:32.91)
They're outspending a 7 to 1.

Charlie Robinson (20:37.632)
It's crazy. Chinese high-speed braille.

Charlie Robinson (20:46.904)
Do you, okay. Let me start with America. American high-speed rail. Zero kilometers. Chinese high-speed rail. 45,000 kilometers of high-speed rail. Not trains, not normal trains, not choo-choo trains, not Thomas the train, none of that. I'm talking high-speed rail. The type of trains like the Tegevay in France.

You could I've taken that from Leon to Paris from from from Paris to Leon. No, I took it from Leon to Nice.

You it's like magic It's amazing. I did that in 1989 I Did that when I was in high school, I'm in my 50s now Francis had a high-speed rail since I was in high school. America has none California is trying to build a high-speed rail system Gavin Newsom's running it. So, know, it's gonna get done

You know and if he ever gets himself into a bind with a high-speed rail He can pimp out his whore wife and have her go fuck Harvey Weinstein for an acting role again Maybe I fucked some guy to get I don't know legislative get more money for this high-speed rail system Gavin Newsom's high-speed rail system. How much have they spent? Billions of dollars how many miles do they have zero? right on schedule there are five he's trying to connect like Obscure

Central Californian towns together. He's like, I gotta connect Merced with Bakersfield, you know, for all those people that are trying to get there. China has connected 550 cities through high-speed rail. United States has zero high-speed rail tracks.

Charlie Robinson (22:38.37)
They have Amtrak and they have some Amtraks in the Northeast and they have some Amtraks in like California. You can take a slow ass train from San Diego to San Francisco. Take you forever.

High-speed trains? No, we don't have that. We have a destroyed Middle East instead. We have a million dead Iraqis.

We have maybe a million dead Palestinians because we're funneling all of our money to Israel. We have zero high-speed rail. When I say high-speed, this is 200 to 350 kilometers an hour. This is advanced technology. China is now, by the way, they're looking at their 350 kilometer an hour high-speed rail trains and they're going,

Well, you know, it was little slow. So you know what they unveiled in 2025? Maglev trains, magnetic levitation trains in China were just unveiled. Mind you, again, we in America still don't have high speed rail that France had in the 80s or Japan had in the 80s or China had, I don't know, has now. We do not have high speed rail.

China unveiled the maglev train that goes 600 kilometers an hour. They're now onto the next generation of high-speed rails. We haven't even gotten in the door yet. The cost for the Chinese high-speed rail system, $890 billion. It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money, to be fair. But it's a, it's, you had a bunch of Chinese working on the project that were buying raw materials that were made in China, used in China, circular economy, right?

Charlie Robinson (24:38.446)
Five-year plan. While we were dealing with COVID and the fuckery that comes with the pronoun people and the DEI nonsense, you know what China was doing? They had a five-year plan for airports. From 2021, essentially when the shots were rolled out, to 2025, which was last year, China built 140 brand new airports.

with Beijing's airport costing $10 billion.

How many did America build? We have, China built 140 airports and they have 600 mile an hour maglev trains. You know what we get? We get fights to get on Spirit Airline. That's what we get. I have to fight some asshole in aisle six on my Southwest flight because he wanted, because he's mad that I opened the peanuts and he's got a peanut allergy.

So now I have to fight this asshole. This is what we're doing. The Chinese have maglev trains. Now, to be fair, to be fair, if your social credit score is in the toilet, you're not getting on that maglev train. So it's not like I'm trying to say that everything in China is peachy here because they got a lot of problems. I got a lot of problems with you people. Let's move on. Let's talk a little bit about the Chinese car market. Largest EV market in the world.

In 2024, China had 12.87 million electric car sales. And BYD, the biggest Chinese car manufacturer plans to sell just this, just that company alone. There are plenty of EV car manufacturers in China, by the way. They're not the only one. And Tesla's not the only one though. They are there. BYD plans to sell 4.6 million electric vehicles in China in 2025.

