Robert Frost has always been right and with that these are the times when legends are born.

Did another long form interview last week. All things China. Covered a ton of ground and covered mostly issues that aren’t being discussed virtually anywhere else, at least that I can find.

Here’s a peak into the real China. And I’m here to tell you that fundamentally nothing has changed in 30 years. And that’s good! Good friends. Good food. And laughter. The people all over the world have far more in common than what separates us. A message that isn’t shared enough these days.

Downtown Shanghai has truly been gentrified. Am right now about 40 min outside downtown and the food and environment has taken me back decades. The food tonight I didn’t expect. It’s awesome.

This is going to be a ton of fun. Haven’t done a proper OG Chinese dinner like this in years.

Saturday morning walks here are the best. The city is quiet and at peace.

CNBC interview clip from this morning here for those interested. “Peter Alexander of Z-Ben Advisors discusses reports of the Shanghai Futures Exchange planning for an AI token futures market. He said it is about “burying the U.S. in electricity”. Highlighting China’s massive surge in token usage, Alexander argues that while the U.S. focuses on compute constraints, China is leveraging its vast electrical grid to scale adoption.”

Been a busy week for sure.

China Morning Missive Well, there would appear to be a whole new battlefield in the ongoing competitive AI war between China and the United States. China is now looking to bury the American AI models via rapid global adoption and will seek to do so through the deployment of the country’s ample power generation. AI tokens are how China is approaching the fight where the American’s are still focused solely on compute and this article does a great job explaining the difference. The upper hand has to go to China given that the base layer is open source, open weight models and as Deepseek demonstrated just this week, those models are being priced at insanely low levels. This will result in quicker global adoption of Chinese models. Mind you, the Chinese models remain behind the American frontier models when it comes to efficacy. I am also well aware that AI token usage isn’t the single best metric to apply when attempting to measure adoption, but it certainly provides insight into the current direction of travel. All said, on a price-to-performance measurement, China wins – at least for now. This is the very same strategy China has deployed across countless industries in the past. Build a substitute that might be slightly lower in performance than an American offering but provide that option at a radically lower price point. This entire development also shows just how critical access to power/electricity is when pursuing a dominate position in AI. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-works-ai-token-futures-market-sources-say-race-with-us-2026-05-28/

China never misses an opportunity. Taobao is flooded with anything you can think of branded with America’s 250th.

Short segment on CNBC. First time back on NY on a very long time. Source: CNBC

CNBC

Treasury Secretary Bessent needs better advisors on China, says Z-Ben Advisors' Peter Alexander

Peter Alexander, Z-Ben Advisors founder and managing director, joins 'Squawk Box' to discuss the state of U.S.-China relations, takeaways from the ...

Here’s an odd thought. What percentage of all these macro geo strategy folks were even born before the fall of the Berlin Wall? Not that they aren’t entitled to their opinion, just, well, the lived experience of the world in the 1980s does provide for an entirely unique lens on current events. Anyway, back to my scotch.