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

So that was the theme of my column, you know, that they have massively digitized. It's a cashless society now. You have beggars with a QR code in their begging bowl. I went with my colleague, Keith Bradshaw, to Zeker, one of their new car companies.

We went to the design lab, watched a designer doing a 3D model of one of their new cars, putting it in different contexts, desert, rainforest, beach, different weather conditions. And we asked him, what software are you using? We thought it was just some traditional CAD design. He said, it's open source AI software. 3D design tool.

He said what used to take him three months, he now does in three hours. Three months to three hours. Because they have such a digital connected system, you just take that hypodermic needle, fill it with AI, and inject it into it, and it can optimize so many things. And it's for all these reasons that I'm worried about the bifurcated world. I'm worried about that.

That world is not going to be at all stable or at all prosperous in anywhere near the last 40 years. And so if I have a choice, my choice is to argue, and I don't care if I'm the only one arguing for it, that we and China are are going to have to get together and actually be the partners that create an architecture for this.

Otherwise, we're going to just keep racing each other in some kind of crazy AI version of nuclear, probably bankrupt ourselves in doing it. And this gets to my gut feeling about the whole world we're going into once we get to AGI, Ezra, which is that I think to manage this world, climate,

AI and disorder, we are going to have to learn to collaborate as a species to a degree that we have never collaborated before. I am a big believer in my friend Dov Seidman's argument that interdependence is no longer our choice, it's our condition. The only question is, will we have healthy interdependencies or unhealthy interdependencies?

But we are going to rise together or we're going to fall together. But baby, whatever we're doing, we're doing it together. That is my view.

Look, let's go back to what would you be doing if you were serious on trade? The first thing you would be doing is saying to the Chinese, you now manufacture about a third of all products in the world. That is not sustainable. You can't make everything for everyone. You have got to leaven out your economy to be retired in China to get like a $5 a month pension.

And you've got to be using that energy domestically and buying more from others. The conversation has to start there. They are making too much and we are consuming too much, Ezra. So why don't we then get our friends and sit down with China as a united front, the European Union, Korea, Singapore, Japan, the Philippines, and make it the world against China

On this issue, you would have told them over the next three years, we're going to gradually be raising tariffs 15, 20, 30% each year. So you can know what's coming, but we're going to keep doing that as a collective. And then behind that wall, you would be offering them, one, the opportunity to invest in America.

And two, you would be serious about that ecosystem I talked about and giving our government, our company's incentives, doing everything we can to get the infrastructure and opportunities for that ecosystem to get going. That would be the rational thing. What did Trump do? He made it America against the world, the whole world at the same time.

So he actually threw away our single greatest competitive advantage over China, which is that we have allies and China has vassals. Our colleague David Brooks likes to say, you know, Trump is always the wrong answer to the right question.

Yes.

Ezra, you have to understand, okay, today Trump, on my way over here, he decided he's going to pause the tariffs and whatnot. Lesotho doesn't have to worry. What he is missing is the world, but China in particular, thinks he's an unstable actor. They look at what's going on here. They watch that Zelensky meeting in the Oval Office.

And they have watched that Trump tore up a basically successor agreement to NAFTA that he negotiated with our two closest neighbors. And they're saying to themselves two things. One is, how do we even get in a room, our leader get in a room with this guy? We don't know what he's going to say. And number two, say we do do an agreement with him. He could tear it up the next day.

So he always thinks he's being cute. Like this is some, he's buying, you know, some apartment block on Long Island and he can kind of do whatever he wants. This is a big game. And they don't think he's a stable actor anymore. There's been a real cost for this back and forth. Hey, I'm glad the stock market, you know, went back up today, but don't think this has been cost-free.

But there was no deal made here. There was, as you say, worse than no deal. We shot ourselves in both feet. And now we are in a much less powerful position because we've alienated all those allies we need to create leverage on China in the future. And so it's an unmitigated disaster.

Mm hmm.

So let me respond in two ways. I want to go back first to the point we were discussing about just the unseriousness of this administration. The morning after Trump announced he was putting this massive tariff on China, when the markets really melted down, I actually called our editors and said, not the most important story of the day, not the most disturbing story of the day.

Please don't lose sight of this story. On the day before, we learned, or maybe in the same day, that Laura Loomer, a conspiracy peddler who believes 9-11 was an inside job, was in the Oval Office, and we have since learned

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