I'm John Bachelor, Gordon Chang at Gordon Ging, we're off to Malaysia,

our good colleague of many years,

Charles Ortell, on the Money with Charles Ortel podcast. Charles is a very good day to you in Malaysia.

It appears there is positive news. I hesitate to characterize it more than that, given the

vicissitudes of the day. U.S. and Indonesia form major cooperation partnership

to do with defense weapons. Is this news? Is this propaganda for the U.S. and Malaysia

working towards some rapprochement? How to think of this headline? Because if I was just arriving from

Mars, I would say thumbs up. Good evening to you. Good evening to you both. I think it's fantastic

news, not least because I intend to buy some property in Indonesia. But if you think about the

problems we face in the Straits of Hormuz at the moment, that's about 20% of world traffic.

The trade going through the Strait of Balacca is more like 40%.

And so for the United States to develop much closer ties with Indonesia, a vast country with about the same population as the U.S., for Indonesia to

welcome the United States the way they have, I think is fantastic news for them and great news

for anybody in the West who might want to invest in Indonesia.

I think it's also good for protecting free flow of trade.

What I know about Indonesia consists of now and again they have very bad storms and volcanoes, and they're the most populous of all Muslim occupied states.

Is that accurate, Charles? It is. It's kind of like the Philippines. It's a collection of many islands. I get the

number is confused. I think it's about 16 or 17,000 islands of which I believe seven or eight have

never been explored. There are, it's many time zones, a lot of land area, a lot of natural

resources, a growing number of big and

bustling cities. And it's actually, I've traveled extensively there in the two years that I've

been living out in South East Asia, and I'd highly recommend to visit. Gordon, you have a question

...