#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 AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Tim Ferriss Show

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Episode: #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

Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 01:53:42

Episode Shownotes

Matt Pottinger is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and chairman of the China Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Matt served as U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor from 2019 to 2021. Before his White House service, Matt spent the late 1990s and early 2000s in

China as a reporter for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. He then fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as a U.S. Marine during three combat deployments between 2007 and 2010. Matt’s new book is The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan.Sponsors:Wealthfront high-yield savings account: https://wealthfront.com/tim (Start earning 5% interest on your savings. And when you open an account today, you’ll get an extra fifty-dollar bonus with a deposit of five hundred dollars or more.)Shopify global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: https://shopify.com/tim (one-dollar-per-month trial period)Helix Sleep premium mattresses: https://helixsleep.com/tim (between 25% and 30% off all mattress orders and two free pillows)Timestamps:[00:00] Start[05:55] Bao Tong’s calligraphy.[08:20] Matt’s decision to study East Asian languages.[10:13] Studying with Perry Link and the challenges of learning Chinese.[12:19] Tips for learning Chinese and other languages.[17:17] How TikTok has been weaponized by the Chinese Communist Party.[20:58] The origins of TikTok and its obfuscatory ownership structure.[26:30] How sowing chaos in the West serves the CCP’s aims.[31:37] “Politics stops at the water’s edge.”[33:11] How should the US rein in TikTok’s influence over its population?[40:23] The significance of Taiwan geographically, ideologically, and economically.[49:59] The semiconductor industry in Taiwan and its global importance.[52:07] Deterring China from attacking or coercing Taiwan.[58:51] Cultivating social depth in Taiwan.[1:01:09] Guessing at Xi Jinping’s timeline.[1:05:33] Demonstrating the will to match the capacity of following through.[1:07:47] Matt’s top priorities for stemming Chinese ambitions.[1:10:15] Architects of chaos.[1:14:21] Staying alert against informational warfare and united front activity.[1:21:00] Countering China’s influence on its Western-based citizens.[1:25:05] Checkers vs. Go.[1:26:56] How can the US reassert its position as a beacon of democracy?[1:33:05] What prompted Matt to join the Marine Corps at age 32?[1:38:50] Getting in shape for the occasion.[1:40:45] Leadership lessons learned.[1:46:59] The Boiling Moat, the importance of public service, and parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Full Transcript

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00:04:22 Speaker_01
I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue of a metal endoskeleton. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to a special episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. I've been wanting to do this one for quite some time.

00:04:43 Speaker_01
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 a U.S.

00:04:56 Speaker_01
Deputy National Security Advisor from 2019 to 2021. In that role, Matt coordinated the full spectrum of national security policy.

00:05:04 Speaker_01
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.

00:05:14 Speaker_01
Before his White House service, Matt spent the late 1990s and early 2000s in China as a reporter for Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. He then fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as a US Marine during three combat deployments between 2007 and 2010.

00:05:30 Speaker_01
Following active duty, Matt ran Asia research at Davidson Kepner Capital Management, a multi-strategy investment fund in New York. Matt's new book, The Boiling Moat, Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, is coming out July 1st.

00:05:43 Speaker_01
And without further ado, please enjoy what I think is a very important, very practical conversation with Matt Pottinger.

00:05:55 Speaker_00
Matt, so great to see you again. I'm delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.

00:05:59 Speaker_01
Absolutely. Hǎo jiǔ bù jiàn.

00:06:01 Speaker_00
Hěn jiǔ bù jiàn. Your tones are actually still quite sharp and acute. I don't know how you did that.

00:06:08 Speaker_01
Měi xiǎng hǎo jiǔ. I guess we saw each other not too long ago, and we were sitting in your kitchen at your dining room table, and there was some calligraphy on the wall. And I asked you, because my characters

00:06:22 Speaker_01
have grown a little rough around the edges, and I asked you what this calligraphy meant. Recognized a few characters, but not all of them. What is this calligraphy that's on your wall?

00:06:33 Speaker_00
That piece of calligraphy was written for me by Baotong. Baotong was a high Chinese official in the People's Republic of China, and he happened to be the chief of staff

00:06:47 Speaker_00
to the party secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, when the Tiananmen protests took off in the spring of 1989. And Baotong ended up, like his boss, getting arrested. His boss spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

00:07:03 Speaker_00
Baotong 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.

00:07:13 Speaker_00
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, 后天下之乐而乐. It was a famous quote by a Chinese statesman from a thousand years ago named Fan Zhongyan.

00:07:35 Speaker_00
And Fan Zhongyan was this polymath who created the Chinese examination system and so forth. But he was a loyal official who had to go into exile. That's what would happen. If you really screwed up, you'd get killed.

00:07:51 Speaker_00
by the emperor, but 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.

00:08:04 Speaker_00
So 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.

00:08:17 Speaker_00
And so we struck up a correspondence.

00:08:19 Speaker_01
So I should say from the outset, and this goes without saying, but fascinated by, I am, and you are, Chinese culture, language. We're going to talk about how that entered the scene. And I've spent time at two universities in China.

00:08:33 Speaker_01
This was a long time ago, 96. And we both studied East Asian languages in school. How did you decide to do that?

00:08:44 Speaker_00
It was highly accidental, like most good things in life. I was studying Spanish in high school, and my Spanish teacher and I weren't a good match. Creative differences.

00:08:57 Speaker_00
Yeah, which is to say he was strict and serious, and 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

00:09:10 Speaker_00
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. Where was this? This was in Milton, Massachusetts, Milton Academy, south of Boston.

00:09:24 Speaker_00
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 going to escape Spanish class, and I asked if I could jump into Chinese, and he let me do that.

00:09:36 Speaker_00
And so that was the beginning of My love affair with China started with the language.

00:09:41 Speaker_00
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 Jertson and others. Classical Chinese. I studied classical.

00:09:54 Speaker_01
Yeah, if contemporary Chinese isn't hard enough for you.

00:09:57 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's like just starting to learn English and someone's like, we're just gonna throw in Latin on top of that.

00:10:02 Speaker_01
Yeah, with a little Beowulf on the side, enjoy.

00:10:06 Speaker_00
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 remember I studied with Perry Link.

00:10:20 Speaker_01
I studied with Perry.

00:10:22 Speaker_00
Princeton University at the time. Amazing teacher. He was my Chinese teacher for a summer program in Beijing. And we're still in touch today. No kidding. Oh yeah.

00:10:31 Speaker_01
Wow, I did not know that part. Lin laoshi. Lin laoshi.

00:10:35 Speaker_00
Oh, man.

00:10:36 Speaker_01
Brutal in his enforcement of the tones, which is probably why it's stuck. I just remember.

00:10:42 Speaker_00
You're stuck.

00:10:42 Speaker_01
I just remember this was, let's see, probably 95, 96, Chinese 101 at Princeton at the time. And the first class had maybe 35 students. I would say a few weeks later, 14 students. It was serious attrition.

00:11:02 Speaker_00
It was serious thinning. 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.

00:11:13 Speaker_01
Really, really phenomenal teacher and thinker. I remember one class I'm going to give him credit and bust his balls a little bit at the same time because I remember a winter class.

00:11:24 Speaker_01
First of all, Chinese 101 had five or six classes a week, I want to say. It was some unbelievable volume of classes. And that was, I want to say, probably including language lab where you would have to read and record your tones.

00:11:38 Speaker_01
Then you'd have these one-on-ones where you would get cross-examined for your failures with your tones. It worked really well.

00:11:45 Speaker_01
And there's one class, it's 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?

00:11:59 Speaker_01
Like, I want to say it was something like yeshu, and so we're saying this word, you know, yeshu, and she's like, yeshu, 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 12 times.

00:12:14 Speaker_01
And we're like, oh, the brutality. It is. It's Marine Corps methods. It's a drill instructor. But it worked.

00:12:19 Speaker_01
And a question for you, when you learned Chinese, and I'm going to backstab and don't worry, guys, we're going to get to the geopolitics and all the juicy bits, TikTok included.

00:12:28 Speaker_01
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.

00:12:37 Speaker_01
One thing that worked really well at Princeton and contrasted it with a lot of other schools at the time is we used something called GR. I don't know if you remember this. It was Goyu Romatsu. So it was teaching tones with different spellings.

00:12:53 Speaker_01
So the romanized version of say, Second tone would be GWO or if you want to say like I went fourth tone would be GUOH.

00:13:04 Speaker_01
It seemed to work really well in terms of memorizing tones where pinyin with diacritical marks was really hard for a lot of students to remember. Did you learn with pinyin?

00:13:14 Speaker_00
I did learn with pinyin.

