YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Pottinger

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2024-05-08
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2024-05-08
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  1. “And it turns out they share the same engineers in China, the same engineering core, same algorithms, but adjusted very, very differently. So if you go to Doin in China, you're not going to see any of this awful content. You're going to see wholesome content and pro-Communist Party content. You're not going to see things that 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 ByteDance with responsibility for all of the apps and their content is also the Communist Party secretary, who was assigned by Xi Jinping and his general office to babysit that company and to make sure that it is serving the purposes of the Chinese Communist Party. His deputy is the deputy editor-in-chief of all.”

    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

  2. “Of a truly innovative Silicon Valley type company that emerges from the mind of Zhang Iming, you know, a very bright, talented entrepreneur and technologist in China and some of his partners. And it quickly catches on in ways that catch the attention of the Chinese government. And so over time, what the Chinese government does is it inserts itself, the Communist Party, which is superior to the Chinese government, inserts itself into the heart of that company. And in fact, the company I'm talking about is Bite Dance. Bite dance is the parent company that fully controls TikTok, along with a number of other apps, including the Chinese version of TikTok that's called Doi Yin.”

    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

  3. “You studied this I have the benefit of working closely with a number of extremely talented historians, linguists, technologists who are focused on China. We run a small private company. We do research, open source research about what China is doing, where it's going. My colleague, John Garneau and Matthew Johnson, two colleagues of mine, Matthew's great. He was an Oxford professor of Chinese modern government before we kidnapped him to come do work for us. John Garneau was a journalist like me in China and 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 Canberra. Anyway, they decided to do a very in-depth study looking at the history of TikTok, trying to figure out things like the structure, who's it beholden to, and what you have is this interesting sog.”

    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

  4. “Makes clear that what he was talking about were short form video apps, and they talk about TikTok specifically. So it's a weapon. It's a weapon pointed at our democracy.”

    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

  5. “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 holds a study session for the Politburo, 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 his senior intelligence officers said publicly, it doesn't matter what's true and what's false. It only matters who controls the platform. And therefore, we need to use this platform to win the global majority. So CG Ming holds this study session, The People's Daily, which is the Communist Party mouthpiece newspaper. A couple weeks later,”

    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

  6. “Things like Instagram or Reels or X. And it's not because of the demographic, because people have done control studies to look at how Taylor Swift trends across those platforms. And it turns out she trends almost exactly equally across all these different Apps and platforms. But when it comes to things that are embarrassing to the Chinese Communist Party, that stuff 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 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”

    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

  7. “Is the really key one to, in the words of Xi Jinping, win the global majority. That's his phrase. They want to use it as a megaphone in what he calls a smokeless battlefield for ideological persuasion and also destruction, namely if you look at how TikTok trends certain content and you compare that, which is not easy to do. TikTok makes this hard to do, that 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 7 terror attacks by Hamas in southern Israel occurred, that stuff trends at multiples of what it does on”

    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

  8. “Well, 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 actually look at where specific users are to track their activities and who they know and what they're doing. So that is a risk. It's actually secondary to the bigger problem with TikTok, which is not being discussed head on very frequently. 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.”

    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

  9. “Repeating full sentences, not vocabulists. Not studying the Roman in Japanese is called Romagi, right? You're studying Latin letters. Instead, you have the discipline to just listen to full sentences, be able to say those sentences flawlessly before you start to deconstruct the sentences. According to the vocab in the grammar and so forth. So it's starting like a child with the sounds. And then getting to vocab and grammar”

    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

  10. “After I learned Chinese, I learned Japanese. I've forgotten most of it because this was 30 years ago. But what amazed me was I followed a smarter technique for studying the language and I learned it much faster than I was able to learn Chinese. And it started with those tapes. Recording yourself.”

    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

  11. “You had to be able to say those words, just emulate, mimic the sounds rather than trying to read a Romanized approximation of it. That was one way to break the back of the ways that you can go wrong trying to study pinying.”

    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

  12. “Teachers like Perry Link and Wang Shu Dong and others who taught me 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.”

    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

  13. “Opinion. 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 language to approximate Chinese, or you end up studying the I Ching and teaching it the mystical text from way back. But I learned it with regular pin, which is sort of the Chinese standard one. But what I learned”

    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

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

    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

  15. “Old English and Latin while you're struggling to order a pizza in a new language. So I was really lucky to have great teachers and I.”

    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

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

    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

  17. “The Chinese language teacher, this is very rare. This is in the 1980s. I was at a high school, which was very unusual at the time to have a Chinese teacher”

    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

  18. “Creative differences, which is to say he was strict and serious. I was a 15-year-old who was struggling in third year Spanish because I hadn't paid enough attention in second year Spanish. Anyway, I remember seeing...”

    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

  19. “Was highly accidental like most good things in life. I was studying Spanish in high school and my Spanish teacher and I Weren't a good match.”

    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

  20. “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.”

    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

  21. “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.”

    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

  22. “Famous quote by Chinese statesman from a thousand years ago named Fan Zhongyen. And Fan Zhongyan was this polymath who created the Chinese examination system and so forth. But he was a loyal official who had to go into exile. That's what would happen. You know, if you really screwed up, you'd get killed.”

    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

  23. “That piece of calligraphy was written for me by Bao Tong. Bautong was a high Chinese official in the People's Republic of China, and he happened to be the chief of staff. The party secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, win the Tiananmen protests took off in the spring of 1989. And Bao Tong ended up like his boss getting arrested. His boss spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Bao Tong went to prison for essentially siding with the students, the pro-democracy students Eventually got out of prison but spent the rest of his life under house arrest. And we developed a friendship remotely. And he wrote two pieces of calligraphy for me. And that one says, and the unwritten, but second part of that is.”

    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

  24. “So great to see you again. I'm delighted to be here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Yeah. Your tones are actually still quite sharp and acute. I don't know how you did 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