#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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/5852991d77355902

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At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And I asked you a personal question.
Now we're just seeing it.
My cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal mental skeleton.
No
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris, and welcome to a special episode of the Tim Ferris 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 US deputy national security advisor from 2019

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 nineteen nineties and early two thousands in China as a reporter for Reuters.
and the Wall Street Journal. He then fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as a US Marine,
During three combat deployments between two thousand seven and
and twenty ten.
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.
It's coming out July.
First.
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.
I'm delighted to be here.
Thanks for having me. Absolutely. How Joe Butch. Yeah.
Hun Jul was yeah. Your tones are actually still uh quite sharp, yeah, acute. I don't know how you did that.
I guess we saw each other not too long ago, and we're sitting
In your kitchen, at your dining room table.
And there was some calligraphy on the wall.
And I asked you because my character's

Rough round the edges.
Right.
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?
That piece of calligraphy
was written for me by Balthorn.
Bautong was a
High Chinese official.
In the People's Republic of China, і happened to be the chief of staff.
to the party secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Zhao Tseyang.
When the Tiananmen protests
took off in the spring of nineteen eighty nine.
And Bao Tong.
Ended up.
Like his boss getting arrested.
His boss spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Balto 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 and
We developed a a friendshirem remotely.
And he wrote two pieces of calligraphy for me, and that one says

And the unwritten but
Second part of that is Holty La or La.
Famous quote by uh
Chinese
statesman from a thousand years ago named Fan Jong Yen. And Fan Jong Yen was
This polymath who created the Chinese
you know, examination system and and so forth. But he was a loyal
Official
Who had to go into exile. That's what would happen, you know, if you really screwed up, you'd get killed, you know, by the emperor, but he he got sent into exile.
But it's really a motto. 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 i it's about the responsibility of a good official.
How did you develop a friendship?
With this person.
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.
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 gonna talk about how that entered the scene.
And I've spent time at two universities in China. This was a long time ago, ninety six. Yeah.
And we both studied
East Asian languages in school.
How did you decide to do that?
It was highly accidental, like most uh good things in life.
I was studying Spanish in high school.
And my Spanish teacher and I
Weren't a good match.
Uh, yeah, which is to say he was strict and serious and I was a you know a fifteen year old
Who uh 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 in the nineteen eighties. I was at a high school, which was very unusual at the time, to have a Chinese teacher. Where was this? This is in in Milton, Massachusetts. Milton Academy, south of Boston. Yeah, good school. And Mr. Murray, Michael Murray, was walking across the quad and I was
Trying to figure out how on earth I'm gonna 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 Jirtson. I study classical if contemporary Chinese isn't hard enough for you. Yeah, it's like it's like just starting to learn English and someone's like, we're just gonna throw in Latin on top of that. Yeah, with a little Beowulf on the side. Enjoy.
Old English and Latin while you're struggling to you know to order a pizza in in in a new language. So
I was really lucky to have great teachers and I
Remember, I studied with Perry Link. Oh, Perry. I studied with Perry. Princeton University. Amazing teacher. He was my Chinese teacher for a summer program in Beijing. Yeah. And we're still in touch uh today. No kidding. Oh yeah.
Wow, I did not know that part. Lean Lausher. Lean Lausher. Oh man.
Brutal in his enforcement of the tones, which is probably why it's stuck. I just remember stuck. I just remember.
This was let's see, probably ninety five, ninety six.
Chinese one oh one.
At Princeton at the time.
And
The first class had maybe thirty five students.
I would say a few weeks later.
Fourteen students?
It was Yeah. Serious attrition. Serious thinning. That's like my Mar my Marine Corps officer candidate school class was roughly that level of attrition. So uh he's uh no nonsense.
And uh and a w a wonderful teacher.
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 one had five or six classes a week, I wanna say it was some unbelievable volume of classes. And uh that was, I wanna 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.
And we would all repeat
Whatever word happened to be, right? Like I wanna say it was something like yes you and
So we're saying this word, you know, yeah and and she's like and he's like
Holds up a finger and he's like, You you know, again again, again. And he just made her do it like twelve times and we're like, Oh, the brutality. It is it's Marine Corps methods. Yeah, it's a drill instructor. But it worked. And a question for you, when you learned Chinese, and I'm gonna back step 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
Yeah, I don't know if you remember this. It was uh so it was
Teaching tones with
different spellings. So the Romanized version of say
Gwa second tone would be GWO.
Or if you want to say like two qua, like I went.
Fourth tone would be G U O H
It seemed to work really well in terms of memorizing tones, where pinion with diacritical marks was really hard for a lot of students to remember.
Did you learn with pinion? I did learn with pinion. 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 uh language to approximate Chinese, or you end up studying the Yi Ching and and teaching it the mystical
Text.
From way back. But
I learned it with regular lua pinin, which is sort of the Chinese standard one, but what I learned
From teachers like
Perry Link and Wang Sui 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 yet or the grammar.
You had to be able to say
Those words just emulate, mimic.
The sounds of the
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 uh
Pinion. 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
Four languages.
After I learned Chinese, I learned Japanese. I've forgotten most of it because this was thirty 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 vocabulists. Not studying the Roman in Japanese is called romaji, right? You're 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. So it's starting like a child.
With the sounds and then getting to vocab and grammar.
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 gonna get off this language learning kick in a second, but
I went from public school on Long Island.
to Saint 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, if 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. So 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 I threw so much against the wall with Japanese to begin with.
Perfect. 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. Totally right.
It makes me want to go back to learning Spanish because that was the my the worst approach that I took. I eventually got back to Spanish. Awesome. 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 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.
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 gonna edge into that, but since it's the topic of the hour.
TikTok.
You and I've 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? 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
So they go in and
And actually look at where specific users are.
to track their activities and who they know and what 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.
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 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, 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 seven
Terror attacks by Hamas in in southern Israel.
occurred.
That stuff trends.
At multiples of what it does on things like Instagram.
Or reels.
or ex
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 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 back, 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 Politbure, which is the highest body of Communist Party.
Officials.
And it's on external discourse mechanisms. And what he's talking about is
In fact, one of a senior intelligence officers said publicly
It doesn't matter what's true.
And what's false. It only matters.
the platform.
And therefore, we need to use this platform to win the global majority.
So C J Ming holds this study session, the People's Daily, which is the Communist Party mouthpiece newspaper. A couple 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 in our democracy.

