The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Digital Silk Road: China’s Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future by Jonathan E. Hillman

Episode Date: October 19, 2021

The Digital Silk Road: China's Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future by Jonathan E. Hillman An expert on China’s global infrastructure expansion provides an urgent look at the battle to connect and control tomorrow’s networks. From the ocean floor to outer space, China’s Digital Silk Road aims to wire the world and rewrite the global order. Taking readers on a journey inside China’s surveillance state, rural America, and Africa’s megacities, Jonathan Hillman reveals what China’s expanding digital footprint looks like on the ground and explores the economic and strategic consequences of a future in which all routers lead to Beijing. If China becomes the world’s chief network operator, it could reap a commercial and strategic windfall, including many advantages currently enjoyed by the United States. It could reshape global flows of data, finance, and communications to reflect its interests. It could possess an unrivaled understanding of market movements, the deliberations of foreign competitors, and the lives of countless individuals enmeshed in its networks. However, China’s digital dominance is not yet assured. Beijing remains vulnerable in several key dimensions, the United States and its allies have an opportunity to offer better alternatives, and the rest of the world has a voice. But winning the battle for tomorrow’s networks will require the United States to innovate and take greater risks in emerging markets. Networks create large winners, and this is a contest America cannot afford to lose.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for being here we have another great show with another amazing author on today.

You can go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss to see the video version of this. You can also go to all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, everywhere you see social media. The Chris Voss or Chris Voss channels are there. You can also go to goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification button and see everything we're reading and reviewing over there. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled

with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book years now, we talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre order the book right now wherever fine books are sold. But the best thing to do on getting a pre order deal is to go to beacons of leadership.com. That's beacons of leadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away.

Different collectors, limited edition, custom made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Today we have Jonathan E. Hillman on the show. He's a senior fellow, economics program, and director, Reconnecting Asia Project. His new book has just barely come out, or it's coming out, I'm sorry, on October 19th, 2021. It's called The Digital Silk Road, China's Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future. So this is going to be an interesting discussion, especially with all the things that are going on in our world right now. He is a

senior fellow with the CSIS Economics Program and Director of the Reconnecting Asia Project, one of the most extensive open source databases tracking China's Belt and Road Initiative. Hillman has testified before Congress, brief government officials, and Fortune 500 executives, written on economics, national policy, and foreign policy issues for the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and other outlets. Welcome to the show, Jonathan. How are you? Good. Thanks for having me. There you go. Thanks for coming. And this is an amazing new book. Congratulations. These are always fun. It's going to be coming out, let's see, technically next week. Boy, this year and this month has just been going by me.

Give us your plug so we can find you on the interwebs. This is a book called The Digital Silk Road, China's Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future. And you can pick up a copy of it at Amazon or at a local book store near you. There you guys go. Pick that up. So what motivated you want to write this book, Jonathan? So I've spent about the last five and a half years tracking China's infrastructure projects outside of, many of them are part of what's called the Belt and Road Initiative, which is Chinese leader Xi Jinping's signature foreign policy vision. And I spent about half of that time, about two, three years, really focused on this digital infrastructure, in part because I

think that's really where the highest stakes are, but also because this stuff is everywhere, but it's also invisible. And anyone who's watching this video who's not in the US is going to be watching it most likely through a subsea cable, which is something that China has been building more and more of around the world. And that's just one example of an area in which just a decade ago, they had very little capability. And now they have one of the world's fourth suppliers of those really important systems. So China is emerging as this not only a global economic power, but increasingly a technological power. Wow. Yeah. They've been doing some interesting things. So what laid the foundation for this road system that they have or this policy they had?