00:13:16 Speaker_00
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.

00:13:31 Speaker_00
and teaching it the mystical text from way back. But I learned it with regular Luo Ma Pinyin, which is sort of the Chinese standard one.

00:13:40 Speaker_00
But what I learned from teachers like Perry Link and Wang Xuedong and others who taught me was not to read that and to focus on the tapes, right? We were using cassettes in those days.

00:13:51 Speaker_00
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,

00:14:00 Speaker_00
you had to be able to say those words, just emulate, mimic the sounds, rather than trying to read a romanized approximation of it. That was one way to break the back of the ways that you can go wrong trying to study pinyin.

00:14:17 Speaker_01
All right, so since this is the podcast that deconstructs people who are good at various things, excellent at various things, any other tips for people who may want to learn Chinese?

00:14:27 Speaker_00
After I learned Chinese, I learned Japanese. I'd forgotten most of it because this was 30 years ago. But what amazed me was I followed a smarter technique for studying the language and I learned it much faster than I was able to learn Chinese.

00:14:40 Speaker_00
And it started with those tapes, recording yourself, repeating full sentences, not vocab lists. not studying the Roman in Japanese, it's called Romaji, right? You're studying Latin letters.

00:14:53 Speaker_00
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.

00:15:06 Speaker_00
So it's starting like a child with the sounds and then getting to vocab and grammar.

00:15:13 Speaker_01
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 in Long Island to St.

00:15:25 Speaker_01
Paul's in New Hampshire.

00:15:27 Speaker_01
I had decided I was bad at Spanish, and then I hopped ship to Japanese, so I did it in the opposite order, in part because a friend of mine was taking Japanese, and I wanted to be in a class with one of my friends at least, but I was going to be bad at a given subject, i.e.

00:15:42 Speaker_01
language learning. And then the Japanese took off and then I learned or studied, I've forgotten most of it. We have the opposite in that sense. My Japanese is still pretty strong.

00:15:51 Speaker_01
I 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. And landed in a very similar place, like start with full sentences. And that recording is so key.

00:16:07 Speaker_01
I feel like that's still pretty neglected in modern Language teaching.

00:16:12 Speaker_00
Totally right. It makes me want to go back to learning Spanish because that was the worst approach that I took.

00:16:17 Speaker_01
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,

00:16:29 Speaker_01
If you have english or any other language you can take. Two volumes a volume four in one piece the exact same comic book panel by panel in two languages and go back and forth without using a dictionary so you can actually study.

00:16:46 Speaker_01
Dialogue and conversation which is one of the benefits of comic books of use that for a couple of languages. Language the chinese language is one of your superpowers it allows you to do things a lot of other folks can not do.

00:16:58 Speaker_01
And i would say one of those is for instance looking at chinese language speeches memos internal documents are maybe not exclusively internal documents and we're gonna edge into that but since it's the topic of the hour. TikTok.

00:17:16 Speaker_01
You and I have spoken about this before, and I was amazed how little I actually knew about TikTok. What are some salient points that you might underscore for folks as it relates to TikTok?

00:17:27 Speaker_00
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 U.S. is focused on the data security aspect. You know, that this app, once it's in your phone, it goes everywhere.

00:17:39 Speaker_00
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.

00:17:54 Speaker_00
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.

00:18:03 Speaker_00
It's actually secondary to the bigger problem with TikTok, which is not being discussed head-on very frequently.

00:18:11 Speaker_00
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,

00:18:24 Speaker_00
to in the words of seeing ping when the global majority that's his phrase they want to use it as a megaphone in what he calls a smokeless battlefield for ideological.

00:18:37 Speaker_00
Persuasion and also destruction namely if you look at how tick tock trends certain content and you compare that. which is not easy to do. TikTok makes this hard to do.

00:18:51 Speaker_00
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.

00:19:00 Speaker_00
But what you found was that anti-American, anti-democratic, anti-Israeli content after the October 7 terror attacks by Hamas in Southern Israel,

00:19:11 Speaker_00
occurred, that stuff trends at multiples of what it does on things like Instagram or Reels or X. And it's not because of the demographic, because people have done control studies to look at how Taylor Swift trends across those platforms.

00:19:30 Speaker_00
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.

00:19:45 Speaker_00
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.

00:19:57 Speaker_00
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.

00:20:08 Speaker_00
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

00:20:23 Speaker_00
officials, and it's on external discourse mechanisms. And what he's talking about is, in fact, one of the senior intelligence officers said publicly, it doesn't matter what's true and what's false. It only matters who controls the platform.

00:20:38 Speaker_00
And therefore, we need to use this platform to win the global majority. So Xi Jinping holds this study session.

00:20:45 Speaker_00
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.

00:20:56 Speaker_00
It's a weapon pointed at our democracy.

00:20:58 Speaker_01
So, to double-click on a few things. First is, in terms of company structure or parent company structure, people involved, is there anything that would be sort of instructive to point out there? Let's begin with that.

00:21:18 Speaker_01
And why should we take you to be an expert in TikTok? How have you studied this?

00:21:22 Speaker_00
I have the benefit of working closely with a number of extremely talented historians, linguists, technologists who are focused on China. We run a small private company. We do research, open source research about what China's doing, where it's going.

00:21:39 Speaker_00
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.

00:21:51 Speaker_00
John Garneau was a journalist like me in China, an Australian. He wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald.

00:21:57 Speaker_00
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.

00:22:06 Speaker_00
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?

00:22:15 Speaker_00
And what you have is this interesting saga of a truly innovative Silicon Valley-type company that emerges from the mind of Zhang Yiming, a very bright, talented entrepreneur and technologist in China, and some of his partners.

00:22:32 Speaker_00
And it quickly catches on in ways that catch the attention of the Chinese government.

00:22:38 Speaker_00
And so over time, what the Chinese government does is it inserts itself, the Communist Party, which is superior to the Chinese government, inserts itself into the heart of that company. And in fact, the company I'm talking about is ByteDance.

00:22:50 Speaker_00
ByteDance is the parent company that fully controls TikTok, along with a number of other apps, including the Chinese version of TikTok that's called Douyin.

00:22:59 Speaker_00
And it turns out they share the same engineers in China, the same engineering core, same algorithms, but adjusted very, very differently. So if you go to Douyin in China, you're not going to see any of this awful content.

00:23:14 Speaker_00
You're going to see wholesome content and pro-Communist Party content. You're not going to see things that pit Chinese people against one another or that agitate them, even though it's the same algorithms, same back office, same engineers.

00:23:29 Speaker_00
And by the way, the editor-in-chief of ByteDance, with responsibility,

00:23:33 Speaker_00
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.

00:23:51 Speaker_00
His deputy is the deputy editor-in-chief of all apps and And he's also the deputy Communist Party secretary for the company.

00:23:59 Speaker_00
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.

00:24:12 Speaker_00
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.

00:24:21 Speaker_00
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.

00:24:31 Speaker_00
He doesn't have any power compared to the Communist Party secretariat that actually governs TikTok's parent company.

00:24:38 Speaker_01
So a question about the airbrushing for a second, because I'm trying to think of the most

00:24:44 Speaker_01
let's just say, obvious closed case examples that you could point to where you might find a contrast between, let's just say, the Taylor Swift being relatively equally surfaced or not surfaced by different platforms.

00:24:59 Speaker_01
You said there are things that might be embarrassing to the Chinese government. Are there examples of any particular things that you could give where

00:25:07 Speaker_01
There's much less visibility because people might be wondering well maybe it's how you torture the data right maybe it's like it appears ten percent on instagram and.

00:25:17 Speaker_01
Eight percent on tiktok but really is that conclusive are there any to your mind very clear cases.

00:25:24 Speaker_00
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.

00:25:40 Speaker_00
And the ranking committee member is Congressman Krishnamoorthi, who's a Democrat from Illinois, the very bipartisan group of 20 or so congressmen and women who were in that committee. They did a hearing

00:25:54 Speaker_00
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 tick tock information it wasn't like an eight percent incremental difference we're talking.

00:26:09 Speaker_00
From three to five to ten to fifty x. certain content that would appear on other US-based platforms. So pro-Chinese military propaganda, multiples, anti-Israeli, and some of it really nakedly just anti-Semitic content,

00:26:32 Speaker_01
Why would that be a potential CCP government priority?

00:26:37 Speaker_00
It's perfectly aligned with Beijing's policy. What Beijing did when Putin re-invaded with a full-scale invasion in early 2022 Ukraine.

00:26:47 Speaker_00
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?

00:27:03 Speaker_00
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.

00:27:17 Speaker_00
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, that's going to be advantageous to Xi Jinping and his party.

