The Ledger, every show

“The three hundred million abortions that China conducted throughout this period, one hundred million sterilizations throughout this period”

“Not far away is the California High Speed Rail Project meant to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles. It's been more than 15 years since voters approved this referendum to build this train. How many people have taken this train? Precisely zero.”

“Personnel costs are not a giant aspect of America's budget, and arguably we need a lot more personnel in order to, you know, process drug discoveries and make the FDA much more efficient, Process high-skilled immigrant visas and have a much more functional gov…”

“The prime contractors to the Department of Defense are not really inspirational places to work”

“What Xi Jinping did was that he elevated a lot of the leaders of China's military industrial complex, the people who ran China's crewed space missions, the people who ran China's biggest weapons companies, and he elevated them to be provincial party secretarie…”

“On the other hand, China owns pretty much 90% of this industry, everything from the polysilicon processing down to module assembly.”

“There's something like something like 40 nuclear plants under construction in the world, and 35 of them are in China right now.”

“If we take a look at some of the rare earth processing facilities around China, the cancer rates are off the charts.”

“China is really good at building these at home, but it's found that it hasn't been super good at building these more locally. It hasn't been able to, you know, build effectively and cleanly and, you know, in a way that satisfies a lot of political elites over …”

“Yeah, I think that China's demographic situation is a problem more in the next 50 years rather than the next five years.”

“Voters originally approved the California high-speed rail by referendum in 2008. I think they said this must be finished by 20 20. Right now we're in 2025. How many people have actually ridden California high-speed rail? The answer is zero because the first se…”

“Historically, Hefei has been significantly poorer. It is much more mountainous, but now Hefei is the center of China's electric vehicle industry, and so there are several big EV makers that are headquartered there or have their operations there, and as a city,…”

“China's economy has grown by an average of something like nine percent over the past 20 years, and what has been happening to China's stock market, it's been essentially flat, where the Shanghai and the Shenzhen exchanges have not risen very much, nothing comm…”

“And I was happy about that until I read deeper into the article that said that new trains are going to be something like 11 minutes slower than the old trains.”

“When I found a timetable from 1914 in which it was faster to get from Grand Central Terminal in New York to New Haven about a hundred years ago than it is today.”

“There's huge trade and integration between the US and China right now, whereas there was essentially no trade between the US and the Soviet Union in the past.”

“And I think that, you know, the future is going to be a really tight race between who can get to AGI and who can deploy AGI in a much better way.”

“And Xiaomi in its first time submitting, going into this race making its very first car, won one of the speed records beating established companies like Porsche and BMW.”

“The censorship isn't necessarily very direct, but above us hangs a chandelier in which a giant anaconda lies sleeping. And you never really know when the anaconda might wake up and decide to strangle you. But you're kind of just aware that the anaconda is ther…”

“In the Chinese countryside, a lot of the remote villages are still really well connected by bridges, by high-speed rail, by highways, and in the U.S. Countryside, there's basically roads and cars and almost nothing else.”

“What Silicon Valley does have, what we have here is, you know, companies worth trillions of dollars, which is not something that any other country is able to claim.”

“Right now, I think there's something like 47 U.S. Senators who went to law school, and one has had any degree that resembles a STEM degree.”

“Van Ness Avenue has tried to add a bus line onto the avenue for something like 20 years. It took about 20 years, more or less, to add a bus lane.”

“So all of these upstream strategic industries like telecommunications airlines energy, essentially these are always organized by three giant state-owned companies that control pretty much the entire state of the business.”

“Right now, last I checked, China's share of its economy dedicated to manufacturing is about something like 26, 27%, and for the U.S. It is about 10, 11%.”

“China is responsible for about a third of manufacturing value added globally.”

“The Three Gorges Dam, which displaced around a million people”

“In recent years, if you take a look at the most senior leadership, the entirety of the Standing Committee of the Politburo had degrees in engineering.”

“There's about seventy million manufacturing workers in China versus about twelve million in the US.”

“The Second Avenue subway extension costs about two billion dollars per mile.”

“The rate of e-commerce purchases in China is something like, I believe last I checked something like twice as high than in the U S.”

“He fired two of his handpicked successors and almost fired his third one Jiang Zemin, who ended up running the country.”