Digital Social Hour - Why Chinese Tech Is Crushing US Innovation in 2024 | Ben Harburg DSH #1071

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

Why Chinese Tech Is Crushing US Innovation in 2024 🚀 Discover the shocking truth about China's technological dominance! 🇨🇳 vs 🇺🇸   Ben Harburg, a China expert, reveals how Chinese innovation is outpacing the US in drones, AI, and military tech. 😱 Learn about hypersonic missiles, humanoid robots, and why TikTok is just the tip of the iceberg!   🔥 Hot topics covered: • China's lead in commercial drones and warfare tech • The future of automated combat and spying • How Chinese apps are dominating global markets • The truth about China's economic stability   Don't miss this eye-opening conversation on the Digital Social Hour! 🎙️ Ben shares insider knowledge on China's strategies and what it means for US innovation.   Ready for more mind-blowing insights? Hit subscribe and join the conversation! 💬 Watch now to stay ahead of the game in the US-China tech race. 🏁   #ChineseTech #USInnovation #DigitalSocialHour #SeanKelly #TechRace #DroneWarfare #AIRevolution   #chinainfocus #geopoliticaltechcompetition #chinanews #drones #ai   CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Introduction 01:19 - China's Economy Overview 06:00 - China's Technology Leadership Insights 07:30 - China's Military Power Analysis 10:04 - Understanding Tariffs Impact 11:24 - How to Take Action Effectively 13:11 - Where to Find Ben Online   APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail]   GUEST: Ben Harburg https://x.com/BenHarburg https://benharburg.com/   SPONSORS: Prolon: http://prolonlife.com/DSH   LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/

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BedMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. 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 photo into photo with the Votaix and solar panels and of course into all kinds of hardware. So today, if you're in an emerging market, more likely and 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'm messing 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 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, I've kept in touch and they invited me out here this time around, but then

they've been trying to give me some 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, I took the view a long time ago that our biggest geopolitical, uh, military economic competitor was going to be China for the, for all of our lifetime and probably that of our children. And I was, I was, I'm a little older than you, but I was in high school when nine 11

happened and the, you know, immediately after it happened, a few people had different reactions. Some race to join the military and list, um, a lot started studying Arabic and going to work and study in the Middle East and try to kind of understand Islam and you know what that dynamic was because we were 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 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 of the biggest ones today is that China is somehow on its knees economically and that maybe it's unstable internally and that people are unhappy with Xi and that therefore there's a chance for, and maybe in 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 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 as 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 5%. But there's still a lot. But it said, you know, it's had it has its own kind of property sector bubble and crash But it said, you know, it's had its own kind of property sector bubble and crash, a little like Japan did. It's had a huge geopolitical kind of pushback against it, not just from the United States.

Its international relations with say India have fallen apart. Other parts of the world, say Japan, Korea, Australia are pushing back hard, parts of Europe. So it's, you know, it's kind of facing a perfect storm of factors that have been beating it down, but that hasn't diminished the power of the CCP nor of Xi Jinping. And I think he views this as kind of natural growing pains towards the ultimate kind of stability and long-term growth of the 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, the kind of scorecard that everyone looks at is just GDP. Uh, and technically they are still behind us. Uh, the, there was narratives that they would surpass us very quickly. Yeah. Uh, but I'm not looking at that number. What I'm looking at, for instance, are these next generation technologies,

so-called, 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. 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. Shut up. Looking for the ultimate online casino experience? Step into the BetMGM Casino app, where every deal, spin and goal brings Las Vegas excitement into the palm of your hand. Take your seat at Premium Blackjack Pro, where strategy meets top-tier gameplay. Hit the ice with Gretzky Goal Lucky Tap, inspired by the great one himself, or play the dazzling MGM Grand Emerald Nights, a slot experience that captures the magic of MGM.

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which contains snacks, soups, and beverages designed to keep the body in a fasting state, no guest work or planning required, which is a relief after a busy holiday. If you guys are ready to make 2025 your healthiest year yet, order your Prolon five-day kit at ProlonLife.com slash DSH. And they're offering digital social hour listeners 15% off their five-day nutrition program. Use the code DSH at ProlonLife.com slash DSH. You see it in everything you do too. I mean, TikTok 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 photo with Votaix 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. They could charge, probably a drone here would cost triple the price, 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 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 dog, 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. Yeah. So they could use it for spying as well. Anything. Anything. Garret times. Like in Dune, right?

Yeah. Things like that. Super scary times. Yeah. Warfare is going to look a lot different for the next generation. Right. So 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 burden of legacy hardware and legacy 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 so they didn't have to kind of go through that. They also went straight from like a wet market to buying everything online. You know, high double digit e-commerce penetration levels. We went through these evolutions. We went through your corner store, big box retail and the shopping mall.

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 tanks and planes and being wedded to old aircraft carriers. they can kind of start fresh and build so you, you know, so you don't want to go up against the Chinese drone, you know, swarm or something like that today. So they're in the lead right now when it comes to that sort of military weapon. I think in certain verticals, for instance, they have something called the hypersonic missile that we don't have any defense for, which just 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. Damn. Essentially. That is scary. Yeah. I mean, there's talks of like World War Three and stuff. It might already be happening behind the scenes for all we know.

It's you know, there's 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. Cause a head on war would be too catastrophic, I think for both sides. I think it's unlikely. I think it's unlikely. I'm more cautionary when people are jumping to the possibility of a hot war. But I think they're a great foil for us because, you know, how do we motivate ourselves during the space race? The Russians. So how do we now motivate ourselves to maintain leadership in AI, to maintain leadership in hardware? We do it

through having China as an adversary, because if we didn't have them, I mean, Russia's nowhere, Iran's nowhere, North Korea's nowhere. Good boy, 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 sexy 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 lever seems to be working with Canada right now. You'll see the Chinese literally are through inner intermediaries right now kind of reach out trying 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 they want to do a deal. Oh, I think they would be happy to do a deal. Right.

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 right great the kind of economic revolution that the president has stood behind absolutely what uh what could people watch this do to take action on this so we're you know we are gonna put a full court press over the next four years and hopefully you know the next date after that on the reindustrialization of the United States

and thinking about what can we bring back home, what should we be protecting, how do we protect our IP, but it's an inter-agency, interdisciplinary process that 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, it 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 automotive and to bring back hopefully some of this hardware that we've lost. Automotive's needed, right? We're falling behind in automotive. For sure.

I mean, you actually, the CEO of Ford recently went to China and I think just blew his socks off what they've been doing on the electric vehicle front. He tweeted about this. He spoke publicly about it. Wow. But I liked his response, which was not to say like, ah, they're cheaters and they're just doing it because they're, you know, lying about 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 catch up and

hopefully succeed them. I love it. Ben, where can people find you, man, and support you? Um, just, you know, 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 or anywhere else. Please join us. What's really exciting to me is that we've got this new quarter of people our age that are going to come into this administration, hoping to really enact positive change. These these are kids out of Silicon Valley, out of large scale asset managers, to 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 when you're older, to get involved in politics. That's awesome. I love it, man. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me.

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