#736: A Strategic Deep Dive on TikTok, The Boiling Moat of Taiwan, and China’s Next-Gen Statecraft — Matt Pottinger, Former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor

Matt Pottinger is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and chairman of the China Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Matt served as U. S. Deputy National Security Advisor from 2019 to 2021. Before his White House service, Matt spent the late 1990s and early 2000s in China as a reporter for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. He then fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as a U. S. Marine during three combat deployments between 2007 and 2010. Matt’s new book is The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan https://www.amazon.com/Boiling-Moat-Urgent-Defend-Taiwan/dp/0817926453/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. Sponsors: Wealthfront https://wealthfront.com/tim high-yield savings account: https://wealthfront.com/tim (Start earning 5% interest on your savings. And when you open an account today, you’ll get an extra fifty-dollar bonus with a deposit of five hundred dollars or more.) Shopify https://shopify.com/tim global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: https://shopify.com/tim (one-dollar-per-month trial period) Helix Sleep https://helixsleep.com/tim premium mattresses: https://helixsleep.com/tim (between 25% and 30% off all mattress orders and two free pillows) Timestamps: [00:00] Start [05:55] Bao Tong’s calligraphy. [08:20] Matt’s decision to study East Asian languages. [10:13] Studying with Perry Link and the challenges of learning Chinese. [12:19] Tips for learning Chinese and other languages. [17:17] How TikTok has been weaponized by the Chinese Communist Party. [20:58] The origins of TikTok and its obfuscatory ownership structure. [26:30] How sowing chaos in the West serves the CCP’s aims. [31:37] “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” [33:11] How should the US rein in TikTok’s influence over its population? [40:23] The significance of Taiwan geographically, ideologically, and economically. [49:59] The semiconductor industry in Taiwan and its global importance. [52:07] Deterring China from attacking or coercing Taiwan. [58:51] Cultivating social depth in Taiwan. [1:01:09] Guessing at Xi Jinping’s timeline. [1:05:33] Demonstrating the will to match the capacity of following through. [1:07:47] Matt’s top priorities for stemming Chinese ambitions. [1:10:15] Architects of chaos. [1:14:21] Staying alert against informational warfare and united front activity. [1:21:00] Countering China’s influence on its Western-based citizens. [1:25:05] Checkers vs. Go. [1:26:56] How can the US reassert its position as a beacon of democracy? [1:33:05] What prompted Matt to join the Marine Corps at age 32? [1:38:50] Getting in shape for the occasion. [1:40:45] Leadership lessons learned. [1:46:59] The Boiling Moat, the importance of public service, and parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. 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• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 0:42Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:22Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:07Tim Ferriss?

  So, go to helixsleep.com/tim to check it out. That's helixsleep.com/tim. With Helix, better sleep starts now.

• 2:21Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Shopify, one of my absolute favorite companies and they make some of my favorite products. Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. And I've known the team since 2008 or 2009. But prior to that, I wish I had personally had Shopify in the early 2000s when I was running my own e-commerce business. I tell that story in the four hour work week, but the tools then were absolutely atrocious and I could only dream of a platform like Shopify. In fact, it was you guys, my dear readers, who introduced me to Shopify when I polled all of you about best e-commerce platforms around 2009 and they've only become better and better since. Whether you're a garage entrepreneur or getting ready for your IPO, Shopify is the only tool

• 3:05Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:50Tim Ferriss?

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• 4:11Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 4:18Speaker 02

  No, it would seem inappropriate.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 4:34Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to a special episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I've been wanting to do this one for quite some time. And my guest today is Matt Pottinger. Matt Pottinger is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and chairman of the China Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Matt served as U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor from 2019 to 2021. In that role, Matt coordinated the full spectrum of national security policy. Before that, he served as the NSC's Senior Director for Asia, where he led the administration's work on the Indo-Pacific region and, in particular, its shift on China policy. Before his White House service, Matt spent the late 1990s and early 2000s in China

• 5:19Tim Ferriss?

  as a reporter for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. He then fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as a U.S. Marine during three combat deployments between 2007 and 2010. Following active duty, Matt ran Asia research at Davidson Keppner Capital Management, a multi-strategy investment fund in New York. Matt's new book, The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, is coming out July 1st. And without further ado, please enjoy what I think is a very important, very practical conversation with Matt Pottinger. Matt, so great to see you again.

• 5:57Speaker 03

  I'm delighted to be here.

• 5:58Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks for having me. Absolutely. 你好，不见

• 6:01Speaker 03

  你好，不见 Your tones are actually still quite sharp and acute. I don't know how you did that.

• 6:08Tim Ferriss?

  没什么好久 I guess we saw each other not too long ago. And we were sitting in your kitchen, at your dining room table, and there was some calligraphy on the wall. And I asked you, because my characters have grown a little rough around the edges, and I asked you what this calligraphy meant. Recognized a few characters, but not all of them. What is this calligraphy that's on your wall?

• 6:32Speaker 03

  That piece of calligraphy was written for me by Bao Tong. Bao Tong was a high Chinese official in the People's Republic of China, and he happened to be the chief of staff to the party secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Zhou Ziyang, when the Tiananmen protests took off in the spring of 1989. And Bao Tong ended up, like his boss, getting arrested. His boss spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Bao Tong went to prison for essentially siding with the students, the pro-democracy students, and eventually got out of prison but spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  And we developed a friendship remotely, and he wrote two pieces of calligraphy for me, and that one says, "先天下之忧而忧," and the unwritten but second part of that is "后天下之乐而乐." It was a famous quote by a Chinese statesman from a thousand years ago named Fan Zhongyan. And Fan Zhongyan was this polymath who created the Chinese examination system and so forth, but he was a loyal official who had to go into exile. That's what would happen. If you really screwed up, you'd get killed by the emperor, but he got sent into exile. But it's really a motto.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  What it means is that you need to be the first one to worry about all under heaven and the last one to enjoy the pleasures of all under heaven. So it's about the responsibility of a good official.

• 8:07Tim Ferriss?

  How did you develop a friendship with this person?

• 8:10Speaker 03

  During the days when I was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, based in China, sometimes he was able to have visitors, and so we struck up a correspondence.

• 8:19Tim Ferriss?

  So I should say from the outset, and this goes without saying, but fascinated by I am and you are, Chinese culture, language, we're going to talk about how that entered the scene. And I've spent time at two universities in China, this is a long time ago, '96.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:36Tim Ferriss?

  And we both studied East Asian languages in school. How did you decide to do that?

• 8:44Speaker 03

  It was highly accidental, like most good things in life. I was studying Spanish in high school and my Spanish teacher and I weren't a good match.

• 8:56Tim Ferriss?

  Creative differences.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, which is to say he was strict and serious and I was a, you know, a 15 year old who was struggling in third year Spanish because I hadn't paid enough attention in second year Spanish. Anyway, I remember seeing the Chinese language teacher. This is very rare. This is in the 1980s. I was at a high school, which was very unusual at the time to have a Chinese teacher.

• 9:19Tim Ferriss?

  Where was this?

• 9:19Speaker 03

  This is in Milton, Massachusetts, Milton Academy, south of Boston.

• 9:24Tim Ferriss?

  A good school.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  And Mr. Murray, Michael Murray, was walking across the quad and I was trying to figure out how on earth I'm going to escape Spanish class. And I asked if I could jump into Chinese and he let me do that. And so that was the beginning of my love affair with China started with the language. And I went on in college, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst had one of the truly great East Asian languages and literature programs. Classical Chinese, Al Cohen, Don Jurtson and others. I studied classical.

• 9:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, if contemporary Chinese isn't hard enough for you.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like, it's like just starting to learn English and someone's like, we're just going to throw in Latin on top of that.

• 10:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, with a little Beowulf on the side. Enjoy.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  Old English and Latin while you're struggling to, you know, to order a pizza in a new language. So I was really lucky to have great teachers and I remember I studied with Perry Link.

• 10:20Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, Perry. I studied with Perry.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  Princeton University at the time.

• 10:24Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing teacher.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  He was my Chinese teacher for a summer program in Beijing and we're still in touch today.

• 10:30Tim Ferriss?

  No kidding?

• 10:30Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:31Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, I did not know that part. Lin Lao Shi.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  Lin Lao Shi.

• 10:35Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, man. Brutal in his enforcement of the tones, which is probably why it's stuck. I just remember.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  You're stuck.

• 10:43Tim Ferriss?

  I just remember. This was, let's see, probably 95, 96 Chinese 101 at Princeton at the time. And the first class had maybe 35 students. I would say a few weeks later, 14 students.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. Serious attrition.

• 11:03Tim Ferriss?

  Serious thinning.

• 11:04Speaker 03

  That's like my Marine Corps officer candidate school class was roughly that level of attrition. So he's no nonsense and a wonderful teacher.

• 11:13Tim Ferriss?

  Really, really phenomenal teacher and thinker. I remember one class, I'm gonna give him credit and bust his balls a little bit at the same time. Because I remember a winter class, first of all, Chinese 101 had five or six classes a week. I want to say it was some unbelievable volume of classes. And that was, I want to say, probably including language lab where you would have to read and record your tones, and then you'd have these one on ones where you would get cross examined for your failures with your tones. It worked really well. And there's one class in the middle of winter, we'd all like shuffled through the snow and bitter cold to get to this class. And this poor girl, this one girl had some type of like laryngitis or something.

• 11:56Tim Ferriss?

  And we would all repeat whatever word it happened to be, right? Like, I want to say it was something like ye shu. And so we're saying this word, you know, ye shu. And, and she's like, and he's like, holds a finger and he's like, you, you know, again, again, again. And he just made her do it like 12 times. And we're like, oh, the brutality.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  It is, it's Marine Corps methods. It's a drill instructor.

• 12:18Tim Ferriss?

  But it worked. And a question for you, when you learned Chinese, and I'm gonna backstep and don't worry, guys, we're gonna get to the geopolitics and all the juicy bits, TikTok included. But this all starts with fast, like a deep fascination and not a deep critique. That's part of what I'm trying to underscore, right? Like a deep fascination. One thing that worked really well at Princeton and contrasted it with a lot of other schools at the time is we used something called GR. I don't know if you remember this, it was Guoyu Romaz. So it was teaching tones with different spellings. So the romanized version of, say, Gua, second tone would be G W O. Or if you wanted to say like, qiu gua, like I went.

• 13:02Tim Ferriss?

  Fourth tone would be G U O H. It seemed to work really well in terms of memorizing tones where pinyin with diacritical marks was really hard for a lot of students to remember. Did you learn with pinyin?

• 13:14Speaker 03

  I did learn with pinyin. Chinese language teachers have a joke that if you stay in the business of teaching Chinese long enough, you ultimately end up creating your own syllabary, you know, romanized language to approximate Chinese, or you end up studying the I Ching and teaching it, the mystical text from way back. But I learned it with regular罗马拼音, which is sort of the Chinese standard one. But what I learned from teachers like Perry Link and Wang Xue Dong and others who taught me was, was not to read that and to focus on the tapes, right? We were using cassettes in those days, going into that lab, putting the headphones on and being able to repeat perfectly, even if you didn't understand what the words meant

• 13:58Speaker 03

  yet or the grammar, you had to be able to say those words, just emulate, mimic the sounds rather than trying to read a romanized approximation of it. That was one way to break the back of the ways that you can go wrong trying to study pinyin.

