This Week in Startups - US inherits China’s Bitcoin Mining Dynasty + Jacob Helberg on the “New Cold War” with China | E1303

Episode Date: October 13, 2021

Jason does a short news segment on China’s Bitcoin Mining hash rate falling to 0 and how the U.S. is now the largest mining hub (1:59). Then, Jacob Helberg author of "The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power," joins to discuss China's long-term goals (9:03), the United States' lack of preparedness, the struggle for control of front-end and backend technologies (32:22), plus much more.

Okay, today on the program, a very important episode. Friend of the Pod, Jacob Helberg, is on to talk about his new book, The Wires of War Technology and the Global Struggle for Power. Great book. And we have a really deep, deep conversation about Russian disinformation, China, Taiwan, what's happening with internet companies in China and what the U.S.'s position should be with Taiwan and long term, how we will compete with China and to a lesser extent, Russia and deal with Russia. disinformation, and how close are we to war? It's a really important episode. If you've been reading the news, you've been watching what's happening in Taiwan, you've been watching the planes flying, you've been watching the buildup of our military, Australia buying submarines. This is an important topic, and we go deep on it, and it affects the technology industry at its core, because, as you know, Taiwan has the most important semiconductor company in the world base there. But first, over the past three months, the U.S. overtook China as the world leader in Bitcoin servers and hash rate and mining. So we'll get into that as well. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by

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Go to lemon.io slash twist to get 15% off for the first. four weeks. Okay, in our top story today, the U.S. has overtaken China as the biggest hub of Bitcoin mining. No surprise. We all know that China has had enough of cryptocurrency. They're obviously going to have their own sovereign, you know, e-cash crypto equivalent, and they do not want to give up their currency to a bunch of randos building a distributed network that nobody controls. Big shocker there. An authoritarian country with a million people in a gulag slash at its worst, potentially a modern day concentration camp. Yeah, they don't want to give over their money supply. Hmm, fascinating. Didn't see that coming.

So anyway, in an article published this morning in the Financial Times, research by Cambridge Center of Alternative Finance, I don't know what that is. The research showed that China's share of the global hash rate fell from 44% to zero. You read that correctly between May and July of the year. Remember, hash rate, that's the computation. computational power that is used to basically create Bitcoin. And, you know, it measures the amount of guesses per second that miners are using to decode the blocks. You can read the original white paper.

More guesses per second, the larger the hash rate. And in comparison to China, the U.S. share of global hash rate more than double from 17% to 35% from April to August. And you know that the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, remember there's communist in there, That ban, I think, started in May. And they said environmental and financial concerns. It's really more about control. And we covered that back on episode 1220 and 1235 as it was happening.

And in that story, we covered actually that three tons of Bitcoin mining rigs were shipped from China to Maryland. And you have to ask yourself, is this a good or a bad thing for Bitcoin? And is it a good or bad thing for the people of China? And is it a good or bad thing for the democracies in the West? Well, just comparing these two charts, here's the hash rate from September 2019. China had over 75%. The U.S. had just 4%. And basically, China had a monopoly, and they gave it away, which is really interesting.

You fast forward 23 months, and if you're watching our YouTube, you can see that the hash rate from August 20, 21, almost two years later, the U.S. now has 35%. And you can see now that there's a nice distribution. across other nations, Romania, Canada, other places, Ireland, everybody's getting a little piece of this. So obviously, this is better for Bitcoin because having an authoritarian country controlling the majority or a significant amount of the network is horrible and leads to a lack of trust. In fact, there was a lot of thought that the Russians or the Chinese might have been behind Bitcoin. that is a conspiracy theory that many people have floated and it's used to destabilize the U.S. dollars. So think about it. If you were Russia or you were China and you wanted to destabilize

the dollar, how would you do that? Well, if you made a global currency that had a finite supply and that had all these great features that it could be shared anywhere and just basically had all the qualities of a cryptocurrency versus a print currency, it could be tracked, but not perfectly tracked and you win by it making the U.S. dollar less of the standard, right? The fact that the U.S. dollar is the standard is really good for America. And if Bitcoin can challenge that, that would be good for who? Who is it good for if the U.S. loses power? It's really good for Russia, because, as we'll hear in our interview after this brief news with Jacob, Russia's goal is to make other countries look bad and make their societies look dysfunctional

so that their citizens don't look inward and say, wow, Russia sucks. It sucks to live here. Putin is horrible. The way we're living is terrible. I'd rather live in America. I'd rather defect. They don't want you to think that way. And the same is true to a lesser extent for China,

although China doesn't seem to look at us as a viable alternative for their citizens to defect to. But China will fully release a digital rem and B is my prediction. And they'll control that currency. we talked about, those Fed coins are going to give even more power to China. So what China was faced with was people who were either corrupt or great business executives, great entrepreneurs, taking their money, putting it into Bitcoin and leaving China, right? That's what everybody was trying to do in China who had any kind of money is just, how do I get this out of China? Well, with a Fed

coin, if you were to leave China or let's say you were Jack Ma, who supposedly is now, I read in the news. Showing up for meetings in Hong Kong, potentially. Going to make a big splash and be more public again. We'll see. But supposedly he's taking business meetings, according to sources in the news. Well, you went from people being able to use a currency that nobody controlled. And now you're going to have a currency that you have more control over than Chinese

dollars or, say, diamonds or gold or, you know, whatever you happen to be able to smuggle out of the country. So this is going to be like a double win for China. and it's obviously a terrible thing for democracy. I think conversely, you know, Bitcoin is really terrible for the U.S. dollar. If Bitcoin becomes the standard and the U.S. loses the power of the dollar, that's going to be very, very bad for America. Conversely, it would be very good for the citizens of China, and it was very good because they could get their money out of the country and have some sovereignty and not be under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. So now the Chinese Communist Party is going to take even more control, which is their want.

And we're going to be talking about that with our guest today on the program. It's time for another R Crowd deal of the week. Right now you can join our crowd's investment in Orient. According to the deal memo, R&'s software-only indoor GPS is 20 times more accurate and scalable than current solutions. And they've landed contracts with some of the biggest retailers in the world. So why join our crowd? Our crowd investors were in early on some of the best performing IPOs of 2019 and 2020, and now you can join them.

