The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Cold War 2.0: Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle between China, Russia, and America by George S. Takach

Episode Date: March 26, 2024

Cold War 2.0: Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle between China, Russia, and America by George S. Takach https://amzn.to/49jxBMc A vivid, thoughtful examination of how technological innovation—especially AI—is shaping the tensions between democracy and autocracy during the new Cold War. So much of what we hear about China and Russia today likens the relationship between these two autocracies and the West to a “rivalry” or a “great-power competition.” Some might consider it alarmist to say we are in the midst of a second Cold War, but that may be the only responsible way to describe today’s state of affairs. What’s more, we have come a long way from Mao Zedong’s infamous observation that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Now we live in an age more aptly described by Vladimir Putin’s cryptic prophecy that “artificial intelligence is the future not only of Russia, but of all mankind, and whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become ruler of the world.” George S. Takach’s incisive and meticulously researched new volume, Cold War 2.0, is the book we need to thoroughly understand these frightening and perilous times. In the geopolitical sphere, there are no more pressing issues than the appalling mechanizations of a surveillance state in China, Russia’s brazen attempt to assert its autocratic model in Ukraine, and China’s increasingly likely plans to do the same in Taiwan. But the key here, Takach argues, is that our new Cold War is not only ideological but technological: the side that prevails in Cold War 2.0 will be the one that bests the other in mastering the greatest innovations of our time. Artificial intelligence sits in our pockets every day—but what about AI that coordinates military operations and missile defense systems? Or the highly sophisticated semiconductor chips and quantum computers that power those missiles and a host of other weapons? And, where recently we have seen remarkable feats of bio-engineering to produce vaccines at record speed, shouldn’t we be concerned how catastrophic it would be if bio-engineering were co-opted for nefarious purposes? Takach thoroughly examines how each of these innovations will shape the tension between democracy and autocracy, and how each will play a central role in this second Cold War. Finally, he crafts a precise blueprint for how Western democracies should handle these innovations to respond to the looming threat of autocracy—and ultimately prevail over it.

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I'm so glad after 16 years I don't have to sing that bit anymore and we hired somebody to do it. Welcome to the big show. We, of course, have the most smartest people on the show. And we're going to be talking about artificial intelligence. We're going to be talking about Cold War 2.0, according to the author that we have on today. And all that great stuff. But in the meantime, refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss linkedin.com for just chris voss chris voss won on the tickety

tockety and all those crazy places on the internet he is the author of the new book that just came out march 5th 2024 it's entitled cold war 2.0 Artificial Intelligence in the New Battle Between China, Russia and America. George Takash joins us on the show with us today. He'll be talking to us about his amazing book everyone's talking about. Oh my gosh you know every day we we've been dealing with some of the most interesting elements that are developing in our world and AI of course is advancing at a pace that's totally crazy and we're going to get into it with him and all the stuff that he does he holds a bachelor degree in history political economy and philosophy from the university of toronto a graduate degree from the

norman patterson school of international affairs at carlton university and a law degree from the university of toronto for 40 years he's practiced technology law at McCarthy Tetrault. Canadian's premier law firm. He's written three books on technology, law, tech, commercial subjects. This is his first book for a general audience. And he also lives, who knew, in Toronto, Canada. Welcome to the show george how are you i'm great i'm really happy to be on with you chris we're really happy to have you as well

big from the great white north up there eh so give us your dot coms where can we find you on the interwebs actually i'd really like you to just find the book at simonschuster.com. That would be great. But if anybody wants to get a hold of me to either agree with me or to take some exception to what I say, just georgetocash at gmail.com is fine. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview, if you would, of your new book, Cold War 2.0.

So the Cold War part is, plainly speaking, because the autocracies of the world, led by China and Russia, have dragged the democracies of the world, led by the United States, Western Europe, they've dragged the democracies into another Cold War. And the reason they do that is because they just don't want to comply with the rules anymore. And, you know, I was thinking, I'm a big Blue Jays baseball fan. And it's like, if you started, you know, the season, and the first batter from the other team up to the plate brought an aluminum bat. and you ran out onto the field and said hold it you know the rules you gotta have a wooden bat and the guy says no i'm not playing by those rules and then when your manager turns to the ump and says hey come on call it on these guys the ump takes off his mask and isn't he the other team's manager's brother?

