Trade war with China continues to escalate, and a new round of tariffs is being levied on China. Steve Kamb has a special guest, Rosemary Gibson, to talk about the dangers of cheap generic drugs coming into the United States from China.
00:01:23.320And we'll get on top of all that here momentarily as we go through another day of this evolving trade war against the Chinese Communist Party.
00:01:31.400It's quite evident what is happening here.
00:01:33.680And we'll break it all down for you a little later in the show.
00:01:37.960So, Rosemary, in the middle of this trade war, you're one of the first investigative reporters to come out now seven years ago with, hey, look, folks, I don't know if anybody realizes this, but all the generic drugs that people take,
00:01:51.200which is a huge percentage of drugs that people take, and 100 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients are all manufactured in China, and we have no control of that supply chain.
00:02:02.420Now we're losing the economics of it, but more importantly, it's a strategic asset.
00:02:07.200And we warn people about this all the time because the CCP is having their back up against the wall right now with President Trump.
00:02:12.340Now, the tariff rate is 104 percent, I think, and President Trump's not backing off.
00:02:17.760This is going to be – it was very clear when Scott Besson came out early and said, hey, we're setting up a process to talk – and just a while ago on Larry Kudlow, we've got that clip and we'll play it later.
00:02:27.940Scott Besson said there's 75 major trading partners that are now trying to get on his schedule to come in and talk about the trade relationships and whether the reciprocity thing is too high or we miscalculated or we didn't calculate correctly the non-tariff trade barriers or currency manipulation, all that.
00:02:51.460In fact, President Trump's canceled any further discussions with China given the fact that they tried to retaliate.
00:02:56.340And he told them flat out, you try to retaliate, I'm going nuclear.
00:03:00.260They tried to retaliate, and he went nuclear.
00:03:03.340Your claims now are actually – I think actually – if that's not disturbing enough, more disturbing.
00:03:08.440You're saying that generic drugs coming through here because either the FDA is overwhelmed or they not have levels of competence but that these generic drugs are essentially contaminated.
00:03:20.740And a pretty high percentage of them are contaminated by different things.
00:03:24.520I don't want to put words in your mouth, but is that what your investigation is showing?
00:03:29.300Well, this is what the Department of Defense testing program that started in November of 2023 has found so far, Steve.
00:03:39.900And they launched this generic testing program.
00:03:42.520Kaiser Health Plan was the first one to start a testing program.
00:03:47.740So they knew that something was not right, that our regulatory folks at FDA just – it's too much for them.
00:03:55.420They don't have the enforcement power against the corporate control by Congress and the Wall Street folks.
00:04:03.980So Kaiser Permanente started testing drugs, and then the DOD followed suit, again, because they realized the FDA – and FDA has said this – that they do not have information on the quality and safety of the U.S. medicine supply.
00:04:23.240And so the DOD started this generic drug testing program for the medicines that are important to them, and according to that independent testing, that 13% of what they've tested so far, they're not pure as they should be.
00:04:46.740And plus, they weren't made right, so they don't work right, and so you don't get the protection or the therapeutic value.
00:04:54.640And this is, you know, so far from Six Sigma quality.
00:04:57.980You know, any manufacturer with, you know, 13% defect rate is just really bad.
00:05:03.420And by the way, it's not just China, Steve.
00:05:06.100It's India and other trading partners.
00:05:09.720And, you know, we can put the onus on China or India, FDA not doing its job.
00:05:17.240Steve, what we need to look at is this.
00:05:19.700There are six companies, U.S. companies, and they source 90% of the generic drugs from around the world.
00:05:27.220They're the ones that bring them into U.S. commerce.
00:05:29.360Just as RFK convened the leaders and CEOs of food industry businesses, we need to have a meeting at the White House with these six CEOs, no complaining, no hand-wringing.
00:05:52.420And we have to implement the executive order that President Trump signed in August 2020 to bring back domestic manufacturing, direct the DOD, HHS, to give priority to domestic manufacturers of the finished drug, the active ingredients, and the components to make them.
00:06:14.760And those components to make the APIs, that's where China has the global chokehold.
