Garland Nixon exposes China’s AI and industrial dominance—$10T+ in annual manufacturing output, 10,000+ TWh energy production—while America’s hollowed-out economy, from $50K+ cars to $800K homes, reflects a financialized collapse. With AI replacing COBOL coders (IBM’s $30B market hit) and UBI risks tied to digital surveillance, Nixon warns of a surveillance state where even Second Amendment rights erode, like the Minneapolis ICE shooting. His critique: both parties now serve power over freedom, as MAGA’s January 6th hypocrisy proves, leaving America trapped in a decaying infrastructure race it can’t win without China’s decades-long industrial ecosystem. [Automatically generated summary]
If you don't have a lot of money saved up, which most people don't, or, you know, you sell your house that you've had for a long time, you're going to get some equity out of it.
You can put that down.
Even that, you're looking at it and you're like, young people can forget it.
They can't buy a new car.
That's 50, 60 grand.
They can't buy a house.
That's $700,000, $800,000.
You know, they can't.
So if you're young, you don't have any future and you don't even have a present, much less a future.
Welcome to today's interview, part two of our interview with Garland Nixon.
We've had an extraordinary conversation in part one already about the Middle East, about the domestic situation, MAGA politics, lots of things like that.
And in this segment, we're going to talk about technology and China and Russia and maybe some other interesting things.
So I'm welcoming back Garland Nixon.
Welcome, Mr. Nixon.
Really enjoyed part one with you.
And I just want to give people your YouTube channel.
It's Garland Nixon, just like it sounds.
And the handle is GarlandN on YouTube.
So please follow Garland Nixon on YouTube.
And welcome back.
Just, I really enjoyed part one with you.
So I'm looking forward to this.
Thank you.
All right.
So I want to ask you, let's start.
Let's talk about China.
China is clearly engaged in tremendous innovation in space of AI.
I'm an AI developer.
I also speak Chinese because I lived in Taiwan, et cetera.
China's leading the world in robotics, in drones, in electric vehicles, in industry, automation of manufacturing.
There's no comparison.
China today reminds me of the lead that the U.S. had post-World War II in the 1950s.
What is your overall understanding of China and its role in our global economy right now?
And what would you like to add?
Well, a couple of things.
You know, there are different types of economies, right?
Russia has kind of a mixed economy where they do a lot of commodities and they do technology and they do, you know, they do agriculture, which I think is very, very healthy.
One of the healthiest economies I think you could possibly have is a diverse economy where, you know, you can produce your own energy, produce your own food, and you can produce the items that you need.
That gives you kind of that, what is it, autarchical ability to sustain yourself.
Like steel.
They have a massive steel industry.
Exactly.
Yeah, they make their own stuff.
Exactly.
Now you go to China and they have a huge industrial capacity.
And that in itself, just having that industrial capacity making things forces you to constantly innovate.
You're making something.
You need a new way to make it, a different way to make it.
So having an industrial capacity also, the other thing is this, you have to invest in infrastructure because when you got all of these factories going, you got to have your electrical grid that will handle the factories.
And as you're expanding, you got to have an electrical grid that expands.
You got to have the waters.
You've got to have all of the infrastructure that's necessary to make things and to transport those things and et cetera, right?
To support that industrial capacity.
And if you look at the United States, we built this gigantic infrastructure in the 40s and 50s and 60s, but at that time, we had tremendous industrial capacity.
And of course, we needed the trains and planes and automobiles, all the stuff that was necessary to support that capacity.
When they decided that they could make a lot more money by basically moving the labor force to outside of the United States to get cheaper labor so that they could increase their profits, yes, it worked.
But the problem is now you don't have an industrial society anymore.
Now you have a financialized society.
And then, you know, you know the rest.
Get rid of Glass Steagle on and on and on.
And now all the money is made with asset-backed securities and et cetera.
CDOs and the big short and all that.
So the reality is this.
There is no need or reason or even ability for the United States to do technological or industrial innovation because we don't have, there's no industry.
It's just not going to happen.
Magically, somebody would just have to sit in a bank and say, I got an idea.
We should come up with a new idea for drills, maybe a new type of steel or something that would make it harder.
No, that's not what they're doing.
There's nobody doing that because there's no factories doing that.
So we cut our own throats basically to make some extra money.
