YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Pottinger

lines on the record: 124
first: 2024-05-08
most recent: 2024-05-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“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 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 has a lot of people signing up”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Without capability, Will is going to be insufficient oftentimes, right? So capability is a pretty good place to start. You touched on something, which is as you develop capabilities, they're not going to deter very effectively if you don't show a little leg. You kind of show some of the things that we're working on. You create headaches for Chinese military planners who say, ah, I didn't think we'd have to deal with that. We thought we just had submarines and some bombers to worry about. No, you want a whole layered defense of different capabilities, some of which are pretty spooky and they're 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 that could be very dangerous. They're very cheap. They're attritable. They can be expendable.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said, if we have to wait a thousand years, we'll wait a thousand years for Taiwan, but we're not going to let it declare independence. Xi Jinping has changed that formula. He's saying it's not good enough.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are certain dates that aren't tied explicitly to D-Day, but we know that 2027 is a year that Xi Jinping had told his military that it needs to be capable of taking them. And the Indo-Pacific commander of the United States, this is a four-star admiral Aquilino, Admiral Aquilino, who's soon leaving his job in Honolulu. He's responsible for practically half the world as a military commander. But he said before Congress recently that he thinks that China will meet the Chinese military will meet that deadline of being ready to take Taiwan. Xi Jinping has also said things like, you know, he's expressed his impatience by saying things to visiting people from Taiwan along the lines of, I'm not going to let this get passed down from generation to generation anymore. That was very much in contrast to what some of his predecessors used to say, like Deng Xiaoping.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a strong ask. They'd be like Putin saying, listen, it's good to talk to you, President Biden. We need your help destroying Ukraine and annexing it. That's what Xi Jinping has just asked of President Biden.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's actually brutal either way. But 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 Lee annexing Taiwan. That was pretty cheeky. We've never heard of Chinese leaders say that strong answers.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, sure. I mean, he has been very clear 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 Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. That handful sounds more”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So here we are. He's only 72 years old as my wife sometimes reminds me assholes never die. They seem to live a long time. And then you also have statements of”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 push it to a head. But we can do better than saying we have no idea. It's really Xi Jinping's lifespan. Xi Jinping is in his early 70s now. He has broken the template for roughly decade-long tours of leadership by his last two predecessors. And he has installed himself for life. He's pretty much in charge for life. And so we know that. We know it's likely that he's going to stay in. I don't think, as Robert Gates, our former secretary once said of the Russians, I think he's someone who's going to leave office feet first. Okay, right. He's either going to leave in handcuffs or in a coffin, basically.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's it Things that the military doesn't have to itself be responsible for but will depend vitally on in the event of a war.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'll give you an example. In the case of Israel, not only did you have people who left their job suddenly everyday jobs as tech entrepreneurs or nurses or 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.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Almost 400,000 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 have social depth because they have a culture of service.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Created a catastrophe for the Russians. We have to help Taiwan reinvent its culture, its military culture, in ways that add what friends of mine would call social depth. I brought a number of Israeli military officers to Taiwan last summer to meet with Taiwan military leaders and civilian leaders. And it was a very useful set of conversations because the Taiwanese are used to hearing from Americans who come to visit. It's very rare that they get a chance to meet with the Israelis. And there's certain things in common. It's a small geography with a lot of hostile neighbors. They don't even have the benefit of a moat in the case of Israel, right? I mean, they've got land borders. And yet Israel has won every war that it has ever fought. And it's done it with predominantly a reserve military. These are reservists who get activated like they did within 24 hours of the October 7 debacle.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things that spook him, and we know what spooks him because they get really upset at certain things. One is the hard power aspect that we're talking about, but the other is will. Will to fight. So it was Liddell Hart who was early 20th century writer about war said Will is the chief incalculable in war. It's the thing that's hardest to measure in advance of war, but which counts more than anything else wants a war begins. And a good example of that is Ukraine. Everyone said Ukraine is going to crumble in a matter of days. You know, it seems to be the assessment of the US intelligence community. It seems to be the assessment of Vladimir Putin that it would fall quickly. And yet it didn't, right? Here we are two years plus later, and Ukrainians are bravely fighting. 