00:06:19.140And we absolutely must ramp up independent testing.
00:06:24.200Let's get a way to brief the new DOD leadership.
00:06:27.380They've got to, because they supply the White House pharmacy, they supply the crash cart.
00:06:33.680We have to have those products tested.
00:06:35.920There could be some retaliation in lots of different ways, and we have to protect our people.
00:07:01.70013% of what they're sending has carcinogenics, arsenic, or lead in it.
00:07:08.580But it just shows you we're kidding ourselves.
00:07:12.860What does it take, because I know you and Peter worked on the situation, I think, south of my hometown, I think it was in Petersburg or Hopewell, to try to have the initial kind of test facility to do this.
00:07:23.760I think on the executive order, is that been successful?
00:07:26.880Do we even have the possibility of saying, hey, look, guess what?
00:07:30.200We're not going to take it from India.
00:07:31.580We're not going to take it from South Africa.
00:07:34.080We're definitely not going to take it from China.
00:07:35.680We're going to give you one year, and we want all 100% of generics and API manufactured in the United States of America by people called Americans.
00:07:52.760We need 50 of these places around the country, but you know the most important thing that we need, Steve, is customers.
00:07:58.740Instead of the DOD sending our taxpayer money to China or India to make our drugs, let's keep that money at home.
00:08:07.620And by the way, some of the lower quality generics, the DOD was paying more money for them than generic drugs that actually performed better and had no problems.
00:08:18.700So the cost and quality is not correlated at all.
00:08:21.940So those who want to say, oh, it's going to break the bank may not be true.
00:08:26.240So I think we have an opportunity here.
00:08:28.560We have a burning platform because it's not just supply chain issue.
00:11:30.140Okay, given what's going on today and kind of the historic nature of this day on the geoeconomic and geopolitical side, I think this has kind of gotten buried.
00:11:43.120And there was a reason that they called off the press conference in the East Room.
00:11:50.180We're just going to have a press availability.
00:11:51.440There's a big difference in a press availability and having a formal press conference.
00:11:58.300Blacktivist and Ryan Grimm put out later that he agreed with this.
00:12:02.500I just want to go through because I think it's very important for everybody in the audience to understand this.
00:12:06.900The meeting with Netanyahu and Trump was a major disappointment from Netanyahu's perspective based on – this guy's reading in Netanyahu's brief statement in the Oval Office.
00:12:17.940Number one, Netanyahu's attempt to have the tariffs lifted was unsuccessful.
00:12:23.280Number two, his efforts to prevent the U.S. from selling the F-35 fighter jets to Turkey failed.
00:12:30.100Additionally, he was unable to convince Trump to pressure Erdogan into abetting his goal of building military bases in Syria.
00:12:37.560Now, I think that's a big defeat for all of us because I think there's no way we should be arming Turkey given what Erdogan and his overall strategy for the new caliphate.
00:12:46.760But be it as it is made, that's Netanyahu's opinion of what happened with President Trump.
00:12:51.080Number three, Netanyahu was also painfully unsuccessful in getting Trump to reveal his plans regarding Iran and Persia.
00:12:57.920On Gaza, Trump wants the war to end and is no longer advocating for the ethnic cleansing of the region.
00:13:18.900We can't get into another military conflict in the Middle East.
00:13:22.220And there are ways with the leverage we have, and we have tons of leverage to bring economic warfare, just like we're bringing it to the Chinese Communist Party right now, to bring even more to bear against the Persians.
00:13:36.200I think it was kind of a – maybe not a surprise, but a surprise President Trump was saying it publicly that at the very high level, we're very far down the road with direct dealings with the Persians.
00:13:46.060And there's a meeting on Saturday at a very high level, and he went out of his way and said it was a direct Persia to the United States meeting.
00:13:54.680Obviously, we've been a big advocate here in the war room that this is one of the things that will get taken care of under the Russian rapprochement.
00:14:06.320President Trump went out of his way and said, hey, no other countries were involved here.
00:14:10.300There's intermediaries, I think he meant to say Israel and Russia, and this was going directly.
00:14:15.320So we'll see what transpires out of that.
