The Ben Shapiro Show - September 25, 2026


The Xi-Trump Meeting, Explained

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Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

187.71

Word count

2,922

Sentence count

210

Harmful content

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

17

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Transcript

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00:00:00.000 All righty, so President Xi of China goes to the White House.
00:00:03.000 Now, let's be clear about this. 0.92
00:00:04.000 Xi is an incredibly repressive dictator.
00:00:07.000 His goal on planet Earth is to not only enshrine his own rule, but to challenge America's global hegemony.
00:00:13.000 And he, like Vladimir Putin, has a vision of a multipolar world in which the United States is not the biggest gorilla on the block.
00:00:19.000 Instead, China, which has been attempting through things like the Belt and Road Initiative, through various loans, through taking control of places like the Panama Canal, to exert force and threat of force and financial force all around the globe.
00:00:30.000 They're challenging the United States over and over and over. 0.78
00:00:33.000 This is why they're challenging Taiwan.
00:00:34.000 It's why they've been challenging Japan.
00:00:36.000 China is an expansionist power on both the economic front as well as on the military front.
00:00:41.000 It's why they're building islands in the middle of the South China Sea in order to threaten the Philippines.
00:00:45.000 In other words, China is not a geopolitical opponent.
00:00:48.000 They're certainly not a geopolitical friend or partner or compatriot.
00:00:51.000 They're a geopolitical enemy of the United States.
00:00:53.000 You know, who understands that?
00:00:54.000 President Trump, which is why when people are very upset about him throwing out the red carpet for Xi, that's just a thing Trump does.
00:01:00.000 It doesn't mean his fundamentally reoriented In favor of Xi Jinping or something.
00:01:04.000 There are people in the media who are treating it that way, which is really absurd.
00:01:08.000 President Trump loves whining and dining people.
00:01:10.000 This is his thing.
00:01:11.000 He does it with everyone from Kim Jong un to the Turkish dictator, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
00:01:19.000 He whines and dines pretty much everybody. 0.98
00:01:21.000 I mean, hell, he'll go to Momdani's house, he'll go to the Gracie Mansion, and he'll pretend that he gets along with Zar Momdani.
00:01:28.000 Trump is very big into the gripping and grinning with various foreign leaders, including the mayor of New York.
00:01:34.000 It doesn't mean that he is somehow surrendering to the Chinese.
00:01:38.000 All that happened of material effect is that yesterday Xi and Trump agreed to a one year trade truce at a meeting in South Korea last October that got extended by a couple of months.
00:01:48.000 So there was no actual agreement for the United States to give up anything. 0.56
00:01:52.000 And again, China remains as opposed to the United States as it ever was.
00:01:56.000 The Houthis in Yemen, who have been trying to exert pressure on the Babylonian Strait, are basically supplied by the Chinese. 0.58
00:02:03.000 The Iranians are also supplied by the Chinese.
00:02:06.000 Okay, with that said, the sort of fakeness of the encounter is a little off putting, I will admit.
00:02:13.000 So, President Xi, yesterday, he suggested that we're about to overcome what he calls the Thucydides trap.
00:02:20.000 So, the Thucydides trap is a much overstated theory that basically a declining power will declare war in order to prevent itself from falling behind another power.
00:02:32.000 In his view, China is the rising power, America is the declining power.
00:02:35.000 That is not.
00:02:37.000 Accurate. 0.94
00:02:37.000 Okay, China is a hollow shell. 0.94
00:02:41.000 It doesn't mean they can't do damage. 1.00
00:02:42.000 They certainly can.
00:02:42.000 They're a nuclear armed large power.
00:02:45.000 With that said, their economy is built on debt.
00:02:48.000 They do not innovate in the way the United States does.
00:02:51.000 They're built on the theft of intellectual property and expropriation from their own citizens.
00:02:56.000 Here is Xi pretending that peace is at hand.
00:03:00.000 Our two militaries should maintain regular dialogue and improve mechanisms for crisis communication and prevention.