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There's no payment involved until you decide to invest. That's our crowd.com slash twist to sign up for free. Okay, everybody, friend of the pod, Jacob Helberg is back. He was on the program back in September of 2020, episode 1105. Anybody who saw that realizes Jacob is really smart. understands one of the most important issues that not only the United States, but I would say humanity has to deal with in this 21st century, which is dealing with authoritarian power in the world and them interfering in our elections, in our public squares, with technology, and maybe even

building a coalition to deal with these cute flare-ups that we've been having with both Russia and China. And we're really excited for his new book, which you're going to love. It's called the Wires of War Technology and the Global Struggle for Power. Welcome back to the pod, Jacob. Thanks for having me, Jason. It's great to be with you. Okay. So you told me you were writing a book about these very issues a year ago. And oh my lord, so much has occurred since you started writing this book and first appeared on the podcast. But, and we'll get to that because I think there's a bunch of turns here that happened in China that very few of us could have predicted, even people who are really up to date. And so we really want to try to understand from your perspective,

what's going on with Xi Jinping in China. But you start in your book talking about your time at Google and dealing with fake news and dealing with interference in our elections and interference in our public swears, it seems like Russia really built a playbook from the 80s on, and you actually go into detail about this with the KGB, with Putin himself, basically having a multi-decade plan to destabilize America and the West from having any sense of what the truth in the world is. For our audience, who is not aware of this overarching sciops that we've been subject to, can you explain it to them? So for these autocratic governments,

controlling information has always been a tool that they've tried to exploit. The interesting thing about Russia and China is, obviously, the Soviet Union was a foreplayer in trying to fabricate information, disseminate propaganda, carry out information operations in every corner of the world. But that was when the world was analog. With China, for China, the Cold War has never ended. And in fact, Xi Jinping started his tenure disseminating memos, basically talking about lessons learned from the fall of the Soviet Union and how the CCP should avoid the same fate. Today, the world is digital.

It's no longer analog. And so an interesting trend that I talk about in the book is how in the early days, you know, in the early 2010s, we all had high hopes that the Internet was going to be. this liberalizing force, and we saw how a decentralized, uncensored internet could actually help be vehicles for democracy and free speech and openness in so many parts of the globe. What happened is that autocratic governments in Beijing and in Russia and Iran saw that and started scrambling for their lives to control the internet, centralize its control, to survive politically. And obviously, it's not a coincidence if China's banning of most American internet content platforms coincided with the early days of the Arab Spring. And so since the early 2010s,

they have built and invested a huge amount of resources in building this internet with Chinese characteristics, which is a centralized internet, heavily censored with pervasive, you know, espionage and monitoring. And now it's, you know, developed into, you know, what I call the book, the I of Soron, which is this, you know, information platform that sees all things and all places at all times that's controlled by the CCP. It's really interesting when you explain it that way, because it did have this profound impact on mobilizing revolutionaries, people who wanted to fight for their freedom. And what we actually saw happen was a very effective flipping of this resource from

being a threat to despots in Iran, China, and Russia, and they actually weaponized it against us. And we've been essentially asleep at the wheel. They banned us from having Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever, in their country, news sources. And then they infected systematically our systems through a series of, I guess, arms-length organizations. And this is another interesting thing you get into in the book, which is, we used to fight these wars. We have agents. There's the KGB, there's the CIA, the Mossad, etc. But now there are these weird corporations that are spun out and they're kept at arm's length. And then they come in and do the dirty work for Putin or Xi Jinping, correct? Absolutely. And actually, so part of a core defining attribute of what I

called the Gray War is this pattern where you have a geopolitical dynamic where Russia and China are trying to attack and subvert democracies, including American democracy, by through proxies, by basically leveraging non-state actors to carry out things like cyber attacks, information operations, and it provides them with the dual benefit of harming the United States, as well as having plausible deniability. I use the term gray war because at the end of the day, a lot of these attacks are carried out in what military experts refer to as the gray zone. It's gray zone conflict. They call it gray because it's between, it's beneath the conventional threshold of war, and it's obviously in the spectrum between war and peace. It's not a state of

peace, but it's not a conventional state of war where you have loss of life, a loss of life and physical destruction. And the reason that I call the Great War is because now this has become a pervasive and predominant feature of international politics. And it's a really big problem because the impacts are significant. And, you know, it's obviously, over the last few years, it started in 2016 when with Russia's meddling in our elections, but it's morphed in over the years with what China's been doing with Huawei. And now, obviously, at the software layer of the internet, you have a whole host of players beyond Russia, including China and Iran, that are very, very aggressive in the space.

Interestingly, this goes back to the KGB playbook of get a society to question itself and make it hard to determine what the truth is. And if eventually you're so exhausted because you've been fighting with each other and infighting over trying to figure out the truth and all of the places you would look for truth, the news, government, organization, trusted cathedrals of power, whether that's, you know, the FDA or Harvard. If you can get all of those institutions to be discredited in some way, you can discredit the United States, then the populace will give up on trying to find a universal truth.

And if we can't find universal truth, then we get into these weird discussions of, well, America has done terrible things. America has, you know, the original sin of race and slavery. America has wealth disparity. America has cops beating up people based on race. America's no better or and perhaps is worse than Russia. Correct? That is the goal here. And that's the Russian playbook. Absolutely. So for a couple of different reasons. For them, our system is entirely predicated on the idea that rules, that are dictated by a single person and authority of a single individual is illegitimate. We have a system that's predicated on the idea that laws are legitimate insofar as they result from a process and checks and balances and public scrutiny. And so for them, it's very threatening to live in a world that's predominantly democratic, which is why they spend so much time trying to discredit democracy and make it seem unattractive. they want that because the more autocracies there are around the world, the safer their regime is.

But they also want that for domestic consumption because they want to be able to tell their people, you don't want to be like the U.S., look at all the problems that they have. You know, they're so divided. An interesting paradigm shift that we've seen over the last few years with the Russian playbook is, as these governments have been aggressively pushing narratives online through all kinds of creative ways, it's in a lot of ways changed our modern day understanding of what censorship means online. In an analog world, censorship was mainly about blocking access to information and banning content. In a world where people get a lot of their information on news feeds, whether it's Twitter,

Facebook or other platforms of information, suppressing information can often be about pushing content up or down. And so it's interesting because a common pattern that we've seen by a number of autocratic governments has actually entailed not so much blocking content, but sputing so much content around the same keywords around same topics to try to overwhelm and drown out content published by everyone else. This is really, yeah. This is something you bring up in your time at Google News.

you called it fire hosing in the book. I remember this specifically. And it really is interesting what you had to work on there. There were professional news organizations will take a little while to tell a story. They'll want to get some confirmation. And as fast as they go in the modern era,

they're still going to be thoughtful about it. Then you have, as you explained in the book, there are these places where there's a drought of information and there are long-tail searches going on. So if a shooting occurs, people are, the journalists are trying to put together what actually happened, but people are already saying, hey, was this a terrorist attack or whoever involved in it? Then a site like Russia today can then flood the zone, is the term I use, used firehosing. They will flood the long tail. And when you were working on Google News, you have

Russia posting all of this information through their proxy Russia today. And then they also make short videos on YouTube where if the New York Times is taking an hour to get the story out CNN might be taking four hours to post something. RT can get it all out in the first 15 minutes and flood the zone and then all of a sudden

you've got this quasi-state actor saying hey listen, Russians weren't using this plenonium to murder people on the streets of London and in fact the U.S. has had access to it. So they're really clever, clever

ways of intercepting and beating us, correct? Maybe you could talk a little bit about that. Yeah. And, you know, in the tech policy space, people have referred to this problem as a data void where you basically have niche topics that don't have, you know, that are too new to have a significant body of public information published around those topics. Because for all the reasons you mentioned, because in New York Times, there was a bit of a lag, you know, in between the time that an event can happen and, and when traditional sources of

information publish around that topic. And so a lot of these state-sponsored sources will just, you know, as I call it, fire hose these topics with tons and tons of articles to basically drown out every other viewpoint. And, you know, an important thing to take stock of is this is, this is pretty different. The reason that I say that this is a freedom of speech issue is because it's very, very different than what this is is not Russia today publishing, you know, an article to get the Russian viewpoint out there in the world. What they're doing is stacking the bookshelf to swamp out the viewpoints of everyone else. And that, I think, poses a lot of questions for free societies that value free speech and diversity of opinion and viewpoints. But I think one of the philosophical silver linings here is that at least at the time, when I worked on the tech industry side of this, there was a predominant philosophy that it was very much possible to address this issue by focusing on behavior.

and conduct rather than focusing on content. And so because at the end of the day, the harm that's being caused here is not what they're saying. It's not about viewpoint, but it's about a pattern of behavior where you have sources that are firehosing information in an artificial way to suppress every other source on online. From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics,

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When we started blogging in the 2000, in gadget and the blogs that we had started, we called this flooding the zone. Now, we didn't do it to create distrust and for political ends. We knew when an iPhone came out that there were going to be 20 questions people had. And so we would say,

we would do a story on the iPhone 4's battery life. The iPhone 4's software updates, the iPhone 4's best accessories. And we did those knowing, okay, we're going to serve the algorithm, we're going to get SEO, and people want to, you know, have bite-sized content. So it's very hard for an algorithm to know the difference between those two scenarios.

One is just a comprehensive publisher trying to give the people content when they do certain searches. The other one is done for a super nefarious reason. On top of all this, I, you know, I hate to have to bring this up because now it's going to become political and people are going to say, I'm, you know, I hate Trump and I have Trump'd arrangement syndrome. But if we just look clinically at the 2016 election, the fact is the Russians meddled severely in that election and did so in support of Trump and to not have Hillary win. This is just the fact, correct? This is the universal fact that all the agencies came to. Yeah.

Yeah. And this isn't, you know, the findings, the evidence about this is, isn't. even something that political bodies like Congress have come up with, but the Judiciary Department has investigated this. It is a fact. Now, people will debate whether or not that changed the outcome of the election, but it is absolutely a fact that the Russians went through extraordinary lengths to try to influence the election. And whether or not they succeeded is almost besides the point. As Americans, it should be concerning that you have foreign powers trying to stick their nose in our election. And now here's the challenge. If you

are a Republican or you support Trump, either of those situations, you do not want to believe that the Russians interfered because that would mean that perhaps Trump's presidency was, you know, manufactured in some way or they assisted him. And now they're calling it a Russian hoax. The Russian, they're calling the overall concept that Trump participated as a Russian hoax. But in fact, you know, after the very specific Access Hollywood tape, WikiLeaks released Hillary Clinton's emails. And Trump specifically said, hey, I think you would get paid off really well by journalists if you, Russia, if you're listening. That moment in time when you heard that and Trump explicitly asking Russia to interfere, what was going through your head just as somebody who does this as their, career and you're a concerned citizen and then you see the presidential candidate say

everything that you fought to try to keep authoritarian from infecting American democracy, Western democracy, this potential president and eventual president is encouraging. It had to be like a surreal moment, yeah? It was surreal. I mean, well, let me just caveat that I think Republicans should be just as concerned as Democrats on the issue of foreign interference because before the Russians directed the

brunt of their efforts at taking down Hillary, they actually disseminated a lot of disinformation directed at Ted Cruz, Marker Rubio, and Jeb Bush. The Republicans did. I mean, the

Russians. The Russians, yeah, oh, yeah, absolutely. They specifically wanted to have the other field of Republicans. So if you you're a true Republican who maybe doesn't agree with Trump as much, there's evidence there for you that, hey, you know, your own party is being manipulated by the Russians. Yeah. And I mean, this is, um, the Russians don't care if a Republicans in power or Democrats in power.

They tried helping Bernie Sanders win. They just want someone that they think is going to divide us and be harmful to us and benefit them. And that's basically the only thing that they care about. So they would have been. just as happy with the Bernie Sanders, perhaps, you know, spewing socialist policies as they were Trump with alt-right policies. I mean, Bernie Sanders honeymoon in the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War,

they would have been thrilled with a Bernie Sanders presidency. For them, if they have, if the U.S. has a very controversial, you know, frankly pro-Russian, a president that espouses, you know, favorable ideas about Russia. it basically means that they're going to have a president in the U.S. that's not going to get anything done through Congress, and they're going to have a paralyzed America, and an America that's going to give them much more leeway internationally, particularly in Eastern Europe. So for them, it's totally a win-win, whether it's Trump or Bernie Sanders. They just don't want someone like Marker Rubio or Hillary or, you know, other Republicans or Democrats that have, you know, know, tendencies that want to stand up for America vis-a-vis Russia. That's absolutely fascinating. And correct me if I'm wrong, but part of the Russian playbook is to just infect as many people as possible and create chaos, you know, in the way Heath Ledger's Joker would create chaos and just want to see the world burn. So they were involved

in courting the useful idiot crowd, whether that was Trump's kids or it was, you know, this woman with the NRA lining up, you know, NRA members to come to Russia and giving them donations. They did a really effective job of just touching a lot of people, which in my mind works towards fermenting this Republican versus Democratic, oh, you're in the pocket of the Russians. No, you're in the pocket of the Russians. And then you have all this evidence of Trump going to Russia, Bernie Sanders going to Russia, this person taking Russian money, the NRA taking Russia money. They just want to so chaos, so we're off our game, and they don't look so bad to their populace. That is the playbook, correct?

Yeah. So the Russians and the Chinese are interesting because they're playing slightly different games. Following similar playbooks, but for different end goals. For Russia, it's really about disruption, and it's about disrupting, you know, at every turn and at every opportunity that they can, disrupting American power. Russia is a threat to American interests. China, it's really about, it's not just about disrupting America. It's really about pushing for Chinese domination politically, you know, in key industries, you know, in terms of political influence in key parts of the world. world. And so China has a much more holistic end goal that is not just a threat to American

interest, but it's a threat to the sources of American power. And that's why, you know, at the end of the day, as I read in the book, what the Russians did is very, very concerning. And we shouldn't, you know, we should never mince words with the seriousness of what they did. But the real money and the end game is going to be fought. on what I call the back end, you know, hardware battle of the gray war, which is really being waged by China. So this is a key differentiator. Putin is trying to hold on to power. They don't have a lot of industry there. They're not looking to become global superpowers and take over Africa or to compete with us to make jet fighters and submarines that we can then sell to other countries.

whereas the Chinese military and their hackers, which are one in the same, have spent their time doing corporate espionage, trying to get codebases. And as you illustrate in the book, quite successful at building based on some of the hacks, I think in the 80s and 90s, they've built competitive weapon systems based on what their hackers were able to steal. And then they're able to steal that and create competing infrastructure. and when somebody wants to put 5G in their country, they're going to choose between the Chinese 5G and American or Norwegian, you know, Scandinavian, basically 5G from the West. Correct. Yeah.

That is the playbook here. And that means when we look at Russia, we can look at a dying empire that's just spasticly trying to cause chaos here, quite effective, punching well above their weight. But with China, it's something else. and it does feel like the one-to punch of having Heath Ledger's Joker of Putin coming in and causing massive chaos. We're now Republicans and Democrats can't even agree that the Russians interfered or they're doing siops. And now that leaves a wide open path for China to take over Hong Kong, potentially Taiwan, and then build a superhighway through Afghanistan to, you know, take over the Middle East or be disproportionately influential in the Middle East.

in Africa. That's, if I'm summarizing correctly, what you're saying is happening. Absolutely. Exactly. I mean, Russia is objectively a declining power. It's, you know, the size, I think it's about 7% of the size of US GDP. What it does have, it has, it has a lot of tanks. And, you know, it additionally, it occasionally threatens to roll those tanks into Eastern Europe. and it's obviously cozyed up to China a lot. Part of the reason is that is the result of American sanctions on Russia. So Russia has been forced to collaborate much more with China on all kinds of gas deals and so forth. But the interesting thing is that Russia, at this point in time, is very much China's junior partner.

It's not an equal partnership. and I think ultimately China and Russia share a very, very long border that has a lot of parts to it that are disputed and it's only a matter of time before that relationship goes south. It's convenient right now because Putin is an autocrat without an exit plan and he frankly needs China because he doesn't have a lot of friends

and the last thing he wants is to have, you know, to on one side of his border, an antagonistic United States and on the other side of his border have an antagonistic China. I think that's very, very threatening to him. But it's, you know, China has grand plans that supersede what Putin's, you know, vision of the world is. And at the end of the day, China wants to reunify its territory. And that includes disputed territories that it has along its border with Russia.

So when we think about what's happening with Taiwan, I don't think anyone can look at that and believe, yeah, Xi Jinping is thinking about taking Taiwan, according to the Taiwanese Minister of Defense. He might do that by 2025, but he's going to stop there. He's not going to pursue anything else.

He has disputes with 17 countries. If he's going to take Taiwan, and if we let him take Taiwan, he will move on to other claims and run down the list. and I think that should be concerning to all 17 countries involved. When you are trying to grow a startup fast, hiring engineers will slow you down like nothing else. Don't I know it?

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He is absolutely not supported by LeBron James or Adam Silver or the NBA. They, in fact, kind of threw him under the bus. He's still in the league. He's still a great manager, probably the best manager in the NBA. And then Hollywood, which is the most woke virtue signaling entity outside of maybe academia in the United States, is changing the end of their movies to try to... I wouldn't underestimate academia. I think they're probably... No offense.

Yeah, yeah. Even more woke. Even more woke. But they're literally changing the ends of movies in order to get their first. films played there. We're obviously taking money from them. And this is like an incremental 10 or 20 percent on the revenue streams of Disney, Hollywood, and the NBA, I would say, just from back of the envelope math, it's not going to make or break them. It's certainly great money, but it's not going to make or break them. So, a long way of sort of coming around to,

they've rolled over Hong Kong. They've got a million Uyghurs in concentration camps. and we still don't have anybody speaking up. And now we have Taiwan. They flew, I think, 75 planes last week in one mission. They're setting records in the number of planes going to mission. We have some people on the ground there from the United States. Japan is now got one of the top five defensive navies. It's, I guess, how they frame it.

And what is the likely scenario here with Taiwan? because it does feel like just in the last two weeks and your books coming out this week, we have another acute situation in our hands. Is it as acute as it feels? Like, could this happen at any moment? It's really, really bad. Scale of one to ten.

I think it's like a nine and a half. Oh, wow. The reason is, is, I mean, if you just, I think part of the challenge is that it's so bad that a lot of people almost don't even want to think that it's true or really happening. Denial. But I think there is a lot of denial because the thought of being at war with China is so infathomable. But, you know, Winston Churchill wrote in the aftermath of World War II that great wars

have a tendency of sometimes happening very suddenly. And he obviously lived through World War I and World War II. So he saw this twice play out in his lifespan. And here, I mean, if you just look at the facts, you have... One of the biggest military buildups in the world going on concentrated in one geographic theater in the Taiwan Strait from China, 350 ships. They are, I mean, as you point out, they have been conducting almost daily incursions in Taiwan's airspace.

Xi Jinping is blatantly saying that he wants to unify Taiwan with China. He's 68 years old. So when we think about when he wants to do that, it's probably going to be in the next 10 years, and the defense minister of Taiwan says that it could be as soon as 2025. So if you kind of take those facts and think, gee, if these people are actually right, if Xi Jinping, if we're going to believe what he says, and if we're going to believe what the Taiwanese minister of defense says, that means that we, the United States, have less than 24 months to decide whether or not we're going to do anything to prevent and deter a

potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. That is a really unattractive position to be in, but a position that's even worse is not doing anything, and then the choice is, the choice that we face is, okay, China, we wake up one morning and China's invaded Taiwan, and then we either basically send our own troops in to throw the Chinese out of Taiwan and we're at war with China, or we don't do anything at all. I think if people, people that want peace and that don't want to go to war with China, basically have two options. Either we don't do anything at all, and we just accept it, or we prevent the invasion from happening in the first place. And the way to do that is to deter it. I think, you know, the old saying of you have to be respected by your allies

and feared by your enemies is true. I don't think that being inoffensive and unprepared is going to be our ticket to peace and safety in the Asia Pacific, and I think Xi Jinping is proving that every single day. Yeah, and people seem to underestimate the size of the coalition that would oppose China. So China seems very scary because they have been, had a pretty amazing run the last 20, 30 years in building their society, advancing their society. But if you just look at the tonnage of our navies, you know, at three and a half million tons, you know, we, China's 700,000 tons, we kind of dwarf them in terms of our Navy, correct? Yeah, we have a lot of advantages and cards that we haven't played yet.

And I think one of the reasons why Xi Jinping is scrambling to get a lot of things done now is because he sees his window of opportunity narrowing. I mean, he knows that 10 years from now, he could be living in a neighborhood that actually has a much more unified front against his agenda because he sees the August deal that was signed between the U.S., the UK and Australia. He sees Japan that is. Explain what that deal is. Yeah. So that deal is basically a deal where the United Kingdom and the United States are going to collaborate to help provide the Australians with nuclear submarines. And that's a really big deal because, you know, nuclear-powered submarines are kind of

are crown jewels in the national security apparatus. It's incredibly sophisticated technology. These are big chess pieces. Yeah. Really big chess pieces. And, you know, most importantly, they sink ships, which is what we need to stop ships from invading Taiwan. And they're really, really hard to target because submarines obviously are protected by bodies

of waters around them and, you know, they move around. So they're not easy to strike. And they can sink a lot of ships. So, and that's exactly what we need in the Taiwan Strait. And if you were to build a coalition, here we have the United States, Australia and the UK, UK, obviously a top five military and Navy in the world. Japan's surprisingly large and slightly eclipses the United Kingdoms. So what is Japan's position here? I know I've been reading the stories of of them hanging their companies to get out of China, to move their factories. Japan seems also willing to put themselves in harm's way here, from what I understand. They will engage in this defense of Taiwan, you believe?