So this is what's going on with the autocracies. There you go. Specifically, Russia, Vladimir Putin, autocrat number one, invading Ukraine, 2014, takes over Crimea. When 20 years ago, Russia signed a treaty that said this land is specifically going to be part of Ukraine. So again, they don't care about treaties. They don't care about agreements. They rip them up. And then more recently, China is getting into the act. The South China Sea, huge body of water. And we have rules for how you figure out maritime rights and the way you draw those maritime boundaries. China comes in and says, no, I'm not interested in those rules. I'm just claiming 90%

of this water for myself. And that has huge implications for international trade and oil discovery and so on. And then the last one that put me over the top and actually, you know, made me write the book was China's approach to Taiwan. Here's a country, 24 million people, but technologically, Chris, absolutely critical, and we'll get into that. And China says, no, I think I'm going to absorb Taiwan. Thanks very much. Even though the Chinese Communist Party has never ruled, has never been the government of Taiwan. And nobody in Taiwan literally wants to be a part of China. So this is the Cold War. And unfortunately, that's the bad news.

For those of us of a certain age, we remember the first Cold War. And it wasn't a happy time. But the better news is, and this is the 2.0 part of the title, is that technology is going to be a critical factor in the outcome of this Cold War. And as you alluded to in your opening, AI is going to be part of everything. The four technologies that I look at, AI is obviously center stage, but I also look at semiconductor chips because the high-end ones are what you need to run AI. So that's really important and again we'll get into some more details I'm sure. And then quantum computing, which is a new type of computing that many of your listeners might not be aware of,

but it's coming on gangbusters. And it actually may be sort of the wild card in this whole technology play. And then finally, biotech, because we're also using technology to change people. Our very evolution is being sort of turned upside down. So those are the four biggies that the book looks at and figures out, okay, how's that going to work with this Cold War rivalry? And the good news, and I'll end on this, the great news is the democracies do innovation and do technology and do these four technologies

way better than the autocracies. So as long as we hang together as a bunch of democracies around the world, you know, we're going to do okay, but that's not an easy trick to do. Definitely. I mean, we're seeing, you know, we're seeing the fallback in you know pending what we have with the election coming up i mean there's if trump were to win we'd see probably closing off of we see an isolationism or a nationalism of of our policies we probably would i was watching mitt romney talked about how we would probably lose our place as a leader in in the in in the world and already british i know european countries are just aghast that he could come to power and that we could become more nationalist.

And, you know, his attitudes towards NATO and, you know, already we're seeing, you know, the House, which is Republican held, won't fund Ukraine anymore. And it's almost like watching them. It's almost like watching them it's almost like watching the british government that was like no go ahead and sell you know sell airplane parts and engine parts to germany you know what could go wrong it's almost like that just 2.0 watching it again so when did the cold war 2.0 start according to your your timeline can i pick up on on your comment a minute ago because actually it's bang on and the example i'm going to use is semiconductor chip technology

which semiconductor chips they're tiny but they're actually the most important device that humans make nowadays. Because anything around you, on you, your smartphone, your watch, your car, if you're in the military, your missiles, you know, your tanks, everything contains these tiny, tiny semiconductor chips. And frankly, they're really hard to make. And the United States is great at designing them. You've probably followed NVIDIA recently. They are knocking it out of the park, to use another baseball analogy, because they're making the chips that run AI. But AMD is right up there as well, another American company. Apple makes its own chips. So those chips are designed in California, but, and here's the big but, they're actually manufactured in Taiwan by a company called TSMC in Taiwan, the big machine that it

uses to make those chips actually is made in little Netherlands in Europe, of all places. It's the most complex machine in the world. Each one costs about 500 million bucks US. And the two most important components of that machine, speaking of Germany, are actually made in Germany. The laser that has to hit a little bit of tin and vaporize it 50,000 times a second. The whole thing, Chris, just boggles the mind, right? These chips, the smallest ones are holding now 100 billion transistors. It's just over the top.