Charlie Robinson (26:42.67)
EV is now 47.9 % of the total car market. By the way, when I said BYD planned to sell 4.6 million cars in 2025, which now wrapped up, I guess we'll have to see what the numbers work out to be. The year before, they sold 3.5 million. So they are growing. They went from 3.5 million one year to 4.6 They grew 1.1 million.

extra cars in just a year. So what will 2026 be? I don't know if we're on, if we stay on the same pace, they might be making five and a half million cars a year. Selling five and a half million cars a year. Not just making them and parking them somewhere. 58 % of global production of EVs are coming from China. And just so you know,

Let's do it just to do a little comparison. go, well, are they like spamming the Chinese people with the ESG propaganda to get them to think that electric cars are like the savior and that diesel or gas powered cars are somehow the enemy? No, they're not doing any of that. They don't need to. They don't. I mean, their entire social structure is propaganda, right? So it's not like they're going to just all of a sudden start saying, these cars are bad. And no, they're just saying electric cars. They're an option. If you're interested, we have these as well, not.

they're gonna save the planet or you're gonna be a better person because you buy one or anything like that. They don't get into any of that shit. Here's the reason why people are buying electric cars in China like crazy. In the United States, the lowest price electric car you're going to get is a Nissan Leaf and that starts at $30,000. In China, if you wanna get the entry vehicle for electric car, it starts below $10,000. So you can get an electric vehicle

in China that's probably going to be better than the comparable electric vehicle in America for a third of the price. So yeah, they're selling.

Charlie Robinson (28:50.798)
Total Chinese car market was in 2020. They imported 62 % of the cars that were in China. 62 % of them were imported. Last year, that number was literally cut in half. It's now only 31%. They're making their own cars. Remember when Detroit used to make cars? Ford and Chevy and GM and Saturn and all these, you know.

America America cars America tough. We're here in the belt rust belt area and we're building cars anything It doesn't exist anymore. They're all being built in China They're being built in China by robots and they call them dark factories The reason why they're dark factories is that they I mean, I don't know if it's like really saving money but they don't have the lights on because they don't really need the lights on because There aren't people they're looking at the at the cars that they're welding. It's all done automated, you know by robots and

precision welding and things like that. And so you don't really need the lights on when the robots are working, which is dystopian as hell. If you think about it, like the idea, if you walked into a factory that was just building thousands and thousands of cars and none of the lights were on, I think that would be terrifying, honestly. I think that would be like a, more of like a shocking visual that like, things have changed so much that

We don't really need humans building this stuff. I think that's unfortunately the direction that we're going. Too many cars are being made in China actually, so they're discounting them. So if you wanna get a car, if you wanna get a discount on a car, you can go to China and get an Audi for about 50 % off. I did a ton of research. I would love to get an Audi for 50 % off. Unfortunately, you have to live in China and drive it in China.

So it doesn't do you much good. But if you happen to be there, that China's F-A-W, it's a seven seat SUV that I saw, it looked pretty bad ass, like a cool, I don't know, like a big SUV. 60 % off, you can get this seven seat passenger SUV for $22,300. So it's like the prices of cars in China are falling off a cliff. The prices of cars in America are going up.

Charlie Robinson (31:17.678)
Now you go buy like a decent, like a really nice pickup truck, but it's like, this pickup truck is $98,000. Like I am not paying Ferrari prices for a pickup truck. I'm just not doing it, sorry. Currently in China, they are making every year 500,000 electric buses. That is 95 % of the market for electric buses are being made in China.

450,000 electric light commercial vehicles, they're all being made in China. Chinese firms produce 75 % of the world's EV batteries. now, listen to this, you think Tesla's the shit, right? You think that's the only one who's doing it. They're the ones doing it right. Chinese firms produce 66 % of the world's EV cars. Two out of every three EV car that's...

available in the world right now is made in China. what they did, the way they did this, you can, and America does this stuff too, but they gave $29 billion of government subsidies between 2009 and 2023 for research and development and also charging infrastructures and tax breaks.

So they really incentivized and grew this market. They didn't do it by scaring people into compliance with, know, if you keep driving these gas powered cars, we're all going to die. They didn't do that. And they didn't try to incentivize people by praying on their goodness and say, you know, buy this electric car and you're going to save the world. They didn't do any of that. They just said, look, straight up cash, right? We'll give you government subsidies. We'll finance your R and D on batteries.

will finance the charging infrastructure that we'll need to set up all throughout the country if we want electric vehicles to be there. Yeah, we've got gas stations all over the place. You're gonna need the electric version of gas stations everywhere. if we're really gonna go to this system or we're gonna have this as an option in addition to gasoline, then we need to think about this like the way we think about gas stations and there's gotta be charging stations everywhere, right? That takes time and that takes money. China budgeted for that.

