US-China Relations: History, Culture, and AI Competition, with Noah Smith, from Econ 102

In this episode, the host Nathan Labenz and economist Noah Smith delve into the complexities of U. S.-China relations, the motivations behind the United States' export controls and the broader geopolitical tensions. The discussion covers the perceived threats posed by China's technological advancements, especially in AI, and the implications for global stability. The conversation includes an analysis of economic decoupling, military deterrence, and the historical context of U. S.-China cooperation. The discussion also explores the role of misinformation, societal destabilization, and strategic military balance. The episode concludes with insights into the future direction of U. S.-China interactions and potential pathways for stabilizing the relationship. SPONSORS: SafeBase: SafeBase is the leading trust-centered platform for enterprise security. Streamline workflows, automate questionnaire responses, and integrate with tools like Slack and Salesforce to eliminate friction in the review process. With rich analytics and customizable settings, SafeBase scales to complex use cases while showcasing security's impact on deal acceleration. Trusted by companies like OpenAI, SafeBase ensures value in just 16 days post-launch. Learn more at https://safebase.io/podcast Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI): Oracle's next-generation cloud platform delivers blazing-fast AI and ML performance with 50% less for compute and 80% less for outbound networking compared to other cloud providers. OCI powers industry leaders like Vodafone and Thomson Reuters with secure infrastructure and application development capabilities. New U. S. customers can get their cloud bill cut in half by switching to OCI before March 31, 2024 at https://oracle.com/cognitive Shopify: Shopify is revolutionizing online selling with its market-leading checkout system and robust API ecosystem. Its exclusive library of cutting-edge AI apps empowers e-commerce businesses to thrive in a competitive market. Cognitive Revolution listeners can try Shopify for just $1 per month at https://shopify.com/cognitive NetSuite: Over 41,000 businesses trust NetSuite by Oracle, the #1 cloud ERP, to future-proof their operations. With a unified platform for accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR, NetSuite provides real-time insights and forecasting to help you make quick, informed decisions. Whether you're earning millions or hundreds of millions, NetSuite empowers you to tackle challenges and seize opportunities. Download the free CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at https://netsuite.com/cognitive RECOMMENDED PODCAST: Second Opinion. Join Christina Farr, Ash Zenooz and Luba Greenwood as they bring influential entrepreneurs, experts and investors into the ring for candid conversations at the frontlines of healthcare and digital health every week. Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0A8NwQE976s32zdBbZw6bv Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/second-opinion-with-christina-farr-ash-zenooz-md-luba/id1759267211 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SecondOpinionwithChristinaFarr PRODUCED BY: https://aipodcast.ing

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We have to get out of the mentality of thinking that America makes all the choices, that we have all the power, that we have all the agency, that we're the big one who makes all the choices. We're not the big one anymore. They're bigger than us in most important ways. We're big. We're still big, but they're bigger than us in most important ways.

• 0:15Nathan Labenz?

  I have never quite been able to figure out why the United States, the West, whatever, is like so bent on this sort of path of escalation and keeping China down. Or I'm not even quite sure what exactly it is we think we're trying to do with our export controls.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  We had this rupture in our relations with China under Mao that we repaired. We patched it up, you know, and we'll patch it up again someday. We'll be friends with China again someday, but unilateral dropping of deterrence, unilateral weakening of all our deterrence methods is not the way to patch that up more quickly.

• 0:51Nathan Labenz?

  Hello and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm beginning what I expect will be an ongoing series of episodes, exploring one of the most consequential and fraught issues of our time, US-China relations. My guide today is economist Noah Smith, author of the No Opinion blog and co-host of the Econ 102 podcast, also on the Turpentine Network. There's an old joke about a visitor to China. After a week, they think they know something about China. And after a month, they believe they know a lot about China. But after a year, they realize they know nothing about China. I mention this because I approach this topic with genuine humility, considering the role that fear of China and Chinese AI plays in American AI discourse today,

• 1:35Nathan Labenz?

  and considering the many foreign policy mistakes the US government has made in recent decades. I feel this topic is too important to ignore and also too complicated to uncritically accept the Washington consensus. But to be very clear and to channel the language of a historical red scare, I do not now, nor do I ever expect to have all of the answers.

• 1:57Nathan Labenz?

  With that in mind, I consider this a sort of warm-up episode, which I hope will serve as useful context for a number of additional conversations going forward. And I think that Noah is really a good person to provide such perspective, as he's a super well-read, well-traveled, including having lived in Asia for a few years, and extremely open-minded thinker who's willing to challenge prevailing orthodoxies. I started off by asking Noah to sketch out the historical arc of US-China relations, and I appreciated how his analysis balanced short-term realism, noting that China, and arguably Xi Jinping specifically, was first to defect from a more positive relationship, with longer-term perspective, observing not only that the US and China have been allies in the past, but that there are no major fundamental reasons

• 2:40Nathan Labenz?

  that the two countries couldn't conceivably repair their relationship in the future. In fact, contrary to anyone who would frame the US-China rivalry as some sort of inevitable or eternal clash of civilizations, Noah also notes that despite our obviously different histories and political systems, there are a number of surprising cultural similarities shared between our two peoples. Along the way, we also get Noah's takes on some of the most important AI-related questions being debated today. What are the US export controls on semiconductor manufacturing equipment and chips themselves ultimately meant to accomplish? How much are they changing China's calculus when it comes to potentially acting on Taiwan? And what will their practical effects be?

• 3:22Nathan Labenz?

  Can we expect to deny China the ability to militarize AI technology, or meaningfully slow their progress toward AGI? Or will we perhaps simply deny the Chinese public the benefit of AI productivity improvements and economic growth? I appreciate that Noah answered as many of these questions as he felt confident answering, and also gave his standard fallback no-opinion answer to a few as well. This is, of course, far from the final word on these topics, and we should all be striving to learn and understand both the other side and the overall situation better as we go forward through time. As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd share it with friends, write a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or leave us a comment on YouTube. Your feedback, including suggestions for guests

• 4:05Nathan Labenz?

  that can provide a unique perspective on the US-China question, is always welcome too, either via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network. Now, I hope you enjoy this foundation-laying conversation on US-China relations with economist and writer Noah Smith.

• 4:25Nathan Labenz?

  What's up, dude?

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Hey, guys. How's it going?

• 4:27Nathan Labenz?

  Great. Great to be with you again.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  Good to see you.

• 4:30Nathan Labenz?

  Here's kind of what I thought I would do, just quick preface for you, and then we can jump into it. Basically, I have never quite been able to figure out why the United States, the West, whatever, is like so bent on this sort of path of escalation and keeping China down. Or I'm not even quite sure what exactly it is we think we're trying to do with our export controls. So I've been like voicing sort of doubt about this in various places. And somebody just recently tagged me online and said that I and Robert Wright are the only two China doves in the world, which is not literally true, but like, I don't, I feel like I'm way out of my depth here in terms of analyzing China.

• 5:14Nathan Labenz?

