The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg From the former news policy lead at Google, an urgent and groundbreaking account of the high-stakes global cyberwar brewing between Western democracies and the autocracies of China and Russia that could potentially crush democracy. From 2016 to 2020, Jacob Helberg led Google’s global internal product policy efforts to combat disinformation and foreign interference. During this time, he found himself in the midst of what can only be described as a quickly escalating two-front technology cold war between democracy and autocracy. On the front-end, we’re fighting to control the software—applications, news information, social media platforms, and more—of what we see on the screens of our computers, tablets, and phones, a clash which started out primarily with Russia but now increasingly includes China and Iran. Even more ominously, we’re also engaged in a hidden back-end battle—largely with China—to control the Internet’s hardware, which includes devices like cellular phones, satellites, fiber-optic cables, and 5G networks. This tech-fueled war will shape the world’s balance of power for the coming century as autocracies exploit twenty-first-century methods to re-divide the world into twentieth century-style spheres of influence. Helberg cautions that the spoils of this fight are power over every meaningful aspect of our lives, including our economy, our infrastructure, our national security, and ultimately, our national sovereignty. Without a firm partnership with the government, Silicon Valley is unable to protect democracy from the autocrats looking to sabotage it from Beijing to Moscow and Tehran. The stakes of the ongoing cyberwar are no less than our nation’s capacity to chart its own future, the freedom of our democratic allies, and even the ability of each of us to control our own fates, Helberg says. And time is quickly running out.

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But I don't know. I'm just a slave to this grind. Welcome to the show, folks. We certainly appreciate you guys always tuning in and being here. You won't believe it. We put into the Google machine. We put in brilliant authors and newest books that are the hottest things off the presses. And wow, we got another one today.

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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. Anyway guys, we have an amazing author on the show. He's written a newest book that just came out October 12th, 2021. The Wires of War, Technology and Global Struggle for Power. Who saw Global Struggle for Power happening? Jacob Helberg is on the show with us. He's going to be talking about his newest book. You definitely want to read it so you understand how the world works and where we're going. He is a senior advisor at the Stanford University Center on Geopolitics and Technology and an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS.

Helberg also co-chairs the Brookings Institution China Strategy Working Group, where he is helping support and lead research efforts focused on China's intentions, foreign policy, and what the right long-term U.S. strategy should be to meet the challenge. Welcome to the show, Jacob. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me on. Awesome, Sauce. This is really great. I love these discussions because a lot of people don't pay attention to these things. And they need to because it's definitely the future is going to be the future. And we need to know what cometh.

So give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs, please. They can follow me on Twitter at Jacob Helberg. There you go. Is that it? Just Twitter? That's it. Oh, you got to get on the TikTok there, bud. I have some intellectual and ideological differences with TikTok that are hard to reconcile.

Yeah, or Facebook these days. So thanks for coming on. Congratulations for the book. What motivated you on to write this? So I worked on the policy team at Google for some time. And from that vantage point, I saw the tech industry grappling with some pretty new dynamics. And specifically, a lot of tech companies are increasingly being caught in the crosshairs of geopolitical competition. I saw that four years ago. That's obviously been ever more clear today. Ultimately, one of the things that was deeply concerning to me is the ways in which foreign autocratic governments are using our everyday

technologies to export autocracy around the world. For me, this is really personal as the grandson of two Holocaust survivors. I've seen my grandparents wear serial numbers on their forearm their whole lives. And to me, that was such a deep reminder of how wrong things can go when autocracies are left unchecked. And obviously, I felt very passionate about writing a book on a topic that I thought was hugely important to avoid history from repeating itself. Yeah, we almost got one on January 6th, too. And that's really important to you see what's going on with the Uyghurs in China. And it's almost like another genocide. Yeah, the Uyghur population has plummeted in China, by some estimates, estimate the