And it worked for a tiny percentage of Americans.
So you've hit upon something really critical here because what Trump likes to do is announce these big plans that some foreign investor is going to build a factory somewhere in America.
Oh, we're going to have a plant.
He likes to call them plants.
We're going to have a plant in Texas.
We're going to have a plant in Arizona.
The problem with that, which is being quickly discovered, is that a factory doesn't exist by itself.
It's part of an ecosystem of a supply chain.
And if you don't have those domestic supplies to get the parts, to get the components, to get the lasers or whatever you're building, then you're pretty much screwed.
And then what Trump has done is, of course, he slapped all these tariffs on China, which is where a lot of the U.S. factories would get those components.
So it's like, hey, you got to set up a plant in America.
And if you do that, then you're like, how do we get our parts?
Because you punished, you know, you set these punitive tariffs and now we can't get the parts.
We can't get the high-purity acids, for example, for microchip lithography processes, et cetera.
And then you waste $500 million in microchips.
It's all ruined because there is a part per billion of some contaminant in the acid.
Like that's happened in America.
So continue this, whatever you want to say about this, but it's a whole ecosystem.
You can't just like push a pin on the board and say, oh, now we're going to manufacture this.
Right.
And yes, and here's the other part of it that's important, why you may not be able to catch up, because it is a developing ecosystem.
You know, it's like as you build factories that do this, you realize, well, we need this kind of acid or we need whatever this particular thing is.
And so we need to set up a supply system so we'll have those things.
And as you expand, your entire industrial capacity expands as one.
So that all of your factories need steel or whatever or what particular alloys.
And you, okay.
So you now have this huge industrial capacity, but you have all of the elements that feed the industrial capacity and you have the infrastructure because these things all grew together kind of organically.
Now, here I am watching you do that for 20 years.
And I say, oh, I better start.
I got to catch up tomorrow.
Well, I can't because I can't build the infrastructure that you've been building for 20 years.
I can't.
The factories, some of the things that you have, some of the supply chains that China has that feeds that industrial powerhouse that they have, they only found out by screwing up and needing it.
You know, it was an organic creation.
So what are we going to do?
Just try to copy everything that they had?
And what are we going to do that?
And it took them 20 years.
We're going to do it in five.
So we have set ourselves back so far that what America, what the United States would have to do, in my opinion, is come up with our own model for how we're going to do it.
What they're saying is, that's how China did it.
Let's copy them.
Too late.
You got to come check your own model.
Garland, listen to this about the power grid, the power grid.
You know, we're 20 years too late on building out power infrastructure.
So listen to these numbers because I ran the math on this in great detail.
China, in an aggregate year, the total power they produce is over 10,000 terawatt hours.
Okay.
It's well over 10,000.
The United States produces 4,400.
At least that's, I think those were 2023 numbers.
So we're less than half.
Trump promised to build 10 AP 1,000 nuclear power plants, which I think are built by Westinghouse.
If you do the math on that, that would raise America from 4,400 terawatt hours to 4,500 terawatt hours.
So it's not even a drop in the bucket.
Meanwhile, China is building a massive new hydroelectric dam project that will dwarf anything in the world, actually, which means that when it comes to, for example, AI research or AI inference, which is a power-hungry industry, that China is going to be able to out-produce and out-compete the United States just because it has cheap available electricity, plus it's getting gas from Russia through that new proposed pipeline that's going to cross Mongolia.
So the U.S., just we're 20 years too late.
And it also means it's not all Trump's fault, by the way.
It's not all Trump's fault.
What do you say?
I agree with you 100%.
These were decisions that were made by the so-called Titans of Industry.
And the decisions were made: let's close down the infrastructure here and let's just use China's infrastructure.
And in using it, or Bangladesh or Vietnam, you know, we basically use the infrastructure of other countries because we can make more money doing that.
And it worked.
The good news is it worked.
The bad news is it worked.
And so you don't need industry anymore.
And so we don't have it.
We don't have, as you know, it was interesting you said that 10 nuclear power plants wouldn't even move the needle.
Nope.
Hardly.
But even then, here's the other issue.
Oh, and they're only going to be ready in the 2040s.
It's not tomorrow.
And by then, China will have lapped us 10 times over.
Exactly.