  But I also feel like I haven't really been able to get a good sort of from the ground up, you know, start with the, explain like I'm five, most basic, like, why are we here? And are there any alternatives that we have? What I would love to hear is sort of the steel man mainstream case for why we need to do what we're currently doing. And the reason I care, in addition to the fact that like, I would like the Chinese public to have, you know, economic growth, just like us to have economic growth, is it feels to me like a pattern of escalation, weaponization, whatever, is like not good for the overall big picture AI safety picture that I, that I do also worry about.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  Well, okay, a couple of questions before I do that. Number one, are we talking mostly about AI? Or are we talking, are we talking just sort of the general geopolitical thing? Like, how focused are you, are you asking about here?

• 6:07Nathan Labenz?

  Well, I'm very focused on AI, but I do think like the broader context is important, you know?

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Because like, for example, I don't, I don't see, personally, I don't see deep seek as a threat to America at all.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Like that just, it doesn't seem like a threatening thing to me. I don't understand why people are like, China just defeated America, blah, blah, blah. Like, I don't, I don't get that. And yet, I, at the same time, I think the threat of, you know, like a war over Taiwan is, is big and real. You know, so I think that a lot of people think of US-China competition as some sort of like vibe, like, you know, like, who's winning? They, some people in China released an LLM that's pretty good, you know, and cheap. Wow, they're winning. And like, I don't, I, I've never seen things that way. In fact, I'm gonna, I'm gonna write that, uh, you know, later today. I'm actually gonna write a post on DeepSeek against my better

• 7:00Speaker 00

  judgment. Um, but, but basically, I don't understand why that LLM is a threat to us. And so I don't think that our policy should be focused around trying to stop China from developing things like DeepSeek. Um, and so that's my, so, so in other words, I don't have a good explanation for you of why, you know, we should worry about that and be freaked out and like, you know, try to kneecap China's AI abilities in that way.

• 7:30Nathan Labenz?

  I think that's fine. I don't, I don't put you on the hook for representing the establishment too much, but.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  At the same time, I, I worry about over Taiwan and other wars quite a lot, like, and some other things that fall short of war, like, you know, cyber attacks, or, um, you know, things. There's a lot of concrete things to worry about that are not an LLM being cheap.

• 7:47Nathan Labenz?

  Can I start way back at the very beginning?

• 7:50Speaker 00

  Go ahead.

• 7:50Nathan Labenz?

  And we could definitely get to the Chinese, or the Taiwan issue. That's kind of where I came into it, because it's like chip ban, the way, aren't they, doesn't this make it like easier for them to justify an attack on Taiwan? But let's go back to that. Start at the very beginning, if you would. How do you, and, and maybe abstracting away a little bit from like current personalities, right? Because I think we've got, uh, let's say, singular personalities at the top of both countries right now. But if we forget about like, personalities and egos and ideologies, what would you say is like the natural strategic relationship between the United States, you know, this what giant landmass on one side of the world, and then like China, this giant landmass, and obviously giant populations on like the opposite side of the world? Is there any reason for us to be rivals?

• 8:34Speaker 00

  Well, there's a question of like, do I think we should be rivals in the ideal world? And do I think there are natural forces pushing us toward rivalry that are unfortunately there? The answer to the first question is no, we shouldn't. The United States and China were de facto allies for most of the 20th century, with the exception of a brief period in which they fought a war against each other. But then, other than that, you know, other than the Korean War, which was, you know, it was stupid on both sides. That was, that entailed big mistakes on both sides, but was rectified when Nixon and, you know, Kissinger and these people, you know, I'm not a Kissinger fan, but he did, this was a good move, actually. We de facto allied with China against the Soviet Union, and China helped us win the Cold War, or we helped China win the Cold War.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  And we helped China economically integrate into the world. We helped China throw off Japan. We helped China avoid conquest by European powers in the early 20th century, which is not a thing a lot of people know, with the open door policy, where basically America sort of stretched the Monroe Doctrine, applied it to China, and said that like, none of you Europeans should try, will try to conquer China, don't do that. And so we've been, you know, with the exception of the time that we fought a war, America and China for the 20th century were in close cooperation, if not actual alliance, which we were several times. And there's no reason we can't be, you know, I mean, like,

• 10:00Speaker 00

  that was good, that was fine, the 20th century went well, I think, you know? A lot of people died. But, oh, I think overall, it sort of turned out well, and like, like, things went in a good direction overall with some bumps, in which a few tens of millions of people died. And, you know, Mao was really terrible. You know, he was sort of a bump in the America-China relationship. So that's, you know, culturally, I think that America and China are very similar to each other. If you look at how Chinese people live and how they think about the world, it's not very different from America, or at least not from what America classically has been. You know, American culture's changed a lot recently due to social media and things. But then I think that a classic American culture of like, "I'm gonna get rich, but I don't know how",

• 10:44Speaker 00

  you know, or being obsessed with real estate, or like, driving to the mall, or...