drop in population to be over 60%. And the public reporting on this has been truly phenomenal. But obviously, there's been Uyghur reports of the Chinese government using technology, specifically facial recognition, to identify Uyghur women of childbearing age, capture them, shave their heads, sending off to re-education camps, where evidently part of their re-education includes forced sterilization, sometimes mass rape, incredibly barbaric, sinister things that obviously as a country, I think 20 years ago at the very dawn of the 21st century, I think we had all assumed that we had sunsetted the days where we would be talking about genocide taking place in an industrialized power. But unfortunately, here we are. It's really interesting. So give us an overall arcing view of the book, if you would, please. So the basic arc of the book discusses how China has been in a gray war with the United States for several years now,

and Washington, on a rare show of bipartisan consensus, has largely accepted that challenge. As I talk about in the book, the gray war has primarily taken place on two fronts. There is the front end of the war and the back end of the war. On the front end, that part of the gray war has primarily been information that users see on the surface of their screen. A key manifestation of that has been what a lot of people have seen written about in the press related to information operations. So obviously, Russia in 2016 was the first mover in that space. But since then, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China have all become major players in that space. But since then, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China have all become major players in that space. Obviously, China is now a top tier player in that space that has a lot of different

state sponsored news outlets that push very aggressively narratives to discredit democracy and discredit the US government. And then there's the back end of the war, which basically refers to the physical infrastructure of the internet. And the reason that the book talks about and makes the case that the decisive front of the war is the back end physical infrastructure of the internet is that if you control the guts of the internet, the wires, the antennas, the satellites, you can control and compromise everything that runs on top of it., the wires, the antennas, the satellites, you can control and compromise everything that runs on top of it. On the back end front, the only two players in that space are the US and China because they are the only two players that have the hardware

companies and expertise to be major players in that space. China has a civil military doctrine that basically fuses together its private companies with its government, which means that Huawei and ZTE, which make backend information infrastructure, can be used and leveraged as instruments of the Chinese state, which is obviously an enormous risk for the personal privacy, civil liberties, and protection of intellectual properties of American citizens and American companies. Yeah, we saw that with the Huawei issues with the presidency, the government, and concerns of ZTE, of course, concerns with that, and a lot of other things where they

control their own internet. We just saw LinkedIn get into a scurfuffle over how they had to adjust their systems and then some of the Hong Kong stuff. Yeah, absolutely. There was a study conducted by a Dutch telecom called KPN that ran an analysis in the early 2010s of Huawei equipment. And they came to the conclusion overwhelmingly that Huawei, the company, had access to everything that ran across its network, including cell phone numbers that people were dialing and making phone calls to, include conversations of members of the Dutch government, and so on. And so ultimately, that study remained confidential until just the last few months when the revelations became public. But that only the findings were shocking, but they shouldn't be surprising because it only reinforced what the U.S. intelligence community has already been saying for several years, which is that these companies pose a very real and present danger to U.S. national security for all of the reasons that we just enumerated. And then Silicon Valley plays into a lot of this.

The title of your book, The Wires of War. So a lot of this is software and decision making. And China has their own rules. I know Russia can control their internet, or at least I think they control some of it. I think, I don't know how that works. I'll leave it to you to tell me. The Chinese government has basically created what I describe as a techno block, is their own version of a centralized internet that is diametrically opposed to our decentralized internet. So we have companies that run the day-to-day of our internet environment in a way that's mostly decentralized in terms of the government doesn't have control of them.

We have a variety of different players in this space. People, everyday internet users can mostly basically say whatever they want online if it's not illegal. In China, you have a very different paradigm where the government can basically has passed very strict content moderation rules that basically require Chinese internet companies to do things like censor Winnie the Pooh, or censor maps that show Taiwan as being an independent territory, or that even just promote content, they restrict content that paints democracy or in a flattering light in any way, shape, or form. So China has between two and three million employees, known as the 50 cent army, whose job it is to basically monitor and censor the Chinese online information environment. We have nothing of the sort, obviously, in the West, thankfully.