00:03:09.000 The Thucydides trap can be overcome. 0.52
00:03:13.000 Again, this is just a, it's silly. 0.72
00:03:17.000 I'm sorry, this is all silly.
00:03:18.000 Here's President Xi then claiming that Chinese rejuvenation and making America great again can go hand in hand.
00:03:24.000 No, they most certainly cannot.
00:03:26.000 Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation and making America great again can go hand in hand.
00:03:37.000 Let us meet the people's expectations and show our historical initiative.
00:03:42.000 Let us keep advancing the cause of friendship between our two peoples and work together to build a better world.
00:03:51.000 Okay, nobody believes one element of this. 0.81
00:03:53.000 This is the same country that unleashed the COVID pandemic on planet Earth, killing legitimately millions and millions and millions of people, and then pretended they didn't do it. 0.95
00:04:02.000 China is behind pretty much every nefarious movement across planet Earth. 0.96
00:04:07.000 They are not our friends. 0.94
00:04:08.000 President Trump knows that just because he's shaking hands with Xi doesn't mean that he's forgotten about this.
00:04:13.000 President Xi, by the way, invited 100,000 American students to study in China.
00:04:19.000 Sounds awesome.
00:04:20.000 How about this? 0.99
00:04:21.000 How about instead of that, we just deport 100,000 Chinese students who are studying in America? 0.95
00:04:25.000 How about we do that instead?
00:04:27.000 The hope of China US relationship lies in our people, and its future lies with the young.
00:04:35.000 I am glad to announce an invitation for 100,000 young Americans to visit China for exchanges and study in the coming five years.
00:04:46.000 No, no, let's not do that.
00:04:49.000 Let's instead support the almost 300,000 students from China who are in the United States right now, many of whom are.
00:04:56.000 Going to take their skill sets and intellectual property they find in America and bring it back to the Chinese communist regime.
00:05:02.000 I will say, again, I don't really care very much about the president putting out a red carpet for Xi or whatever. 0.93
00:05:06.000 This is what foreign leaders do for one another as a sort of typical thing.
00:05:10.000 I was not a fan of something that, you know, it's one of those things where you kind of slightly chuckle, but it's not great.
00:05:16.000 So the president was walking through this hall of portraits of prior presidents they put up.
00:05:20.000 And as a sort of troll, the portrait of Joe Biden is a picture of the auto pen.
00:05:24.000 And he shows this to Xi Jinping.
00:05:26.000 And then Xi laughs at Trump's auto pen portrait of Biden.
00:05:29.000 Biden was the worst president in modern American history.
00:05:29.000 Listen, I think.
00:05:32.000 I actually don't think it's particularly close.
00:05:36.000 Still, he was an American president.
00:05:37.000 I don't like Chinese dictators laughing at American presidents.
00:05:39.000 I just don't. 0.91
00:05:49.000 Okay, again.
00:05:51.000 As much as I despise Joe Biden as a politician and disdain him in many ways, I don't think that that is a great look.
00:05:59.000 And President Trump, after his meeting with the Chinese, he said, We had a great meeting, and he likes granite.
00:06:05.000 All right.
00:06:06.000 We had a great meeting, and he has great interest in granite.
00:06:11.000 He likes granite.
00:06:12.000 He's an expert on stone, aside from many other things, and he loves good granite.
00:06:17.000 Thank you very much.
00:06:19.000 Okay, whatever.
00:06:19.000 And then they had a state meeting, a state dinner, and that state dinner involved Trump, Vance, the cabinet, ambassadors, Trump's kids, and then a bunch of tech bros showed up as well.
00:06:30.000 People ranging from Jensen Huang over at NVIDIA to Mark Zuckerberg to Tim Cook to Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Michael Dell, Elon showed up.
00:06:38.000 All right, fine.
00:06:39.000 Whatever.
00:06:41.000 Don't care very much.
00:06:42.000 Now, honestly, the conflict on planet Earth right now between the West and the rest is so simple, but I think that maybe we're just not staffed up for it.
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00:07:51.000 The one thing I care about is that President Trump is not surrendering on AI.
00:07:54.000 And he did say this.
00:07:55.000 He said that he is not going to change the AI system on behalf of China, which is the big thing.