Or they may have come up with some nuclear way.
You know, they'll be getting that, what is it, the hydrogen or whatever that stuff is that comes off the dark side of the moon where they can do nuclear power plants.
And by then, you know, we'll be basically in horse and buggies compared to them.
That's the direction we're going.
We'll be in effectively in horse and buggies because of China, because of decisions that were made.
And now we're going to go start a bunch of wars.
That's going to help.
That's money that we could be spending on infrastructure.
That's money.
What about educating people?
We need STEM.
First of all, even if we had everything that we want, we do not have the engineers and the physicists.
We do not have our education system is shot to hell.
Our schools are old.
They don't have the latest technology.
I was watching this thing of these Chinese schools, and they've got these big, like the whole wall is like a computer screen, and they're aiming information from school to school, and they're teaching kids all this stuff.
Our kids barely got heat and light in a school.
We spend money on everything, but investing it in our future and investing it in our people.
Instead, it's all getting laundered off by some bio-research lab in Ukraine or some other military boondoggle where we're building a plane that costs us $200 million.
Yeah, I think America is now really, frankly, in the late stage pillaging phase of the collapse of the empire.
It's like you look at Trump and the people around him and the military.
They're all just trying to say, how much can we extract from this collapsing system?
This is what it looks like.
Yeah.
You know what it kind of reminds me of?
And I was involved in this one time in a corporation that I work for, and that is where someone comes in and they, you know, they do the hostile takeover.
They buy a corporation without any intent of continuing to run the corporation.
They buy a corporation and they just basically pull everything.
Oh, how much money can this corporation buy?
10 million borrow 10 million, borrow the 10 million.
What do they have?
Well, they got these machines, sell them off, consulting fees.
And when you get this thing in maximum debt, and then, because basically you're saying this corporation is going to come over, I'm going to extract every penny of equity and potential equity out of this corporation before it goes under.
I get the feeling that these money laundering, you know, Epstein class that they're looking at it like, nah, yeah, you know, the United States is done.
Let's try to extract every bit of equity out of it that we can before it finally craps out.
And then we'll move on to bigger and brighter things.
That's exactly what it is.
Like when I see Trump and he's the head of this board of peace, and then he gets $10 billion transferred to his board from the U.S. government for it's it just looks it just looks like total corruption to me.
You know, it looks like money laundering.
Like, well, so is there any accountability for that $10 billion?
Does anybody oversee?
No, it's just, it's offshore.
It's in the hands of Trump.
It smacks of really the Bidens and Ukraine and all the kickbacks from Ukraine.
It's the same thing.
Nothing's changed.
It's just different people, same looting.
Yeah, that's the, and that's the, that's the problem I think we're looking at.
And that's what you're saying.
That is the system we have now.
That's what it does.
The outcome is the intention, as they say.
If you want to know what something's designed to do, well, you can try to figure out what it's designed to do, or you can just look at what it does.
Well, I don't know what it's designed to do, but I can tell you what it does.
And whatever it does, we can imply that was the design.
When we look at what's happening, you got people in Ukraine now, like caught with $100 million in cash still in the package from the Federal Reserve, and they go to Israel.
Wait a minute.
How do you steal $100 million, probably a lot more, from the United States?
You go to Israel, where we're giving them billions of dollars and say, oh boy, I'm free.
They can't get me now.
We can't somehow say to Israel that guy stole $100 million from us.
See, that's- Please, can you send them back?
No, I guess we can't.
What the American people are largely failing to understand is that the reason they are impoverished, the reason they can't afford food and housing and health insurance is because of all the money printing theft and the money laundering that's taking place through Israel, through Ukraine, through whatever, through the wars, through the Pentagon.
That's, you know, I think most Americans don't connect these things.
Like, why do I work so hard every day and I can't get ahead?
There's a reason for that.
The reason is these crooks in DC, they keep printing money, right?
Second Amendment Surveillance00:13:07
Exactly.
You know, like, I sold my house and excuse me, and I'm shopping for another house.
I'm an apartment now shopping for a house.
My God, man, the prices of houses is unbelievable.
And I'm a middle-class guy.
I'm not rich.
I'm not broke.
I'm okay.
I should be able to afford a house.
And I look at it and I'm like, I can buy a house, but what I thought I should be able to get based on what's available to me, it's unbelievable now.