So the point I would make to you to follow on your point, which is, as I say, bang on, is that nobody can do technology in 2024 all alone. It's just not on. It's just not on. It's just so complex, and there's so many pieces. And the Japanese are in there with the chips. They make the underlying silicon wafers and the gases that are used. So it just goes on and on and on. So I'm with you 100%.

And the book talks at some length about, yeah, we're leaders in the technology, but unless we have strong alliances where all the democracies agree to kind of cover each other's backs, you know, it's going to be a much harder trip for everyone. So I'm with you, whoever comes out of the November election in the U.S., both the president and the legislative races, they just can't turn their back on the world. And not just for the sake of Europe and Japan and so on, but for the sake of the United States.

Because if these chips don't show up in your supply chains, your cars aren't working, your machines aren't working, your trains aren't working. And aren't working your trains aren't working like and we had a little taste of it right a couple of years ago coming out of covid some of the supply problems i had a lot of companies we review products so at the chris voss show they couldn't get the chips for their for their products to sell bingo so that was like child's play compared to what's going to happen if if the chinese move on on taiwan and and we're not if the democracies aren't there to protect them absolutely now

recently i i think a year or two ago but the biden administration put a clamp down on the chip thing i was really surprised by that tell us your thoughts on that. Yeah, I think, you know, when I considered 2022 and what happened in the international sphere of real importance, two things happened. Putin and the Russians invaded Ukraine on a full scale mode. That was in February. But in October of 2022, again, you're bang on, Chris. The Biden administration brought in a very sweeping law that said chips of a certain performance level, I won't get into all the technical details, but basically the high-end chips and the machines that make them, to my earlier point, those can no longer be sold to China. And this is huge. And frankly, the Chinese are up in arms

because they import and used to import, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of this stuff. And without it, you know, your military becomes second class, your economy becomes second class. And so what Biden's doing, and it makes so much sense is, hey, in the democracies, we shouldn't give the autocrats the rope with which to hang us. That would be madness. And so, you know, kudos to Biden. Now, to be fair, Trump started a bunch of that as well during his four years. But Biden made it much more sort of broadly effective.

And it's not just the chips again. It's without those chips, you can't do the leading edge AI. And right now, you know, the democracies are probably five to seven years ahead of the Chinese on AI. And AI is going to be the defining technology of this century. So really important stuff. Yeah, and whoever leads AI, I think, wins. Wasn't it Putin that said something like that?

Yeah, I have a quote in the book from Putin. He's talking to some high school kids, and he says exactly your phrase. He says, you know, this AI race is going to be critical, and whoever leads in AI can, you know, rule the world. What's fascinating, though, and just let me take a minute on this, because particularly people in your audience who work as engineers or in the science fields and so on, the way that the democracies do science and do technology and do innovation sort of ground up, you kind of back an entrepreneur, you back a university professor with a spin-out company, you bring in venture capital, maybe private equity, and then you take them public. That model, which doesn't exist in the autocracies, is golden.

Like the Silicon Valley model for moving us forward. And there's a thing I call, and I spent a little bit of time on this in one of the chapters, called competitive displacement. Now, do you remember when the Sony Walkman, you know, the Discman was all the rage, and then along came the iPod. And I just, I was almost in tears with the iPod. It was so small.

It didn't skip when you jogged with it. And you could navigate your playlist and so on. So that's competitive displacement. The iPod, within seven months, Discman were like decimated. And that's frankly the beauty of the free market system working, you know, within a democratic environment. In the autocracies, the problem for them is that the autocrat, so Putin in Russia, Xi Jinping in China, they pick one winner, the this man, and then they ride it. And when along comes the iPod,

they said, no, no, no, no, no, no, we're going with the Discman. In the case of Putin, it's because he gets probably, you know, 15% off the top. So he is really second to none. And so if we can blend that in with this, none of us is as strong as all of us approach to the world, we'll prevail in Cold War II, just as we actually prevailed in Cold War I. Let's hope so. it's the importance of those ideas and this is very topical just this morning it came out across the wire that china is has announced it's phasing out amd intel chips from government computers according to financial times and they're they're basically trying to force their force their own systems to make up for these things and develop their own sort of chip thing.

