SPEAKER_01: 0:17

Welcome everybody. My name is Adam Browse. I'm Scott Moppin. This is Solutions from the Multiverse. Also, Solutions FM. You know, if you're not into the whole brevity. Yeah, exactly. So Solutions FM, it's a podcast where we share unheard of solutions to the world's problems, to personal problems, to the country's problems, United States of America's problems. And it's a blast every time. And it doesn't mean we're right, and we don't necessarily even believe in the solutions we're talking about, but they're new, they're unheard of, and so it's exciting to talk about them and sort of try them out and explore them. I'm a professor. Scott is a comedian and producer of podcasts. I'm a talk. That's our roles. So I'll try to be funny and fail. Scott will try to be smart and try to be smart and fail. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04

That's not what I was gonna say. Divisional labor.

SPEAKER_01: 1:08

So let's go into this this one today. So today the solution is what I call the the American Green Belt and Road Initiative. This is what I'm proposing. The American Green Belt and Road Initiative. Yeah, and I did some some research about this, and it's it is a new idea, but it also is not totally new. Some people have kind of batted around a sort of concept like this. But it also has major reasons why it might never be adopted. But I think it's interesting to talk about.

SPEAKER_00: 1:38

Agbari.

SPEAKER_01: 1:39

Agbari. Agbari. American green belt road and initially and road initiative. I think we should call it the belt and suspenders initiative because that sounds more American. Yeah, that's way better. Got your belt suspend way better than Agbari. Yeah, Agbari sounds like we're gonna say uh, you know, a la Akbar. That's sort of what you're saying there. I don't know if that's gonna fly with a lot of red suspends. In the middle of the middle of the middle country, okay, yeah. So belt and suspenders. Belt and suspenders initiative. So basically the idea is that so we have like this idea of the Green New Deal, which is like hearkening back to FDR's New Deal, but it would be like making the economy more green and you know, protecting, you know, creating jobs and doing good things, but all in the name all also with a kind of environmental aspect. So there's this other thing, so that's inward facing, that's like domestic. But there's also this thing that China has been doing the last 10 years called the Belt and Road Initiative. Okay, and they're investing like trillions of dollars, ones of trillions, not many more than that, but they're investing at least a trillion dollars in building like ports in like Africa and uh Southeast Asia, and they're building like railroads and like highways to some extent, but mostly railroads and ports and you know, uh basically connecting the world to China's supply chain through infrastructural developments around the world. And it serves various things. It helps them make more money because they can connect then now China, you know, Africa can start buying things from China. Also, China can export things from Africa, like minerals or whatever food they want from Africa, they can more easily get you know trade with Africa and with Southeast Asia, and um, I think even in South America, there's there's there's a lot of Chinese investments going on.

SPEAKER_00: 3:25

Wait, help me out. So, what is different about this than just trading with a company in Brazil per se? Like if you're a China.

SPEAKER_01: 3:31

Because China, this is the government going and saying to like say they go to you know, Eastern Africa, like Madagascar or something. I don't I this is not an actual, I don't know. I'm I should have looked up actual places. But they've done big projects on the internet. Well, what is building infrastructure there? They'll say, like, hey, the Chinese government will finance and Chinese engineers will come and build like an entire port and railroad system for your country. And in exchange, you know, you have to give us these, you know, trade agreements and et cetera, et cetera. But it's it's sort of like a aid, economic aid, economic development aid, but with a sort of soft power, you know, return on investment. So now they have this orientation towards China instead of an orientation towards Europe or towards America or towards you know someone else. Um and so China's done this quite effectively because it's a great deal for these countries. Like they're like, oh my god, you can come in and put it like a massive, totally modern port into you know Djibouti, and Djibouti wasn't gonna have that port without without China's help. So um, yeah. So uh that's that's what the Belt and Road Initiative is.

SPEAKER_00: 4:45

And if you and if you get to build the port and decide what goes in it, you get to build it to your specifications and to work best with your machinery and your like however you're set up, right? So that it's like, oh, if we've already started trading with China, then why not continue trading?

SPEAKER_01: 5:02

And so you become not exactly not like a vassal state, but you become oriented towards China in terms of imports, exports, trade. Maybe you have other kind of add-on things like universities or you know, other things might energy, who knows, might go across those same lines now that you've initiated this sort of connection with China. So China's been doing that, and America basically has just been like fumbling around, ruining its relationships abroad. No, yeah, almost this this is yes, just bungling our major, even our allies. We were just totally screwing over. The rest of the world's mad at us, you think? Yeah, the rest of the world is bit is pretty mad at us. Okay, you know, the tariffs were just struck down by the Supreme Court, the Trump tariffs, yeah, just today. Yeah, and um, you know, but uh but they didn't strike down the entire ability for the president to make tariffs, just his blanket tariffs or his emergency tariffs, but he can actually still put tariffs on things, like targeted tariffs. It's kind of it actually is kind of crazy. Like people all the all the all the journalists like are burying that, which is actually that's actually the problem is the president can still be like, we're gonna put a tariff on you unless you give my family this much money. That is still allowed. Yeah, but he can't just do like a blanket tariff 10% on everybody. That was the only thing that was struck down. He has to get more detailed and specific, yeah, which is like super easy, right? So, you know, basically that's just an example, one example of how we're completely bungling things, but we also just bungle things because we're racists and we think Africa is like a poor continent, and that's just not true anymore. Africa is like a great place to go do business and trade and do import and export, but we think of them as like you know being primitive or something, which is completely like that's like a 30-year-old, 50-year-old idea.