So they haven't said specifically that they will directly step in to defend Taiwan, but they're kind of dancing around that idea increasingly. So, you know, the Japanese Minister of Defense gave an interview a few days ago, basically kind of tiptoeing or tiptoeing around that question, basically saying, you know, we're not directly, we're not, we will not, you know, directly step in for the defense of Taiwan. But, you know, here are a bunch of things that we're doing and we're very, very concerned. The reason that Japan is concerned is obviously because Japan and China are historic adversaries. They do not like each other. and but also they share i mean the japan knows that if uh if china takes taiwan tomorrow i mean the the next shooter drop is going to be the sincaku islands which japan views as an integral part of its sovereign territory which china has been uh incessantly trying to annex and so japan also has is one of the 17 countries that has territorial disputes with china and they don't want to see China nibble away at their sovereign territory, and they don't want to

see China start to tamper with trade flows in the Taiwan Strait, which Japan relies on. Japan gets 90% of its energy through the Taiwan Strait. So for them, and you know, the last time that a country cut off Japan's power, Japan went to war. So, you know, obviously was Pearl Harbor. So, you know, it's, I think they are really, really concerned. And my hope is that those concerns materialize really quickly into much, much closer military integration in the Asia Pacific between Japan and the U.S. Because that's exactly what we need to stop China from invading Taiwan.

China also sees what we would consider soft declarations as acts of war. So if we even putting some, as people are reporting, and I don't know if this has been substantiated by the U.S., but the fact that troops have been deployed, even a modest group of folks to just train, this small presence that's supposedly training Taiwanese soldiers and how to use anti-missiles and stuff like that, that could be a provocation to Xi Jinping, saying that, you know, Japan saying that they're going to do. defend Taiwan or even sending ships over there in that region could be considered to China as an act of war. So that's what's making this dance very unnuanced. Am I correct? Yeah. And I mean, I think I would kind of take what Xi Jinping, you know, I would take Xi Jinping's outrage with a grain of salt just because this is someone that has expressed outraged at, you know, what an H&M executive said like 10 years ago about Uighurs. I mean, they are outraged about everything under the sun, seemingly.

You know, when the EU publishers a report on disinformation, they went and sanctioned EU parliamentarians. Australia dare to ask about investigating the origins of COVID. They banned Australian coal. I mean, they get, they are very, very thin-skinned. And so that doesn't mean that because they're thin-skinned, we shouldn't do what we have to do to protect our allies. I think that we have the Taiwan Relations Act. We have had a longstanding practice of helping support sales of military equipment to Taiwan as part of our commitment to a peaceful resolution of the quote-unquote Taiwan question.

because we don't want that question to be resolved by force, and specifically by a Chinese invasion. And part of supplying weapons is that some of the weapons requires training on how to operate that weaponry, and that's why we have forces there. But if I could just add one more point, having forces there is actually really useful

because it basically means that if Xi Jinping wants to invade Taiwan, he might have the close lateral damage of having, he has the very unenviable question of, if I want to invade Taiwan, I might be killing Americans, inadvertently, if I bombed Taiwan, and that means that I might be declaring war on the U.S. I mean, part of this game here is who's going to be declaring war on who, and so he would much rather invade Taiwan if the U.S. is not in Taiwan, because then for him, it basically means that the U.S., you know, the ball would fall in our camp about whether or not

we're going to be the ones pulling the trigger. And so that's why he actually came out not long ago asking the U.S. to withdraw its personnel from Taiwan. Because for him, it's, you know, he, if they, it's a much lower risk equation if the U.S. isn't there. Let's kind of go into two conspiracy theories here and kind of parse out what's true and what's not. The first is, obviously, the semi-conduct.

company that's worth $500 billion in Taiwan is a major chess piece. The United States and China are actually battling it out, not just for the sovereignty of the Taiwanese people, but it's actually about that specific chip manufacturer. True false, semi-true? Oh, totally true. Totally true. I mean, there are basically, you know, when I think about why Taiwan meets such an important part of an American interest abroad. I kind of break it down into

four parts. It's about submarine internet cables, a huge chunk of which flow through the Taiwan Strait. We want to protect those because we want to protect the integrity of our ability to uphold free flow of information between North America and the Indo-Pacific, and a lot of that

information runs through the Taiwan straight. It's about computer chips because everything in our economy nowadays is made with chips and a lot of them are made in Taiwan. It's about maritime trade routes because the Taiwan Strait happens to be a major trade corridor. And it's about precedent. And I don't think any military strategist would look at that, you know, at the current situation and say, gee, we should really give Xi Jinping a victory and allow setting the precedent of

a fait accompli annexation of territory that is basically going to rubber stamp a green light on the ability of an autocrats to just seize territory without any consequences. And the company we're talking about is obviously

Taiwan SEMC, Taiwan Semiconductor manufacturing corporation limited, 500 billion dollar company and they are creating a manufacturing unit here in the United States, I think, in Arizona, but these things take a decade to kind of build out and hit scale. So this is a key chip. Then let's go on to the COVID situation.

It was absolute, you would be an absolute heretic to say this was created in a lab, even though, as many comedians pointed out, like there's a COVID lab in the town of Wuhan, and that's what happened. Now, everybody's kind of leaning towards this was inadvertently released. But it does turn out that a global pandemic has caused everybody to maybe stumble a little bit, trip, get distracted. China obviously hit first, but an authoritarian country that can work through these things quicker. And here we are. The United States is, you know, going into debt, tripping over itself. Maybe, you know, can we keep affording, can we, afford to have the biggest military when we're spending all this trying to recover from this pandemic.

Chances that this pandemic is some way part of a larger strategy here by China. In other words, maybe there was some intent here. Is that absolutely insane to even say? And I don't even want to say because I don't want to come up like a conspiracy there is, but there are people floating this right now and crazier things have in fact happened in the world. Well, I think anyone that wants to believe that this was an accident should be aggressively encouraging an impartial independent investigation into what happened and how it happened. And I think that the fact that China has gone out of its way to prevent any type of investigative reporting or international inquiry into that topic, I think should raise a lot of eyebrows, understandably so.

I also do think that at the end of the day, I mean, like you, I don't want to be the one to kind of level that kind of accusation. And I myself, you know, I don't know, I mean, we don't really know what happened because we don't have all the facts. But what we do know, which is really, really odd, is that there was a window at the beginning of the pandemic when China, suspended all of its outbound domestic flights from Wuhan to the rest of China domestically, but it continued operating all of its outbound international flights out of Wuhan.