First is in terms of company structure.
or parent company structure.
People involved. Is there anything
That would be
Sort of instructive.

Let's begin with that.
And why should we
Take you to be an expert in TikTok.
How have you studied this? I
Have the benefit of working closely with a number of extremely talented
Historiens
Linguists.
Technologists who are focused on China.
We run a small
private company. We do research, open source research about what China's doing and where it's going. My colleague, John Garneau and Matthew Johnson, two colleagues of mine, Matthew's great, he was a Oxford professor of Chinese modern
government before we uh kidnapped him to come do work for us. John Garneau 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 advisors in uh Canberra.
Anyway.
They decided

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 Jiang Yi Ming, uh you know, very bright, talented
entrepreneur and technologist in China and some of his
Partners.
And it quickles 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 Bite Dance. Bite Dance is the
parent company that fully controls tick tock.
along with a number of other apps, including a Chinese version of TikTok that's called Do Yin.
And it turns out they share
The same engineers in China.
Same engineering core, same algorithms, but adjusted very, very differently. So if you go to Doe Ying.
In China.
You're not gonna see any of this awful.
content. You're gonna see wholesome.
content and pro
Communist Party content. You're not gonna see
things that hit 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 Bite Dance.
With responsibility
for all of the apps and their content.
І also the Communist Party Seкретарі.
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.
Editor in chief.
Of all apps. And he's the also the deputy communist party secretary for the company. So it took a lot of digging to piece all of this together because.
Tick tock.
And Bite Dance 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 is a foreign company. They say, oh no, no, we're Singaporean. It's nonsense.
It has nothing to do with Singapore. I mean there 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, he's sort of a spokesman.
He doesn't have any power compared to the communist party secretariat that actually governs.
TikToks.
Parent company.
So a question about
the airbrushing for a second.
So I'm trying to think of the the most
Let's just say obvious close 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
Uh
Any particular things that you could give.
Well.
There's much less visibility because people might be wondering, well, yeah, maybe it's how you torture the data, right? Maybe it's like, yeah, it appears 10% on Instagram and
eight percent on TikTok, but really is that conclusive?
Are there any, to your mind, very clear cases?
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 the ranking committee.
member is uh Congressman Krishna Morthy.
Who's a democrat from Illinois.
the very bipartisan group of uh twenty or so congressmen and women who 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 eight percent incremental difference.
We're talking
From three to five to ten to fifty ex.
Certain
content that would appear on other
US based platforms.
So uh pro Chinese military
Propaganda.
You know, multiples.
anti Israeli and some of it really nakedly just anti Semitic content.
Cool question. Because people might wonder. Why would that be a
Potential.
CCP government priority. It's perfectly aligned with Beijing's policy. What Beijing did when
Putin it.
reinvaded with a full scale invasion in early twenty twenty two.
Ukraine
Чана сайди.
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
Comis 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 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 gonna be ad advantageous.
to Xi Jinping and his party.
So
When the attack occurred on the seventh of October.
In southern Israel.
Hamas did their worst.
depraved uh terrorist attacks.
China immediately oriented
It's propaganda.

