China's Plan For Global Domination - Jamie Metzl

Jamie Metzl is a futurist, geopolitical expert and Founder and Chair of the global social movement OneSharedWorld. The war between East and West is unfolding in front of our eyes. From Chinese land grabs in the South China Sea to bugged electronics and squeezed trade sanctions, tensions seem to be rising below the surface. Expect to learn what China's anti-US propaganda looks like, why tennis star Peng Shuai's disappearance is so disturbing, why the CCP has stopped children from playing computer games for more than 3 hours per week, how much the civil discontent in the West is Chinese-created, Jamie's predictions for the next few decades of relations and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Reclaim your fitness and book a Free Consultation Call with ActiveLifeRX at http://bit.ly/rxwisdom Get 5 days unlimited access to Shortform for free at https://www.shortform.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Jamie's website - https://jamiemetzl.com/ Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #china #politics #tradewar - 00:00 Intro 00:27 Is the Lab Leak Theory Still Relevant? 12:44 New Evidence on the Origin of Covid-19 20:08 China’s Current Goals for the Nation 24:11 How China is Expanding its Territory 30:35 Are Russia & China Gaslighting the West? 36:58 China’s Anti-US Propaganda 42:06 Why China Isn’t a Democracy 50:35 Are Citizens Happy Under the CCP? 55:26 The Chinese Tennis Player Who Disappeared 1:04:03 How China Aims to Increase Masculinity 1:11:06 How We Can Move Forward 1:15:06 Where to Find Jamie - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Let me just use this opportunity to condemn John Cena. John Cena, if you're listening to this podcast, you are a scoundrel. You're supposed to be a tough guy. That's your entire brand and China criticizes you and you get on your hands and knees and bark like a dog. Show some backbone. I challenge you, John Cena, to come on this podcast with me and let's have the conversation about China.

• 0:27Chris Williamson?

  So you were one of the first guys to really get on to the lab leak story. Where are we at with that now, 18 months hence?

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I'll start in the beginning. It was late January of last year. Like everybody else, I was deeply concerned about this emerging pandemic and thinking, well, where does this come from? And like most people, I thought, well, it's sounds pretty similar to the last SARS outbreak, which we knew happened and it came from nature through markets. But then in late January of last year, I saw a report in The Lancet, which showed that more than a third of the earliest people being infected had no contact with that now infamous seafood market in Wuhan. And then I kind of had, I have two perspectives.

• 1:18Speaker 00

  One, as a person who's deeply immersed in the world of science and another, as the other part of my life, deeply immersed in Asia and China and geopolitics. And so something just didn't feel right when the Chinese government kept talking about a market origin, when it was pretty clear to me that the evidence suggested otherwise. And then I just started digging. I really, I dove in and the more I learned, the more questions were raised about the possibility of a lab incident origin. And it's still not 100% proven that that's where this pandemic comes from. But the circumstantial evidence is just incredibly strong and everything we learn,

• 2:03Speaker 00

  at least it seems to me that it's, that it's getting stronger. So yeah, I know we'll, we'll dig into the details of this, but where we are now. Is in my mind, there's a very strong but still circumstantial case suggesting a very likely but not certain lab incident origin of the pandemic. China is really just outrageously preventing any kind of investigation into the origins of the pandemic. They're still engaged in just a massive and outrageous cover-up involving destroying samples, hiding records, imprisoning people in China for asking questions. They have a gag order preventing Chinese scientists from saying or writing anything

• 2:47Speaker 00

  about pandemic origins without prior government approval. There are some efforts to dig deeper, but we need, we need a lot more.

• 2:56Chris Williamson?

  Is that not likely to be potentially the most evidence that we get? The purely coincidental anecdotal, this is what it seems because if the Chinese government continues to stonewall as effectively as it is at the moment, then maybe we're never actually going to find out anything that's concrete. It's all just going to be best-case scenarios.

• 3:17Speaker 00

  Well, that, that could be. That's one possibility, but we also have to think of how much we, and by we, I mean a bunch of we's. There's certainly our group, it's called the, quote unquote, the Paris Group, a group of about two dozen experts around the world who've been collaborating on this issue since last year. There's another group, and there's some overlap between our two groups called Drastic, which is a group of, they're called internet sleuths, but they're, they're more than that, who've been digging. And, and we have uncovered, and this community more broadly has uncovered, a lot of highly, highly relevant information that has told us a lot about this, this story.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  So yes, it would be better if China had complete transparency, but there's a lot that we can do. And most people, most people will be surprised. That there's still no comprehensive international investigation into the origins of the pandemic. And what that means is if you're somebody in China, maybe a scientist who has highly relevant information, I'm sure you're scared for your life right now, and you wanted to share that information, there's not even an address, there are no secure whistleblower provisions. So there's much more that we can do. Will it work? Will it get us to 100% certainty? Maybe it will, maybe it won't, but we can't say it won't before we even try.