And you look at it and you're like, if you don't have a lot of money saved up, which most people don't, or, you know, you sell your house that you've had for a long time, you're going to get some equity out of it.
You can put that down.
Even that, you're looking at it and you're like, young people can forget it.
They can't buy a new car.
That's 50, 60 grand.
They can't buy a house.
That's $700,000, $800,000.
You know, they can't.
So if you're young, you don't have any future and you don't even have a present, much less a future.
You're exactly right.
And, you know, the psychological impact of this is really strenuous on an entire generation.
But it's even worse than that, I would argue, because I want to bring in the AI picture here.
Now, I'm an AI developer and I know a lot about AI because I've been building with it for two years and I've built successful platforms.
I can assure you that the job replacements of AI will accelerate this year and next year and the year beyond.
And it's not going to be just the entry-level kids coming out of college who are already struggling to find jobs.
It's also going to be middle managers, decision makers, logistics people, because AI is advancing its capabilities into higher and higher positions within the corporate structure.
I don't hear anybody really understanding or expressing that they're ready for this to happen in America.
Have you thought about this issue and what does it mean when entire sectors of the economy vanish?
Like, for example, I'm sorry to keep going, but when Anthropic just announced the other day that they have a new engine that reads COBOL, which is a programming language back in the day.
Fortran and COBOL.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
And Pascal and whatever.
IBM lost, I think, $30 billion in market valuation instantly because IBM depends on service contracts for maintaining COBOL language for ATMs.
So boom, COBOL, COBOL programmers wiped out.
Happened in one afternoon, basically.
Like that's going to continue to accelerate.
Have you thought about where this is going?
Absolutely.
I mean, think about this.
You know, Grok or whoever write me a lawsuit against so-and-so, write me a will.
Oh, well, you know what?
I don't need a lawyer anymore, do I?
I write the lawsuit and my, you know, adversary there writes, you know, some kind of a document to the court that I have to respond to.
Guess what?
I upload it and say, write me a response.
I handle my whole case without an attorney.
And get, so all of a sudden now you don't need attorneys.
You know what's coming when you go to the doctors and they're, all right, doctor, I got this kind of problem.
You'll go in.
It'll examine your blood, this and that.
You'll put a few things in and it'll tell you this is wrong with you or whatever the case may be.
So basically, we're creating an environment wherein people will not just, you know, you could say workers, people will become unnecessary to the ruling elite.
And I would argue to some extent, based on what I've seen the last couple of years, they already consider us, you know, unnecessary.
We are an unnecessary aggravation to them.
They sure act like it anyway.
Yeah, that's true.
And the examples you gave, legal and medicine, but also think about architecture, for example.
You're not going to need an architect.
You're going to just talk to the AI agents and say, okay, I want a house that does this and this, and it'll draw one up.
And you'll say, okay, I don't like this.
Let's move the kitchen, whatever.
It'll work with you.
And in the end, it'll produce all the construction blueprints, all the materials, estimated costs, 3D renderings, walkthrough, fly-through, freaking everything.
No architect needed.
Like that's, that's, I think that's possible now, actually.
That's not even.
Yeah, I would think so.
That's not even years away.
But nobody, I mean, it's going to put the government in the position under the Trump administration, unless he's impeached and removed, which is a possibility, but it's going to put the Trump administration in a position where I think we're going to have, you know, uprisings of unemployed people demanding government, you know, basic income payments, you know, UBI.
Do you see that as a possibility as well?
Yeah.
And so I do have my concerns because for a while, you know, starting during COVID, I got some real concerns about, you know, when they came out with, you know, some areas literally came out with an app.
And if you wanted to get on a train or do this or that, and, you know, you had to have this app.
I know in New York, they had this stuff.
And I thought, you know, I can see the time coming, you know, when we talk about a universal basic income and things like that.
But I can see, and this is just my kind of conspiracy here.
Okay, you get in that situation, but then the government says, oh, good news for we're going to give you, I don't know, you just throw me a number, $5,000 everybody gets a month.
And you get your app on your phone and you get your, you know, digital currency of $5,000 a month.
Isn't that great?
Yes.
Oh, that's just wonderful.
We all get $5,000 a month.
You can go ahead and pursue your life now.