Blame Israel.
And to blame the United States, just like it blamed Ukraine and blamed the United States.
For the war that uh Vladimir Putin undertook. So they take the side of the aggressor.
and try to spin the aggressor into a victim.
Because anything that
Embarrasses, humiliates, discredits.
United States.
is a good thing under that model.
And that's why China had okay relations with Israel until October the seventh, and now they've demonized Israel because they view that as a way
To discredit the United States.
I have to say there's
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
deep familiarity 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 four D 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 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 gonna 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 gonna 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
Certainly

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 it the macro.
Things that might be embarrassing. And if we look at, for instance, these may or may not be the right examples, but
Tibet.
Uyghur or ethnic minorities in China.
Are those
Ten percent, twenty percent less than other platforms?
Or is it
It's almost zero. It's almost zero.
On TikTok. Very hard to find. There was a 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 uh traditionally Islamic
Weager people.
She wanted to get
word out about that on TikTok. So she recorded an eyelash video for she's showing doing a how to how to curl your eyelashes.
While she's doing this, she suddenly cuts into talking about the genocide, what's going on there, and then eventually TikTok even erased.
That content.
I agree with you the four D chess.
Is no joke. 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, you know. And and 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 containment with some variations and so forth. We'd be well served to remember what Senator Vandenberg said. You remember who Vandenberg was? He was an isolationist Republican before World War II, who ended up becoming an internationalist.
Bipartisan partner.
Of a democratic.
Democratic president Harry Truman
And he ended up getting the Marshall Plan.
Through the
Senate.
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 what does that mean?
It means we can have bitter debates internally.
between left and right демократс републики тромба
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 probably the most successful.
you know, multilateral alliance in in world history.
And you've seen it strengthen.
by um putin's attack on ukraine
President Biden's meeting with uh the Japanese prime minister. We've got a very strong relationship with Japan, with South Korea.
with Australia the Філіпенс
And those things serve us well. Those are our shields that
Protect us. We're gonna talk about we're gonna segue to Taiwan in a second. I wanna 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 policy makers 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.
Yeah.
Just a quick note before we get back to the interview, this conversation with Matt was recorded prior to the April twenty third passage of the TikTok bill in the Senate.
Go to Tim dot blog slash TikTok to learn more about the bill.
No?
Back to the episode.

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 tick tock.
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
Whole generation of Americans
communicate and acquire their news.
Remember the the TikTok you say, Oh no, it's just cat videos. It's actually a primary source of news.
for people under the age of thirty.
We would never have алад нації.
To control.
all of our newspapers and radio stations in the nineteen thirties. And in fact we passed laws
Under
President F D R 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, hundred year old rules almost that are
Blessed by the Supreme Court, they are sound.
with our uh 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, 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
AIDS are now
Full time lobbyists for TikTok.
Several of them.
Okay.
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 the 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
Кана би он.
by a Chinese entity.
And subject to
Chin Communist Party control.
They simply have to sell it.
And then the thing will still happen.
Відія з нато спрес
or ban the speech that people are contributing to TikTok is to make sure that that speech is actually organic.
And unfettered.
And is not manipulated and suppressed or amplified.
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 D C 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 A CLU'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 according to
A hostile government.
And then on the right, you've got Jeff Yas.
Who is
one of the other largest shareholders in tick tock 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.
And what was the senator's name who you mentioned for
Can't well. 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 they don't work for her anymore. This is her former deputy chief of staff and and one or two other senior
Aids to her who have left.
To lobby for TikTok. What are the incentives? I don't really understand lobbying. Like w how does that
work in brief. Just what like why would they do that?
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 gonna 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.
All right, thank you for that. And
We're gonna go to Taiwan now.
So
Taiwan, what is the