I know, it seems like I read something a few days ago, too, that they're actually trying to move away from the OS, I think. They're not going to use Microsoft and other OSs as well. Talk to us about that if you're familiar with the latest news on that. Yeah, so the last chapter of my book talks about a technology decoupling so i'm not talking about a hundred percent of the merchandise from china that you find in a walmart you know you'll you'll still get your shower curtains you know and some of your ceramic plates and all that you'll get that from china you know for as long of your ceramic plates and all that. You'll get that from China, you know, for as long as there's no war between China and the democracies.

But what you'll see more and more and more of is this decoupling on the technology side. So exactly what you said in response to the Biden policy of prohibiting chips and chip- making equipment from going over to China, China has reciprocated, but very gingerly, actually, because they're shooting themselves in the foot every time they say no more Intel or no more AMD and so on and so forth. The interesting decoupling, though, Chris, that's going to be fascinating to watch is TikTok. Because TikTok is owned by a Chinese company. If you go on TikTok, and TikTok, by the way, has 170 million users in the United States. So this is a big app.

It's really given YouTube, short reels, and so on, Instagram, a run for the money. But frankly, if you go on TikTok and look at the videos that are there, a lot of them are put there by the Chinese government, and they're just blatant propaganda. So it's that problem plus the Chinese government doesn't really allow a private sector to be private. Everybody in China has to kowtow to Beijing. So if they want to find out about Chris Voss because he's on TikTok, guess what? They get to look at your preferences, what sort of stuff you like, so that they can start feeding even more specific propaganda into, you know, Chris Voss's feed. So the House of Representatives a week or so ago passed a bill that would require TikTok to either be divested to sort of a non-Chinese owner or shut down. And I think that's absolutely the right, you know, decision to make. And it's really just tit for tat because you can't get Google,

you can't get Facebook, you can't get Instagram in China. So this decoupling is going to happen. And what I predict in the book is that over time, our technology and our technology environment is simply going to be more, you know, it's going to be superior to theirs. And at some point, I'm hoping that the way the Soviet Union fell apart, China will ultimately, the people will rise up and say, look, this is madness. You know, they've got a cure for cancer over in the United States, and we don't get access to it, and so on. And that, in 30, 40 years time, may well bring a regime change in China to something, you know, more like a democracy. Yeah, and let's get into that

you you mentioned about how you know they put their thumb on the scale and they they don't allow private industry to thrive we saw that you know but most people were seeing it that knew what was going on was china was cheating their gdp numbers by building just crazy you know housing and and and and commercial centers. And they're building whole cities that were sitting empty. And everyone knew they were cheating their GDP to make it seem like there's a lot of growth happening. And they've hit two walls.

One is they're generationally declining now. So they're starting to enter what Japan has been going through with their population. And that one child policy definitely really screwed the pooch on them for all the years they were doing it. And then recently, and you may not have been able to address this in the book because I know a lot of times you guys have to go to publish about a year before. There's the collapse of the housing market, which they kept putting their thumb on to discourage private enterprise

and try and control it. And they end up just botching the whole thing. And now the stock market has lost, what, $6 to $8 trillion or something like that? They're trying to patch the hole on. How do you see that playing into what you talked about in the book, since that's probably newer news? Yeah, in the chapter that I talk about China, I do talk about the menacing part because everything, again, Chris, you're way up to date. Everything you said is bang on. we've seen from China the biggest military buildup in human history.

Even with all the economic difficulties that they currently have, they're still increasing their defense budget next year by 7.2%. They currently have the largest Navy in the world by number of vessels. Now, the U.S. is still ahead in terms of raw tonnage, because the Americans have the huge aircraft carriers. They're building nuclear missiles at a frantic pace. So even with their economic troubles, they're doubling down on the military. But to your point, in that chapter, I do talk about the difficulties that china's having particularly on the economic side and the one that i think is is one to really keep a sharp eye on is the

population collapse yeah i mean you mentioned the one child policy what a mistake that was you need 2.1 children for a couple to get to, you know, replacement numbers because some kids die. So that's the 0.1. And they're at about 1.3. And by the end of the century, they could be at something like 550 million from 1.4 billion. It's an amazing decline, which is why in the book, in the biotechnology chapter, and this is the only time in the book that I talk speculatively. The stuff that I'm saying about AI and quantum computing and the chips, that's today. That's not science fiction 2050. That's here and now.