And so it's a very different internet paradigm. And as I talk about in the book, I think 15 years ago, a lot of the debate was about, is the internet open or closed? I think today the paradigm has shifted to a debate that's more about, is the internet democratic or authoritarian? Because the internet is starting to look more like the physical world. Even in the West, we have rules. Germany passed the hate speech law. We are seeing GDPR, California passed a privacy law. So you're seeing the internet start to look more like the physical world. And the result is that it's not that the internet is totally lawless or ungoverned, but the question is, is it democratic? And are the rules democratic? Are they the results

of a process where you have a legislature, an independent judiciary, a press that can scrutinize them? Or are they're authoritarian which basically means that they're the result of the wishes of a single person and without any kind of judicial or um or uh journalistic accountability i think you can say they certainly have contributed to autocracy around the world at least i'll leave that to you to tell me but we've seen the rise and it's interesting we're having this discussion now. For those of you watching this in the future years from now, Facebook is getting a huge blowback and they've had a huge dump of documents. I think there's been 17 news organizations working on just unraveling just these thousands or

hundreds of thousands, I don't know how much it is, of pages and stuff that have been whistleblown. And we're finding out that they've known evil they've been up to in Miramar and everything else all these years. And they've been very aware of what's going on, basically gaslighting all this time. Like, nothing to see here. They're like, nothing to see here. Everything's whatever.

But you see the rise of autocracy. And so a lot of the manipulations around who put Trump into power, and I'm forgetting the software company that scraped, Banner's software company that scraped Facebook contacts, and then they used it and abused it. I think you may be referring to Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica. That's where I got Oxford from.

Yeah, Cambridge Analytica. So is the Internet basically causing this new rise of autocracy on the world, or is this players like Russia and China using them? Autocracy has been around before the internet came into existence. In a way, autocracy is the oldest form of government. So it's been around before even democracy even existed. China has been Freedom House, which is obviously has been published, has been publishing excellent documentation and research on what foreign policy experts call the 15 year long democratic recession that we've been in, basically referring to the fact that democracies have been retreating for 15 years in a row now around the world, has documented very clearly that China has been very intent on

exporting autocracy around the world. So that's not to say that activities that Facebook or other tech companies have been engaged in are questionable, deserve scrutiny, that some of the statements or actions of some employees that those companies could be reprehensible. I think it's important to lose sight that even if all those things are true, we are living in a system where we can have these open conversations and scrutinize all of that in a free environment. And I think that is very qualitatively very different than the kind of system where everything you do and say is done under a big brother watching you over your shoulder. So for example, China has obviously been exporting its CCTV companies abroad, trying to basically bribe foreign autocrats by saying, we'll help you build your infrastructure, we're going to install these CCTV cameras,

and you're going to be able to control your people so much more effectively thanks to all these new technology systems that we've refined in China. And obviously it's a Trojan horse because China has access to all the data, which is partly why they're doing it, but they're also doing it because they want to embolden and inflame autocracy around the world because the more autocratic the world is, the safer it is for the CCP. Wow, man. That is crazy, man. How soon before they become the biggest economy in the world? They're already the biggest in terms of purchasing power, PPP. They still have a ways to go when it comes to nominal GDP, which obviously matters quite a bit because you don't buy oil domestically, you buy it on an international market and nominal dollars

is what counts for that. And the point is that they're on a path where they think that they are inevitably going to overtake the US and they want us to believe that we are an irreversible decline because they want us demoralized. And ultimately, if we're demoralized, they're hoping that to invite inaction on the part of the U.S. The last thing that they want is for Americans to believe that this context is going to be, that the contest between our two countries is going to be close. Because if we think that it's close, we're going to act very aggressively to compete and they don't want that. And so that's why in the early days of the Sino-American competition, the narrative that they were pushing was that, yeah, they were growing

really fast, but we shouldn't worry about them because so much of their population is still rural and poor. And we don't have to worry about them being such a powerful country because they're still overwhelmingly a developing country. Now, what the predominant narrative that they're pushing is they are on this unstoppable path to overtaking us and therefore don't even try to contain us because that'll be futile. You might as well try to just accommodate our rise. Both narratives are contradictory, but they converge over the basic message

that the U.S. should do nothing. And in reality, it's a close contest. The U.S. has a lot of advantages over China. China's primary advantage over the U.S. is that it has a lot of people. It's 1.4 billion people. But ultimately, as I talk about in the book, the reason that the U.S. can actually win this contest is because it's not just a competition between two countries. It's a competition between ideas. And the US has the better ideas. Our ideas about democracy and individual liberty are ideas that are universal. They're ideas that are present in every part of the world, in Japan, in South Korea, in Australia, in parts of the Americas.