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 why is it important? What does it matter? Why does it matter?
It's a small
I can't remember the size. It's 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 you, Shanjade 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 twenty five 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. In fact, General MacArthur, Douglas MacArthur, would agree with this assessment. And in fact, he made a similar assessment all the way back in nineteen fifty, after World War Two. He said at 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 eighteen ninety five all the way for fifty years till the end of World War Two. And they used it as a springboard to move into Southeast Asia, particularly when World War Two.
Kicked up. Nineteen forty, forty-one.
The Japanese were
Promoting this idea 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 gonna 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 South East Asia. And then of course the United States
comes into the war after Pearl Harbor in late nineteen forty one. The rest is history.
China's following a similar model.
To the Japanese model of nineteen forty. 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. Chao Ludzi
Talking about
The importance
Of
Asia remaining in control of Asians, by which he means Beijing.
It was Tokyo in nineteen forty, but it is very similar language to what we heard when the Japanese were promoting a a greater East Asia co prosperity sphere, which was an empire.
I
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So did you mention the size of Taiwan? Sounds like a spec.
Why is it positionally
Advantageous.
If you look at the map from the perspective of China and you're looking eastward.
Mm-hmm.
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 Filippine Islands.
So you've got
Basically democracies.
That him 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
І несен а гейтве
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 a hundred and fifty miles from China's coast.
It means that Chinese bomber patrols it provides safe passage in safe passage for them to, in the words of their own doctrine.
inflict a blockade on Japan at will.
Could you say more about that? What is a blockade against Japan?
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.
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 f 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. 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.
Freedom of speech, equality, rule of law, equality of access to run for government.
Taiwan's legislature is forty percent women compared to I think about 27, 28 percent 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 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.
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 bus 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 that
The positional advantage.
Of say Beijing.
having control of Taiwan as you just described. The geographic element.
But if Taiwan falls ideologically
What are the ripple effects? I think what you have at that point is a state of emergency in all 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, uh, you know, during COVID and tw twenty. Imagine you're in a situation where
These countries are having to rapidly militariz 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 visited Taiwan
generally come away with a pretty
positive impression. It's almost like they're visiting
This uh 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 it's all there and it is unfettered. It is unmolested by And for people who don't have the history, though I mean a lot of that got cleaned out.

of mainland for a host of different reasons.
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 blow uh the Communist Party.
Okay, so we have the
Geographic importance. We've got the
Ideological ideological component.
Is there anything else you would add to that? Economy. Uh look, Taiwan, this amazing
Small country.
produces ninety two percent of the advanced semiconductors in the world.
Ninety two percent.
We're talking about
That's wild. I know. We're talking about uh CPUs, central processing units that go into your phone to GPUs, which are the the chips like NVIDIA is famous for making that
are really central to everything from self driving cars to uh other AI

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, uh 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.
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 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.
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?
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. It's the D word.
Deterrence.
Okay, deterrence is a funny thing. People don't
don't often think about deterrence as a strategy. We think that if we just kind of build a 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 coerciv annex Taiwan,
There will be costs.
Associated with that that are gonna 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 deterrence by denial. We will deny you your goal.
Taiwan will be so well outfitted 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 gonna run into so many sea mines. You're gonna 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.
I got it. So you're speaking from the perspective of Taiwan. 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.
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?

And this may relate on a more macro level, is that
Yeah, 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. For instance, like do we even have enough
Do we have sufficient quantities of
missiles or fill in the blank.
Right. That's a really key one. So 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 seventy plus years, you know, almost eighty years from the end of World War Two, there was because there was such a stark imbalance.
between what the Chinese military was capable of
Versus 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 that is
Things that are relatively cheap.
relatively plentiful that can threaten an aggressor.
In ways that negate
There are 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.
They have a a number of very big ports, but those can be cut off.
through anything from sea mines to uh 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, you know, to get to the machine gun nest that's shooting at you. So Taiwan has these natural advantages that w 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 have the stockpiles of these kinds of munitions, anti-ship 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 and other elements of an invasion force.
What would
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. 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 uh Liddell Hart who was
early twentieth 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 gonna 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. 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 would call social depth. I brought a number of Israeli military
Офісер Тайван лас сумер.
To meet with Taiwan military leaders and civilian leaders. And it was very useful set of conversations because the the Taiwanese are used to hearing from Americans who come to visit. It's very rare that they get a chance to meet with the Israelis. And there's there's certain things in common. It's a small geography with a lot of hostile.
Neighbours.
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 twenty four hours of the October seven.
debacle.
three hundred, almost four hundred thousand troops. Most of them
Who had already trained, they'd already gone through that crucible.
Of being a conscripted
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 s have social depth because they have a culture.
of service
What do you mean by social depth? Can you just
Give me another.
Brief explanation of what that means. 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 we're
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. I got it.
sort of a broad social fluency with
Skills and
Playbooks. That's it.
Checklist.
vitally on in the event of a war.
So I've neglected something important, which we should probably hit on and I arrived at this somewhat obvious

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 imminents
Or
Maybe
Amount of time.
that we may have before there is decisive action on the part
Uh
China to potentially
Do something disruptive or aggressive for
Otherwise towards Taiwan.
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 a head.
But we can do better than saying we have no idea.
It's really Xi Jinping's life span.
Okay. Xi Jinping is in his early seventies 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.
is pretty much in 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 uh
Robert Gates, our former secretary, once said of the Russians, I think the he's someone who's gonna leave office feet first. Okay. And he's he's either gonna leave in handcuffs or in a coffin, basically. And um seems to be a trend around the world. Right. So here we are. He's he he's only he's seventy two years old.
As my wife uh sometimes reminds me, uh assholes never die. They seem to l they seem to live a long time. Okay. And then you also have statements of this is what I was wondering about. Any telegraphs. Yeah, well, sure.
And has distinguished himself from his predecessors, and 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 Chin of the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
That handful of the calls more poetic in Chinese.
It's 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 course of Leannexing.
Taiwan. That was pretty cheeky. We've never heard a Chinese leader say that's a strong ask. That's a strong ask. That's like maybe 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 X Jinping has just asked of President Biden.
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?
There's certain dates that aren't tied
Explicitly to you know D Day.
But we know that twenty twenty seven 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
Іногізпрес із імпацієн.
By saying things to visiting people from Taiwan.
Along the lines of
I'm not gonna let this get passed down from generation to generation anymore.
That was uh very much in contrast to what some of his predecessors used to say. Like Deng Xiaoping said, if we have to wait a thousand years, we'll wait a thousand years for Taiwan, but we're not gonna let it declare independence.
Xi Jinping has changed that formula. He's saying it's not good enough the buck stops with me. Yeah, it's not good enough for Taiwan not to

It needs to come back into the bosom of the
The motherland. So coming back to what would
Need to be shown.
to sufficiently determined.
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 C C P that is in effect. We have
these numbers of these types of weapons. So we are
Prepared and ready.
shows the capability, but not necessarily the will. That's right. Without capability
Will is gonna 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 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. She's working on some things that are designed to
Field large numbers of drones.
Uh 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. 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 been. And you're saying in Taiwan. In Taiwan, absolutely. And that can be done reasonably quickly. I mean, in the span of two or three years. There are really brave, energetic people trying to do that right now. You've got people like Enoch Wu.
He was educated in the US.
But went back to do his uh 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.
So if you were, let's 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.
On Taiwan specifically.'Cause this is the biggest uh Yeah, on Taiwan. I mean if you wanted to throw in a
Bonus that's not Taiwan, that's fine too, from national security perspective. But
Taiwan or other, but certainly including Taiwan. 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 nineteen forty five. Si djing ping'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 work. No idea. It's big.
How do you determine something like that? Not to put on my skeptic's 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 the
Like, how do you figure that out? Jamie Rubin is the head of the Global Engagement Center at the State Department. He knows the answer to that question. I got it.
Okay.
So we got number one.
So Mr. President. 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.