But the one that I think is one to, as I say, keep an eye on, and you heard it here first on the Chris Voss show, ectogenesis, ectogenesis, an artificial uterus, where if the Chinese government can't convince women to have babies, there's two ways to go. There's Margaret Atwood's A Handmaid's Tale, if you remember, it was made into the television series and so on. But the other approach is the government simply starts making people itself. And I talk in the book that we actually have all the pieces. It was actually a medical practitioner scientist in Philadelphia a couple of years ago that built such a device for lambs.

So still for animals, but it kept the animals alive, as it were, as they were gestating. So don't discount that sort of a response, because that kind of a population decline is so drastic that if you're Xi Jinping, and ultimately, you know, you want to be one of the two big superpowers in the world. I wouldn't be surprised if he turned to something like that. And what I say in the book is we certainly don't want to participate in any of that. To your point, we have to cut off any flow of our biotech capability to China when they start mucking around with that stuff. Now, interestingly, we might pick it up as well. Our birth rates are dropping pretty dramatically as well.

Korea, South Korea is down to 0.8. Like it's really like all over the world. But the way the autocrats will deal with it is is just scary yeah i was listening to i don't know if you follow this stuff peter zahan i'm not sure if i'm pronouncing that correctly he wrote the books the accidental superpower in the end of the world is just beginning and he was on sam harris's show and he was talking about the generational decline some of the factors you're talking about you know he was saying Germany's going to pretty much cease to exist as a country with their generational declines. You know, everyone's declining. And of course, we have these huge populations that are going into the,

with the boomers and, you know, the big retirement generation. But the brain drain that comes from that, the ability to come up with new ideas, new possibilities, he seemed to suggest that America has the best lead on that. But Europe, of course, will be in a future danger. I think I was reading in Europe, I think it's in Britain. 50% of the women of childbearing age over 30 are single, which means they don't have good prospects to have families and kids. They're single with no kids. And that's like half the population. And we're already seeing that here in America where people aren't making families. They can't afford to buy houses.

There's a whole different, there's a whole set of cards that play into that but so it sounds like you've done some factors where you've there's measurements that you're using on population growth that you've talked about in your book and how that impacts this whole thing yeah so a couple of those so peter zahan yeah i've heard him actually on sam harris he's been on a couple of times he does sort of geopolitical risk analysis and that sort of thing. What's very interesting on the population decline phenomena, yeah, is you can counter it with immigration. And I talk about this in the book, because, again, the autocrats don't do immigration well at all. Today, of course, nobody wants to go to Russia. And even China, they're just not good at allowing, you know, non-Han Chinese to become part of their society. And last year, the stats are in 24,000 Chinese actually, you know, escaped from China and came up through the Darien Gap up through

Central America and that sort of thing. Whereas when you look at, for instance, the United States, NVIDIA, the hottest AI company in the world right now on the chip side, you know, Jensen Huang, born outside of the United States, the presidentensen Huang, born outside of the United States, the president of Microsoft, born outside of the United States, Google, born outside the United States. So that's a huge competitive advantage. And, you know, we talked at the top of the show about, you know, US hopefully not shutting off the rest of the democracies for its own sake. Same thing with immigration. I mean, you know, the U.S. has an issue at the southern border,

and I'm sure you guys will get around to fixing it. But for heaven's sakes, don't lose sight of the fact that the best and the brightest in the world, particularly in the democracies, they all want to go to the US, to your universities, you know, whether it's Stanford or MIT or Caltech. And you guys have done fabulously by that. And frankly, so has Canada and so has the UK. The other thing that we do much better than the autocracies is gender equality. AMD, the number two chip company, the CEO, is female.

The president of Taiwan currently is female. So again, you look at China and you look at the senior leadership groups and the senior scientists and so on, and the women in the ranks are pretty thin. So there really are some strengths to our system. So coming back to the population decline issue, immigration is going to be a very important part of that. And again, I think our prospects are much brighter because of that.