What was the foundation for this? So I think it was some pure self-interest. I think that's where it started. China has seven of the world's 10 largest construction companies. And they've built so much at home that they have essentially run out of things to build. And these are state-owned enterprises. They get a lot of support from the state. And so in order to go and do new business,

they created this Belt and Road Initiative. And it resonates in the developing world because there's this massive need for infrastructure. We need infrastructure in the United States too, but you can imagine having even fewer resources and having this be something that your eyes might open up when you hear about it. So that's where it began matching China's self-interest with this global. Now, does this include what they're doing with their investments in highly resource nations or developing nations like Africa? I know they're very deep their investments in highly resourced nations or developing nations like Africa? I know they're very deep in Africa and stuff. Yeah, this is definitely a global set

of activities. So initially, it was really focused on Asia and Central Asia, and it has expanded not only to Africa, but even Latin America and the Arctic. And this thing just keeps expanding. And what it looks like depends on the country that we're talking about. But you're right, there are some countries where these are basically resource-backed loans that are being given. And some of them are risky markets. And China's going in, offering to provide infrastructure, and its payment is coming through access to those natural resources. And it's interesting. We can barely maintain our own infrastructure.

And China is basically, they're basically taking over mining the world. And what's interesting, too, is they're doing some interesting stuff when they need to foreclose on these loans. I know there's a port or something they seize control of and basically foreclosed on their loan and said, we'll just take this port over or something. Is that correct? Yeah. So I've been to that port in Sri Lanka. And actually the first book that I wrote, it's called The Emperor's New Road, has a whole chapter of Sri Lanka and about that case. And so that case has the sort of short version is Sri Lankan leaders wanted financing to build a port. China provided the financing. Sri Lanka couldn't repay its loans. China ended up taking,

a Chinese state-owned enterprise ended up taking controlling equity stake in the port and now operates, it's got a 99-year on the port. And it does from the outside, the simple version of the story does look like what has been referred to as debt trap diplomacy. But when you look at the case a little bit closer, I think it's a little more chaotic too than meets the eye because at the end of the day, that port is not exactly thriving right now. So it wasn't a very smart investment. And it's one

of several white elephant projects in that country. There's the port, there's an airport near the port, there's a cricket stadium near the port. And what they all have in common is they were all financed by China, built by Chinese companies, and named after the then president, the then head of Sri Lanka. So there's a pretty strong domestic politics angle to this. And so I don't want to give the implication that sort of everything China is doing is uber strategic and does face coordination challenges, and it has made some of its own mistakes. One of the ways that I think China aims to beat us and eventually will just by the sheer nature of their market, future market and population, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't have your economic credentials, but I was going to call it loan sharking,

but you use a term that is new to me, the debt. What did you say, debt? So it's been referred to as debt trap diplomacy. I think some of the scholars have debunked the idea now because the original meeting of that was basically using loans to get a country's debt unsustainable and then taking strategic assets. And to do that requires an incredible degree of sophistication and probably better coordination than we've often seen on the ground. So no question that there's some opportunism here and a lot of self-interest, a lot of backroom dealing. There's also some mistakes being made, some financial costs being paid by the Chinese, some reputational costs too. Isn't there like a thing though, where the Chinese think like a hundred years or a thousand

years into the future and we don't, and that's a real problem for us. If they have a 99 year lease, they've got a lot of runway to make that thing turn around or the country develops. Yeah. And, or I guess the other way of looking at it is where they could lose a lot of money. So it's the problem, the challenge that that port faces, this is something that other projects face as well, is that it's, there's already a really thriving port in Sri Lanka, the Port of Colombo, and shifting a whole bunch of economic activity from that area is not very likely. The port, I expect, will improve over time, the one, the Hamantota Port that China operates, but I still think that they face a tough road ahead. For a long time, I don't know if this road thing was part of the, for, I don't know if this road thing was part of the, I don't know,

20 years, they were basically building these cities out in the middle of nowhere. And they were these ghost towns. You would see videos and different documentaries on them. And it was a joke and they were using it to drive, fake drive their GDP to keep their GDP constantly going up every year. And everybody was like, that's going to eventually collapse. But evidently what I'm reading and hearing now, correct me if I'm wrong, is those cities are starting to fill. And so it turns out it may have been a good investment. Is that part of that initiative? That's the kind of domestic manifestation of if you build it, they will come philosophy. And you're right that it was done often to juice the sort of local GDP growth

statistics, because if you build stuff, you can do that in the short term. But if people aren't living in those things, then it's a drag on economic growth in the longer term. And I think actually what we're seeing some of, I should, by the way, recommend a book on this called Ghost Cities by Wade Sheppard. And he went to a bunch of these places and did some good reporting on it. I think what we're seeing now, there's a story in the headlines right now about Evergrande, which is a Chinese company that's really facing some financial troubles. Large part of its portfolio is in the real estate sector. And the problem is that some of those buildings and apartment complexes are not being used.