• 10:50Speaker 00

  I don't know, liking hip hop, but also being slightly racist. Like, all these, these, I could go on and on about the ways in which Chinese culture and America, American culture are fundamentally similar to each other. And they're both like, large countries.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  You know, China's bigger than us, but we're both pretty big. Uh, and, and we're bigger than the surrounding countries. And these create natural similarities between us and China. Now, I think there's a popular myth that countries and civilizations that are similar to each other do not fight, have less of a reason to fight because they're similar. Well, no. As my little sister likes to put it, bitches fight for niches. And the fact that, you know, we in China are so similar means that in some ways we occupy the same niche, both in our own minds. You know, I'm the big country, I should be in charge, you know? And then like, uh, CCTV versus Fox News, I guess.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  You know, and then, but also in the, in the world, you know, like, and so I think even China's economy looks a lot like our economy did a hundred years ago. This, you know, massive manufacturing, overcapacity, sort of fast follower and everything. Like, you know, innovative bit on a small scale rather than a basic research scale. Like, that was us. That was, that was early 20th century America. I mean, we, yeah, we had some, some big inventions like the airplane, obviously. But, but, you know, in cars, for example, we were a fast follower. In machinery, we were a fast follower, et cetera, of Britain, Germany and France. Those are the guys inventing this stuff and, and we, we follow them. Anyway, China's following a similar pattern to us. And, you know, we dipped our toes in the waters of imperialism with the Philippines.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Um, and the Spanish-American War, you know, and, and China looks like they may do that in, in Taiwan with trying to grab some territory from India, throwing their weight around. Big, rich country, you know, guess who's rich now? Haha, we're gonna throw our weight around. Haha, can't boss us around anymore, foreign powers. Like, that was us. And I think that.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  But our similarity naturally pushes us toward rivalry. Uh, that doesn't mean we have to fight a world war three, but I think that this is a thing we have to deal with. And you know, it's easy to say that we should just be nice back down and not, you know, just not do it. But that's, you know, all your life, you grew up in a, in a world where America was the dominant power and could basically choose international relations. We could have chosen not to do the Iraq war. If we wanted, we could have chosen not to do the war on terror. We could have chosen all these things. China gets a vote. And if you watch, uh, I, I think, um, you know, Sarah Payne, uh, have you watched Dwar Kesh's podcast with, with Sarah Payne? They're just really excellent and I recommend watching that. She's like, we can talk about how, what we, our approach to China should be all day long.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  But at the end of the day, China has an approach to us. And we have very limited ability to control that. And us being, you know, nice to China and facilitate, trying to do everything we can to facilitate their power and economic strength and blah, blah. Is a thing that we did for decades upon decades. We did that. That's a thing we already did. And there's a general consensus now that that was a failure. I think that, that China turned around and bid us, you know, bit the hand that fed them in some way. I think that's a, that consensus is a little overstated. I think that you did see some real liberalization in China during the, uh, uh, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao years of the nineties and the two thousands.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  You saw, um, you know, you went from like Mao, like having your personality cult and slaughtering everybody to like Mao impersonators being normalized during the Hu Jintao era. And, and you had years of peace and prosperity. So I don't think that was as, and, and Chinese people deserve to not be poor and they're not poor anymore. I mean, there's still some poverty in China, obviously, but like overall, they're not a poor country anymore at all. Uh, they developed, they're a developed country and. That's, I'm not gonna say that's bad. I don't think that that was, the consensus now in America is that that was bad. We shouldn't have done that. We should have, you know, avoided that. Let them stay poor, shut them out of the international trading system and blah, blah, blah. I don't think so. I don't think we should have done that. I think it's better for a billion people to not be poor.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  You know, at the end of the day, poverty is the ultimate enemy of the human race. We've got to conquer it. Then we can solve all our other problems then. You know, but, but absolute poverty, the kind where you don't have enough to eat? Like not, people not having enough to eat in the world is the ultimate enemy of humans. And I, I wrote an essay about this called "The Elemental Foe", which I recommend, my own thing. And so, in that sense, however, however, I think that China's leadership has transitioned. China's system for selecting leaders is bad. They, Deng Xiaoping made a huge mistake when he crushed the Tiananmen Square protests instead of accommodating them. Which is that he cemented a leadership system that selects leaders via essentially backroom power dealings.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  What that means is that eventually you will get a leader who is extremely good at backroom power dealings to the detriment of other things. And that's what you've gotten with Xi Jinping. You got that actually pretty fast. You know, it's, this is not popularly known, but Deng Xiaoping handpicked Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao to be the next two leaders of China. After that, he said, "You all are on your own, you know, because, because I can't pick forever." And so, as soon as they got on their own, there was a big political knife fight and a guy named Xi Jinping, who was extremely good at getting his cronies in everywhere and dominating the CCP. He knifed Bo Xilai and Jiang Youkang, and I'm mispronouncing his name. But he, he was this great political infighter who basically dominated China.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  And he is not the hawkish, most hawkish guy in China, but he's pretty hawkish. And he definitely sees America as a foe, as an enemy, despite engagement, despite our, our decade-long policy of engagement. So...

• 16:44Speaker 00

  It was China who defected from that cooperation first. When Xi Jinping came to power in the early 2010s. Before that. We had a cooperative relationship with China under Hu Jintao. We had differences over Taiwan. They were an authoritarian government, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We had our differences, but we had this fundamentally cooperative relationship still. And Xi Jinping decided to change this. He decided we didn't make that decision.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  We have to get out of the mentality of thinking that America makes all the choices, that we have all the power, that we have all the agency, that we're the big one who makes all the choices. We're not the big one anymore. They're bigger than us in most important ways. We're big. We're still big, but they're bigger than us in most important ways, and they made the choice. Xi Jinping made the choice to that America is our rival. We've got to topple the American-led global order as he saw it. And Rush Doshi is a very good analyst of this. One of the most preternaturally calm human beings you'll ever see. He, um, he has attention surplus disorder. And he went through. He's, he's, you know, extremely good at Chinese. Well, you know, that's an understatement.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  Um, he went through decades of Xi Jinping's communiques and speeches and stuff like that, summarized them in a book. Um, uh, called The Long Game. In which he basically summarized, it's, it's one of the driest books you'll ever read. It's very hard to get through. Uh, but if you think that's hard to get through, try getting through, you know, reams and oceans of Chinese Communist Party documents. And he basically said, okay, look. Xi Jinping has a paradigm. There's a paradigm shift in Chinese thinking under Xi Jinping. Which is not entirely caused by Xi Jinping himself. There are more hawkish people than him somewhere in the Chinese government. But Xi Jinping is the guy who cemented this into a new idea. Um, and created Chinese Communist Party slogans for this, which they love those slogans, right?

• 18:42Speaker 00

  And his slogan is great changes unseen in a century, which means basically. You know, the current, the current global order is an American imperium. And this will be overthrown by China. China will overthrow that imperium and replace America. And that's how Xi Jinping thinks. That's not how Noah Smith thinks. That's not how people should think. But it's how Xi Jinping thinks, and it's pretty clear that he thinks that. And China gets a vote. We don't get to decide unilaterally the relationship between us and China. We just don't. And I think that people who think that we do get to unilaterally decide that are coping. They're clutching for the feeling of control, this illusion of control that they always felt like they had before.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  In the nineties, the US-China relationship was entirely determined by the US. In the 2000s, it was, you know, 85% determined by the US. Now it's like, less than half. China is, they're, they're leading the dance. They are in the driver's seat. That's a fundamental fact that I think we have to acknowledge. And Xi Jinping's attitude shift, huge attitude shift toward the United States predates our attitude shift, predates Trump, predates Biden, predates, you know, like back in, back in 2013, the only person saying that China was our like rival is Chuck Schumer, this old dude who nobody was listening to. And, and that consensus shifted very quick. And it shifted, and Xi Jinping was the first to shift it. He was the first.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  So economic decoupling between the United States and China has been proceeding since the beginning of the Xi Jinping era. He has tried to, I mean, that's what made in China 2025 is about. It's about decoupling. It's about removing all Chinese dependence on US inputs. Economic, you know, chips and machinery, whatnot, you know, airplanes, everything. Making China totally economically self-sufficient. Uh, that was something he did before the United States. Export controls or tariffs or any of this stuff. Right? The narrative that the United States just woke up one day and decided to like kneecap China and keep them down is bullshit. It's wrong. Xi Jinping woke up one day and decided that China's gonna overthrow the US-led global order and stuff like that.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  We're basically reacting to that. Now, I say basically because Trump watched a lot of, you know, CNN back in the 90s and decided that like, America is losing the industrial race against Japan. And then he sort of transferred that anxiety, which was mostly misplaced at the time. He transferred that onto China mentally and he's like, how come we have this big trade deficit with them? We've got to fix it. So, so some of it, you know, Trump had some agency here and some of this was going on there. It wasn't entirely Xi Jinping, but it was, it was mostly him who shifted this, this relationship. And I think we have to just respond to that. We are in a position we're not used to being in. We're used to being the big one, the one who acts and everyone else reacts.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  Now we're reacting. We're not the big one anymore. And I think that's a mentality, that's a mindset we've got to get used to.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

• 21:45Nathan Labenz?

  So what do you think is the threat in like concrete terms, right? Cause I, the word like overthrow, you know,

• 21:53Speaker 00

  What, what, what, what could actually happen? What's the bad thing?

• 21:56Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, I mean, they want like to be part of some international reserve currency bundle or they want like, you know, I mean, what do they want?