00:08:00.000 That is a very different thing, by the way, from the Democratic left wing perspective on AI.
00:08:06.000 Again, if a Democrat were president, they would be kowtowing in real time to China on AI.
00:08:09.000 Here was Barack Obama talking about how we, meaning government, is going to have to take control essentially of AI development.
00:08:19.000 I will say that.
00:08:21.000 The rise of social media and the siloing the information bubbles that we all occupy, so that the reality of somebody who's reading the New York Times is entirely foreign to somebody who's watching Fox News.
00:08:39.000 We're going to have to find ways to bridge that.
00:08:42.000 And we're going to have to create new town squares, essentially, where everybody is having a common dialogue with certain rules.
00:08:50.000 And that becomes even more important.
00:08:52.000 As technology accelerates and AI and deepfakes and all kinds of nonsense is coming. 0.63
00:08:59.000 Yeah, again, he's just the worst.
00:09:00.000 He also has support from people like Bernie Sanders.
00:09:03.000 Bernie continues to maintain that we should put people in prison for developing AI. 0.94
00:09:08.000 Again, there's a reason why Bernie and the Chinese are best friends. 0.99
00:09:11.000 Is it not extreme, though?
00:09:12.000 20 years seems like a long time to violate a regulation that you were suggesting.
00:09:15.000 Really?
00:09:16.000 And if that violation results in the possibility of millions of people dying, do you think that that's really terribly radical?
00:09:25.000 We're dealing with a technology that, according to some of the most knowledgeable people in the world, could be lethal, could be extremely dangerous.
00:09:33.000 And if you are breaking the law and developing that technology and endangering millions of people, you know what?
00:09:39.000 I think we should have strong laws to protect people.
00:09:41.000 And if you break it, you got to pay the price.
00:09:43.000 But has the rhetoric got.
00:09:45.000 Again, this is what Democrats would like.
00:09:47.000 They want to work in.
00:09:48.000 For all the people who are on the left who are saying Trump is kowtowing to China, if Democrats take office, they will immediately surrender to China.
00:09:54.000 And you know who will help them out?
00:09:56.000 Is half the tech bros who just want regulatory capture so that they can prevent everybody else from developing.
00:10:02.000 So, Dario Modi actually spoke with the UN.
00:10:06.000 Again, just another reason why we should get rid of the UN, blow up the building, salt the earth.
00:10:11.000 Dario Modi spoke to the UN Security Council, warning about his own industry.
00:10:16.000 I see two main categories of risk.
00:10:19.000 The first is misuse of AI models, for example, misuse by bioterrorists to create biological weapons.
00:10:25.000 The second risk is loss of control.
00:10:28.000 Model capabilities accelerating beyond developers' ability to control them.
00:10:32.000 These questions are global in scope and concern all of humanity.
00:10:36.000 They are grave enough that I believe they are important questions for this council, not just for economic or ICT ministries.
00:10:44.000 This is the call from Daryl Modi and Sam Altman.
00:10:47.000 They're leading the AI race right now.
00:10:49.000 Great way to keep leading that race is to say that we're all going to die if you don't create regulations that enshrine us as the global leaders in AI development.
00:10:57.000 Here is Sam Altman again speaking to the UN Security Council.
00:11:01.000 It doesn't matter whether people put the risk of catastrophe at 10% or 1% or 12% or 0.1%.
00:11:06.000 None of these levels are remotely acceptable.
00:11:08.000 And we should not train models that we cannot make an extremely strong case that we'll be able to keep under human control.
00:11:14.000 Okay.
00:11:15.000 This is just also, I'm sorry, going to speak before China and Russia and beg their involvement in AI is such a disaster area.
00:11:23.000 I'm with Jensen Huang of NVIDIA.
00:11:25.000 He's speaking with the New York Times' Ezra Klein.
00:11:27.000 He says, just because you're an alarmist doesn't mean that you're actually doing anything useful.
00:11:31.000 Is it good or bad that we scare young people about the future of AI so much so that they don't even want to go to universities and don't want to go to college anymore because they don't think they'll get a job?
00:11:43.000 Is that helpful or hurtful if it were to happen?
00:11:47.000 It's hurtful.
