Why Chinese Tech Is Crushing US Innovation in 2024 | Ben Harburg DSH #1071

Fast fashion brands that they built and kind of gamifying e-commerce, just knocking the socks off of Western competition.

So, you're going to see this over and you know, extends into photovoltaics and solar panels, and of course, into all kinds of hardware.

So, today, if you're in an emerging market, more likely than not, you have a Chinese phone in your hand.

Apple is way too expensive for anyone.

So, those are the metrics I'm worried about.

All right, guys, we got Ben here today.

We are at Amfest.

Is this your first one?

It is.

Let's go.

What do you think so far?

Amazing.

Amazing.

I met some good people.

Yeah.

You had a breakfast this morning with Charlie, right?

Yeah.

How'd that go?

Really impressive seeing the results of all the work that they've done over the last year and how much of this vote they turned and how much really I think that this election can be credited to their work.

Dude, I think he might have been Trump's MVP this election.

For sure.

I mean, he was going to college campuses every single day.

For sure.

And the clips were getting tens of millions of views.

Yeah.

Is that how you found out about him through the clips?

No, no.

I've known Charlie since 2016.

Wow.

I met Charlie then, and he invited me to his credit.

So his,

one of his events, I think it was an AmFest or something in

Washington with President Trump, and I couldn't fit it in my schedule, and I regret it.

But I've kept in touch.

And so they invited me out here this time around.

But then they've been trying to get me to come things for a while.

I love it.

So you've been going to China back and forth for the past nine years.

What's been going on with your trips lately?

I mean, I took the view a long time ago that our biggest geopolitical,

military, economic competitor was going to be China for all of our lifetime and probably that of our children.

And

I'm a little older than you, but I was in high school when 9-11 happened.

And

immediately after it happened, a few people had different reactions.

Some raced to join the military and enlist.

A lot started studying Arabic and going to work

and study in the Middle East and try to kind of understand Islam and what that dynamic was because we are fixated on this global war on terror.

I see China as the same thing.

So I really thought it was kind of my duty to go and understand China because our bench of people that actually understand China and are in a position to make a difference from a policy perspective is very, very thin.

Yeah.

And there's a lot of misinformation on China, too, right?

That's right.

I mean, people around here would understand this concept of fake news.

I mean, fake news doesn't just extend to the Republican Party.

There's a huge opacity around China and the way it's described and depicted economically, politically, militarily.

And that leads to misadvised policy decisions.

Right.

What do you think the biggest misunderstandings are with China from ordinary people?

Well, I think one, one of the biggest ones today is that China is somehow on its knees economically and that, you know, and that maybe it's unstable internally and that people are unhappy with Xi and that therefore there's a chance for in the in the, you know, and maybe in the more modest case, a huge economic downturn and in the extreme, some kind of

change of government.

And I, I, and I think both of those are grossly overstated.

Really?

Because you see on social media, there'll be clips of like the banks crashing or the real estate market crashing.

So, what do you think is going on exactly?

Definitively, the Chinese economy is in really bad shape.

And I mean, it's, and it's, you know, some of it is natural.

Like, the growth is slowed, you know, because it was growing at such a high caliber.

It was 10% a year.

And now it's a mature market that's highly efficient.

And so it's going to grow at four or five percent, but just still a lot.

But it's said, you know, it's had it had its own kind of property sector bubble and crash uh a little like japan did uh it's had um a huge geopolitical kind of pushback against it not just from the united states it's it's international relations with say india have fallen apart uh uh other parts of the world say japan uh korea australia are pushing back hard parts of europe so it's you know it's it's kind of facing a perfect storm of factors that have been beating it down but that hasn't diminished the power of of the ccp nor of our xi jinping um and i think he views this as kind of natural growing pains towards the ultimate kind of stability and long-term growth of a country.

You hear these stories of how their economy is catching up to ours.

Where do they stand right now?

Are they ahead of us?

Are they still behind us?

So, I mean, the kind of scorecard that everyone looks at is just GDP, and technically they are still behind us.

There was narratives that they would surpass us very quickly.

But I'm not looking at that number.

What I'm looking at, for instance, are these next generation technologies and the things that will shape our interaction with technology, the military.

So for instance, China is definitively the world leader in commercial drones today.

Wow.

And if you look at drone technology,

it's what's changed the whole nature of warfare.

A couple hundred dollar drone is now able to immobilize

a $5 million tank.

Wow.

And so, you know, and so what they've got now is technology, hardware, and software that is perfectly designed for the new era we live in.

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You see it in everything you do too.

I mean, TikTok is the, is the most addictive and best consumer-facing social media app.

Shein and Temu are these quick, you know, quick commerce, fast fashion brands that they built, kind of gamifying e-commerce, just knocking the socks off of Western competition.

So you're going to see this over and you know, extends into photovoltaics and solar panels, and of course, into all kinds of hardware.

So today, if you're in an emerging market, more likely than not, you have a Chinese phone in your hand.

Apple is way too expensive for anyone.

So those are the metrics I'm worried about.

Right, because they're able to price everyone out.

That's right.

Their labor is so cheap.

You know, they could charge probably a drone here would cost triple the price, right?

Right.

If you got it American-made.

Right.

So do you envision a future with a lot of drones, a lot of businesses like police officers, firefighters using drones?

Yeah, I think, you know, again, everything is going automated.

So, you know, they're also now a market leader in humanoid robots.

And so, you know, the likes of, you know, Boston Dynamics or Boston Scientific, kind of one of of these dogs with a gun strapped to its back.

This is the future of war.

I was spending time with one of the four joint chiefs of staff a few months ago.

All the concepts that we knew about warfare are out the window.

The idea of a static battle line and of soldiers being able to take hot showers and have a meal cooked around a fire.

These days are over.

Wow.

Because you can see everything with drones.

You can see heat maps.

No one's safe.

And, you know, you don't want to fight a robotic dog with a machine gun strapped to its back either.

so i've heard of drones that are the size of a fly they can enter buildings through like the sewage or whatever right crazy stuff yeah wow no so they could use it for spying as well anything anything

like in dune right when yeah things like this super scary times yeah warfare is going to look a lot different for our the next generation right i wonder if our military is adapting as fast as china's yeah again so you have this concept we call late mover advantage right which is like you don't have the a burden of legacy hardware and legacy practices practices so in china we used to talk about it from the perspective of adoption of things like mobile payment so they didn't have you know they basically went straight from cash to mobile payment because they didn't have credit cards they didn't have checks and and so they didn't have to kind of go through that they also went straight from like a wet market to a um uh to to buying everything online you know you know high double digit e-commerce penetration levels we went through these evolutions where we went from you know your corner store and big box retail and the shopping mall and and so the same is true for their military and for their hardware which is they don't have the legacy that we have of all these old you know tanks and planes and being wedded to old aircraft carriers they can kind of start fresh and build so uh you you know so you don't want to go up against a chinese drone uh you know swarm or something like that today yeah so they're in the lead right now when it comes to that sort of military weapon i think in in certain verticals for instance they have something called the hypersonic missile that we don't have any defense for which is kind of this missile that goes straight up in the air and then it just kind of zigzags and goes like you can't even shoot it down.

Impossible to intercept essentially.

That is scary.

Yeah.

I mean, there's talks of like World War III and stuff.

It might already be happening behind the scenes for all we know.

It's, you know,

there's always the threat of something happening over Taiwan.

And of course, the South China Sea.

I think the more likely is some kind of a proxy war, like we're seeing play out in Ukraine, right?

And so it could be, you know, it could be using the Filipinos or the Koreans or what happened in Syria where you've got, you know, different sides backing their own kind of rebel or state-backed groups because a head-on war would be too catastrophic i think for both i think it's unlikely i think it's unlikely i i'm i'm more i'm i'm more cautionary when people are jumping to the possibility of a hot war yeah but i think they're a great foil for us because you know how do we how do we motivate ourselves in during the space race the russians yeah so how do we now motivate ourselves to maintain leadership in ai to maintain leadership in hardware we do it through uh through having china as an adversary because if we didn't have them i mean Russia's nowhere.

Iran's nowhere.

North Korea is nowhere.

Good point.

Yeah.

Are you a fan of the tariff stuff that Trump's trying to get through?

I think tariffs make a lot of sense.

I think they make sense on kind of three levels.

So one, they can be used actually as a tax, as a revenue generation mechanism to fund tax cuts.

Two, they can protect existing industries.

So, you know, again, we've got a, to your point, you know, China has such lower kind of operating costs.

They've been a currency manipulator.

They use kind of national champions and subsidies to drive down the costs of businesses, which could just put American companies out of business immediately, like our electric vehicles.

So

you have that.

And then most importantly, I think it's a tactic for generating leverage in a kind of a negotiation around a new trade deal.

The Chinese are terrified of a 60% tariff.

It would create millions of persons in unemployment.

And so for them, it makes a lot of sense to come to the table rather than be affected by that.

Yeah, the leverage seems to be working with Canada right now.

You'll see the Chinese literally are through intermediaries right now, kind of reach out, trying to to reach out to Mar-a-Lago and saying, what do you want?

Really?

Yeah.

What do you want?

So they're willing to work with us.

They want to do a deal.

I think they would be happy to do a deal.

We just need to make sure we do the right deal that isn't kind of a ferric victory where we give something that looks good on paper, but actually doesn't.

protect American interests long term, really, truly bring industries back home, create the kind of economic revolution that the president has stood behind.

Absolutely.

What could people watching this do to take action on this?

So we're, you know, we're going to put a full court press press over the next four years and hopefully, you know, the next date after that, um, on the reindustrialization of the United States and thinking about what can we bring back home, what we should be protecting, how do we protect our IP?

But it's an interagency, interdisciplinary process requires that we engage, for instance, the education sector.

One of the biggest problems in America today is we don't have the engineers necessary to bring a lot of these kind of next generation technologies home or to build them domestically.

So, we need to create kind of a German-type education system where even in high school, a certain cohort branches off and starts going into trade schools to teach them engineering skills and kind of work in lockstep with industry.

So they're being trained when they're 16, 17, rather than graduating with a degree in, I don't know, liberal arts and then trying to like retroactively go backwards and become an engineer.

And so it has that has to do with immigration.

How do we keep the best minds here and ensure that they don't take our knowledge and run back to wherever they came from?

It relates to how we subsidize technologies like we did just with the CHIPS Act, but now another hundred versions of this to bring back shipbuilding to America and to bring back, you know, automotive and to bring back, hopefully, some of this hardware that we've lost.

Automotives needed, right?

We're falling behind in automotives for sure.

I mean, you actually,

the, you know, the CEO of Ford recently went to China and I think just blew his socks off what they've been doing there on the electric vehicle front.

He tweeted about this.

He he spoke publicly about it.

But I liked his response, which was not to say like, oh, they're cheaters and they're just doing it because they're you know lying about you know wages and whatever he said this is our motivator this is our north star so now we need to come back and push our foot on the gas to to catch up and hopefully succeed them i love it ben where can people find you man and support you um just you know uh i'm i'm i'm not i'm not trying to sell anything i'm not trying to raise anything you can find me on ben harberg at twitter

um or anywhere else but uh yeah please join us and what's really exciting to me is that we've got this new court of people our age that are going to to come into this administration, hoping to really enact positive change.

And these are kids out of Silicon Valley, out of

large-scale asset managers, the types that you didn't see in the 2016 group.

And so a lot of us feel like this is dawn in America right now, kind of a new day for an incredible new rebirth of industry.

And so please, please contribute and get involved if you can.

Don't sit on the sidelines and wait to when you're older to get involved in politics.

Awesome.

I love it, man.

Thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me.