And so that's why what we stand for is greater than just a country and a flag. It's for what President Clinton called the idea that is part of the American DNA. And ultimately, China stands for a model that is fundamentally authoritarian, which I don't think, I think sooner or later, people's tendencies skew towards wanting to be free. And so ultimately, I think we shouldn't take anything for granted in this contest, but we should feel confident in the fact that this is a contest that we can win. What do you think that we can win that in 2024 and 2022? We're seeing some really, the reporting we're seeing come out now is that I think Rolling Stone had something out today where they were saying the government, some of the government legislators were meeting with the January 6th people and planning this out.

It's really scary to me if you study fascism and autocracies and different things like that. We're on a hell of a path if you study history towards the failure of democracy. How does that play into our little competition here with China? Obviously, our part of the message that we need to get out there is the fact that China will point to a lot of these internal dynamics in the U.S. to try to say, look how messy democracy is. You can't trust it. It's eroding, et cetera, et cetera. Part of what we have to counter with is to say, actually, we've never claimed to be perfect as a democracy or as a country. Our history is one that is punctured with flaws and imperfections and trial and error. But what we do have is, as several presidents have described, is the capacity to self-correct. We go through these motions of

change, but we have open debates about them. We introspect, we discuss issues, and ultimately, the arc of history is long, but I believe that it bends towards justice and that at the end of the day, the country will land in the right place on a lot of these important debates. I would hope so. I would hope so. I forget the name of the general who said on Biden's inauguration, he said, we landed the plane and nobody was more worried than I was. General, his name escapes me right now. But yeah, I'm really concerned about what we do. I think China and Russia for a long time have been just trying to do this all around the world, trying to disrupt democracies, trying to turn them into autocracies. You've seen the rise of it in South America,

all around the world. You saw the fall of democracy in Hungary. And yeah, you almost have to wonder where we're going. What are some other aspects of the book you want to tease out to readers to encourage them to buy? There are a few different aspects. The first is one of the things that I've become very passionate about is the fact that it's incredibly important for our technology community and our policymaking community to work much more collaboratively to solve a lot of the important challenges that our country faces, particularly in the area of technological competition. One of the blockers and the challenges that we've had over recent years is what I call the rift between the hill and the valley. And in the book, I

basically go into a lot of detail discussing why we have that rift. It's generational, it's cultural. The average age of an employee at Google and Apple is in their early 30s, 31 and 32. The average age of an employee at Google and Apple is in their early 30s, 31 and 32. The average age in the Senate is 63. These are obviously people that came of age through very different life experiences. They view technology very differently. They have very different approaches to risk taking. They see the internet very differently. A lot of young people see it as

this borderless place. Policymakers don't always view it that way. And ultimately, there is a very profound cultural gap where Silicon Valley is a very horizontal, unstructured, flat place that has a culture of moving really fast. Washington moves really slowly, is very hierarchical. People tout their 30 years of experience working on X. And so it's just the culture is profoundly different. But ultimately, both communities play an essential role for the country. And so finding a way for both of those communities to work together on around solving hard problems is incredibly important for the future of the country. And the last point that I'd like to touch upon is the point that I talked about earlier, which is the fact that in the foreign policy community,

I think there's been too much of a tendency to go from denial, meaning denying that there's a problem with China that needs to be addressed and reckoned with, to despair, where now there's just so much defeatism out there. And ultimately, I think it's incredibly important for people to take a deep breath and appreciate the fact that the competition between the US and China is about more than just a competition for raw resources, but there is an ideological component to it, which is why for us, we have been able to be so fortunate to get support from so many allies, because we stand for something that's greater than just ourselves. The CCP is about power for the CCP. For us, it's about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as is

proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence. And it's an aspirational idea that a lot of people around the world can relate to. And that's ultimately our key to winning this competition with China. I hope so. It's how we beat the USSR, right? Absolutely. Yeah. I used to talk about this when I first became an entrepreneur where it's like you said, the competition for ideas, the freedom to do whatever. And it basically inspires the human spirit.

It's very core, really, when it comes down to it. And yeah, it was general mark milley was who i was thinking of who who was really concerned about our democracy and landing the plane as he called it so yeah it's i i hope we do this country has been filled with a lot of despair and got really dark there for four years and like you mentioned earlier i think obama's quote got me through a lot of it the sometimes this country zigs and sometimes it zags and hopefully it zags back but yeah these i hope maybe more americans just need to read your book and realize how the the enemies aren't inside or within us although there are some but the

enemies are definitely outside of us they're trying to destroy us maybe we need to embrace the american ideal you know i had somebody write on one of my comments the other day that the Bill of Rights was more important than the Constitution. And maybe more people need to read the Constitution. That might be really, like, really read the Constitution. I was like, dude, do you understand the Bill of Rights doesn't, can't be the Bill of Rights? It's built on the Constitution. Do you understand the parents? Like, this, you know, we really have an education problem in this country, but there are certain states that

really enjoy that. Anyway, anything more you want to plug out in the book, Jacob? The last point that I want to add is, obviously, I think it's so important for us to stress when we have conversations, China, Russia, and a lot of these external players that we talk about doing deference things around the world, I think it's so important to emphasize that ultimately everything that I discuss in this conversation and the book is really a political matter between governments and in no way is about casting judgment on the Chinese people or the Russian people. And in the US, we've been so fortunate to have Chinese and Russian diaspora that has enriched our lives and contributed so

much to the United States. And ultimately, I think that's part of what makes our model better is we have a model of society by virtue of being a democracy that is welcoming to you're tired, you're hungry, or in the words of Lazarus. And so I think that is welcoming to you're tired, you're hungry, or in the words of Lazarus. And so I think it's important to stress that so that people don't conflate discussions about geopolitical competition with, and don't get the wrong message with respect to potential prejudices that are out there. Yeah. I think there was one, I grew up under the USSR era. That's how old I am. So I grew up hiding under the dust from nuclear bombs because those old steel desks they made in the 50s could, you know, you could survive nuclear blasts, really, in school. That's what I was taught.

There was some sort of thing. I think it's like a fight club scene from when they're in the airplane. They show the people as docile cows curled up. They'll be safe if they just breathe in the oxygen mask. With the Russian thing, I think I lost my component with my segues there. I totally went off, but there actually was something really good at the end of that road, but we forked it and now we're on a different thing. But Jacob, I certainly appreciate you coming on the show. Come back. Thanks for having me.

I've been. Thanks for coming. We certainly appreciate it. Congratulations on the new book. Everyone should pick it up. Go pick up the new book, guys. Oh, give me your plugs, if you would. One more time, Jacob.

It's at Jacob Hallberg. There you go. Pick up the new book, October 12th, 2021. The Wires of War, Technology and the global struggle for power. And I think one thing I really got out of this is as Americans, we really need to realize that these guys are still our enemies, not the people, but the ideology. And we need to realize they're trying to destroy us and discourage us and put us down. So maybe we need to get educated and not so much turn against each other. And that's what an American used to be.

I think that's what they've been focused on is getting us to collapse from the inside out as opposed to the old style of war. Anyway, thanks, Jacob, for being on the show. Thanks for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com, 4ChessChrisFoss. Hit the bell notification button, Goodreads.com, 4ChessChrisFoss, and all our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and all those different places. Thanks for tuning in, 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 5, 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.