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...”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be cut off through anything from sea mines to other actions that could be taken. They've got mountainous terrain that you can't really approach very easily from the east side and you've got muddy flats if you try to approach from the west side. It would be a disaster for imagine saving private Ryan, but like you have to run three miles to get to the machine gun nest that's shooting at you. So Taiwan has these natural advantages that should work to our benefit, but it does mean that we have to show Xi Jinping that we have the ability to produce, and we actually are producing, 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 other elements of an invasion force.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 their massive advantages in terms of just mass of the number of ships they're cranking out or the number of bombers, the number of missiles. So one of the things I learned as a Marine early on was the old rule of thumb is that you need three times as much force to take a position as you need to defend it. So we're actually 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 number of very big ports, but those can”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a really key one. So it starts with hard power. There's a diplomatic element to deterrence. There's an economic and informational aspect. But all of that doesn't amount to much if you don't have the foundation of hard power. The reason we've kept the piece for 70 plus years, you know, almost 80 years from the end of World War II there was because there was such a stark imbalance between what the Chinese military was capable of versus 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 outproducing China's incredibly formidable defense industrial base?”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the D word deterrence. Okay. Deterrence is a funny thing. People don't often think about deterrence as a strategy. We think that if we just kind of build a big military, people won't want to push us around. But deterrence is more than just having a very capable military, hard power. It's also sending a signal to decision makers in aggressive states like Beijing currently is a message that if you try this if you attack, if you blockade or coercively try to annex”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Economy. Look, Taiwan, this amazing small country produces 92% of the advanced semiconductors in the world. 92%. So we're talking about wild. I know. We're talking about CPU, central processing units that go into your phone to GPUs, which are the chips like Nvidia's famous for making that are really central to everything from self-driving cars to other AI sorts of applications. Taiwan doesn't design all those chips. American companies are sort of in the lead in design, but they actually produce them. They're the best company in the world as a fab, you know, a contract fab, meaning that they fabricate the chips based on the instructions and blueprints that they're provided by American and Korean and Japanese and other companies. And there you have it TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, which was founded by Morris Chang.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A host of different reasons. The Chinese government demands that it oversee any religious activity in China and in ways that are, to put it mildly, that distort the doctrine and in effect demote God to below the Communist Party.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Language. They share a lot of the same heritage. You can actually see freedom of religion in Taiwan in ways that are spectacular. You have traditional Chinese religions, different strains of Buddhism and Taoism, ancestor worship, Christianity, Catholic and Protestant. It's all there and it is unfettered. It is unmolested by people.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what you have at that point is a state of emergency in all of the other democracies of the region where they are now facing an existential threat, military threat, and states of emergency aren't good for democracies, right? Look at what happened to us just during the lockdowns, during COVID in 2018. Imagine you're in a situation where these countries are having to rapidly militarize in order to try to deter China from now being able to threaten them with blockades or 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 Allison Wonderland alternative future where people enjoy free speech. They can go vote for their leaders. And yet they're speaking the same language.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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? wholly dependent on imports other than some of their nuclear plants. And so China says we will be able to 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 have found consistently”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 air base. And even though it's just extending out 150 miles from China's coast, it means that Chinese bomber patrols”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“American strategist 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. It comes down to the Japanese islands, down to the Yuku Islands where Okinawa is, also Japanese islands. And then right in the middle, you've got Taiwan, and then it continues on to the archipelago of the Philippine Islands. So you've got basically democracies that hem in Beijing's military ambitions. And for China to send a bomber or a ship or even a submarine through that first island chain, they have to go through, in essence, a gateway of democracies that are by and large