Decouple

This week, I’m joined by Patrick McGee, a journalist and author of Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. I recommended this book on LinkedIn as a MUST READ, and stand by it.

Apple in China is an in-depth corporate history which examines one of the most important symbioses in economic history. It explains Apple's meteoric rise in market capitalization/revenue, as well as China's newfound dominance in precision manufacturing. McGee argues convincingly that neither outcome would have happened without this relationship.

To back up this extraordinary claim, McGee closely maps how Apple systematically sent top engineers from around the world to train up hundreds of factories in China, pressed for demanding specifications at “ridiculously high yield,” and invested sums directly into China that made the post-WW2 Marshall Plan look small. The result? China now leads in 57 of 64 critical technologies, as measured by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, dominating everything from smartphones to electric vehicles.

As Trump threatens iPhone-specific tariffs and Tim Cook promises impossible reshoring timelines, Apple finds itself captured by the very system it helped create. Having accidentally armed its greatest competitor, there is no clear pathway for the U.S. to regain the lead it helped China take.

Find transcripts, extended shownotes, and more on our Substack.

Ashley Nunes, a senior research associate at Harvard Law School, joins me to disentangle the hope from the hype in the EV debate.

Alberta, sitting on massive reserves of oil and gas, found itself teetering on the edge of blackout this week as temperatures in the negative 40 degree ranges led to multiple grid alerts. As a new record for peak demand was set at 12,384 MW, Alberta's 4481MW wind fleet went AWOL. This raises major concerns regarding electricity planning with a country wide federal mandate for Net Zero electricity by 2035 having already generated significant political controversy in Alberta which has imposed a moratorium on new wind and solar over affordability and reliability concerns. Its is therefore a timely occurrence that this same week Alberta's Capital Power and Ontario Power Generation announced a feasibility study looking at near-term deployment of a fleet of nuclear reactors in the province . Chris Popoff joins me to explain.