China's Plan For Technology Dominance With Richard Turrin!!!

welcome to geopolitics in conflict show today you know russ our viewers been asking for one of a specific guest by name yes and we didn't i we did not want to answer that by saying uh yes we're gonna have that guy well today that guest is right here and our viewers gonna be in for a treat when it comes down to what our guest is gonna share with us his perspective on technology his understanding of where things are going would you introduce our guest please it's a pleasure to introduce richard turin he's an award-winning executive with more than 20 years experience in finance and technology innovation after a long career at ibm both in singapore and china currently is an independent fintech and ai consultant helping clients navigate the uncharted waters associated with latest cognitive technologies he's also a speaker and author of many books including his international bestselling book innovation lab excellence and his new book cashless china's digital currency revolution richard resides with his wife in shanghai and has for about 20 years richard it's really a pleasure to have you on the show today david and ross thank you so much for having me it's a great honor to be here and hello to everyone out there listening well we are so excited to get into this uh lively conversations with you so uh well we're gonna just have a conversation uh richard here our viewers know our style we we don't focus just q a here but rather a conversation and we will take it from there and move on without i'd like to start with do you have something to say i just wanted to say that's the first make the first comment sure [Laughter] so what one of the first things we want to talk about it has to do with where do you see china moving forward technologically and what are the implications for the u.s yes regarding that sure um real simple this is this is the easiest question ready i'm gonna answer your question with the question where is china not moving forward technologically and that's and that's sort of really the problem because um you both cover the geopolitical issues between china the us gdp but on a technological technological battleground china is no longer a copier china is no longer borrowing ideas it's innovating on its own right so as i say in my book cash people who think oh china just copies um it's too far away it's not relevant china's technology is real innovative powerful and a real challenge to the us especially when it comes to things like the internet digital money digital uh sales all of these um pro products or things or services that can be done digitally are being digitized in china and it's at a tremendous rate so yeah it's a big deal and it's relevant for people in the west it's not just that it's happening here and well it doesn't matter what happens in china it's irrelevant to us no it's deadly serious business and it matters because we're entering a period where now this is going to be controversial i would brace for it where the u.s will be actually copying china's technology i think that's been predictable because china is moving ahead so rapidly and the united states is lagging behind as much as a decade in some of these areas and yet the argument the argument uh richard we still hearing here is in the u.s is that china is stealing the technology you know that's like well wait a minute who who came up with 6g already launching into that one cannot debate historically that um china copied from the us historically the u.s copied from england and that's not a means a way of of making light of it but yeah sure but that's sort of yesterday's battle yeah and actually it's very interesting because there was a survey by the american chamber of commerce about ip theft and really for ceos of multinational american multi-american companies here in china ip theft was like number four or five on the list because actually china tightened up its ip laws yeah so it's harder now so i understand that that's still in everybody's mind oh china steal stuff and likely somewhere somebody can say that's still happening i'm not going to argue that yeah it's a problem i know that we all do but that is not the issue when you look at china's ai development when you look at their development of new digital currencies you know these are all technologies that are made in technology in china and really don't have cognates in in the us or in europe so yeah there's a tremendous amount of innovation going on wow well we can we can just see that one of us one of the things we laugh about frequently is china is producing one million graduates a year in science and technology how do you how does any country in the world compete with that yeah you know i love that i don't have the statistics like you do off the top of my head right now but the number of sem stem excuse me graduates in china is astounding and you know um that unto itself is going to be very hard for the u.s to compete with especially when you look at you know i'm a graduate of an engineering program in the united states from a different era yeah from 1987 from princeton right i did my graduate work now even then the graduate programs in engineering were by and large foreign graduates but from everything i'm reading and everything i see it's even more tilted in that direction today so if we're denying visas to chinese students because of fears that they're sponsored and we're not producing stem graduates at either the graduate or the undergraduate level you know we have a real major problem to deal with so yeah china's push to space china's push for ai china's push to build chips all of these demand that society produce science and technology graduates and china is delivering with those and we couldn't ramp like we couldn't ramp that up like we did when i was young with the space program right it would take it would take a decade to ramp that up right now if we even try well we look at it for example how fast now when it comes down just to piggyback on what you mentioned about space when the u.s congress passed the legislation back in 2014 asking that china would not have access to iss the international space station