Very weird situation. Really odd. I mean, and I think that, you know, was it intentional? I mean, ultimately, if China, you know, believes that the facts are on its side, it should welcome an international investigation that disproves all these theories. Is there some reason why both administrations are treating China with kid gloves with regard to the pandemic? You know, aside from calling it the Wuhan flu, Trump never really said, hey, we need this investigation. You're responsible for this. You're going to need to pay for what happened to.

our economy, et cetera. And now we have Joe Biden. It doesn't seem like anybody's forcing, you know, Beijing's hand on this. But you don't want to see people unfairly accuse China, and obviously the Chinese people are not responsible with this, but the Chinese government might have some culpability here. And it does feel like either we're not wanting to address that because we don't want to create an international instance. But it kind of feels like this is something we could be using as leverage over China, which is, hey, you guys, this thing originated in your country, we need to have this inspection, or we're going to take sanctions against you, or is it our economies are so intertwined that it's not possible for the president of the United

States to be holding the line with China, where it's just difficult to put your foot down with China because Apple could get crushed if they had to, you know, weren't able to make more iPhones in China, right? I mean, I totally agree with you that I think that surprisingly China has actually been able to get off the hook really easily, considering that, you know, considering the degree of destructiveness that this pandemic has caused in terms of lives, in terms of economic output, I do think that this is something that governments should not let go. We should demand legitimate answers and inquiries into the origins of this virus. to make sure that it never happens again, to make sure that we fully understand how this virus works, how it came about into being.

And it is perfectly reasonable for the world to get answers to these things. And I don't think that the U.S. government or any government should let China get off the hook so easily. I mean, I do think that, obviously, you know, you pointed out the really important issue, which is that we have a lot of large companies that are very economically interoperable.

retwined in China that is kind of the main lever that China has, that China, you know, has hanging over our heads. And that is something that we should absolutely be working to address. And I've, you know, as I write in the book, I'm very much in favor of an outbound Situous framework whereby the same way that the U.S. government can review for on grounds of national security, inbound investments into the United States, I think the U.S. government should be able to conduct similar reviews on outbound investments from the United States into foreign countries, especially China, on grounds of national security, because the billions of dollars that have been poured from American companies into China are now creating a lot of really complicated national security

issues for the U.S. Certainly you did not anticipate, I don't think anybody did, that Xi Jinping would neuter their own technology companies that were the amazing crown jewels in a way of this China Renaissance, whether it's, you know, Alibaba and Jack Ma or, you know, Tencent or the education companies. And here we have Xi Jinping come in and decapitate all these companies, send Jack Ma to go do oil paintings on an island somewhere. Like, literally, that's what they said he's doing, is oil painting.

I think he might be in a re-education camp, but they have essentially consolidated power. And at the same time, we had people in New York Times telling us, when you and I and other folks who might be a little bit more pragmatic about this, hey, we shouldn't have TikTok in this country. We had people at the New York Times saying, oh, you're being hyperbolic. Oh, you know, we shouldn't worry about TikTok.

Oh, there's no evidence that the Chinese government has control of these companies. And I was like, are you people dumb? Like, it's an authoritarian country. Of course they have access to this. Not only do they have access to it. They've just taken over the entire private sector. This would be as if Biden or Trump decided they would be running SpaceX, Tesla, Amazon, Google, and Facebook in the same month. And all of those CEOs just disappeared.

Yeah. Maybe you could comment on how. nobody saw that coming and what it actually represents. Why is Xi Jinping doing it? It is wild. And I think that-scale a one to ten wild. I mean, it's really, really wild. It's not, I mean, it's not quite, to me, it doesn't rise to the level of China's about to declare war on Taiwan in terms of the repercussions for Americans. But it's wild in what it reveals about the Chinese system and what's going on inside of the country. And so- I think that, you know, the interesting thing is I've spoken with a few of my friends that work in the intelligence community. And I don't think there's anyone in the U.S. anywhere that ultimately a characteristic of an authoritarian government is that knowing why they did this is really about knowing why Xi Jinping did this. It's about knowing the intent of a single person. And nobody in the U.S. really knows what his motives were.

but what we do know is what is the impact of what he did. And so we know what the effect was. And what the effect is that it was a massive consolidation of power. And so to me, what that says is this was, you know, Xi Jinping, an autocrat that saw an alternative power base forming inside of China where you had very, very powerful, you know, celebrity pop culture phenomenons in these tech companies. and their CEOs that he felt threatened by.

And at the end of the day, it, you know, with Xi Jinping, all roads lead back to power and control. And this was just, you know, yet another manifestation of that. The other day, the other day of point. It's just going to be like a big mistake on this part. Yes, I think it is. Why? I think this is an example of how we're seeing China starting to repeat some of the self-destrored.

habits of past dictatorships. When they grow paranoid, they start to go after, you know, all of their industries. I mean, for a long time, the Chinese miracle was justified by, wow, they have an autocratic government, but man, the trains run on time. They're capitalists. You know, they are pro-business. Things are really booming in China. Now, it's really just becoming, you know, vintage, circa dictatorships from, you know, Soviet style. And You know, he's, as you point out, he basically nationalized an entire swath of its economy. He's, you know, now if you're a Chinese entrepreneur, if you want to start a company, this has changed what success looks like. It's like success is no longer, I want to be the next Jack Ma.

Success is, if I'm really, if I'm too successful, I might end up in jail. Right. So it's, you know, I think it's, it's really kind of changed. Yeah, it's a fine line. it's changed the basic bargain of Chinese society in a lot of ways. How is it changing people wanting to invest there? We saw Sequoia Capital. And before them, IDG, Pat McGovern was the first venture capitalist there really in the

80s. And then shortly after that, Sequoia, other folks coming into China having incredible returns, incredible runs. Are private equity, public market investors, venture capitalists going to form new funds to address China or are they going to be wrapping up shop at this point? I think the picture is mixed. I mean, I think you have some investors that are looking at that and that are being very realistic about the fact that the U.S.-China relationship is in the next five years

is going to go south. It's not going to get any better. And that is just the reality. There's no exit ramp here. There is no exit ramp for the next five years for unless you have, and I've been saying this for over a year now. Unless you have structural changes on the part of how the CCP operates,

we are not going to see an easing of tensions until structural things take place. If you're a realistic investor, you may want to limit your exposure to that. With that being said, China is very, very clever about wanting to deliberately,

for them, every time an American investor puts money in China, it's another lever that they have hanging over the US. So for them, they want to attract as many, you know, American dollars as possible. Historically, I have, but are they still in that position? Because it does seem like cutting 10 cents valuation or Alibaba's valuation when all these Western investors were in it is a weird signal of like, hey, come to China.

Totally. And you would think that, but BlackRock just announced a $100 million dollar fund, you know. 100 billion, 100 billion, you're right. And like 100 million. How quaint. Yeah, yeah. I think that buys an apartment in Hong Kong. Right, right. That's true.