allied with the United States. And so Beijing”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be on top. It's a new empire that we run, but we'll take care of the economics, we'll take care of the security and so forth. In fact, what it did was it kicked up massive response antibodies to this approach. Millions were killed in China under that period. There were millions killed throughout Southeast Asia. And then, of course, the United States comes into the war after Pearl Harbor in late 1941. The rest is history. China's following a similar model to the Japanese model of 1940. Xi Jinping has even given speeches. I don't know whether he has a sense of irony about this or not or whether he's even aware, but he gave a big speech in Shanghai, one of his political members just last week gave another speech, Zhao Lu, talking about the importance of Asia remaining in control of Asians, by which he means Beijing. It was Tokyo in 1940, but it is very similar language.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was the old Portuguese name for Taiwan. If it were to fall to a hostel government, it would become a springboard for aggression throughout the region. And in fact, it had already been that. The Japanese Imperial Japan had controlled Taiwan from 1895 all the way for 50 years till the end of World War II, and they used it as a springboard to move into Southeast Asia, particularly when World War II kicked up 1940-41. The Japanese were promoting this idea of a greater East Asian co-prosperity sphere. I know that's a mouthful, but what it was was it was the Japanese government saying, we're going to dominate Asia. We don't want Western colonial powers anywhere near this, but we also don't want those countries to run themselves. So it was an involuntary invasion of Japan's neighbors. And they said, well, this is going to be great for everyone.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Does it matter? It's a small, I can't remember the size. It's like the size of Connecticut, and it's a small, amazing geography, very mountainous, the tallest mountain in East Asia is not Mount Fuji. It is actually Yuan Jade Mountain in Taiwan. And then you have these beaches, and you've got this tropical climate that meets some of the biggest urban centers in the world. roughly 25 million or so people many of them of Chinese heritage So why does it matter? 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 1950 after World War II. He said if Formosa, which”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 U.S. 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 we're not going to let it be edited and controlled and manipulated by a totalitarian dictatorship that doesn't even have the rule of law much less free speech rights.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They don't work for her anymore. This is her former Deputy Chief of Staff and one or two other senior aides to her who have left to lobby for TikTok.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 owns Washington, D.C. now. They've thrown millions and millions of dollars at this. They've managed to get on the left the ACLU. And by the way, look at who the ACLU's donors are. It includes perhaps their largest donor is one of the biggest American shareholders in TikTok. And so the ACLU says, oh, no, this is a First Amendment issue. BS. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment. This has to do with ensuring that people really do have free speech on these platforms and that it's not being suppressed or amplified according to a hostile government. And then on the right, you've got Jeff Yass, who is one of the other largest shareholders in TikTok and its parent company. And he's a Republican donor. And he is giving huge amounts of money to...”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To his desk, and now it's stalled on her desk. Several of her top aides are now full-time lobbyists for TikTok. Several of them, okay? 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, which is this is the equivalent of. And by the way, it's not a ban of TikTok. This is what TikTok is spread disinformation about. All it says is that TikTok cannot be owned by a Chinese entity and subject to Chinese Communist Party control. They simply have to sell it. And then the thing will still happen. The idea is not to suppress or ban the speech that people are contributing to TikTok. It's to make sure that that speech is actually organic and unfettered and is not manipulated and suppressed or amplified according to the”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ownership in the hands of any foreign power. So we have simply not updated those rules. Those are longstanding, 100-year-old rules almost that are blessed by the Supreme Court. They are sound with our First Amendment rights. Why is it that we've allowed the Chinese Communist Party to be the primary arbiter of what content trends and what content gets suppressed? It's insane. And so what would we do about it? I would say that the United States Senate right now, specifically Senator Cantwell, 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.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Telling you this sincerely as a former Marine Deputy National Security Advisor, I was juggling the most serious national security threats facing the United States. I think TikTok is near the top, near the top, okay? Think for a moment how preposterous it is that we're in a situation where the main platform is controlled by a hostile totalitarian government. The main platform by which a whole generation of Americans communicate and acquire their news. Remember that TikTok, you say, oh no, it's just cat videos. It's actually a primary source of news for people under the age of 30. We would never have allowed the Nazis to control all of our newspapers and radio stations in the 1930s. And in fact, we passed laws under President FDR Roosevelt that made sure that you could not concentrate on the...”