If you were to go and you were to protest the wrong thing, oh, it might cost you a little bit.
Or if you do certain things, if you say something, if you post something wrong, well, then, you know, your money may be less or it may not work for certain things.
Or, you know, you use this app to pay for everything since nobody can afford a car anymore.
That's going to bring your autonomous driving taxi there.
Oh, wait a minute.
You went to some protests.
You did this, this, and that.
You posted such as, you know, you've got the merits for what you posted online.
I'm sorry, your self-driving taxis won't take you any further than five miles from your house for two weeks.
You know, it gives, I just see when once you're in a situation where, which I think is ideal for them, where the government's saying, we're going to give you just enough to feed you.
And by the way, that $5,000, you know, $2,000 of it goes back to the same company, you know, BlackRock who owns your house.
Another thousand goes to Verizon.
Before you finish, the corporate, the money, you didn't really get any money.
It hit you.
It passed through your app right back to the same oligarchs that own everything.
Except now that they can use it, use it against you to tell you what you can and can't do and punish you financially if you don't go along with what you want to see.
I see it ultimately.
I think you're right.
And I see that as a means of control in the long run.
Yeah, yeah, 100%.
That economic control will be intense.
And for those who don't have their own independent wealth or assets outside that system, they're going to be really prisoners to that system.
In fact, I was just bringing it up as you were talking because it reminded me of the Stanford prison experiment.
Yes.
And I believe that the entire country of America is being turned into a Stanford prison experiment.
And I think we saw that with the ICE agents recently in Minneapolis who were so arrogant.
Like, if you film me, you're interfering with me.
If you film me, I'm putting you on a list.
You're going to be on a list.
Or they're just shooting you or punching you or whatever.
That was classic behavior that was documented in 1971 in this, where a certain class of citizens were given the right to rule over others and they immediately turned into violent authoritarians.
Do you see that too?
Yes.
And the other thing is, I mean, you can see how they can kind of brainwash people to reject some of the foundational beliefs that they have, like Second Amendment, right?
Right.
Well, you have a lot of people, hey, you've got a right to own guns.
And, you know, if I want to own a gun, I should be able to, blah, blah, blah.
Now, all of a sudden, some guy comes out and the ICE agents, oh, he's got a gun, and they shoot him.
And now the government that came in, the administration that came in and literally said, we will protect the Second Amendment now says, you know what?
If you bring a gun to a demonstration, well, then you deserve to be shot.
And I'm thinking, well, that's not what you were saying before.
And by the way, if you bring a gun to a demonstration that you legally bought, legally registered, and you're legally carrying, what gives them a right to shoot you?
You're not violating any law whatsoever.
And now they're just sending the message to you.
Yeah, don't worry about the Second Amendment.
It only applies when we say it applies.
And you got some people going along with it.
It's extraordinary.
I'm so glad you brought that up because the other thing that was really disturbing about that is Pam Bondi announcing that she knew the state of mind of the person they shot, saying that because he had a gun, he planned to, quote, massacre federal agents.
Wait a second.
Are you a mind reader?
No evidence of that.
There's no manifesto from this guy.
Was he maybe not happy with the ICE agents?
Yeah, he was not happy with them, but he was observing, and he has a right to carry a firearm.
And he had a license as well.
But in some states, you have that right regardless.
So I'm really glad you brought that up.
But we're now in the place where we see the government itself now going to war against its own citizens, killing them, and then justifying it after the fact.
Now, you have a history in law enforcement.
Would that have been, would that have ever flown in police business or presenting a case to the judge in the past?
Well, absolutely not.
I mean, I wouldn't think, you know, traditionally, you know, what we thought was, well, the Democrats are going to be more, you know, anti-Second Amendment and the Republicans are going to be more pro.
That has been the history.
What we're seeing now, to me, that is another very clear example of the duopoly.
That's a very clear example.
Here's what they say: we're pro First Amendment, Second Amendment, until we get in power.
Right.
Once we get in power.
And you're saying, I could, well, we think it may threaten you.
And if one of our guys shoots you, I don't care what he does.
He's right.
You know, it's like, oh, I'm anti-government or I'm suspicious of the government until I'm in charge of it.
Now I'm in charge of the government.
Yeah, the government, everything the government does is right.
And if you walk in here with a gun, you get shot.
Who cares?
The government's always right.
I thought you were anti-government.
You were until you got in charge with it, in charge of it.
And now the Democrats have never been more anti-Second Amendment.
I mean, the Democrats said a lot of things, but I don't remember them saying, you're going to, if you, if you bring a gun to a protest, then we can shoot you.
I mean, I'm looking at it.
It's just, this is the uniparty.
Whoever's in power says the same damn thing.
I lost respect for so many MAGA people following the shooting in Minneapolis.
Well, the two shootings.
But at one point, there was so much support for the government for ICE agents, that is masked, unidentifiable ICE agents shooting this man that I said to MAGA people on X, I said, just wait until the MAGA of 2026 finds out what MAGA did on January 6th, 2021.
Because according to you today, all of you should have been shot in 2021 because you were protesting the government.
You know what I mean?
It's like they've completely abandoned all principles.
Back then, no, we're peaceful protesters, even though we're smashing things up or whatever, but you can't attack us.
Today, they're like, attack them, kill them.
We're the boot.
Yeah.
What was the woman's name?
Was it Ashley Babbitt?
I think was she the one that got shot in January 6th?
That's right.
And I remember, I said, let me look at the video.
In the video, I saw, and I'm an ex-law enforcement.
I looked at it and I said, they had no reason to shoot her.
She was not shooting.
You know, she was not at that point presenting a threat to anyone's life.
Was she trying to crawl through a door or something?
It was locked.
She probably couldn't have got it through it.
But at that point, she did not, she was unarmed.
She did not present a threat under the, and the actual case is Tennessee versus Garner and under the standards of Tennessee versus Garner, she did clearly did not meet the standard for the use of deadly force.
And I'm like, no, that's wrong.
Now, and all these conservatives and, you know, so MAGA people, whatever you want to call it, are like, yeah, that was terrible.
And I'm like, you're right.
I agree with you.
That was wrong.
Now this guy gets shots and I'm like, holy crap.
He was perfectly legal.
He had a gun.
They took the gun from him and then shot him.
They took the gun.
And now they're like terrible.
And I'm like, don't just say it's my team, therefore it's okay.
That's right.
You know, I put it like this.
I'm anti-government, to be quite frank.
I don't trust the government.
I always think they're up to no good.
Why I Enjoy Foreign Policy00:01:58
And most of the time, I'm right.
And I don't care who's in power.
I didn't trust him when Biden was in power and I don't trust him.
These people who suddenly become pro-government goons, as soon as the person that they vote for, to me, it just goes against everything I believe in politically.
Yeah, they've abandoned their principles.
Well, look, Garland, we're out of time here for the interview, but I want to give you a chance to just tell people about your channel on YouTube and the kinds of topics that you generally cover.
Yes.
Well, you know, I talk a lot about foreign policy.
I really enjoy foreign policy.
I have all kinds of guests on.
You know, I have guests that are libertarian, socialist, conservative, MAGA, you name it, people from various parts of the world, economists, you know, whoever I think has something to say and I like them, they can come on my channel.
I do some shows where I just talk about stuff myself.
But I do a lot of foreign policy.
I really enjoy it.
I've started doing a lot of stuff on Ukraine.
And since I've just branched out into a lot of foreign policy stuff, I think it's important.
Well, I'm a fan of your work.
Like I said, I've also seen you on many other shows.
So you're pretty busy.
You do a lot of shows.
Yes, I do.
And I enjoy it.
It's not work.
Yeah, it's great.
Well, thank you so much for taking the time with us today.
And it's been a pleasure meeting you.
This is the first time we've ever spoken and I really enjoyed it.
So thank you for all that you're doing.
All right.
Thank you.
All right.
All right.
That was Garland Nixon, everyone.
And again, his YouTube channel is just Garland Nixon.
You can search for him on YouTube.
Come right up.
And you can also catch part one of this interview on brightvideos.com.
And thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of the Bright Videos platform and other AI platforms, as you know.
And I hope you enjoyed this today.
Feel free to share it and you can repost it on other platforms and channels as well.
So thanks for watching.
Take care.
Pink Himalayan salt.
One of the purest and healthiest salts on earth.
Non-GMO, certified kosher, lab tested and trusted.