• 22:03Speaker 00

  Not important. So, so they actually don't want to be the reserve currency and they should. China should have the reserve, have one of the reserve currencies at this point. The, the RMB should be one of the dominant reserve currencies on the planet. They don't want it. What China wants is number one, control of the seas. Trade goes over the ocean and physical goods. Trade goes over the internet cables in digital goods. China wants to control, and internet cables are maybe like Starlink or whatever. China wants to control those things. They would like to control the lanes of global trade. And you see this in the South China Sea where they've basically said, you know, this is our maritime territory.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  This is, you know, your ships may not pass here until we say so. And that's, that's an area through which much of the world's trade flows. That's different. The US-led global order entailed freedom of the seas. We said, here's the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Anyone can send their ships through these waters. It's international waters. We have rules about you. You own the waters next to your coast and then the international waters are free. And the United States Navy, overwhelmingly the most powerful Navy until recently, was the policeman of the seas. We, we made sure that trade, that there was freedom of the seas and that global trade could go. And also the internet. So we, basically, much of the internet was United States-controlled and we enforced freedom of the internet.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  We said, you can send your data, you can send your data over these cables. We built these cables. You can send your data over these cables. Go for it. And of course, China built the Great Firewall, but still the international internet cables through which digital trade happens, all services trade, et cetera. Those were free because the United States said so. And the freedom of the seas happened because the United States said so. And that created the trading regime that ironically led to big American trade deficits that Trump dislikes. But that created the trading regime that allowed the world to enjoy an unprecedented period of growth. But that also tied China to the United States in important ways and made us mutually interdependent. And that was why we did it.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  That's why we did that. We, we believed that if we bound the world together in the mutual interdependence of commerce, that would prevent conflicts and wars. After World War II, our priority was preventing conflicts and wars. China would like to have sovereign control over extended areas of the ocean, where the Chinese Navy decides which ships may pass and which may not. The United States, much of the United States' economy depends on trade that passes through those waters. Much of the United States' economy similarly depends upon digital trade that passes over the internet cables that China would also like to now control. And now they're going around cutting some of their cables. Anyway, that's a preview of what's to come, I think. But, but when you talk about the US-led global order, I don't think you're talking about the reserve currency.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  I don't think you're talking about like the IMF or the World Bank or things like that. I think what you're talking about is trade. And you're talking about the lanes of trade, the sea and the internet. And those are the things that China would like to control, I think. Now, there's some other, I think, harms, bad things that Xi Jinping would like to do to the United States. Ways that he would like to hurt the United States in order to make us less of a potential threat to Chinese power in the world. One of those, obviously, is to cut us off from, from trade and from control of our own trade. That's one thing. A second thing is destabilization of our society. I think that the more we end up fighting over pronouns or AI safety or defund the police

• 25:43Speaker 00

  or whatever the fuck we're fighting about this week, the more our society becomes disunited and unable to oppose whatever China wants to do, Chinese power. Power is optionality. Power is option value, right? Power means, power doesn't mean I do a thing. Power means I can do a thing if I want. That's what power means. It's option value. And China wants the option value of being able to do whatever it wants. And as long as the United States is a big, rich, powerful country, we get a vote. They get a vote, but we get a vote too, with our power. So China would like to, when I say China would like to stuff, I don't mean that your average Chinese person on the street would like this, right? I mean Xi Jinping and his regime and his cronies who now dominate the CCP would like

• 26:28Speaker 00

  us to be weaker simply so that we don't get a vote in the future. And if you think that this is not realistic...

• 26:37Speaker 00

  We were generally a much nicer country than China, and yet we also did the same thing to all our rivals. We weakened Germany and Japan after World War II, and we weakened Russia after the Cold War so that they didn't get a vote. You know, and China wants to do this to us, but more because they're a bit meaner than than we are now. So China would like to destabilize our society. Whatever you get on the internet and argue about and have flame wars about, and whatever cultural thing you think is a threat to you, China would like you to have more of those flame wars. Xi Jinping would like you to have more of those flame wars. He would like you to feel more of that threat from your fellow Americans, from your neighbors. And so, because that, the more we fight each other,

• 27:18Speaker 00

  the less we have the option value to stop China from doing whatever it feels like doing today, tomorrow, whatever. So I think that China has made concerted attempts to destabilize our society, which I don't like because I like living in a stable society. I grew up in a more stable society than I live in now, and I kind of like that. And so I think that weakening us-

• 27:36Nathan Labenz?

  Can you be more concrete on that? Are we talking like tick, thumb on this TikTok algorithm scale or what?

• 27:42Speaker 00

  Yes, so TikTok algorithm scale is is absolutely part of it. Influence operations are another part of it. But the the biggest part of it is actually called sharp power, which is that the Chinese state, uh, party state, if you will, if you like that term, the the Chinese party state has basically gone around, um, using economic leverage to force, uh, people to say and do various different things. It has used that so far pretty narrowly to protect its, you know, perceived interests over Taiwan, you know, other things, Xinjiang, promote its its stuff. It's used its sharp power to, you know, bash, uh, to stop the NBA from standing with the Hong Kong protesters, all that stuff.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  But sharp power can also be used to to favor actors that destabilize American society, partisan shouters and culture warriors, and to weaken-

• 28:40Speaker 00

  Actors that want to unite and who oppose anything China wants to do. So if there's someone in America who says, no, guys, we gotta, we gotta unite to stop China from closing off freedom of the seas, or whatever they want to do, taking Taiwan, taking part of Japan, taking part of India, all these things, we gotta stop them, guys. You know, we gotta stop them from, from controlling our supply of, of critical minerals. We gotta stop them from doing these other things. And anyone who speaks up, China can use sharp power and control of, of online algorithms to silence those people, to silence the people who would have us unite. So that the voices that would divide us end up being the de facto, the only voices left. That's a threat.

• 29:23Nathan Labenz?

  So I hear that. And I'm still kind of like, not super, you know, it doesn't sound like my grandchildren are going to be speaking Chinese. I, I do hear like-

• 29:33Speaker 00

  They're not, nor does China want them to.

• 29:35Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, so it seems like the threat is sort of marginal.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  No, no one, no one wants you to speak Chinese, because that would mean that you could pollute China's own thought ecosystem with your own-

• 29:46Nathan Labenz?

  I was wondering how long I was gonna be welcome on Red Note, where I-

• 29:49Speaker 00

  No, they, they don't want you-

• 29:50Nathan Labenz?

  Just popped in for a minute.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  They don't want, they, they, they want you, they want you to not matter, to be at the periphery of the world, where you don't matter, and you go fight your little battles over whatever parochial bullshit you fight over, and you don't bother them, and you don't have any power to stop them from doing anything that they want. That's what they want. They don't want you to speak Chinese. When I say they, I don't mean your average Chinese person. I mean Xi Jinping and his, and his croquis. That's, that's their image of power. Their image of power is that you become Argentina. You know, to America, Argentina is not even on the map. They don't matter. Malay's fun, I like him, and, and Argentina occasionally provides us entertainment, and occasionally provides us with some supplies of raw minerals, right? But they don't matter.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  They are not, they are a non-entity to us geopolitically. We don't have to think about, Argentina doesn't get a vote on anything, right? They want you to be Argentina to them. That's their, that's their power. To you, to, to, the way you've grown up and the things you're used to, becoming Argentina is bad. You know, if, if you lived in Argentina, it would be worse than where you live now. And that, so that's a threat. That's a threat to you. Whether you choose to accept, believe and resist that threat or not is up to you, but the threat exists.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

• 31:18Nathan Labenz?