00:14:17.920Maybe I would hold off on bombing the Houthis and let the Brits, French, and Italians get down there, and they keep the sea lanes open to the Suez Canal for a change.
00:14:29.040Okay, we have a – now, do we have the short version or a long version?
00:14:31.700We have a short version or a long version of this?
00:14:48.280We are trying to sort of solve general intelligence.
00:14:51.420We're trying to build the algorithm for a program that is truly smarter than a human in every way and then figure out how to have that maximally benefit humanity.
00:15:01.280We don't ever want to be making decisions to benefit shareholders.
00:15:03.840You know, the only people we want to be accountable to is sort of humanity as a whole and doing this thing right.
00:15:10.080Elon Musk is asking a federal court to block OpenAI's effort to convert into a fully for-profit business.
00:15:15.980It's the latest escalation in an ongoing legal feud between Musk and the company.
00:15:20.400You know, I think I've often said that, you know, my chance that something goes, you know, really quite catastrophically wrong on the scale of, you know, human civilization, you know, it might be somewhere between 10 and 25%.
00:15:35.580In 10 years, how is life going to be different because of AI for just a normal person?
00:15:41.440I think in 10 years, based on the current rate of improvement, AI will be smarter than the smartest human.
00:15:48.400There will be ultimately billions of humanoid robots.
00:16:39.400Max, you've been one of the leaders in trying to alert people to the fact that we're heading down a path of artificial intelligence that is, quite frankly, not only not regulated, really not looked at by any outsourced sources.
00:16:54.860We're kind of taking everybody's word for it.
00:16:57.020In the clip we just played right there, when you have people saying, I don't know, 20% that robots could kill humanity, I mean, these numbers are astronomical.
00:17:20.580You have all this geopolitical activity going on throughout the world right now.
00:17:25.000I think, unfortunately, this has been put a little bit in the back burner.
00:17:27.980And I keep saying this ought to be not just on the front burner.
00:17:31.360This ought to be on the front burner with the heat turned all the way up.
00:17:35.100So take a second and ascribe to the audience exactly where do we stand with this whole race on artificial intelligence, the couple or three people that are really making this happen, and how little oversight there is, sir.
00:17:48.360Yeah, it's truly insane what's going on right now.
00:17:52.140And so easy to miss the forest for all the trees because of all the other things going on.
00:17:56.900What's basically happened is scientists have always been curious about how stuff works, and we figured out how muscles work, and we built machines that are much stronger than us, gave us the industrial revolution.
00:18:10.020People then shifted to starting working more with our brains.
00:18:13.280Now, the people are trying to do the ultimate replacement where you replace not just the muscles but also our brain work with machines that can just outthink us in every way.
00:18:23.260And if that happens, we have nowhere to go.
00:18:28.560And first of all, I think it's very naive to just trust that some oligarchs are going to be very compassionate about taking care of people when they don't need to anymore if we can't get jobs.
00:18:44.820Second, there's this even bigger risk that it's not clear that anyone is able to control machines that are just vastly smarter than us.
00:18:54.400You know, just walk down to the zoo and ask who's in the cages?
00:19:03.760You know, it's because the smarter species tends to control.
00:19:08.040And the sad fact is that we're much closer now to building smarter than human machines.
00:19:16.240Many of the leaders of the companies and many of the top scientists think it's going to happen within one to five years, depending on who you ask.
00:19:25.660I had drinks with one of the leaders the other week.
00:19:28.140He thinks it's going to be in March next year.
00:19:29.920And we're much closer to building this than we are to figuring out how to control it.
00:19:40.720Okay. Hang on one second. Hang on one second.
00:19:44.400There's one thing to talk about the cultural or socioeconomic impact this can have of, you know, cutting through and laying off all the low-level programmers, administrative, clerical, managerial.
00:20:16.200When you say that – explain to people when you say, I guess it's artificial general intelligence or where a computer or where these thinking machines are actually smarter than a human brain.
00:20:36.060Now you've met with – you've met informally with one of the leaders in the industry.
00:20:40.140He says, yeah, I think it will be March of next year.
00:20:42.160That's the last time I looked, 11 or 12 months, right?
