This Week in Startups - E1105: Unpacking the US/China Relationship with Foreign Policy & Technology Expert Jacob Helberg

Episode Date: September 4, 2020

FOLLOW Jacob: https://twitter.com/jacobhelberg FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash Twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Kalakhanis.

And we are in the summer of the pandemic in 2020. It's August. And while we're in this pandemic, which has been caused by COVID-19, or as the president likes to call it, the China virus, we have an escalating issue. And it's one that's been boiling up for decades. And you've heard me ranting and raving about it on Twitter and even on this podcast that I think people are crazy if they would ever put a Huawei router in their country. or it's insane that people would put TikTok on their phones and not believe that the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, would not have access to that. And I've been heartbroken watching Hong Kong put up the fight of their lives and lose their lives and lose their freedom.

And at the same time, watching a bunch of entitled Americans and journalists trivialize the seriousness. of this. Not all, but many. And people complaining that they're going to lose their follower count on their TikTok app. And what will that mean? The New York Times, these poor kids are going to lose it while when I was growing up and I was in school and I worked for Amnesty International, we were concerned about human rights and tanks running over nonviolent protesters in Tiananmen Square, not our follower counts on TikTok. Now, I've been screaming the stuff on Twitter and a bunch of people tell me I'm losing my mind. I don't think I am. And the more I talk about it with intelligent people, the more I've learned that we may have made some big mistakes,

frankly, in the engagement of a communist country and a deepening relationship with them. We've had many people debate, many sides of the issue. It is one of the most complex issues you can think of. It's very nuanced, and I don't have all the answers. And I don't think my guest has all the answers either, but he's an expert on it. So I want to introduce you to Jacob Helberg. And Jacob, I know that you're a senior advisor in cyber policy at the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University. But if you could welcome to the program number one, you heard my intro and my concerns about human rights. If you could give me just in the audience a brief overview of what you do and what you know about the relationship with China.

Sure. So I'm currently, as you said, a senior advisor at the Cyber Policy Center's program on geopolitics and technology where I'm currently investigating issues at the nexus of technology and geopolitics and national security. I'm currently writing a forthcoming book that will be published next year by Simon & Schuster. And I've been working on publishing a few pieces on issues that I think are salient to the country's national security in the moment that we find ourselves in. Okay, so when one looks at the relationship with China today, it's certainly becoming more and more adversarial. I wanted to start with maybe how we got here, because I am not a student of history, but I was told that as I was growing up, that globalization was a good thing, and that when countries did business together, this reduced the ability for those countries to go to war, and it increased. increased the, and increased the chances that democracy and human rights would increase around the world and with those different partners. And when we look at the United States engaging China, net, net, over these last 20 or 30 years, has this been a successful endeavor for America and for democracy, for the people of China? Well, Jason, as you're accurately pointing out, the big picture that I think provides a lot of the framing for what we're living through today is that we are in the early stages of a new kind of a cold war between the United States and China.

And unfortunately, in the United States, we've had a tendency to forget that China has as much agency as we do in the U.S.-China relationship. In other words, they're not a non-active player. We've known from leaked CCP documents that date back to 2013 that Xi Jinping had every intention to avoid being the Mikhail of Gorbachev of China. He saw the USSR's attempts to liberalize as the key reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union. And in fact, in January of 2013, he delivered a speech saying as much to members of the Central Committee. So since then, Xi has also outlined a lot of different plans that paint a number of. naked ambition to dominate the world's technology companies, which has led several prominent national security professionals, including the current head of the FBI, to conclude that

China's long-term aim isn't to be one of several superpowers, but it's to be the world's only superpower. And that raises some serious questions for democracies. So the writing's been on the wall for some time. And China has backed up a lot of their rhetoric with action aggressively engaging in what the U.S. military calls gray zone conflict, which typically refers to attacks on an adversary that fall just short of the conventional threshold of war. We call them gray zone because these tactics are often said to be in the murky gray zone between war and peace.