Charlie Robinson (33:37.006)
They gave themselves a massive 14 year window from 2009 to 2023 to get all that in place. And then on top of that, they incentivize with tax breaks. Now American industry gets this treatment as well, know, where America comes in and subsidizes and grows industries that they want and steps on the throat of other industries that they want to destroy. So it's no different in the sense that China is doing this as well. It's just that

It's just that you see what can get done without a lot of the red tape. Now, in China, sometimes the red tape means that like rights, property rights, personal rights, and things like that get trampled in the process. So I'm not trying to say that China is like a model for how you run the world, their behavior is reprehensible, but they get shit done, right? And China's EV exports from 2020,

right when it really kind of started to 2023, not too long, just a couple of years, their EV exports increased by 850 % and 40 % of it went to Europe. You know how much of China's EV exports came to the US? Zero. You don't get those cars. You don't get to drive a badass BYD that puts Tesla to shame. You don't get to do any of that. You don't get to buy the

50 % off Audi, you don't get to buy the, well, you can maybe buy the electric bus, but you you don't get it for the price they're charging. You don't get the $22,300 seven seat SUV.

because we won't allow that. We have to make sure that Chevy is building a Volt for three times the price that you can go buy for $30,000. And then when your battery goes out and you take it to the dealer and you say, guy, I need to get a new battery for my electric car. And they go, yeah, that'll be $22,000. And you go, it's worth more than the car. And they go, yeah, we know. So that's what you get in the West. Sorry.

Charlie Robinson (35:49.92)
All the EV industry is dependent on a very particular type of battery. These batteries that are made in China with, as I mentioned, China producing 75 % of the world's EV batteries. So every car manufacturer is dependent on China for this. And they are also, as you might've noticed, once they explode, they're impossible to extinguish.

is pretty wild. And we're gonna get into this in second, the rare earth minerals. well, you know what, let's talk about it now. The rare earth elements are a huge industry. they're also very, you know, they're almost exclusively refined in China. So that puts all the countries in a really bad spot. And

What they're used for, I'll give you some of the numbers on it. Permanent magnets. Now you may not think about magnets in your day-to-day life, and most people don't, but 45 % of the demand for permanent magnets is used in EVs. And it's also used in wind turbines and electric motors and F-35 fighter jets and computer hard drives and all kinds of crazy stuff, right? So,

Magnets, you may be thinking, I don't really use a magnet too much in my day-to-day life, and that's true, but the electronics that you use in your daily life are heavily influenced by magnets, the price of magnets, where you get them, how you get them, and it's one of those components that you just don't really think about until you're in a situation like this and you go, well, yeah, let's just...

go buy more magnets then. And it's like, well, we would, except that you have to get the materials from a very specific, it's not like you can just go to Costco and get these magnets. They're very specific. And the materials that you use to make them, it's not even so much that when they call them rare earth minerals, it's a little bit of a misnomer because that sort of makes you think that, you have to find some particular region where there's a big

Charlie Robinson (38:17.62)
of these rare earth minerals, neodymium or whatever. once we have our geologists kind of find that, then we'll, well, that's sort of true, right? You have to be in an area where that stuff is there. But the barriers to refining and mining rare earth minerals isn't so much, do you have rare earth minerals in the ground where you are? It's more a factor of, you willing to do what it takes to get them out of the ground?

because this isn't like digging a coal mine, you know what I mean? Or digging some sort of stone pit somewhere. If you are looking to extract the rare earth minerals out of the ground, you need to allocate something along the lines of like the state of Wyoming to do it.

where you just say, from this point forward, we have decided that the state of Wyoming, everybody's gotta leave, we're digging the whole thing up, and we're gonna pull the rare earth minerals out of the ground. If we did that, we could do it. We would have access to, and I'm making Wyoming up, I'm just pulling it out of my ass, but whatever. Pick a large, and I mean a large piece of land, and say, whatever happens there, pollution, whatever, you're just gonna have to deal with it.