china said sure we build our own and they did and they did yeah you see look that's a wonderful example and look right look at what's going on right now in the chip industry so under the trump administration we banned chip sales into china and i get it there are certain chips that certainly that may have been prudent for but there's an entire industry that was essentially cut off china said okay we'll build our own ships and they are investing countless billions to build trip plants and there's a lot of snarkiness in the business saying well they haven't done it yet no you're right they haven't done it yet give them five five to seven years the u.s essentially pushed china to build its own chip industry and give it enough time and they'll be building ships and what we will have created our own new competitor so you know for you know forgive me and i don't mean to make light of it but it's but but you know assuming that china can't do is a really really bad bet to me with what they've done recently how could you how could anybody say that who's knowledgeable these people are remarkable in what they're accomplishing yeah look i i live here and i see it every day and you know so let me let me speak with something that's domain to my book cash list because when i got here in 2010 there was no digital payment and literally i would take when i had to make some really large payments you know so rent security deposits to rent a new flat i literally went to the bank with a backpack and filled the backpack full of 100 rmb notes 100 rmbs is like about 17 15 or something like that right you know so that's how i paid for rent security deposits rent eventually we did atm transfers you know but in the period of uh of about three years between 2014 and 2017 shanghai a city of 27 million people went cashless you know it was incomprehensible in the speed with which it happened and it's a really magnificent story of how china implemented technologies that were bits and pieces borrowed from all over the place qr codes actually were invented in japan you know but nobody dreamed of using them to to build a payment system and that's what china's innovation was using qr codes and to build this uh this payment system so um living here you see a speed of technological advancement that's frankly mind-blowing and here's the thing that i think is important for a u.s audience to understand it's not about say the ai race who's got the fastest ai it's sometimes about really dumb technology that's really simple but china can implement the technology china can say oh we can make this technology work and they'll do it within six months or a year the same technology is you know sitting in the united states we have easy access to it but we just are not able to implement and put the technology to work and it's not always about the the you know they're really complicated sometimes it's just really simple stuff but this one has to do more like ross always say this one here remember we always say this has to do with the strategy so the plan and the strategy it looks like china is moving based on a strategy on the planet we don't we are thinking of the next quarter politically speaking yeah you know that's really interesting that you know um i i pick on uh ge's chairman uh his name escapes me now the head of you know the mr quarterly man and mr mr management because you know he basically instru destroyed an r d a u s r d community and made every corporate think in terms of very short term and what you see here with the government is the government thinks in terms of five-year plans and even now 10-year plans that go out even further um and you also see corporate planning you know look at look at huawei today okay huawei is a chinese company that has obviously um been crippled by us restrictions and whether they're good or bad that's really let's leave that all know obviously i'm no fan of them but let's leave that for another day the point is the company is now reinventing itself right it's going into digital finance it's going into try self-driving cars it's innovating its way out of a hole richard they just came up with the operating system called harmony so that just gives you an indication right there where they are moving with that technology moving forward as far as what whatever they want to achieve for absol absolutely and that's and that's the thing and you know there are critics of harmony who say well it's not so great okay this generation is not too great next generation tomorrow will be better and the funny thing is that what what people don't really get about china is that they think about well the next generation will be in a year or two it should be the next generation is it three or four months you know this the cycle of change and the cycle for development of technology here has been shortened you know they're they work in agile and you know you look at how they work it's agile companies everything is everything has been the time cycle has been shortened to to a point where most in the west can't really conceive of it and that's what's hard you know so when i talk about china look when i when i got to china and they started with digital payment i worked in technology and i worked in money and banking for a very long time you know it was inconceivable to me that a city as big as shanghai would go cashless so quickly even though i was living here and i saw that it was a fast pace of life so you know what it was very hard for people from the west to sort of wrap their hands around is the speed of change so people who say well i lived in china in 2010 i'm like yeah i was here then you know you haven't been back in a long time it's different now you wouldn't even recognize it well i guess it's the west or the us in general terms we are having a hard time accepting this this change by which china has reached within such a short period you're talking about like 30 or 40 years and they achieve far greater objectives than we anticipated and we're having a hard time accepting that reality hey look absolutely and look you're both better familiar with this on the geopolitical scene than i am i'm more of a technology guy which overlaps with