And so, you know, you would think that, but then, you know, you have these funds that make these massive moves in the Chinese market. And, you know, and I think China is just really clever at buying off, you know, key players in the American elite circles. My hope is that ultimately America is a country with very smart people and that people, and that people kind of read the tea leaves and see that, you know, they're getting played and that there are other opportunities elsewhere. There isn't just China where there's money to be made. There's a, you know, it's a big world out there and that dollars are better spent in a country that's not going to, you know, end up nationalizing your investments.

How can Apple get away with having such a huge presence in China and being, you know, essentially, they're major partners, I think, on a global basis, when Uyghurs are allegedly, and I think it's been proven at this point, providing slave labor to suppliers who then go on to supply Apple. How can this, given Apple's, you know, very virtue signaling, high moral ethics here in the United States of how they look at the world, how can this be compatible long term or can it be compatible long term? I don't think it's compatible. I think this is a classic example of one company, two systems, which the paradigm, which is something that I have said for some time and I read in the book

is I don't think it's sustainable for these companies to straddle both sides of the fence, especially as both sides diverge farther and farther apart over time. and I think that Apple isn't a really particular quandary because I think part of what's happening is that it relies on brick and mortar infrastructure in China that's really hard to move and really expensive to move but also in a lot of specialized technical human talent that is hard to find in a lot of other parts of the world

and I think that's part of what makes the stickiness of, you know, manufacturing hubs like Shenzhen, hard to just offshore elsewhere. With that being said, I don't think that it's not because it's hard that it shouldn't happen. And I think that, you know, if it is hard, I'm not trying to minimize, you know, that it's complex, it's hard, it's going to take a lot of effort, but it should still happen because otherwise Apple could face, could be in an impossible situation a few years from now where China says, we're going to put the iPhone on pause and, you know,

Xiaomi is, that's going to cause a global, a huge amount of global demand in phones that's going to go unmet and show me is going to fill that void. And Apple, it's been great, it's been great knowing you,

you know, figure out where to make your phones elsewhere. That would be a really big crisis for Apple. And, you know, it's a $2 trillion dollar company. It has macroeconomic, uh, repercussions for the American economy.

And I think the U.S. government should absolutely, top holding for people's 401ks, people's retirements, endowments. I mean, there is, that would create the Apple contagion, let's call it the iPhone contagion, if they said, yeah, you know, this is a great opportunity for us to get market share. We're going to just put it, forget about even shutting down the factory. It's just telling Apple, every phone that leaves here, you've got to give us 200 bucks in US cash. Now the price of an iPhone goes from $1,400 to $1,400 or their margin goes from $400

$400 a phone to $200. It could be pretty challenging for them and just shift a whole bunch of money. to China, I think screwing with Apple would be a bigger provocation than the scenario we've listed. We've outlined, you know, screwing with the iPhone or invading Taiwan,

which one would actually have a bigger, global, you know, trickle down effect, I guess. Or bigger global ramifications. He seemed very, very big, you know, obviously,

yeah, I mean, they're both, they're both, They would both cause shocks in global supply chains. So, you know, Apple, they just, they would operate at slightly different segments of the supply chain. Obviously, TSM is the, you know, semiconductor segment. And Apple obviously encompasses Foxconn operations and, you know, the assembly line segment. But at the end of the day, it would cause a massive shock to global supply chain operations in the electronic space. Okay.

What are the chances that America comes out on the winning side of this when we look at it a decade from now? Just on a percentage basis, what do you give our chances? And then what does victory look like for us? What is required for us to win this competition with an authoritarian China? Well, I'm very happy that you use the word victory because I think part of the issue is that we've been a little bit too hesitant to use clear, you know, plain language. of victory and defeat, you know, in this geopolitical struggle. But I think it's, you know, unless we have a certain level of strategic clarity about the fact that, you know, this is a war, even if it's not yet a hot war, and there will be a winner and there will be a loser, just like

there was during the Cold War. And we should do everything we can to be the winner. I don't think we're going to marshal the will and national unity and resources to actually rise to the challenge. I think to answer a question, I'm actually pretty bullish on our ability to rise to the challenge, and I'm happy to explain why. But I think that there has been a lot of people in the foreign policy community that have been in denial for a long time. And once they stopped being in denial, they moved very quickly to a state of despair. And I think part of that despair has been fueled by this notion. It's a population argument. It's the idea that China just has to such a big population that if they have a GDP per capita the size of the U.S., their economy is going

to be so massive that we just can't do anything. They're unstoppable. They're too big. But I think that what that argument overlooks and ignores is the power of ideas and human nature. And that, yeah, they have a lot of people, but at the end of the day, you know, you see Xi Jinping just like, you know, a lot of his, a lot of other dictators surround themselves with airplanes and masses of armed men and tanks. And, you know, they talk tough and play tough, but they are absolutely terrified of words and thoughts, of words spoken abroad and thoughts stirred at stirring at home. And I think that is an incredible display of weakness on their part. That is the their Achilles heel, and it's a representation of the fact that their system at the end of the

day is not on the side of people's basic human instincts and legitimate desire to want to express freely their thoughts. And that is why we are, we should feel confident about the fact that we at the end of the day are on the right side. There is a right and wrong in the world, and we're on the right side of history on this issue. And I think that, you know, with respect to our odds, I think we could win it, but I think we can lose, and I don't think we should be overly confident. I think we have agency.

It's going to be a close contest, and I think we have agency to influence how events unfold. And I would obviously encourage Congress and our tech executives to take a lot of really urgent steps to collaborate much, much more closely, but also deal with this at a philosophical level with the same urgency that they would in an actual war. So, if I'm reading correctly, freedom in the United States, entrepreneurship, in us being on the same page here in America so that we can lead the West as a key component of this, which means

we have to get past this insane bickering we have over minor things or things that, you know, Dave Chappelle's special, we could have a debate on it, or Trump and, you know, the Russian hacks. But essentially, we need to level up the discussion here to start thinking about the freedom of humanity here and which side's going to win. There is an evil. There is authoritarian. There should be no debate that North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China are not the society that humans should have to live under and the better operating system is democracy in the West. Yes. Period. End of the end. Totally.

And at the end of the day, we should want to win and we should be confident in our ability to win because the Chinese are selling a product that people don't want, which is Xi Jinping's centralized political control over their lives.

And I think that, you know, we have the better narrative and we should feel, you know, confident about pushing that narrative abroad much more vocally. All right, listen, this has been amazing. I've kept you for over an hour. And the book, The Wires of War Technology and the Global Struggle for Power, Essential Reading,

if you're in the industry or care about government, the world, or humanity. There's going to be a lot more to discuss. So when the next shoe drops, we'll definitely have you on for an emergency pond. Let me ask this question at the end. Is Xi Jinping, is there a possibility that Xi Jinping is going mad? and that his behavior is going to be more and more erratic, and that there could be a coup or revolution in that country, or his behavior could be so erratic that he does something, you know, crazy?