Nobody's gonna wanna live anywhere near there except people that are gonna work there. And a lot of them are gonna die in the mines and all the stuff in the refining. And it's gonna be a desolate wasteland and nobody's gonna wanna go there for the next thousand years afterwards. But we could get it out of there. China said, fuck it, we'll do it. Like we'll do it. We don't care. We'll pick a spot in the middle of China somewhere and we'll just dig. You said, we'll dig to China. Well, what do you do when you're in China and you dig? You dig to...

What, Western Europe? I don't know. But Flat Earth Dave has a thought on that somehow, I feel.

Charlie Robinson (40:25.294)
but you have rare earth minerals that are coming from China. America can talk about how, we'll be a competitor. We've identified some mines in Nevada, in parts of Nevada where we can go in there and, okay, yeah, maybe. But again, you're going to have to destroy that piece of land to get to that. So if you want to have the permanent magnets for your...

electric motors and your F-35s and your computer hard drives and your EVs and your wind turbines and all that stuff, you're going to have to buy them from China. You're either gonna have to buy the materials from China or you're gonna have to buy the materials somewhere else and have them refined in China. Or you're going to have to buy them from somewhere else and then build the refineries and do it yourself and figure out how to do that. And I suppose you could do that. And maybe you should do that if you're a nation that's, especially if you're a country that's

actively picking a fight with China, probably should do that. But this is kind of what's going on. These permanent magnets, they're used in rechargeable batteries, or well, the rare earth minerals, used in rechargeable batteries, fuel cells, clean energy, which is like everywhere, big deal, and sonar systems.

So the military industrial complex needs this. They don't get the option to just go, it'd be nice if we had it, but we don't, so well.

And a reminder, or maybe just a education on this, when I say that rare earth minerals are needed for an F35, and we know how expensive F35s are and what a boondoggle that's been.

Charlie Robinson (42:10.818)
They need, to escape from mere generalizations when I say that they need rare earth minerals, they need 900 pounds of it for each F35. 900 pounds. It sounds like a lot to me. I don't know. I don't know much about rare earth minerals or F35s. But I do know this, the minerals and magnets will not be sent to the United States. They just will not be. We have...

We now have, according to these stats, we have at least 70 % of the world's total rare earth minerals being mined in China in 2024, at least 70%. I've heard that number as high as 90%. Let's err on the side of caution and say that the 70 % number is the number. So right then, we're talking about...

Charlie Robinson (43:10.165)
270,000 metric tons in China. To put that in perspective, only 45,000 metric tons in the USA. So we're not even in the game. You drop down below that. Third on the list, Myanmar, 31,000 metric tons. Below that, Australia at 13,000, Nigeria at 13,000, and Thailand at 13,000. I would be very careful if we're Myanmar.

You're about to get some democracy dropped on your ass in the form of your rare earth minerals being stolen by the American empire. Be careful with that.

So the reserves though, is kind of what you want to look at. So it's like, it's one thing to see how much has been pulled out. 270,000 metric tons in China last year, that sounds like a lot. Do they have more? yeah, they've got more. They have 44 million metric tons of rare earth minerals just in reserve in China. That's the stuff that's in...

in their mountains, land, just waiting to be pulled out and extracted. 44 million metric tons. Next on the list, about half that, Brazil, 21 million. Be careful, Brazil. Below that, India, 6.9 million. Below that, USA, 1.9 million. So this is a little bit. Russia's got some, Russia's got a lot of assets, commodities, minerals.

oil, all kinds of stuff. Russia has 3.8 million metric tons of rare earth minerals in reserve. Vietnam's got about the same. Greenland has 1.5 million. That might explain one other reason why Greenland has become so popular with Trump and his Trump doctrine. Let's talk a little bit about the production. This is important. It's China's production of key

Charlie Robinson (45:18.572)
rare earth elements. is in metric tons. We've got neodymium magnets and praseodymium oxide. These two elements are used in magnets. China has 95,000 metric tons of it. They have another 83,000 metric tons of neodymium and praseodymium metals.

So there's oxides and there's metals and they've got both. Disporium oxide for magnets, dysporium iron alloy for magnets. And so you go, what's this used for? Magnets, magnets, magnets. Is it anything else? mean, it? Yeah, well, here's kind of the key. These magnets and the dysporium oxide and the dysporium.

