Writer, geopolitics expert and technology futurist Jamie Metzl says that those Chinese who are involved in the tech industry think people in Silicon Valley are “lazy.”
In a May 9 interview for Joe Rogan’s podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, Metzl and Rogan discuss China in technology, as well as Chinese telecom giant Huawei.
“People in China who are involved in the tech world, when they go and visit Silicon Valley, uniformly they say ‘We cannot believe these people are so lazy. Why are they not working 24 hours a day? Why are they not issuing product, new products every week?’ And this is, I mean… They are racing somewhere, and it’s going to have huge implications for the world,” Metzl stressed.
Watch the clip here:
“If we believe in our values, as I believe we should, we have to fight for ’em, and the place we have to fight for them first is here,” he said. “Every day that just we’re focusing on this drama, this reality TV drama of our government is another day we’re not focusing on the big things,” he continued.
“How are we going to get our act together? How are we going to lead the world in technology,” he asked.
“We’re not focusing on the right things,” Metzl later noted.
Metzl has served in the U.S. National Security Council, State Department, Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as a Human Rights Officer for the United Nations in Cambodia.
He serves on the Advisory Council to Walmart’s Future of Retail Policy Lab, is a faculty member for Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine conference, was Chief Strategy Officer for a biotechnology company, and ran unsuccessfully for the Missouri House of Representatives Fifth Congressional District in Kansas City in 2004.
Metzl and Rogan also discuss telecommunications giant Huawei.
“For sure the founder of Huawei is a former Chinese military officer. For sure in the early stages of their company, they stole, straight out stole lots of source code from companies like Cisco. For sure we should be really worried if Huawei is the sole supplier of the infrastructure that supports 5G all around the world because the Chinese government would have access to everything,” Metzl says.
“Let’s just say Huawei is a legit company and they’re not totally, intimately connected to the Chinese government. Can we trust their relationship with the Chinese government? The Chinese government has a rule that every one of these cos has … a communist party cell inside that company,” he says. “We can’t think of big Chinese companies like we think of them here. We have to think of them as quasi state actors.”
“When China is out investing in different parts of the world, including Africa, their companies are kind of acting like arms of the government,” Metzl added, saying he is concerned about what Huawei is doing, and that the U.S. should push back on them.
You can watch the full interview here:
