Rogan Talks to Futurist About Tech Battle with China

You anticipating seeing a lot of freaky things come out of China? Yes. Whoa, you said that very quick. Yeah, no, it's true. I spend a lot of time in China. It's a different... The thing with China, China has this great ancient civilization, but they destroyed their own civilization in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. They burned their books. They smashed their own historic relics. It's a society in many ways that's starting from scratch. All of these norms that people get inherit through their traditions, China in many ways doesn't have. It's a very different... China is growing. They are increasingly powerful. China is going to be a major force defining the world of the 21st century. That's why America has to get its act together. That's a hard concept for us to grasp when we think about the fact that they had the Great Wall, they have so much ancient art and architecture. We just assume they're a really old culture. They are, but they wiped it out. That's so crazy. That's a unique perspective. That's why if you want to see great Chinese art, you have to go to Taiwan. Because when the Chinese nationalists left in 1949, when they lost, as they were losing the Civil War, they took the treasures and they put them in the National Museum of Taiwan. Then the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, China, the Red Guards were just smashing all of their own stuff, their own ancient history. Now the Chinese Communist Party is saying, oh no, we're going back and we have this great 5,000 year old culture. Some ways it's true, but in some ways it's like an adolescent culture without these kinds of restrictions that other societies have. That's such a unique perspective that I haven't heard before. It makes so much sense in terms of how frantic they are at restructuring their world. They feel that they got screwed over because there is this vague sense of Chinese greatness. When you hear the word middle kingdom, it's like China is the center of the world and everybody else is some kind of tributary. They're monumentally pissed off that these colonial powers came and overpowered them and they had to make all these concessions. They had to give land away and hell bent on regaining it. Regaining it. They're playing the long game. They are playing a long game. We're not. We are not and we have to be mindful of it. That's also something you can do if you have complete control of your population. You don't have to worry about people's opinions or you can just go in the direction that you feel is going to benefit the Chinese power, the power that be. This is a country run by engineers. We're a country run largely by lawyers and reality TP people, I guess. In China, it's run by engineers. There are all these problems and the answer is always engineering. If you have a population problem, the answer is the one child policy. Environmental problem, you have three gorges dammed. You don't have water in the north of China. You build this massive biggest water project in the world from south to north. You want to win in the Olympics. You engineer your population. You take kids away from their families and put them in their Olympic sports school. I write about this in Genesis code. If you're China and you have this Plato's Republic model of the world and we're going to identify the genetic or maybe manipulate these genetic superstars to be our greatest scientists and mathematicians and business leaders and political leaders. There's a model that you can imagine for how to do it. Wow. It makes you really nervous. It should. Yes. That's the thing. That's why. I just feel like with this country, we don't have time to have all these distractions. We're focusing on junk. Like what? Just like all of this. I'm on CNN all the time when I'm home in New York. I always say, and I'm talking about geopolitical issues, China and North Korea. What I always say is you guys recognize this is porn. CNN and MSEB, that's one kind of porn. Fox and whoever else, InfoWars, that's another kind of porn. It's all porn. We're drawing people's attention to these few stories. There's these big stories that we have to focus on. Unfortunately, the rise of China is such an essential story for the 21st century because China is competing in all of these technologies. China, it's like go, go, go. People in China who were involved in the tech world, when they go and visit Silicon Valley, uniformly they say, we cannot believe these people are so lazy. Why are they not working 24 hours a day? Why are they not issuing new products every week? They are racing somewhere and it's going to have huge implications for the world. If we believe in our values, as I believe we should, we have to fight for them. The place that we have to fight for them first is here. Every day that we're just focusing on this drama, this reality TV drama of our government is another day where we're not focusing on the big things. How are we going to get our act together? How are we going to lead the world in technology? Another example is this is immigration. We have this whole fight of how do we keep people out? What I'd like to do is to go to the State Department and say, all right, every embassy in the world, you have a new job. You have to, we're going to give you whatever number, 500 slots per year. In your country, find the 500 most brilliant, talented, creative entrepreneurial people and say, we're giving you a green card. We're going to give you a little starter money. We want you to move to the United States and just start a life and have kids. We should be screaming the crop, skimming the cream over the rest of the world. We could take over, we could revitalize this country, but we're having this fight of how do we keep a small number of refugees out? We're not focusing on the right things. That's again another very, very interesting perspective. We learned about Huawei in this country, really not just, well, I learned about it because they put out some pretty innovative phones and some interesting technology, but we learned it because the State Department was telling people to stop using their phones. Do you think that that is trying to stifle the competition? Because the market share that they have, if they do really have the number two selling cell phones in the world now, that's not from America. America's largely out of that conversation. If they were in America, they would probably dominate in America as well. Because they're cheaper. Yeah, and they're really good. Their phones are insane. The cameras in their phones are off the charts. They put some video of the Zoom capability of their newest phone and people were calling bullshit. There's like, there's no way that's possible, but it turned out it was true. It really consumed a super expensive telephoto lens. So Huawei, it's a complicated story. For sure, the founder of Huawei is a former Chinese military officer. For sure, in the early stages of their company, they stole, straight out stole lots of source code from companies like Cisco. For sure, we should be really worried if Huawei is the sole supplier of the infrastructure that supports 5G all around the world because the Chinese government would have access to everything. So that leads us to the question is, one, is there a problem with Huawei itself? But then two is let's just say, and I think the answer to that first question is probably yes. But then the question two is, let's just say Huawei is a legit company and they're not totally intimately connected to the Chinese government. Can we trust their relationship with the Chinese government? The Chinese government has a rule that every one of these companies has the big Chinese national companies, national champion companies. They have a Communist Party sell inside of that company. And so these, like, I think that we can't think of big Chinese companies just like we think of companies here. We have to think of them as quasi state actors. And that's why this fight that's happening right now is so important. And that's why, like, when China is out investing in different parts of the world, including Africa, their companies are kind of acting like arms of the government. They're making all kinds of investments that don't really make sense if you just see, well, this is a company doing something. If you say that this is a company with backing by the state that's fulfilling a function that supports the state, it's just, it's a very different model. So I am actually quite concerned about Huawei and I'm not a fan of everything that this administration is doing, but I think on China, it's important that we need to stand up. And I think pushing back on Huawei is the right thing to do. I'm uncomfortable about this for two reasons. One, I'm uncomfortable about that, about the Chinese government being inexorably connected to this global superpower in technology. But I'm also uncomfortable that it sets a precedent for other nations to follow because they're like, look, this is the only way to compete. Because what you were talking about, the investments at Huawei or that the Chinese government makes in these other, these countries, and they don't seem to make sense if you're just dealing with a company. But if you're dealing with someone who's trying to take over the world, it makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And so when we have our companies that you're out in someplace in Africa and you're competing with a Chinese company to do something, build a port or whatever, and you're competing because you are an American company. And so you have your calcicide, this is the port, what's the income stream going to be about it? And you have a certain amount that you can bid because otherwise it becomes a bad investment. But if the Chinese company is that their calculus is not, is this a good or bad investment? It's what is the state interest in controlling or quasi controlling this asset? And so that's why we can't project ourselves onto the Chinese. We can't say they're just like us, just different. We have different models and our models are competing. Do you think that we should avoid Huawei products? Like consumers should? Well, I think the government should very tightly regulate products like Huawei products. Because some of their network, like routers, they've shown that they're using them to extract information. We have a long history of European, Japanese, South Korean companies that have invested very well. They've out competed us and we've allowed the Japanese companies to out compete our auto manufacturers. And that was fine. In the sense in the 1970s, our cars had become shit because we had this monopoly. And so I'm all for open competition, I'm all for free trade, it has to be fair. But I think that what China is doing, China recognized as a state that they could use the tools of capitalism to achieve state ends. And I think we need to be very cautious about that. That's interesting that you compare it to the automotive market because the consequences are so much different, right? So much different because... But we do have a model to go on. We could see what happened. We made shitty cars, the Japanese took over. And then we made better cars. I have a rental car here in Los Angeles and I went to the rental car place at LAX and they had all of the different cars. And there was like a Nissan and a Toyota and there was a Cadillac. And for the fact that I said, I'm going to go with the Caddy. It's a great car. Oh, they're amazing. They're incredible. Yeah, American cars are very good now. They're great. Yeah. And then so I'm all for competition, but I just feel like what Chinese, some Chinese companies are doing, it's not competition. It's they have become, not all of them, but quasi state actors. And if that's what they're doing, I think we need to respond to them in that way. Interesting.