Iron alloy are also used in nuclear reactor control rods. And so I think that is a huge part of this they don't you know, we're eventually going to need to go to nuclear and you can't go to nuclear if you don't have nuclear rods and you can't get nuclear rods built if you don't have the dysporium oxide and iron alloy so

that's part of the magnets that they built. This is way outside of my area of expertise to be fair. I know you're surprised that I'm not an expert on magnets and nuclear reactor control rods, but these elements are needed for these things. And so, kind of kind of forces you to have to learn a little bit about it. And you look at China's refining process or capabilities and they have the ability to refine

250,000 metric tons. They did it in 2024. And so you can start yourself a hot war with China if you'd like, but this will turn into a financial war if they refuse to export anything. And so good luck with your EV aspirations. Good luck with your nuclear reactors. Good luck with all of the things that you wish to do technologically that involve magnets.

Charlie Robinson (47:42.498)
way more than you think. you know, here's the thing, it's fine if China has access to this and refines it and gets it ready and sells it to you. Somebody's got to do it right there. The manufacturing and refining country that's taken on this job in the aftermath of Kissinger and Bush and...

Rockefeller and Nixon opening up China in the early 70s and then opening it up further in 2000 with the World Trade Organization and you turn it into a factory. And what happens in factory? Well, a lot of pollution, a lot of line jumping and regulation skipping happens, especially in a place like China where they just don't really value individual human rights as much as they do the collective.

If it's good for the collective to get this shit done and it hurts a couple people in the process or kills a village, you know, with all the toxic poisons, well, then that's just the price that you pay for tech for technological advancement. I suppose you could go back to picking rice and growing it in the fields if you'd like. But in case you didn't notice, we're building electric cars here in China. So, you know, you get on board and get the fuck out. And because they have that mentality, things get done very quickly there. I'm not saying it's right. I'm just saying that there's no red tape.

But it's all fine if you stay on good terms with China because China exports rare earth minerals like crazy. In fact, in 2024, terms of metric tons, 6060 metric tons were exported to Japan. 3144 metric tons were exported to the USA. That number will go from 3000 to zero if you start a war with them. Just so you know.

And if it goes to zero, it'll go to zero immediately. And you don't have time to get your neodymium production plants up and running and start the extraction process and build the refineries and do all that. Good luck to you. It'd be a decade before you get that stuff going, especially with the red tape. Meanwhile, you have nothing coming in. So you can get on the wrong side of these, of China if you'd like, but you don't have to. India imports

Charlie Robinson (50:06.453)
815 metric tons of rare earth elements from China every year. South Korea, 777 tons. Italy, 500 tons. Vietnam, 700 tons. China's open for business and everybody is buying.

Top exports for Chinese rare earth magnets. Who do you think the largest, country that bought the most Chinese rare earth magnets? Well, who's the other manufacturing country in the world? Germany. Germany has always been, has been, maybe past tense. You don't have that.

Natural gas coming in from Nord Stream anymore because, you know, it doesn't blow it up. But Germany was the leader for the top exports of Chinese rare earth magnets, 10,912 metric tons. Next on that list, good old USA, about 7,500 metric tons of rare earth magnets. United States buys from China, 7,500 tons.

goes to zero when you start a war. Again, do you have the magnet factories built? Do you have all the items that you need to make the magnets? Who will build the magnets? Your government will not. Your government, if your government isn't the American government, your government has been so busy getting on its knees for Netanyahu that it has totally lost the plot.

Charlie Robinson (51:48.494)
Vietnam buys 4,700 metric tons of magnets. They don't have a problem with China. So does India buys 2,800? They don't have a problem.

They're selling to everybody. That will change. Let's talk about China's future.