geopolitics and you're especially both specialists in this and you know that's really the question that is on everybody's mind here in china will the us accept a powerful china that is gdp powerful that is powerful for technology is there room can the united states psychologically move itself even slightly off center stage and accept china as a global power and that's not you know that's not an issue at a university geo-political level this is an issue for my mandarin teacher you know this is something that common people are very concerned about because they feel that china is being perpetually thwarted yeah by the us and you know and they're saying look well we do good stuff too and we just want to be recognized for the good that we do as well and we want to be recognized that we're we're somebody we're not you know it's not 1976 all over again it's a different era in a different time yeah the century of humiliation and humiliation is over yeah absolutely and that's and you know that's really a great line because it is absolutely in the minds of young chinese today when you talk to people that sense like look we're not this is not people in mouse you know in blue costumes and bicycles like a national geographic article from 1976 just to use that again you know and there is a sense that hey we are somebody now and you know i think the concept is that people just want to be treated fairly and they feel that they're not getting that right now and that works in the tech spectrum in the bigger geopolitical spectrum but keeping it with technology um you know china tech is really good right now and when you put bans on it when you jail the you know the the daughter of huawei you know stuck in canada right now which is very much a political exercise and you know yeah chinese people are very concerned about all this going on well the u.s propaganda machine has all has half the population here terrified of china and they can't even say why they're afraid but when i talk to relatively well-educated people they're saying yeah well you know we need to be afraid of china what for yeah um it's very hard for me um look i've lived here for a long time now and i love it very much i was born and raised in the united states to an italian immigrant family so i have family in italy i have family in the u.s and my home is here now and nothing makes me sadder than to see the drone of um really bad reporting and bad press about china there simply is no story about china that is ever good everything about china has to be bad so let's let's make that specific and into the area of technology where i specialize right now china is undergoing a tremendous change in the laws that govern big tech now watching that right everybody in the world is watching it and certainly i feel for all those investors of which i am one who has lost money on china tech stocks i get it it's it's shocking to me at the same time in the west in the u.s and in europe we look at the same conflict we have a conflict between big tech and the control that they have over society and government and where is the right balance now china was is interesting because it took a number of really big steps with about three or four specific laws that fundamentally change how big tech relates to society now what's interesting about them is if you go to some deeper technology spots you can occasionally find people saying hey look these are some pretty good ideas and we could use so few of these you know but if you really read the papers on this stuff there's not a single one of these laws that has given any credit for controlling big tech in china and by the way if you think big tech has a you know an important role in us society china which is digitally sophisticated in advance of of the west in many ways the the role of big tech here is is is tremendous so you know it's interesting because you can't find a an article except a very few that say look they're doing something interesting and maybe we can learn a little bit from what's going on in china um but but it's very hard to find that and mostly everything is greeted with it's a disaster china is a disaster it's bad and you know that's very hard to um to digest day in and day out yeah well that's become you know the challenge also we're noticing that here in the us with the big uh attack industries app you know without naming names here but we all know who the within the social media apparatus to the point that things will become okay now they're gonna have to it's not they have to be already doing that by detaining to you what to say and not to say and that becomes a little bit questionable as to where democracy is and kind of put the big question mark on where things are moving forward so i absolutely look absolutely that is the fundamental issue of our times is what role should big tech have in society and what should be determined by government and what should be determined by big tech now in china look that answer is easy all right there's no question of where that should be here and that's good and bad i understand that yeah but that question for the west is absolutely critical and what's interesting and we saw this very clearly when the trump administration put a ban on tick-tock right it said well we're uncomfortable with user data leaving the country and the the use of user data that's fine but what was interesting is the us did not put any laws recommendations or any policies in effect which dealt with people's personal data and what you can and can't do with it so it's one thing to ban tick tock and say we're afraid of your data but it's another to say look here are personal data protection regulations that will help clarify what can and can't be done with data and that's exactly what china did and to a certain degree that's what europe did through the gdpr regulations there the double standard richard that's what the west is approaching it from that perspective absolutely yeah i mean i look at it just with the uh yeah i'm sure you're aware of all you were aware of the prison program a p-r-i-s-m prism you know who gave the government the right to just read my text and listen to my calls without even though for us in the