And just to cite a few examples, by some accounts, up to 90% of the world's fentanyl compounds are made in China and are all for export, the vast majority of which go to the United States where 35,000 Americans die from fentanyl overdoses every single year. China's unfair trade practices has produced a bilateral trade deficit in goods

that's the size of a G20 economy just to put things in perspective. They've blocked nearly every American content platform including Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, Google, YouTube, Reddit, just to name a few. The level of IP theft that they've engaged in has been referred to by the former head of cybercom as the greatest transfer of wealth in human history. And the FBI announced that they now open a China-related investigation

every 10 hours, which paints color on the scope of China's corporate espionage operations in the United States. They're actively working to dislocate the dollar status as the world's reserve currency through bilateral currency swap agreements with a number of African countries as well as Russia, as well as through new institutional mechanisms like the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank. And of course, more recently, they've sought to export their model of authoritarianism around the world. So piece on those terms, Jason, and a piece that's predicated on the United States abdicating so many of its core interests is, as George Orwell once described, it's a piece that's not really a peace. And that's why in the last three years or so, we've seen

policymakers in the United States increasingly awakened to the comprehensive nature of the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party. When we look at this, it is a bipartisan issue now. It does not seem like it's just Republicans who are concerned about that here in the United States. It's the Democrats. And what seems to have happened in my estimation is we had an interesting up over the last year. One of them was Darrell Mori from the Rockets, the Houston Rockets, the greatest general manager of this generation, I think anybody would say in what he's done with the Houston Rockets, just tweeting, you know, I support the people of Hong Kong. It was just a GIF or, you know, an image on Twitter. And the entire NBA got into a frenzy and essentially

attacked him, you know, superstars up and down. And then we had Hong Kong. which I had just visited just two years ago when my book came out. I had a wonderful time and how we show my friend where the protest used to be. And then I left and whatever, a couple months later, we started to see the protest and we started to see the law change there. And you could start to take people from Hong Kong and then put them on trial in mainland China. And then lo and behold, the pandemic happens and we realize,

you know, this PPPs and masks and everything, or PPE rather. and certain medicines, putting aside fentanyl, the drug, certain pharmaceutical medicines that we need, maybe we're over, we're at too much risk in terms of our dependency on China. So these three things seem to all happen within 12-month period. Is that what kind of shock the system to bringing everybody to this collective awareness now? The reason that I think this digital geopolitical struggle has escalated dramatically, really over the last decade. And as you know, there's been a saying that the coronavirus has only accelerated trends that were already underway before the coronavirus. Is that over the last decade, now more than ever, the Internet at both the software level and the hardware level is the platform where we fulfill the most critical.

functions of our daily lives. We have personal and intimate conversations with close ones. We conduct sensitive, confidential, professional work. We express our views on things big and small. So the potential to leverage these information platforms to project political power has increased substantially. Fundamentally, I think it's important to appreciate what's at stake. The contest that we're seeing between the U.S. and China is a choice between competing visions of world order. As Tim Cook pointed out in a speech at the EU Parliament, it's about choosing what kind of world we want to live in. Do we want to live in a world where the Internet is decentralized, free, and empowers ordinary people? Or do we want to live in a world where the Internet is centralized, repressive, and essentially a government tool of political control?

That is fundamentally the choice we have before us today. And technology companies are caught in the cross-airs of those two profoundly contradictory visions. of world order. And ultimately, as I wrote a few weeks ago, I think it's only a matter of time before straddling both sides of the great firewall becomes untenable and tech companies are eventually forced to pick aside. From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all in one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. With Squarespace, you already know that you can blog and publish content as you like. You can promote your business, and now it's upcoming events, do special projects like I do all the time.

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Go to Squarespace.com slash twist. We also have TikTok falling into the middle of this. I want to unpack TikTok just for a moment. it's owned by a company that is a Chinese company. It, there, in my experience, any system, any data, that can be hacked, will be hacked, all data, all information eventually gets hacked. Any information controlled by a Chinese or any other authoritarian country has the keys to the kingdom. In my mind, there is zero chance that the CCP does not have complete access or, you know, whatever level of access they want to that data. because all the companies in China are required to give that level of access already.