Well, I'll be honest, the future is different over there. I went through, I tell you my minority report meets total recall story of going through China. go to Shanghai, it's 2005, I go to Shanghai, I go in and it's cool and I'm there for a couple of days. The last day I'm there, the night before we're about to leave, I don't feel good. I felt worse, know, I'm functional, I'm up.

but I've got a massive fever and I just feel shitty. I don't know. I don't know what it is. Could be anything. Maybe I ate something bad. I don't know. But we, got to get on a plane. I'm with some people, my team. I got to go from Shanghai to Hong Kong. And so I'm like, all right, well, at least, you know, I'm fine. I'll just sleep it off. I'll get on the plane and we'll be good, right? So I'm going to go through security and the

and you're kind of going down this big hallway that's all white. It's like white tile, white tile on the walls and like a white ceiling. And as I'm walking down this hall and I'm just like, I'm just cooking. I'm just like, fuck, I don't, I'm just going to get through security, sit down, chill out, get on this plane, maybe take a nap for a little bit, get there and we'll be fine. But as I'm going through this hallway, I noticed that it's getting narrower and we're being sort of funneled into a...

Charlie Robinson (53:36.622)
just like an entrance. You kind of have to go through, not like a security entrance necessarily, but I don't know, there's something going on up there. as I get closer, I see that they're sending us through these scanners and there's a little, small little, I want to call them like satellite, not satellites that are flying around, but like a dish, like a direct TV or like a

something like a small satellite dish on either side of this room. I'm going, what the fuck is this? And then I see these monitors and I can see as people are walking through the monitors, it's almost like, it's like total recall. You can like see the glowing picture of them, like the green out light of them as they're walking through and their body temperatures. And what they're looking for, I didn't know what they were looking for. This was like, they weren't searching you to see if you had a bomb. They were checking to see if you were sick.

They were checking, they were scanning your body temperatures to see if you had a fever. Cause if you had a fever, it was going to be because of bird flu and they were going to put you in a quarantine camp for weeks. And as I start to go through, I'm with some people, go, fuck, fuck. I need to total recall. I need to wrap the wet towel around my head, you know, start going through two weeks, two weeks and hope that they, you know, I don't, I don't glitch out as I go through this and I'm going, they're going to, they're going to see my fever.

They're gonna, I mean, I can tell I've got a fever. I'm like sweating like a whoring church going through this thing already. And I'm like, and I said to people, said, don't let them put me in a cage. Like if they catch me, like, and you guys get to Hong Kong, you guys gotta come back and get me, right? And as I went through there, I was doing everything I could to like, be cool, don't sweat, don't look like your head's on fire. And I went through that and I was looking around like suspiciously and I don't know, I got through. But that made me think of like,

It made me think of like the future, right? That was 20 years ago, going through that wild Chinese airport, right? So China's future is on a different trajectory in terms of where you think things are headed. In the past 25 years in China, 1,575 skyscrapers have been built.

Charlie Robinson (56:00.718)
1500 high-rise skyscrapers have been built. again, I'm not trying to tell you that this is some sort of symbol of the epitome of human achievement, right? Building skyscrapers is interesting and cool. It's a bit dystopian. And in Shanghai, I remember going to the roof of our hotel and looking, like there's a pool at the Ritz, Carlton, Shanghai, there's a pool at the top.

and you could go up there and you can look out, can see in all directions. I looked as far as I could, all four directions. I could not see the end of the high rises. It was very much like Blade Runner and it was not in a good way. So again, when I say 1,575 skyscrapers had been built, I'm not saying that necessarily that's a great thing. I say it in terms of just understanding the context of what they're trying to do, how they get things done, do they have them? A lot of ghost cities were built as well and that's like,

condo projects for the future. If you build them, they will come hopefully and maybe they're there. And a lot of this has to do with the Chinese don't allow their citizens to invest in things outside of China. So you can't like really get your money out of the country as easily. You don't get the option to like

buy US stocks or US real estate or European stocks or European real estate or whatever you want to do. So you're sort of forced to buy your investments. you're Chinese and you make a lot of money and you want, and you make excess money and you want to invest it in things and retain it, they buy real estate because it's like, that's all they can buy. And so they buy real estate. And so it's not uncommon for some rich guy to be buying high rises, buying condos in high rises in

in China, buying six or seven of them when he's already got a place he lives in. And I know this because I would talk to the guys that when I was in Shanghai and Hong Kong, but particularly in Shanghai about what they were doing and why they were doing it this way and how, you know, I was there for the worldwide property show. So reason why I was in these places and I was talking to the developers, they're like, they're like, let me show you our new buildings, you know, cause I'm there going, I'll show you the new building.

