Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Matt Pottinger. Matt is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and chairman of the China Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Matt served as U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor from 2019 to 2021. In that role, Matt coordinated the full spectrum of national security policy. Before that, he served as the NSC’s senior director for Asia, where he led the administration’s work on the Indo-Pacific region, and in particular its shift on China policy.
Before his White House service, Matt spent the late 1990s and early 2000s in China as a reporter for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. He then fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as a U.S. Marine during three combat deployments between 2007 and 2010. Following active duty, Matt ran Asia research at Davidson Kempner 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.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Listen to the episode onApple Podcasts,Spotify,Overcast,Podcast Addict,Pocket Casts,Castbox,YouTube Music,Amazon Music,Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform. Watch the interview on YouTube here.
#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 (#736)
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Tim Ferriss: Matt, so great to see you again.
Matt Pottinger: I’m delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.
Tim Ferriss: Absolutely. 好久不见 hǎojiǔbújiàn [“Long time no see”].
Matt Pottinger: 好久不见 hǎojiǔbújiàn [“Long time no see”]. Your tones are actually still quite sharp and acute, I don’t know how you did that.
Tim Ferriss: 没什么好就 méishénme hǎojiù [“It’s nothing good”]. I guess we saw each other not too long ago and we were sitting in your kitchen at your dining room table and there were some calligraphy on the wall, and I asked you, because my characters have grown a little rough around the edges, and I asked you what this calligraphy meant. Recognized a few characters, but not all of them. What is this calligraphy that’s on your wall?
Matt Pottinger: That piece of calligraphy was written for me by Bao Tong. Bao Tong was a high Chinese official in the People’s Republic of China, and he happened to be the chief of staff to the party secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, when the Tiananmen protests took off in the spring of 1989. And Bao Tong ended up like his boss, getting arrested. His boss spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Bao Tong went to prison for essentially siding with the students, the pro-democracy students, and eventually got out of prison, but spent the rest of his life under house arrest. And we developed a friendship remotely and he wrote two pieces of calligraphy for me. And that one says 先天下之忧而忧 xiāntiānxià zhīyōu éryōu [”The first concern is affairs of state”], and the unwritten, but second part of that, is 后天下之乐而乐 hòu tiānxià zhīlè ér lè [“Enjoying the pleasure comes later”].
It was a famous quote by a Chinese statesman from 1,000 years ago named 范仲淹 [“Fan Zhongyan”]. And 范仲淹 was this polymath who created the Chinese examination system, and so forth, but he was a loyal official who had to go into exile. That’s what would happen. If you really screwed up, you’d get killed by the Emperor, but he got sent into exile. But it’s really a motto. What it means is that you need to be the first one to worry about all under Heaven and the last one to enjoy the pleasures of all under Heaven. So it’s about the responsibility of a good official.
Tim Ferriss: How did you develop a friendship with this person?
Matt Pottinger: During the days when I was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, based in China. And sometimes he was able to have visitors, and so we struck up a correspondence.
Tim Ferriss: So I should say from the outset, and this goes without saying, but fascinated by IM and UR Chinese culture language, we’re going to talk about how that entered the scene. And I’ve spent time at two universities in China, this is a long time ago, in ’96, and we both studied East Asian languages in school. How did you decide to do that?
Matt Pottinger: Yeah, 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.
Tim Ferriss: Creative differences.
Matt Pottinger: 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 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 —
Tim Ferriss: Super unusual.
Matt Pottinger: — to have a Chinese teacher.
Tim Ferriss: Where was this?
Matt Pottinger: This was in Milton, Massachusetts. Milton Academy, south of Boston.
Tim Ferriss: Good school.
Matt Pottinger: And Mr. Murray, Michael Murray, was walking across the quad and I was trying to figure out how on Earth I’m going to escape Spanish class. And I asked if I could jump into Chinese and he let me do that. And so that was the beginning of — my love affair with China started with the language. And I went on, in college, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst had one of the truly great East Asian languages and literature programs, classical Chinese. Al Cohen, Don Gjertson, and others.
Tim Ferriss: Classical Chinese.
Matt Pottinger: I studied classical, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If contemporary Chinese isn’t hard enough for you.
Matt Pottinger: Yeah, it’s like just starting to learn English and someone’s like, “We’re just going to throw in Latin on top of that.”
Tim Ferriss: With a little Beowulf on the side. Enjoy.
Matt Pottinger: 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 of —
Tim Ferriss: Wow, Perry. I studied with Perry.
Matt Pottinger: — Princeton University at the time.
Tim Ferriss: Amazing, amazing teacher. Yeah.
Matt Pottinger: He was my Chinese teacher for a summer program in Beijing, and we’re still in touch today.
Tim Ferriss: No kidding.
Matt Pottinger: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Wow, I did not know that part. 林老师 lín lǎoshī [“Lin teacher”/”Mr. Lin”]
Matt Pottinger: 林老师 lín lǎoshī. Yeah. Right, right.
Tim Ferriss: Man. Brutal in his enforcement of the tones, which is probably why it stuck. I just remember —
Matt Pottinger: You’re stuck.
Tim Ferriss: I just remember — this was, let’s see, probably ’95, ’96. Chinese 101 at Princeton at the time and the first class had maybe 35 students. I would say a few weeks later, 14 students.
Matt Pottinger: Yeah, serious attrition.
Tim Ferriss: It was serious thinning.
Matt Pottinger: That’s like my Marine Corps officer candidate school class was roughly that level of attrition. No, he’s no nonsense and a wonderful teacher.
Tim Ferriss: 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. First of all, Chinese one-on-one had five or six classes a week, I want to say. It was some unbelievable volume of classes, and that was, I want to say — probably including language lab, where you would have to read and record your tones, and then you’d have these one-on-ones where you would get cross-examined for your failures with your tones. It worked really well. And there’s one class in the middle of winter, we’d all shuffled through the snow and bitter cold to get to this class. And this poor girl, this one girl had some type of laryngitis or something, and we would all repeat whatever word it happened to be, right?
I want to say it was something like 也许 (yexu), right? And so we’re saying this word, 也许, and she’s like, “也许.” And he’s like — holds up a finger, and he’s like, “You. Again, again, again,” and he just made her do it like 12 times and we’re like, “The brutality.”
Matt Pottinger: It’s Marine Corps methods, it’s a drill instructor.
Tim Ferriss: But it worked. And a question for you, when you learned Chinese, and I’m going to backstep — and don’t worry, guys. We’re going to get to the geopolitics and all the juicy bits, TikTok included. But this all starts with a deep fascination and not a deep critique. That’s part of what I’m trying to underscore, like a deep fascination. One thing that worked really well at Princeton and contrasted it with a lot of other schools at the time is we used something called GR. I don’t know if you remember this. It was 国语罗马字, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, so it was teaching tones with different spellings. So the romanized version of, say, 国 guó, “country,” second tone, would be G-W-O. Or if you wanted to say, like, 去过, qù guò, like, “I went.” Fourth zone would be G-U-O-H, and it worked. 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?
Matt Pottinger: I did learn with pinyin. Chinese language teachers have a joke that if you stay in the business of teaching Chinese long enough, you ultimately end up creating your own syllabary romanized language to approximate Chinese or you end up studying the I Ching and teaching it. The mystical text from way back. But I learned it with regular [foreign language 00:11:48] pinyin, 罗马拼音 luómǎ pīnyīn which is the Chinese standard one. 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. We were using cassettes in those days. Going into that lab, putting the headphones on, and being able to repeat perfectly. Even if you didn’t understand what the words meant yet or the grammar, you had to be able to say those words, just emulate, mimic the sounds rather than trying to read a Romanized approximation of it. And that was one way to break the back of the ways that you can go wrong trying to study pinyin.
Tim Ferriss: All right, so since this is the podcast that deconstructs people who are good at various things, excellent at various things, any other tips for people who may want to learn Chinese?
Matt Pottinger: Yeah. Well, look, I learned — after I learned Chinese, I learned Japanese. I’ve forgotten most of it, because this was 30 years ago. But what amazed me was I followed a smarter technique for studying the language and I learned it much faster than I was able to learn Chinese. And it started with those tapes, recording yourself, repeating full sentences. Not vocab lists, not studying the Roman — in Japanese, it’s called Romaji, right? You’re studying Latin letters. Instead, you have the discipline to just listen to full sentences, be able to say those sentences flawlessly before you start to deconstruct the sentences according to the vocab and the grammar, and so forth. So it’s starting like a child, with the sounds, and then getting to vocab and grammar.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So you and I have a very similar approach in that way. I did not realize we had this parallel, and don’t worry, guys, we’re going to get off this language learning kick in a second. But I went from public school on Long Island to St. Paul’s in New Hampshire. I had decided I was bad at Spanish and then I hopped ship to Japanese, so I did it in the opposite order. In part, because a friend of mine was taking Japanese and I wanted to be in a class with one of my friends at least if I was going to be bad at a given subject, IE, language learning. And then the Japanese took off and then I learned, or studied, I’ve forgotten most of it, so we have the opposite in that sense. My Japanese is still pretty strong for, 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.
Matt Pottinger: Perfect.
Tim Ferriss: And landed in a very similar place, like start with full sentences, and that recording is so key. I feel like that’s still pretty neglected in modern language teaching.
Matt Pottinger: Totally right. It makes me want to go back to learning Spanish, because that was the worst approach that I took.
Tim Ferriss: I eventually got back to Spanish.
Matt Pottinger: Awesome.
Tim Ferriss: I eventually got back to Spanish. I’ll throw in a bonus language learning tip, which is you can use a comic that is very widely translated, like One Piece. If you have English or any other language, you can take two volumes, say volume four in One Piece. The exact same comic book panel by panel in two languages, and go back and forth without using a dictionary. So you can actually study dialogue and conversation, which is one of the benefits of comic books, so I’ve used that for a couple of different languages. Language, the Chinese language is one of your superpowers. It allows you to do things that a lot of other folks cannot do, and I would say one of those is, for instance, looking at Chinese language speeches, memos, internal documents, or maybe not exclusively internal documents, and we’re going to edge into that. But since it’s the topic of the hour, TikTok.
Matt Pottinger: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: 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?
Matt Pottinger: Well, there’s been a lot of discussion about some of the risks of using TikTok, and most of that discussion in the US is focused on the data security aspect. That this app, once it’s in your phone, it goes everywhere, it pulls everything. Now, famously, although people have forgotten, TikTok was using that data to track American journalists to try to figure out who their sources were, so they could fire those sources from TikTok. So they go in and actually look at where specific users are to track their activities and who they know and what they’re doing, so that is a risk. It’s actually secondary to the bigger problem with TikTok, which is not being discussed head-on very frequently, and that is that the Chinese Communist Party has stated explicitly that it wants to use tools such as TikTok, specifically short-form video apps, of which TikTok is the really key one, to, in the words of Xi Jinping, “Win the global majority.”
That’s his phrase. They want to use it as a megaphone in what he calls “A smokeless war” or “A smokeless battlefield,” for ideological persuasion and also destruction. Namely, if you look at how TikTok trends certain content and you compare that, which is not easy to do, TikTok makes this hard to do, but you could use some of their proxies, some of the data that they share for advertisers, which they’ve since shut down, because they didn’t like the fact that people were starting to look. But what you found was that anti-American, anti-democratic, anti-Israeli content after the October 7 terror attacks by Hamas in Southern Israel occurred, that stuff trends at multiples of what it does on things like Instagram or Reels or X. And it’s not because of the demographic, because people have done control studies to look at how Taylor Swift trends across those platforms.
And it turns out she trends almost exactly equally across all these different apps and platforms, but when it comes to things that are embarrassing to the Chinese Communist Party, that stuff gets minimized on TikTok through the algorithm. When there are things that they want to amplify, pro-Communist Party, or things that make Americans hate one another or hate or lose faith in their system of government, that stuff gets amplified inordinately. And so it’s very clear that the algorithms are being manipulated, and those algorithms are subject to the control, very explicitly subject to the control, of the Chinese Communist Party. So Xi Jinping back — I think it was in 2021, he had a study session, right? He’s the chairman of everything in China. He’s dictator par excellence. He holds a study session for the ClipPolitburo, which is the highest body of Communist Party officials, and it’s on external discourse mechanisms.
And what he’s talking about is —. In fact, one of his senior intelligence officers said publicly, “It doesn’t matter what’s true and what’s false, it only matters who controls the platform and, therefore, we need to use this platform to win the global majority.” And TikTok — so Xi Jinping holds this study session. The People’s Daily, which is the Communist Party mouthpiece newspaper, a couple of weeks later, makes clear that what he was talking about were short-form video apps and they talk about TikTok specifically. So it’s a weapon, it’s a weapon pointed at our democracy.
Tim Ferriss: So to double-click on a few things. First is, in terms of company structure or parent company structure, people involved, is there anything that would be instructive to point out there? Let’s begin with that.
Matt Pottinger: Well, a good friend and colleague of mine is —
Tim Ferriss: And why should we take you to be an expert in TikTok? How have you studied this?
Matt Pottinger: Well, look, 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 and where it’s going. My colleague, John Garnaut and Matthew Johnson, two colleagues of mine — Matthew’s great, he was an Oxford professor of Chinese modern government before we kidnapped him to come do work for us. John Garnaut was a journalist like me in China, an Australian, he wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald. And eventually, a little bit before I went into government, he was working for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull as one of his China advisors in Canberra. Anyway, they decided to do a very in-depth study looking at the history of TikTok, trying to figure out things like the structure, who’s it beholden to. And what you have is this interesting saga of a truly innovative Silicon Valley-type company that emerges from the mind of Zhang Yiming, a very, very bright, talented entrepreneur and technologist in China, and some of his partners.
And it quickly catches on in ways that catch the attention of the Chinese government. And so over time, what the Chinese government does is it inserts itself. The Communist Party, which is superior to the Chinese government, inserts itself into the heart of that company. And in fact, the company I’m talking about is ByteDance. ByteDance is the parent company that fully controls TikTok, along with a number of other apps, including the Chinese version of TikTok that’s called Douyin. And it turns out they share the same engineers, it’s all in China, the same engineering core, same algorithms, but adjusted very, very differently. So if you go to Douyin in China, you’re not going to see any of this awful content, you’re going to see wholesome content and pro-Communist Party content. You’re not going to see things that pit Chinese people against one another or that agitate them, even though it’s the same algorithms, same back office, same engineers.
And by the way, the editor in chief of ByteDance, with responsibility for all of the apps and their content, is also the Communist Party secretary who was assigned by Xi Jinping, and his general office, to babysit that company and to make sure that it is serving the purposes of the Chinese Communist Party. His deputy is the deputy editor in chief of all apps, and he’s also the deputy Communist Party secretary for the company. So it took a lot of digging to piece all of this together, because TikTok and ByteDance have erased this history, but there are ways to go back and look at websites that have since been erased and piece this together. They’ve airbrushed out all of this history. And TikTok masquerades as a foreign company. They say, “No, no, we’re Singaporean. It’s nonsense.” It has nothing to do with Singapore. I mean, there’s only a handful, relative to their overall staff of people there. And the guy who’s the CEO is really just a front man, is sort of a spokesman. He doesn’t have any power compared to the Communist Party secretariat that actually governs TikTok’s parent company.
Tim Ferriss: So a question about the airbrushing for a second. So I’m trying to think of the most, let’s just say, obvious closed case examples that you could point to where you might find a contrast between, let’s just say, the Taylor Swift being relatively equally surfaced or not surfaced by different platforms. So you said there are things that might be embarrassing to the Chinese government, are there examples of any particular things that you could give where there’s much less visibility? Because people might be wondering, “Well, yeah. Maybe it’s how you torture the data,” right? Maybe it’s like, “Yeah, it appears 10 percent on Instagram and eight percent on TikTok,” but really, is that conclusive? Are there any, to your mind, very clear cases?
Matt Pottinger: Yeah, I would point you to the house committee in Congress. It’s called the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and this is a committee that’s been chaired by Mike Gallagher, who’s a Republican congressman from Wisconsin. And the ranking committee member is a 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 in November last year, which is worth looking up, because they actually share some of the data, some of the studies that they did comparing TikTok information. It wasn’t like an eight percent incremental difference, we’re talking from three to five to 10 to 50 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.
Tim Ferriss: Quick question on that, because people might wonder. Why is that — why would that be a potential CCP government priority?
Matt Pottinger: It’s perfectly aligned with Beijing’s policy. What Beijing did when Putin re-invaded with a full-scale invasion in early 2022 Ukraine, China cited itself in terms of its propaganda orientation, in terms of becoming the main lifeline economically for Russia, in terms of becoming the main diplomatic champion for Russia and its war in Ukraine. Why did China do that? If you read through, as colleagues and I have, some of the internal Chinese Communist Party textbooks, they say explicitly that, “We want to see Europe in chaos. We want Russia to become more aggressive, we want to see America weakened,” because those things actually provide an opportunity for the Chinese Communist Party to advance an authoritarian model for global governance that they feel safer with, that’s going to be advantageous to Xi Jinping and his party.
So when the attack occurred on the 7th of October in southern Israel, Hamas did their worst depraved terrorist attacks, China immediately oriented its propaganda to blame Israel and to blame the United States, just like it blamed Ukraine and blamed the United States for the war that Vladimir Putin undertook. So they take the side of the aggressor and try to spin the aggressor into a victim, because anything that embarrasses, humiliates, discredits the United States is a good thing under that model, and that’s why — China had okay relations with Israel until October 7th, and now they’ve demonized Israel, because they view that as a way to discredit the United States.
Tim Ferriss: So 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 native source material, right? You can actually look at the actual words used, these stated objectives in Chinese. And I also must admit, I have this admiration for the 4D chess that China has played with respect to things like access to natural resources in South America, building infrastructure in Africa. It’s really remarkable how good they seem to be at playing a very, very long game. It’s incredibly impressive. And also, just to give credit where credit is due, I guess — I mean, there are trade-offs, of course, with all these things, but I went to a very fancy event where, I’m not going to name the country, but a country in Europe, Middle Eastern area, was talking about partnerships with China, and they said it’s simply more stable and predictable.
With the US every four years, we have no idea what’s going to happen, we don’t know if this, that, and the other agreement are going to change. There’s a certain predictability that is advantageous for certain countries that might want to, say, partner with one or the other. And we can come back to that, I just wanted to mention that first. But coming to TikTok just as a way of studying the micro to study the macro, things that might be embarrassing. And if we look at, for instance, these may or may not be the right examples, but Tibet, Uyghur, or ethnic minorities in China, are those 10 percent, 20 percent less than other platforms, or is it —
Matt Pottinger: It’s almost zero, it’s almost zero on TikTok. Very hard to find. There was famously one woman who was doing — wanted to talk about the genocide. According to our Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, there’s a genocide taking place in Xinjiang, Northwest China, against ethnic minorities, including the traditionally Islamic Uyghur people. She wanted to get word out about that on TikTok, so she recorded an eyelash video for — she’s showing doing a how-to, how to curl your eyelashes. While she’s doing this, she suddenly cuts into talking about the genocide, what’s going on there, and eventually TikTok even erased that content.
But look, I agree with you. The 4D chess is no joke. It’s why I think we need to be a lot more candid about what China’s doing that does harm our interests, harms the interests of other democracies. A lot of autocracies in particular talk about, “Well, one thing we like about dealing with the Chinese Communist Party is they don’t really bug us about our own human rights problems.” And there’s often a consistency in that approach. We’re a democracy, it means that we’re an X factor, probably more than we should be. There’s certain things that we did throughout the Cold War that served us very well, where there was a continuity in our Cold War policy from Democrats, from Truman, to Eisenhower, to Kennedy, and on the thread makes curves, but you can string that thread through the overall policy of containment with some variations and so forth.
We’d be well served to remember what Senator Vandenberg said. You remember who Vandenberg was? He was an isolationist Republican before World War II, who ended up becoming an internationalist bipartisan partner of a Democratic president, Harry Truman. And he ended up getting the Marshall Plan through the Senate. He’s the one who got NATO through the Senate. And so, Vandenberg had a famous line, he said, “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” That is a great motto that we should return to and actually try to —
Tim Ferriss: What does that mean?
Matt Pottinger: It means we can have bitter debates internally between left and right, Democrats, Republicans, independents, Trump, Biden, but when it comes to our national interest, there must be a general consensus that prevails that we are on the same team, and that there needs to be some predictability and continuity in our policies.
And in fact, by and large, even that still continues to some extent. You have bitter fights over things like what should our approach be to Iran? But you also have strong alliances. We’ve got NATO. It’s probably the most successful multilateral alliance in world history, and you’ve seen it strengthened by Putin’s attack on Ukraine. President Biden’s meeting with the Japanese Prime Minister. We’ve got a very strong relationship with Japan, with South Korea, with Australia, the Philippines, and those things serve us well. Those are our shields that protect us.
Tim Ferriss: We’re going to segue to Taiwan in a second. I want to put a little button on top of TikTok and then we’ll move on. In terms of weapons or offensive techniques, or let’s just call it overall threats from China against, say, US national interests, where would you rank TikTok, and what would you like to see policymakers or others do in terms of next actions if they’re like, “Hey, this is a lot for me to digest. Just tell me what we should do.”
Tim Interlude: Just a quick note before we get back to the interview—this conversation with Matt was recorded prior to the April 23rd passage of the TikTok bill in the Senate. Go to tim.blog/tiktok to learn more about the bill. Now, back to the episode.
Matt Pottinger: Look, I’m telling you this sincerely. As a former Marine, Deputy National Security Advisor, I was juggling the most serious national security threats facing the United States. I think TikTok is near the top. Near the top, okay? Think for a moment how preposterous it is that we are in a situation where the main platform is controlled by a hostile totalitarian government. The main platform by which a whole generation of Americans communicate and acquire their news. Remember TikTok, you say, “Oh, no, it’s just cat videos.” It’s actually a primary source of news for people under the age of 30. We would never have allowed the Nazis to control all of our newspapers and radio stations in the 1930s. And in fact, we passed laws under President FDR, Roosevelt, that made sure that you could not concentrate media ownership in the hands of any foreign power. So we have simply not updated those rules. Those are long standing, 100-year-old rules, almost, that are blessed by the Supreme Court, they’re sound with our First Amendment rights. Why is it that we’ve allowed the Chinese Communist Party to be the primary arbiter of what content trends and what content gets suppressed? It’s insane.
And so what would we do about it? I would say that the United States Senate right now, specifically Senator Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, is the most important person in America at this moment, because she’s the one who’s either going to stall and water down the bill, very good bill that’s already passed the House overwhelmingly, I think it was 362 votes for this TikTok bill. President Biden has said he’d sign the bill if it came to his desk, and now it’s stalled on her desk. Several of her top aides are now full-time lobbyists for TikTok, several of them. Okay? So I’m hoping that she does the right thing for the country that she doesn’t say, “No, I’m okay with the Nazi party owning all American newspapers and radio stations,” which this is the equivalent of.
And by the way, it’s not a ban of TikTok. This is what TikTok has spread information and disinformation about. All it says is that TikTok cannot be owned by a Chinese entity and subject to Chinese Communist Party control. They simply have to sell it, and then the thing will still happen. The idea is not to suppress or ban the speech that people are contributing to TikTok, it’s to make sure that that speech is actually organic, and unfettered, and is not manipulated and suppressed or amplified according to the dictates of a totalitarian adversarial government. It’s very reasonable. It’s certainly not a First Amendment threat.
It’s interesting to me. I mean, TikTok owns Washington D.C now, okay? They’ve thrown millions and millions of dollars at this. They’ve managed to get on the left, the ACLU. And by the way, look at who the ACLU’s donors are. It includes perhaps their largest donor is one of the biggest American shareholders in TikTok. And so the ACLU says, “Oh, no, this is the First Amendment issue.” No, BS. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment. This has to do with ensuring that people really do have free speech on these platforms and that it’s not being suppressed or amplified according to a hostile government.
And then on the right, you’ve got Jeff Yass, who is one of the other largest shareholders in TikTok and his parent company, and he’s a Republican donor and he is giving huge amounts of money to any Republican that is willing to ensure that TikTok stays under Chinese control. So here we are. I mean, it comes down to some big money investors, both left and right. It’s an equal opportunity. It’s a bipartisan effort by big stakeholders in TikTok to try to ensure that TikTok remains under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. It doesn’t make any sense.
Tim Ferriss: And what was the senator’s name who you mentioned?
Matt Pottinger: Cantwell.
Tim Ferriss: Cantwell. And those, you said, I guess it was I think two or three lobbyists on staff, well, they’re not lobbyists, but they’re people —
Matt Pottinger: They don’t work for her anymore. This is her former Deputy Chief of Staff and one or two other senior aides to her who have left to lobby for TikTok.
Tim Ferriss: What are the incentives? I don’t really understand lobbying. How does that work, in brief? Why would they do that?
Matt Pottinger: They get millions of dollars. I don’t know exactly how much they’re getting paid, but lobbying firms, their firms get paid millions of dollars to try to block the US Senate from allowing this House Bill to pass. It’s as simple as that. They have a huge campaign, advertising campaign, disinformation campaign saying that it’s an attempt to block speech, to ban TikTok. No, it’s saying, “TikTok can thrive, but we’re not going to let it be edited and controlled and manipulated by a totalitarian dictatorship that doesn’t even have the rule of law, much less free speech rights.”
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. All right, thank you for that. And we’re going to go to Taiwan now. So Taiwan, what is the significance to the US of Taiwan? Because I imagine a lot of people have many things they try to track in the news, Taiwan, they’re like, “Yeah, I think it has something to do with processors, or chips or something, but is that really the end of the world? Can’t we onshore that,” et cetera, et cetera. What are the most important characteristics of Taiwan? Why is it important?
Matt Pottinger: Why does it matter? Why does it matter? I mean, look, it’s this small, I can’t remember the size. It’s like the size of Connecticut and it’s a small, amazing geography, very mountainous. The tallest mountain in East Asia is not Mount Fuji, it is actually Yu Shan Jade Mountain in Taiwan. And then you have these beaches, and you’ve got this tropical sort of climate that meets some of the biggest urban centers in the world, roughly 25 million or so people, many of them of Chinese heritage. And so why does it matter? So it matters because of geography, it matters because of democracy, and it matters because of economics, okay? It matters for us here in the United States.
Geographically, the Chinese Communist Party views Taiwan rightly. In fact, General Douglas MacArthur would agree with this assessment. And in fact, he made a similar assessment all the way back in 1950 after World War II. He said, if Formosa, which was the old Portuguese name for Taiwan, if it were to fall to a hostile government, it would become a springboard for aggression throughout the region. And in fact, it had already been that. The Japanese, Imperial Japan had controlled Taiwan from 1895, all the way for 50 years till the end of World War II. And they used it as a springboard to move into Southeast Asia, particularly when World War II kicked up 1940/41, the Japanese were promoting this idea of a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. I know that’s a mouthful, but what it was was it was the Japanese government saying, “We’re going to dominate Asia. We don’t want Western colonial powers anywhere near this, but we also don’t want those countries to run themselves.” So it was an involuntary invasion of Japan’s neighbors and they said, “Well, this is going to be great for everyone. We’re going to be on top. It’s a new empire that we run, but we’ll take care of the economics. We’ll take care of the security and so forth.”
In fact, what it did was it kicked up massive response antibodies to this approach. Millions were killed in China under that period. There were millions killed throughout Southeast Asia. And then of course, the United States comes into the war after Pearl Harbor in late 1941. The rest is history. China’s following a similar model to the Japanese model of 1940. Xi Jinping has even given speeches, I don’t know whether he has a sense of irony about this or not, or whether he’s even aware, but he gave a big speech in Shanghai, one of his Politburo members just last week gave another speech, Zhao Leji, talking about the importance of Asia remaining in control of Asians, by which he means, Beijing. It was Tokyo in 1940, but it is very similar language to what we heard when the Japanese were promoting a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, which was an empire.
Tim Ferriss: You mentioned the size of Taiwan. Sounds like a speck. Why is it positionally advantageous?
Matt Pottinger: If you look at the map from the perspective of China and you’re looking eastward, American strategists during the Cold War used to describe it the way that Chinese strategists now describe it, which is the first island chain that prevents Beijing from expeditionary of projection of military force. And so if you look, it’s the Aleutian Islands, which are part of Alaska. It comes down to the Japanese Islands and down to the Ryukyu Islands where Okinawa is, also Japanese islands. And then right in the middle you’ve got Taiwan, and then it continues on to the archipelago of the Philippine Islands. So you’ve got, basically democracies that hem in Beijing’s military ambitions. And for China to send a bomber, or a ship, or even a submarine through that first island chain, they have to go through, in essence, a gateway of democracies that are, by and large, allied with the United States. And so, Beijing believes that Taiwan is the linchpin of that first island chain. If Taiwan were to fall under Chinese control, Chinese military doctrine, their own manuals say, “At that point, we can dominate Japan.” So 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 —
Tim Ferriss: It provides safe passage, in a way —
Matt Pottinger: Safe passage for them to, in the words of their own doctrine, inflict a blockade on Japan, at will.
Tim Ferriss: Could you say more about that? What is a blockade against Japan?
Matt Pottinger: A blockade would mean that it’s an act of war. A blockade means that you’re cutting off trade to and from a country, by either surrounding it with ships, or aircraft or threatening it with missile strikes to say, “We can shut down your economy. We can shut down your food and energy supply. The lights go out in Japan.” Japan doesn’t produce energy, right? They’re wholly dependent on imports other than some of their nuclear plants. 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. So if you look at independent sort of assessments of democracies, The Economist magazine has what’s called the Economist Intelligence Unit. They do rankings, right? They have found consistently that Taiwan is the most liberal democratic state in all of Asia, and it actually ranks higher than the United States. So they know what they’re doing. They built something pretty special.
Tim Ferriss: I have to ask, sorry, I won’t be able to let this go. Based on what does it rank more highly than the United States?
Matt Pottinger: Freedom of speech, a rule of law, equality of access to run for government. Taiwan’s legislature is 40 percent women compared to, I think about 27, 28 percent of our Congress are women in the United States. Many of the top cities are governed by female mayors. They’ve twice elected a woman as President of Taiwan. In terms of freedom of the press, I mean, it’d be worth taking a close look at these EIU, what their methodology was, but they’re not the only ones. There are others as well who say Taiwan is really a true, liberal democracy in the classical sense of the word “liberal.” It has really shed its authoritarian past. And so, if that were to fall because it was coercively annexed by Beijing, that would have huge ramifications for the region and knock-on effects for the world. Right —
Tim Ferriss: Now, why is that? I’m curious if you could say more about that. Because I have to admit, right, growing up with my dad yelling at the TV about politics, I just basically tuned it out. I decided to be sort of selectively ignorant about this, which I regret on some level, but I think to myself, “Okay, they are this sort of ideological paragon of democracy in the region.” I understand the positional advantage of, say, Beijing having control of Taiwan, as you just described —
Matt Pottinger: The geographic element.
Tim Ferriss: Exactly. But if Taiwan falls ideologically, what are the ripple effects?
Matt Pottinger: I think what you have at that point is the 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. Even if it’s, I mean, look at what happened to us just during the lockdowns, during COVID in ’20. Imagine you’re in a situation where these countries are having to rapidly militarize in order to try to deter China from now being able to threaten them with blockades. And it’s pretty clear that Beijing has much bigger ambitions than just Taiwan.
The other part is that 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. And it’s almost like they’re visiting this Alice in Wonderland alternative future, where people enjoy free speech, they can go vote for their leaders, and yet they’re speaking the same language. They share a lot of the same heritage. You can actually see freedom of religion in Taiwan in ways that are spectacular. You have traditional Chinese religions, different strains of Buddhism, and Daoism, ancestor worship, Christianity, Catholic and Protestant. It’s all there and it is unfettered. It is unmolested by —
Tim Ferriss: People who don’t have the history, I mean, a lot of that got cleaned out of Mainland —
Matt Pottinger: Absolutely.
Tim Ferriss: For a host of different reasons.
Matt Pottinger: The Chinese government demands that it oversee any religious activity in China, in ways, to put it mildly, that distort the doctrine, and in effect demote God to below the Communist Party.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, so we have the geographic importance. We’ve got the —
Matt Pottinger: Ideological.
Tim Ferriss: Ideological component. Is there anything else you would add to that?
Matt Pottinger: Economy. Look, Taiwan, this amazing small country produces 92 percent of the advanced semiconductors in the world. 92 percent. So we’re talking about —
Tim Ferriss: It’s wild.
Matt Pottinger: I know. We’re talking about CPUs, Central Processing Units that go into your phone to GPUs, which are the chips like Nvidia is famous for making, that are really central to everything from self-driving cars to other AI sorts of applications. Taiwan doesn’t design all those chips. American companies are sort of in the lead in design, but they actually produce them. They’re the best company in the world as a fab, a contract fab, meaning that they fabricate the chips based on the instructions and blueprints that they’re provided by American, and Korean and Japanese and other companies. And there you have it, TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp, which was founded by Morris Chang. I’ve met him. He’s an incredible figure who was at Texas Instruments way back during our silicon sort of revolution and went on to build a superior company. It’s one of the best run, most valuable companies in the world.
If Beijing were to even blockade Taiwan, that is to say, not attack it, not bomb it, but prevent ships from coming and going, and flights from coming and going, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp would begin to die very quickly. Necrosis. You can think of a firm like theirs, those plants, as being a lot like a human brain. It needs a constant supply of oxygen and nutrients in the form of everything from software updates to recalibrating after an earthquake. There was just a huge earthquake, condolences to the people of Taiwan, but there are also lots of little earthquakes that take place there, you have to recalibrate the equipment. You have to buy equipment from the Dutch, chemicals from the Japanese, key equipment and designs from Israelis and Americans. If that stops, the whole thing starts to calcify in ways that are very hard to reverse. So we will be in, 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.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So I think you’ve done a good job of establishing the significance of Taiwan on a number of different levels. What should the US do and why aren’t we doing it already?
Matt Pottinger: Look, if we’ve learned one thing from Putin’s —
Tim Ferriss: I’m sorry to interrupt. It doesn’t need to be limited to the US. Maybe there are other state actors that should be involved as well. But since we’re sitting here in the US —
Matt Pottinger: It’s the D word: deterrence. Okay? Deterrence is a funny thing. People don’t often think about deterrence as a strategy. We think that if we just kind of build a big military, people won’t want to push us around, but deterrence is more than just having a very capable military, hard power. It’s also sending a signal to decision-makers in aggressive states like Beijing currently is, a message that, “If you try this, if you attack, if you blockade or coercively try to annex Taiwan, there will be costs associated with that that are going to be worse than what you thought you would’ve gained. And by the way, you’re not going to be able to gain it anyway. We’re going to deny you. It’s deterrence by denial. We will deny you your goal. Taiwan will be so well-outfitted with things like anti-ship missiles that can be launched from trucks that are disguised like milk trucks driving around Taiwan. You’re going to run into so many sea mines, you’re going to have swarms of drones that come down on your ships trying to cross. And by the way, we’ve got friends behind us, we’ve got the United States, we’ve got Japan, we’ve got Australia, as well as other countries that don’t want to see…”
Tim Ferriss: I got it. So you’re speaking from the perspective of Taiwan right now.
Matt Pottinger: Taiwan now. Taiwan is going to make the moat of the Taiwan Strait into a boiling cauldron, a boiling moat, and if you try to cross that moat, you’re going to lose your navy. That’s the message that we all, in coordination, need to be sending to a certain person who is the one decision-maker that counts in the Chinese system, and his name is Xi Jinping. He’s the chairman of everything.
Tim Ferriss: 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? Because I think one of the fundamental disconnects, and this may relate on a more macro level, is that I’ve observed conversations among media pundits and so on who say, “Well, Xi Jinping, he’ll do a calculus on acceptable cost and yada, yada yada, and then we will not do A, B, and C because of D, E, and F.” But it’s all viewed through the lens of acceptable cost in a Western democracy, which is not necessarily a comparable. So what would the next actions look like? For instance, do we have sufficient quantities of missiles, or fill-in-the-blank military technology to even provide in terms of assistance?
Matt Pottinger: That’s really key one. So it starts with hard power. There’s a diplomatic element to deterrence, there’s an economic and informational aspect, but all of that doesn’t amount to much if you don’t have the foundation of hard power. The reason we’ve kept the peace for 70 plus years, almost 80 years from the end of World War II, there was, because was such a stark imbalance between what the Chinese military was capable of versus what Taiwan and the United States together were capable of. So you don’t want a balance of power. That’s a misnomer. You want a gross imbalance of power. That’s what keeps the peace. And so, right now we’re moving towards a balance of power, and that’s why things are actually so dangerous. So, it starts with hard power.
You put your finger on one of the really, really key elements, which is do we have a defense industrial base that is capable of outproducing China’s incredibly formidable defense industrial base? The short answer is, “No.” Do we have to match them equally? Also, the answer is, “No.” But we have to be able to make asymmetric weapons. That is things that are relatively cheap, relatively plentiful, that can threaten an aggressor in ways that negate their massive advantages in terms of just mass, of the number of ships they’re cranking out or the number of bombers, the number of missiles.
So one of the things I learned as a Marine early on was the old rule of thumb is that you need three times as much force to take a position as you need to defend it. So we’re on the better end of that cost curve, because we’re trying to defend Taiwan in order to show Xi Jinping that it’s not worth even attempting. Taiwan has this moat. They’ve got very few beaches that are suitable for landing on. They have a number of very big ports, but those can be cut off through anything from sea mines to other actions that could be taken. They’ve got mountainous terrain that you can’t really approach very easily from the east side, and you’ve got muddy flats if you try to approach from the west side, it would be a disaster for — imagine Saving Private Ryan, but you have to run three miles to get to the machine gun nest that’s shooting at you.
So Taiwan has these natural advantages that should work to our benefit, but it does mean that we have to show Xi Jinping that we have the ability to produce, and we actually are producing and have the stockpiles of these kinds of munitions; anti-ship 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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 —
Matt Pottinger: The things that spook him, and we know what spooks him because they get really upset at certain things. One is the hard power aspect that we’re talking about, but the other is will, will to fight. So it was Liddell Hart who was an early 20th century writer about war, said, “Will is the chief incalculable in war. It’s the thing that’s hardest to measure in advance of war, but which counts more than anything else once a war begins.” And a good example of that is Ukraine. Everyone said Ukraine is going to crumble in a matter of days. It seems to be the assessment of the US intelligence community. It seems to be the assessment of Vladimir Putin that it would fall quickly and yet it didn’t. Right? Here we are two years plus later, and Ukrainians are bravely fighting. They’re not asking for anyone to send troops. They’re putting their own lives on the line. Will to fight was that X factor that actually created a catastrophe for the Russians.
We have to help Taiwan reinvent its culture, its military culture in ways that add what friends of mine would call, “Social depth.” I brought a number of Israeli military officers to Taiwan last summer to meet with Taiwan military leaders and civilian leaders, and it was a very useful set of conversations, because the Taiwanese are used to hearing from Americans who come to visit, it’s very rare that they get a chance to meet with the Israelis. And there’s certain things in common. It’s a small geography with a lot of hostile neighbors. They don’t even have the benefit of a moat in the case of Israel, right? I mean, they’ve got land borders. And yet Israel has won every war that it has ever fought, and it’s done it with predominantly a reserve military. These are reservists who get activated, like they did within 24 hours of the October 7 debacle, three hundred, almost four hundred thousand troops, most of them who had already trained, they’d already gone through that crucible of being a conscripted soldier or officer, men and women both, and then they were able to mobilize rapidly because they’re continually trained. 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, and —
Tim Ferriss: What do you mean by social depth? Could you just give me another brief explanation of what that means?
Matt Pottinger: So I’ll give you an example. In the case of Israel, not only did you have people who left their jobs suddenly; everyday jobs as tech entrepreneurs or nurses or you name it, and were in uniform, ready to fight, but you also have a core of a civilian cadre that knows how to respond to emergencies, that knows how to provide logistics, even though they’re not in military cammies, that knows how to turn hospitals into triage centers for combat victims.
Tim Ferriss: I got it.
Matt Pottinger: So it means that you’ve got more than just —
Tim Ferriss: It’s sort of a broad social fluency with skills and playbooks, checklists.
Matt Pottinger: That’s it. Things that the military doesn’t have to itself be responsible for, but will depend vitally on in the event of a war.
Tim Ferriss: So I’ve neglected something important, which we should probably hit on, and I arrived at this somewhat obvious element; timeline, because I was thinking to myself, do we really have time to help Taiwan develop this social depth or are more expedient next actions required? So how should people think of the imminence or maybe amount of time that we may have before there is decisive action on the part of China to potentially do something disruptive or aggressive or otherwise towards Taiwan?
Matt Pottinger: Yeah. 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 and push it to a head. But we can do better than saying we have no idea. It’s really Xi Jinping’s lifespan, okay? Xi Jinping is in his early 70s now, he has broken the template for roughly decade-long tours of leadership by his last two predecessors, and he has installed himself for life. He’s pretty much in charge for life. We know that. I mean, 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, he’s someone who’s going to leave off his feet first. He’s either going to leave in handcuffs or in a coffin, basically.
Tim Ferriss: Seems to be a trend around the world.
Matt Pottinger: Right. So here we are, he’s 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 —
Tim Ferriss: This is what I was wondering about, any telegraphs?
Matt Pottinger: Yeah, well, sure. I mean, he has been very clear and has distinguished himself from his predecessors in how he talks about the goal of unifying Taiwan. He says it is the essence, that word, the essence of his broader agenda, which he calls the Chinese dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. That handful —
Tim Ferriss: It sounds more poetic in Chinese.
Matt Pottinger: It’s actually brutal either way. Sometimes it’s called The Chinese Dream for short, sometimes it’s called The Great Rejuvenation. But he says the essence of it is unification with Taiwan. I think that’s a very serious statement by him. He told President Biden, when they were in San Francisco just last November, that he now expects the United States not only not to interfere, but to actively support China in its goal of coercively annexing Taiwan. That was pretty cheeky. We’ve never heard a Chinese leader say that before.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a strong ask.
Matt Pottinger: That’s a strong ask. That’d be like Putin saying, “Listen, it’s good to talk to you President Biden, we need your help destroying Ukraine and annexing it.” That’s what Xi Jinping has just asked of President Biden.
Tim Ferriss: Has he given any specific dates in official statements or in closed conversations that then have transcripts for whatever reason, have there been any dates mentioned?
Matt Pottinger: There are certain dates that aren’t tied explicitly to D-Day, but we know that 2027 is a year that Xi Jinping had told his military that it needs to be capable of taking them, and the Indo-Pacific commander of the United States, this is a four-star admiral, Admiral Aquilino, who’s soon leaving his job in Honolulu, he’s responsible for practically half the world as a military commander. But he said before Congress recently that he thinks that the Chinese military will meet that deadline of being ready to take Taiwan. Xi Jinping has also expressed his impatience by saying things to visiting people from Taiwan along the lines of, “I’m not going to let this get passed down from generation to generation anymore.” That was very much in contrast to what some of his predecessors used to say. Like Deng Xiaoping said, “If we have to wait a thousand years, we’ll wait a thousand years for Taiwan, but we’re not going to let it declare independence.” Xi Jinping has changed that formula. He’s saying, “It’s not good enough.”
Tim Ferriss: “The buck stops with me.”
Matt Pottinger: Yes, it is not good enough for Taiwan not to seek independence, it needs to come back into the bosom of the motherland.
Tim Ferriss: So coming back to what would need to be shown to sufficiently deter, in the case of the hard power, is it some type of official statement or some type of information that gets deliberately leaked so that it makes its way back to the CCP that is in effect, “We have these numbers of these types of weapons, so we are prepared and ready.” But that shows the capability but not necessarily the will.
Matt Pottinger: That’s right. That’s right. Without capability, will is going to be insufficient oftentimes, so capability is a pretty good place to start. You touched on something which is, as you develop capabilities, they’re not going to deter very effectively if you don’t show a little leg, you kind of show some of the things that we’re working on, you create headaches for Chinese military planners who say, “Ah, I didn’t think we’d have to deal with that. We thought we just had submarines and some bombers to worry about.” No, you want a whole layered defense of different capabilities, some of which are pretty spooky.
And there are things that are being worked on, you’ve probably heard of the Replicator initiative, which is, I would refer you to some of the speeches by Kathleen Hicks, who’s our current Deputy Secretary of Defense. She’s working on some things that are designed to field large numbers of drones that could be very dangerous. They’re very cheap, they’re attritable, they can be expendable for us, and yet are very dangerous to exquisitely expensive hardware like Chinese destroyers and frigates and ferries that would carry over men and equipment. So you want them to have to worry about several different dimensions of a layered defense. And then will is a tough one. Like I said, it’s hard to measure in advance, but it starts with cultivating a culture of service, a strategic culture like, I would argue, Israel has.
Tim Ferriss: And you’re saying in Taiwan?
Matt Pottinger: In Taiwan, absolutely.
Tim Ferriss: And that can be done reasonably quickly? I mean, in the span of two or three years?
Matt Pottinger: There are really brave, energetic people trying to do that right now. You’ve got people like Enoch Wu, he was educated in the US but went back to do his military service in Taiwan and has now built something called The Forward Alliance, which is basically a civilian cadre of emergency response workers. And it has a lot of people signing up.
Tim Ferriss: So if you were, let’s say hypothetically, back in the White House after the next election cycles, whoever ends up in the big seat, and they say, “All right, Matt, next six months or next year, give us the top three things. I’ll sign off.”
Matt Pottinger: On Taiwan specifically? Because this is the biggest —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, on Taiwan. I mean, if you wanted to throw in a bonus that’s not Taiwan, that’s fine too from a national security perspective, but Taiwan or other, but certainly including Taiwan.
Matt Pottinger: Number one, I would ask the president to call Xi Jinping to tell him that we are imposing significant costs on his economy in response for the support he is providing to Iran, which is waging terrorist proxy wars against us and Israel and others in the Red Sea and across the Middle East and so forth, as well as his support for Putin and the biggest war in Europe since 1945. Xi Jinping is the main backer of that war. He’s the underwriter. The State Department says that Xi Jinping is spending more money on pro-Russian propaganda worldwide than Russia is spending on pro-Russian propaganda worldwide.
Tim Ferriss: I had no idea.
Matt Pottinger: It’s big.
Tim Ferriss: How do you determine something like that? Not to put on my skeptics hat, but I’m like, how would you even figure that out? If the Russians are getting around sanctions with tether and so on and so forth, at least according to a cover story in the New York Times, how do you figure that out?
Matt Pottinger: Jamie Rubin is the head of the Global Engagement Center at the State Department, and he knows the answer to that question.
Tim Ferriss: I got it. Okay. All right, so we got number one. So, Mr. President —
Matt Pottinger: Yeah, that’s number one, imposing costs. You can’t be an agent of chaos around the world to try to weaken the United States. By the way, you know what the next one is? Xi Jinping is backing the dictator in Venezuela, Maduro, to threaten his small neighbor Guyana.
Tim Ferriss: Why?
Matt Pottinger: It’s chaos. Like I said —
Tim Ferriss: I mean, I’ve spent some time down in Suriname, which is right next to Guyana, and it’s like these countries are tiny. Tiny little countries. Now, they happen to be important for a couple of reasons, like Suriname with respect to the Netherlands and also narco trafficking and so on, but —
Matt Pottinger: Oil.
Tim Ferriss: Oil? Okay.
Matt Pottinger: Guyana has a lot of energy deposits and they’ve discovered more, and so Maduro’s just signed a law sort of claiming that a big, huge chunk of Guyana is actually Venezuelan territory. Guess who’s backing him in that? Chinese Communist Party; diplomatically, propagandiscally, one of the main customers for the Venezuelans.
Tim Ferriss: Now, is that chaos intended to distract the US specifically or is it part of a broader strategy that includes but is not exclusive to the US?
Matt Pottinger: It’s primarily about us, because they view us as the main obstacle to a world vision that Xi Jinping calls, “A community of common destiny for all mankind.” And that is his —
Tim Ferriss: Sounds good.
Matt Pottinger: I know. He’s tied it to Marxist-Leninist theory, that basically you would have a series of Leninist single-party dictatorships, and the United States is a big obstacle to that. So it’s about spreading us thin. Xi Jinping gave a speech in 2021 where he said, “The single most important word to describe the world today is chaos.” 大乱 dà luàn. Chaos.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. Literally?
Matt Pottinger: He goes on in the speech to say that this works to China’s advantage. He says that, “This trend of chaos will continue and the trends are in our favor.” He also goes on to say that the risks of world turmoil are outweighed by the benefits to the Chinese Communist Party. Two years later, that was right before the Ukraine war went into overdrive, he signed an agreement, a no-limits pact with Putin. In February of 2022, and less than three weeks later, Putin was sending tanks in to try to take Kiev. Now, a year after that war began, Xi Jinping went to visit the Kremlin. He went to go see his best and most intimate friend. That’s his own phrase by the way, Xi Jinping says, “My best, most intimate friend is Vladimir Putin.” He went to go check in on his friend, see how the war is going, see what he needs.
And as Xi Jinping was leaving the Kremlin, he was caught on camera saying in essence that he was not only benefiting from chaos, but that he was one of the architects of global chaos. What he said specifically to Putin was, “Vladimir, you and I are seeing changes occurring in the world that only happen once in a century.” And this is a phrase Xi Jinping uses a lot, “Opportunity that comes once every hundred years,” and he’s talking about the opportunity for China to become the global dominant power. And he said, “You and I, Vladimir, are the ones driving those changes.” So in essence, he was saying, “We’re the architects of turmoil. We are agents of chaos.” And so it gives you some insight into the way that he’s thinking about these things. That’s why I would tell the president of the United States, step number one is impose massive costs on China’s economy until Beijing starts to back off of lighting or squirting lighter fuel on these conflagrations that are taking place now on multiple continents.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, “The opportunity of a lifetime. A chance that it arrives only once every hundred 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, 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?
Matt Pottinger: I think it’d be very dangerous not to respect an adversary that’s as committed and capable as they are. When I worked at the White House, when I was deputy national security advisor, my boss was Robert O’Brien, who was the national security advisor at the time. I remember him once saying to me, “Doesn’t Xi Jinping take off a weekend to play golf?” It’s just relentless, right? It’s this constant. And it takes enormous effort to seize the initiative in that dynamic and to become a protagonist again in the story. Xi Jinping is the protagonist. I don’t mean that in the sense that he’s the hero, I mean it in the sense that he’s the one driving events, by his own admission in his little meeting with Vladimir Putin. He’s the protagonist of the story and it takes immense effort, will, coordination, and guts to actually seize back the initiative and to become the protagonist again in this story, because it’s not a story that’s going to end well if we let Xi continue writing it.
Tim Ferriss: I would love to segue briefly, because it’s an area of deep fascination for me, to information or informational warfare, right? Disinformation, misinformation, just kind of statecraft in terms of intelligence, asset development. What are the most formidable techniques or capabilities that China has with respect to those types of activities? Because they seem to be very sophisticated and to have incredible patience also with a lot of it.
Matt Pottinger: They’re getting more sophisticated about it. And of course, AI tools. I’m still waiting for our AI firmament, all these smart technologists who are developing these technologies to figure out how to use that to sniff out foreign government interference. I don’t have a good answer yet, but what I can tell you is that Beijing is experimenting with deep fakes in ways where they create whole personas that look like Westerners speaking in very fluent local English or other languages. So they’re able to localize the messengers and to create them out of digits. And so they look like newscasters, and yet they’re providing fraudulent or deceptive sorts of messages.
Tim Ferriss: Just a quick side note on that. I say side-by-side comparison of a real Chinese newscaster and a deep fake Chinese newscaster, and you really could not, even at this point, tell the difference. It’s remarkable. So what other perhaps types of tells should people be aware of or cognizant of? And the one that comes to mind is, for instance, if you are maybe a naturalized citizen in the US but ethnically Chinese, you have family in China, it seems like a lot of people have outreach on social media from folks they might develop a relationship with over years, and then lo and behold, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I saw you got promoted to this tier in Google. It’d be really helpful for me to know A, B, and C, your family in Guangdong would really appreciate it,” type of situation.
Matt Pottinger: LinkedIn has been a very potent espionage tool for the Chinese premier spy agency and others.
Tim Ferriss: So what kind stuff should people be on the lookout for? What type of demographic should be just hip to these types of techniques?
Matt Pottinger: Yeah, I mean, Sunshine is a good disinfectant. If people understand what these modalities are — there’ve 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. And you don’t want to take money from strangers to share secrets and things that you know, you need to know who you’re really dealing with. And in that system, that type of activity always has to feed back into the party apparatus. It’s what they’re really good at. The Chinese Communist Party was really superior in many ways to the Soviet Communist Party because they perfected what’s called united front activity.
Now what is united front? We don’t use that word very often. It’s a central concept in the history of the party, but especially under Xi Jinping. He has massively increased funding for united front activity. What it is it’s something that’s between legitimate organization and espionage. So it’s things that involve a degree of a lack of transparency about what the real goals are, but what it’s designed to do is to spot and assess and recruit allies to the party’s goals. But they don’t always let you know that it is actually for the sake of the party’s goals. You think it’s just an individual or —
Tim Ferriss: Can you give an example of what that looks like? Because on the espionage side, I’m like, okay, we’ve all seen spy movies, we can imagine what that might look like. And then you’ve got two levels up. You’ve got a sort of official party doctrine and explicitly stated goals. This intermediary, could you give an example of what form that could take?
Matt Pottinger: Yeah. A lot of them have the name “friendship organizations,” there’s a whole plethora of these groups. And it looks like it’s an organic sort of small movement of people saying, “Well, this is something we believe. We believe that Taiwan really needs to become part of China again, that’s our personal view.” But in fact, the funding is coming from the Communist Party. The group has a huge tail to it. It has information that’s being fed to it about people that show promise, that look like they’re ideologically sympathetic or susceptible to some of those messages. And then it identifies up and coming politicians, and 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; some of the student associations that look like, we were in college, there are all kinds of student associations, but there’s one, the Chinese students and Scholars Association, which is actually reports to and is funded by the Chinese consulates and embassies, and they get special additional jobs. They’re on 220 US campuses, that’s by an old account.
They have 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 because they have a playbook, that’s actually one of the reasons that they’ve been constituted. And they also keep an eye on other Chinese students on campus who come from China. I met this terrific student who was at a university in the Midwest, I met her when she was still a student. I had a number of students come to the White House individually to tell us about some of the issues they were dealing with. And she had a friend on campus. She’s from China, her friend was from China, and she was organizing things having to do with the freedom of the Uyghur people and specific Uyghurs who are being held as political prisoners.
Tim Ferriss: A risky move if you have family in China.
Matt Pottinger: Risky move, and she does have family in China. And one of her friends one day told her, who’s 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. 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 go back to Beijing.” And so here you have people who are coerced into spying on US campuses on fellow students.
And so I think this is something we should take head on, put a spotlight on it. I think we should be issuing a smartphone to every student who arrives from an authoritarian country in the United States, make it a university program to say, “This is your freedom phone. You can put any apps on here that you want. Don’t put any Chinese apps on here. Don’t put TikTok on here. They’ll see everything. Don’t put WeChat, 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.” So we should be doing much more for the Chinese diaspora that comes here to study. We should be giving them a shot at actually breaking free from this bubble of surveillance and censorship that follows them when they come to the United States. We should be breaking out of that.
Tim Ferriss: So 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. To what extent — let me rephrase this. Taiwan comes under Chinese rule. They now have Chinese passports and they travel overseas. How does the reach of an influence and ability to exert power on those citizens differ from, say, a US example, where US with a passport moves to Amsterdam and they’re there and they’re criticizing the US government, okay, fine. But the equivalent example for someone with a Chinese passport or someone who gives up their passport, I’m not sure that’s even a process you can go through in China, I don’t know, but could you speak to that?
Matt Pottinger: Well, look, I mean, there are Hong Kong citizens who have now moved to the UK or they’ve moved to the United States, many of them are now Americans or British citizens who still come under coercive pressure. I can think of a couple who, their parents have been called in Hong Kong, and there have been warrants issued for the arrest of American citizens for things they say about Hong Kong, not even in Hong Kong. So this is the extraterritorial new phase of China’s repression, which is to say, “We’re not just going to repress our own people in our borders, we’re not just going to threaten our people when they go abroad, we’re going to threaten foreign citizens.” So the things they say in their home country about us can be punishable under the national security law that’s taken effect and has really undermined the autonomy and the rule of law of Hong Kong. So this is the new phase that people have to face up to. People — we should be helping. I mean, look, there’s a mass exodus of people out of China right now. People from China want to live in countries where they can enjoy the rule of law, where human rights are going to be respected, where they have a lot of different opportunities that they can pursue. They’re leaving by the millions to go to other countries. I think that we should view those people as natural allies, but it means that you have to make some work, you have to take some steps because Beijing will use their families as hostages to make them quiet. I talked to a friend recently when I was visiting Japan. A lot of very wealthy Chinese have moved to Hokkaido in northern Japan. And recently —
Tim Ferriss: I did not realize that.
Matt Pottinger: Yeah, yeah. Singapore is one of the places that they’re escaping to.
Tim Ferriss: Singapore I’ve heard for sure. I don’t know how much safety that confers to someone, but —
Matt Pottinger: And Japan is another one. But I was told that a very outspoken, wealthy Chinese guy was recently run over by a car in Japan. I have to double-check the story. But what I was told from someone who’s pretty well plugged into that community was that it had a chilling effect, that people viewed this as an effort by Beijing to cause discomfort about even speaking your mind in a free country like Japan. So we should be getting creative about ways to neutralize that sort of terror. We should be identifying people who are conducting that sort of extra-legal interference in our own system, people who are thugs, people who are coerced into spying. We should be focusing on that so that people feel safe in the United States.
Tim Ferriss: So I feel obligated to say a couple of things. 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. 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. Secondly, I want to say that I’ve spent time in China in a bunch of different places, I’ve enjoyed a lot of my trips, I’ve spent a lot of my life studying Chinese history. Did take a class on the I Ching, believe it or not, way back in the day even. I’ve spent time in Taiwan, Japan. And what we’re talking about is, at least for me, a grand chess match. Maybe chess isn’t exactly the right game because that would be a game of complete information. Maybe it’s closer to backgammon. Who knows? But —
Matt Pottinger: Did you ever play Weiqi? The game Go?
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I have played Go. Yes, I have. Absolutely.
Matt Pottinger: It’s closer to Go. And —
Tim Ferriss: Okay. Please explain.
Matt Pottinger: Go. You can see what’s happening on the board, but you can’t see the strategy readily.
Tim Ferriss: For those who don’t know, the image, white and black stones —
Matt Pottinger: It’s a 19 by 19 board. And famously, up until recently, a computer could never beat a pretty good human being at Go —
Tim Ferriss: Until AlphaGo.
Matt Pottinger: — whereas it’s been years and years that chess masters have been defeated by AI. And then of course you had AlphaGo a handful of years ago, which changed it, and actually taught Go masters new ways of approaching the game.
Tim Ferriss: So wild.
Matt Pottinger: Yeah, it’s a great game.
Tim Ferriss: Demis Hassabis between —
Matt Pottinger: 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.
Tim Ferriss: So the broader question I wanted to ask you was, US. What a rocket ship. This young upstart of a country, bada bing bada boom, has turned into this incredible global superpower. In terms of studying empires, pretty short-lived so far. Still an adolescent, let’s just say. But what can the US do, in your mind, broadly speaking, to continue to act as a global superpower? And maybe this ties into other factors that could affect China like a population implosion, if that seems to be a pending problem with birth replacement rates and so on in the next 20, 30 years. I don’t know. But what are the things the US should be thinking of maybe if we go one level up? Like, they’re China specific questions, but this is more a permanence question writ large. What can the US do or should do differently?
Matt Pottinger: Yeah. One thing we should first do is recognize that we are a very special country. We have to recognize that the things that the United States has made possible well beyond our borders. Democracy. Right? The Bill of Rights. Look at how many countries around the world have emulated that model. And yet that model is not sustainable without the United States. You can’t have British successful parliamentary democracy today or in Denmark or in Japan if the United States does not remain the strongest Democracy.
Tim Ferriss: Why is that?
Matt Pottinger: Because the nature of these Leninist systems or totalitarian systems that are more like monarchies like you have with Russia or North Korea today, they are compulsively hostile because they will never feel safe within their borders or confined to their borders when their neighbors are liberal democracies. It’s just — you know. It doesn’t matter how much you try to reassure them. The nature of that kind of a system is that it is compulsively hostile. And so small countries are not going to have an easy time standing up to a juggernaut like the People’s Republic of China so long as it is a totalitarian Leninist system. And now China’s stitching together an axis of these countries. Venezuela is one of the minor partners. Iran is a more important partner. North Korea as a freakish, difficult partner, but a partner nonetheless. And then you’ve got Russia.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a difficult cousin of the family reunion.
Matt Pottinger: Exactly. The Kim family regime spoils a lot of dinners at the holidays. But what you are facing now is a very significant decision by these unnatural partners to decide to work together because they believe they have a once-in-a-century opportunity right now to break the back of American credibility and American power. So first we have to recognize that as many problems as we have at home, and I’m the first — that’ll be another podcast for us to talk about. We are a country that deals with those problems openly and with the participation of our citizenry and with the protection of the rule of law. Those are very, very special things that we should not take for granted and we should actually be proud of them and own them. And I think if we were to do that, even as we talk openly about the legacy —
Ronald Reagan, when he was president, people remember that he made this very hostile set of remarks about the Soviet Union. He called it an evil empire. He said it was the root of all evil in the world. People forget that when he gave that evil empire speech, he also talked about the legacy of evil in American history. He talked about slavery. So he’s not — there’s a — I mean, can you imagine a Chinese leader or Putin giving a speech like that? It’s impossible because they don’t —
Tim Ferriss: Meaning one finger pointing outward, but another finger pointing backward.
Matt Pottinger: Yeah. Saying, look, we are a country that navigates by a north star that is really worthy of navigating by. Even though we don’t reach the North Star, when we deviate from that path, we know that we’re on the wrong path. So we have to keep going towards those higher human ideals, the things that the founders framed in the Declaration and in the Constitution. These are very powerful ideas and things that we should continue to try to live by.
But by speaking more openly about those things, we should also not be afraid to be candid about what distinguishes our system from ones that are actually pretty dark. I’m sorry. Genocide in the year 2024, as recognized by a number of countries, as recognized by both Mike Pompeo when he was Secretary of State and by Antony Blinken when he is Secretary of State. This is not a country that we’re going to be able to do business with amiably. This is not a leader who has declared himself essentially an agent of chaos in the world, and who’s funding and anti-democratic and anti-American propaganda. That’s not someone who we’re going to be able to resolve problems with. Okay? So we need to be a bit more real. We need to impose more costs. We need to be rhetorically sharper in drawing the distinctions between who we and our allies are and other democracies and —
Tim Ferriss: And that’s in terms of just informational campaigns in the US for the citizenry of the US, you mean?
Matt Pottinger: Yeah. I mean, President Biden has given some good speeches. When he first came into power, people rarely read strategy documents. 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. 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. And so I’d like to hear him talk more about that, but then also to follow up with more policies that show that we’re doing something about those problems. That’s where I think the disconnect has been with President Biden. But I think those speeches were admirable.
Tim Ferriss: So I’d like to segue to some of your personal history because maybe it ties into other parts of this conversation. So age 32. You make some decisions. So can you walk us through some of what you did up to that point, and then what changed?
Matt Pottinger: Sure. So 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. It was a great exciting time to be there through the ’90s into the early 2000s. But I had a near miss on September the 11th. I was coming back from our Hong Kong bureau to visit the managing editor and the foreign editor of The Wall Street Journal. And our office happened to be right across the street from the World Trade Center. So the World Financial Center was the old Wall Street Journal headquarters at that time. And I had gotten in the day prior.
My father, who lives in Westchester County New York, said, “I’ve got an idea. I’ll drive you into town tomorrow. You’re right there at the World Financial Center. Why don’t we get breakfast at Windows on the World in the World Trade Center?” And I said, “Look, I’ve got to prepare my story ideas. I’m going to be talking to Paul Steiger and John Bussey, the top editors at the journal. I want to tell them what I want to work on. I want to tell them what I’ve been working on and some of the ideas I have. And I’m exhausted. I’m jet-lagged. Let’s just sleep in and you can just drive me straight in. I’ll grab a bagel for the car ride.”
So as we were headed into town, we got the news that the towers had been hit while we were listening to the talk radio, AM talk radio. And as it unfolded, became clearer and cleaerr what had happened. This wasn’t an accident. It was something much more serious than that. We left the city before we’d even really gotten deep into it. Went back home. And I stewed on that. I mean, I was absolutely in a state of shock about the September 11 terrorist attacks. I ended up going back to the bureau and writing in Beijing and in Hong Kong and other places in China for the next few years. But I was watching out of the corner of my eye as the US went into Afghanistan and then ultimately in 2003 decided to invade Iraq. And by 2004, as I’m watching these developments, it became clear to me that the war in Iraq was going very badly. We had the two battles of Fallujah. It was metastasizing into really 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. 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. I don’t know if you remember the Indian Ocean tsunami that struck the Indian Ocean country, Southeast Asia. Devastating. A quarter million or so people were killed by that tsunami day after Christmas, 2004. 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.
And I went up to U-Tapao 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. And the guy who was in charge was a Marine. Met a bunch of these young kids who were like — I couldn’t even make coffee when I was 20, and here you had the corporals who were leading squads of Marines and they were really, really gung-ho and proud of the work they were doing to help get humanitarian stuff out there.
So anyway, one thing leads to another and I suddenly meet a Marine colonel just around that time who challenges me to go visit a recruiting station. And I couldn’t even believe it. You know? It was actually an officer selection office, 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.
Tim Ferriss: Let me pause you for one second. So you have a job. You’re doing pretty well with said job.
Matt Pottinger: Yeah. No, it was great.
Tim Ferriss: What was the inner monologue or the moment where you’re like, “Okay, I’m actually going to take this meeting now.” Because you’ve sort of taken — now you’ve crossed a threshold, right? When you’re taking a meeting.
Matt Pottinger: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So how did you just make that decision?
Matt Pottinger: It’s funny. I mean, it was a —
Tim Ferriss: Or was it more of a like, “Ah, it can’t hurt, so why not?”
Matt Pottinger: No, no. It was sort of an out-of-body experience. The logic became more and more apparent as I made those tentative steps. And then it came to feel almost inevitable. But the feelings, sort of abstract feelings were, “Wow, we’re in trouble.” Our power, our system, our constitution, all these things are actually more fragile than I thought they were, number one. Number two, we’re losing a war and fighting another war at the same time in Afghanistan, which would end up going worse over time. And then there was the feeling that, “What if I don’t do this? You know? I have a happy job. I’ll become a bureau chief in one of The Wall Street Journal offices. I love The Wall Street Journal, I love reporting.
But I also had this 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.
Tim Ferriss: So then what happened?
Matt Pottinger: I discovered that I’m out of shape and I meet a Marine who is studying in Beijing. He’s a captain and he’s there doing an Olmsted Foundation scholarship, which is like you can go study in a foreign university for a year or two. And he’s getting his master’s degree. And this is such a great Marine Corps moment because I’m a nobody; I’m a stranger. But I meet him at the Marine Corps Birthday Ball, which I don’t know if you’ve ever — any city you go to in the world —
Tim Ferriss: I’ve never been to a Marine Birthday Ball, if that’s what you’re going to ask me.
Matt Pottinger: Well, 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. 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’ve got to let you in on something. My family doesn’t know this. My employers don’t know this, but I’ve just have to spill my guts to you. I’m thinking of joining the Marine Corps.” And so within two days at sun up I’m at a stadium with him in the middle of Beijing, and he’s PT-ing me, giving me physical training. We’re doing sprints and, what do you call it, interval training around the worker’s stadium.
And this guy becomes my personal trainer. Just kicks my ass. His name’s Cedric Lee. He’s still in. He’s a Colonel now in the Marine Corps working at the White House. And Cedric Lee trains me to be ready and trains me so well that by the time I get to Officer Candidate School, I’m actually near the front of the pack, at least on the physical aspect. I’m not a big guy. I’m light. He got me so I could do 20 pull-ups, dead hang pull-ups, and I could run my ass off. And then I was in for the shock of actually going through 10 weeks of Officer Candidate School training, six months of the basic school training to become a provisional rifle platoon commander, and then intel training after that. It was an unbelievable organization and culture.
Tim Ferriss: How did that — what would you say were the biggest impacts of that experience on you?
Matt Pottinger: Well, it’s funny. 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 have —
Tim Ferriss: Nature of being human.
Matt Pottinger: It’s called being human. And you come into this thing and they’re like, “Hey, this isn’t about you.” You’re like, “Well, what do you mean? I made the decision to be here.” They’re like, “No, no.” We had this great colonel, Colonel Chase, who was running the Officer Candidate School. He’s 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. I mean, it was very personal. It was visceral. It was 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. 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 sh*t for that. But I’m proud of him irrespective of whether that’s true. He basically winnowed out almost half of the group of us. And he basically said, “If I don’t see it, if I don’t smell it on you that you’re going to be a good leader of those Marines whose lives you’re going to be responsible for and putting at risk, then I’m not going to let you march across the grinder and become a Marine officer. You’re not going to pin those lieutenant bars on.” And so this culture where suddenly — now you’re suddenly feeling real responsibility. It’s like, holy sh*t, I’m not responsible for myself in war. I’m responsible for a platoon of 40 young men and women. And it’s a shock. You know? 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. And it was really something.
The other thing about the Marine Corps that people should all know, and this goes for the military generally, is that it is a — the Marine Corps in particular pushes down responsibility. It delegates to the lowest level. So the idea is — think about how many things in American life are about we’re going to give opportunity to the guy who’s at the top. The creme de la creme, de la creme, de la creme. We’re going to keep skimming and giving you unlimited opportunity to achieve your goals, to achieve fame and fortune.
Marine Corps is the opposite. It says, “I want to know who the worst guy is in your platoon, and I want to make sure that you’re pulling him up so that the baseline is present.” Now you’re talking about an organization that is incredibly effective because the worst guy is pretty good. Is pretty good. So it’s very much about the focus is on the bottom of the layer of the pyramid. 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 that young 20-year-old, 19-year-old lance corporal or corporal has immense responsibility very, very quickly.
Tim Ferriss: We’re going to wrap up in a few minutes, but I wanted to ask, are there one or two leadership lessons, as you said, that to get pounded into you, one or two that have really stuck with you? Could be something you observed, could be a principle, could be some type of expression. Anything that sticks out.
Matt Pottinger: The Marine Corps talks a lot about both physical courage but also moral courage. So moral courage is more important. It’s this idea that you will do the right thing when no one’s looking, the idea that you will sacrifice yourself and not your integrity or your honor, but your position in order to make sure that the right thing gets done, even when it exposes you to ridicule. And moral courage isn’t something that people talk about a lot in everyday life. I’ll tell you one funny quick story that 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? 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 —
Tim Ferriss: It’s like scuba diving. Yeah.
Matt Pottinger: It’s a lot like that. And because I was either insufficiently attentive, but also because I was still getting acquainted with the gear, one of the valves was part way open. So you had these two 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. And 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 sh*t. You can easily die from this stuff. And I ended up asphyxiating. My entire throat closed off.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, no.
Matt Pottinger: And I passed out and I slid down the wall. And I ended up getting carried out on the back of a fellow lieutenant. And so here you’ve got a whole company of Marines getting ready to go through, and I’m the first one out. And they lay me down on the ground, strip my mask off. And everyone at first thought it was a joke that it was meant to just kind of spook them. And then they saw that I was deep, deep purple, like blue, and not breathing. 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, wild wake up. And apparently I turned from purple to blue to green in front of everyone’s faces. And a couple of lieutenants started puking.
But the best part of the story is my platoon commander is looking at me. I mean, I’m just a mess, right? I mean, I’ve been unconscious. And Captain Gaskell, who is 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.” 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 —
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Matt Pottinger: Back on the horse, son. I lost some IQ points that I never got back from that whole incident, unfortunately.
Tim Ferriss: Wow. Well, man of many stories, many capabilities. And I’m very glad we got time to, not just meet and spend time eating pho at your house, which was spectacular, but also talking about some very important topics. And the book is The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, which I’m very excited about. I encourage people to check this out. Is there anything else you would like to mention, say, point my audience to, anything at all that you’d like to mention before we went to a close?
Matt Pottinger: Well, I’ll only say one thing, which is that service is really good stuff. You know? Like a life of service, whether it’s military service or teaching. But public service is one of the best mistakes I stumbled into in my life, especially for your young listeners. And I joined the Marine Corps at 32, and I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything.
Tim Ferriss: Thanks so much, Matt. I really appreciate all the time. And for everybody listening, we’ll link to everything in the show notes as per usual at tim.blog/podcast. You can search Matt Pottinger, will probably be easier. Taiwan, Boiling Moat. Any of those things and it’ll pop right up. And until next time, be a bit kinder than as necessary as always to others, but also to yourself. And thanks for tuning in.
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