Xi Jinping is backing the dictator in Venezuela, Maduro.
To threaten
His small neighbor Guyana.
And so
It's chaos. Like I said, 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
Oil.
Oil.
Okay. Guyana has a a lot of energy deposits and they 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. Now is that chaos intended to distract the US specifically or is is it part of a broader
Strategy.
that includes but is not exclusive to the to the 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 good. 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 us thin. In twenty twenty one, Xi Jinping gave a speech.
Where he said
The most important word to describe the world today.
Із Кайос.
Wow. Literally. 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.
Yeah.
He also goes on to say that the risks
Of world turmoil.
Are um 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 twenty twenty two, 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. He went to go see his best and most intimate friend. That's his own phrase, by the way. Cine Ping says my best, most intimate friend is Vladimir Putin. He went to go check in on his friend.
See how the war's going, see what he needs.
And as Xi Jinping was leaving the Kremlin
He was caught on
Camera.
Seen
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.
He's talking about the opportunity for China to become the global dominant power.
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 massiv cos.
On China's economy.
Until Beijing
starts to back off of lighting or
Scorting
Lighter fuel.
On these conflagrations that are taking place now on multiple continents.
The opportunity of a lifetime.
The chance that it 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.
implementation of some degree of anti fragility, right? Thinking in terms of Nasim Taleb, it's like okay, can you not just be resilient in the face of chaos, but
benefit it'd be very dangerous not to respect
An adversary that's as committed and capable as they are. When when I worked at the White House.
When I was deputy 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? You know? 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 it events.
By his own admission in his little meeting with Vladimir Putin.
He's the protagonist of the story and it takes immense effort.
Will
Coordination.
And guts.
to actually seize back the initiative and to become the protagonists again in the story because it's not a story that's gonna end well.
If we let she continue writing it.
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. Yeah. And to have incredible
Patience also with a lot of it.
They're getting more sophisticated about it. And of course
AI tools
I'm still waiting for
Or
A I
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 f 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
English or or other languages. So they're 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. Just a quick side note on that's a 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.
What other perhaps

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 lo 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. Be really helpful for me to know A, B, and C. Your family in Guangdong would really appreciate it. Yeah. Type of situation. LinkedIn has been a very
Potent espionage tool for the Chinese
Premier spy agency and and others.
Yeah. So what kind of stuff should people be
on the lookout for if I mean they like what type of demographic
should sort of be hip to
These types of techniques.
You know, sunshine is a good disinfectant. You know, if people understand what these modalities are, there have been a number of cases that
MI5 in the UK and FBI here in the US have cracked that have involved people being approached.
through um social media and
Things like LinkedIn. And
You don't wanna 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 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.
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. Can you give an example of what that looks like? Like on 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 f a sort of official party doctrine and explicitly stated goals. This intermediary, could you give an example of what form that could take? Yeah, the 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 pr 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 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 two hundred and twenty US campuses.
That's by an old count.
They have
People who
Organized protests against professors or students
who are talking about things like Tibet.
Or talking about the Uyghurs 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 a 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 she was organizing
Things having to do with the the freedom of the Uyghur people and specific Uyghurs who are being held as uh
political prisoners. Risky move if you have family in China. Risky move, and she does have family in China. And
One of her friends one day told her
you know, who was it was actually part of the 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 you have people who are coerced into spying.
On US campuses
On fellow students.
And so I think this is something we should take ahead 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.
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.
We Sin, 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 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. 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
And a US example. Where like uh
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 pastor. I'm not sure that's even a process you can go through in China. I don't know.
But can you speak to that?
There are Hong Kong
citizens who have now
Move 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 extra territorial new phase of China's repression, which is to say
We're not just gonna repress our own people in our borders.
We're not just gonna threaten our people when they go abroad.
We're going to threaten
Foreign citizens.
So the the 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 exetus of people out of China right now.
People
From trying to want to live in countries
Where they can enjoy the rule of law.
Where human rights are gonna be respected.
where they have a lot of different opportunities that they can pursue.
They're leaving by the millions.