  I mean, you pick a country I happen to know better than most countries. When I think about Argentina, I feel like their problems are largely the result of mismanagement over many successive generations of leadership. And we may have a similar problem, but I don't think Argentina as a nation can point to somebody else and say, you did this to us. And I don't feel like if we end up, you know, entering into some hyperinflation or whatever, we'll be able to point to China and say, you did this to us either. So I'm kind of like, okay, you know, and there are other things that haven't been mentioned, right? They steal IP from American companies and, you know, we could go down a reasonably long

• 31:58Nathan Labenz?

  list of grievances, one by one, but I, I kind of feel like, man, everything that we're accusing them of doing or most things like we're kind of doing, right? Like we're bullying Colombia and threatening them, you know, you don't take some symbolic thing that doesn't matter, just like, you know, Daryl Morey, uh, standing up for Hong Kong protesters or whatever. We've got some, you know, one plane full of dudes going to Colombia. We're going to like threaten to sever the relationship over it until they back down. China's doing that to our private actors. We're doing it to other states. I feel like your point about like the similarity is definitely, you know, resonates with me. And if I bring this to the AI moment, I'm like, okay, they want to be more powerful.

• 32:43Nathan Labenz?

  I would also say like, they are quite powerful, like whether they want to, whether we want them to be or not, as you said, they have a vote, like they're producing a lot of frontier AI research these days, right? So they're like, they are a, an advanced country that is capable of frontier advancing work. What are we trying to accomplish? Seems like right now, like the, the sort of main point of escalation is the chip export control and now increasingly like AI arms race, or even as it's been recently put in to the paper by Alex from scale, AI war. Going back like a few years ago, my understanding of why we were trying to deny China these chips was that we thought they were going to militarize it and we wanted to keep them

• 33:28Nathan Labenz?

  off the frontier. And now we fast forward to today and we're in the deep sea plus eight days moment. And it seems like they're staying at the frontier, basically of AI are very close. But you know, it's not quite at the same level as the very best American companies, but it's better than any. But I would say the top three American companies. So deep sea is maybe number four in the world, maybe number five, depending you could count, you know, whatever else in there. Maybe count Meta could maybe count Tesla X. But we're not keeping them from going to the frontier. It seems like they probably have enough chip capacity domestically to like manufacture whatever drones they want to make.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  And remember, I don't think that deep sea is a threatening thing. It doesn't seem that way, maybe, maybe I haven't thought about it enough and I'm not just not thinking about this, right? But I don't see that specifically as a, as a threat. Remember, I do think there are threats here.

• 34:28Nathan Labenz?

  So what do you think we are trying to accomplish? Like, what is the most coherent account of what the export controls are supposed to do?

• 34:35Speaker 00

  So the export, the purpose of export controls is to maintain a military technological edge over China. Cause China. So, so first of all, let's talk about military balance. We have nuclear weapons and China has nuclear weapons. As long as no one figures out how to hack and cancel the nuclear weapons, which we always try to do. Right? As long as no one figures out that or detect the ballistic missile submarines. That's another way you could like potentially eliminate second strike capability. But barring that, if we maintain second strike capability and a whole lot of nuclear weapons. Then neither country is under existential threat from the kind of like World War Two style war. But what that also means is that in order to stop from losing a war, we would have to destroy the world.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  That's not a kind of, that's the kind of escalation you can only, you will only do when the alternative is just you die anyway. Nuclear weapons are only a defense against existential, you know, destruction. They are not some, they are not a tool of crisis management. They're not, Vladimir Putin tries to use them that way, but it doesn't really work because they're not, you know, you can't just say, you know, let me have that little chunk of territory, I'll nuke the world, I'll destroy the world, man. No, no, you won't. You won't destroy the world over that little chunk of land. You won't destroy the world out of, over this trade treaty. You won't destroy the world over this and that. You'll destroy the world if you're gonna die anyway. But that's the only time in which you'll destroy the world. If you're even in the ballpark of a rational actor, you don't even have to be rational,

• 36:04Speaker 00

  but if you're even just of any ounce of self-preservation instinct, you won't destroy the world unless you're about to get killed anyway. So nuclear weapons do not create a balance of power by themselves. You need conventional weapons as well. John Mearsheimer actually wrote the whole thing about this, conventional deterrence. And he was right about this. This is back in the days when John Mearsheimer was writing about things before he got sort of old and kooky. Everyone gets old and kooky and it's gonna happen to you and me as well. Our conventional deterrence against China, in other words, if China wants to take over US ally, we wanna stop them from doing that. That's very weak because if China has this massive production capacity, they could produce a bazillion missiles, a bazillion drones, et cetera.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  In order to offset that, we can't completely offset that with technological advantages. We have to produce things ourselves and get our allies to produce more things. But we can partially offset it by maintaining a military technological advantage, having, you know, they have more stuff, we have better stuff. You know, that, that helps us, it doesn't solve the whole problem, but it's one thing that helps. There's many aspects to the question of maintaining a military technological advantage, but one of them is precision weaponry. Have you heard of the, uh, the third offset or whatever? Okay, so, starting in the eighties, but then really accelerating after that, we, we got precision weapons. We got weapons that could find a target and hit the target instead of just throwing it into the general area of wherever the shit was. Precision missiles, precision drones, precision things, right? That's how you fight now.

• 37:32Speaker 00

  The purpose, the, the reason this is powerful has to do with actually inverse square laws and inverse cube laws of physics. As in, a blast, a shock wave dissipates according to an inverse cube law and heat this, you know, light radiant heat dissipates according to inverse square law. And that means that if you hit something accurately, you can just be much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much more effective. In fact, in terms of ground warfare, we realized that precision warfare was more effective than using tactical nuclear weapons in ground warfare. Because tactical nuclear weapons are big, but the inverse square law and inverse cube law were so powerful that tactical nuclear weapons blast radius would dissipate.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  Precision weapons could actually give you more power than than tactical nukes on the battlefield in terms of destroying enemy vehicles, destroying enemy command posts and things like that.