• 14:17Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So since this is the podcast that deconstructs people who are good at various things, excellent at various things, any other tips for people who may want to learn Chinese?

• 14:26Speaker 03

  After I learned Chinese, I learned Japanese. I'd forgotten most of it because this was 30 years ago. But what amazed me was I followed a smarter technique for studying the language and I learned it much faster than I was able to learn Chinese. And it started with those tapes, recording yourself, repeating full sentences, not vocab lists, not studying the Roman, in Japanese it's called romaji, right? You're studying Latin letters. Instead, you have the discipline to just listen to full sentences, be able to say those sentences flawlessly before you start to deconstruct the sentences according to the vocab and the grammar and so forth.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  So it's starting like a child with the sounds and then getting to vocab and grammar.

• 15:13Tim Ferriss?

  So you and I have a very similar approach in that way. I did not realize we had this parallel. And don't worry, guys, we're going to get off this language learning kick in a second. But. I went from public school on Long Island to St. Paul's in New Hampshire. I had decided I was bad at Spanish and then I hopped ship to Japanese. So I did it in the opposite order, in part because a friend of mine was taking Japanese and I wanted to be in a class with one of my friends at least. But I was going to be bad at a given subject, i.e. language learning. And then the Japanese took off and then I learned or studied. I've forgotten most of it. We have the opposite in that sense. My Japanese is still pretty strong. Forgot most of my Chinese, but had a much more refined method for the Chinese because

• 15:56Tim Ferriss?

  I threw so much against the wall with Japanese to begin with.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Perfect.

• 15:59Tim Ferriss?

  And landed in a very similar place, like start with full sentences. And that recording is so key. I feel like that's still pretty neglected in modern language teaching.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  Totally right. It makes me want to go back to learning Spanish because that was the worst approach that I took.

• 16:17Tim Ferriss?

  I eventually got back to Spanish.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Awesome.

• 16:19Tim Ferriss?

  I eventually got back to Spanish. I'll throw in a bonus language learning tip, which is you can use a comic that is very widely translated, like One Piece. If you have English or any other language, you can take two volumes, say a volume four in One Piece, the exact same comic book panel by panel in two languages and go back and forth without using a dictionary. So you can actually study dialogue and conversation, which is one of the benefits of comic books. So I've used that for a couple of different languages. Language, the Chinese language is one of your superpowers. It allows you to do things that a lot of other folks cannot do.

• 16:58Tim Ferriss?

  And I would say one of those is, for instance, looking at Chinese language speeches, memos, internal documents, or maybe not exclusively internal documents. And we're going to edge into that, but since it's the topic of the hour. TikTok. You and I have spoken about this before, and I was amazed how little I actually knew about TikTok. What are some salient points that you might underscore for folks as it relates to TikTok?

• 17:27Speaker 03

  Well, you know, there's been a lot of discussion about some of the risks of using TikTok. And most of that discussion in the US is focused on the data security aspect, you know, that this app, once it's in your phone, it goes everywhere. It pulls everything. Now, famously, although people have forgotten, TikTok was using that data to track American journalists to try to figure out who their sources were so they could fire those sources from TikTok. They go in and actually look at where specific users are to track their activities and who they know and what they're doing. So that is a risk. It's actually secondary to the bigger problem with TikTok, which is not being discussed head-on very frequently.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  And that is that the Chinese Communist Party has stated explicitly that it wants to use tools such as TikTok, specifically short-form video apps, of which TikTok is the really key one, to, in the words of Xi Jinping, "win the global majority." That's his phrase. They want to use it as a megaphone in what he calls a "smokeless battlefield" for ideological persuasion and also destruction. Namely, if you look at how TikTok trends certain content and you compare that, which is not easy to do, TikTok makes this hard to do. You could use some of their proxies, some of the data that they share for advertisers,

• 18:56Speaker 03

  which they've since shut down because they didn't like the fact that people were starting to look. But what you found was that anti-American, anti-democratic, anti-Israeli content after the October 7 terror attacks by Hamas in southern Israel... Occurred, that stuff trends at multiples of what it does on things like Instagram, or Reels, or X. And it's not because of the demographic, because people have done control studies to look at how Taylor Swift trends across those platforms. And it turns out she trends almost exactly equally across all these different apps and platforms. But when it comes to things that are embarrassing to the Chinese Communist Party, that stuff

• 19:41Speaker 03

  gets minimized on TikTok through the algorithm. There are things that they want to amplify, pro Communist Party things, or things that make Americans hate one another, you know, or hate, or lose faith in their system of government. That stuff gets amplified inordinately. And so it's very clear that the algorithms are being manipulated. And those algorithms are subject to the control, very explicitly subject to the control of the Chinese Communist Party. So Xi Jinping, I think it was in 2021, he had a study session. He's the chairman of everything in China. He's a dictator par excellence. He's, he holds a study session for the Politburo, which is the highest body of Communist Party officials. And it's on

• 20:25Speaker 03

  external discourse mechanisms. And what he's talking about is, in fact, one of his senior intelligence officers said publicly, "It doesn't matter what's true and what's false. It only matters who controls the platform. And therefore, we need to use this platform to win the global majority." So Xi Jinping holds this study session. The People's Daily, which is the Communist Party mouthpiece newspaper, a couple of weeks later, makes clear that what he was talking about were short-form video apps, and they talk about TikTok specifically. So it's a weapon. It's a weapon pointed at our democracy.

• 20:58Tim Ferriss?

  So, to double-click on a few things. First is, in terms of company structure, or parent company structure, people involved, is there anything that would be sort of instructive to point out there? Let's begin with that. And why should we take you to be an expert in TikTok? How have you studied this?

• 21:22Speaker 03

  I have the benefit of working closely with a number of extremely talented historians, linguists, technologists, who are focused on China. We run a small, private company. We do research, open source research about what China's doing, where it's going. My colleague, John Garnaut, and Matthew Johnson, two colleagues of mine. Matthew's great. He was a Oxford professor of Chinese modern government, before we kidnapped him to come do work for us. John Garnaut was a journalist like me in China, an Australian. He wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald. And eventually, a little bit before I went into government, he was working for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull as one of his China advisers in Canberra.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  Anyway, they decided to do a very in-depth study, looking at the history of TikTok, trying to figure out things like the structure, who's it beholden to? And what you have is this interesting saga of a truly innovative Silicon Valley-type company that emerges from the mind of Zhang Yiming, a very bright, talented entrepreneur and technologist in China, and some of his partners. And it quickly catches on in ways that catch the attention of the Chinese government. And so, over time, what the Chinese government does is it inserts itself. The Communist Party, which is superior to the Chinese government, inserts itself into the heart of that company. And in fact, the company I'm talking about is ByteDance.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  ByteDance is the parent company that fully controls TikTok, along with a number of other apps, including the Chinese version of TikTok that's called Douyin. And it turns out they share the same engineers in China, the same engineering core, same algorithms, but adjusted very, very differently. So if you go to Douyin in China, you're not going to see Any of this awful content, you're going to see wholesome content and pro Communist Party content. You're not going to see things that pit Chinese people against one another or that agitate them, even though it's the same algorithms, same back office, same engineers. And by the way, the editor in chief of ByteDance with responsibility for all of the

• 23:34Speaker 03

  apps and their content is also the Communist Party secretary, who was assigned by Xi Jinping and his general office to babysit that company and to make sure that it is serving the purposes of the Chinese Communist Party. His deputy is the deputy editor in chief of all apps and he's also the deputy Communist Party secretary for the company. So it took a lot of digging to piece all of this together because TikTok and ByteDance have erased this history, but there are ways to go back and look at websites that have since been erased and piece this together. They've airbrushed out all of this history and TikTok masquerades as a foreign company. They say, oh,

• 24:17Speaker 03

  no, no, we're Singaporean. It's nonsense. It has nothing to do with Singapore. I mean, there's only a handful of relative to their overall staff of people there. And the guy who's the CEO is really just a front man, is sort of a spokesman. He doesn't have any power compared to the Communist Party secretariat that actually governs TikTok's parent company.

• 24:38Tim Ferriss?

  So a question about the airbrushing for a second. So I'm trying to think of the most, let's just say, obvious closed case examples that you could point to where you might find a contrast between, let's just say, the Taylor Swift being relatively equally surfaced or not surfaced by different platforms. So you said there are things that might be embarrassing to the Chinese government. Are there examples of any particular things that you could give where there's much less visibility? Because people might be wondering, well, maybe it's how you torture the data, right? Maybe it's like, yeah, it appears 10% on Instagram and 8% on TikTok, but really, is that conclusive? Are there any, to your mind, very clear cases?

• 25:24Speaker 03

  I would point you to the House Committee in Congress. It's called the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. And this is a committee that's been chaired by Mike Gallagher, who's a Republican congressman from Wisconsin. And the ranking committee member is Congressman Krishnamurti, who's a Democrat from Illinois. The very bipartisan group of 20 or so congressmen and women who were in that committee. They did a hearing in November last year, which is worth looking up because they actually share some of the data, some of the studies that they did comparing TikTok information. It wasn't like an 8% incremental difference.

• 26:07Speaker 03

  We're talking from 3 to 5 to 10 to 50x certain content that would appear on other US-based platforms. So pro-Chinese military propaganda, you know, multiples, anti-Israeli, and some of it really nakedly just anti-Semitic content.

• 26:30Tim Ferriss?

  Quick question on that because people might wonder, why would that be a potential CCP government priority?

• 26:37Speaker 03

  It's perfectly aligned with Beijing's policy. What Beijing did when Putin reinvaded with a full-scale invasion in early 2022 Ukraine. China sided itself in terms of its propaganda orientation, in terms of becoming the main lifeline economically for Russia, in terms of becoming the main diplomatic champion for Russia and its war in Ukraine. Why did China do that? If you read through, as colleagues and I have, some of the internal Chinese Communist Party textbooks, they say explicitly that we want to see Europe in chaos. We want Russia to become more aggressive. We want to see America weakened because those things

• 27:21Speaker 03

  actually provide an opportunity for the Chinese Communist Party to advance an authoritarian model for global governance that they feel safer with, you know, that's going to be advantageous to Xi Jinping and his party. So when the attack occurred on the 7th of October in southern Israel, Hamas did their worst depraved terrorist attacks. China immediately oriented its propaganda to blame Israel and to blame the United States, just like it blamed Ukraine and blamed the United States for the war that Vladimir Putin undertook. So they take the side of the aggressor and try to spin the aggressor into a victim.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  Because anything that embarrasses, humiliates, discredits the United States is a good thing under that model. And that's why China had okay relations with Israel until October the 7th, and now they've demonized Israel because they view that as a way to discredit the United States.

• 28:22Tim Ferriss?