Charlie Robinson (58:24.719)
that we're going to be doing in Vegas, this 50 story high rise and I got a billion dollars worth of condos I can sell you. And they're like, oh, we'll come see our new project. And I'm like, oh, you're building a new building? They're like, no, sort of. And they're like, we're building 75 of them. And I'm like, I'm sorry, over how long? They're like, well, we're just going to start them all in August. I'm like, okay, so you're going to one building at a time or are going to, no, we're going to build them all at once. I was like,

I mean, the scale of their ambition was off the charts. I literally couldn't understand what they were talking about. They had to show me a physical, one of those topography, you know, maps, like the miniature maps that they build with like the miniatures of everything they take. Come, no, come, come. We'll take you to our place. And show me what you're talking about. I looked at this thing. It was a gigantic, I don't know, like 10 yards by five yards. And it was like a built out of the city. And I was like,

my God, I've never seen anything quite like this. It was all lit up and I was like, this is like, this model is remarkable. This might be the greatest model I've ever seen. They're like, yeah, well, this is the project we're working on. okay, are you guys doing other projects? Yeah, we've got 14 other projects going. Are they all like 75 buildings at a time? They're like, no, not all of them, but you know, 10, 20. The scale is, it's hard to process, right? So in the past 25 years, they've just been building, you know?

They've been, now they've got robots building in dark factories, right? That's kind of the direction it's gone. And they have, of course, China's future is tied to BRICS, BRICS Plus. They're the driving force behind this and they're using their new development bank to finance this. So China is gonna be a big player. The future is bright in China in this regard. The future is not so bright with their demographics.

They have a massive demographic problem. I'll wrap up with that. they're doing things. I mentioned that they're beyond high-speed trains. They're now moving into maglev trains. Well, guess what else they're doing? They just announced the launch of a thorium reactor cargo ship. Are you familiar with thorium? Like it will run forever, essentially. This new cargo ship carries

Charlie Robinson (01:00:53.583)
14,000 containers. has a, the thermal output of this cargo ship matches the Sea Wolf class nuclear submarines. Okay. It's an advanced propulsion system. It's a totally new propulsion system. They reinvented cargo ships completely. They're now thorium powered. They don't have to stop for fuel. They're bigger than they've ever been. They built a thorium reactor in the Gobi desert.

China has in the western part of China, it's like desert. It's very different than the eastern part. And they built a thorium reactor out there. And there are massive thorium reserves in inner Mongolian. And they are working on something called a thorium molten salt reactor, TMSR. How many TMSRs is America working on? I'll give you a hint. It starts with the letter Z, okay?

Robots per worker, in just an interesting little tidbit, robots per 10,000 workers, right? So if you have a factory that has 10,000 human beings working in it, it's a big factory, right? And you have 10,000 workers in there. In China, 567 of those 10,000 will actually be robots. Okay, so what is that? 5 %?

Okay. In Germany, if you have 10,000 workers in this factory, 449 of them will be robots. So they're pretty good, right? But they're not China, but about 115 or so behind China, but making progress. If you had the same 10,000 workers in a factory in the UK, only 104 of them would be robots.

What about in the US? What about? We're not even a number. We're not even on this. We're not even registering as a real number here. So China has basically about 5 % of the human workforce has already been replaced by robots. In America, that hasn't happened yet. That may be a good thing. I'm not even trying to tell you that...

Charlie Robinson (01:03:15.629)
I'm not saying that China has 5 % of the workforce as robots and that that's a good thing. I'm just saying that's the way it's going, good or bad. We'll see. But China is so good at building infrastructure that they have started doing it in Africa. They got so good at it that, you know, with the maglev trains and the connecting 550 cities to each other with high speed rail and all that, they even, shit, I mean.

We're moving on to thorium reactors. We've got maglev trains. We've got thorium cargo ships. Like, shit, we can build the infrastructure out in Africa. And then they go over there and then you get that movie Empire of Sand from 2013 with the Chinese guy with the meme that it's also tiresome. Yeah. They went over, they're trying. They're trying to build in Africa. It's just, it's tough, you know.

with the Africans. And all this stuff. He should watch the movie. The guy is so frustrated. He's like, how long have these roads been here? They're like 65 years. And he's like, and you never paved them. It's like, well, yeah, we never really got around to it. It's like, in 65 years, you never paved the roads. They're like.