• 38:22Speaker 00

  Precision weapons have become a cat and mouse game, electronic jamming, hiding from things, you know, GPS sensors, computer vision, blah, blah, blah. America has had the best precision weapons for a long time. That's a military technological advantage that can partially cancel out greater production. So you see this on the battlefields of Ukraine. You see, American precision weapons have been holding their own against Russian mass, even though Russians fire eight times many artillery shells the Ukrainians, that, you know, they, the Ukrainians get more kills because they have American precision weapons. And there's been big fights over jamming. There's fights, you know, like fights about how to hide stuff. When I say fights, I mean

• 39:03Speaker 00

  adaptations, military adaptations about how to do those things. And so we've seen that on the battlefields of Ukraine. It won't solve the entire problem of like underproduction, but it will solve, it will partially solve it. It's an offset, right? It'll offset their power. And so in order to maintain that military technological advantage in precision weaponry, it helps to have better chips because chips become your onboard computer. When you have a drone using computer vision, looking for stuff. So suppose you have a drone controlled by a remote operator, right? The drone's controlled by a remote operator, it's using radio waves. Okay, to talk to this guy, you've got this guy with a little joystick sending the drone. It's called an FTV drone, right? It's a toy, you can buy it anywhere, but GPS is not a toy.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  And so you can jam that, right? You can send out a radio wave, you can have this big radar thing that sends out a big radio wave signal to jam the drone's connection to the GPS, which means it's connection to the operator, the human operator. Then the drone just goes, "Where am I, dude? I can't find the thing." Or even just falls right out of the sky. And so that's the game people are playing in Ukraine. The way you beat that is you cut off, you make the drone not need a signal. Right? You have it, you have the drone have computer vision so it can look around. It says, "Oh, there's that tree. I see a Russian thing hiding under that tree. I'll get him." Boom, and then he gets him, you know, with no need to, autonomous weapons. And now we're talking about the future of warfare as autonomous drone squads.

• 40:33Speaker 00

  And for that, you need lots and lots of chips. And once drones start fighting other drones, it becomes an arms race of who has the better chips? On your drones. Right? And export controls are one way, they're not sufficient, obviously. But they're just one of a number of ways that we're trying to maintain our edge in that future fight, in that sort of fight that's coming. The fight may not come. But if, if we would deterministically definitely lose such a fight, that takes away our power, that takes away our optionality, that allows China to do whatever they want. Conquer Japan, conquer India. Maybe, I'm not gonna conquer India. But they could grab some of their territory and basically reduce them to the minor power.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  They probably could conquer Japan. And conquer South Korea, all those things. It means that we can't stop them if they want to. Whether they then do that depends entirely, not, we lose our vote. And the chip export controls, which have been effective, by the way, chip export controls, you know, they didn't stop China from developing L L Ms, but they've stopped China from manufacturing the best chip. They really have. They've been very effective in that. Uh, how effective that is militarily, we don't actually know. Because we're talking about weapons that haven't been created yet. Autonomous drone swarms exist in the research lab. Uh, but they don't exist on the battlefield yet. How effective those export controls will be at stopping autonomous drone swarms uh, and making America's autonomous drone swarms better than China's

• 42:01Speaker 00

  is a question that I don't know the answer to, and I suspect that no one on the planet knows the answer to. Although someone out there knows better than me and is saying, right? But the export controls have been working. The purpose of the export controls was not to prevent something like Deepsea. I mean, maybe someone hoped that they would, but that was never the stated purpose. That was never, you know, the, the purpose of the, the export controls was to stop China from being able to mass manufacture leading edge. That it is not enough to maintain a military advantage over China is not sufficient.

• 42:31Nathan Labenz?

  But we're also not selling them chips, right? I mean, there's, there's multiple levels of the export control, so.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  That's right. That's exactly right. But those, frankly, that part of the export controls are, are, are not going to work. That part of the export control, the, the part where we don't sell them the chips, uh, will, will fail. Um, but the part of the.

• 42:52Nathan Labenz?

  So you think we can slow the domestic, the development of China's domestic chip industry effectively? But we can't keep chips writ large out of their hands. That, that seems plausible to me as well.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Yes, the, in fact, had I been in charge of the export controls, no one thinks to make me in charge of these things because I'm a random blogger who sits around with his pet rabbit. Um, but had they made me in charge, I would have focused, I wouldn't even have focused on, on chips. I would have kept selling them all possible chips. And I would have focused only on machinery, tools, software, and other things where we actually have a reasonable choke point.

• 43:32Speaker 00

  I don't know why they focused on the chips thing as well. I don't know why they added those. I don't think it's going to do us a huge amount of harm either. I don't think it's going to be a big deal. I think what's going to happen is that your slightly off frontier Nvidia chips are going to be just as good as the frontier Nvidia chips. And we're just going to keep selling those. I think it's cosmetic. I think that that part of the export control is for all intents and purposes useless. Maybe it serves as a distraction. I don't know, but I think the equipment export controls are effective. They're already proving extremely effective. Uh, and also software export controls, personnel export controls. So the most effective part of export controls isn't even the machinery. It's that we said, if you're an American citizen, you can't work in the Chinese chip industry. We'll, you know,

• 44:18Speaker 00

  fine you, put you in jail. I don't know, whatever. It's personnel. Talent is everything. You know, basically it's, we put a stop to a lot of talent going over to, to China's side. Not a complete stop because remember all these things are to some degree for us. You can't make a complete wall. Right? And, and I don't know whether, you know, in the last days of the Biden administration, they released these very complex export controls that, you know, designate all these third countries, blah, blah, blah. Cause they looked at who was trying to circumvent the export controls and I don't know if that's going to fly. I don't know if that's going to actually work. I, I haven't, it seemed rushed. And it seemed a little too overreaching. And the stuff we were doing before was probably working better than people realized.

• 45:00Nathan Labenz?

  It's like planned economy almost.

• 45:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and I don't, I think that's going to need to be reevaluated. But the export controls over machinery were effective. They were obviously effective. China tried to like pull this stunt with like making this like seven nanometer chip, which then they turned out not to be able to manufacture in any appreciable volume. And their, you know, their costs were really high and their reliability was low, like the quality of those chips sucks ass. And really they're just continuing to be dependent on TSMC. But anyway, that stuff works and it will slow them down. It'll work to slow them down. So it's just one part of an overall strategy to maintain conventional deterrence over China for 10 years. After 10 years, the conventional, the threat of war probably diminishes. It will not go away.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  But I think that the next 10 years are the peak risk. They are, as Hal Brands has put it, we're in the 1950s again. In terms of the threat of war, where we were with the USSR, except now we're we're more on the position of the USSR, but uh because they're the they're the ones with the manufacturing capacity now, but um and we're the ones with the ideology, we proselytize, but our goal should be to freeze everything deter China from launching a giant World War III for 10 years and export controls are not sufficient to do that by any means, but they are one piece of how we do that. And then I think Xi Jinping is not going to last much longer after that. He'll be 80, you know, by the end of that, his fourth term will be

• 46:28Speaker 00

  up. The bellicosity and the dream of overthrowing US, the US-led order, blah, blah, blah, blah, that he that he has will diminish after 10 years, just as the Soviet Union's sort of expansionism and aggression diminished a lot upon the death of Stalin and never really came back even under Brezhnev. There was a little bit more aggression under Brezhnev. There were some, you know, nuclear scares, blah, blah, blah, but it never, we were never in as much danger of fighting the Soviet Union as we were in the 1950s. That almost happened. World War III came very close. The Cuban miss, after the Cuban missile, Cuban missile crisis, actually was the peak of danger of nuclear launch. In terms of conventional

• 47:08Speaker 00

  war, it wasn't even close to the the peak. And so um, we need 10 years of deterrence. That's what we need. That will make the situation a lot better. And then we will work on repairing that relationship with China and having a, you know, going back to being friends as we were. Remember that we had this this 15-year rupture in our relations with China under Mao, right? May 15 years, maybe, maybe 20 years. We had this rupture in our relations with with China under Mao that we repaired. We patched it up, up, you know, and we'll patch it up again someday. We'll be friends with China again someday, but that that but but unilateral dropping of deterrence, unilateral weakening of all our of all our deterrence

• 47:52Speaker 00

  methods is not the way to patch that up more quickly. Establishing deterrence.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  You know, and establishing stability is the quickest path to repairing our relations with China.