So why wouldn't one operating the United States also have that level of access? What do you think about my assessment of the situation as somebody who's not on the ground in China, but is involved in technology and used to manage servers for a living when I was in the IT world? I think it's an accurate assessment. I think TikTok is precedent setting, and it's really important we get it right. The way I see it, there are three main issues in this case that need to be unpacked. The first is whether the president has the authority to force a divestment or suspend transactions with an entity on grounds of national security. The second is whether or not the president followed an adequate process for deliberating and implementing the action.

And the third is whether or not the outcome is the right outcome or is at least justified. On the first, the presidents have fairly commonly put sanctions on entities like banks in the past. I suspect this case feels different to some people in the public because TikTok is a consumer mobile application. But based on my understanding of the authorities granted by the Defense Production Act of 1950, the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act of 2018, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, I do believe. that the president has the authority to take both types of actions. With that said, unlike in China, we have a system that's based on duly passed laws and checks and balances. And in our system,

TikTok has the ability to sue the actions that the White House has taken if it believes that they are unlawful in part or in whole. Congress can choose to amend the law if it believes that the law should be clarified in some way, though once the case is thoroughly litigated, the question is whether a majority of two-thirds of the Senate will conclude that the law was applied in unintended way. And I think like you, I actually think most members of Congress will simply view this as the law working as intended, and that future presidents, regardless of what party, should have the authority to take similar actions against applications that pose similar national cybersecurity risks. And when you look at the public's naivete to this, they think it's just a dance app,

but it's part of the problem that people are so unsophisticated when they think about their smartphone, that they don't also realize that it has a microphone camera, GPS, and your photo albums, and can be rooted, and your Mac address can be hacked as apparently TikTok has been doing. And that even if the data, this was the stupidest thing ever saw, was the New York Times, I believe, saying like, well, the data is stored in the United States. It's like, well, hey, dummy, there's a thing called downloading. You download the data anytime you want and back it up. So you have this incredibly naive group of journalists or content producers in the world.

And then you have the public. I'm not saying all journalists are, but a large number of them are when it comes to technology issues like this. And then the public is, it's wrapped in a silly dance moves. But we had specifically, I believe it was ISIS or Al Qaeda or some derivative group that was actually tracking our soldiers and high-target soldiers like seals and green berets in the United States and overseas because of their smartphones. And that became a very critical issue of, hey, you guys can't be on social media. And we had to come up with policies for that because they were looking to assassinate our high-value generals and special forces. So this is not some

abstraction. This is just completely naive atay on the part of both journalists and the public. Yeah. As you point out, TikTok seems benign because it is a video-based dance app. If you look at the details of the software, it's actually an incredibly sophisticated data collection software that collects people's GPS data every 30 seconds. It pings your clipboard and collects what people are copying and pasting on their cell phones on and off the app, in an ongoing way, that might mean that TikTok might have the passwords to almost all your accounts, including your email. Wow. So if somebody goes to

their like whatever password manager can does the copy and then paste it and they have access to the clipboard, boom. Now they have compromised some child's account whose parents might be a president or a governor or the CEO. They could also get compromising photos or video. This is not an abstract concept here. This is how compromise, this is how the United States, the Musad, the KGB, this is how everybody's done it forever, except they used wiretaps and they used cameras and agents and now we basically have an app to do it. They could. And let's remember that a few years ago, they hacked the Office of Personnel Management. So they have a list of all the government employees that have security clearance. So if they wanted to know who to target

in order to get compromising information, they actually have the list of that. And as of the early 20 times. Wow. And so this is like, we're sitting here having this conversation. It seems so obvious to us. How much of this not being clear to our politicians has to do with the fact that we have such a polarized political space here? You know, one of the most surprising things in the current debate about TikTok is there is the fact that the current debate seems to not factor in the full,

aperture of the reasons why I think the current status quo is TikTok doesn't make sense, on the one hand. And on the other hand, there is this bizarre argument that is being peddled that taking action against TikTok is somehow replicating China's behavior. On the first point, I would just say that there are, as I see it, three reasons why the U.S. taking action against TikTok makes sense for the United States. The first is that, as I mentioned earlier, China has taken action against almost every single American content platform. And given that China's Internet censorship discriminates against foreign companies, locks the legitimate flow of services, and doesn't offer a channel to appeal, there is a credible argument to be made that their firewall violates several WTO rules that China itself agreed to when it joined the WTO back in 2001. So after years of diplomatic patience, I don't think most Americans would find it unreasonable for the U.S. government to demand and enforce a basic principle of trade reciprocity.

That's not arbitrary. On the contrary, it would be consistent with the spirit of WTO rules and the rules-based order that the United States has worked so hard to build over the last 70 years. Yeah, that seems to be like a no-brainer. Like if you want to have TikTok here, that's totally fine. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, we're all coming to China. The chances of that happening are exactly zero, right? Xi Jinping would never allow any of those platforms. It would never, it would never happen.

If we ask for reciprocity, it would not happen. It's just not a possibility. They will let us sell, why will they let us sell the iPhone there? I'm curious. Well, one of the reasons that they have allowed American hardware companies to operate in China is because American companies, hardware companies are

operate in China under the condition that they form joint venture partnerships that a lot of the times are a vehicle for transferring and handing over valuable intellectual property to local Chinese companies.

And obviously, hardware is an integral part of China's broader manufacturing and industrial plans. So there are some broader macroeconomic agenda for why Apple as well as companies like Tesla, for example, have been allowed to operate in China. So your belief is they're allowed to operate there because, one, they need the jobs. China needs to employ over a billion people. This is their acute Achilles seal, correct? That's right. So they need the jobs, but they also want

all of that IP. So by going there, you're essentially handing over your IP in order to get access to the market. That's the condition that's being met. Is that correct? You have to form a joint venture, and the joint venture inherently comes with the expectation that you are going to be essentially transferring a lot of know-how, a lot of technical and institutional knowledge to the local partner, which is tantamount to basically handing over your IP. You were going to continue on to a second point after the sort of reciprocity issue? I was going to say so the second point is and as the grandson of two Holocaust survivors, I'm shocked doesn't get brought up more often, is that TikTok's parent company bite dance is believed to have helped the CCP with identifying Uighur women of child

bearing age to load them on trains, send them to concentration camps where their heads were forcibly shaved bald and where they were. forcibly underwent mass sterilization. Under UN conventions, intentionally destroying in whole or in part an ethnic group causing bodily harm is genocide. Several legal scholars have argued that what China is doing to U.N. to U.N. conventions, and in fact, just a few days ago, 70 faith leaders publicly denounced it as one of the most egregious human rights tragedy since the Holocaust. And I was so glad to see in Silicon Valley, Patrick Carlson, the CEO of Stripe,

calling out the atrocities as reprehensible evils. And I can't tell you that if you look at the definition of genocide under the UN Convention, I think Patrick got it right. I think it's a perfectly reasonable, I think it's a perfectly reasonable corollary to simply affirm that the United States should have no part in genocide, full stop. No buts, no ifs, no part in genocide. Yeah, and we saw those drone videos, it seemed, of individuals which shaved had, they seem to be gentlemen, not women, which is heartbreaking to see them being loaded onto trains. And I don't know if you saw the clip of somebody saying, well, you don't know what

they did, and you don't know the circumstances. Somebody was on TV, and it was like, whoa, they're not even denying that these people are going to what they call re-education camps. The rumors out of these re-education camps are that torture is occurring, sterilization, as you mentioned, re-education, being forced to eat pork and being forced to do, you know, other things that would be against the Muslim faith, correct? Correct. If they were really meant to be educational facilities, they should allow international inspectors to go in and see what's taking place in the facilities. they have called them educational facilities for several years until recently that drone footage you alluded to leaked and China's ambassador to the United Kingdom in his attempts to defend

the indefensible refer to them as prisoners, which I think is a much more accurate description of these poor detainees. And do we even know the scale? I've heard people say a million. I've heard people say over a million. Not that any genocide needs a number attached to it, obviously. But just to give this some scale, we're not talking about a thousand people who you could say, hey, these were, this is the immoral equivalent of Guantanamo Bay, which is what a lot of,

bizarrely, a lot of Americans are trying to make, you know, some kind of, you know, correlation between, you know, how we behave in the United States when we're at our worst and how China is behaving at scale as their standard. Right. So estimates vary between 1 million and 3 million. Three million would be roughly one of every three or so Uyghurs in China would essentially be in one of these concentration camps. So that is a pretty horrifying statistic. Right.

It's not like they can fall back and say, oh, well, what did America do when you had a problem with al-Qaeda or terrorist? or what happened in London in Paris when they had bombing issues and you went and tried to stop, you know, some radical Islamic cell, you know, at a mosque. That is not the equivalency. And the equivalency, and this is one of the things I find most bizarre is the unbelievable gymnastics people are trying to go through to find an equivalency between racial issues we have in America, you know, the worst things that happened in the Iraq War or the Afghanistan War, bad behavior on the part of soldiers, issues where we water war to people, and genocide. These are two different things.

And genocide run and approved by a government systematically versus a rogue group of people who may have tortured somebody or, you know, us putting 50 people who we don't know what to do with because they're so radicalized that no country will take them back in Guantanamo, correct? I think it's, first of all, I think that's such a central point. I think it's important to be clear that in any person's layman textual understanding of the English language, based off of the UN's definition of genocide, what China is doing is genocide. The U.S. capturing terrorists does not meet that threshold. And I think the equivalency that you point out is so important because it's been pervasive in the conversation around the action taking it against TikTok. And I think that it's important to point out that from a principle standpoint, the flaw in that argument is that the argument's premised on the idea that what sets the U.S. apart from China is some sort of unfettered right by anyone to engage in commerce.

and that any restrictions on internet applications would essentially be comparable to China's censorship practices. I think that rationale is deeply flawed and fails to consider the fact that no right in any democratic system is completely absolute or unfettered. Even the right to free speech can be constrained by time, place, and manner restrictions, or restrictions on incitement to violence. The same is true of commerce, analog or digital. Commerce isn't an entirely unfettered right. That's the rule of law. What sets the U.S. apart from China is about why those restrictions exist and what they're used for. In this case, the difference isn't necessarily about the process, but it's really about the substance.

The motivation for China's action to suppress, for the motivation for China's actions against American platforms is to suppress speech and erode personal privacy. The motivation for the action taken by the United States is on the contrary to protect free speech and safeguard privacy. The U.S. government's action is directed against the government repressing its own people. The Chinese government's actions are directed at people that want the basic ability to speak their mind and be themselves. So though the processes look similar, there's a big substantive difference. And while some reporters and pundits in our uncensored free press, as you point out, may not always see the difference. The people in Taiwan, the people in Changsong and Hong Kong know exactly what the difference is.

That is to me the blind spot that this group of people who are doing the, you know, what aboutism are really the most insincere about. If we were to look at what's happened in Hong Kong, it's lost and gone forever. Is that correct? It's over for Hong Kong. I mean, the press is now, people are being arrested, the laws have changed. China's put it, there's no going back. Hong Kong is China.

I'm very, very concerned about the fact that people in Hong Kong seem to think that it's over. And there have been a lot of whispers about the political repressiveness in Hong Kong being actually even more repressive than in mainland China. So the direction of travel and the direction that Hong Kong is going in is deeply concerning. And there's really a cautionary tale for Taiwan. Yeah, I mean, that was literally the next jump I was making, as Taiwan considers themselves to be a sovereign nation. China considers them to be as, you know, a province. I think it would be the word they would probably use or part of mainland China.

But the Taiwanese are a proud people. do we think that China is going to do to Taiwan what they just did to Hong Kong? Well, we know that China considers Taiwan as part of their sovereign territory, and we know that China has been in recent weeks engaging in a buildup of amphibious military equipment in its southern coastline near, near Taiwan, right off the, right across the straight from the South China Sea. So I think, I think those two facts alone are pretty concerning. And China, Taiwan, you know, Hong Kong, a finance center, an international hub for travel and commerce that can easily be moved,

you know, relatively speaking. in terms of semiconductors and chip manufacturing, not easily replicated in other places. So maybe you could speak to, you know, the fact that Australia, Japan, and Singapore and every other country in Korea, every other country in the region is chomping at the bit to get expats out of Hong Kong, give them asylum, a visa citizenship, a path to citizenship. That is, you know, what the free market is doing. which in one way is, I think, a huge punishment to China. Does China care that if they lose that finance center and they lose that?

Because it appears that they do not care about losing what was the finance capital of the region. China thanks in very long time horizons. And the Chinese Communist Party cares first and foremost with retaining power and with protecting the legitimacy of their government. That's why they've invested so much time, effort, and resources in propping up their economy, in misrepresenting a lot of their economic data, and in doing a lot of the various things from setting up an incredibly sophisticated surveillance state that has CCTV cameras with facial recognition everywhere that's de-anonymizing the internet inside of China to preserve their grip over political power.

And Hong Kong thumbing their nose at China, even though it's just a million, two million, three million people, depending on how you count the region involved in the protests. And they look at that as an existential problem in that it could infect the mainland and that they needed to squash it now. Is that the correct interpretation of why they did this? Well, the power of the example, fundamentally, this is about the legitimate. about democracy, undermining the example of democracy, undermining the legitimacy of autocratic governments. Democracies are premised on the idea that authority based on a single person, on arbitrary decisions taken by a single person, is illegitimate.

So, well-functioning, prosperous democracies will always undermine the basic argument for autocracy. The basic bargain that China has been trying to advance to its own people is, yes, we're an autocratic country, but look how much technological and, you know, they would argue human

development progress we've made over the recent years. We've lifted people out of poverty. We've built so many roads and dams and bridges. And they try to show material progress through very large infrastructure projects in order to justify their holdover power and in order to justify their repressive regime. And they're not wrong. They have been incredibly effective at moving people from poverty and not having electricity or water to having apartments and having jobs and creating a middle class that just

is the middle class in China's larger, correct if I'm wrong, than the entire United States now. So as a market and as a standard of living, they do have the high ground to say that. and the counter argument that people put up there is, hey, this is a country that's existed for much longer than democracies in America have. Obviously, not as long as democracy back to the Greeks. Or is that right? Yeah. I mean, the idea here is that you would,

you're getting such a huge benefit that unless you're just a troublemaker, you have nothing to worry about. The standard of living is going to keep going up. How long can that narrative exist? You know, how long can people be oppressed and watch people go to jail because they have a private WeChat group or they read a book or they got a VPN? Because it seems to me that China could implode and have a revolution at any moment. If they're fact, if we get kicked out of China and we don't make iPhones there and they can't

sell iPhones, I think they have a revolution. Am I wrong or crazy? The weakness of autocracies is that because they're so much more centralized than democracies, they're inherently also more brittle. And that's why Xi Jinping has placed such a single-minded focus on learning from the lessons of history of the collapse of the Soviet Union to avoid the same fate. But I mean, it seems. that the people of China will hit a road bump at some point or a tipping point.

Is that going to happen in our lifetime where these middle class people say, why can't I practice their religion? Why can't I see the end of that movie? Or why did my cousin go to jail because they used the VPN and read the New York Times or watched a series on Netflix or Disney Plus that you don't agree with? The Chinese government has drummed up nationalism and has intentionally stoked a lot of anti-American rhetoric and has really amplified narratives around Western democracies being the primary cause for China's century of humiliation and the opium wars in order to in order to justify having a in order to justify pride

in a national need in standing with the Chinese Communist Party. Sooner or later, people, I think, are going to start to want more than just 3% or 4% GDP growth and foreign adventures. I think sooner or later, if you were a Christian

trying to observe a Sunday worship that gets arrested simply because of your faith, I think that will eventually start to really cause people to question the legitimacy of the government. I want to know in your mind, as we wrap, because I know you got some important stuff you got going on, what is the end game here in the short and the midterm?

Taiwan, obviously, we need to get that technology or companies or potentially defend them or reproduce that technology here in the U.S. or other places. I understand Japan has been subsidizing the moving of factories of Japanese companies out of China to reduce dependency. India is not having any of this nonsense. They kick TikTok out already, I believe. What is America's best path forward in the short to midterm avoiding war, avoiding a cataclysmic economic collapse of either or both countries? is there an exit ramp here where everybody can come to some conclusion, or do you think this is

destined to hit, you know, some pretty dramatic short to midterm outcome? So as I mentioned earlier, I think China has as much agency in determining the outcome of that as we do. I think with that being said, it's important to approach China for what their government's, for what their government is, and for what actions they've been pursuing. I think the first step on our side is to appreciate the fact that we are in a Cold War. This Cold War looks and feels very different than the last one because our economies are much more intertwined than our economy ever was with the Soviet Union. Silicon Valley, you know, funnily enough, has actually emerged at the center of this showdown

between the U.S. and China because the Internet is the contested Vogel point. And I saw during my time at Google that the technology dimension of this new Cold War is really taking place on two fronts, which I think is important to wrap our minds around if we're going to address it. There's a software side and there's a hardware side. On the software side, you have Russia, China, and to a lesser extent, Iran distorting and manipulating what you see on the front end of your screen. These are the issues we've seen in headlines related to disinformation, information operations,

issues related to Russia's face app or even China's TikTok. On the hardware side, you have China quietly working to expand its control over everything on the back end of your device. And that's the spectrum of issues related to Huawei and ZTE. These typically take the form of very expensive multi-billion dollar internet infrastructure projects, which is why China has up until now essentially been America's only real competitor on the hardware front of this battle. But the reason that the hardware front, in my view,

is the most important one, is that if your hardware is compromised, so is everything that sits on top of it. Control at the hardware level could give China the engineering capability to enforce its norms of censorship and surveillance well beyond its own borders. And that's why I think the first step to secure democracy is actually to invest in our own,

domestic industrial renewal and to question this assumption that we've had for so many years that manufacturing jobs can't can it's almost like a second law of thermo dynamics that democracies can't make things anymore we assumed that as china grew richer it would go freer we were wrong we assumed that if china would be part of the international was a stakeholder in the international system it wouldn't seek to completely overhaul the international system. We were wrong on that too. And for a long time, we assumed that the United States and other democracies didn't have the capacity to make things. And I think the time is ripe for us to revisit a lot of that, a lot of those assumptions. Yeah, I'm 100% with you.

That needs to be a hard reset. As we wrap, if Biden wins and Kamala win, Biden's hawkish on this as well. Trump, it's hard to determine what his exact position is. Obviously, he did these executive orders, but then on the other side, he's trying to be a dealmaker. Does it matter? Do you see any difference between the two in terms of which one would be more effective at managing this complexity? The way that I see it is Trump is getting a lot of political mileage for having accurately early on put his finger on China being a national security issue. With that being said, I think it's not enough to identify the problem. I think we need a president now moving forward for the 2020s that's actually going to get us to success.

And this is a very daunting geopolitical problem. I've been incredibly proud and relieved to see Joe Biden speaking forcefully in favor of being ambitious from an industrial standpoint here in the United States. as well as holding China accountable. I think the choice of Kamala Harris as his running mate is going to really lend America an opportunity to have a half-ethically Indian vice president that could potentially be a diplomatic asset to creating a reprimal with India. So the stage is set for a really, a really fantastic geopolitical, geopolitical moment for the U.S. in the years ahead if Vice President Biden wins the election.

All right. I'm going to leave it at that, Jacob Helberg. You've been incredible on the podcast, and you can follow Jacob on the Twitter, Jacob, H-E-L-B-E-R-G. And this is going to be an ongoing conversation, so I'd love to have you back after the new year. and we see who's president and maybe check it again on where we think this relationship is at continued success. Sounds great. Look forward to it. Okay. Cheers now, Jacob.

Cheers. Okay, we'll see you all next time on the spring service. Bye-bye.