west you know it says in the constitution right there the government shall not infringe on citizens of privacy without probable cause and that becomes the question of okay is the government using technology to the benefit of society or is it using technology to counter the the the rise of consciousness within the population and this is where as you said earlier uh the importance of technology and why is that important in west for for us to understand where china is headed technologically speaking look at i i look i couldn't be in greater agreement with you you use prism as an example i'm going to use a different example from my book and one of the critiques over central bank digital currency is that people will say the government will know where your money is going and i laugh and i outline very deep in detail in the book i say the government already knows where your money is going in fact edward snowden made a major point of saying how the government had cracked the visa and the mastercard networks especially with regard to europe and the middle east to trace money so you know the concept of the government doesn't know where your money is going at this point is sort of ludicrous but no one will exactly confess to it you know it's like you have to really read between the lines so right now the irs has a really very very large multi-hundred million dollar contract with the big data firm palantir and the contract between the irs is to find tax cheats and it uses ai so whereas the government says we do not have access to your credit card data we don't have access to your other personal data they are in essence correct they do not but they hire talent here goes out yeah and you know and it's because we have data brokers data you can buy every credit card swipe ever done in the united states you know lifetime just about and they have access to all this of course they do you know so it's this thing where um it's like a cat and mouse game where we know the data is going out there but nobody really wants to admit it unless of course you catch us or unless somebody leaks and you know the reality is um we have very few secrets these days all right with the control of the government but thanks to advances in technology for set excel well speaking of that advances will it be fair would it be very richer to say that the 21st century belongs to china technologically would that be fair statement oh absolutely in your opinion you know you know you know you see the here's the problem i don't know i do not have words strong enough and i don't and i hope i genuinely hope that listeners viewers who are doubting this or are unsure of this do more research and follow this because again it goes down and look anybody who i'm 60 in another two weeks i'll be exactly 60 60. they're just numbers those aren't just numbers richard but i grew up yeah right but i grew up doing this during the space program and i remember very clearly being pushed to become an engineer i was always good at math so it was a good fit for me but i remember be an engineer we need more engineers i remember what the us with the purpose was like during that 60s cold war conflict right and the only way i can describe china today to someone who would remember is to say it's like the u.s during the 60s when you saw an advertisement in on tv in 1965 telling you that this washing powder would make your clothes brighter or whiter you believed it because science technology actually made it pretty much a fair bet that it was going to be better than last year's well ever china is living that right now next year is better than this year whatever technology you have will be better next month and there is a government cultural mandate to do more to be better to develop technology to use technology and most of all for people give somebody a new pen and say this is a new digital pen half a billion people will buy it why because they believe that whatever is new will fundamentally do more and be better for them and convey an advantage to them in some meaningful manner and people's uptake of new technology here is beyond belief you don't get people saying well last year's technology is good enough oh i'm happy this is old but it works i'll do business i'll do it no way people here want new they want high tech because for them high tech is a symbol of societal advancement and increase in economic standing it's a small wonder that such a high percentage of the chinese people support the government what is it 82 percent of it some outrageously high number 19 look you know the poll gets criticized but you know it was something like 94 and that's you know you know look folks and i'm not i know i'm not speaking to david and ross directly but if you're thinking that someday the chinese people will rise up and i see this comment all the time i'm very active on linkedin and probably once or twice a week i get somebody saying china will rise up and be free free from what let me tell you something china chinese people think they have freedom and they do and there is no desire to rise up people love the government here you know and it's really interesting people don't get that the government is actually tremendously responsive look let me tell you a story and this i know perhaps you know we have you know the the party has community leaders and community representatives and you know the amazing thing is we know who they are they come by and they visit people you know they're like hi how are you are you happy what do you mean i mean i i lived in wayne new jersey for you know the better part of my life nobody ever came to our door i never said what do you need how could we help you you know i mean i know this sounds outrageous but it really is true you know china had a revolution they get that they know that being responsible responsive to people's needs is critically important so getting the streets fixed getting small things in your community fixed in shanghai it's like they fix stuff overnight it's mind-blowing so china's government is tremendously responsive to people's needs and you have to compliment them for that that's true you aren't cuny dallas city council meeting they invite the