So there's also footage out there of some of these being knocked down. And it's not only a financial problem, but a political problem in China because there are still people who feel like they're not getting enough, who would like to live in some of those places, but don't have the means to do that. Wow. So do you think it's going to backfire? I know some of my Silicon Valley friends who are familiar with that project have been talking about it online. And I haven't been able to sit down and fully grasp what the whole thing is. I just knew about the fluffiness of the GDP there for a lot of years. Is that going to affect China's – China was supposed to beat us by I think 2025 or something as the largest economy in the world.

But are they still on track for that? So the, I think the, some of the foreign activity that China is involved in because of some of these risks has actually been dialed back quite significantly. So one of the advantages of this Belt and Road Initiative is that it's so vaguely defined, there's no official criteria for what projects qualify, that it's pretty adaptable. And so it's able to dial back and to transform to meet the needs of the moment. And so we've seen in the aftermath of the pandemic, an emphasis on providing health goods and services and infrastructure through this effort that wasn't there beforehand. And also this emphasis on digital infrastructure. But there's still this big question mark over a whole bunch of activity lending that China has been engaged with as to did it make sound investments.

The jury is very much still out on that. They invested in us, so that wasn't very sound. Barnard T. Bill's. I don't know. I don't know. I guess we'll see how that turns out. I didn't know about this, that they were running cables and routers that lead to their, basically their internet. Is that correct?

So sometimes it's from one country to another country. One example of this, one of their flagship projects goes from Africa to Latin America. And so this is, it's a really impressive set of activities because they went from not, they went from being entirely dependent on foreign companies for these systems. And these systems globally, by the way, carrying about 95% of the world's international data. So they're just, this is like the backbone of the internet essentially. And they began by doing smaller projects and then those got increasingly large. And so they partnered with a British company in order to learn how to do this. It was very strategic. And then that joint venture was then fully purchased by a Chinese company. And so now it really is. China has the fourth major supplier of these systems. The other three are in the US, Japan, and EU. So it really wanted this capability and it set out to

obtain it. That's scary when you really think about the strategy of it all. They're really playing a very big game. At least that's my impression. Like I said, you're a professional here. But watching them, knowing they were going to be the largest economy, I know a lot of billionaires and the top one or three percent were sending their kids sometimes over there. They were teaching them Mandarin. And just by the nature of the size of their population, of course, we're idiots and we don't expand our population at all, especially with our immigration issues. I think there was a great book called A Billion Americans.

I forget who did it, but it was one of the writers. Matty Gracious, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We had him on the show and wow, he was really eye-opening. And you look at what's going on in China, and especially now that they've changed their policy to allow people to have more children. They're just going to grow.

But they're playing a hell of a game. They have the largest navy now in the world or second to us, which is disturbing. You see the recent issues with Taiwan, and then those are ongoing. The South China Sea, of course, initiative with their islands. And then they seem to be investing more in the world and resources than we are. And I think with a lot of their Africa investments, they're pretty much getting exclusivity to a lot of minerals and different things that we would need to build stuff if we ever wanted to. So yeah, there's a whole bunch of activity underway. And you mentioned the growth

of their Navy. One of the other, I think, important things you mentioned the sort of the growth of their Navy. One of the other, you know, I think important things to watch here is that the growth of what is their ostensibly commercial sector too in the maritime space is pretty dramatic. Everything from building the shipping containers, they build a really sizable large of those, sizable percentage of those globally to the ships that they go on to even the cranes that take the containers off of the ships. One Chinese company produces something like 70% of the world's ship to shore cranes. And so when you look across the sort of the whole maritime supply chain, it really does open your eyes. The U.S. is doing, particularly the U.S. private sector,