  I have to say, there's a part of me that's excited to have you on the show. Number one, because I enjoy having conversations with you. Number two, because you have such defamiliarity with sort of native source material, right? Like you can actually look at the actual words used, these sort of stated objectives in Chinese. And I also must admit, I have this admiration for the 4D chess that China has played with respect to things like access to natural resources in South America, building infrastructure in Africa. It's really remarkable how good they seem to be at playing a very, very long game. It's incredibly impressive.

• 29:05Tim Ferriss?

  And also, just to give credit where credit is due, I guess, I mean, there are trade-offs, of course, with all these things, but I went to a very fancy event where I'm not going to name the country, but a country in sort of Europe, Middle Eastern area was talking about partnerships with China, and they said, it's simply more stable and predictable. With the US, every four years, we have no idea what's going to happen. We don't know if this, that, and the other agreement are going to change. There's a certain predictability that is advantageous for certain countries that might want to say partner with one or the other. And we can come back to that, I just wanted to mention that first, but coming to TikTok just as a way of studying the micro to study the macro.

• 29:51Tim Ferriss?

  Things that might be embarrassing, and if we look at, for instance, these may or may not be the right examples, but Tibet, Uighur or ethnic minorities in China, are those 10%, 20% less than other platforms, or is it?

• 30:06Speaker 03

  It's almost zero. It's almost zero on TikTok. Very hard to find. There was famously one woman who wanted to talk about the genocide, according to our Secretary of State Tony Blinken, there's a genocide taking place in Xinjiang, northwest China, against ethnic minorities, including the traditionally Islamic Uighur people. She wanted to get word out about that on TikTok, so she recorded an eyelash video where she's showing, doing a how to, how to curl your eyelashes. And while she's doing this, she suddenly cuts into talking about the genocide, what's going on there, and eventually TikTok even erased that content. But I agree with you, the 4D chess is no joke.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  It's why I think we need to be a lot more candid about what China's doing that does harm our interests, harms the interests of other democracies. A lot of autocracies in particular talk about, well, one thing we like about dealing with the Chinese Communist Party is they don't really bug us about our own human rights problems. And there's often a consistency in that approach. We're a democracy. It means that we're an X factor, probably more than we should be. There are certain things that we did throughout the Cold War that served us very well, where there was a continuity in our Cold War policy from Democrats, you know, from Truman to Eisenhower to Kennedy and on. The thread makes curves, but you can string that thread through the overall policy of

• 31:32Speaker 03

  containment with some variations and so forth. We'd be well-served to remember what Senator Vandenberg said. Remember who Vandenberg was? He was an isolationist Republican before World War II, who ended up becoming an internationalist, bipartisan partner of Democrat, Democratic President Harry Truman. And he ended up getting the Marshall Plan through the Senate. He's the one who got NATO through the Senate. And so Vandenberg had a famous line. He said, "Politics stops at the water's edge." That is a great motto that we should return to and actually try to practice.

• 32:11Tim Ferriss?

  What does that mean?

• 32:12Speaker 03

  It means we can have bitter debates internally between left and right, Democrats, Republicans, independents, you know, Trump, Biden. But when it comes to our national interest, there must be a general consensus that prevails that we are on the same team and that there needs to be some predictability and continuity in our policies. And in fact, by and large, even that still continues to some extent. You have bitter fights over things like what should our approach be to Iran? But you also have strong alliances. We've got NATO. It's probably the most successful, you know, multilateral alliance in world history. And you've seen it strengthened by Putin's attack on Ukraine.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  President Biden's meeting with the Japanese prime minister. We've got a very strong relationship with Japan, with South Korea, with Australia, the Philippines. And those things serve us well. Those are our shields that protect us.

• 33:10Tim Ferriss?

  So we're going to talk about, we're going to segue to Taiwan in a second. I want to put a little button on top of TikTok and then we'll move on. In terms of weapons or offensive techniques, or let's just call it overall threats from China against, say, US national interests, where would you rank TikTok? And what would you like to see policymakers or others do in terms of next actions? If they're like, hey, this is a lot for me to digest, like, just tell me what we should do. Just a quick note before we get back to the interview. This conversation with Matt was recorded prior to the April 23 passage of the TikTok bill in the Senate. Go to tim.blog/tiktok to learn more about the bill.

• 33:55Tim Ferriss?

  Now, back to the episode.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  I'm telling you this sincerely as a former Marine Deputy National Security Advisor. I was juggling the most serious national security threats facing the United States. I think TikTok is near the top, near the top, okay? Think for a moment how preposterous it is that we're in a situation where the main platform is controlled by a hostile totalitarian government. The main platform by which a whole generation of Americans communicate and acquire their news. Remember TikTok, you say, "Oh, no, it's just cat videos." It's actually a primary source of news for people under the age of 30. We would never have allowed the Nazis to control all of our newspapers and radio stations

• 34:46Speaker 03

  in the 1930s. And in fact, we passed laws under President FDR Roosevelt that made sure that you could not concentrate media ownership in the hands of any foreign power. So we have simply not updated those rules. Those are longstanding, 100-year-old rules almost that are blessed by the Supreme Court. They are sound with our First Amendment rights. Why is it that we've allowed the Chinese Communist Party to be the primary arbiter of what content trends and what content gets suppressed? It's insane. And so what would we do about it? I would say that the United States Senate right now, specifically Senator Cantwell,

• 35:30Speaker 03

  a Democrat from Washington, is the most important person in America at this moment because she's the one who's either going to stall and water down the bill, very good bill that's already passed the House overwhelmingly. I think it was 362 votes for this TikTok bill. President Biden has said he'd sign the bill if it came to his desk, and now it's stalled on her desk. Several of her top aides are now full-time lobbyists for TikTok, several of them, okay?

• 36:02Speaker 03

  So I'm hoping that she does the right thing for the country, that she doesn't say, "No, I'm okay with the Nazi party owning all American newspapers and radios, radio stations," which is, this is the equivalent of. And by the way, it's not a ban of TikTok. This is what TikTok has spread disinformation about. All it says is that TikTok cannot be owned by a Chinese entity and subject to Chinese Communist Party control. They simply have to sell it, and then the thing will still happen. The idea is not to suppress or ban the speech that people are contributing to TikTok, it's to make sure that that speech is actually organic and unfettered and is not manipulated and suppressed or amplified

• 36:46Speaker 03

  according to the dictates of a totalitarian adversarial government. It's very reasonable. It's certainly not a First Amendment threat. It's interesting to me, the ACLU, TikTok is, owns Washington DC now, okay? They've thrown millions and millions of dollars at this. They've managed to get, on the left, the ACLU, and by the way, look at who the ACLU's donors are. It includes, perhaps their largest donor is one of the biggest American shareholders in TikTok. And so the ACLU says, "Oh, no, this is a First Amendment issue." BS! This has nothing to do with the First Amendment. This has to do with ensuring that people really do have free speech on these platforms, and that it's not being suppressed or amplified

• 37:27Speaker 03

  according to a hostile government. And then on the right, you've got Jeff Yass, who is one of the other largest shareholders in TikTok and its parent company, and he's a Republican donor, and he is giving huge amounts of money to any Republican that is willing to ensure that TikTok stays under Chinese control. So here we are. It comes down to some big-money investors, both left and right. It's an equal opportunity. It's a bipartisan effort by big stakeholders in TikTok to try to ensure that TikTok remains under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. It doesn't make any sense.

• 38:02Tim Ferriss?

  And what was the senator's name who you mentioned?

• 38:05Speaker 03

  Cantwell.

• 38:05Tim Ferriss?

  Cantwell. And those, you said, I guess it was two, I think, two or three lobbyists on staff. They're, well, they're not lobbyists, but they're-

• 38:13Speaker 03

  They don't work for her anymore. This is her former deputy chief of staff and one or two other senior aides to her who have left to lobby for TikTok.

• 38:21Tim Ferriss?

  What are the incentives? I don't really understand lobbying. Like, how does that work in brief? Just like, why would they do that?

• 38:29Speaker 03

  They get millions of dollars. I don't know exactly how much they're getting paid, but lobbying firms, their firms get paid millions of dollars to try to block the US Senate from allowing this House bill to pass. It's as simple as that. They have a huge campaign, advertising campaign, disinformation campaign, saying that it's an attempt to block free speech, to ban TikTok. No, it's saying TikTok can thrive, but it's, we're not going to let it be edited and controlled and manipulated by a totalitarian dictatorship that doesn't even have the rule of law, much less free speech rights.

• 39:04Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Thank you for that. And we're going to go to Taiwan now. So Taiwan, what is the significance to the US of Taiwan? Because I imagine a lot of people have many things. They try to track in the news, Taiwan, they're like, yeah, I think it has something to do with processors or chips or something, but like, is that really the end of the world? Can't we onshore that, et cetera, et cetera? What are the most important characteristics of Taiwan? Why is it important?

• 39:30Speaker 03

  Why does it matter?

• 39:31Tim Ferriss?

  Why does it matter?

• 39:32Speaker 03

  It's this small, I can't remember the size, it's like the size of Connecticut, and it's a small, amazing geography, very mountainous, the tallest mountain in East Asia is not Mount Fuji. It is actually Yushan Jade Mountain in Taiwan. And then you have these beaches and you've got this tropical climate that meets some of the biggest urban centers in the world, roughly 25 million or so people, many of them of Chinese heritage. So why does it matter? So it matters because of geography, it matters because of democracy, and it matters because of economics. It matters for us here in the United States. Geographically, the Chinese Communist Party views Taiwan rightly.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  In fact, General MacArthur, Douglas MacArthur, would agree with this assessment. And in fact, he made a similar assessment all the way back in 1950, after World War II. He said, "If Formosa," which was the old Portuguese name for Taiwan, "if it were to fall to a hostile government, it would become a springboard for aggression throughout the region." And in fact, it had already been that. The Japanese, Imperial Japan, had controlled Taiwan from 1895 all the way for 50 years till the end of World War II. And they used it as a springboard to move into Southeast Asia, particularly when World War II kicked up. 1940, 41, the Japanese were promoting this idea

• 40:59Speaker 03

  of a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. I know that's a mouthful, but what it was, was it was the Japanese government saying, "We're going to dominate Asia. We don't want Western colonial powers anywhere near this, but we also don't want those countries to run themselves." So it was an involuntary invasion of Japan's neighbors. And they said, "Well, this is going to be great for everyone. We're going to be on top. It's a new empire that we run, but we'll take care of your, the economics, we'll take care of the security and so forth." In fact, what it did was it kicked up massive response, you know, antibodies to this approach. Millions were killed in China under that period. There were millions killed throughout Southeast Asia.

• 41:41Speaker 03

  And then, of course, the United States comes into the war after Pearl Harbor in late 1941. The rest is history. China's following a similar model to the Japanese model of 1940. Xi Jinping has even given speeches. I don't know whether he has a sense of irony about this or not, or whether he's even aware, but he gave a big speech in Shanghai. One of his Politburo members just last week gave another speech, Zhao Leji, talking about the importance of Asia remaining in control of Asians, by which he means Beijing. It was Tokyo in 1940. But it is very similar language to what we heard when the Japanese were promoting a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which was an empire.