SPEAKER_00: 6:47

Well, it does seem like, and from the outside, not diving deep into economics, it seems like our attitude is like, oh yeah, well, we're gonna make it so that you have to pay out the nose to deal business with us, or you won't deal business with us. And countries are like, I'll go with plant. Yeah, yeah, I'll go with China. Right.

SPEAKER_01: 7:04

That's what you want to do. Right, exactly. And we also give them all kinds of punitive, you know, punitive um relationships in terms of debt and in terms of working through these sort of abusive debt things like the IMF and the World Bank, which have not been that have not led to actual liberation economically for these countries, they've led to a kind of certain debt servitude. Whereas China openly, I mean, whether whether well how the Belt and Road Initiative turns out is still a question mark. Maybe China will embroil these countries in a similar kind of servitude, but at least the stated you know, handbook, you know, the stated policy of the Belt and Road Initiative is to help liberate these countries. Okay, like it's like a communist, you know, they're like, Yeah, we actually stand with you as these sort of post-colonial nations and that to actually liberate you and help you grow your economy.

SPEAKER_00: 7:58

There will be like a closer relationship than just a transaction like we're doing.

SPEAKER_01: 8:03

Well, we don't we don't know because it's only 10 years, but the stated goal is to actually help those countries fully lift, like lift themselves up, you know, and and and uh whereas it that has not been the case since you know the 70s and 80s, since we started giving aid and debt, you know, loans to these co also America only basically sells weapons. So we're already doing this everywhere in the world, but it's not a belt and road, it's the bullet and bomb and bomb initiative, right? That's what it is. And we say, yeah, we'll loan you money. You know, most money that we say was like international aid is like loaning a country money so they can then buy weapons from our military industrial complex. That that's most of our industry, most of our developmental aid. Whereas China does, they said they might say, Well, finance will loan money to you to then build a port using our engineers and machinery. So so they're doing a similar thing, except for it's not bombs and guns, it's ports and railroads, which actually help the country be better and be healthier and help the happier and stronger country economically. So so the so the proposal is to do an in a green belt and road initiative funded by a belt initiative, that idea.

SPEAKER_00: 9:15

So what is vendors? What is a green belt and road?

SPEAKER_01: 9:18

So a green one is basically saying, okay, let's draw a Venn diagram. There's like all the international aid we could do, and then there's like an overlap of like what would make the environment like you know, help climate change, help nature, but also achieve other goals of our national interests in the world. Okay. Um so you know, I think one of the tip top, I'll just give you like the what I think is the best example of this, is helping water building going around the world and giving people financing and engineering and even just aid, just money, to improve their water resources and water security. This is like a really, really good idea. Well, because it would prevent water wars, which is like what the next hundred years of conflict.

SPEAKER_00: 10:05

Why water instead of uh food or yeah, well, water makes food.

SPEAKER_01: 10:09

So that's one thing. Like when you have a drought, you lose all your cows and your food, and so everyone has drought, you know. So a drought, like right now, even in America, they just published that pri good beef prices are up 15% because of droughts killing the herds in Texas, like in America. So I mean, water security is going to become this thing that's just like really a big deal. And I'll give you an example. Mexico City loses half of its water every day to leaky pipes. Half, 50% of its water is just coming out of leaky pipes. Yeah. On the con on the flip side, Tokyo, Japan, or Tokyo in specific, has a policy where if they f detect a leak, it will be fixed within 24 hours. They got that super plumber.

SPEAKER_00: 10:57

He just goes right down into the tube.

SPEAKER_01: 11:00

That's the origin that's the origin story right there of Mario.

SPEAKER_00: 11:04

They have reverence for plumbers in Japan. Like they've encoded it into 8-bit hero. Like that's that's dumb. Part of the history.

SPEAKER_01: 11:13

I love how this does not surprise me though. Yeah, I just think I just see like you know, Japanese guys in like white suits with white helmets in like a little tiny red truck, like pulling up right to it. Like, we were told that there's a leak here, and then like go down there, cutting out the road. Right, exactly. Oh, we did a gallon of water has come out of this leak. Perfectly fixing it absolutely perfectly, and then leaving like it was never touched, like everything just looks like totally pristine. 50%. That's yeah, so Mexico City's 50%. Mexico City has 250 million people. Right, right.

SPEAKER_00: 11:46

Is that just a pure infrastructure problem?

SPEAKER_01: 11:48

Like that's you just have pipes that are too old and too many of them, too many places, and just not the engineering and not the public, not the public, you know, the public uh dime thrown at that problem. You know, other things to work on first. But if America said, hey, you know what? It's bad for Mexico City to have water scarcity. It's bad because if there ever was a drought, you know that two million of those people are going to America. Like, where are they going? Right.

SPEAKER_00: 12:16

You know what I mean? And it's just nicer, like it yeah, water security is a thing, like we need to help sure from a humanitarian perspective.