is still very active and I think sees potential in a lot of these developing markets. It's just often not done under the sort of formal U.S. government blessed initiative. One example of this is last week, Google announced a $1 billion initiative for Africa that's going to provide infrastructure, digital infrastructure, training services. So something like that's very encouraging, but it's not a formal U.S. government initiative. The U.S. private sector here is still active. You know, we're really finding out how dependent we are on what goes on with shipping from Russia and other countries, or not Russia, but China and other countries with the inflationary pressures we're having right now

because they can't offlift enough of these container boats that are sitting offshore in Long Beach Harbor and stuff like that. Ironically enough, like perfect timing, Wall Street Journal's Christopher Mimson a couple of weeks ago, I think three weeks ago, in his book Arriving Today, Factory to Floor, and he talked about the whole chain. And I was reading a Wall Street or Washington Post article this morning about why we're now in this inflationary process. And I'm seeing a lot of videos from food producers that are saying, you better stock up on food because for our cost of what it's costing us right now to produce food, even here locally in the States, once it gets to your table, it's going to cost exponentially more.

And I knew we were going to hit inflationary problems, but wow, the supply chain and bogged down. And literally a country like China could shut us off if they began in some sort of battle with them over Taiwan or the South China Sea, or they just decided to be dicks. Not only could they cut off our feed of goods, but also you're talking about running these cables around the world and stuff. They have their own exclusive internet, and they could literally cut us off from that. We just saw LinkedIn got in trouble with them, and they had to rechange their whole process, and that's because they wouldn't block journalists or something of that nature. So it's interesting how we're really getting,

it seems like we're really getting put out to the pasture slowly. The design, the sort of architecture of China's internet and how it's basically, it enables, could enable that kind of self-isolation to happen. It's something I talk about in the book. They've built this sort of fortress-style internet, and they really funnel the vast majority of international connections through about three points. It's like a medieval castle and you've got a handful of entry points. And so

that they've really, they've clearly put a premium on control of that, those information flows. I mean, they have a lot of requirements too, that basically don't allow foreign telecommunications providers to operate freely within China. And so that emphasis on control is definitely there, but it comes with costs too. And I think it makes it more difficult for them to scale their domestic internet companies. So if you look at a company like Alibaba, which is big in e-commerce, but has pretty big ambitions to be a global cloud provider, it's a giant within China, but an infant really still outside of China, in part because of that architecture that it lives in. And so I'm

still a believer that this more open US model, where we're more open to allowing those foreign connections to happen, does provide us with a longer term advance. I wonder if though, as the world gets more dependent upon China, you can see that in Europe where Russia is bad, but we should buy gas for them, become dependent upon their pipelines for gas because Russia is just basically what a giant gas station, at least to my understanding, or at least that's what we've talked about in the past. So does, how much of a danger are we in or what's the future of China eclipsing our economy in the near future? So I think when you start to look at it in terms of GDP per capita, this is not going to happen soon. And the U.S. is still a wealthier country. China has the advantage of having a massive domestic market, though. And so it is able to

have some of these self-insulated policies. The U.S. market is big, but we still need to care about foreign markets. For companies in the US to have enough revenue, especially ones who are doing R&D, to have enough revenue, they really do need to scale their stuff and sell it globally in order to invest in the next set of innovations. And so that's really one of the points in the book. We got to care about these, not only other advanced democracies, which are big markets and important in their own right, but the developing world of the sort of markets of tomorrow, the places where population growth is occurring. And I think they really shot themselves in the foot with the one

child policy that they just recently reversed. Yeah, you can, if you look at their demographics, they've got a real challenge there. And that does stem from that decision. They're trying belatedly to help address that, but I don't think that's going to really correct the underlying challenge. Yeah, they should just come over here. We seem to have a lot of trailer home parks that breed. I'm just joking, but I'm not. They should just come to Utah and just copy the Utah model. They have one more child per capita here in Utah than other places. I was going to ask you, do you talk in the book about cryptocurrency and its effect with what China tries to do to regulate? In fact, I think

they just cut it completely off recently. So the crypto part of this, I think, relates to this idea of wanting to have control and access to information. It is really, I think, a play for more information and a centralized one. And so it's not the vision of crypto that I think some others would promote, which is more about increasing privacy and not seeing as strong a role for the state. So it is really still the state running that. And I think that is a theme that runs through the book, whether we're talking about wireless networks or smart cities, which China is a major exporter of, or even subsea cables, as we were talking about, or satellite communications, this emphasis on wanting to do domestic production, reduce foreign reliance,