Well, his behavior isn't reflective of someone that's calm, cool, collected, and trusting of people around him. I mean, he's locking up his billionaires left and right, nationalizing companies. Clearly, this is someone that is very, very concerned about having domestic enemies. and I think that if you look at... Does he have domestic enemies? Is there like an acute chance that somebody would... Or is there a chance somebody would whack him in his own country?

Would there be like a revolution there? I think it's not so much about a revolution as much as undermine him or just, you know, pose a potential, you know, becomes so affluent and influential culturally. Like Jack Maugh for a long time was culturally influential because he was kind of, you know, a tech star in China. Yeah. that it becomes threatening to him. And so, you know, it's, I mean, the decision to marginalize a lot of these people is clearly he felt that he had, let's remember, he arrived in power and went on a corruption, you know, anti-corruption campaign supposedly, which was basically a way to wrap cotton candy around, you know, him going after all of his enemies.

Now he's doing it under the guise of, oh, we need to have common prosperity. We're going to address inequality. And therefore, the logical solution of addressing inequality is locking up billionaires and nationalizing companies. It's the same thing. It's not an anti-corruption campaign. It's just him going after his domestic enemies and consolidating power. There's a really fascinating way to look at it because somewhere Elizabeth Warren and

Bernie Sanders are just like, absolutely, get all those billionaires, round them up and let's end them and let's get rid of the billionaire class. And it's kind of like, well, that's... Well, there's a country that exists that they could go to, you know, that already operates on that model. I mean, there's a number. You could go to Saudi Arabia. MBS has been pretty deft to get rid of his folks.

Russia seems to have anointed who gets to be a winner, and now China is doing the same. As we close again, the situation with the Uyghurs is so analogous. and it's very rare you would ever bring up the Holocaust or something was analogous to it. But Jewish people I've talked to who have family members who suffered in the Holocaust or didn't make it out, or saying, hey, this is analogous, right? Almost never should somebody bring up the Holocaust as an analogy to something. But in the case of the Uyghurs, it feels awfully close to what we saw or the beginnings of exterminating an entire race of people.

Why is the world taking no action when a million people are in a gulog being sterilized, tortured, raped, and being forced to pick cotton in fields? It's so horrifying, Jason. And I mean, my grandparents were Holocaust survivors and their whole lives. They, you know, wore the serial number tattooed on their forearms. And obviously, you know, my husband and I just had two kids three months ago. So one of the things that really makes me particularly passionate about this topic is that I genuinely think that, and this is a reason that I read this book, that China is probably the single greatest political force that make the lives of our kids significantly worse in 30 years from now. And I mean, I think that what they're doing to Uyghurs is the Canary and the coal mine because just like, you know, the, you know, the, the Germany in the 30s, it wasn't just the Jews. It was, you know, anyone that basically stood in

Hitler's way. And in a way, you're basically seeing Xi Jinping adopt that habit where obviously he's enslaved Tibetans, he's enslaved Uyghurs, he's going after any political dissident. And if he's doing this to his own people, one should wonder who thinks that he's going to treat people of other countries any better than he's going to treat his own people. So it's really, really, really concerning. And, you know, Elon Musk in the past has talked about this concept of entropy and that, you know, throughout history, civilizations have learned and unlearned things. And obviously, you know, Egypt was an empire that achieved so many technological breakthroughs. And then for centuries, a lot of those breakthroughs were lost. We should never take for granted the notion that we live

in a free country and, you know, a relatively open and free world because, you know, the last 300 years is a very, very small window in the grander arc of history. And history, you know, can turn in a more autocratic direction unless we prevented from doing so. And so I think that is where it is so important. And it's about, you know, what's at stake is much bigger than just the U.S. the ideas that, you know, the U.S. has been a vehicle for. And really, the Russian disinformation campaign has been so effective in making us as Americans criticize ourselves more than we criticize, you know, Saudi Arabia for murdering Khashoggi and throwing gay people off of roofs to their death, the Uyghurs being systematically

raped and tortured in, you know, China. And we would much rather talk about. about our own flaws in this country and beat ourselves up, then hold other countries accountable. And if the United States can't be a leading force in the world to say, hey, we're doing a magnitude better. These are not comparable. But the Russians have been so successful, I think, at this me-toism of like,

what about-ism, I think it's actually the better term. The what aboutism is just mind-blowing that young people in this country can say, well, Yeah, they're doing stuff to the Uyghurs, but look at our criminal justice system. These are not comparable. The inequities in our criminal justice system are horrible and we're aware of them and we're working on them and they should be reformed. It's completely different than a million people being tortured because of their religion in the north of China. It's totally different.

And actually, it's funny because every now and then some people on Twitter when I post stuff about the book will say, oh, yeah, but what about America's injustices to towards Native Americans. What about this? What about that? And I think that a fundamental difference between the U.S. and China is the fact that we've never claimed to be perfect. We've never claims to not have problems. The difference is we have a system where people can complain about them on Twitter and complain about them in the news. And, you know, you can take, if you don't like a government policy, you can take that policy to court and have it reviewed by an independent judiciary and complain about it in the press. And it's what past presidents have called America's ability to self-correct that makes us unique and special. And that is something

that is completely absent in China. And that is totally a reason for us to feel, you know, a reason for us to love our country, but also feel good about it and not so pessimistic. We should be proud of this country and what we've achieved. And the fact that, that we can complain about the things that have not yet been solved. As you're pointing out, like, this person's complaining about it on Twitter. If they had complained about that in China on a social network,

they would be in a re-education camp bound to a chair for 24 hours a day and being tortured. Like, yeah, tonight, tomorrow. And you need only look at what happened to the small, peaceful protest in Hong Kong. Those students went to jail. Apple News, their version of the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, was shut down. They just told them, listen, next Friday is your last issue. Like, this is a magnitude

different. And I think we need to really be proud of this country. And this country needs to lead the world in human rights, even with our own flaws. I don't know if you saw Saudi Arabia bought Newcastle. They allowed the Saudi investment fund to buy one of the premier sports teams in the UK. And I just thought, wow, there really is no ramification for these despots and dictators and their behavior globally and there needs to be. If Saudi Arabia is going to murder journalists from the Washington Post, we should not be taking their investment dollars. It's just really that simple. We should stop sending movies and the NBA to China if they want us to change the ending. It's pretty simple. All right, listen, I can go on for hours. You got me all worked up here now at the end. Everybody go

by the book. If you're listening to my voice, just pause the podcast, go over to Amazon, buy the audio book by the Kindle book or the hardcover, whatever you're into, the wires of war technology and the global struggle for power. If you do read a review, that's really supportive Jacob and the great work he does. You can follow Jacob on his Twitter, Jacob, H-E-L-B-E-R-G-Helberg. Jacob Helberg. He's good on Twitter. The book's fantastic, and it's important that we have people like Jacob in the world thinking and communicating these issues to the world. Thank you for coming back on the pod, Jacob. Thanks so much. All right, good luck with the kids. and we'll see you all next time on this week in startups.