There you go. The one thing that's been great in America is the melting pot of people and ideas. And that's really kept us as a leader in the world. And people need to recognize how important that is. People have this kind of closed door behind them policy. There's all sorts of darker reasons behind why immigration is being fought over so much. The people that come to this country, even recently, Alan Greenspan. all sorts of darker reasons behind why immigration is being fought over so much. The people that come to this country, I mean, even recently, Alan, or not Alan Greenspan,

how old am I with the Federal Reserve? Paul, the current head of the Federal Reserve, I can't come up with his name off the top of my head right now, but you know, he recently admitted that one of the biggest factors of the economy still cooking along in GDP growth is immigration workers coming here and doing the jobs Americans don't want to do. And that's contributing to it. And a lot of people don't realize we're in a shortfall of employees with the baby boomers retiring. We're, I think it's like two to three million shortfall of employees. And that's why wages are going up and, and the fight is, you know, going up over employees. And, you know, it's like, well, you know, on immigrants coming here, they do the jobs. Most people don't want, they contribute to the economy when you put them to work.

And there's no, as you said, with the women working different things, diversity, et cetera, et cetera. There's no, there's no monopoly on who has the good ideas. It could be anyone. The head of Google, as you mentioned, he grew up on a dirt floor in India and was born and raised, I believe, in a poor caste. There's examples of that everywhere, and we need to realize that the importance of the numbers of people we can have, the numbers of ideals, and then the freedom that we have where anybody can achieve and be successful.

You know, I think even NVIDIA's SEO story, didn't he say he was like parking cars or washing toilets or something at one time? And even then, you know, they never thought NVIDIA would be a big deal. Feel free to build on that, but also play into how big, you know, we've seen NVIDIA's stock just go through the roof recently and stuff. And it looks like they're going to be the big important part of this AI Cold War 2.0. Yeah. The third piece that I'll build on top of, you know, racial diversity and then gender equality is gay rights. You know, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, he's gay. And if you actually shut out from your economy and your society, you know, people of a different colored skin, you know, women, gay people,

and this is Russia to a T today, and why, you know, a million people have left since the full scale invasion of Ukraine, you're just not going to achieve because, what 60% of your population is, is defunct, right? They're not participating. They're not, to your point, they're not giving their ideas. They're not generating the next great thing in innovation and technology. So, again, going back to the theme about the November elections, yes, every border needs a fence, but it also needs gates. And don't forget to build your gates and to make sure that sufficient people at all stages,

you know, the graduate student from India is huge. But so is, you know, the manual worker who comes in, and who works in the hospitality industry, and so on, and then moves up, and then look at their children, and how, you know, my parents were political refugees from Hungary, because they were involved in an uprising that didn't work, and so on and so forth. So that's huge. And you asked about NVIDIA. What I do in the book, and this is actually, I think, pretty funky, is in each of those four big tech buckets, the AI, the chips, the quantum computing, and the biotech, I actually list the leading companies in the world by market cap. So how valuable are they? And by their sales. And you'll see NVIDIA on the list and so on and so forth. But I break it out by, you know, the democracies, the autocracies. And then there's actually a

fascinating list led by India, which are sort of sitting on the fence. So they might be a democracy, sort of, in the case of India. But, you know, they have some allegiance to Russia, some allegiance to the U.S., and that sort of thing. So I break them out like that, and then I give them a scoring. And in the last chapter, you'll see I kind of bring it all together. And so you can really see it black and white, the strength that the democracies have. And the phrase that I use, which isn't very elegant, but it works on the street is, we can't fritter this away. Like, we can take these guys,

as long as, you know, we have good, strong alliances we we tighten these sanctions because little armenia is buying a lot of chips all of a sudden i mean you know so so we need better tools for for figuring out how to stop the flow but yeah the nvidia's are there and they're there for everyone to see and and and but to your point yeah the book is is written about a year ago. And so NVIDIA, I think I had them at high $800 billion market. They're well over that now. So the paperback edition will have updates, I'm sure. There you go. Now, recently, the Senate held hearings, I think it was in February, on the use of U.S. chips.