00:27:34 Speaker_00
So when the attack occurred on the 7th of October in southern Israel,

00:27:40 Speaker_00
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.

00:27:58 Speaker_00
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.

00:28:12 Speaker_00
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.

00:28:22 Speaker_01
I have to say there's a part of me that's excited to have you on the show. Number one, because I enjoy having conversations with you. Number two, because you have such deep familiarity with sort of native source material, right?

00:28:36 Speaker_01
Like you can actually look at the actual words used, these sort of stated objectives in Chinese.

00:28:42 Speaker_01
And I also must admit, I have this admiration for the 4D chess that China has played with respect to things like access to natural resources in South America, building infrastructure in Africa. It's really remarkable.

00:28:58 Speaker_01
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 their trade offs of course with all these things but i went to a very.

00:29:14 Speaker_01
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.

00:29:26 Speaker_01
With the US, every four years, we have no idea what's going to happen. We don't know if this, that, and the other agreement are going to change.

00:29:32 Speaker_01
There's a certain predictability that is advantageous for certain countries that might want to, say, partner with one or the other. And we can come back to that. I just wanted to mention that first.

00:29:45 Speaker_01
But coming to TikTok just as a way of studying the micro to study the macro, things that might be embarrassing.

00:29:53 Speaker_01
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 10%, 20% less than other platforms? Or is it... It's almost zero.

00:30:08 Speaker_00
It's almost zero. On tiktok very hard to find there's 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.

00:30:21 Speaker_00
Northwest china against ethnic minorities including the traditionally islamic we are people. She wanted to get word out about that on TikTok, so she recorded an eyelash video where she's doing a how-to, how to curl your eyelashes.

00:30:36 Speaker_00
And while she's doing this, she suddenly cuts into talking about the genocide, what's going on there, and eventually TikTok even erased that content. But I agree with you. The 4D chess is no joke.

00:30:48 Speaker_00
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.

00:30:57 Speaker_00
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.

00:31:10 Speaker_00
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

00:31:20 Speaker_00
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.

00:31:35 Speaker_00
We'd be well served to remember what Senator Vandenberg said. Remember who Vandenberg was? He was an isolationist Republican before World War II who ended up becoming an internationalist bipartisan partner

00:31:49 Speaker_00
of 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.

00:32:06 Speaker_00
That is a great motto that we should return to and actually try to practice. What does that mean? It means we can have bitter debates internally between left and right, Democrats, Republicans, independents, you know, Trump, Biden.

00:32:20 Speaker_00
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.

00:32:35 Speaker_00
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

00:32:48 Speaker_00
you know, 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.

00:33:00 Speaker_00
We've got a very strong relationship with Japan, with South Korea, with Australia, the Philippines. And those things serve us well. Those are our shields that protect us.

00:33:10 Speaker_01
We're going to segue to Taiwan in a second. I want to put a little button on top of TikTok and then we'll move on. In terms of weapons or offensive techniques or let's just call it overall threats from China against, say, U.S.

00:33:28 Speaker_01
national interests, where would you rank TikTok and what would you like to see policymakers or others do in terms of next actions? If they're like, hey, this is a lot for me to digest, Just tell me what we should do.

00:34:01 Speaker_00
I'm telling you this sincerely as a former Marine, Deputy National Security Advisor, I was juggling the most serious national security threats facing the United States. I think TikTok is near the top, near the top, okay?

00:34:16 Speaker_00
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.

00:34:32 Speaker_00
Remember 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 30. We would never have allowed the Nazis to control all of our newspapers and radio stations in the 1930s.

00:34:47 Speaker_00
And in fact, we passed laws under President FDR Roosevelt that made sure that you could not concentrate media ownership in the hands of any foreign power. So we have simply not updated those rules.

00:35:02 Speaker_00
Those are longstanding, hundred-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

00:35:13 Speaker_00
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?

00:35:25 Speaker_00
I would say that the United States Senate right now, specifically Senator Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington,

00:35:33 Speaker_00
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.

00:35:49 Speaker_00
President Biden has said he'd sign the bill if it came to his desk, and now it's stalled on her desk. Several of her top aides are now full-time lobbyists for TikTok, several of them, okay?

00:36:02 Speaker_00
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 this is the equivalent of. And by the way, it's not a ban of TikTok.

00:36:16 Speaker_00
This is what TikTok has spread disinformation about. All it says is that TikTok cannot be owned by a Chinese entity. and subject to Chinese Communist Party control. They simply have to sell it, and then the thing will still happen.

00:36:32 Speaker_00
The idea is not to suppress or ban the speech that people are contributing to TikTok.

00:36:38 Speaker_00
It's 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.

00:36:51 Speaker_00
It's certainly not a First Amendment threat. It's interesting to me, the ACLU, TikTok owns Washington, D.C. now, okay? They've thrown millions and millions of dollars at this.

00:37:03 Speaker_00
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.

00:37:15 Speaker_00
And so the ACLU says, oh no, this is a First Amendment issue. BS. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment.

00:37:20 Speaker_00
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.

00:37:29 Speaker_00
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.

00:37:38 Speaker_00
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.

00:37:54 Speaker_00
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.

00:38:02 Speaker_01
And what was the Senator's name who you mentioned?

00:38:05 Speaker_00
Cantwell.

00:38:05 Speaker_01
Cantwell. And those, you said, I guess it was two, I think two or three lobbyists on staff. They're, well, they're not lobbyists, but they're- They don't work for her anymore.

00:38:14 Speaker_00
This is her former deputy chief of staff and one or two other senior aides to her who have left to lobby for TikTok.

00:38:22 Speaker_01
What are the incentives? I don't really understand lobbying. How does that work in brief? Why would they do that?

00:38:29 Speaker_00
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.

00:38:43 Speaker_00
They have a huge campaign, advertising campaign, disinformation campaign saying that it's an attempt to block free speech, to ban TikTok.

00:38:52 Speaker_00
No, it's saying TikTok can thrive, but 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.

00:39:04 Speaker_01
All right. Thank you for that. And we're going to go to Taiwan now. So Taiwan, what is the significance to the US of Taiwan? Because I imagine a lot of people have many things they try to track in the news.

00:39:18 Speaker_01
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?

00:39:29 Speaker_01
Why is, why is it important?

00:39:30 Speaker_00
Why does it matter? Why does it matter? It's this small, I can't remember the size, it's like the size of Connecticut and it's a small, amazing geography. Very mountainous, the tallest mountain in East Asia is not Mount Fuji.

00:39:43 Speaker_00
It is actually Yushan Jade Mountain in Taiwan. And then you have these beaches and you've got this tropical climate that meets some of the biggest urban centers in the world. Roughly 25 million or so people, many of them of Chinese heritage.

00:39:59 Speaker_00
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.

00:40:17 Speaker_00
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 that Formosa, which was the old Portuguese name for Taiwan.

00:40:30 Speaker_00
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.

00:40:38 Speaker_00
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.

00:40:56 Speaker_00
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.

00:41:08 Speaker_00
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.

00:41:22 Speaker_00
We're going to 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.

00:41:36 Speaker_00
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.

00:41:47 Speaker_00
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

00:42:01 Speaker_00
One of his Politburo members just last week gave another speech, Zhao Leji, talking about the importance of Asia remaining in control of Asians, by which he means Beijing.

00:42:13 Speaker_00
It was Tokyo in 1940, but it is very similar language to what we heard when the Japanese were promoting a greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere, which was an empire.

00:42:26 Speaker_01
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00:42:32 Speaker_01
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Visit livemomentous.com slash Tim and use code Tim at checkout for 20% off. That's livemomentous, L-I-V-E, M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com slash Tim and code Tim for 20% off. So you mentioned the size of Taiwan. Sounds like a speck.

00:43:46 Speaker_01
Why is it positionally advantageous?

00:43:50 Speaker_00
If you look at the map from the perspective of China and you're looking eastward.

00:43:55 Speaker_00
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.

00:44:09 Speaker_00
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 Ryukyu Islands where Okinawa is, also Japanese islands. And then right in the middle,

00:44:21 Speaker_00
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.

00:44:34 Speaker_00
And for China to send a bomber or a ship or even a submarine through that first island chain, they have to go through, in essence, a gateway of democracies that are, by and large, allied with the United States. And so Beijing believes that

00:44:51 Speaker_00
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.

00:45:04 Speaker_00
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. It provides safe passage.

00:45:18 Speaker_00
Safe passage for them to, in the words of their own doctrine, inflict a blockade on Japan at will.

00:45:26 Speaker_01
Could you say more about that? What is a blockade against Japan?

00:45:29 Speaker_00
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.

00:45:44 Speaker_00
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.

00:45:56 Speaker_00
And so China says, we will 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.

00:46:12 Speaker_00
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?

00:46:22 Speaker_00
They have found consistently that Taiwan is the most democratic, liberal democratic state in all of Asia. And it actually ranks higher than the United States. They know what they're doing. They've built something pretty special.

00:46:34 Speaker_01
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?

00:46:41 Speaker_00
Freedom of speech, equality, rule of law, equality of access to run for government. Taiwan's legislature is 40% women compared to I think about 27, 28% of our Congress are women in the United States.

00:46:55 Speaker_00
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.

00:47:09 Speaker_00
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,

00:47:25 Speaker_00
because it was coercively annexed by Beijing. That would have huge ramifications for the region and knock-on effects for the world.

00:47:33 Speaker_01
Why is that? I'm curious if you could say more about that because I have to admit, growing up with my dad yelling at the TV about politics, I just basically tuned it out. I decided to be selectively ignorant about this, which I regret on some level.

00:47:49 Speaker_01
But I think to myself, okay, they are this ideological paragon of democracy in the region. I understand the positional advantage of, say, Beijing having control of Taiwan, as you just described.

00:48:03 Speaker_00
The geographic element.

00:48:04 Speaker_01
Exactly. But if Taiwan falls ideologically, what are the ripple effects of that?

00:48:09 Speaker_00
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?

00:48:22 Speaker_00
Look at what happened to us just during the lockdowns, you know, during COVID-19. Imagine you're in a situation where these countries are having to rapidly militarize in order to try to deter China from now being able to threaten, you know,

00:48:36 Speaker_00
with blockades or, you know, and it's pretty clear that Beijing has much bigger ambitions than just Taiwan.

00:48:42 Speaker_00
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

00:48:56 Speaker_00
this Alice in Wonderland alternative future, where people enjoy free speech. They can go vote for their leaders, and yet they're speaking the same language. They share a lot of the same heritage.

00:49:07 Speaker_00
You can actually see freedom of religion in Taiwan in ways that are spectacular. You have traditional Chinese religions, different

00:49:16 Speaker_00
strains of buddhism and taoism ancestor worship christianity catholic and protestant it's all there and it is unfettered it is unmolested by and for people who don't have the history i mean a lot of that got cleaned out of mainland for a host of different reasons what the

00:49:33 Speaker_00
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.

00:49:48 Speaker_01
Okay, so we have the geographic importance, we've got the ideological component. Is there anything else you would add to that?

00:49:57 Speaker_00
The economy. Look, Taiwan, this amazing small country, produces 92% of the advanced semiconductors in the world. So we're talking about, it's wild. I know.

00:50:10 Speaker_00
We're talking about CPUs, central processing units that go into your phone, to GPUs, which are the chips like NVIDIA is famous for making that are really central to everything from self-driving cars to other AI sorts of applications.

00:50:26 Speaker_00
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.

00:50:37 Speaker_00
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.

00:50:48 Speaker_00
And there you have it, TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, which was founded by Morris Chang. I've met him.

00:50:53 Speaker_00
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.

00:51:07 Speaker_00
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.

00:51:23 Speaker_00
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.

00:51:38 Speaker_00
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.

00:51:45 Speaker_00
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.

00:51:59 Speaker_00
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.

00:52:07 Speaker_01
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 U.S. do, and why aren't we doing it already? It doesn't need to be limited to the U.S.

00:52:20 Speaker_01
Maybe there are other state actors that should be involved as well, but since we're sitting here in the U.S.

00:52:26 Speaker_00
One thing, 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.

00:52:39 Speaker_00
But deterrence is more than just having a very capable military, hard power. It's also sending a signal

00:52:48 Speaker_00
to decision makers in aggressive states like Beijing currently is, a message that if you try this, if you attack, if you blockade or coercively try to annex Taiwan, there will be costs associated with that that are going to be worse than what you thought you would have gained.

00:53:06 Speaker_00
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.

00:53:14 Speaker_00
Taiwan will be so well outfitted with things like anti-ship missiles that can be launched from trucks that are disguised like milk trucks driving around Taiwan. You're going to run into so many sea mines.

00:53:27 Speaker_00
You're going to have swarms of drones that come down on your ships trying to cross. And by the way, we've got friends behind us. We've got the United States, we've got Japan, we've got Australia, as well as other countries that don't want to see.

00:53:41 Speaker_00
I got it.

00:53:42 Speaker_01
So you're speaking from the perspective of Taiwan.

00:53:44 Speaker_00
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.

00:53:54 Speaker_00
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.

00:54:07 Speaker_01
How do you strategically or tactically do that in terms of, let's just say, next actions? What would be the next actions? If you could wave a magic wand and compel the people in power to take certain next steps, what would those things be?

00:54:21 Speaker_01
I think one of the fundamental disconnects – and this may relate on a more macro level – is that I've observed conversations among

00:54:30 Speaker_01
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.

00:54:49 Speaker_01
So what would the next actions look like? For instance, do we even have enough, do we have sufficient quantities of missiles or fill in the blank military technology to even provide.

00:55:02 Speaker_00
That's a really key one. So it starts with hard power. There's a diplomatic element to deterrence, there's an economic and informational aspect, but all of that doesn't amount to much if you don't have the foundation of hard power.

00:55:14 Speaker_00
The reason we've kept the peace for 70 plus years, you know, almost 80 years from the end of World War II there, was because there was such a stark imbalance between what the Chinese military was capable of,

00:55:26 Speaker_00
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.

00:55:37 Speaker_00
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.

00:55:44 Speaker_00
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? The short answer is no.

00:55:59 Speaker_00
Do we have to match them equally? Also, the answer is no.

00:56:03 Speaker_00
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.

00:56:23 Speaker_00
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.

00:56:33 Speaker_00
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.

00:56:49 Speaker_00
They have a number of very big ports, but those can be cut off. through anything from sea mines to other actions that could be taken.

00:56:58 Speaker_00
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. Imagine saving Private Ryan, but you have to run three miles.

00:57:12 Speaker_00
to get to the machine gun nest that's shooting at you. So Taiwan has these natural advantages that should work to our benefit.

00:57:21 Speaker_00
But it does mean that we have to show Xi Jinping that we have the ability to produce, and we actually are producing and have the stockpiles of these kinds of munitions, anti-ship missiles, drones, 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.

00:57:42 Speaker_01
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 idea?

00:57:54 Speaker_00
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.

00:58:03 Speaker_00
So it was Liddell Hart, who was early 20th century writer about war, said, will is the chief incalculable in war. It's the thing that's hardest to measure in advance of war, but which counts more than anything else once a war begins.

00:58:19 Speaker_00
And a good example of that is Ukraine. Everyone said Ukraine is going to crumble in a matter of days. It seems to be the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community.

00:58:29 Speaker_00
It seems to be the assessment of Vladimir Putin that it would fall quickly, and yet it didn't. Here we are two years plus later, and Ukrainians are bravely fighting. They're not asking for anyone to send troops.

00:58:42 Speaker_00
They're putting their own lives on the line. Will to fight was that X factor that actually created a catastrophe for the Russians.

00:58:51 Speaker_00
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.

00:59:06 Speaker_00
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.

00:59:17 Speaker_00
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.

00:59:29 Speaker_00
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.

00:59:44 Speaker_00
300, 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 trained.

00:59:59 Speaker_00
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 social depth because they have a culture of service

01:00:13 Speaker_01
What do you mean by social depth? Can you just give me another brief explanation of what that means?

01:00:18 Speaker_00
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 tech entrepreneurs or nurses or you name it, and were in uniform ready to fight.

01:00:33 Speaker_00
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.

01:00:54 Speaker_00
I got it.

01:00:54 Speaker_01
Sort of a broad social fluency with skills and playbooks. That's it. Checklists.

01:01:01 Speaker_00
Things that the military doesn't have to itself be responsible for, but will depend vitally on in the event of a war.

01:01:09 Speaker_01
So I've neglected something important, which we should probably hit on.

01:01:13 Speaker_01
And I arrived at this somewhat obvious element, timeline, because I was thinking to myself, do we really have time to help Taiwan develop this social depth or are more expedient next actions required? So how should people think of the imminence or

01:01:36 Speaker_01
maybe amount of time that we may have before there is decisive action on the part of China to potentially do something disruptive or aggressive or otherwise towards Taiwan.

01:01:50 Speaker_00
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.

01:02:07 Speaker_00
It's really Xi Jinping's lifespan, okay? Xi Jinping is in his early 70s now. He has broken the template for roughly decade-long tours of leadership by his last two predecessors, and he has installed himself for life.

