the middle of a story that is going to have an interesting endpoint. But when you're in the middle of a story sometimes you don't know you're in the story. And here's the story.

I take you back in the wayback machine to when the United States said, you know, if we started manufacturing things in China it'd be a lot cheaper. Not only would it be a lot cheaper but we can move the stuff over there that's dangerous, as the EPA would not let us do in the United States. Like there's going to be some industrial waste. We can't do that here. How about China? We've got lower standards. So I believe that some of the manufacturing move to China was because we couldn't do it here. Some of it was because it was cheaper. And I think the cheaper part became the important part over time.

Then what happened next? Well the United States suffered, did they not, by the lack of manufacturing jobs. And we did the best we could to adjust. People took service jobs that aren't as good. You know, that's a problem. But at the moment we're at 3.6 unemployment. We're fully employed. 3.6 is what economists would call, ish in that range, economists would call that full employment. Because you wouldn't want it any better. If it were better it would be worse because that would mean you couldn't hire anybody unless you took them from another job. That would be the worst case scenario. You can't hire anybody unless you ruin another company by taking an employee that's necessary, right? You don't want that. You need a little bit of slop. 3.6 unemployment is just enough people who are floating around that you can hire somebody who doesn't already have a job sometimes. And that seems to be pretty important to keep everything moving.

And so here we are. We gave up all of our manufacturing and yet still the biggest economy. Here's the interesting part. What happens next? Because you saw that Biden is pushing 3D printing. 3D printing of products, especially metal products. They could make a rotor for a helicopter with a 3D printer, slap it on the helicopter and it flies.

Now what would be the cost of building a factory to make — there can't be many helicopter rotors. You're not making millions of them. You might make hundreds of them. And you don't have any shipping. You don't have any foreign language stuff or taxes or all the difficulty of dealing with another culture and nation. You just turn on the printer, feed it the software and it builds you a helicopter rotor.

We are at the precipice of destroying China because we turned them into a manufacturing company with manual labor and then we're going to obsolete it. But not until we'd already had an alternative. Our employment is on track so we can replace the entire supply chain concept with 3D printing, robots and AI. Those three technologies — AI, 3D printing and robots — completely will take manufacturing out of the mix. China is in big trouble.

Because one of the things I was thinking about yesterday is every time there's something that the United States is especially good at — let's say air power, developing aircraft and owning the sky — something the United States is uniquely amazing at, they tend to be the most important things. Have you noticed that? Like owning aviation. Well that's like the most important thing. How about space? We seem to be, thanks to SpaceX and other things, we seem to be leading in space. That's going to be really, really important. Military, really, really important. And we lead that. So the United States seems to be really good at leading at technologies and things that matter a lot.

China looks like it's going to be really good at controlling their population and manufacturing, which will be obsolete. The size of China's problem is immense. It's immense. I don't know how they get past it.

Meanwhile we've got problems with baby formula and fertilizer and water shortages in the west and all kinds of food related things. How worried am I about all of those things? Pretty worried. Pretty worried. But they all fall into an interesting category of things that humans are good at working out if they have to. They're all in that category.

Are you as surprised as I am that we still have food? Because I don't know how that happened. How did we go through the pandemic and we still fed ourselves? Like I don't know how. How did things just sort of kind of work? Yeah, now the baby formula looks like it could be a serious problem but I'll bet we'll just nurse more and we'll find substitutes and there will be do-it-yourself formulas for making your own formula at home and there'll be some industries that pop up and somebody else will make it. So as long as we have time we can solve all this stuff. I feel as if we'll be okay. I feel as if we'll be okay. Yet it does make sense to worry about it. And if I were you I'd make sure I had enough food and toilet paper to get through three mont