• 42:26Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Momentus. Momentus offers high-quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more. I've been testing their products for months now and I have a few that I use constantly. Personally, I've been using Momentus Mag 3-8, L-theanine, and apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep. Now, the Momentus Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients. Momentus also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world-class products to market, including a few you will recognize from this podcast,

• 43:10Tim Ferriss?

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• 43:42Tim Ferriss?

  So, you mentioned the size of Taiwan. Sounds like a speck. Why is it positionally advantageous?

• 43:50Speaker 03

  If you look at the map from the perspective of China and you're looking eastward, American strategists during the Cold War used to describe it the way that Chinese strategists now describe it, which is the first island chain that prevents Beijing from expeditionary projection of military force. And so, if you look, it's the Aleutian Islands, which are part of Alaska, comes down to the Japanese islands, down to the Ryukyu Islands where Okinawa is, also Japanese islands, and then right in the middle, you've got Taiwan, and then it continues on to the archipelago of the Philippine Islands. So, you've got basically democracies.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  That hem in Beijing's military ambitions. And for China to send a bomber or a ship or even a submarine through that first island chain, they have to go through, in essence, a gateway of democracies that are by and large allied with the United States. And so Beijing believes that Taiwan is the linchpin of that first island chain. If Taiwan were to fall under Chinese control, Chinese military doctrine, their own manuals say, at that point, we can dominate Japan. There's a Chinese Air Force manual for Air Force officers that says, we turn this into an airbase. And even though it's just extending out 150 miles from China's coast, it means that Chinese

• 45:15Speaker 03

  bomber patrols-

• 45:17Tim Ferriss?

  It provides safe passage in a way.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  Safe passage for them to, in the words of their own doctrine, inflict a blockade on Japan at will.

• 45:26Tim Ferriss?

  Could you say more about that? What is a blockade against Japan?

• 45:28Speaker 03

  A blockade would mean, it's an act of war. A blockade means that you're cutting off trade to and from a country by either surrounding it with ships or aircraft or threatening it with missile strikes to say, we can shut down your economy, we can shut down your food and energy supply. The lights go out in Japan. Japan doesn't produce energy, right? They are wholly dependent on imports other than some of their nuclear plants. And so China says, we will be able to, we'll basically have so much leverage over Japan as well as the Philippines to the south, that we kind of have them in our pocket at that point. And so Taiwan is the key to that geographically. Now, it's also a great democracy.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  If you look at independent sort of assessments of democracies, The Economist magazine has what's called the Economist Intelligence Unit. They do rankings, right? They have found consistently that Taiwan is the most democratic, liberal democratic state in all of Asia. And it actually ranks higher than the United States. They know what they're doing. They've built something pretty special.

• 46:34Tim Ferriss?

  I have to ask, sorry, I won't be able to let this go. Based on what does it rank? More highly than the United States.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  Freedom of speech, equality, rule of law, equality of access to run for government. Taiwan's legislature is 40% women compared to, I think, about 27, 28% of our Congress are women in the United States. Many of the top cities are governed by female mayors. They've twice elected a woman as president of Taiwan. In terms of freedom of the press, I mean, it'd be worth taking a close look at these EIU, sort of what their methodology was. But they're not the only ones. There are others as well who say Taiwan is really a true liberal democracy in the classical sense of the word liberal. It has really shed its authoritarian

• 47:21Speaker 03

  past. And so if that were to fall because it was coercively annexed by Beijing, that would have huge ramifications for the region and knock-on effects for the world.

• 47:33Tim Ferriss?

  Why is that? I'm curious if you could say more about that because I have to admit, right, growing up with like my dad yelling at the TV about politics, I just basically tuned it out, right? I decided to be sort of selectively ignorant about this, which I regret on some level. But I think to myself, okay, they are this sort of ideological paragon of democracy in the region. I understand the positional advantage of, say, Beijing having control of Taiwan, as you just described.

• 48:03Speaker 03

  The geographic element.

• 48:04Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. But if Taiwan falls ideologically, what are the ripple effects?

• 48:09Speaker 03

  I think what you have at that point is a state of emergency in all of the other democracies of the region, where they are now facing an existential threat, military threat. And states of emergency aren't good for democracies, right? Look at what happened to us just during the lockdowns, you know, during COVID-20. Imagine you're in a situation where these countries are having to rapidly militarize in order to try to deter China from now being able to threaten, you know, them with blockades or, you know, and it's pretty clear that Beijing has much bigger ambitions than just Taiwan. The other part is that if Taiwan right now is a beacon for a lot of Chinese people on the mainland, Chinese people Who've visited Taiwan generally come away with a pretty positive impression.

• 48:54Speaker 03

  It's almost like they're visiting this Alice in Wonderland alternative future. Where people enjoy free speech, they can go vote for their leaders. And yet they're speaking the same language, they share a lot of the same heritage. You can actually see freedom of religion in Taiwan in ways that are spectacular. You have traditional Chinese religions, different strains of Buddhism and Taoism. Ancestor worship, Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, it's all there and it is unfettered. It is unmolested by.

• 49:26Tim Ferriss?

  And for people who don't have the history, I mean, a lot of that got cleaned out of mainland.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 49:32Tim Ferriss?

  A host of different reasons.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  The Chinese government demands that it oversee any religious activity in China. And in ways that are, to put it mildly, that distort the doctrine and in effect, demote God to below the Communist Party.

• 49:48Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so we have the geographic importance. We've got the.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  Ideological.

• 49:54Tim Ferriss?

  Ideological component. Is there anything else you would add to that?

• 49:57Speaker 03

  Economy. Look, Taiwan, this amazing small country produces 92% of the advanced semiconductors in the world. 92%. So we're talking about.

• 50:09Tim Ferriss?

  It's wild.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  I know, we're talking about CPUs, central processing units that go into your phone to GPUs, which are the chips like Nvidia is famous for making that are really central to everything from self-driving cars to other AI sorts of applications. Taiwan doesn't design all those chips. American companies are sort of in the lead in design. But they actually produce them, they're the best company in the world as a fab. You know, a contract fab, meaning that they fabricate the chips based on the instructions and blueprints that they're provided by American and Korean and Japanese and other companies. And there you have it, TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., which was founded by Morris Chang.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  I've met him, he's an incredible figure who, you know, was at Texas Instruments way back during our silicon sort of revolution and went on to build a superior company. It's one of the best-run, most valuable companies in the world. If Beijing were to even blockade Taiwan, that is to say, not attack it, not bomb it, but prevent ships from coming and going and flights from coming and going, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. would begin to die very quickly, necrosis. You can think of a firm like theirs, those plants, as being a lot like a human brain. It needs a constant supply of oxygen and nutrients in the form of everything from software updates to recalibrating after

• 51:37Speaker 03

  an earthquake. There was just a huge earthquake, condolences to the people of Taiwan, but there are also lots of little earthquakes that take place there. You have to recalibrate the equipment. You have to buy equipment from the Dutch, chemicals from the Japanese, key equipment and designs from Israelis and Americans. If that stops, the whole thing starts to calcify in ways that are very hard to reverse. Some would argue we would be in a Great Depression, even with just a blockade of Taiwan. We'd be facing a global Great Depression.

• 52:07Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so I think you've done a good job of establishing the significance of Taiwan on a number of different levels. What should the US do and why aren't we doing it already? It doesn't need to be limited to the US. Maybe there are other state actors that should be involved as well, but since we're sitting here in the US...

• 52:26Speaker 03

  It's the D-word, deterrence. Okay, deterrence is a funny thing. People don't often think about deterrence as a strategy. We think that if we just kind of build a big military, people won't want to push us around. But deterrence is more than just having a very capable military, hard power. It's also sending a signal to decision-makers in aggressive states like Beijing currently is, a message that if you try this, if you attack, if you blockade or coercively try to annex Taiwan, there will be costs associated with that that are going to be worse than what you thought you would have gained. And by the way, you're not going to be able to gain it anyway. We're going to deny you. It's

• 53:11Speaker 03

  deterrence by denial. We will deny you your goal. Taiwan will be so well out... Fitted with things like anti-ship missiles that can be launched from trucks that are disguised like milk trucks, you know, driving around Taiwan. You're going to run into so many sea mines. You're going to have swarms of drones that come down on your ships trying to cross. And by the way, we've got friends behind us. We've got the United States. We've got Japan. We've got Australia as well as other countries that don't want to see.

• 53:42Tim Ferriss?

  I got it. So you're speaking from the perspective of Taiwan.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  Taiwan now. Taiwan is going to make the moat of the Taiwan Strait into a boiling cauldron, a boiling moat. And if you try to cross that moat, you're going to lose your navy. That's the message that we all in coordination need to be sending to a certain person who is the one decision maker that counts in the Chinese system and his name is Xi Jinping. He's the chairman of everything.

• 54:07Tim Ferriss?

  How do you strategically or tactically do that in terms of, let's just say, next actions, right? What would be the next actions? If you could wave a magic wand and compel the people in power to take certain next steps, what would those things be? Because I think one of the fundamental disconnects, and this may relate on a more macro level, is that, you know, I've observed conversations among media pundits and so on who say, well, Xi Jinping, he'll do a calculus on acceptable cost and yada, yada, yada, and then we'll not do A, B, and C because of D, E, and F. But it's all viewed through the lens of acceptable cost in a Western democracy, which is not necessarily a comparable. So what would the next actions look like?

• 54:52Tim Ferriss?

  For instance, like, do we even have enough, do we have sufficient quantities of missiles or fill in the blank military technology to even provide?

• 55:02Speaker 03

  That's a really key one. So it starts with hard power. There's a diplomatic element to deterrence. There's an economic and informational aspect, but all of that doesn't amount to much if you don't have the foundation of hard power. The reason we've kept the peace for 70-plus years, you know, almost 80 years from the end of World War II there, was because there was such a stark imbalance between what the Chinese military was capable of versus

• 55:27Speaker 03

  What Taiwan and the United States together were capable of. So you don't want a balance of power. That's a misnomer. You want a gross imbalance of power. That's what keeps the peace. And so right now we're moving towards a balance of power. And that's why things are actually so dangerous. So it starts with hard power. You put your finger on one of the really, really key elements, which is, do we have a defense industrial base that is capable of out producing China's incredibly formidable defense industrial base? The short answer is no. Do we have to match them equally? Also, the answer is no. But we have to be able to make asymmetric weapons.

• 56:07Speaker 03

  That is, things that are relatively cheap, relatively plentiful, that can threaten an aggressor in ways that negate their massive advantages in terms of just mass of the number of ships they're cranking out, or the number of bombers, the number of missiles. So one of the things I learned as a Marine early on was the old rule of thumb is that you need three times as much force to take a position as you need to defend it. So we're actually, we're on the better end of that cost curve because we're trying to defend Taiwan in order to show Xi Jinping that it's not worth even attempting. Taiwan has this moat. They've got very few beaches that are suitable for landing on.