people to come in and so this really incredible lady comes in and says well in my neighborhood the sidewalks are so rough that we can't do wheelchairs over them we can't walk with canes and the city class said i'm sorry that's the case next wow yeah that's a true story yeah that's that's yeah i don't i don't know what to say it makes it makes me sad you know i i look i grew up in the u.s i love i love america and um it makes me tremendously sad to see this level of decline that's all i can say exactly right and yeah richard when we address it when we talk about those issues we become the one that categorized or labeled as the mouthpiece for china or how much does china is paying you for that i mean such ridiculous comments to the point that you feel sorry for the level of ignorance that people do not acquire and understanding where things are headed well look i i get that in fact you can check my amazon book reviews like 75 wonderful reviews and then i have two of 75 which gave me one star out of and i saw so yeah i have 73 five-star reviews and two that are one star and the one star reviews both of them said that i was a i was paid by the chinese government it was a communist party mouthpiece and you know my book is really i don't deal in politics at all i just talk about technology and why the technology works you know it's pretty hard to debate you know that it works i mean china's cashless that's good okay the type of tech works you know but it's really uh that's a sort of a weekly uh occurrence for me where i get that and i i get it people are patriotic or people believe um that america is a great place it is there's no question about that but that doesn't mean that other places can't be great and that doesn't mean that we can't all learn from one another and that's sort of the message that i get with cashless trying to tell people that china's gone cashless it's a good future to live in to and you will be living that future too maybe it'll take a while to get there but it's coming and it's going to be good yeah cashless and belton road what do you think um they were built to go with one another okay belton road and is a phenomenal program it's it's not perfect if there are there are reasons to have you know debate about the good and the bad of belt the road but overall china paid attention to developing countries because it it was itself a developing country and it saw that already 15 10 15 years ago that it couldn't go head to head with the united states in developing markets but it did have technology and it did have infrastructure development that was relevant for developing countries so they went to a space that the us had long forgotten and ignored and done a lot of great infrastructure development that many countries could not have dreamed of achieving without china's help and i you have to give them credit for that so now the next question that comes up is digital rmb or digital yuan and belton road countries and in my book i talk all about how the first countries to use the digital iran in cross-border trade which would be removing dollar from from trade will be the belt and road countries and it's going to have a huge impact on dollar use abroad and um eventually it will make the chinese rmb or chinese yuan into a significant global currency um you see it's not going to sing the no you know because the reason and it's a really simple simplistic answer to that is because so much is so much of the chinese economy is based on dollars and based on u.s bond holding based on um investments in dollars that you know the two what what most people really don't want to admit is that the two countries are like siamese twins conjoined at the hip that's a good analogy you know this concept you know that we saw of decoupling was such nonsense and i'm not saying that we shouldn't make antibiotics in the u.s i'm not saying that there are certain critical industries that we shouldn't have sure but the concept that you're going to decouple from china when i think the number was 27 of of of uh imported goods or something like that were all coming from china it was it was remarkable it was a remarkable figure and you know somebody calculated they said look even if if we wanted to replace that it would take us 20 years to build the factories you know it was just so you know impossible so china and the us are sort of siamese or locked together perhaps like yin and yang and conflict but they can't live without one another and that's a key um distinction for people to really understand you just can't cut china out it's not gonna happen so wouldn't it be it would be even better if some some hawks in washington will will come to their senses and say you know what it might make perfect sense to sit down across from each other with the chinese and talk and cooperate and figure out a way that we all can benefit rather than this you know pushing for a conflict with china for what look uh david ross uh i i i weep yeah we had this change of administration we had the big meeting in alaska and i was very hopeful and i was shocked at the outcome and uh and it's been sort of a downhill trend ever since so i i don't know what to say collaboration on coronavirus collaboration for global warming collaboration for developing countries these are all things that we need to do we are not just connected to china we are connected to poverty we are connected to people who are financially excluded from the system and you say well that's just africa no we have 23 percent of the american population that is financially excluded or financially um uh disadvantaged um so you know these are real problems that with a little bit of collaboration between the between china the u.s between us and other countries we can all globally do better yeah but it's not happening would you talk a little bit about the people who don't have access to banking and how digital currency might make a real difference here yeah let's let's talk about this and this is something that um i give credit i know perhaps she is a lightning rod for controversy but elizabeth warren has been on this and i give her tremendous credit because her her comments have been actually um very very