and increase the world's reliance on their products. And I know that they've manipulated their currency, the yuan, I believe, the Yuan, is it pronounced that way? I know they manipulated theirs and they've tried to make theirs. This is always a battle between Russia and China and us to make our currency or their currency the most dominant one that's used everywhere. That's what helps us, I think, succeed in the world. But I know they've done a lot of manipulation. Do you talk in the book about how I know the big thing now is the future wars are going to be done by AI and that's like a whole new thing. And whoever wins that or getting the AI wars and military control or some sort of military stuff is the future of that. Do

you talk about that in the book at all? Yeah, I get into artificial intelligence a little bit in a chapter on internet connected devices. And I talk a lot about what China is doing with surveillance cameras and the software it uses to analyze that footage. And so there's been just massive deployment of surveillance equipment domestically within China and a growing export business for China. And its products have been, its products have done relatively well, even in the United States. I did a search last week for Hikvision as the world's largest supplier of surveillance cameras. It's based in China. And there's this search tool called Shodan that allows you to search for internet connected devices. And when I was using it last week, it turned up about 750,000 Hikvision cameras in the United States.

And so this is a company that's been banned. You can't, Congress banned the federal government from buying their products. We've put some export controls on them because of their, because of national security concerns and also their involvement with human rights abuses. And, but their products are so cheap that they're often relabeled. Something like 90 companies resell their stuff. And they make these pretty grand claims about what the tech is able to do that I think sometimes stretches the truth. So there's a lot of data that was being used

to enhance these artificial intelligence systems, whether they're being used to recognize faces or to do other things. But we're still a ways away from having truly, truly intelligent systems. The more I learned about these things, the less comfortable I was allowing them to make important decisions. Oh, yeah. So subversive, all the different things that they have going on. They're working on infrastructure week courses every week these days. They're doing the Build

Back Better program that they're trying to pass. And of course, that thing just keeps, it looks like it just keeps getting sliced and diced thinner and thinner. How does the Belt and Road Initiative compare to that? Are we doing the right investments in infrastructure locally to compete with China? Or what do you think? Yes, I think we need that infrastructure package. And it's not only an economic imperative, but I think it's a national security imperative that we have infrastructure that is better adapted to work in a world where severe climate events are more likely. Just look at what happened in Texas over last winter, right? The United States has more power outages than most developed in the world. And that doesn't need to be that way.

I'm also encouraged by the Build Back Better plan's emphasis on digital infrastructure, too. There's a significant amount of money in there for expanding broadband. I think that's important. And I think if this is done right, you can actually scale some technologies that help the United States compete in foreign markets. And so it's important for all those reasons. And I think we need to do it in order to play this longer game. Yeah, there's so much going on, but I can't remember what the saying is, but China, they play a thousand years into the future. We're just like trying to get to next year, kicking the ball down the court like we did with the debt ceiling recently. And one of our problems is the amount of debt we hold. And of course, the games that the Federal Reserve especially had to play over coronavirus to hold, I think, over $8 trillion in kind of float print money, stuff that they do. How do we compare with our debt load and what we're kind of gaming with our money compared to what China's been playing games with theirs. Yeah, I think we have at least much more transparency into what our commitments are.

Whenever I see Chinese official figures, you always have to take them with more than a grain of salt. And this is a problem too with their international activities. It's all done, all these deals are done bilaterally, many of them behind closed doors. You often don't know what the terms of the contracts are. And I think some of those incentives play to China's advantage. It allows them to get deals done faster internationally. It allows them to sweeten the deal sometimes, put a little money in someone's pocket. But I think it also stokes corruption and poor backing projects that aren't viable. I think ultimately

that's going to have, there are going to be costs to that, but I don't, I don't claim to have the crystal ball as to when those costs are going to come only that in historical terms, we've seen that there have been most infrastructure booms, like the ones that China is going through have ultimately has some kind of bust. We saw that here in 2008. So that was fun. Be great if they went through one of those. But anything we haven't touched on about the book, John, that we missed? Look, I think we're talking about a lot of issues here. Some of them are technical, but the book's supposed to be accessible too. So you don't have to be a tech expert to enjoy it. It's really written for people to get a better sense for