00:11:48.000 Don't think for a second just because you're an alarmist that you're doing a social good.
00:11:53.000 It is not true.
00:11:56.000 So I think that we ought to just all be wiser, more mature, be evidence based, be scientific.
00:12:03.000 If you wanted to be scientific, be scientific.
00:12:06.000 Do the science.
00:12:07.000 Do the science.
00:12:09.000 But alarming people, making claims that don't, they simply, their track record is horrible.
00:12:16.000 I mean, he is right about that.
00:12:19.000 And he says, listen, If you don't like how it's developing, then don't release your product.
00:12:22.000 I mean, like, why are all the rest of us bound by regulations you want to write while you're the ones claiming you're the danger?
00:12:29.000 Well, in that case, they shouldn't release the product.
00:12:32.000 That's the simple answer.
00:12:34.000 If you're going to build a car, a self driving car, and let's say it's a robo taxi, and there's a really difficult condition, and it just, as an engineer, we just have no idea how to solve this problem because these cars are not programmed, they're trained.
00:12:52.000 And so we have no idea how to train these cars and we have no idea how to align them to the safety standards that are expected on the road.
00:13:00.000 And so what's the answer?
00:13:02.000 Don't ship it.
00:13:03.000 These products were unreleased.
00:13:04.000 These products weren't released.
00:13:04.000 What's that?
00:13:06.000 So now it's coming back to the engineering problem again.
00:13:08.000 And so the one is one, you have to root cause it.
00:13:11.000 Second, you have to think about what you could have done, what's the solution for it.
00:13:16.000 And then in the future, you just improve your process so that you could avoid this from happening again.
00:13:21.000 Okay, so again, I'm with Jensen Huang.
00:13:24.000 Mark Zuckerberg also spoke on a show called New Things with Joanna Stern, where he talked about the fact that there is, in fact, a commercial incentive for people to not blow up Earth.
00:13:33.000 Here he was.
00:13:34.000 You know, with the Muse launch that we just did, we had a version of it that was quite good a few months ago.
00:13:41.000 And we wanted to make sure that we really nailed all the privacy and security parts of it, because part of this is that if you're building a product, like people aren't going to want to use it if it doesn't do what they want.
00:13:52.000 We want to get to a world where everyone can benefit from this.
00:13:55.000 And it's just not going to happen.
00:13:58.000 People aren't going to adopt it if they don't trust it.
00:14:02.000 I mean, he is right about all of that.
00:14:03.000 By the way, the developments in tech are so extraordinary that many of the problems that we have been arguing about are going to become irrelevant fairly quickly.
00:14:11.000 So, one of the big developments in tech that people have been arguing about is data centers.
00:14:14.000 Oh my gosh, our precious farmlands are being taken, it's going to use all our water.
00:14:18.000 None of that is true, but it may be obviated by the fact that Google just apparently. Announced that next Thursday they're going to send an experimental satellite into orbit that will have enough computing power to answer simple AI queries from space.
00:14:31.000 So basically, this is space based data centers now, right?
00:14:34.000 This is the beginning.
00:14:36.000 Well, if you've got the data centers in space, you don't have to worry about it in the middle of Iowa, do you?
00:14:40.000 Tech development is extraordinary.
00:14:41.000 And again, it is the biggest economic bet in American history, as the Wall Street Journal points out, that the future of the American economy is largely reliant on the success of AI as a productivity grower.
00:14:54.000 If you look at infrastructure spending as a percentage of GDP in major periods in the past, between the 1870s and 1890s, we spent about 2.24% of American GDP on building railroads.
00:15:07.000 In the 50s and 70s, we spent in that period 1.13% of American GDP was spent on building highways.
00:15:13.000 Today, almost 4% of American GDP is being spent on building AI infrastructure.
00:15:18.000 So this is a massive bet.
00:15:19.000 And this is why killing the AI industry on behalf of people who are very, very warm to China.
00:15:24.000 Is a terrible idea.
00:15:25.000 What an amazing video you just watched!
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