do anything about this. One question, Nick. Let's take the devil's advocate position.

If all of these countries are, you know, they're willing to pay the higher HBO max subscription

price to deal with the United States, was Trump correct? Was the United States getting, quote,

unquote, screwed just to take the devil's advocate position? They could have charged more,

and they weren't,

and now this is not a good thing

from the global harmonious position that you and I advocate,

but was there something to the Trumpian right-wing criticism

of the free trade regime,

of what Bannon would, with anti-Semitic undertones,

called the globalist regime?

Is there a reality there, or not? Or is this, you know, sort of stopped clock right twice a day situation?

I mean, my very basic view is that in the U.S., a lot of these problems are due to the fact that the U.S.

state does not provide basic public goods to keep the

social fabric of Middle America together. And I really think it doesn't have that much to do with

other countries. You know, the U.S. is so big. It is such a big internal market. Most of the

issues in the United States are really due to factors domestic to the United States. And it's interesting because I, you know, the China shock argument, you hear it a lot, of course,

right, that having China entered the WTO was the moment where things went wrong.

But there's two things to say about that.

I think one is that the China outsourcing of jobs by U.S. firms began in the 80s already as a response

to competition with Japan. Because the Japanese were out competing American firms, and American

multinationals had to find a cheaper way of competing. And so that's when the big outsourcing began.

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