SPEAKER_01: 12:24

That's the beautiful thing about like a green belt and road initiative. It's this lovely humanitarian thing, but then it overlaps with actually kind of these sort of hard national interests. Like, do we want uh a water shortage to lead to millions of migrants trying to get into the United States? Right. I mean, I don't think even the most soft-hearted, warm-hearted, caring person who cares about immigrants and cares, they don't want that if we could avoid it. Yeah, right. If people like to stay in the country they live in, it's better for them. They don't want to flee. We don't want refugees fleeing anywhere. Okay. So if we could prevent that, that would be better. And then right wing people who hate immigrants would get on board too. Because they'd be like, we want to keep these weirdos who are not like American, you know, or whatever, with finger quotes, out of the country. Right.

SPEAKER_00: 13:09

You'd have to connect the dots to say this is a move that ultimately accomplishes something that you care about. Right. Then yeah. Right. Well, here's playing devil's advocate. What about the people who would say, hey, how can we go and fix the water situation in Mexico City when we can't, for instance, fix the water situation in Flint, Michigan? Or why not, you know, like that sort of thing?

SPEAKER_01: 13:31

Yeah. Well, that's where the Green New Deal comes in. I mean, the Green New Deal would fit the water structure in Flint Michigan. I feel like the answer would be like, I'm not saying don't fix that. Right. I'm saying we could have a Green New Deal and we can have another bill about foreign policy. What I about, you know, yeah, I would be like a foreign policy Green b bill.

SPEAKER_00: 13:51

What we don't want to do is have that existence of that problem cause us to ignore everything.

SPEAKER_01: 13:57

Right, right, right, right. They're two different problems. Yeah. And they both need to be solved. The Green New Deal, I think, is a good proposal. I'm in favor of that. I think it makes perfect sense. You know, un we have an unprecedented problem, which is climate change. Well, we should throw uh tr trillions of dollars at it to fix it. We're Americans. If not throwing money at things, what good are we if we don't just throw money at problems, you know?

SPEAKER_00: 14:17

Yeah. Plus, if we get a reputation of uh I mean, I would love it if our country had the right right now. The reputation feels like it's spreading of violence and war and colonialism. Like, and if we had the reputation of spreading like healthy environments, clean air and clean water and you know, like better birth rates and stuff like that. Like that was what an amazing reputation to have globally instead of what we've that's actually a big thing that could be done.

SPEAKER_01: 14:45

One of the one of the biggest uh environmental dangers right now is that South Sub-Saharan Africa population is like is is growing enormously still. Okay. And if you look at the demographics, I think even if tomorrow we radically changed everything so that their birth rate wasn't totally off the chart, they would still become like one of the most populous places in the world in like 50 years. Okay. So sub-Saharan Africa is going to be like the most populous place in the world, like more than Asia, more than your United States, more than anywhere. And that's because their birth rate's like crazy. But it turns out there's been really good work done by this Swedish uh a Swedish statistician guy. He he printed a whole video about this. He's done like six TED talks. I think he recently died, but he did this whole thing explaining that the best way to get birth rates closer to just two per woman, like replacement, is actually reducing infant mortality. Because it turns out when you reduce infant mortality, then people want to do birth control because they know that they're gonna have two or three kids and they'll live. But if you don't know how many of your kids are gonna live, you just say, well, we'll have four or five or six, because like through two or three of them might die. Yeah. So so a big thing that could be done is just like billions of dollars for um infant mortality medicine, maternal health care in sub-Saharan Africa. And that would actually be not only a huge act of humanitarian goodwill, because it's like just trying to save babies. Collective psyche improvement of not having and a huge projection of soft power. All of southern sub-Tahran Africa would say, America's amazing. My baby was in an American uh uh incubator. Incubators are the kind of key technology along with other medications and stuff. But the incubator, the physical incubators, could have like American flags on them or whatever. Like you'd be like, Oh, you, oh, my baby was like saved by an American incubator. Like that would project this like soft power into this really populous part of the world that's gonna be very powerful in the future. And it would help the environment because you wouldn't have overpopulation and the drain of resources that that causes. So it's like you could that's another one, like infant mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, water scarcity in the South America for sure, but also in other parts of the world. Chennai, India is one of the most uh water endangered cities in the in the world. Really, and a few miles away, a few a hundred miles away, is Caracas, the or Caracas, the not Caracas, uh Karachi, the Pakistani city. And this is like Indian Pakistan, two nuclear powers who are constantly posturing against each other for war. Guess what happens if Chennai, 12 million people, Karaki, uh Karachi, 12 million people, both get water scarcity in a drought. Do we think the tensions between these nuclear powers are gonna improve or are they gonna get worse? Like they're gonna get way worse. Yeah, probably so so. If we said, hey, guess what? Karachi and and and and uh and Chennai, here's money, engineering, you know, what you need to get your water sorted, you know, whether it's desalination or piping it from somewhere else or dams or or fixing leaks, whatever it is. Well, a combination of it does it's not just what like it's we we're doing all the things. Whatever it is, yeah. And American money can come and do it. American banks can do it and get fees and blah, blah, blah, blah, the finance it all. And then American engineering can come in and can actually even work with Chinese engineers. Why not say to China, hey, you've got pipes, you've got what we need to do this work. American banks and and consultants and engineers can finance it and work on it. The Chinese can supply it. Why not? Like, why not? Why don't we work as a whole cooperatively to achieve this thing? Right. And at the end of the day, we can project soft power, we can achieve national interests, and we can be humanitarians.