good so look the u.s has a tremendous banking system if you look at it on paper it has a great number of branches it has lots of good statistics if you look at it but then if you look at the flip side the federal reserve itself admits that there is i think the exact statistic is 22 of the population um which is uh unbanked or underbanked that's the exact term i missed it in my last comment so let me just make it clear there are seven percent of the u.s population that is unbanked that means they have no banking services and on top of that there's uh 16 of the population which is called underbanked meaning that they have to go to check cashers and pay for payday loans and use non-bank expensive services and this basically goes down the economic divide in the americas so basically if you look at wealthy people they have banking services and if you look at poor people they do not and what's interesting is the american banking system doesn't want the poor people and and is not particularly friendly toward them so now we're looking at central bank digital currency here's the thing that china is doing with it because china has a massive unbanked population which has reduced substantially through the use of digital banking and digital payment and now they're taking the next step which is central bank digital currency which means that you'll have a digital wallet on a phone or even on a little card all right it doesn't have to be a phone it can be a very inexpensive little card and it gives people access to digital money which is the same as the dollar bill and it gives them a way to save it and it gives them a way to spend it and it gives them a way to be included in the financial system and be relieved from cash and what people don't recognize that cash is a major source of robbery and theft and loss and financial disadvantage for people so going digital gives people financial inclusion and gives them a potential way to save money and to get a leg up on the financial system which has predominantly excluded them because they don't have enough money to be bothered with and that's the sad sad truth is that why you're saying now some countries for example pushing for uh like bitcoin uh as a legal tender in in in a way to start to not rely too much on the dollar per se moving into that direction uh with even the uh the uh what we call the central bank digital currency cbdc uh sort of you have countries that like in europe i heard some conversations and i have family lives in europe and we talk sometimes there is now a conversation inside europe some of them are calling to go back to the single currency i mean as far as each country using back its own currency yeah there is a conversation going on right now and to me it was like is this a red flag for what lies ahead regarding the application or implementation of technology into the financial system oh yes okay so let's talk about cryptocurrency first first let's make a distinction central bank digital currency is just that it is a digital currency issued by the central bank cryptocurrency is a digital currency it is but it isn't backed by a central bank it's banked by faith of the users all right so central bank digital currencies which the european central bank is looking into and obviously china's central bank is issuing are built on the technology used for cryptocurrencies does that make sense so yeah so so here's what i said i want to make something clear to everybody out there if you hate cryptocurrency absolutely your business that's absolutely fine with that if you hate it hate it but give them credit for inventing the technology that central banks are now adopting and say thanks for that even if you dislike crypto now if you love cryptocurrency chances are you're already proud of the technology and you're probably upset that the central banks are using it to them i say well treat the central banks at least with with care at least they're trying even though you may not like them so cryptocurrency use in el salvador cryptocurrency use in africa both of them have similar themes and the theme is that these are countries that are underserved by the international banking population because of strict anti-money laundering and kyc which is know your client regulations that are really a fall off fallout of 9 11 where the american and banking system closed down and said we want to stop the flow of money to bad people and in doing so smaller countries were essentially cut off and cut out of the banking system it made it very difficult and expensive to transfer money it was already expensive but they made it not just expensive but really tough so what you see with cryptocurrency is a lot of people who simply want to move money around the globe and there's no better way for them to do it it's fast it's relatively inexpensive um yes there are certainly people who use it for black market and bad purposes and that's terrible but by and large most of it is run by people who just want to move money from point a to point b and cryptocurrency is a simple and convenient way to do it so you know it's hard to find you know it's hard to go to developing country in africa with a um poor banking system and high expenses on cash movement and tell somebody they shouldn't use bitcoin to move cash why you know i mean you know i i get it it's you know and there's other implications here because you don't want to you don't want to destabilize an already weak government that may be really trying hard yeah but at the same time um we have to recognize that banking services are not the same all over the globe there's costs and if cryptocurrency provides an inexpensive way for people to send money home remittances right which is what el salvador is using bitcoin for remittance transfer um god bless him i i you know i i can't say no to it i can't say it's a bad use case but much of this is based on the issue that it's very hard for banks to transact in for larger transaction value it's just hard for banks to move money around because of kyc and aml laws which are very strict wow that's an interesting concept uh i want to talk about one one thing that that came to mind quickly while we have you here