these systems that are, again, they're all around us, but they're invisible and we're so reliant on them. And many countries are increasingly reliant on China as a supplier of these systems. So I think it's just, I hope people are able to read it and to get a better sense for what that landscape looks like and what the different futures are that are ahead of us. Do we need to start? I know we've started making goods more in Vietnam and other third world countries. China is, I think, fading a little bit to my understanding. Do we need to start reinvesting in other countries just as a bulwark against them being such a dominant player? Yeah. And there are some, I think, encouraging efforts underway to try to look at supply chains

and especially supply chains for critical products and materials and to diversify them and to build a little more resiliency. So some of that will require going and moving some production, creating new production in other places like Vietnam. India is another place with manufacturing ambitions. It's hard to do and it comes with a cost, but we've seen what happens when you don't have some of that resiliency. I know we'll probably have to go through a couple of years of pain here with everything that's going on with the ports and offloading these things and trucking and the whole infrastructure of moving goods around the world. And maybe that's, like you say, maybe that's going to push people to go, hey, we really need to analyze our supply chain and see what happens. Because a lot of people just don't even realize it. They're just like, I don't know, I go to Walmart and I buy some stuff from China. They don't understand the whole, like, whatever.

They're like, I don't have lamps here. It must be Biden's fault or something. You know, you're like, I don't think you understand how the world works. To be frank, even some companies didn't totally understand exactly their supply chains in the degree of detail that they needed to. And I think some of them now do, thankfully. This is much more complex than often assumed. Yeah. The chip shortage is like, I've had so many companies that we've normally review their products on the Chris Foss show. And they're just like, we're having trouble getting chips and chips are in everything. So you're just like, oh my God, what a mess. And then the car shortage and you name it. Anything more you want to plug

out before we go out? No, I'd give the book a read or a listen. There's also an audio version. So if you're like me and you like sometimes consuming stuff by listening to it, I'd encourage you to do that. And I'd love it if people have reactions to part of the fun here is to you work on something for a long time and you put it out there and I'm genuinely interested to hear from people. So please, you know, check out our work at CSIS and get in touch. We mentioned, let me ask you this one more, if I can throw this in here. You, we mentioned the book by Matthew from Vox. I'm remembering it now. Do we need to expand our population to compete with China? So there's a really important, when you look at everything we need to do domestically to be competitive, the human capital part is really important.

And sometimes overlooked, we think about making investments in R&D and infrastructure, and those are important. But we do need to have human capital. We need to make the US the place that continues to attract the brightest minds, not only from within the US, but globally. Really important in order to remain competitive internationally in these emerging technologies. And it doesn't help we have less men going to college now than ever before. In fact, I think we have less people going to college than ever before. I'd have to check those stats, but I know there's been a big fall off partially because of the cost and

everything else. But yeah, and I know we have less engineers, I think, coming out of college or going into college, something like that. So yeah, we're having a real brain trust problem, I think. Anyway, it's been wonderful having you on the show, Jonathan. Give us your plugs, your.com, so people can find you on the interwebs, please. So you can go to csis.org and you can see all the work that we've been doing to track not only China's Belt and Road Initiative and China's Digital Silk Road, but other international issues. And then you can go to Amazon or your local book retailer and please pick up a copy of The Digital Silk Road. There you guys

go. It's out October 19th, 2021. I think you'll be seeing this on that date. The Digital Silk Road, China's Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future. Thanks for coming on the show, Jonathan. We certainly appreciate it. Very insightful. Thanks for having me. There you go. And guys, go to youtube.com, Forge. That's Chris Voss.

Hit the bell notification button. Go to goodreads.com, Forge. That's Chris Voss. See everything we're reading or reviewing over there. Also go to YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, all those different places you can see The Chris Foss Show. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out.

It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021, and I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about

leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold, but the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom made, numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com.

So be sure to go there, check it out, or order the book wherever fine books are sold.