How is this reception of President Xi by President Trump, how is that likely to resonate in China? And do you agree with Nick Burns that President Trump is treating his enemies or adversaries better than he treats US allies?

I was in China for much of July, and I think going into the summit this week, expectations were very low, particularly when it comes to AI.

Both sides have been focusing more on an AI race than the reality that we both have shared vulnerabilities.

So until this week, it was unclear whether this would be on the agenda.

Yes, Trump, President Trump is much cozier with autocrats than he is with like-minded democratic leaders, and that's a problem.

But the reality is we have to coexist with China to talk about shared vulnerabilities when it comes to new technologies.

And my sense from track twos and other long conversations with Chinese experts is that having a discussion about AI would be, would be set to fail from the start if the US went into those conversations insisting on American primacy, insisting on keeping China back.

Should Taiwan be worried about the US softening its support?

to have it be normalized we're like oh yeah we do the normal things in our lives like we do what we enjoy and also we vocally support palestine you know there's value in the average person approaching politics that way uh it's certainly and and it's a contradiction that people who are more activist minded have to have to deal with sam um your thoughts on any of this and and and i guess also the you know we've really already broached the topic of the other outside of the stadium shenanigans that have really framed people's, first of all, frame people's expectations of what the group stages were like, and then to an extent really did color our experience of this and the way it actually played out.

Yeah, I've been watching the games, and I've been watching the games the way I usually engage in unethical consumption, and that's by shaking my head aggressively while I'm watched.

But no, I mean, I would just echo what Alexander and Adnan had said about how just kind of dirty this world cup feels and you know all world cups going back you know for at least the last uh 16 years have seemed uh you know tainted in various ways and There's pretty much no, it's hard to imagine any ethical way that the World Cup could be put on given the organizations behind it.

But yeah, this one seems particularly bad.

And it's not just, I mean, Israel's obviously not in this World Cup, but Israel, as you said at the beginning, QMAR should have long been kicked out of FIFA and UEFA competitions.

But the U.S. should not be anywhere involved in playing in this World Cup at all, let alone hosting it if we're operating on the same platform.

sort of standards that have applied to a country like russia so um yeah everything about this um feels uncomfortable and i feel like watching it has been uh deservedly punishing um in the way that a lot of these games have been played out in which you've seen a lot of um underdog teams perform very well, only to lose at the end to a powerhouse team due to some controversial decision.

in this 2030 tournament that otherwise takes place in spain portugal and morocco is only going to get crazier from here like when will this it almost feels like a bubble that's just that's going to collapse will it collapse

Sam Sacks is a senior fellow at Yale Law School and New America focused on Chinese technology.

So just having the data housed in the US by a US company or consortium of companies doesn't exactly answer who has access to the data, under what conditions does it flow out of the US? Same for the content.

There are a lot of questions about who will be overseeing the recommendation algorithm, right? A license in and of itself doesn't tell us about how certain content will be promoted.

She says the Chinese government's stance on TikTok has become more flexible because Beijing sees a TikTok deal as a step toward making a larger deal with the US on computer chips, trade, or even about Taiwan.

I don't think Beijing cares about TikTok, but I think they realized that they have a real opportunity here because Trump does, and they have bigger fish to fry.

They may be using this as an opening to extract larger concessions.