You write about this in the book. You talked about how Russia is making these drones have become really important. And it still seems that in spite of all the blockades, embargoes that we put on Russia two years ago, they're still finding our chips in the military equipment the Russians are using against Ukraine, which I guess is still a big concern if you want to talk about that yeah we we have to do and by we i mean all the democracies need to do a much better job little chips are kind of hard because because they are so small but there was a report recently that big machine tools,

you know, like from Germany, one of the leading machine tool companies in the world, even those are still getting into Russia, for goodness sakes. And what I sometimes suggest on this sort of a topic is that the answer is actually more technology. So build into those machine tools, you know, a drop-dead device that's either geolocated or that once a week, you know, it has to ping back to the factory. And if the ping is coming from the wrong building, then it shuts down. Like there are lots of ways to deal with this.

And frankly, you know, a slap on the wrist to the corporate sector for not wanting to do this badly enough because they're losing sales. So I get it. They're going to lose some money. But hey, fellas, you got to play ball because frankly, and this is why I wrote the book, I mean, this is really serious stuff.

Like, if we see Putin successful in Ukraine, if we see China successful in absorbing Taiwan, those are going to be very, very bad moments in the history of democracy. One of the things that will happen, Chris, in my view, is about 30 countries will rush to acquire nuclear weapons. Wow. Because if the current global security system, which the U.S. is a huge part of, I talk about

the U.S. as the indispensable indispensable democracy and you are. If you're not gonna, you know, feed weapon systems to Ukraine, not a single American has died in that war by the way. Like this is actually a really good deal. You get to blunt Putin for 5% of your annual spend on defense, and no American is coming home in body bags. This is actually a really good deal. But if you can't get up to that, and if you let Taiwan fall into the hands of the Chinese, if I'm Japan, if I'm South Korea, if I'm Brazil, if I'm south korea if i'm brazil if i'm australia like all these countries are going to rush to get nuclear weapons because what north korea has taught us is that nuclear

deterrence still works i mean it's it was a big part of cold war one it's still a big part of cold war two yeah and even putin is still threatening it from time to time in fact it just came out that in 2022 the the pentagon was ready for evidently there was something up with russia and putting out a dirty radioactive bomb or a small nuclear bomb in in ukraine but you're right i mean and i wish the american people thought about this more because you know a lot of the a lot of the people who are going to be voting are going to be the ones sending their sons to Ukraine. And you talked earlier in the show about how some of these important things come from different countries like Germany and places in the European bloc,

or the old European bloc from Russia. And if Russia starts attacking, which they will, their original plan, they found the plans when they attacked. The original plan was to go to Moldova and start working on the other NATO policies. I mean, once they start attacking a lot of these countries, they're in NATO. We have to step in and do what we do. And then you start running into, you know, the same sort of thing do we want to have something that looks like that looks like world war ii where you know they just russia just takes freaking europe and and then we come in at

the end by then what you're saying now is if we lose these chip manufacturers these machine buildings and all this other stuff we're we're in hot water and imagine these sort of things are harder to track like you've talked about than arms you know it used to be we had to worry about okay who's shipping a bunch of ak-47s to i don't know afghanistan now with these chips here you've got chips moving around the world you've got these machines and stuff running around the world there must be much harder to track yeah they're harder to track. The autocrats are getting smarter,

so they set up hundreds of dummy corporations all over the world. One of the things we need to do better is actually use AI to stop this evasion and getting around the rules. The other thing, and you might smile at this, every year I take my wife to the Canadian National Exhibition. It's like a big state fair. And one of the games on the midway is called Whack-A-Mole. And I don't know if you know this game, but you get a mallet and you have to bonk on the head a little mole

as it sticks its head up. But every time you hit one down, another one pops up and hence it's whack-a-mole. And, you know, some people have said, oh, it's so hard to, you know, control the export of these technologies. It's like whack-a-mole. And I say, it is whack-a-mole and we have to get really good at playing whack-a-mole. And you can get good. And Gina Raimondo, who's your commerce Secretary, she's actually like tier one. She gets it. She's working her team really hard on it,

but it is hard. And you just, but it's for the long run. Like, you know, shutting out Russia is not going to just be a couple more years. I think it's, we're talking, I mean, the first Cold War took 40 years to resolve. So we've got to get better at this because our tech is so valuable. But, you know, I'll end on this in terms of the leakage. It was, it came out last year, the two British

