They've sometimes actually pushed those countries towards China, where we didn't actually have such a strong relationship before, because we're looking for other trading partners, right, James? Can you just give us a sense then of how the trade war between the US and China is, is affecting other countries here?

Yeah, absolutely.

And this has probably been the biggest change that Trump has achieved in the relationship, is that from his first term when he was very aggressive against China and put in a bunch of tariffs, and they were carried on by the Joe Biden administration.

And then Biden was actually quite successful in getting a number of, um, allied democracies to also take a harder stance on China.

Those countries have now mostly rolled back those stances because the US has taken a hard stance against them.

So, you know, China was maybe a little bit more isolated, and Trump has talked about trying to isolate China on trade.

But at the same time, because he keeps starting these trade wars and imposing tariffs with other countries, they essentially have to turn to China.

So what are, what are the dynamics at play here between the US, China, and Iran?

So, I mean, yeah, I made it complicated on myself,

didn't I? Yeah.

Instead of just doing one collaboration this year, we decided to do two.

So we had one in Australia, New Zealand, three incredible artists, Drax Project, Keita Alexander, Peking Duck.

And then we expanded our remit to the Philippines this year.

So we were lucky enough to collaborate with the largest P-pop band there, Binnie, and the Youth Orchestra to create an original song there.

So not just one, but two original songs.

What do you think people might not understand about what it takes to deliver a project like Coke Studio when working with brand and music?

Okay, let's talk more broadly about the relationship between the two countries beyond the leaders themselves because things have been pretty tense, right? Can you remind us why that is?

So almost immediately upon returning to office last year, Trump launched this sweeping trade war against China, uh, imposing tariffs across almost all Chinese goods, and then when China responded in kind, he escalated that, and China escalated, and we went through this prolonged session of tit-for-tat tariffs, which reached at one point US tariffs were something like 145%.

Chinese tariffs were also close to 100%, and that would essentially have cut off trade between the world's two largest economies, and that would've been, you know, devastating for both them, but also devastating for the global market.

And, you know, that eventually they kind of both walked down from that.

There was a meeting in South Korea late in the year last year where they agreed to a truce, and things are kind of m- I, I guess kind of stuck in that truce ever since.

You know, we- we're now, uh, six months or more than six months away from it, and there hasn't been too much progress since, which is one of the reasons China particularly was keen to have this meeting, even though now it's unclear just what the outcomes of that meeting might be.

What's China's position on the war?

China has consistently opposed this war.

on

um starmer people in wales for the whole seem to be prioritizing welsh issues like the nhs um alongside other issues that like the cost of living where the welsh government's ability to influence things is a little bit less certain but people are unhappy with Welsh Labour's records in Cardiff.

Now, previously, they've been able to use things like the pandemic or the really unpopular Conservative government to deflect criticism from their record, but they don't have those... things there that can deflect this blame, especially now that Labour are in Westminster.

And this means that they're losing a lot of support to the left, to Plaid Cymru and the Greens as viable left-wing alternatives.

The Senate by-election, was it earlier this year or last year? Turnout there was quite high, wasn't it? Actually, when the outcome is unpredictable and people think that their vote might make a difference, that tends to drive up turnout.

Yeah, turnout was surprisingly high in Caerphilly.

And a big part of that is that one, as you rightly say, is that people think that their vote matters, but also that they have something to mobilise them against.

They have a party that they want to stop.

So I just wanted to hear from you about what that experience was like and any highlights from that time playing for the county.

Yeah, I mean, I'd had a great experience when I was sort of 19, I guess.

I'd played for the Colts with Martin and Martin Davey, I believe another one of your guests.

A few of us played at under-19.

So I'd sort of been in that group and knew how tough it was, actually, just the schedule and all that stuff.

But I was honoured to get the call-up, actually, and I felt like a bit of a, you know, like a...

I was representing the whole team when I was playing for them because essentially 14 of the other team were Weston Park players.

It's still fun.

What kind of impact does this have on their home countries?

It could have quite a pronounced impact.

Uh, we're not seeing it immediately, but this is something that there is a great concern with the kind of, uh, weeks and months to come because these migrant laborers are incredibly important to a lot of economies because they send back literally billions of dollars a year in remittances.

You know, there's nine million Indians in, in the region, and they alone send fifty billion US dollars a year back to India in remittances, you know.

And India is a massive economy, but-- and that's still a decent chunk of their GDP, but it's a massive economy.

They can absorb that, though obviously a lot of these families will be struggling without that money.When we talk about smaller economies in Asia, places like Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh, that is an incredibly important part of their kind of national economy, their g-- their national GDP.

And it's felt in more than one way, n-not just a lack of that money itself, which could be a devastating hit for families and, and kind of for the wider economy if there is any cutoff in remittances as a result of, you know, people working less or people losing their jobs.

So James, just to end on, on the big picture here, the US and Israel started this war, and now the people in these countries are dealing with the fallout, right? What do you think happens to the relationship or even the perception of the US in this part of the world?

Tell me a little bit about the construction, in particular, the bamboo scaffolding that was wrapping many of these buildings.

Yeah.

So renovations have been going on at Wong Fuk Court since, uh, July last year, and, uh, you see this a lot in Hong Kong that it's very common that bamboo scaffolding is using, used, and particularly the development companies and construction companies like to wrap the entire building in bamboo scaffolding so they can kind of do all of the work at once in one massive marathon job.

And what...

You know, that was kind of a scale, scale up even f- further at Wong Fuk Court because we had eight buildings wrapped in, uh, bamboo scaffolding and, uh, kind of a mesh, uh, protective net, and it seems to be that net more so than the scaffolding that allowed the fire to spread so quickly.

There have been a lot of questions today about whether it was actually a fire safe, uh, net that was used or if it was some other kind of cheaper product, um, that corners were cut.

But you could see in the early videos, in the early hours of the fire, that this net was just burning incredibly quickly.

Did you see the comparison there?