richard because you wouldn't know what about this uh one time i had a conversation with an individual who under that name understand a little bit about financial markets and my argument to him was hey listen and this is only mainly for an american audience here i said look it looks like to me and i'm a no financial girl i don't understand that much i understand the basics it looks to me that the more the government prints money the more the weaker it makes the currency the value of it his argument was no no no no the us dollar will always be on demand as my effect is going to go up is there any truth to that no that's a broken that's a broken look printing my excess monetary printing is a real problem it's uh it's the issue of our times we're facing a major spending bill right now in washington and when i was working on a trading floor i spent the first 18 years of my career in investment banking i worked designing specialty mathematically driven products for fixed income and bonds and what i was told from from my earliest days on a trading floor was never bet against the dollar it's a bad bet you'll eventually lose and that was just something that you know everybody knew don't bet against the dollar it's over that you know that advice that was sort of given to me as a young uh 29 30 year old starting now starting in the business is is meaningless today yeah and that's you know so people ask the fundamental question that you did is can the digital yuan replace the dollar and i say no it can't replace it but what it's going to do is it's going to displace the dollar in trade and other specific uses and the thing is it's not because the yuan is so spectacular the digital part is very convenient cuts fees makes it fast very good but the but what really it's it's the dollars gain to lose and the digital yuan happens to have taught the luck of timing in life right that's everything and it's being printed at exactly the time or being digitally printed at exactly the time when dollar over printing is becoming a real issue that many governments are watching now here you should talk to economists who know far more about this than me but certainly it's in the newspaper every day about concern international concern about how much dollar printing is going on now that's why i say the digital yuan is so lucky because frankly that concern will drive people to use a different asset and if that asset is digital is cheap is fast has other physical advantages that just make it nice to use yeah go flip they'll go with that yeah yeah that's why i kind of didn't buy that argument when uh the individual is saying no no no the dollar demand on the global market will always go up but like to what degree when the currency is getting weaker and i kind of like okay i'll i'll i'm sure i'm going to follow up on this with some other experts to see the other side of the argument well he look there's a point dollar demand is driven by not just the u.s it's driven by the need for a currency to transact in for international trade for investment for a lot of different reasons and there's some truth to that but game doesn't last forever so you know i talk about specifically in my book i talk specifically about the use of the digital rmb in trade if you're buying stuff from a developing country right now you have to take your local currency convert it to dollars then convert the dollars send them to china then have them converted into rmb the whole process for small business small medium-sized enterprise it's not working it can take weeks it's not worth it so you know you're making your payment the guy gets it a couple of weeks later he said you underpaid me or you overpaid him because the exchange rates you're living in a world now with the digital rmb you'll be able to convert the money and pay pay the guy for your container of new refrigerators within minutes yeah wow you know who's who who will not want to use that system you're right yeah i i i know personally personally i just see it going that direction going forward i mean i do know uh that for example uh uh between china and iran regarding oil transactions they are conducted in the chinese currency not all of it not all of it but some of it is conducted in the chinese currency so they're moving into that direction basically absolutely absolutely but i have a there's a but there's a side point to that yeah the digital rmb will likely not be used for sanction busting okay in the in the in the early days china wants as many people countries as possible to use the digital rmb yeah and of course they're going to work with central banks it doesn't just get tossed out there and say okay people use it they go to each central bank and arrange use yeah but what they're what they don't want to do is to use it for sanction busting because they know the americans will blackball the digital rmb and tell people not to use it so so i agree with you so right now trade with iran is conducted in r b and it's also conducted in barter and that happens yeah and uh i would not expect it to move to digital rmb in the near term someday it may but not at least soon after launch because there's too much at stake for uh china china knows that its technology gets blocked right we have tick tock being blocked we've got wechat being blocked in the u.s and when china launches the digital r b there were already two senators calling for a ban and a block once yeah did you did you catch this this is a great one no there were a couple of senators who said that american olympians when they go to debate the the beijing olympics in 2022 they should be prohibited from using the digital rmb or the digital yuan it's already starting so yeah so so china's central bank digital currency is launching into this geopolitical theater where everything that china does is back and the uh unfortunately there's not much we can do for the digital yuan when it launches it will be perceived in that way as well and that's that's unfortunate wow that's interesting well i have one last question for me i don't know about ross but i have one question for me that that i'd like to get your intake uh on it uh richard this one has to do with taiwan and