• 48:04Nathan Labenz?

  Okay, let me ask a couple. I want to really, we don't have too much more time, so I want to spend the remaining time on this next few years critical period. And I agree, it's critical period. For AI reasons, if not for plenty of other reasons. I know you're, you know, analyzed demographics and whatnot previously too. But it seems like to me, we are on a pretty risky path where we've got Taiwan, obviously, the, you know, the object of their desire is where the chips are made. It seems to me that cutting them off from the chips made in Taiwan lowers the barrier to attacking Taiwan, right? If they're not getting

• 48:47Nathan Labenz?

  the best stuff that's made there, then it makes it just that much easier to attack. In fact, you'd even say, maybe that is a reason to attack. We're getting the stuff from there. They're not, right? So geez. We've now got both sides kind of announcing multi hundred billion dollar build out plans. And I think most concerningly to me, we've got multiple Western AI leaders. And here I'm thinking again, Alex from Scale, but also Dario from Anthropic, who literally said that our plan should be to build a giant global alliance, apparently under Trump's second term. Box out the autocracies by which he primarily seems to be referring to China.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  And then the gas station, you know, it's just China.

• 49:32Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, it's China. So eventually then we'll make them an offer they can't refuse. He doesn't use exactly those words, but that's basically how I read the essay. We're going to come around and say, okay, we are now, we've, you know, we've cut you off. We've advanced our technology. We have overwhelming AI superiority. Here's the terms on which you get to be part of the AI-enabled world order.

• 49:56Nathan Labenz?

  That seems kind of crazy to me. I don't know if you think it's crazy, but

• 50:00Speaker 00

  I actually don't know.

• 50:00Nathan Labenz?

  It does seem like it increases their incentive to like, do something crazy sooner rather than later.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  You might be right and you might be wrong. I'm, I'm not well placed to evaluate this because I don't understand the technology well enough here. Again, I don't see DeepSeek as a big threat to America, but I could be wrong because I could just not be understanding how these things work enough. So I, I guess my, my answer is I don't know. Let me talk to those guys and see what they're thinking. Read their stuff. Think a little more about this and then I'll get back to you because I've had a lot of time to think about precision weaponry and the effective export controls and things like drones and missiles and to watch Ukraine war unfold. And to think about conventional deterrence with respect to Taiwan and the whole thing I just gave you. What you just talked about with that whole AI supremacy thing, it's funny because um, my friend Grace

• 50:53Speaker 00

  like wanted to have this big discussion with me about that. And I was like, Grace, I don't have, you know, my, my blog is called No Opinion for a Reason, which is I have, I have plenty of opinions, but the, the thing, set of things upon which I do not have opinions is vastly larger than the set of things upon which I do have opinions. And I don't actually have a strong opinion on this one way or another. I don't know if what these guys are talking about makes any sense. I would like to talk to, to Alex Wang. Um, I can't talk to Dario, you know, he came on our podcast before. We can talk to him about this. In fact, Eric, we should probably just get him back to talk about this. And maybe y'all could even debate. I'll, I don't know. I will ask him about this.

• 51:31Speaker 00

  Next time I see him, but I don't know, man, that it sounds hokey to me, you know, like the idea that we could like maintain this AI supremacy in like the LLM field. It sounds like, uh, it sounds unrealistic. And I think DeepSeek probably shows that it's unrealistic, like LLMs are a borderless commoditized universal thing. And all the AI that I was thinking of was, you know, in terms of chip stuff was like autonomous onboard compute for like autonomous drone swarms and precision weaponry, which is a very different kind of AI, right? That's not even the same kind of model. Computer vision. That's a convolutional neural net, stuff like that, right? It's, I mean, maybe if you used an L M to say, hey, hey, robot, go kill the Russians. Find a Russian, kill him.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  You know, maybe you could do that, but that's like, that's, that's sort of a, that's icing on the cake. Right? Slightly better control interfaces. Um, I know, you know, Locky Groom? He's very into using like L M's for voice controlled robots. Maybe that's, that's useful, but I don't know. Like, I don't know how, how are L M's, L M's gonna fight wars? Are we gonna say like, like, you know, Claude, come here and I kick the ass of the Chinese? Like, actually, when I was, it's funny because it's not very well written, so I need to rewrite it. It's also very dated. But when I, uh, in, when I was a college kid, I wrote this, this silly short story about, um, an A I war between the U S and China, between A G I's, U S and Chinese A G I's, but the U S and Chinese A G I's, both after having achieved, uh, sentience,

• 52:58Speaker 00

  both decided that it would be better to not fight and to be stoner kids and basically just like watch old movies and like get stoned and like, uh, you know, whatever, just chill. And then they, um, the human minders, like the humans who were, whose job was to make the A G I's fight each other. Uh, they, they, uh, the A G I's basically traded them romantic advice in exchange for collaboration. And so in exchange for advice on their romantic relationships, the human minders would, uh, ignore, you know, overlook the fact that the U S and Chinese A G I's had become friends and were not fighting each other. And that was after the, um, that was after the spy plane incident. I don't know if you're old enough to remember that, but there was a spy plane that got, uh, or yeah, it got shot down. It's, um, was it spy plane?

• 53:43Speaker 00

  It was like a, like a radar plane. I don't remember what kind of plane it was because I didn't understand things in those days, but, but they were like a brief ratcheting up of U S China tensions. And I was like, just thinking about this, uh, this thing, you know? So I don't have any idea how L M's will figure into the military balance. I don't understand their military applications. I don't know if anyone does. It seems to me, just looking at how things are going, that trying to maintain supremacy in L M's at the company level, much less the country level, is probably not going to work. But again, I'm not an expert. I'm just split balling here.

• 54:16Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, the model starts to get very like AGI or even ASI, superintelligence. And then it's like, I think the path goes like, well, we'll have this like superintelligence. And then it will figure out how to make the best drones. And then we'll have like, you know, and it'll figure out, you know, how to hack their electrical grid better than, you know, and meanwhile harden ours. And then we'll have like all, you know, have them kind of cornered on all these fronts. Uh, but the time window in which that is supposed to happen is like very short.

• 54:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, maybe I, I can't tell you, I can't sit here and say, well, that's bullshit. That's obviously wrong. If I said that I would be overstepping my knowledge. I can't tell you that they're wrong about that, but I also can't tell you they're right about that. Or like, oh, sounds legit. Like, I don't even know if that sounds legit.

• 54:53Nathan Labenz?

  It doesn't sound impossible to me, just given the trajectory that we do seem to be on. But the time delta between when we have those things and when everybody else has those things does seem like it could be fairly short.

• 55:05Speaker 00

  Eric, what do you think? You've been so silent this whole time. What do you think about this? Help me out here. I don't know what I'm talking about.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  I wish, uh, I, I wish I could. These are, these are beyond my, my pay grade just to some degree. But I think it's a good, uh, good call for us to, to bring on some more, some more experts in the spaces you were saying before.