I think that we should view those people as natural allies.
But that means that you have to make some work. 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 bit realize that. Yeah, yeah. Singapore, I've heard for sure. I don't know how much safety that confers to someone, but 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

conducting that sort of extra legal interference.
In our own system, people who are thugs.
People who are coerced into spying.
We should be focusing on that so that people feel safe.
In the United States. So I feel obligated to say a couple of things. So the first is
For people listening, I fulnize 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.
Yeah.
China and 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 Yi Ching, believe it or not, way back in the day. Even I've spent time in Taiwan, Japan. 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? But Did you ever play Way Tea?
Uh the game Go. Oh, I have played Go, yes, I have. Absolutely. It's closer to Go.
And Okay, please explain. Go, you can see what's happening on the board, but you can't see the strategy.
Uh readily. Yeah. For those the for those who don't know, yeah, the the image, white and black stones.
It's a nineteen by nineteen board.
And famously up until recently
A computer could never beat a pretty good human being at Go until Earth. It's been years and years that chess masters have been defeated.
by AI. And then of course you had Alpha Go a handful of years ago, which changed it. It actually taught
Go masters.
New ways of approaching the game.
Yeah, it's a great game. 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. Okay. So the broader question I wanted to ask you was
US what a rocket ship.
This young upstart of a country.
Bada bing but a 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 twenty, thirty years. I don't know.
But what are the things that U S should be thinking of
Maybe if we go one level up. They're China specific questions, but this is more a
Permanence.
question.
Writ large. What can the US do?
Yeah.
First.
Do is
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 є 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.
Why is that?
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
Yeah.
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 gonna 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, in Axis.
Of these countries.
Venezuela is one of the minor partners
Iran is a more important partner.
North Korea as a freakish
Difficult partner, but a partner nonetheless. And then you've got and then you've got Ricult Cousin of the family reunion. Exactly. You know, the Kim family regime is uh you know spoils a lot of dinners uh the holidays. But um
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 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 he made this very uh
Yeah, hostile.
set of remarks of 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.
You talked about slavery.
I m you imagine
A Chinese leader or Putin giving a speech like that.
It's impossible.
Because they don't
Meaning one finger pointing outward but another finger pointing backward.
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 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 dark.
I'm sorry, uh genocide.
in the year twenty twenty four.
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 is Secretary of State.
This is not a country that we're gonna 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 gonna 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 in other democracies and that's in terms of just
informational campaigns in the US for the citizenry of the US, you mean? 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'cause 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 gonna determine whether the world is predominantly
Democratic.
Law abiding?
Peaceful.
Or whether it's going to be
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 with President Biden. But I think those speeches were.
Admirable.
So let's segue.
to some of your personal history.
'Cause maybe it ties into
other parts of this conversation.
So age thirty two.
You make some decisions. So can you walk us through
Some of what you did up to that point and then what changed.
I spent my twenties for the most part as a reporter writing for Reuters and the Wall Street Journal in China.
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 nineties into the early two thousands.
But I had a near miss.
On September the eleventh.
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 uh Westchester County, New York.
Said I've got an idea.
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 gonna be talking to Paul Steiger and John Busy, the top editors at the journal. I'm gonna tell them what I wanna work on. I wanna 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 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're listening to the
Talk radio. AM Talk Radio.
And as it unfolded became clearer and clearer.
what had happened. This wasn't an accident. It was something
much more serious than that. 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 eleven 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 two thousand three
Just I'll do invade.
Iraq.
And by two thousand four, 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 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 seventeen's in World War Two. 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 marines.
in quick succession by happenstance. You know, I don't know if you remember the
Indian Ocean Tsunami.
It struck