SPEAKER_00: 18:33

Do you think this could be a way that the two larger but like the United States and China could commingle in a new way? It'd be amazing. Yeah, that'd be a lovely thing. If they're like, if we're like, hey, we see what you're doing and we think this is very smart and effective, yeah, we're going to do something somewhere. Would you like to be a partner? They'd love it. I feel like if you come up, you approach someone like that, sure, there's a very likely they go to the street.

SPEAKER_01: 18:54

This is like how you build friendships and allies and peace around the world instead of division and America first and you know, exactly what we're you know. So all of this is predicated on building, you know, having more sane, you know, good people. Diplomacy. Yeah. I mean, just people who understand both. They want to make the country, the world a lovely place that's safe for children and safe for families, yeah, healthy and happy and and collaborative, you know. The people who want to say China's the bad guy, they're evil, they're the enemy, those people are all crazy. Like China's not the bad guy. I don't think China's a bad guy, evil, or enemy. I mean, we make them that by antagonizing them and by telling them they're our enemy. Then they say, well, then we're their enemy because they're saying we're their enemy, well, then they must be our enemy, right? But if you say, hey, uh, could you guys we'll provide the financing and some of the know-how and you guys provide some of the pipes and like machinery? Let's get Chennai enough water. Everyone's gonna show up in Chennai and just help out. It's gonna be great.

SPEAKER_00: 19:54

Yeah, yeah. It does. I this I have a hard time thinking of things to comment because I'm just like, yeah, this seems like a very smart beneficial.

SPEAKER_01: 20:01

I think I think you're right that politically the so there are challenges. One is, you know, why don't we fix the water in Flynn, Michigan? Blah. Okay. Well, you can say, well, that's a separate issue.

SPEAKER_00: 20:09

Or it'll be that version of whatever you want to do for the other thing is it's like, how dare you not make us live in flying stocks?

SPEAKER_01: 20:16

The other question is, how do you pay for it? What are the pay fors? How do you pay for this? That's always what people say when they want to. If you're like, I want to stop the orphan grinding machine, they're like, How are you gonna pay to stop the orphan grinding machine? You have to pay the, you know, well, it's like, well, because we're just gonna pay. Why do you pay to send your kids to school? Why do you pay to you know your healthcare bills? Like, we pay for things because they're worth paying for, you know.

SPEAKER_00: 20:38

Yeah, we just went through this contraction of like USAID, USAID, where it's like, oh, we we definitely know this is going to stop helping other countries and increase their not liking of America. And we're like, yeah, well, it's not valuable anymore. I'm like, what? I just think it really is valuable. Yeah, there was a large group of people, a voice of opposition saying, like, no, no, no, this is right.

SPEAKER_01: 20:59

It's just I think I think you can say the pay for's are a couple things. One is soft power. I think you just have to be really realize, you have to say, look, if if if the most populous place in the world, South Saharan Africa, if they think America is awesome, that's good for the next hundred years. Like that's really good for America for the next hundred years, you know. So let's do stuff to help them out, you know, while helping the environment, while helping every, you know, ourselves, while helping everybody. This the other thing is if people are like, you know, immigration, illegal immigration costs a lot, whether you're going to police it with$80 billion to ice and borders, walls, and stuff. And okay, fine. Even if you are gonna do that, and then it's expense and expensive problem. Why not just cut it off at the source by making it so the countries those immigrants are coming from they don't want to leave them because they're comfortable and healthy and prosperous, you know.

SPEAKER_00: 21:47

So plug some of the easiest holes to fix in these places down there. Yeah, right. We have the ability to do a lot of uh create a lot of effect with relatively little efforts.

SPEAKER_01: 21:58

We can do like acupuncture. It can be like, what let's let's go ask you know a thousand targeted humanitarian strikes immigrants and say, why did you leave? You know, and it's like a lot of times it's gonna be the Syria like for example, the Syrian refugee crisis. People say, Oh, that was from the Syrian civil war, so it must have been political. But Actually, if you look at the history, the year before the political civil war was the greatest drought in Syrian history for the last hundred years. So the Syrian refugee crisis, even the Syrian civil war, in some ways, it might have happened whether or not there was a drought, but the drought certainly pressurized it.

SPEAKER_00: 22:38

At least before that, they were finding a way to not have a civil war. Right.

SPEAKER_01: 22:42

And then there was a huge drought. And then there was a civil war and a refugee crisis. Well, you know, if the if Europe or America or some or people or China had said, you know what, that's a war, that's like a water risk part of the world. Let's just help them achieve water safety. However, maybe there wouldn't have been a Syrian refugee crisis. And guess what? No Syrian German, no Syrian refugee crisis to Europe. Guess what? No right wing shift it to fact to these whole butterfly effects. Yeah, the right-wing country, right wing politicians in Europe don't have any uh thing to go on because there hadn't there hadn't been a Syrian refugee crisis. Right. Um so I think there's there's this interest, uh there's this interest to you know preempt uh immigration, uh too much immigration, an involuntary immigration.