• 55:22Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, at a minimum, this has been, you know, good foundation. And I think more time should be spent in just the American discourse. Just getting clear on like, what are our complaints? Like, what is the threat from China? It's not nothing, but that part of the conversation is so often just jumped over into like, are the chip controls working or not? And I feel like we've so often skipped like, what were we trying to do? And, you know, has that morphed in the time that the policy has been in effect? And now we're sort of, you know, I think there's a lot of post hoc justification going on. Uh, and also a lot of confusion because, you know, DeepSeek has, has definitely burst onto the scene and confused a lot of people. And I'm with you. I'd be, it's hard to.

• 56:07Nathan Labenz?

  Look at something that's an open source that it looks more like a peace offering to me than it does like a, you know, a threat.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  Nathan, to that point on peace offering, have you sort of read Xi's speeches when he's like, you know, very direct about sort of the goals for, for what China, like in terms of you are familiar with their own rhetoric about how they conceive the United States and do you take them kind of literally, um, you know, in that? And no, I know it's 45. So feel free to, to, to go whenever you want and we'll, we'll just continue.

• 56:37Speaker 00

  I got like five minutes.

• 56:39Nathan Labenz?

  I've read very little. So, you know, I wouldn't even pass myself off as a hobbyist in this domain, certainly far, far from expert. But I, since you asked, I did just happen to read one because I've been asking everybody like, what am I missing? You know, that should make me afraid of China to the point where I want to do all these things, which I think probably won't work, except to keep beneficial AI out of the hands of the Chinese public. That seems like the, the biggest effect that I can see we're likely to have. So anyway, somebody sent me a, a speech.

• 57:06Speaker 00

  That won't happen. That won't happen.

• 57:08Nathan Labenz?

  Well, I hope not. I think they all deserve.

• 57:09Speaker 00

  There's no way that'll happen. That's, that's impossible.

• 57:12Nathan Labenz?

  I hope not.

• 57:12Speaker 00

  Can't do that. The only person who could do that is Xi Jinping. He won't do that. Well, maybe a little bit, but he, he mostly won't.

• 57:19Nathan Labenz?

  In any event, my.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  The Chinese public will have all the AI they can, AI.

• 57:23Nathan Labenz?

  But yeah, well, then I guess I still am like, I don't know what we're hoping to accomplish other than we just seem to be escalating. But I, you know, I read one speech, which was chosen, you know, to try to persuade me. And it felt like, I don't know, it seemed like a very mirror image sort of speech. Like it was mostly domestically focused. It included specific, you know, explicit, uh, claim from Xi, which you could say, well, he's lying or whatever. But he said, we are not seeking to export our models to the rest of the world. Uh, we want to like resist and overcome containment, which was the translated word, I think for what we're, you know, what they perceive us to be doing to them. But it didn't seem like particularly.

• 58:02Nathan Labenz?

  War mongery, or hateful, or anything, you know, super. When it was sent to me, I expected it to be a lot more, you know, scary sounding than it ultimately was when I read it in translation.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  Well, the guys who were scary sounding were so, so around 2020, starting in 2019, but really 2020, Xi Jinping put all these guys called the Wolf Warrior diplomats. It's named after some silly action movie. The Wolf Warrior diplomats he put in charge of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And all these guys went around and said a bunch of very bellicose things. You are falling, we are rising, we will bury you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They sounded like Kaiser Wilhelm in like 1913, right? They sounded, you can read what these people said, just Google Wolf Warriors, read what these people said. It was incredibly aggressive.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  Xi Jinping himself is not that aggressive, but if I would urge you to read the book The Long Game by Rush Doshi, it is not an alarmist book. It is one of the driest books you'll ever read. However, it is relentless. It is well argued and Rush Doshi understands Chinese strategic thinking better than you or I will by the time of our deaths. He already understands better. So I would urge you to read The Long Game. And if you want to see examples of, of actual Chinese bellicosity, certainly read, uh, look at, look, Google Wolf Warriors and read some of the things that they said a few years ago. But in addition to that, I would urge you to look at some of the actual actions in not just words, but actions that China's been doing.

• 59:36Speaker 00

  The hacks of critical infrastructure that have been happening daily.

• 59:41Speaker 00

  You know, not just privacy invasions, like listening in your phone calls over your cell phone or reading your text messages, but also just penetrating critical infrastructure.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  I would urge you to look at some of the things China's been doing with cutting internet cables around the world. That's a real action. Cutting internet cables is a real thing that you can do. The actions are bellicose in addition to the words. China is actually doing things that are aggressive. Look at their, you know, territorial acquisitions in the Philippines. Some of the stuff they've done toward India and the border with India, you know, like slowly taking territory. There's a, there's a lot of, you know, sort of aggression out there happening. That's not just actions, that's actual words. Will that blossom into like conquers of world? Well, maybe not. Our job is to stop it, to minimize the probability that that happens. You know, because in, in World War One, it, it sort of did.

• 1:00:35Speaker 00

  But then in World War Two, it also sort of did. And so World War Two, World War One taught us that you shouldn't go to war. You should hold your fire. Don't be an idiot. World War Two taught us the opposite. World War Two taught us that holding your fire is appeasement. That, you know, when you've got an enemy that, that relentlessly wants to take over more and more and more and will never stop. You don't appease them. That just makes it harder to fight them later on. Which is the right lesson with regards to modern China? I don't know. And it may be some, some third, some mix of the two. You know, or some third thing. The Cold War, the Cold War taught us that deterrence works. You know, yes, there were fights in Vietnam and Korea, blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, at the end of the day, we didn't nuke the world.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  We didn't have a big conventional war against the Soviet Union. You know, we didn't pull out the tanks and the helicopters and all the things for the big one. It didn't happen. And all through that time, the world got more and more peaceful and stable. Not you, not uniformly monotonically so, but the Cold War was a success. Despite all the dumb mistakes we made and the horrible things that happened. The Cold War was a success. And it was a, you know, a bigger success than World War Two. Cause World War Two, we also beat the bad guys. If you want to, you know, we, we won, but at the same time, a lot of people died, like 55 million people died. That sucked. However, with the Cold War where we established, we, we learned from World War Two.

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  We didn't appease, we deterred, we contained. We, um, but most of all, we deterred the Soviet Union from a military adventurism. And after Stalin died, after that pivotal decade, the danger went way down. That's a success that I think we can learn from. I think the Cold War, not World War Two or World War One, the Cold War, despite the lack of an ideological component to it. I think that we're not ideologically at war with China. But the, we're, you know, but the Cold War is still the best model for our interactions with China. And deterrence is still the best option because ultimately.

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  That's the way our relations improve in the future is to stabilize the world. Only in a stable world can we in trying to become friends again as we traditionally were. That's my thesis and I do have to go, but that's my final thought.

• 1:03:00Nathan Labenz?

  Yeah, that's a scary one because I expect pretty choppy waters ahead for multiple reasons. But yeah, for now.

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

  No, thanks for joining and, and yeah.

• 1:03:13Nathan Labenz?

  Until next time, folks. It is both energizing and enlightening to hear why people listen and learn what they value about the show. So please don't hesitate to reach out via email at [email protected] or you can DM me on the social media platform of your choice.