01:02:23 Speaker_00
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?

01:02:38 Speaker_00
He's either going to leave in handcuffs or in a coffin, basically.

01:02:42 Speaker_01
Seems to be a trend around the world.

01:02:44 Speaker_00
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- This is what I was wondering about, any telegraphs. Yeah, well, sure.

01:03:00 Speaker_00
I mean, he has been very clear and has distinguished himself from his predecessors in how he talks about the goal of unifying Taiwan.

01:03:09 Speaker_00
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.

01:03:21 Speaker_01
Sounds more poetic in Chinese.

01:03:23 Speaker_00
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.

01:03:37 Speaker_00
He told President Biden when they were in San Francisco just last November that he now expects the United States not only not to interfere, but to actively support China in its goal of coercively annexing Taiwan. That was pretty cheeky.

01:03:53 Speaker_00
We've never heard a Chinese leader say that before.

01:03:54 Speaker_01
That's a strong ask.

01:03:55 Speaker_00
That's a strong ask. That's like, they'd be like Putin saying, listen, you know, it's good to talk to you, President Biden. We need your help destroying Ukraine and annexing it. That's what Xi Jinping has just asked of President Biden.

01:04:08 Speaker_01
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?

01:04:19 Speaker_00
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.

01:04:32 Speaker_00
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.

01:04:45 Speaker_00
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.

01:04:55 Speaker_00
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.

01:05:08 Speaker_00
that was 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 going to let it declare independence.

01:05:19 Speaker_00
Xi Jinping has changed that formula. He's saying it's not good enough.

01:05:23 Speaker_01
The buck stops with me.

01:05:24 Speaker_00
Yeah, it's not good enough for Taiwan not to seek independence. It needs to come back into the bosom of the motherland.

01:05:31 Speaker_01
So coming back to what would Need to be shown to sufficiently deter in the case of the hard power is it some type of official statement or.

01:05:41 Speaker_01
Some type of information that gets deliberately leaked so that it makes its way back to the ccp that is in effect we have. These numbers of these types of weapons so we are preparing ready but that shows the capability but not necessarily the will.

01:05:56 Speaker_00
That's right. Without capability, will is going to be insufficient oftentimes, right? So capability is a pretty good place to start.

01:06:04 Speaker_00
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.

01:06:12 Speaker_00
You create headaches for Chinese military planners who say, ah, I didn't think we'd have to deal with that. You know, we thought we were just had submarines and, you know, some bombers to worry about.

01:06:22 Speaker_00
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.

01:06:30 Speaker_00
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

01:06:42 Speaker_00
field large numbers of drones that could be very dangerous. They're very cheap. They're attritable.

01:06:48 Speaker_00
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.

01:07:00 Speaker_00
So you want them to have to worry about several different dimensions of a layered defense. And then will is a tough one.

01:07:08 Speaker_00
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.

01:07:18 Speaker_01
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?

01:07:24 Speaker_00
There are really brave, energetic people trying to do that right now. You've got people like Enoch Wu.

01:07:30 Speaker_00
He was educated in the U.S., but went back to do his military service in Taiwan and has now built something called the Forward Alliance, which is basically a civilian cadre of emergency response workers, and it has a lot of people signing up.

01:07:47 Speaker_01
So if you were, let's just say hypothetically, back in the White House after the next election cycles, whoever ends up in the big seat, and they say, all right, Matt, next six months or next year, give us the top three things, I'll sign off.

01:08:02 Speaker_00
On Taiwan specifically, because this is the biggest.

01:08:04 Speaker_01
Yeah, on Taiwan. I mean, if you wanted to throw in a bonus that's not Taiwan, that's fine too, from a national security perspective. But Taiwan or other, but certainly including Taiwan.

01:08:14 Speaker_00
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

01:08:27 Speaker_00
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 the biggest war in Europe since 1945. Xi Jinping's the main backer of that war.

01:08:43 Speaker_00
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 worldwide.

01:08:53 Speaker_01
I have no idea. It's big. How do you determine something like that? Not to put on my skeptics hat, but I'm like, how do you even figure that out, right?

01:09:00 Speaker_01
If the Russians are getting around sanctions with Tether and so on and so forth, at least according to the cover story in the New York Times, how do you figure that out?

01:09:08 Speaker_00
Jamie Rubin is the head of the Global Engagement Center at the State Department. He knows the answer to that question.

01:09:13 Speaker_01
I got it. Okay, so we got number one. So, Mr. President.

01:09:17 Speaker_00
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, the next one is Xi Jinping is backing the dictator in Venezuela, Maduro. to threaten his small neighbor Guyana.

01:09:34 Speaker_00
And so it's chaos.

01:09:36 Speaker_01
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.

01:09:44 Speaker_01
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.

01:09:51 Speaker_00
But oil, oil, Guyana has a lot of energy deposits and they've discovered more. And so Maduro's just signed a law sort of claiming that the big huge chunk of Guyana is actually Venezuelan territory. Guess who's backing him in that?

01:10:07 Speaker_00
Chinese Communist Party. Diplomatically, propagandistically, they're one of the main customers for the Venezuelans.

01:10:14 Speaker_01
Now, is that chaos intended to distract the U.S. specifically, or is it part of a broader strategy that includes but is not exclusive to the U.S.?

01:10:24 Speaker_00
It's primarily about us, because they view us as the main obstacle to a world vision that Xi Jinping calls a community of common destiny for all mankind. Sounds good. I know.

01:10:35 Speaker_00
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.

01:10:48 Speaker_00
In 2021, Xi Jinping gave a speech where he said the most important word to describe the world today is chaos. Da luan.

01:10:58 Speaker_01
Wow.

01:10:59 Speaker_00
Chaos. 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.

01:11:12 Speaker_00
He also goes on to say that the risks of world turmoil are outweighed by the benefits to the Chinese Communist Party. Two years later, that was right before the Ukraine war went into overdrive.

01:11:26 Speaker_00
He signed an agreement, a no-limits pact with Putin in February of 2022, and less than three weeks later, Putin was sending tanks in to try to take Kiev. Now, a year after that war, Xi Jinping went to visit the Kremlin.

01:11:42 Speaker_00
He went to go see his best and most intimate friend. That's his own phrase, by the way. Xi Jinping says, my best, most intimate friend is Vladimir Putin. He went to go check in on his friend, see how the war is going, see what he needs.

01:11:54 Speaker_00
And as Xi Jinping was leaving the Kremlin, he was caught on camera. Saying in essence that he was not only benefiting from chaos but that he was one of the architects of global chaos what he said specifically to putin was.

01:12:11 Speaker_00
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.

01:12:23 Speaker_00
And 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.

01:12:38 Speaker_00
And so it gives you some insight into the way that he's thinking about these things.

01:12:42 Speaker_00
That's why I would tell the President of the United States, step number one is impose massive costs on China's economy until Beijing starts to back off of lighting or squirting lighter fuel on these conflagrations that are taking place now on multiple continents.

01:13:00 Speaker_01
The opportunity of a lifetime, the chance that arrives only once every 100 years. Again, 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?

01:13:17 Speaker_01
Thinking in terms of Nassim Taleb, it's like, okay, can you not just be resilient in the face of chaos, but benefit from chaos?

01:13:24 Speaker_00
I think it would be very dangerous not to respect an adversary that's as committed and capable as they are.

01:13:30 Speaker_00
When I worked at the White House, when I was Deputy National Security Advisor, my boss was Robert O'Brien, who was the National Security Advisor at the time. I remember him once saying to me, doesn't Xi Jinping take off a weekend to play golf?

01:13:42 Speaker_00
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.

01:13:56 Speaker_00
I don't mean that in the sense that he's the hero. I mean it in the sense that he is the one driving events, by his own admission, in his little meeting with Vladimir Putin.

01:14:05 Speaker_00
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 protagonist again in the story.

01:14:16 Speaker_00
Because it's not a story that's going to end well if we let C continue writing it.

01:14:21 Speaker_01
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.

01:14:37 Speaker_01
What are the most formidable techniques or capabilities that China has with respect to those types of activities? Because they seem to be very sophisticated and to have incredible patience also with a lot of it.

01:14:52 Speaker_00
They're getting more sophisticated about it. And of course, AI tools.

01:14:56 Speaker_00
I'm still waiting for our AI firmament, all these smart technologists who are developing these technologies to figure out how to use that to sniff out foreign government interference.

01:15:09 Speaker_00
And I don't have a good answer yet, but what I can tell you is that Beijing is experimenting with deep fakes. They create whole personas that look like Westerners speaking in very fluent local English or other languages.