• 56:49Speaker 03

  They have a number of very big ports, but those can be cut off through anything from sea mines to, you know, other actions that could be taken. They've got mountainous terrain that, you know, you can't really approach very easily from the east side. And you've got muddy flats. If you try to approach from the west side, it would be a disaster for, imagine Saving Private Ryan, but like you have to run three miles to get to the machine gun nest that's shooting at you. So Taiwan has these natural advantages that should work to our benefit. But it does mean that we have to show Xi Jinping that we have the ability to produce, and we actually are producing and have the stockpiles of these kinds of munitions, anti-ship

• 57:30Speaker 03

  missiles, drones, you know, you name it, the things that really count because they pose such a big threat to China's navy or to its helicopters and other elements of an invasion force. What would?

• 57:43Tim Ferriss?

  Xi Jinping need to see to decide it's not worth it? And on what basis are you saying what you're about to say? How do we have any idea?

• 57:54Speaker 03

  The things that spook him, and we know what spooks him because they get really upset at certain things. One is the hard power aspect that we're talking about, but the other is will, will to fight. So it was Liddell Hart, who was early 20th century writer about war, said, "Will is the chief incalculable in war. It's the thing that's hardest to measure in advance of war, but which counts more than anything else once a war begins." And a good example of that is Ukraine. Everyone said Ukraine is going to crumble in a matter of days. You know, it seems to be the assessment of the US intelligence community. It seems to be the assessment of Vladimir Putin that it would fall quickly. And yet it didn't, right? Here we are two years plus later and Ukrainians are bravely fighting.

• 58:39Speaker 03

  They're not asking for anyone to send troops. They're putting their own lives on the line. Will to fight was that X factor that actually created a catastrophe for the Russians. We have to help Taiwan reinvent its culture, its military culture, in ways that add what friends of mine would call social depth. I brought a number of Israeli military officers to Taiwan last summer to meet with Taiwan military leaders and civilian leaders. And it was a very useful set of conversations because the Taiwanese are used to hearing from Americans who come to visit. It's very rare that they get a chance to meet with Israelis. And there's certain things in common. It's a small geography with a lot of hostile neighbors.

• 59:23Speaker 03

  They don't even have the benefit of a moat in the case of Israel, right? I mean, they've got land borders. And yet Israel has won every war that it has ever fought. And it's done it with predominantly a reserve military. These are reservists who get activated like they did within 24 hours of the October 7 debacle. 300, almost 400,000 troops, most of them who had already trained. They'd already gone through that crucible of being a conscripted.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  Soldier or officer, men and women both, and then they were able to mobilize rapidly because they continually train. Taiwan needs a little bit of Israel right now. It needs a little bit of Finland. It needs a little bit of Estonia. These small countries that face steep odds, but have a have social depth because they have a culture of service.

• 1:00:13Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by social depth? Could you just give me another brief explanation of what that means?

• 1:00:18Speaker 03

  So I'll give you an example. In the case of Israel, not only did you have people who left their jobs suddenly, everyday jobs as, you know, tech entrepreneurs or nurses or you name it, and were in uniform, ready to fight. But you also have a core of a civilian cadre that knows how to respond to emergencies, that knows how to provide logistics, even though they're not in military camis, right? That knows how to turn hospitals into triage centers for combat victims.

• 1:00:53Tim Ferriss?

  I got it. Sort of a broad social fluency with skills and playbooks.

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  That's it. Things that the military doesn't have to itself be responsible for, but will depend vitally on in the event of a war.

• 1:01:09Tim Ferriss?

  So I've neglected something important, which we should probably hit on. And I arrived at this somewhat obvious element, timeline, because I was thinking to myself, do we really have time to help Taiwan develop this social depth? Or are more expedient next actions required? So how should people think of the imminence or maybe amount of time that we may have before there is decisive action on the part of China to potentially do something disruptive or aggressive or otherwise towards Taiwan?

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  The specific date, no one knows. Probably Xi Jinping himself doesn't yet know what the specific date would be that he would try to push this to crisis, right? And and push it to ahead. But we can do better than saying we have no idea. It's really Xi Jinping's lifespan, okay? Xi Jinping is in his early 70s now. He has broken the template for roughly decade-long tours of leadership by his last two predecessors, and he has installed himself for life. He's pretty much in charge for life. And so, we know that. We know it's likely that he's gonna stay in. I don't think, as Robert Gates, our former secretary, once said of the Russians,

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  I think he's someone who's gonna leave office feet first. Okay? Right? And he's either gonna leave in handcuffs or in a coffin, basically. And...

• 1:02:42Tim Ferriss?

  Seems to be a trend around the world.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  Right. So here we are. He's only, he's 72 years old. As my wife sometimes reminds me, assholes never die. They seem to live a long time. Okay? And then you also have statements of...

• 1:02:57Tim Ferriss?

  This is what I was wondering about. Any telegraph?

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, sure. I mean, he has been very clear and has distinguished himself from his predecessors in how he talks about the goal of unifying Taiwan. He says it is the essence, that word, the essence, of his broader agenda, which he calls "the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation." That handful sometimes is called...

• 1:03:21Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds more poetic in Chinese.

• 1:03:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. It's actually brutal either way. But it's, uh, sometimes it's called "the Chinese dream" for short. Sometimes it's called "the great rejuvenation." But he says the essence of it is unification with Taiwan. I think that's a very serious statement by him. He told President Biden, when they were in San Francisco just last November, that he now expects the United States not only not to interfere, but to actively support China in its goal of coercively annexing Taiwan. That was pretty cheeky. We've never heard a Chinese leader say that before.

• 1:03:55Tim Ferriss?

  That's a strong ask.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  That's a strong ask. That's like, they'd be like Putin saying, listen, you know, it's good to talk to you, President Biden, we need your help destroying Ukraine and annexing it. That's what Xi Jinping has just asked of President Biden.

• 1:04:08Tim Ferriss?

  Has he given any specific dates in official statements or in closed conversations that then have transcripts for whatever reason? Have there been any dates mentioned?

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  There are certain dates that aren't tied explicitly to, you know, D-Day, but we know that 2027 is a year that Xi Jinping had told his military that it needs to be capable of taking them. And the Indo-Pacific Commander of the United States, this is a four-star Admiral Aquilino, Admiral Aquilino, who's soon leaving his job in Honolulu, he's responsible for practically half the world, you know, as a military commander. But he said before Congress recently that he thinks that China will meet, the Chinese military will meet that deadline of being ready to take Taiwan. Xi Jinping has also said things like, you know, he's expressed

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  his impatience by saying things to visiting people from Taiwan along the lines of, I'm not going to let this get passed down from generation to generation anymore. That was very much in contrast to what some of his predecessors used to say, like Deng Xiaoping said, if we have to wait 1,000 years, we'll wait 1,000 years for Taiwan, but we're not going to let it declare independence. Xi Jinping has changed that formula. He's saying, it's not good enough.

• 1:05:23Tim Ferriss?

  The buck stops with me.

• 1:05:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not good enough for Taiwan not to seek independence. It needs to come back into the bosom of the the motherland.

• 1:05:31Tim Ferriss?

  So coming back to what would need to be shown to sufficiently deter, in the case of the hard power, is it some type of official statement or some type of information that gets deliberately leaked so that it makes its way back to the CCP that is in effect? We have these numbers of these types of weapons. So we are prepared and ready. But that shows the capability, but not necessarily the will.

• 1:05:56Speaker 03

  That's right. Without capability, will is going to be insufficient oftentimes, right? So capability is a pretty good place to start. You touched on something, which is as you develop capabilities, they're not going to Deter very effectively if you don't show a little leg. You kind of show some of the things that we're working on. You create headaches for Chinese military planners who say, ah, I didn't think we'd have to deal with that. You know, we thought we were just had submarines and, you know, some bombers to worry about. No, you want a whole layered defense of different capabilities, some of which are pretty spooky. And there are things that are being worked on. You've probably heard of the replicator initiative, which is, I would refer you to some of the speeches by our Catherine Hicks, who's our current deputy secretary of defense.

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  She's working on some things that are designed to field large numbers of drones that could be very dangerous. They're very cheap. They're attritable. They can be, you know, they can be expendable for us and yet are very dangerous to exquisitely expensive hardware, like Chinese destroyers and frigates and ferries that would carry over men and equipment. So you want them to have to worry about several different dimensions of a layered defense. And then will is a tough one. But like I said, it's hard to measure in advance, but it starts with cultivating a culture of service, a strategic culture, like I would argue Israel has.

• 1:07:18Tim Ferriss?

  And you're saying in Taiwan?

• 1:07:19Speaker 03

  In Taiwan, absolutely.

• 1:07:20Tim Ferriss?

  And that can be done reasonably quickly? I mean, in the span of two or three years?

• 1:07:24Speaker 03

  There are really brave, energetic people trying to do that right now. You've got people like Enoch Wu. He was educated in the U.S., but went back to do his military service in Taiwan and has now built something called the Forward Alliance, which is basically a civilian cadre of emergency response workers. And it's, it has a lot of people signing up.

• 1:07:47Tim Ferriss?

  So if you were, let's just say hypothetically, back in the White House after the next election cycles, whoever ends up in the big seat, and they said, all right, Matt, next six months or next year, give us the top three things, I'll sign off.

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  On Taiwan specifically, because this is the biggest.

• 1:08:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, on Taiwan. I mean, if you wanted to throw in a bonus that's not Taiwan, that's fine too, from a national security perspective. But Taiwan or other, but certainly including Taiwan.

• 1:08:14Speaker 03

  Number one, I would ask the president to call Xi Jinping to tell him that we are imposing significant costs on his economy in response for the support he is providing to Iran, which is waging terrorist proxy wars against us and Israel and others in the Red Sea and across the Middle East and so forth, as well as his support for. Putin and his, the biggest war in Europe since 1945. Xi Jinping's the main backer of that war. He's the underwriter. The State Department says that Xi Jinping is spending more money on pro-Russian propaganda worldwide than Russia is spending on pro-Russian propaganda.

• 1:08:53Tim Ferriss?

  I had no idea.

• 1:08:54Speaker 03

  It's big.

• 1:08:54Tim Ferriss?

  How do you determine something like that? Not to put on my skeptics hat, but I'm like, how would you even figure that out, right? If the Russians are getting around sanctions with Tether and so on and so forth, at least according to cover story in the New York Times, how do you figure that out?

• 1:09:08Speaker 03

  Jamie Rubin is the head of the Global Engagement Center at the State Department. He knows the answer to that question.

• 1:09:13Tim Ferriss?

  I got it. Okay. So we got number one. So Mr. President.

• 1:09:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's number one. Imposing costs. You can't be an agent of chaos around the world to try to weaken the United States. By the way, you know what the next one is? Xi Jinping is backing the dictator in Venezuela, Maduro, to threaten his small neighbor Guyana. And so

• 1:09:35Tim Ferriss?

  Why?

• 1:09:36Speaker 03

  It's chaos. Like I said,

• 1:09:37Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I've spent some time down in Suriname, which is right next to Guyana. And it's like, these countries are tiny, tiny little countries. Now, they happen to be important for a couple of reasons, like Suriname with respect to the Netherlands and also narco trafficking and so on, but

• 1:09:51Speaker 03

  Oil.

• 1:09:52Tim Ferriss?

  Oil. Okay.

• 1:09:53Speaker 03

  Guyana has a lot of energy deposits and they've discovered more. And so Maduro's just signed a law, sort of claiming that the big, huge chunk of Guyana is actually Venezuelan territory. Guess who's backing him in that? Chinese Communist Party. Diplomatically, propagandistically, they're one of the main customers for the Venezuelans.

• 1:10:14Tim Ferriss?

  Now, is that chaos intended to distract the US specifically, or is it part of a broader strategy that includes but is not exclusive to the

• 1:10:24Speaker 03

  It's primarily about us, because they view us as the main obstacle to a world vision that Xi Jinping calls a community of common destiny for all mankind. And that is his

• 1:10:34Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds good.

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  I know. He's tied it to Marxist-Leninist theory, that basically you would have a series of Leninist, single-party dictatorships, and the United States is a big obstacle to that. So it's about spreading In 2021, Xi Jinping gave a speech where he said the most important word to describe the world today is chaos.

• 1:10:58Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  Chaos.

• 1:10:59Tim Ferriss?

  Literally.

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  Literally chaos, and it gets worse. He goes on in the speech to say that this works to China's advantage. He says that this trend of chaos will continue and the trends are in our favor. He also goes on to say that the risks of world turmoil are outweighed by the benefits to the Chinese Communist Party. Two years later, that was right before the Ukraine war went into overdrive. He signed an agreement, a no limits pact with Putin in February of 2022. And less than three weeks later, Putin was sending tanks in to try to take Kiev. Now, a year after that war began, Xi Jinping went to visit the Kremlin.

• 1:11:42Speaker 03

  He went to go see his best and most intimate friend. That's his own phrase, by the way. Xi Jinping says, "My best, most intimate friend is Vladimir Putin." He went to go check in on his friend, see how the war is going, see what he needs. And as Xi Jinping was leaving the Kremlin, he was caught on camera saying, in essence, that he was not only benefiting from chaos, but that he was one of the architects of global chaos. What he said specifically to Putin was, "Vladimir, you and I are seeing changes occurring in the world that only happen once in a century." And this is a phrase Xi Jinping uses a lot, "opportunity that comes once every hundred years." And he's talking about the opportunity for China to become the global dominant power.

• 1:12:27Speaker 03

  And he said, "You and I, Vladimir, are the ones driving those changes." So in essence, he was saying, "We're the architects of turmoil. We are agents of chaos." And so it gives you some insight into the way that he's thinking about these things. That's why I would tell the President of the United States, "Step number one is impose massive costs on China's economy until Beijing starts to back off of lighting or squirting lighter fuel on these conflagrations that are taking place now on multiple continents."

• 1:13:00Tim Ferriss?

  The opportunity of a lifetime, the chance that arrives only once every hundred years. Again, you know, there is part of me begrudgingly that has a high degree of admiration for the long-term.

• 1:13:14Tim Ferriss?

  Implementation of some degree of anti-fragility, right? Thinking in terms of Nassim Taleb. It's like, okay, can you not just be resilient in the face of chaos? But benefit from chaos?

• 1:13:24Speaker 03

  I think it'd be very dangerous not to respect an adversary that's as committed and capable as they are. When I worked at the White House, when I was Deputy National Security Advisor, my boss was Robert O'Brien, who was the National Security Advisor at the time. I remember him once saying to me, "Doesn't Xi Jinping take off a weekend to play golf?" It's just relentless, right? It's this constant, and it takes enormous effort to seize the initiative in that dynamic and to become a protagonist again in the story. Xi Jinping is the protagonist. I don't mean that in the sense that he's the hero. I mean it in the sense that he is the one driving events. By his own admission, in his little meeting with Vladimir Putin, he's the protagonist

• 1:14:05Speaker 03

  of the story, and it takes immense effort, will, coordination, and guts to actually seize back the initiative and to become the protagonist again in the story. Because it's not a story that's going to end well if we let Xi continue writing it.

• 1:14:21Tim Ferriss?

  I would love to segue briefly, because it's an area of deep fascination for me, to information or informational warfare. Disinformation, misinformation, just kind of statecraft in terms of intelligence, asset development. What are the most formidable techniques or capabilities that China has with respect to those types of activities? Because they seem to be very sophisticated and to have incredible patience also with a lot of it.

• 1:14:52Speaker 03

  They're getting more sophisticated about it. And of course, AI tools. I'm still waiting for our AI firmament, all these smart technologists who are developing these technologies, to figure out how to use that to sniff out foreign government interference. And I don't have a good answer yet, but what I can tell you is that Beijing is experimenting with deep fakes. They create whole personas that look like Westerners, speaking in very fluent, local...

• 1:15:21Speaker 03

  English or other languages. So they're able to localize the messengers and to create them out of digits. So they look like newscasters, you know, and yet they're providing fraudulent or deceptive sorts of messages.

• 1:15:36Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick side note, I say side by side comparison of a real Chinese newscaster and a deep fake Chinese newscaster. And you really could not, even at this point, tell the difference. It's remarkable. What other perhaps types of tells should people be aware of or cognizant of? And the one that comes to mind is, for instance, if you are maybe a naturalized citizen in the US, but ethnically Chinese, you have family in China, it seems like a lot of people have outreach on social media from folks they might develop a relationship with over years. And then low and behold, they're like, oh yeah, you know, it'd be really helpful. I saw you got promoted to like this tier in Google. It'd be really

• 1:16:18Tim Ferriss?

  helpful for me to know A, B, and C. Your family in Guangdong would really appreciate it.

• 1:16:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:24Tim Ferriss?

  Type of situation?

• 1:16:25Speaker 03

  LinkedIn has been a very potent espionage tool for the Chinese premier spy agency and others.

• 1:16:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So what kind of stuff should people be on the lookout for? If, I mean, they've like, what type of demographic should sort of be hip to these types of techniques?

• 1:16:43Speaker 03

  You know, sunshine is a good disinfectant. You know, if people understand what these modalities are, there've been a number of cases that MI5 and the UK and FBI here in the US have cracked that have involved people being approached through social media and things like LinkedIn. And you don't want to take money from strangers, you know, to to share secrets and things that you know, you need to know who you're really dealing with. And in that system, that type of activity always has to feed back into the party apparatus. It's what they're really good at. The Chinese Communist Party was really superior in many ways to the Soviet Communist Party because they perfected what's called united front

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

  activity. Now, what is united front? We don't use that word very often. It's a central concept in the history of the party. But especially under Xi Jinping, he has massively increased funding for united front activity. What it is, is it's something that's between legitimate organization and espionage. So it's things that involve a lack of transparency about what the real goals are. But what it's designed to do is to spot and assess and recruit allies to the party's goals. But they don't always let you know that it is actually for the sake of the party's goals. You think it's just an individual.

• 1:18:03Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give an example of what that looks like? Like down the espionage side, I'm like, okay, we've all seen spy movies. We can kind of imagine what that might look like. And then you've got two levels up. You've got a sort of official party doctrine and explicitly stated goals. This intermediary, could you give an example of what form that could take?

• 1:18:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lot of them have the name friendship organizations. Okay, there's a whole plethora of these groups. And it looks like it's an organic sort of small movement of people saying, well, this is something we believe. We believe that Taiwan really needs to become part of China again. That's our, that's our personal view. But in fact, the funding is coming from the Communist Party. The group has a huge tail to it. It has information that's being fed to it about people that show promise, that look like they're ideologically sympathetic or susceptible to some of those messages. And then it identifies up and coming politicians. They start to target and sometimes compromise, you know, a mayor who looks like someday he might be governor or even president. I'll give you

• 1:19:05Speaker 03

  another example are these, some of the student associations that look like, you know, we were in college, there are all kinds of student associations. But there's one, the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, which is actually reports to and is funded by the Chinese consulates and embassies. And they get special additional jobs. They're on 220 US campuses. That's by an old count. They have.

• 1:19:33Speaker 03

  People who organize protests against professors or students who are talking about things like Tibet, or talking about the Uighurs and the genocide there, or talking about democracy in China, or talking about Taiwan and all the great things about Taiwan, they will organize demonstrations because they have a playbook. That's actually one of the reasons that they've been constituted. And they also keep an eye on other Chinese students on campus who come from China. I met this terrific student who was at a university in the Midwest. I met her when she was still a student. I had a number of students come to the White House individually to tell us about some of the issues they were dealing with. And she had a friend on campus. She's from China. Her friend was from China. And

• 1:20:17Speaker 03

  she was organizing things having to do with the freedom of the Uighur people, and specific Uighurs who are being held as political prisoners.

• 1:20:25Tim Ferriss?

  Risky move if you have family in China.

• 1:20:27Speaker 03

  Risky move. And she does have family in China. And one of her friends one day told her, you know, who was actually part of this organization, he made sure that their phones weren't on them, that were in another room. He said, "I really like you. That's why I have to tell you, we shouldn't talk anymore, because I have to report back everything you tell me to handlers that ultimately, you know, go back to Beijing." And so here you have people who are coerced into spying on US campuses on fellow students. And so I think this is something we should take head on, you know, put a spotlight on it. I think we should be issuing a smartphone to every student who arrives from an authoritarian country in the United States. Make it a university program to say, "This is your freedom phone.

• 1:21:12Speaker 03

  You can put any apps on here that you want. Don't put any Chinese apps on here. Don't put TikTok on here. They'll see everything. Don't put WeChat, WeChat, the Chinese app, which is used also as a surveillance tool. Don't put that on here. Put all your free society things onto this phone, and then know that your other one is being monitored by Beijing, by the party." We should be doing much more for the Chinese diaspora that comes here to study. We should be giving them a shot at actually breaking free from this bubble of surveillance and censorship that follows them when they come to the United States. We should be breaking out of that.

• 1:21:50Tim Ferriss?

  Here's a question that I don't know the answer to, but I'm pulling on a thread that could be something I misremembered. Taiwan comes under Chinese rule. They now have Chinese passports and they travel overseas. How does the reach of an influence and ability to exert power on those citizens differ from, say, a US example where like US with a passport goes to, moves to Amsterdam and they're there and they're criticizing the US government. Okay, fine. But the equivalent example for someone with a Chinese passport or someone who gives up their passport, I'm not sure that's even a process you can go through in China, I don't know. But could you speak to that?

• 1:22:32Speaker 03

  There are Hong Kong citizens who have now moved to the UK or they've moved to the United States. Many of them are now Americans or British citizens who still come under coercive pressure. I can think of a couple who their parents have been called in in Hong Kong and there have been warrants issued for the arrest of American citizens for things they say about Hong Kong, not even in Hong Kong. So this is the extraterritorial new phase of China's repression, which is to say, we're not just going to repress our own people in our borders, we're not just going to threaten our people when they go abroad, we're going to threaten foreign citizens so that the

• 1:23:15Speaker 03

  things they say in their home country about us can be punishable under the national security law that's taken effect and has really undermined the autonomy and the rule of law of Hong Kong. So this is the new phase that people have to face up to. We should be helping, I mean, look, there's a mass exodus of people out of China right now. People from China want to live in countries where they can enjoy the rule of law, where human rights are going to be respected, where they have a lot of different opportunities that they can pursue. They're leaving by the millions to go to other countries. I think that we should view those people as natural allies. But that means that you have to make some work.

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  You have to take some steps because Beijing will use their families as hostages to make them quiet. I talked to a friend recently when I was visiting Japan. A lot of very wealthy Chinese have moved to Hokkaido in northern Japan. And recently a very-

• 1:24:12Tim Ferriss?

  Did not realize that.

• 1:24:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, you know, Singapore is one of the places that they're escaping to.

• 1:24:17Tim Ferriss?

  Singapore, I've heard for sure. I don't know how much safety that confers to someone, but-

• 1:24:21Speaker 03

  And Japan is another one, but I was told that a very outspoken, wealthy Chinese guy was recently run over by a car in Japan. I have to double check the story. But what I was told from someone who's pretty well plugged into that community was it had a chilling effect, that people viewed this as an effort by Beijing to cause discomfort about even speaking your mind in a free country like Japan. So we should be getting creative about ways to neutralize that sort of terror. We should be identifying people who are conducting that sort of extralegal interference in our own system, people who are thugs, people who are coerced into spine. We should be focusing on that so that people feel safe in the United States.

• 1:25:06Tim Ferriss?

  So I feel obligated to say a couple of things. So first is, for people listening, I fully recognize that this type of statecraft espionage, this is part of the game, right? China's not the only people with boots on the ground, right? Everyone is conducting this type of, maybe not exactly this species, but in terms of information gathering, having agents on the ground. I mean, this is just kind of part of geopolitics. And secondly, I want to say that I've spent time in China in a bunch of different places. I've enjoyed a lot of my trips. I've spent a lot of my life studying Chinese history. Did take a class on the Qing, believe it or not, way back in the day, even. I've spent time in Taiwan, Japan.

• 1:25:48Tim Ferriss?

  And what we're talking about is, at least for me, a grand- Chess match. Maybe chess isn't exactly the right game because that would be a game of complete information. You know, maybe it's closer to backgammon. Who knows?

• 1:26:01Speaker 03

  Did you ever play Wei Qi, the game Go?

• 1:26:04Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I have played Go. Yes, I have. Absolutely.

• 1:26:07Speaker 03

  It's closer to Go.

• 1:26:08Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, please explain.

• 1:26:09Speaker 03

  Go, you can see what's happening on the board, but you can't see the strategy readily.

• 1:26:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for those, for those who don't know, the image, white and black stones.

• 1:26:19Speaker 03

  It's a 19 by 19 board and famously up until recently, a computer could never beat a pretty good human being at Go.

• 1:26:28Tim Ferriss?

  Until AlphaGo.

• 1:26:30Speaker 03

  It's been years and years that chess masters have been defeated by AI. And then, of course, you had AlphaGo a handful of years ago, which changed it and actually taught Go masters new ways of approaching the game.

• 1:26:42Tim Ferriss?

  So wild.

• 1:26:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great, it's a great game.

• 1:26:45Tim Ferriss?

  Demis Hassabis.

• 1:26:46Speaker 03

  But China's playing Go, we're playing checkers right now. If we can get our game up to playing chess against their Go, we've got a chance.

• 1:26:53Tim Ferriss?

  So the broader question I wanted to ask you was, US, what a rocket ship. This young upstart of a country, bada bing bada boom, has turned into this incredible global superpower. In terms of studying empires, pretty short-lived so far, still an adolescent, let's just say. But what can the US do, in your mind, broadly speaking, to continue to act as a global superpower? And maybe this ties into other factors that could affect China, like a population implosion, if that seems to be a pending problem with birth replacement rates and so on in the next 20, 30 years. I don't know. But what are the

• 1:27:36Tim Ferriss?

  things the US should be thinking of? Maybe if we go one level up, there are China-specific questions, but this is more a permanence question writ large. What can the US do? Or should do differently?

• 1:27:50Speaker 03

  One thing we should first do is

• 1:27:54Speaker 03

  Recognize that we are a very special country. We have to recognize that the things that the United States has made possible well beyond our borders, democracy, the Bill of Rights, look at how many countries around the world have emulated that model. And yet, that model is not sustainable without the United States. You can't have British successful parliamentary democracy today, or in Denmark, or in Japan, if the United States does not remain the strongest democracy.

• 1:28:25Tim Ferriss?

  Why is that?

• 1:28:27Speaker 03

  Because the nature of these Leninist systems, or totalitarian systems, that are more like monarchies, like you have with Russia or North Korea today, they are compulsively hostile, because they will never feel safe within their borders, or confined to their borders, when their neighbors are liberal democracies. It's just, you know, it doesn't matter how much you try to reassure them, the nature of that kind of a system is that it is compulsively hostile. And so, small countries are not going to have an easy time standing up to a juggernaut, like the People's Republic of China, so long as it is a totalitarian Leninist system. And now, China's stitching together, you know, an axis of these countries.

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  Venezuela is one of the minor partners. Iran is a more important partner. North Korea is a freakish, difficult partner, but a partner nonetheless. And then you've got, and then you've got Russia.

• 1:29:25Tim Ferriss?

  The difficult cousin of the family reunion.

• 1:29:26Speaker 03

  Exactly. You know, the Kim family regime is, you know, spoils a lot of dinners at the holidays. But what you are facing now is a very significant decision by these unnatural partners to decide to work together, because they believe they have a once-in-a-century opportunity right now to break the back of American credibility and American power. So first, we have to recognize that as many problems as we have at home, and I'm the first, that'll be another podcast for us to talk about, we are a country that deals with those problems openly, and with the participation of our citizenry, and with the protection of the rule of law. Those are very, very special things that we should not take for granted, and we should

• 1:30:11Speaker 03

  actually be proud of them and own them. And I think if we were to do that, even as we talk openly about the legacy, Ronald Reagan, when he was president... People remember that he made this very, you know, hostile set of remarks about the Soviet Union. He called it "an evil empire." He said it was "the root of all evil in the world." People forget that when he gave that evil empire speech, he also talked about the legacy of evil in American history. He talked about slavery. I mean, can you imagine a Chinese leader or Putin giving a speech like that? It's impossible because they don't...

• 1:30:47Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning one finger pointing outward, but another finger pointing backward.

• 1:30:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, saying, "Look, we are a country that navigates by a North Star that is really worthy of navigating by." Even though we don't reach the North Star, when we deviate from that path, we know that we're on the wrong path. So we have to keep going towards those higher human ideals, the things that the founders framed in the Declaration and in the Constitution. These are very powerful ideas and things that we should continue to try to live by. But by speaking more openly about those things, we should also not be afraid to be candid about what distinguishes our system from ones that are actually pretty

• 1:31:31Speaker 03

  dark. I'm sorry, genocide in the year 2024, as recognized by a number of countries, as recognized by both, you know, Mike Pompeo, when he was Secretary of State, and by Tony Blinken, when he was his Secretary of State. This is not a country that we're going to be able to do business with amiably. This is not a leader who has declared himself essentially an agent of chaos in the world and who's funding anti-democratic and anti-American propaganda. That's not someone who we're going to be able to resolve problems with. Okay, so we need to be a bit more real. We need to impose more costs. We need to be rhetorically sharper in drawing the distinctions between who we and our allies are and other democracies.

• 1:32:13Tim Ferriss?

  And that's in terms of just informational campaigns in the US for the citizenry of the US, you mean?

• 1:32:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, President Biden has given some good speeches. You know, when he first came into power, he... People rarely read strategy documents. I wish the press would do a better job of reading them, but because, you know, the president took the time to write an introduction to his strategic guidance six weeks into his administration. And he said, "We're facing a serious moment right now that's going to determine whether the world is predominantly democratic, law-abiding, peaceful, or whether it's going to be..."

• 1:32:47Speaker 03

  Authoritarian, anti-democratic, violent. And so I'd like to hear him talk more about that, but then also to follow up with more policies that show that we're doing something about those problems. That's where I think the disconnect has been with President Biden. But I think those speeches were admirable.

• 1:33:05Tim Ferriss?

  So I'd like to segue to some of your personal history because maybe it ties into other parts of this conversation. So age 32, you make some decisions. So can you walk us through some of what you did up to that point? And then what changed?

• 1:33:21Speaker 03

  I spent my twenties, for the most part, as a reporter, writing for Reuters and the Wall Street Journal in China. I spent, you know, eight or nine years in total, either as a student or as a reporter living in China. It was a great, exciting time to be there through the 90s into the early 2000s. But I had a near miss on September the 11th. I was coming back from our Hong Kong bureau to visit the editor, the managing editor and the foreign editor of the Wall Street Journal. And our office happened to be right across the street from the World Trade Center. So the World Financial Center was the old Wall Street Journal headquarters at that time. And I had gotten in the day prior. My father, who lives in Westchester County, New York, said, I've got an idea.

• 1:34:06Speaker 03

  I'll drive you into town tomorrow. You're right there at the World Financial Center. Why don't we get breakfast at Windows on the World, in the World Trade Center? And I said, look, I've got to prepare my story ideas. I'm going to be talking to Paul Steiger and John Bussi, the, you know, top editors at the Journal. I want to tell them what I want to work on. I want to tell them what I've been working on and some of the ideas I have. And I'm exhausted. I'm jet lagged. Let's just sleep in and you can just drive me straight in. I'm gonna, I'll grab a bagel for the car ride. So as we were headed into town, we got the news that the towers had been hit while we were listening to the talk radio, AM talk radio. And as it unfolded, it became clear and clearer what had happened. This wasn't an accident. It was something much more serious than that.

• 1:34:50Speaker 03

  We left the city before we'd even really gotten deep into it, went back home. And I stewed on that. I mean, I was absolutely in a state of shock about the September 11 terrorist attacks. I ended up going back to the bureau and writing in Beijing and in Hong Kong and other places in China for the next few years, but I was watching out of the corner of my eye as the US went into Afghanistan and then ultimately in 2003 decided to invade Iraq. And by 2004, as I'm watching these developments, it became clear to me that the war in Iraq was going very badly. We had the two battles of Fallujah. It was metastasizing into really

• 1:35:32Speaker 03

  an insurgency. And then there was sort of a confluence of a bunch of different influences in my life. You know, my stepfather had been an air force officer. His dad flew B-17s in World War II. I grew up with those stories and with a strong sense of respect for military service. As a result, they were both West Point grads. I also met a bunch of Marines in quick succession by happenstance. You know, I don't know if you remember the Indian Ocean tsunami that struck the Indian Ocean countries, Southeast Asia, you know, devastating. A quarter million or so people were killed by that tsunami after, day after Christmas 2004. I got scrambled down to Thailand to cover that story and ended up pulling back from

• 1:36:17Speaker 03

  the devastation along the beach, you know, where I'm interviewing family members, survivors of this thing. And I went up to Udaan Air Base, which was an old airbase in Thailand that the US used to use during the Vietnam War, except it was bustling again with American troops who had all arrived basically to carry out the humanitarian response to that tsunami. And the guy who was in charge was a Marine. I met a bunch of these young kids who were like, I couldn't even make coffee when I was, you know, 20. And here you had the corporals who were leading squads of Marines and they were, they were really gung ho and proud of the work they were doing to help get humanitarian stuff out there. So anyway, one thing leads

• 1:36:58Speaker 03

  to another. And I, suddenly I meet a Marine Colonel around that time who challenges me to go visit a recruiting station. I couldn't even believe it. You know, it was actually an officer selection office, right? It's a recruiting office for officers of the Marine Corps. And I started reading up on the Marine Corps. I ended up taking an appointment and going down to the USS Intrepid, which is the aircraft carrier museum on the Hudson River.