00:20:47.280So – and that would mean a red flag of like what are we talking about?
00:20:50.940So specifically, what are you talking about when you say there's a problem with they could actually be smarter than humans and there would be a problem with they would be the smarter species?
00:21:02.500Yeah, so if you look back a bit here, you know, AI has been seriously overhyped from the 1950s until about four years ago, falling far behind its promises.
00:21:17.600And people kind of got used to that and didn't take it seriously.
00:21:20.640But as recently as five, six years ago, most of my colleagues also still predicted, therefore, that we were decades and decades away from building something that could master language and common knowledge at the level of ChatGPT.
00:21:35.460And they were all wrong because there's been some enormous breakthroughs in the last five years.
00:21:42.100And things are now going much faster than we thought.
00:21:44.460But – so the kind of AI that people called AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, I think we should actually call it replacement AI because the real purpose of the investors and companies that are building it is to replace all humans on the job market.
00:22:01.960Some of the companies even admit this on their websites.
00:22:05.680And then, as you said, if that happens, there's a separate question of whether they'll also just replace us altogether on the planet and get rid of us.
00:22:11.920And I think it's – we're on track for this technology coming.
00:22:19.780It's not here now, but during Trump's presidency.
00:22:22.660So if someone stops it, it's going to be Trump and his administration.
00:22:26.600And the reason that this is so insane is because we're effectively treating the AI industry differently from any other powerful industry.
00:22:41.820AI is the only industry that can do whatever it wants without any safety standards.
00:22:46.720You talked earlier on the show here about the FDA and how we have to have safety standards before you can sell medicines to make sure they don't have 13 percent toxins in them, right?
00:22:59.960If there's a sandwich shop in San Francisco across the street from one of these companies, they can't even sell one sandwich until the health inspector has checked out their kitchen, right?
00:23:09.160Yet, it's completely legal now if some company wants to build smarter-than-human machines that they have no idea how to control it, just sell them.
00:23:19.620So the good news with this is although the problem is very serious, and in my professional opinion as someone who's worked on this for many years, the most serious challenge we've ever faced in the history of our species, it's also super easy to solve.
00:23:33.260Just stop making dilly-dallying and making special exceptions for this particular industry and their lobbyists and just treat them like anyone else.
00:23:44.120There should be some sort of FDA for AI, and if they can't convince independent experts who don't have a conflict of interest that this stuff can be controlled, come back when you can, buddy.
00:24:02.020But I want to just go back to make sure the audience – because I love replacing AGI with replacement AI because that's what they're trying to do.
00:24:09.780Just go back for – something has been overhyped for decade after decade after decade.
00:24:15.140You said the language model was the differentiation.
00:24:18.460That's what was released, I guess, with Chad GPT at Davos two years ago, I think it was, two or three years ago.
00:24:27.380Why did that catch people by surprise, and why was that such a huge leap that all of a sudden folks go, wow, this thing could be – this thing really could replace humans?
00:24:36.500Why was that such a big leap for the industry for how you actually build these, and what exactly happened?
00:24:43.140You know, traditionally AI systems are the ones that always underperformed and have the intelligence programmed into them by humans, like the machine that beat Gary Kasparov at chess, you know, back when I was a kid, was programmed by people who knew how to play chess.
00:24:57.040The modern approach is to instead make machines that just grow intelligence by gobbling up lots of data.
00:25:04.160And the reason people underestimated how well that was going to work, I think, is because of a simple mistake.
00:25:14.380You know, imagine if we had this conversation the year 1900.
00:25:18.200How long will it be until we can have flying machines?
00:25:21.840And you said to me, you know, hey, Max, we're clearly decades away because we don't even understand quite how birds fly and can't build mechanical birds.
00:25:29.900That would have been wrong because there turned out to be a much easier way to fly airplanes.
00:25:36.620And I think a lot of my colleagues, even very smart ones, similarly thought we would never figure out how to make thinking machines that could outthink us until after we figured out how our brain works.
00:25:48.000And we're nowhere near figuring out the brain works.
00:25:50.340Turns out there is an easier way to build thinking machines, and that's what the industry is doing.
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