why is that important not from a geopolitical aspect but from technology you and i know that taiwan has the uh what is that company that manufactured chips the tmc one of the the top companies whatever so given the tensions that's going on you know of course between the us and china over taiwan and now with the blanket of the chip manufacturing do you think that china is going to overcome that issue with taiwan regarding the production of the chips in taiwan you know so look yeah look taiwan is probably is is one of the world's largest chip producers and tsmc is the world's largest for sure so look are they going to overcome very simple china's going to build its own ship business look this is new my wife is from taiwan i love taiwan hello taiwan i you know i love you yeah um and you know it's not like new everybody working for one of the big semiconductor companies in taiwan they were all their top engineers and all their top production line people were being bought by the chinese chip producers so you know they they just said okay hi we're a chinese chip company located wherever in china we'll triple your salary if you come to work for us oh so look they speak the same language so there's no language difficulty you know you put a job offer in front of a guy who you know pays them multiples of what they're making or some large enough amount and yeah what you're going to do is you're going to buy away the brain power slowly and it's not going to it's not going to be overnight because i understand there's machines and other things that we have to be able to they have to be able to recreate i get that um but um yeah they're gonna they're going china will develop its own ship capacity and here's the thing that most people don't get they're going to make they're going to build that ship capacity using a lot of the brain power that they will import from taiwan interesting wow i did not know about it that way very very interesting yeah you know it's really interesting what's really funny is that it's the little details that you pick up in the taiwan english language paper or in other here's my advice to everybody go do some google searches and exclude all the major newspapers and go to the second and third tier newspapers from countries that you don't know and read some of those stories because you know you really can learn what's going on and you know this just happens to be some story that i read about and followed up when i was reading the english language newspaper in taiwan you know you know having a coffee shop with my with my wife and i'm like wow look at that so yeah it's it's a thing interesting interesting well ross do you have any other questions for richard richard we can't thank you enough this has been utterly fascinating and the information is remarkably useful so thank you so much for spending the time with us today so richard if if people want us to learn about where where where can they go for our viewers hello everybody my book on that side i got to get the right size cashless cashless is available on amazon it's available on apple it's available through the barnes and noble boat electronic bookstore go to whatever electronic book store you'll you'll probably find it there um i'm available on linkedin i write every day about china and technology on linkedin and i write write really not just about hard tech i write about some of the geopolitical aspects and i'm also on twitter so twitter and linkedin if you want to find out what's going on about china and cbds and cbdc and technology um the book is on amazon and apple and i look forward folks i would just love to hear from you if you don't buy my book i'm still loving you just send just send me a note and say hey that was fun you know and i enjoyed it and david and ross i want to thank you both your questions are on target and they're really getting you know to this concept of conflict you you know that's the title of the show and what you the questions that you asked were really perfect for uncovering the real conflict between china and the united states and i hope for nothing but less conflict between the two and the things resolve and i'm honored to be here and thank you so much for asking great questions we're circulating we're certainly our enjoyed having you here and i'm sure our viewers will will learn a lot from what richard had to share with with all of us so exactly thank you so much for your perspective and to our viewers you know remember to subscribe by the way ross we are short about 69 million 469 000 uh subscribers because we have a goal 70 million subscribers so so we want to thank our viewers we thank you so much for your support and we look forward to having you next time and as always stay informed until next time bye

Channel: The Geopolitics In Conflict Show

Views: 32,611

Rating: 4.9590669 out of 5

Keywords: AI, China, STEM, Digital Currency, Geopolitics, Taiwan, USA, 6G, Global Technology, 5G, Microchips

Id: dD1BmOqL3eM

Length: 62min 19sec (3739 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/yaiyen]

It will give you a chance to go even deeper into the most pressing global topics. You'll get information and a much deeper dive with bi-weekly live calls and Q&A with Dr. David Oualaalou PhD& Dr. Ross Stewart PhD, as well as a community to ask questions and have discussions with others who are interested in deeper information and knowledge as well.

Since opening its economy, China has grown into a global economic powerhouse whose influence on global markets is widely acknowledged. Leading in many areas of technology, the West is in denial that China has the capacity to assume global technology leadership. In this interview, we answer the following:

Where is China headed technologically & what the West needs to know?

Will China’s recent technological strides have geopolitical ramifications?

What impact & application 6G technology may have on the AI sector?

What sort of technology shall we expect from China when it comes to Space Exploration?

One thing is sure: China’s technological strides & leadership will continue to create opportunities for emerging market investment & collaboration for whomever is ready for it.