• 1:37:25Tim Ferriss?

  Let me pause you for one second. So you have a job. You're doing pretty well with a job.

• 1:37:32Speaker 03

  No, it was great.

• 1:37:33Tim Ferriss?

  What was the inner monologue or the moment where you're like, okay, I'm actually going to take this meeting because now you've crossed a threshold, right? When you're taking a meeting like, so how did you just make that decision?

• 1:37:46Speaker 03

  It's funny. I mean, it was a

• 1:37:47Tim Ferriss?

  Or was it more of a like, ah, can't hurt?

• 1:37:49Speaker 03

  No, no, it was sometimes it was sort of out of body experience, like the logic became more and more apparent as I made those tentative steps. And then it came to feel almost inevitable, but the feelings, sort of abstract feelings were, wow, we're in trouble. Our power, our system, our constitution, all these things are actually more fragile than I thought they were. Number one. Number two, we're losing a war and fighting another war at the same time in Afghanistan, which would end up going worse over time. And then there was the feeling that, what if I don't do this? I have a happy job. I'll become a bureau chief in one of the Wall Street Journal offices. I love the Wall Street Journal. I love reporting, but I also

• 1:38:31Speaker 03

  had this sense that if I don't do this, I may regret it because this is the moment where I'm supposed to serve. We're in two wars. They're not going well. If I don't serve now, I won't be able to serve. I'll be too old to do it. So I need to do this gut check and see if this is something I'm up to. And it became a test of myself, too. It was a self test.

• 1:38:50Tim Ferriss?

  So then what happened?

• 1:38:52Speaker 03

  I discovered that I'm out of shape and I meet a Marine who is studying in Beijing. He's a captain and he's there doing an Olmsted Foundation Scholarship, which is like, you know, you can go study in a foreign university for a year or two and he's getting his master's degree. It's such a great Marine Corps moment because I'm a nobody. I'm a stranger. But I meet him at the Marine Corps Birthday Ball, which I don't know if you've ever, any city you go to in the world.

• 1:39:16Tim Ferriss?

  I've never been to a Marine Birthday Ball.

• 1:39:17Speaker 03

  Well, the Marines

• 1:39:18Tim Ferriss?

  That's where you're gonna ask me.

• 1:39:19Speaker 03

  The Marines who guard our embassies around the world, every year for the Marine Corps' Birthday, when it was founded, November the 10th, they put together a ball where they invite dignitaries and the ambassador and foreign attachés and so forth. And I got invited to one of these things and I end up meeting This Marine captain who's in his dress blues and I tell him, I gotta let you in on something. My family doesn't know this, my employers don't know this, but I just have to, I just have to spill my guts to you. I'm thinking of joining the Marine Corps. And so, within two days, at sunup, I'm at a stadium with him in the middle of Beijing, and he's PTing me, giving me physical training. We're doing sprints and interval training around the Workers Stadium. And this guy becomes my personal trainer, just kicks my

• 1:40:04Speaker 03

  ass. His name's Cedric Lee, he's still in, he's a Colonel now, in the Marine Corps, working at the White House. And Cedric Lee trains me to be ready, and trains me so well, that by the time I get to Officer Candidate School, I'm actually near the front of the pack, at least on the physical aspect. Cause I'm not a big guy, I'm light, you know, he got me so I could do 20 pull-ups, dead hang pull-ups, and I could run my ass off. And then I was in for the shock of actually going through 10 weeks of Officer Candidate School training, six months of the basic school training to become a provisional rifle platoon commander, and then intel training after that. It was unbelievable organization and culture.

• 1:40:45Tim Ferriss?

  What would you say were the biggest impacts of that experience on you?

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  It's funny, I mean, one of the first things you learn, you just inhabit your own head all the time. That's what we do when we walk around.

• 1:40:57Tim Ferriss?

  Nature of being human.

• 1:40:58Speaker 03

  It's called being human. And you come into this thing, they're like, hey, this isn't about you. You're like, well, what do you mean? I made a decision to be here. They're like, no, no. We had this great Colonel, Colonel Chase, who was running the Officer Candidate School. He was a former enlisted guy, he'd been a drill instructor, now he's a Colonel running the Officer Candidate School. And he gives this talk, it was very personal, it was visceral, because he had been a drill instructor too. And he basically said, none of you are gonna make it through here if I don't believe that you're gonna be a good leader of Marines. And this was a promise, this was a threat. And he held to it. I heard that he got in trouble for tritting so many officer candidates, at a time when we were at war, that he got some shit for that. But I'm proud of him, irrespective of whether

• 1:41:39Speaker 03

  that's true. He basically winnowed out almost half of the group of us. And he basically said, if I don't see it, if I don't smell it on you, that you're gonna be a good leader of those Marines, whose lives you're gonna be responsible for and putting at risk, then I'm not gonna let you march across the grinder and become a Marine officer. You're not gonna pin those lieutenant bars on. And so, this culture, where suddenly... Now you're suddenly feeling real responsibility. It's like, holy shit, I'm not responsible for myself in war. I'm responsible for a platoon of 40 young men and women. It's a shock. And, you know, I didn't have any leadership skills naturally. Everything I learned had to get pounded into me through repetition and screaming and

• 1:42:22Speaker 03

  and making mistakes and touching the electric fence and finding out it hurts. And, you know, it was really something. The other thing about the Marine Corps that people should all know, and this goes for the military generally, is that the Marine Corps in particular pushes down responsibility. It delegates to the lowest level. So the idea is, think about how many things in American life are about, we're going to give opportunity to the guy who's at the top. The creme de la creme de la creme de la creme. We're going to keep skimming and giving you unlimited opportunity to achieve your goals, to achieve fame and fortune. Marine Corps is the opposite. It says, I want to know who the worst guy is in your platoon, and I want to make sure that you're pulling him up so that the baseline is impressive.

• 1:43:07Speaker 03

  Now you're talking about an organization that is incredibly effective because the worst guy is pretty good. So it's very much about, the focus is on the bottom layer of the pyramid. And the officers are, just have the privilege of being custodians for a while and being able to lead a group that has leadership already imbued in it. And where young 20-year-old, 19-year-old Lance Corporal or Corporal has immense responsibility very, very quickly.

• 1:43:39Tim Ferriss?

  We're going to wrap up in a few minutes, but I wanted to ask, are there one or two leadership lessons, as you said, that had to get pounded into you? One or, one or two that have really stuck with you? Could be something you observed, could be a principle, could be... Some type of expression, anything that sticks out.

• 1:43:55Speaker 03

  Marine Corps talks a lot about both physical courage, but also moral courage. So moral courage is more important. It's this idea that you will do the right thing when no one's looking. The idea that you will sacrifice yourself and not your integrity or your honor, but your position in order to make sure that the right thing gets done, even when it exposes you to ridicule. And moral courage isn't something that people talk about a lot in everyday life. I'll tell you one funny, quick story. You just reminded me of, because we're talking about the basic school. You have to do gas chamber training where you put on a gas mask and you run into this concrete hut, which they fill with CS tear gas.

• 1:44:41Speaker 03

  Okay. And I was in the first wave to go through this and they're teaching you how to wear the mask, how to clear the mask so that you take the mask off and then learn how to clear it, just like you're scuba diving. It's a lot like that. And because I was either insufficiently attentive, but also because I was still getting acquainted with the gear, one of the valves was partway open. So you have these two like coin sized valves on the side where one side, depending on which side you hold your rifle on, you put the canister there that filters out the gas. So when I got in there, I cleared the mask and put it back on, but I was sucking in pure CS gas through this hole, gaping hole in the front of my mask. And anyone who tells you that tear gas isn't lethal is full of shit. You can easily die from this stuff.

• 1:45:26Speaker 03

  And I ended up asphyxiating. My entire throat closed off and I passed out and I slid down the wall. And I ended up getting carried out on the back of, you know, a fellow lieutenant. And so here you've got a whole company of Marines getting ready to go through and I'm the first one out and they lay me down on the ground, stripped my mask off. And everyone at first thought it was a joke, that it was meant to just kind of like spook them. And then they saw that I was deep, deep purple, like blue and not breathing. And one of the corporals, so it was a sergeant, came over and literally was about to give me mouth to mouth and was sort of pushing my chest and so forth. And then I, I sprung up to my feet again.

• 1:46:11Speaker 03

  I mean instantly, like, you know, wild wake up. And apparently I turned from purple to blue to green and like, like in front of everyone's faces and a couple of lieutenants started puking.

• 1:46:27Speaker 03

  But the best part of the story is my, my commander, my platoon commander is looking at me. I mean, I'm just in, I'm just a mess. Right? I mean, I've been unconscious and Captain Gaskell, who was my platoon commander says, Hey, do you know where you're going? And I said, uh, you know, to the infirmary? He says, No, you're going straight back in. And so I get my mask fixed and then I go and do the whole thing again. And it worked out. But that was, that was one of my.

• 1:46:53Tim Ferriss?

  Back on the horse, son.

• 1:46:54Speaker 03

  I lost some IQ points that I never got back from that whole incident, unfortunately.

• 1:46:59Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. Well, man of many stories, many capabilities, and I'm very glad we got time to not just meet and spend time eating pho at your house, which was spectacular, but also talking about some very important topics. And the book is The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, which I'm very excited about. I encourage people to check this out. So anything else you would like to mention, say, point my audience to anything at all that you'd like to mention before we wind to a close?

• 1:47:37Speaker 03

  I'll only say one thing, which is that service is really good stuff, you know, like a life of service, whether it's military service or teaching, but public service is one of the best mistakes I stumbled into in my life. So for, especially for your young listeners. And I joined the Marine Corps at 32 and wouldn't trade that experience for anything.

• 1:47:58Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks so much, Matt. I really appreciate all the time. And for everybody listening, we'll link to everything in the show notes as per usual, timetoplog/podcast. You can search Matt Pottinger, probably be easier, Taiwan, boiling mode, any of those things, and it'll pop right up. And until next time, be a bit kinder than is necessary, as always, to others, but also to yourself. And thanks for tuning in.

• 1:48:22Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

• 1:49:04Tim Ferriss?

  And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, one of my absolute favorite companies, and they make some of my favorite products. Shopify is the commerce platform revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide, and I've known the team since 2008 or 2009. But prior to that, I wish I had personally had Shopify in the early 2000s

• 1:49:49Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:50:33Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:51:15Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:51:56Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:53:22Tim Ferriss?

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