In this special episode, Robinson and Karl Zheng Wang co-host at the Yale US-China Forum. Return guests from the show include Slavoj Žižek, Richard Wolff, and Yascha Mounk. Slavoj Žižek is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University, and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana’s Department of Philosophy. Richard Wolff is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor at The New School, where he works on economics in the Marxist tradition. Yascha Mounk is a Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University. He is also a Contributing Editor at the Atlantic, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the host of The Good Fight podcast. Yannis Varoufakis is a Greek economist and politician, and current Secretary-General of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025. Robin Visser is Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she researches modern Chinese and Sinophone literatures, urban cultural studies, and environmental studies. Pei Wang is Professor in the Chinese History and Culture Program at the University of Hong Kong, where she specializes in comparative philosophy, psychoanalysis, and more. Daniel Mattingly is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University, where he studies the domestic and international politics of authoritarian regimes, with a focus on China.
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00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:46 The Future of Europe and China
00:10:40 There Is No Such Thing as Trade Wars, They Are All Class Wars
00:15:50 How Wall Street’s Failures Fueled the Rise of Tech
00:20:02 Why Is There a New Cold War Between the US and China?
00:27:18 Why the United States Is Abandoning Democracy and Why China is Yannis Varoufakis’s Only Hope
00:29:26 Richard Wolff to Yannis Varoufakis: Are We Heading Toward Nuclear War with China?
00:35:58 How Class WARFARE Shaped the World Superpowers CLIP
00:41:01 Is China Capitalism’s Final Form?
00:52:03 Is There Any Way that China and the United Stated Could Avert Conflict?
00:59:16 Varoufakis to Wolff: Is a Tariff Hail Mary Trump’s Only Remaining Option?
01:03:39 Daniel Mattingly on China’s Sociopolitical Organization
01:08:39 How Does Xi Jinping Talk About Socialism?
01:13:47 Yascha Mounk on US-China Competition
01:22:36 Philosophy, Socialism, and Capitalism
01:48:40 Pei Wang on the Hero and Father in US-China Competition
01:54:31 Hero and Father Archetypes in Politics
Robinson’s Website: http://robinsonerhardt.com
Robinson Erhardt researches symbolic logic and the foundations of mathematics at Stanford University.