01:15:24 Speaker_00
So they're able to localize the messengers and to create them out of digits. So they look like newscasters, and yet they're providing fraudulent or deceptive sorts of messages.

01:15:36 Speaker_01
Just a quick side note on that. It's a side-by-side comparison of a real Chinese newscaster and a deepfake Chinese newscaster. you really could not, even at this point, tell the difference. It's remarkable.

01:15:51 Speaker_01
What other, perhaps, types of tells should people be aware of or cognizant of?

01:15:56 Speaker_01
And the one that comes to mind is, for instance, if you are maybe a naturalized citizen in the U.S., but ethnically Chinese, you have family in China, it seems like a lot of people have outreach on

01:16:08 Speaker_01
social media from folks they might develop a relationship with over years and then lo and behold they're like oh yeah you know be really helpful so you got promoted to like this here in google you really helpful for me to know a b and c your family in guam don't really appreciate it type of situation linkedin is been a very potent espionage tool for the chinese.

01:16:30 Speaker_00
Premier spy agency and others.

01:16:33 Speaker_01
So what kind of stuff should people be on the lookout for? What type of demographic should be hip to these types of techniques?

01:16:43 Speaker_00
You know, sunshine is a good disinfectant.

01:16:45 Speaker_00
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 social media and things like LinkedIn.

01:17:00 Speaker_00
And you don't want to take money from strangers. You know, 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.

01:17:16 Speaker_00
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.

01:17:28 Speaker_00
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.

01:17:43 Speaker_00
So it's things that involve a lack of transparency about what the real goals are. But what it's designed to do is to spot and assess and recruit allies to the party's

01:17:56 Speaker_01
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 or an example of what that looks like like down the espionage side i'm like okay we've all seen spy movies we can kind of imagine what that might look like and then you've got

01:18:13 Speaker_01
two levels up, you've got a sort of official party doctrine and explicitly stated goals. This intermediary, could you give an example of what form that could take?

01:18:21 Speaker_00
Yeah, a lot of them have the name friendship organizations, okay? There's a whole plethora of these groups. And it looks like it's an organic sort of small movement of people saying, well, this is something we believe.

01:18:33 Speaker_00
We believe that Taiwan really needs to become part of China again. That's our personal view. But in fact, the funding is coming from the Communist Party. The group has a huge tail to it.

01:18:45 Speaker_00
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.

01:18:58 Speaker_00
They start to target and sometimes compromise a mayor who looks like someday he might be governor or even president. I'll give you another example are some of the student associations that look like, you know, we were in college.

01:19:11 Speaker_00
There are all kinds of student associations. But there's one, the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, which actually reports to and is funded by the Chinese consulates and embassies. And they get special additional jobs.

01:19:27 Speaker_00
They're on 220 US campuses. That's by an old count.

01:19:33 Speaker_00
People who organize 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

01:19:51 Speaker_00
because they have a playbook. That's actually one of the reasons that they've been constituted. And they also keep an eye on other Chinese students on campus who come from China. I met this terrific student who was at a university in the Midwest.

01:20:07 Speaker_00
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.

01:20:17 Speaker_00
Her friend was from China, and she was organizing things having to do with the freedom of the Uyghur people, and specific Uyghurs who were being held as political prisoners. A risky move if you have family in China.

01:20:27 Speaker_00
Risky move, and she does have family in China. And one of her friends one day told her, who was actually part of this organization, he made sure that their phones weren't on them, that they were in another room. He said, I really like you.

01:20:41 Speaker_00
That's why I have to tell you we shouldn't talk anymore because I have to report back everything you tell me to handlers that ultimately, you know, go back to Beijing. And so here you have people who are coerced into spying on US campuses.

01:20:56 Speaker_00
on fellow students. And so I think this is something we should take head on, you know, put a spotlight on it. I think we should be issuing a smartphone to every student who arrives from an authoritarian country in the United States.

01:21:07 Speaker_00
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.

01:21:19 Speaker_00
Don't put WeChat, Weixin, 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.

01:21:35 Speaker_00
We should be doing much more for the Chinese diaspora that comes here to study. We should be giving them a shot at actually breaking free from this bubble of surveillance and censorship that follows them when they come to the United States.

01:21:48 Speaker_00
We should be breaking out of that.

01:21:50 Speaker_01
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.

01:22:05 Speaker_01
How does the reach of an influence and ability to exert power on those citizens differ from, say, a U.S. example where a U.S. with a passport moves to Amsterdam and they're there and they're criticizing the U.S. government? Okay, fine.

01:22:22 Speaker_01
But the equivalent example for someone with a Chinese passport or someone who gives up their passport, I'm not sure that's even a process you can go through in China. I don't know. But could you speak to that?

01:22:32 Speaker_00
There are Hong Kong citizens who have now moved to the UK or they've moved to the United States. Many of them are now Americans or British citizens who still come under coercive pressure.

01:22:46 Speaker_00
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.

01:23:00 Speaker_00
So this is the extraterritorial new phase of China's repression, which is to say, we're not just going to repress our own people in our borders. We're not just going to threaten our people when they go abroad. We're going to threaten

01:23:14 Speaker_00
foreign citizens so that 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.

01:23:26 Speaker_00
So this is the new phase that people have to face up to. We should be helping. I mean, look, there's a mass exodus of people out of China right now. People from China want to live in countries where they can enjoy the rule of law.

01:23:40 Speaker_00
where human rights are going to be respected, where they have a lot of different opportunities that they can pursue. They're leaving by the millions to go to other countries. I think that we should view those people as natural allies.

01:23:54 Speaker_00
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.

01:24:06 Speaker_00
A lot of very wealthy Chinese have moved to Hokkaido in northern Japan. And recently – I did not realize that. Yeah, yeah. You know, Singapore is one of the places that they're escaping to. Singapore, I've heard for sure.

01:24:19 Speaker_00
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.

01:24:32 Speaker_00
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.

01:24:47 Speaker_00
So we should be getting creative about ways to neutralize that sort of terror. We should be identifying people who are conducting that sort of extra legal interference in our own system, people who are thugs, people who are coerced into spying.

01:25:03 Speaker_00
We should be focusing on that so that people feel safe in the United States.

01:25:06 Speaker_01
So I feel obligated to say a couple things. So the first is, For people listening, I fully recognize that this type of statecraft, espionage, this is part of the game, right? China's not the only people with boots on the ground, right?

01:25:19 Speaker_01
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

01:25:33 Speaker_01
I've spent time in 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 I Ching, believe it or not, way back in the day, even.

01:25:46 Speaker_01
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.

01:26:00 Speaker_01
Who knows? Did you ever play Weiqi, the game Go? Oh, I have played Go. Yes, I have. Absolutely.

01:26:07 Speaker_00
It's closer to Go. Okay, please explain. Go, you can see what's happening on the board, but you can't see the strategy. readily.

01:26:15 Speaker_01
Yeah, for those who don't know, yeah, the image, white and black stones.

01:26:19 Speaker_00
It's a 19 by 19 board. And famously, up until recently, a computer could never beat a pretty good human being at Go. Until AlphaGo. Whereas it's been years and years that chess masters have been defeated by AI.

01:26:34 Speaker_00
And then, of course, you had AlphaGo a handful of years ago, which changed it and actually taught Go masters new ways of approaching the game. So wild.

01:26:43 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's a great, it's a great game.

01:26:45 Speaker_00
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.

01:26:53 Speaker_01
So the broader question I wanted to ask you was, U.S., what a rocket ship. This young upstart of a country, bada bing, bada boom, has turned into this incredible global superpower.

01:27:04 Speaker_01
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?

01:27:23 Speaker_01
And maybe this ties into other factors that could affect China, like a population implosion, if that seems to be a pending problem with birth replacement rates and so on in the next 20, 30 years. I don't know.

01:27:36 Speaker_01
But what are the things the US should be thinking of Maybe if we go one level up there china specific questions but this is more a permanent. Question writ large what can the us do or should do different one thing we should first do is.

01:27:54 Speaker_00
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.

01:28:08 Speaker_00
And yet, that model is not sustainable without the United States. You can't have British successful parliamentary democracy today or in Denmark or in Japan if the United States does not remain the strongest democracy. Why is that?

01:28:27 Speaker_00
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

01:28:42 Speaker_00
within their borders or confined to their borders when their neighbors are liberal democracies. It's just, you know, it doesn't matter how much you try to reassure them, the nature of that kind of a system is that it is compulsively hostile.

01:28:57 Speaker_00
And so small countries are not going to have an easy time standing up to a juggernaut like the People's Republic of China. so long as it is a totalitarian Leninist system. And now China's stitching together an axis of these countries.