SPEAKER_00: 23:33

I mean they don't want to leave, they want to stay in their countries, it helping them stay in their countries immigration by just helping with irrigation earlier in the process, then like that's a that's a valuable.

SPEAKER_01: 23:46

If you're of that persuasion, then we should uh so, anyways, that's the idea. I think there are drawbacks, you know, there's there's things people would say about it. How do you pay for it? But I think soft power preventing, you know, preempting uh immigration that is not uh that is costly or whatever, even though immigration is not costly, it actually contributes to the American economy, blah, blah, blah, blah. People perceive it as costly and it's made costly by this reactionary right-wing stuff. So yeah, I think there's a lot of reasons to do a kind of belt and road initiative, American belt and road initiative that's not guns. Because we currently already do a multi-hundred billion dollar year violence belt and road initiative around the world. And it's just we need to stop doing that. And a gr and a green belt and road initiative would be so much more admirable and praiseworthy, and we could tell our children that we do it without being ashamed of our country.

SPEAKER_00: 24:43

And yeah, yeah, and it would make the world better. Yeah. So Green Belt Initiative, we would where would you start if you were gonna Green Belt and Road Initiative?

SPEAKER_01: 24:52

We could give it a different name, but that's the what the Chinese call their thing, the Belt and Road Initiative. The Green Belt and Road Initiative. I'm just yeah, I'm just calling it that. Maybe we'd want to call it the Green Marshall Plan for the world or something if we wanted to draw an American.

SPEAKER_00: 25:05

Is that a thing that starts through like companies doing this, or is this a government?

SPEAKER_01: 25:09

No, I think the government should somebody should build write a law like like AOC wrote the Green New Deal, proposed it. I think some congressperson should with maybe with some or even AOC could do this. She's trying to project that she has like foreign uh she just went to this Munich security conference. Did you see that? Yeah, and she tried to sort of look presidential like she knows anything about foreign um foreign affairs. She doesn't really know about foreign affairs. I mean, she has good instincts because she's like a humanitarian, okay, but she doesn't actually really know very much about it. She's very much like a domestic focused politician. So she was but she was trying to sort of you know show that, and I'm sure she can learn. She obviously learned a lot for that, and she could learn more. But she could she could come out with this. She could be like Green New Deal at home, Green Belt and Road Initiative abroad, but then she would look like a pure environmentalist, so she probably doesn't want to look like that. So might be you might want to get someone else to do it. Like there's an older guy who's a congressman who is very like he's very environmentalist, and he's this old August statesman, and he sort of pals with AOC.

SPEAKER_00: 26:11

Okay, and he could propose it.

SPEAKER_01: 26:12

I think I know who you're talking about. Yeah, I don't know his name. You don't? I've just seen him around. Oh not Bernie Sanders.

SPEAKER_00: 26:18

Oh no? No, no, I'm talking about another guy. I totally thought that's what you were talking about. I thought you were trying to get me to say Bernie Sanders. I was like, no, no, no. Am I gonna say Bernie Sanders?

SPEAKER_01: 26:24

He's not an environmentalist. I mean, he is, you know, just because he's sane and he wants to like see the world not turn into a cinder, but he's not an environmentalist. That's not his Ed Markey. Ed Markey. Yeah, Senator Ed Markey. Oh, he's not a congressman, he's a senator. Senator Ed Markey. He's very he's very uh environmental guy. But yeah, so so so Mark Mr President Senator Markey could could say, hey, Green New Deal is great. Now I'm proposing this foreign affairs sort of Green New Deal where we're gonna project American power and achieve American interests and sort of compete but also collaborate. It's kind of a collaboration with China, like it's competition, but it's like friendly and for a greater purpose and you know it's a race to the like to a better space, you know, like nobody loses, right? Right, exactly. Nobody loses, right? Right, it's I like that. Yeah, it's cool.

SPEAKER_00: 27:11

Green belt and road initiative.

SPEAKER_01: 27:13

Yeah, why not? I mean, uh there are other things you can do with it too, like um like um I mean, solar panels are a big thing here where especially China is the question mark because China produces 80% of the solar panels of the world. So if you were like, hey, we're gonna like go help finance putting solar panels all over somewhere, some country, because it's gonna help electrify, which is gonna help people know prosperity, keep people in their countries and blah blah blah. Yeah, uh, you know, you're gonna buy like at least, you know, at least two thirds of the country. Um, so people would be like, Well, it's a handout to China. That would be a big criticism if you're like, oh, we're opponents of China. So I think you'd want to include like a 50% made in America requirement or something. Right. So even if the solar panels are they cost twice as much as they get from China, they st you still just buy them from an American manufacturer or an allied manufacturer.

SPEAKER_00: 28:04

It allows you to get your thing going and it also stirs domestic production here, so that that kind of undercuts any that that undercuts that criticism of, you know, like your outward face or whatever. Right, right.

SPEAKER_01: 28:16

And you could also be an al it could be allied, like uh friend shoring, you know, friend shoring. No. Okay, it's a term. So there's like outsourc outsourcing. Outsourcing. Outsourcing is when you slam your finger in the door. Ouch ow! And then someone captures that in a job. Hey bro, don't get mad at me. I'm just outsourcing. Outsourcing this. Um, what is it? Near shoring, friend shoring, offshoring. Okay, so offshoring is when you send jobs to other countries. Okay. Friend near shoring is when you bring the jobs to a nearby country. So it's like the job goes from like China to Mexico. That's near shoring.

SPEAKER_00: 28:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 28:55

And friendshoring is when you move the job from like a I won't call China an adversarial country because I don't believe they're an adversary, but you know, someone who we don't have as strong of allied connections with to a country that we have very deep allied connections with. Like, you know, you move a job from you know from Pakistan to uh to um to Poland. Okay. You know, it's like oh we have closer allied connections to Poland than we do to Pakistan. Right. So that's called friend shoring. So this would be you could say like America fur America has to be, you know, 30% of what we go into the this stuff has to all be American-made, but 70% of it needs to be friend shored, like 70% of it needs to be our allies, and only 30% of it can come from like non-really strong allies like China and Pakistan, you know, these kinds of things. Just kind of limit the yeah, yeah. Make sure the benefits go and sort of and make sure the supply chains stay in our sort of sphere of influence, like a soft power. But anyways, so this would be like um I think this would be a very good because you know, progressives, you know, left-wing democratic, socialist, progressive type people often are not very canny in foreign affairs, and they don't have as interesting of like a vision for the world because they're very focused on like their workers locally, you know, the issues in their neighborhood, their issues in their country, yeah. Medicare for all, you know, blah blah blah. And maybe they want peace, but in order to have peace, you know, you know, there you gotta deal with the bad guys, right? I mean, Russia is stopping peace by invading Ukraine.

SPEAKER_00: 30:32

Like, yeah, yeah, you know, to have peace, you can't just be like, let's all get peaceful dudes, you know, like it doesn't work, you know. Guys, we're gonna let the world do its own thing for four years. We're gonna focus on us, and then we'll just we'll check back into the world.

SPEAKER_01: 30:46

America has an empire, right? It has 200 some mil or 180 military bases.

SPEAKER_00: 30:50

Well, and we've stuck our fingers into everywhere we could, and so now we sort of have a responsibility to at least oversee what we're doing.

SPEAKER_01: 30:58

And oh, a big part of this could actually be greening the military, which a lot of the military is in favor of, right? So the military guys, the generals, are like, yeah, we don't want to have to have like oil supply lines because then the enemies can just like shoot drones, asymmetrically drones on the oil supply lines, and we can't and we lose oil supply.

SPEAKER_00: 31:17

I heard there's two Yahoos over in America who are talking about how to blow up a pipeline, right?

SPEAKER_01: 31:21

I know, and the Houthis can just shut down the Strait of Harmuz with some drones and rockets, and now oil's like destroyed, and now our military capacities are you know restricted unless we do these expensive, you know, oil reserves and stuff. But guess what? If if a third of the military or half the military runs on electrical panels and electric guns, which are very, very effective. It's about as equivalent as licking a nine-volt battery. Ooh, we should get our uh uh get our enemies to do that.

SPEAKER_00: 31:52

Yes, drink these batteries, these are so delicious, you guys. You try this.

SPEAKER_01: 31:58

Um, but yeah, so the military's in favor of this outsourcing. We're gonna outsource. But the military, a lot of the military is in favor of this, and it could be there, there are all these military bases around the country could be could be supply nodes where solar panels, grid batteries, you know, things are going into, and then even right around the the bases are all being you know affected by that. There could be projects around the bases.

SPEAKER_00: 32:22

Yeah, well, and there's so much military that doing something that affects our military actually has a pretty big wide footprint. Right.

SPEAKER_01: 32:29

And the military contractors in America go like, oh, you want us to like you'll give us billions of dollars so long as the next truck that the next Humvee is hybrid, you know, or the next, you know, uh, you know, we do.

SPEAKER_00: 32:41

Because contractors will start building to the standards of whatever they're told.

SPEAKER_01: 32:45

And if they're usually paid extra to do it, like they're given RD funds to transition. One thing is I know that container ships could could be uh the physics is there and the engineering is there to some extent, to converted a lot of shipping could be converted into hydrogen engines. Okay. And be green or some more green, not totally green, because hydrogen's not always produced instead of what they've got like right. Diesel. Okay. Yeah, it's just diesel. But if they switch to hydrogen, you know, and then you did green hydrogen rather than right now. Hydrogen is mostly produced from fossil fuels, is not great. But if you did green hydrogen with solar plants or nuclear hydrogen, and then you put that into ships, anyways, there's all these things that could be done if you just had the money and the willpower and the interest in doing it, and you know, the marketing to tell people, hey, this is smart. Yeah, this is exciting. This is a cool thing. This is our world war two, but it's not the enemy is carbon, and we're pr and and yet we're still gonna get all the benefits. Like World War II gave us a huge amount of benefits in the world as an empire, right? Yeah, part of the reason why we fought it. I mean, we fought it to you know stop the Nazis, but we also fought it because we were like Europe Europe's gonna be a a cinder and we can like you know basically take over the world because the world will be empty, and all the there'll be no.

SPEAKER_00: 33:57

But if we have an initiative that like makes all the air cleaner and everyone has fewer cases of cancer and people live longer and have healthier lives, then and there aren't food shortages, right?

SPEAKER_01: 34:06

Yeah, and that'll help Americans have cheaper food at home and you know, better and not have you know 10 million you know, South Americans when there's some major drought in five or ten years.

SPEAKER_00: 34:16

I think people care about the cost of food. People haven't been talking about that very much.

SPEAKER_01: 34:19

Definitely not uh Americans just eat algae out of vats now.

SPEAKER_00: 34:25

We're headed there. That sounds good. I mean, what is this barbecue algae? What flavor we got?

unknown: 34:29

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 34:30

People don't really understand. That's one of the well, we've talked about this in another episode, but beef is 15% more expensive over the last, I think, year. And I know I've noticed that for sure at the store. I'm like, we're not buying beef, it's too expensive. Yeah, like a steak is like$30 a pound at Whole Foods. It used to be like$22. What? It's like really quickly got way more expensive. And it's because of climate change. And it's just, and there's diseases, but the diseases are all caused by climate change too, because the diseases move through the hotter weather across barriers and then start to, you know.

SPEAKER_00: 35:00

This is how I know we're gonna live different amounts of years, is because your uh your your example is that the the beef, the steak at Whole Foods is more expensive. And I'm immediately thinking, like, well, the burgers at Jack in the Box are probably more just carry the one to find.

SPEAKER_01: 35:16

Yeah, wait a minute. Carl's Jr.'s McDonald's. Yeah, you're right. Beef is more expensive. We buy the cheapest beef we can, which is the stuck, the chuck stew meat. And then you have to cut away. There's a lot of like grizzle. You cut that all away. Probably if you cut all the grizzle away, actually, you're losing all the the cost change because you're throwing away, you know. There's our profit. Throwing away 20% of it. You eat that grizzle. Yeah, you gotta eat that. It's our grizzle. Or you just get hamburger meat, that's pretty good, I guess. But we don't buy that very much. We buy mostly the stuck chicken. I have an embarrassingly seldom buying steak person, so I just me too, because it's$30 some dollars a pound now, but occasionally on a special occasion, you buy like a T-bone steak or a New York strip steak and split it between two or three people, you know. Like wartime. I mean in America, people used to just eat steak every day. Yeah, you know, but now for breakfast was like steak and eggs. Yeah, steak and eggs, right? But why people don't understand like kiss your there's just like bend over and kiss your butt goodbye with red meat, like it's gone. It's gonna be something only millionaires can buy in in five years.

SPEAKER_00: 36:21

So yeah. Are we replacing it with other meat or are we replacing it with other protein sources?

SPEAKER_01: 36:25

I think people eat chicken. You you can see right now chicken is being eaten like crazy. It's like off the charts how much people eat chicken, and that's just because beef is going too expensive. But no, beef wings are no good, man. Beef wings, chicken wings are way better. Actually, oh my god, business idea, beef wings. Let's do this. Let's do this.

SPEAKER_00: 36:41

Buffalo beef wings.

SPEAKER_01: 36:44

What would that even be? God, but no, chicken is off the charts. Chicken, you could you put in big, you know, big air-conditioned, you know. I mean, it's horrible factory farming, it's ethically, it shouldn't be done. But people do it in these big climate-controlled things, and that that'll be more resilient to to climate change. So we'll probably still have chicken, but say goodbye to say goodbye to steaks. It's gone. Working class people won't be able to eat steaks. Wow, that's crazy. Yeah. I mean, maybe once in a blue moon you'll buy a$50 steak, you know.

SPEAKER_00: 37:14

You'll go to some rich person's house and they'll be like, We have a cow in the back, actually.

SPEAKER_01: 37:18

It'll be like it'll be like oysters. So oysters used to be uh working man's food. Really? Yeah, you just oysters every corner in New York City in the whole East Coast. Slap them down. There'd just be oysters that they just pulled out of the harbor, and then guys would just sell oysters, and working guys would walk up and just shuck a few oysters and eat them and give and eat a bread in a bottle of wine or a bottle of food. So horny. And then they yeah, they were just horny. That's why the population's collapsing. So yeah, and now and then they they ate all the oysters out of the all, there's no more oysters. So now oysters are like, ooh, fancy, only rich people can have it. Same thing, same thing. Red meat will go the same way. But but we can reverse. We could, and if we if we secured the food and water resources of the world, and and our own country, but of the world, that would make it so that where there is plentiful water, where there is plentiful, you know, meat or whatever, that can be shipped to the water. Because it wasn't always like this.

SPEAKER_00: 38:14

It was if there were large groups of cattle being driven all over the place.

SPEAKER_01: 38:18

Right, right. Yeah, so there's a possibility of that too. People should also eat just less meat. But the idea that you would eat less but still be able to enjoy very fine. That you're doing it by choice, not by or or just that you could still working people could still enjoy delicious things and not have to eat algae vat bat algae.

SPEAKER_00: 38:37

Not be relegated to the the serfdom of we don't get certain things.

SPEAKER_01: 38:40

I want my beef wings.

SPEAKER_00: 38:43

Beef wings are gonna be so huge.

SPEAKER_01: 38:45

But yeah, so Green Belt and Road Initiative. I proffer that as a new solution. I'm sold, I like it. I vote for it. I'd vote for it too, actually. I think this would be cool. It's a it's a foreign policy that we could be proud of to tell our children and grandchildren about.

SPEAKER_00: 39:01

It would be about time. I would like one of those. It doesn't feel like we have very many curves.

SPEAKER_01: 39:05

Yeah, I can only think of a few things. Like George W. Bush gave a ton of money for HIV medication to Africa. And that was pretty cool. That was that was pretty cool. And uh I don't actually even know of anything Obama did like that. I'm sure he didn't think he was some somewhat humanitarian, but I don't know of any of them. But there are a lot of things that could be done that would be that would be sweet. But fixing the leaky pipes in Mexico Mexico City, and I'm sure an actual foreign policy wonk who knows all about this, and an environment environmentalist who know all about the the fragility of economic ecological systems, they would have like a list as long as my goddamn arm. Oh yeah, they'd be like soil in Argentina.

SPEAKER_00: 39:48

They they talk about things I wouldn't know anything about. You start this program, you start working with like companies that dig up the pipes and companies that manufacture the pipes and companies that do this labor.

SPEAKER_01: 39:58

Everyone's getting paid, everyone's making money, helping everything, everyone's helping everybody, water's flowing.

SPEAKER_00: 40:03

Bueno, muy bueno, yeah, muy bueno, muchos buenos. Outsourcing, no. Muchos español? No, no, no, I do. Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 40:14

I speak I speak Spanish. You speak more than me, apparently. I speak a lot of Spanish. I won't try. Yeah. And my German is getting better too. I'm reading das boot, or it's pronounced das boat, but people say das boot in English. But it's das boat. It is? Das boat. I've always pronounced it das boot. It's das boat. Oh, two vowels in German is just a long version of the vowel. So it's das boot. It actually is. You say it longer. Das boot.

SPEAKER_00: 40:39

We watched that movie when I was in like ninth grade in a German class. Great movie. It was good. Yeah, the book is really pretty intense though for ninth grade German. That's true. Wow. To like watch in like 45-minute increments. I talked to this Belgian guy. It's a boat.

SPEAKER_01: 40:53

I talked to this Belgian guy outside of Whole Foods before I bought some beef chuck. And the guy was like, um, he was like, oh, I'm Belgian. Uh and I was like, what are you reading? He's like, oh, I am reading Das Boot. Oh, it's so good. I've read it three times. This is, and I'm reading it in German. It's so good in German. And I was like, oh. And then he I was like, I think I might read that. I might try to read it in German too. And he's like, oh, oh, then you must also read. And he listed off like five other books. So I like wrote them all down. And in German also? Some of them are German, some are you know in English, but yeah, they're all like about World War II and stuff. I was like, this guy is really into World War II history and World War I too. How do you know he's not just a like a crackpot who's giving you bad reasons? I think he might be like a time traveler. Like he was like just sanding outside Whole Foods, like this Belgian long-haired guy with like a turquoise ring. He looked like a like a kind of elf or something. He hops back in his time machine.

SPEAKER_00: 41:45

He's just like I did it.

SPEAKER_01: 41:46

I gave the knowledge to John Connor in 2023. He was like, he needs to know about the leadership of Das Boat. And what was the other one? Shards of Metal. And there's other ones. Maybe it's the other way around, though.

SPEAKER_00: 41:59

Maybe you do horrendous things in the future, and this is the thing that will keep you from doing it. From it, yeah, yeah. So it was like the killing baby Hitler. I'm Baby Hitler. Well, you were just about to like do something horrific, and then reading Das Boot, they discovered makes you better. Makes me better.

SPEAKER_01: 42:13

I'm true, but it's really good. It's really good. And the book seems to be even better than the movie. Okay. It's very beautiful. I mean beautiful in the sense of I mean it's not beautiful. It's not like flowers. It's freaking rough. I mean, it's all these guys in U-boats dying and like trying to hide. And supposedly the U-boats, it was so early in technology that there weren't like sensors. So there was like there's like 80 guys in each one of these U-boats. And like some of the guys' jobs were to just like keep touching a pipe until it got unless it was too hot. And if it was too hot, be like the pipe's really hot. Because there was no like sensors. There's no like technology. So the people were just like sensors. Yeah. They were like, it was you know what it was like? It was like the like the train, that movie, the uh snow piercer, where the children are like in the train making. It was like that, but it was real, and it was like 30,000 U-boats. No, no, no. I can't remember the exact number, but it was I think it was somewhere in the tens of thousands of men, and then that was some thousands of U-boats.

SPEAKER_00: 43:13

Like, there are people who are early adopters of technology, right? But like you want to draw the line at the thing that could implode and kill you immediately. Like, I don't want to be that early.

SPEAKER_01: 43:23

U-boats are crazy. U-boats are crazy. Let's not do U-boats. No more U-boats. No.

SPEAKER_00: 43:30

No, no submersible, uh homemade submersible things that we're not totally sure about. No need to have homemade submersibles. I feel like there's enough uh uh up here that I can satisfy myself with. That's right. Okay, should we be done? I think so. Green Belt and Road. I like it. Yeah. See you next time. See you in a couple of weeks. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01: 43:53

All right, take care, everyone.

SPEAKER_00: 43:54

Bye.

unknown: 43:54

Bye.