You know you can pay them like, yeah, but we just don't do that. They're like almost seven decades. But to be fair, China is building. They're building in 35 countries. They are building in Angola. They are building in Nigeria. They are building in Sudan. They are building power generation. They are building transportation rails. They are building all kinds of things. They want the resources that are in there. They want to partner with Africa to get the resources, the...

minerals and whatnot that is currently underground in Africa. And so they are willing to do what they need to do. Now America, like I said, America could look at that and say, well, we'd like to take those resources from Africa too. It's like, all right, great. You have to first build the rail lines. You have to build ports. You have to be there permanently with your guys because you're not going to be able to teach the people in the dementia

Charlie Robinson (01:05:36.281)
Democratic Republic of Congo how to extract cobalt out and have them figured out again We're back to roads that haven't been paved in 70 years. They can't get past paved roads They're not going to be you know building thorium reactors right away It's gonna take some time the Chinese take a long game. They they they long approach to this fine It'll take 20 years to get this up and running We'll need these resources in 20 years So let's start the process now. Do we have to vote on it? No

Do I have to go through a committee? Do I have to have Marjorie Taylor-Kareen fight with somebody to get me the money that I need to start? No, I don't have to do any of this. It's China. They just say, we're doing it and it gets done. So in the past 50 years, the number of dams in China has increased from 1,019, very specific number, to over 17,000.

There were a thousand dams in China 50 years ago. There are 17,000 of them now. They've been busy. Half the world's concrete is used by China to build dams. It's building it. Here's the beavers of the Far East, the Chinese. Everybody knows that.

And you know, they're bridges too. Although, did you see the video of the Chinese bridge like coming down? So that's kind of a problem, right? And John Perkins would tell you, know, he'd say, when we were the economic hit men in South America and we were enslaving these fine people in their countries and to economic bondage.

At least our hydroelectric power plants didn't fall down, right? That's what he would say. These shit Chinese, the hydroelectric power plants are, you you wind up pretty soon, you're in a Looney Tunes cartoon where you're trying to put your fingers in your toes and all the holes in the dam. So you do want to have your infrastructure built to higher standards, of course, right? And so a case can be made that maybe spend a little bit extra time.

Charlie Robinson (01:07:51.989)
on that Chinese bridge and maybe not Russia, take your time because if you don't, the video of those bridges coming down, that goes mega viral and everybody wants to dunk on you for building bridges that fall down. But I mean, and that's true, because that bridge shouldn't fall down. But to be fair, have you seen the other bridges that they've built that haven't fallen down? their technological advancement when it comes to infrastructure is out of control. So, but they're...

they're doing things different and that is the future. That's the future of China. lastly, let's talk about this. China's demographics are a mess. this is the, when I talk about the future of China, I am talking, I have been talking about the economic future of China. Maybe their political trade future and the Belt and Road Initiative and all of that. But we haven't talked about the actual people. And yeah, you know, we're going to robots and.

Chinese kind of say, well, we got a lot of Chinese people. We don't need all these people. Well, you do though. You can't implement a one child policy and think that that's going to not have long-term implications. And it does, and it has. The one child policy was a mistake. the time they did, it's 2.1 is what you need to keep your population consistent, not grow, not fall. 2.1 kids per person, right?

That's kind of what you need. China's is now down to 1.18. That is that puts them in, I think, if I recall the numbers, top 10, but actually number 10 in terms of the lowest population rate. And so that creates a demographic catastrophe. So working age people have contracted, but you know, just in time for robots.

These aren't your grandpa's communist Chinamen. They're super organized. They're not bogged down with red tape. But they also starved and killed 30 million people on multiple occasions, which is good to know. So you plan accordingly when dealing with the Chinese, but the future for China is very different than the future for America. And hopefully we don't have to...

Charlie Robinson (01:10:16.141)
kill 30 million people to join their club. as always, keep your eyes open and your head on a swivel. Hey everybody, if you liked this episode, you can take the additional step right this second of sharing it with your friends and family. Real quick, rate the show. Give me five stars. Write a little something. Macroaggressions.io is the website. Thanks everybody. Talk to you again soon.