01:29:12 Speaker_00
Venezuela is one of the minor partners. Iran is a more important partner. North Korea is a freakish, difficult partner, but a partner nonetheless. And then you've got Russia.

01:29:24 Speaker_01
The difficult cousin of the family reunion.

01:29:27 Speaker_00
Exactly. The Kim family regime spoils a lot of dinners at the holidays. But what you are facing now is a very significant

01:29:37 Speaker_00
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.

01:29:50 Speaker_00
So first, we have to recognize that as many problems as we have at home, and that'll be another podcast for us to talk about,

01:29:58 Speaker_00
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.

01:30:08 Speaker_00
Those are very, very special things that we should not take for granted, and we should actually be proud of them and own them.

01:30:14 Speaker_00
And I think if we were to do that, even as we talk openly about the legacy, Ronald Reagan, when he was president, people remember that he made this very you know, hostile set of remarks about the Soviet Union. He called it an evil empire.

01:30:29 Speaker_00
He said it was the root of all evil in the world. People forget that when he gave that evil empire speech, he also talked about the legacy of evil in American history. He talked about slavery.

01:30:40 Speaker_00
I mean, can you imagine a Chinese leader or Putin giving a speech like that? It's impossible because they don't,

01:30:47 Speaker_01
Meaning one finger pointing outward, but another finger pointing backward.

01:30:50 Speaker_00
Yeah, saying, look, we are a country that navigates by a North Star that is really worthy of navigating by. Even though we don't reach the North Star, When we deviate from that path, we know that we're on the wrong path.

01:31:06 Speaker_00
So we have to keep going towards those higher human ideals, the things that the founders framed in the Declaration and in the Constitution. These are very powerful ideas and things that we should continue to try to live by.

01:31:20 Speaker_00
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, genocide in the year 2024.

01:31:36 Speaker_00
as recognized by a number of countries, as recognized by both Mike Pompeo when he was Secretary of State and by Tony Blinken when he is Secretary of State. This is not a country that we're going to be able to do business with amiably.

01:31:50 Speaker_00
This is not a leader who has declared himself essentially an agent of chaos in the world and who's funding anti-democratic and anti-American propaganda. That's not someone who we're going to be able to resolve problems with.

01:32:02 Speaker_00
So we need to be a bit more real. We need to impose more costs. We need to be rhetorically sharper in drawing the distinctions between who we and our allies are and other democracies.

01:32:13 Speaker_01
And that's in terms of just informational campaigns in the U.S. for the citizenry of the U.S., you mean?

01:32:20 Speaker_00
Yeah, I mean, President Biden has given some good speeches. When he first came into power, people rarely read strategy documents.

01:32:27 Speaker_00
I wish the press would do a better job of reading them, because the president took the time to write an introduction to his strategic guidance six weeks into his administration.

01:32:36 Speaker_00
And he said, we're facing a serious moment right now that's going to determine whether the world is predominantly democratic, law-abiding, peaceful, or whether it's going to be authoritarian, anti-democratic, violent.

01:32:51 Speaker_00
And so I'd like to hear him talk more about that, but then also to follow up with more policies that show that we're doing something about those problems. That's where I think the disconnect has been with President Biden.

01:33:02 Speaker_00
But I think those speeches were admirable.

01:33:05 Speaker_01
So I'd like to segue to some of your personal history, because maybe it ties into other parts of this conversation. So age 32, you make some decisions. So can you walk us through some of what you did up to that point, and then what changed?

01:33:22 Speaker_00
I spent my 20s, for the most part, as a reporter writing for Reuters and the Wall Street Journal in China. I spent eight or nine years in total either as a student or as a reporter living in China.

01:33:34 Speaker_00
It was a great, exciting time to be there through the 90s into the early 2000s.

01:33:39 Speaker_00
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 in our office happen to be right across the street from the world trade center so the world financial center was the old.

01:33:56 Speaker_00
Wall street journal headquarters at that time and i got in the day prior my father who lives in westchester county new york. Said i got an idea i'll drive you into town tomorrow.

01:34:08 Speaker_00
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.

01:34:13 Speaker_00
And i said look i've got to prepare my story ideas i'm gonna be talking to paul steiger and john bussey the top editors of the journal tell them what i want to work on.

01:34:23 Speaker_00
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 and i'm gonna grab a bagel for the car ride.

01:34:34 Speaker_00
So as we were headed into town we got the news that the towers have been hit while we're listening to the talk radio am talk radio.

01:34:43 Speaker_00
And as it unfolded became clear and clear what happened this wasn't an accident with something much more serious than that we left the city before we even really gotten deep into it went back home.

01:34:56 Speaker_00
And i stood on that i mean i was absolutely in a state of shock about the september eleven terrorist attacks.

01:35:03 Speaker_00
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 U.S.

01:35:15 Speaker_00
went into Afghanistan and then ultimately in 2003 decided to invade Iraq. And by 2004, as I'm watching these developments, it became clear to me that the war in Iraq was going very badly. We had the two battles of Fallujah.

01:35:30 Speaker_00
It was metastasizing into really an insurgency. And then there was sort of a confluence of a bunch of different influences in my life. My stepfather had been an Air Force officer. His dad flew B-17s in World War II.

01:35:43 Speaker_00
I grew up with those stories and with a strong sense of respect for military service. As a result, they were both West Point grads. I also met a bunch of Marines in quick succession by happenstance.

01:35:57 Speaker_00
I don't know if you remember the Indian Ocean tsunami that struck the Indian Ocean countries, Southeast Asia, devastating. A quarter million or so people were killed by that tsunami day after Christmas, 2004.

01:36:10 Speaker_00
I got scrambled down to Thailand to cover that story and ended up pulling back from the devastation along the beach where I'm interviewing family members, survivors of this thing.

01:36:23 Speaker_00
And I went up to Utapau Air Base, which was an old air base in Thailand that the US used to use during the Vietnam War, except it was bustling again with American troops who had all arrived basically to carry out the humanitarian response to that tsunami.

01:36:38 Speaker_00
And the guy who was in charge was a Marine. I met a bunch of these young kids who were like, I couldn't even make coffee when I was, you know, 20. And here you had the corporals who were leading squads of Marines, and they were really gung-ho and proud of the work they were doing to help get humanitarian stuff out there.

01:36:57 Speaker_00
So anyway, one thing leads to another, and suddenly I meet a Marine colonel around that time who challenges me to go visit a recruiting station. I couldn't even believe it. It was actually an officer selection office, right?

01:37:11 Speaker_00
It's a recruiting office for officers of the Marine Corps. And I started reading up on the Marine Corps. I ended up taking an appointment and going down to the USS Intrepid, which is the aircraft carrier museum on the Hudson River.

01:37:25 Speaker_01
Let me pause you for one second. So you have a job. You're doing pretty well with such a job. Yeah, no, it was great. What was the inner monologue or the moment where you're like, okay, I'm actually going to take this meeting?

01:37:39 Speaker_01
Because now you've crossed a threshold, right, when you're taking a meeting. So how did you just make that decision? It's funny, I mean, it was a- Or was it more of a like, ah, it can't hurt.

01:37:49 Speaker_00
No, no, it was sometimes, it was sort of out of body experience. Like the logic became more and more apparent as I made those tentative steps. And then it came to feel almost inevitable.

01:38:00 Speaker_00
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.

01:38:12 Speaker_00
Number two, we're losing a war and fighting another war at the same time in Afghanistan, which would end up going worse over time. And then there was the feeling that, what if I don't do this? I have a happy job.

01:38:25 Speaker_00
I'll become a bureau chief in one of the Wall Street Journal offices. I love the Wall Street Journal.

01:38:30 Speaker_00
reporting but i also had this sense that if i don't do this i may regret it because this is the moment where i'm supposed to serve we're in two wars they're not going well if i don't serve now i won't be able to serve i'll be too old to do it so i need to do this gut check and see if this is something i'm up to and it became a test of myself too it was a self-test so then what happened

01:38:52 Speaker_00
I discover that I'm out of shape, and I meet a Marine who is studying in Beijing.

01:38:57 Speaker_00
He's a captain, and he's there doing an Olmsted Foundation scholarship, which is like you can go study in a foreign university for a year or two, and he's getting his master's degree. It's such a great Marine Corps moment because I'm a nobody.

01:39:09 Speaker_00
I'm a stranger. but I meet him at the Marine Corps birthday ball, which I don't know if you've ever, any city you go to in the world. I've never been to a Marine birthday ball. That's what you're going to ask me.

01:39:19 Speaker_00
The Marines who guard our embassies around the world every year for the Marine Corps birthday, when it was founded November the 10th. They put together a ball where they invite dignitaries and the ambassador and foreign attaches and so forth.