you know, devastating a quarter million or so people were killed by that tsunami after day after Christmas two thousand four.
I got scrambled down to Thailand to cover
That story.
And ended up
Pulling back from the devastation along the beach, you know, where I'm interviewing
family members survivors of this thing. And I went up to Utapau Airbase, 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 to carry out the humanitarian
response to that tsunami.
The guy who was in charge was a Marine, uh met a bunch of these young kids who were like
I couldn't even make coffee when I was you know twenty. And here you had 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 to another and I suddenly
I meet a marine colonel.
Around that time.
Who
challenges me to go visit a recruiting station.
I just 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 uh 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. Let me pause you for one second. So you you have
A job.
Yeah.
You're doing pretty well with the job. I know, it was great.
What was the
Inner monologue or the moment where you're like
Okay, I'm actually gonna take this meeting. Cause now you've crossed a threshold, right? When you're taking a meeting. Like so how did you just make that decision?
It's funny. I mean it was a Or was it more of a like ah can't hurt. No, it was sometimes it was it was sort of out of body experience. Like the logic became more and more
apparent as I made those tenative 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 in Afghanistan.
Which would end up going worse over time.
And then there was the f 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 had this s 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 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.
So then what happened?
I uh discover 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.
is such a great Marine Corps moment because I'm a nobody. I'm a stranger.
But I meet'em at the Marine Corps birthday ball, which I don't know if you've ever any city you go to in the world. I've never been to a Marine Birthday Ball. Well the Marines where you're gonna ask me. The Marines who guard our embassies around the world every year for the Marine Corps' birthday when it was founded.
November the tenth.
they put together a ball where they invite dignitaries and the ambassador and foreign attaches and so forth. And I got invited to one of these things and I 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 I just have to spill my guts to you. I'm thinking of joining the Marine Corps. And so
Within two days
At sun up.
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 worker stadium
And this guy becomes my personal trainer, just kicks my ass. Uh his name's Cedric Lee. He's still in. He's a 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 on at least on the physical
aspect.
You know, he got me so I could do twenty pull ups, dead hang pull ups, and I could run my ass off.
And then I I was in for the shock of
Actually going through.
Ten weeks of Officer Candy school training, six months of the basic school training to become a provisional rifle platoon commander.
And then uh Intel training after that. It was an unbelievable organization and culture.
What would you say were the biggest
impacts of that experience.
On you. It's funny. I mean, one of the first things you you learn
You just inhabit your own
Head all the time. That's what we do what when we walk around being human. It's called being human. And you come into this thing and they're like, hey, this isn't about you.
You're like, well, what do you mean I made it to
Decision to be here. They're like, No, no. We had this great colonel, Colonel Chase, who was running the office candidate school. He's a former enlisted guy. He had been a drill instructor. Now he's a colonel running the
the officer candidate school and he gives this talk
It was very personal. It was visual, but it was 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 he held to it. I heard that he got in trouble for attriting 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 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 g march across the grinder and and become a Marine officer. You're not gonna pin those
Lieutenant Barzon.
And so
This culture where 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.
A forty
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 r repetition and screaming and and me making mistakes and
touching the electric fence and finding out it hurts and you know
The other thing about the Marine Corps that
People should all know, and 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 gonna give opportunity to the guy who's at the top.
The creme de la creme de la creme de la creme. We're gonna 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 wanna make sure that you're pulling him up so that the baseline
is impressive. 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 are it just have the privilege of being
custodians for a while and and being able to lead
A group that has leadership.
already imbued in it and where young twenty year old, nineteen year old
Lance corporal or corporal has immense responsibility very, very quickly.
We're gonna wrap up in a few minutes, but I wanted to ask, are there one or two
leadership lessons, as you said, that 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.
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
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.
Just reminded me of because we're talking about the basic school.
You have to do gas chamber.
training where you put on a uh gas mask.
And he run into this concrete hut.
Yeah, which they fill with C S
Tear gas. 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 uh
either insufficiently attentive, but also because I I was still getting acquainted with the gear. One of the valves was part way open. So you get these two like coin size 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. Uh y you can easily die from this stuff. 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 uh
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, strip my mas off.
And everyone at first thought it was a joke that it was meant to just kinda like spook them.
And then they saw that I was
Deep.
Deep purple. Like blue.
And
Not breathing.
And one of the uh 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.
I mean instantly, like you know, wild wake up.
And
Apparently I turned from purple to blue to green and a like like in front of everyone's faces, and a couple of lieutenants started puking.
But the best part of the story is my my commander.

Is look at me. I mean I'm just in
I I'm just a mess, right? I mean I've I've been unconscious and
Captain Gaskell, who is 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 w it worked out. But that was it was one of my
Back on the horse, son. I lost some IQ points that I never got back from that whole incident, unfortunately. Wow. Well.
Man of many stories, many capabilities, and I'm very
Glad we got time to not just meet.
and spend time eating phu 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. Is there anything else you would like to mention, say
Point my audience to
Anything at all that you'd like to mention before we
Wine to a close.
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 thirty two and wouldn't trade that experience for anything.
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 at Tim.blog slash podcast.
You can search
Matt.
Pottinger would probably be easier.
Taiwan, boiling mud, 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.
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