scientists were working with their counterparts in Iran. And get this, Chris, they were working on drone navigation systems, for goodness sakes. These are the drones that the Russians were buying to fly into Ukraine. do their part including the academic institutions that you know no more r&d joint venturing with china russia iran north korea yeah that's just insane that's insane and you know that they're the ones are iran is the one who's providing the drones to russia the the recent fuel purchases by India gave Russia just a huge shot in the arm, money-wise, buying their cheap oil. It's just insane. And when you see we're not funding Ukraine,

and you understand what's going on in Ukraine, I mean, if anything, just holding the line, bleeding Russia out. I saw a recent picture someone posted of all the ships that Russia runs in their navy, and how many of them have been taken out by Ukraine. It's extraordinary. And then, I mean, the amount of tanks.

I mean, they've depleted. They bled out and depleted Russia and then probably as well as lives a lot. And so we have to hold the line there if russia if the way the way a lot of people see it they're they're he's trying to reconstruct the ussr and there's a blockade there a land blockade that they try and take and do and part of what they're trying to do is is is change russia from just being a glorified gas station with resources into having other have their abilities to grow as a country because they're not i think they're in a decline too for birth and then of course people left the country for the ukraine war so they've got they've got their own mind suck and and chris

with russia it's ukraine for sure but it's also the U.S. and Canada and Western Europe. You know all those cyber attacks? You know all those ransomware attacks, which they're now targeting hospitals on, which is absolutely disgusting? You had the big colonial pipeline takeout on the cyber side where people were lining up for gasoline a couple of years ago on the East Coast, because again, Russia, both its own government, but also they have private criminal groups that they condone and they put up with. And Putin's deal is as long as they don't attack Russian companies and Russian organizations, they can attack the democracies as much as they want. And again, I don't know this for a fact, but I'm sure Putin gets a cut. And again, we've got to stand up to Putin on this

sort of behavior. And one of the recommendations in my book, and again, it's going to be controversial, is with adequate notice, right, in advance, we've got to say, the ransomware has to stop, the cyber attacks have to stop. And if they don't, we're going to shut down your internet for 20, 30 minutes to begin, and we'll escalate, because we don't want to shut down their hospitals because that's what autocrats do and you know we have to stay as freedom-loving democracies but we absolutely have to hit back and you know you folks in the pentagon i mean you created a cyber command a few years ago specifically to do this sort of thing and And I think if the NATO alliance,

possibly at the UN as well, we get a consensus that this long distance attack through cyber, through the internet, if it doesn't stop, we've got to ratchet up the response. And we can do it. We just need political will and people. And this is why I wrote the book, Bottom Line, is, you know, the average American who reads, who listens,

who's interested in this stuff, has to at some point, send an email or a note or when he meets his congressman, you know, during the election campaign say by the way we have to be more muscular and here's george's book that tells you how to do it i mean that that's what we need now because these autocrats have had you know the run of the board so far and and we need to push back yeah even them buying our politicians and filling their dirty money and so it's a real interesting world crisis that we're living in. And it almost seems like a repeat of everything. So I'm glad you wrote about this.

I'm glad you called it out. And maybe, maybe the realization is we really need to think that we are in the 2.0 cold war. And we really just need to call it that and address it. Give us your final thoughts, George, as we go out,

tell people where they can order the book, et cetera, et cetera. It's in all leading bookstores, but you can also get it online, Amazon, Simon Schuster, Kobo, depending on what you lose. It's in indie bookstores now as well, so it's pretty easy to get a hold of. And as I said at the top of the show, george.tackach, so G-E-O-R-G-E-T-A-K-A-C-H at gmail.com. If you have questions, comments, you want me to come and speak to your rotary group about these sorts of things or what have you, I'd be delighted to do that. There you go. Thank you very much, George, for coming to the show. We really appreciate it. Thanks, Chris.

Real pleasure. There you go. Order up the book, folks, wherever fine books are sold. It's called Cold War 2.0, Artificial Intelligence and the New Battle Between China, Russia, and America. Ouch. March 5th, 2024. Thanks for tuning in, everyone.

Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.