01:39:32 Speaker_00
And I got invited to one of these things. And I end up meeting this Marine captain who's in his dress blues. And I tell him, I got to let you in on something. My family doesn't know this. My employers don't know this.

01:39:42 Speaker_00
But I just have to spill my guts to you. I'm thinking of joining the Marine Corps. And so within two days,

01:39:49 Speaker_00
at sunup i'm at a stadium with him in the middle of beijing and he's pt-ing me giving me physical training we're doing sprints and interval training around the workers stadium and this guy becomes my personal trainer just kicks my ass

01:40:05 Speaker_00
His name's Cedric Lee. He's still in. He's a colonel now in the Marine Corps working at the White House.

01:40:11 Speaker_00
Cedric Lee trains me to be ready and trains me so well that by the time I get to officer candidate school, I'm actually near the front of the pack, at least on the physical aspect. I'm not a big guy. I'm light.

01:40:24 Speaker_00
He got me so I could do 20 pull-ups, dead hang pull-ups, and I could run my ass off. Then I was in for the shock of actually going through

01:40:32 Speaker_00
through 10 weeks of officer candidate school training, six months of the basic school training to become a provisional rifle platoon commander, and then intel training after that. It was an unbelievable organization and culture.

01:40:45 Speaker_01
What would you say were the biggest impacts of that experience on you?

01:40:50 Speaker_00
It's funny. I mean, one of the first things you learn, you just inhabit your own head all the time. That's what we do when we walk around. You inhabit your ego. Nature being human. It's called being human.

01:40:59 Speaker_00
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 a decision. decision to be here. They're like, no, no.

01:41:06 Speaker_00
We had this great colonel, Colonel Chase, who was running the Officer Candidate School. He was a former enlisted guy. He had been a drill instructor. Now he's a colonel running the Officer Candidate School. And he gives this talk. It was very personal.

01:41:17 Speaker_00
It was visceral because he had been a drill instructor too. And he basically said, none of you are going to make it through here if I don't believe that you're going to be a good leader of Marines. And this was a promise. This was a threat.

01:41:29 Speaker_00
And 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.

01:41:40 Speaker_00
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,

01:41:47 Speaker_00
that you're gonna be a good leader of those marines whose lives you're gonna be responsible for and putting at risk, then I'm not gonna let you march across the grinder and become a marine officer. You're not gonna pin those lieutenant bars on.

01:41:59 Speaker_00
And so this culture where suddenly, Now you're suddenly feeling real responsibility. It's like, holy shit, I'm not responsible for myself in war. I'm responsible for a platoon of 40 young men and women. It's a shock.

01:42:13 Speaker_00
And I didn't have any leadership skills naturally. Everything I learned had to get pounded into me through repetition and screaming and making mistakes and touching the electric fence and finding out it hurts is really something.

01:42:29 Speaker_00
The other thing about the Marine Corps that people should all know, and this goes for the military generally, is that the Marine Corps in particular pushes down responsibility. It delegates to the lowest level.

01:42:41 Speaker_00
So the idea is, think about how many things in American life are about, we're going to give opportunity to the guy who's at the top.

01:42:47 Speaker_00
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.

01:42:58 Speaker_00
It says i want to know who the worst guy is in your platoon and i want to make sure that you're pulling him up so that the baseline. is impressive.

01:43:07 Speaker_00
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.

01:43:21 Speaker_00
And the officers just have the privilege of being custodians for a while and being able to lead a group that has leadership already imbued in it and where young 20-year-old, 19-year-old

01:43:33 Speaker_00
Lance Corporal or Corporal has immense responsibility very, very quickly.

01:43:38 Speaker_01
We're going to wrap up in a few minutes, but I wanted to ask, are there one or two leadership lessons, as you said, that had to get pounded into you? One or two that have really stuck with you.

01:43:49 Speaker_01
Could be something you observed, could be a principle, could be some type of expression, anything that sticks out.

01:43:55 Speaker_00
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

01:44:11 Speaker_00
not your integrity or your honor, but your position in order to make sure that the right thing gets done. Even when it exposes you to ridicule and moral courage isn't something that people talk about a lot in everyday life.

01:44:25 Speaker_00
I'll tell you one funny quick story. You just reminded me of, because we're talking about the basic school. You have to do gas chamber training where you put on a gas mask and you run into this concrete hut. which they fill with CS tear gas, okay?

01:44:41 Speaker_00
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.

01:44:53 Speaker_00
And because I was either insufficiently attentive, but also because I was still getting acquainted with the gear, one of the valves was partway open.

01:45:02 Speaker_00
So you get these two, like, coin-sized valves on the side, where one side, depending on which side you hold your rifle on, you put the canister there that filters out the gas.

01:45:11 Speaker_00
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.

01:45:25 Speaker_00
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 a fellow lieutenant.

01:45:40 Speaker_00
And so here you've got a whole company of Marines getting ready to go through, and I'm the first one out.

01:45:45 Speaker_00
And they lay me down on the ground, stripped my mask off, and everyone at first thought it was a joke, that it was meant to just kind of like spook them. And then they saw that I was deep. deep purple, like blue, and not breathing.

01:46:00 Speaker_00
And one of the corporals, 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 sprung up to my feet again. I mean, instantly, like, you know, wild wake up.

01:46:15 Speaker_00
And apparently, I turned from purple to blue to green and like in front of everyone's faces. And a couple of lieutenants started puking. The best part of the story is my platoon commander is looking at me. I mean, I'm just a mess, right?

01:46:34 Speaker_00
I mean, I've been unconscious. And Captain Gaskell, who was my platoon commander, says, hey, do you know where you're going? And I said, to the infirmary. He says, no, you're going straight back in.

01:46:45 Speaker_00
And so I get my mask fixed, and then I go and do the whole thing again, and it worked out. But that was one of my... Back on the horse, son. I lost some IQ points that I never got back from that whole incident, unfortunately.

01:46:59 Speaker_01
Wow. Well, man of many stories, many capabilities. And I'm very glad we got time to not just meet and spend time eating pho at your house, which was spectacular. but also talking about some very important topics.

01:47:19 Speaker_01
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?

01:47:31 Speaker_01
Anything at all that you'd like to mention before we wind to a close?

01:47:37 Speaker_00
I'll only say one thing, which is that service is really good stuff. 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, especially for your young listeners.

01:47:54 Speaker_00
I joined the Marine Corps at 32. I wouldn't trade that experience for anything.

01:47:58 Speaker_01
Thanks so much, Matt. I really appreciate it all the time. And for everybody listening, we'll link to everything in the show notes as per usual at tim.blog.com slash podcast.

01:48:06 Speaker_01
You can search Matt Pottinger, probably be easier, Taiwan, boiling note, 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.

01:48:22 Speaker_01
Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

01:48:33 Speaker_01
Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page

01:48:44 Speaker_01
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01:48:52 Speaker_01
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01:49:04 Speaker_01
And these strange, esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, Again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

01:49:19 Speaker_01
If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

01:49:31 Speaker_01
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Models with more responsive foam to cradle your body for essential support in stomach and back sleeping positions and on and on. They have you covered. So how will you know which Helix mattress works best for you and your body?

01:51:56 Speaker_01
Take the Helix sleep quiz at helixsleep.com slash Tim and find your perfect mattress in less than two minutes. Personally, for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress.

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I also have one of those in the guest bedroom and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. They frequently say it's the best night of sleep they've had in ages. It's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever.

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Helix mattresses are American made and come with a 10 or 15 year warranty, depending on the model. Your mattress will be shipped straight to your door free of charge.

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And there's no better way to test out a new mattress than by sleeping on it in your own home. That's why they offer a 100-night risk-free trial. If you decide it's not the best fit, you're welcome to return it for a full refund.

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Helix has been awarded number one mattress by both GQ and Wired magazines. And now, Helix has harnessed years of extensive mattress expertise to bring you a truly elevated sleep experience.

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Their newest collection of mattresses, called Helix Elite, includes six different mattress models, each tailored for specific sleep positions and firmness preferences, so you can get exactly what your body needs.

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Each Helix Elite mattress comes with an extra layer of foam for pressure relief and thousands of extra micro-coils for best-in-class support and durability.

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Every Helix Elite mattress also comes with a 15-year manufacturer's warranty and the same 100-night trial as the rest of Helix's mattresses. During the month of May, Helix is running their Memorial Day sale.

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You can get between 25 and 30% off plus two free pillows on all mattress orders. So go to helixsleep.com slash Tim to check it out. That's helixsleep.com slash Tim. With Helix, better sleep starts now.