Patrick McGee, author of Apple and China, you've been doing a rounds lately.

You've been on the Daily Show with John Stewart.

You've been on a bunch of other shows, but now you've hit the big time.

You're on the talk show.

Hit the big times.

Yep.

This is all culminating here.

I was just joking to you pre-show that my show notes for this is a stack of index card bookmarks in the actual book. We'll see how this goes.

There's so much to talk about. Is this your first book? Let's talk some authorial stuff.

My first book and based on the sort of strain it took, it might be my last book as well.

So your day job or whatever you want to call it, what's the beat for the financial times?

It really is the Apple beat, but it includes other hardware. So I would have to cover

robo taxis to some extent gaming consoles, drones, and so forth. But in a way, if I just

described that, it still wouldn't really tell you the story of how I got involved in this topic. And the short version is that I've been at the

FT for 12 years. And it was in Hong Kong where I basically got to understand China,

Germany, where I was covering the auto industry. So I was in and out of factories and understanding

supply chain and then Apple, right? And the book is sort of the culmination of those three beats. Yeah. And so you have been reporting on

Apple and its supply chain and financial stuff. I mean, you write for the financial time. So obviously,

and we'll get to some of the issues like the, what was it, the five alarm fire in 2018,

the financial issues for how long? I covered Apple for four years before I took off two

years to write the book. All right. And then you took two years off to write the book. Like,

at what point did you think this, this is a book link thing? It was when I reported the two-part

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