Title: "China Is Miles Ahead Of The US" | Doomberg Show: Risk Takers (YouTube channel) — interview clip Guest: Doomberg — the anonymous energy/finance Substack collective (green-chicken avatar), doomberg.substack.com Date: 2026-AUG-24 URL: https://youtu.be/mnIIeWNlBOg Length: 8:06 Note: Short interview clip; the interviewer is unnamed in the transcript ('>>' marks a speaker change). Fillers (um/uh/you know/like-as-tic) removed and stutters collapsed; wording otherwise verbatim, including ASR garbles: "open AI on topic" = OpenAI, Anthropic; "Chem AK3" = an open-source Chinese frontier model (most likely Kimi K3) — NOT a company or ticker; "the total invested capital in the SpaceX was something like 13 trillion" is garbled (almost certainly $13 billion) and is kept verbatim here. Macro-heavy: China's technology leapfrog, US market cap as fiscal monetization ("stealth financial repression"), and the US hydrocarbon/resource endowment as the basis for a multipolar (not unipolar) role.
00:00 Can AI change this picture, save the US? If we're thinking about this mental model of a weakening US dollar being required to reshore manufacturing in the US, well, guess what? Robots are really cheap. Supposedly, we're only one, two, maybe a bit longer years away from having an entire workforce that are humanoid robots.
00:24 Is it a fantasy? Can it actually end up allowing the reshoring? I guess there's a lot of things that— Yeah, yeah, go ahead. >> Look, AI and robotics can only save the US relative to China if there's a lead against China. There is no lead against China in these critically important supply chains. China is miles ahead of the US in robotics.
00:51 One of the other six mental models in that doomsaying presentation, which we think will prove prescient, was China has leapfrogged the US in terms of technology. That is an axiom for analysis. Anybody who's been to China knows it. You can't deny it. Go to a Chinese factory. Ask Elon Musk.
01:16 Ask the chairman of Ford how he's going to— he gets beat, it gets BYDs. Yeah, yeah. Just text him. Should have a text while we're bantering about. So, your question is based on an assumption of at least temporary supremacy, which does not exist. The only thing China's missing is chip making, and they're closing that gap shockingly fast as we have been predicting for many years.
01:46 >> This has been the narrative with China ever since their dominance in whatever field they put their resources to, ever since they've been doing that, this narrative has been the case, right? Like, "Oh, China, they're manufacturing stuff, but it's not as good."
02:07 Suddenly, it's as good and it's not better. And arguing now the same thing is true with the frontier labs, right? You've got open AI, on topic. Admittedly, these are the ones that we actually have access to. These models were miles ahead of any open-source model.
02:27 Suddenly, Chem AK3 comes out and bang, you can download it basically for free if you've got a large enough computer at home. And it's basically in line with the absolute frontier labs, the absolute frontier models that had been being distributed. So it's hard to argue with the fact that they are cheaper and eventually better and that trajectory has been evident with energy production, with electric cars, with product and manufacturing.
03:00 The list goes on. I guess the question is, the US still has the world's largest companies. The US economy is de facto now the stock market, the top one of the series behind the fact the US market can't crash because it is essentially the economy in a little wrapper.
03:23 Is there enough value inside those companies to continue, to fend this off, or do you think that's— the writing's— I think you already— the writing's on the wall and it's just a matter of time. >> How would you guess what it is? Look, we wrote up an important piece and, we think, an under— what? We think all of our pieces are underappreciated.
03:52 I agree. I joke. We wrote a piece called stealth financial repression where you said something very interesting, which is the US still has the quote biggest companies. Well, define biggest. I suppose you mean market cap as measured in US dollars. That is a form of monetization. The driving function of US tax receipts today is capital gains tax.
04:24 And every trillion-dollar IPO that happens is 150 billion in capital gains tax potentially collected by the US to close its fiscal gap, to monetize its debt. It serves two functions. It enriches rich people and creates taxable income for the government to collect out of nothing, out of whole cloth, like the total invested capital in the SpaceX was something like 13 trillion and it came out of a two-trillion market cap.
04:52 That's an awful lot of capital gains for the US government to harvest. And so, anthropic, what is the purpose of a system is what it does. I would argue that no Western manufacturer will compare to BYD very soon. Which has gone from zero to 5 million cars a year like nothing. What's BYD worth compared to Ford? The only place, one of the few remaining places where the US in particular has a strong position is in, ironically, the hydrocarbon complex.
05:38 Where the remnants of the old Standard Oil empire are reconstructing themselves in the form of two companies, Exxon and Chevron, that collectively have a real market cap that is defendable to the tune of hundreds of billions, not these fantasy trillion-dollar unicorns, or gigacorns, that we see coming off the Wall Street IPO printing press.
06:08 And we're doing a deep dive on Chevron for this month's Doomberg Zoom, our first single-company deep dive since Doomberg was a thing, so that's kind of exciting. So, that is a strong basis. Look, the US has a lot of foundations of power to be a highly competitive multipolar player.
06:33 Which sounds shocking to people who just assume US dominance and projects forward indefinitely. It can be the second or third most significant global power for very long time. The first step in order to accomplish that is to recognize that as the goal. It produces the world's most oil.
06:54 It produces the world's most natural gas. It has a fleet of 90 operating nuclear reactors. It has among the world's largest proven coal reserves. It has amazing natural resources. It has a Western Hemisphere to itself, which has plenty to do. Canada, the Arctic, Mexico, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, Chile, Argentina.
07:22 The big wild card is Brazil. But plenty to eat at home. A huge strong foundation to be a significantly competitive multipolar player. It cannot be the unipolar power anymore. And the quicker that realization is internalized, we think the better.