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It means we can have bitter debates internally between left and right Democrats, Republicans, Independents, you know, Trump Biden. But when it comes to our national interest, there must be a general consensus that prevails that we are on the same team and that there needs to be some predictability and continuity in our policies. And in fact, by and large, even that still continues to some extent. You have bitter fights over things like what should our approach be to Iran, but you also have strong alliances. We've got NATO. It's probably the most successful multilateral alliance in world history. And you've seen it strengthened by Putin's attack on Ukraine. President Biden's meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister, we've got a very strong relationship with Japan, with South Korea, with Australia, the Philippines.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nationalist bipartisan partner of a democratic president Harry Truman, and he ended up getting the Marshall Plan through the Senate. He's the one who got NATO through the Senate. And so Vandenberg had a famous line. He said, politics stops at the water's edge. Is a great motto that we should return to and actually try to. What does that mean?”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Candid about what China's doing that does harm our interests, harms the interests of other democracies. A lot of autocracies in particular talk about, well, one thing we like about dealing with the Chinese Communist Party is they don't really bug us about our own human rights problems. And there's often a consistency in that approach. We're a democracy. It means that we're an X factor, probably more than we should be. There are certain things that we did throughout the Cold War that served us very well where there was a continuity in our Cold War policy from Democrats, 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. Remember who Vandenberg was? He was an isolationist Republican before World War II who ended up becoming an international”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Almost zero. It's almost zero on TikTok. Very hard to find. There was famously one woman who wanted to talk about the genocide according to our Secretary of State Tony Blinken. There's a genocide taking place in Xinjiang, northwest China against ethnic minorities, including the traditionally Islamic Uyghur people. She wanted to get word out about that.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jinping and his party. So when the attack occurred on the 7th of October in southern Israel, Hamas did their worst, depraved terrorist attacks. China immediately oriented its propaganda to blame Israel and to blame the United States, just like it blamed Ukraine and blamed the United States for the war that Vladimir Putin undertook. So they take the side of the aggressor and try to spin the aggressor into a victim. Because anything that embarrasses, humiliates, discredits the United States is a good thing under that model. And that's why China had okay relations with Israel until October the 7th, and now they've demonized Israel because they view that as a way to discredit the United States.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's perfectly aligned with Beijing's policy. What Beijing did when Putin reinvaded with a full-scale invasion in early 2022, Ukraine, China sided itself in terms of its propaganda orientation, in terms of becoming the main lifeline economically for Russia, in terms of becoming the main diplomatic champion for Russia and its war in Ukraine. Why did China do that? If you read through, as colleagues and I have, some of the internal Chinese Communist Party textbooks, they say explicitly that we want to see Europe in chaos. We want Russia to become more aggressive. We want to see America weakened because those things actually provide an opportunity for the Chinese Communist Party to advance an authoritarian model for global governance, that they feel safer with, you know, that's going to be advantageous to see.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pro Chinese military propaganda, you know, multiples, anti-Israeli and some of it really nakedly just anti-Semitic content. Cool question on that because people...”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would point you to the House Committee in Congress. It's called the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. And this is a committee that's been chaired by Mike Gallagher, who's a Republican congressman from Wisconsin. And the ranking committee member is Congressman Krishna Murthy, who's a Democrat from Illinois, the very bipartisan group of 20 or so congressmen and women who are in that committee. They did a hearing in November last year, which is worth looking up because they actually share some of the data, some of the studies that they did comparing TikTok information. It wasn't like an 8% incremental difference. We're talking from three to five to 10 to 50x certain content that would appear on other U.S.-based platforms.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Appse and he's also the deputy communist party secretary for the company. So it took a lot of digging to piece all of this together because TikTok and ByteDance have erased this history, but there are ways to go back and look at websites that have since been erased and piece this together. They've airbrushed out all of this history. And TikTok masquerades as a foreign company. They say, oh, no, no, we're Singaporean. It's nonsense. It has nothing to do with Singapore. I mean, there's only a handful of relative to their overall staff of people there. And the guy who's the CEO is really just a front man is sort of a spokesman. He doesn't have any power compared to the Communist Party secretariat that actually governs TikTok's parent company.”
2024-05-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT