Tom Friedman

speaker

94 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard Apr 2025

Tom Friedman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Ezra Klein Show · Tom Friedman Thinks We’re Getting China Dangerously Wrong · 15 Apr 2025 podcast

People who want to work in the government have to take a test, and it's a very meritocratic test. And the product of that is, on the whole, okay, as a generalization, the deep state there actually is pretty good, quite responsive when it comes to backing innovation. It's also very good at arresting you if you get out of line. But that's how these things go together.

So if Ezra does decide he wants to make shirts with that pink polka dot button that can sing the Chinese national anthem backwards, not only can he get that button overnight, but no one will stand in the way. In fact, you may find a lot of sources of capital locally to produce that button.

And at the same time, if you want that button to sing Tiananmen Square in 1989 over and again, you're going to get arrested. But those two things actually exist side by side.

The dark factories are fully roboticized factories. So they're dark. They don't need to turn the lights on except at two and three in the morning when the engineers come in and clean the machines. There are dark factories all over China today. The Huawei campus was built in three years to house 35,000 researchers, including, Ezra, foreign ones that they hoped to recruit. Had 100 different cafes.

Each building was distinctly designed, has a monorail, you know, going around a beautiful long campus. By the way, I've been to Huawei's headquarters in Shenzhen. I have no illusions about Huawei, written about them. They stole stuff. They have not been at all good actors. But today, we tried to kill Huawei, the United States.

I mean, we tried to deny them the chips, and they almost went into the tank. And they innovated their way out. Maybe they stole those chips from NVIDIA somewhere. I have no idea. All I know is today, the same day that Josh Hawley declared that China can't do innovation, Huawei reported record profits on CNBC with some very new technology. And again...

My job is to take the world as it is, all right? And the way the world is right now is however China got there, it's there. And if you don't think it's there, then you are really missing something.

Hire clowns, expect a circus, okay? If that is your theory, then go ahead, put all the tariffs 1,000% on China. That's day one. But these guys are entirely first order thinkers. Day two has to be a strategy for what you do the morning after here. How do you then build the industrial base that you want to take advantage of the time you're buying with your tariffs? So what are these guys doing?

Trump put up a wall, OK, against China, and then they went out and shot the American car companies. Ford was just downgraded today. I saw its stock, I think, is down to $7.50. Why is that? Because Ford did everything that Biden asked it to do, that a rational company would ask it to do, that we would want it to do. And then what does Donald Trump do? He comes in with his right-wing woke bullshit.

and says, we don't do EVs here. EVs are for girly men. We only do manly industries. Well, fuck that, okay? Because look what happens now to Ford. So you say, we want to bring this here. I don't want to have my kids screwing in parts, okay, into cars. I want them designing, okay, investing in and inventing the next generation of EVs. But let's go back to that ecosystem I talked about, Ezra.

EVs, robots, autonomous cars, batteries, clean energy. If you say, oh, we're not to do the EV part. Before I came over here, I read Trump wants to reopen coal plants, right? And he loves Drill Baby Drill. Okay, so it doesn't make any sense. You're building a wall against China. Great, I'm all for it, but what are you doing behind the wall?

So we catch up, you're taking your own companies out and shooting them in the back if they're not right-wing woke. What's the project, what's the Trump administration's focus on? How many billions can we take away from American universities of their research funds to punish them for DEI strategies? Now I'm here not to advocate DEI, but if I had a limited time in the world right now,

I sure wouldn't be focused on that. I'd be focused on doubling down on the research capacity of these universities. I'd be doubling down on NIH. What are they doing? They're cutting the budgets of our crown gem research facilities. So it's all just bullshit. They're not serious people. They're clowns.

Exactly. You should do 50-50 joint ventures with Chame. You can build your cars here, 50-50 joint venture, number one and number two. You have to build your supply chain here as well. So you're not going to just bring all the parts in, you know, from China. You've got to build the supply chain and the factory here, joint owned exactly here. what you did to us.

I argued for this before with Huawei. And Huawei has a very dodgy past. And they've been involved in all kinds of lawsuits, you know, with different companies over IP. So what I said at one point was I would say to Huawei, here's the deal. We're going to let you wire Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. You can sell your technology in those three states. We're going to watch you for three years.

We're going to see how you handle that. We'll see how you handle the data. If you do well, we're going to give you to other states. We created no incentive for them to be a better actor. There was no ladder up or out at all. We just then tried to kill them. And their response was, you talking to me? You talking to me? And they now went out, got into the fitness gym, and they might kill us.

So if all Trump is doing right now, Ezra, I don't know, I've lost track what the tariff is on China. We may be getting toward infinity. I have no idea. But if behind that is a strategy to basically do what we did the other way, I'm all for it.

But if the strategy is to only build a wall so we can go back to digging coal and only depending on oil and killing the wind business and killing the EV business... then this is going to end in such a disaster. All right, that's the immediate problem. You have another problem coming down the road with AI.

And AI going to be injected into everything, okay, from your car to your toaster to your refrigerator, and maybe even your body. If we in China don't have a trusted architecture for managing AI, then everything, Ezra, is going to become TikTok. And this whole debate we're having over TikTok, can we have it? They're listening to us. What are they doing with the data?

That's going to apply to your toaster, to your tennis shoes, to your car. And so that's coming down the road. But that's already here.

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