• 4:43Chris Williamson?

  Why is there no investigation?

• 4:45Speaker 00

  It's been a political process, and the main reason is that China has blocked it. Last year, in early 2020, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for a full investigation. After he did that, the Chinese government punished Australia by imposing trade sanctions to try to deliver the message that anybody who dares to ask questions will be punished. He and Australians brought that idea to the World Health Assembly, which is the governing board overseeing the World Health Organization, in May of last year. And there was a jujitsu move by the Chinese, and the Europeans played a role in this as well.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  And so this idea for a full investigation into the origins of the pandemic morphed into a Chinese-supported resolution, which mandated essentially a Chinese-controlled joint international Chinese study, not into the origins of the pandemic, but into the single hypothesis of a natural origin not associated with a lab incident. And so that led to just the farce of this international joint study group that then the international members went to Wuhan in January of 2021 this year.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  In early February, they held just a farcical press conference in Wuhan, where they basically repeated Chinese propaganda lines, "It comes from nature, maybe it comes from frozen food", they said, which was preposterous, and they were just, later admitted they were just doing that as a favor to the Chinese. And then the lead spokesman for this international expert team, independent expert team, he said, we've concluded that a lab incident origin is extremely unlikely and doesn't merit further investigation. And it later turned out, he admitted he was lying. That wasn't what he thought. He was just doing, he had done a backroom horse trading deal with the Chinese who didn't want a lab incident mentioned at all. And so he said,

• 6:52Speaker 00

  all right, well, I'll say it's extremely unlikely. All say it shouldn't be investigated. But is it okay if we just mention a lab incident? And as I understand, that person is actually under investigation by the WHO for doing this kind of thing.

• 7:07Chris Williamson?

  I was gonna say, it's so crazy that there is no further level of authority that can look to try and impose on this particular group. When you talk about an entire global event, each individual nation state kind of looks after itself, but we don't, there's no, what was that Team America? There's no one that's like the global police that's flying around and trying to enforce this stuff. And yeah, I mean, you know, I'm not advocating for a new world order, or, you know, one nation state across the entire world. But we are seeing here that there is a lack of recourse when it's nation state versus nation state, because the only thing that you have to play with are like, trade

• 7:48Chris Williamson?

  sanctions, and threats of war, and all sorts of stuff like that, which seems kind of primitive.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a hundred percent right and really accurate. And so, the leadership of the World Health Organization, they're now trying to do as much as they can. They have created a group called SAGO, the Scientific Advisory Group, for investigating the origins of novel pathogens. And that was kind of a really bold move by Dr. Tedros and the WHO leadership, to supersede the mandate that had been given to them by the World Health Assembly, who was basically their bosses of the states. And so that's happening now. But China has essentially condemned Dr. Tedros and efforts to, and what he's

• 8:36Speaker 00

  called for a full audit of Wuhan labs and access to the raw data. And China has clearly said that they're not going to allow that. And their participation in a lot of these international organizations. Isn't designed to strengthen the organizations, but to blunt and block them. And that's really, really concerning. Right now, as we speak, there's a special session of the World Health Assembly that is meeting to negotiate what will likely take many years, which is a new pandemic treaty. Because it's just 100% clear that the institutions and structures that we have in place right now

• 9:18Speaker 00

  for responding to this kind of crisis are massively insufficient. But ironically, after the first SARS in 2003, 2004, where China had a similar kind of cover up in the early stages, we had the same meetings, said we need to have stronger structures. We built them through the international health regulations. And then it didn't make a difference. As a matter of fact, China's behavior this time is even worse. It's even more atrocious. And that leads to your broader question about just how the world is organized. And as you know, I'm the founder of an organization called One Shared World. And what we're trying to do is to address exactly what you said.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  There's a mismatch between the nature of the biggest problems that we face, which are global and common, and the absence of sufficient structures for addressing that entire category of problems. And that's pandemics, climate change, proliferating nuclear weapons, and lots of other things. And that's why China, in the name of national sovereignty, is able to do all of these things that certainly I find despicable. Not just covering up the origins of the pandemic, but also committing mass human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Tibet, and illegally seizing territory in the South China Sea

• 10:45Speaker 00

  and along the border with India and elsewhere. And that's why we really need to think deeply. About how do we build a safer structure for for the world? And if we don't do it, unfortunately, our world's going to become a much more much more dangerous place. So that's why we need to start moving in that direction. And it's not just about what states can do. Everybody has a role.

• 11:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there definitely needs to be more oversight. That's a really interesting way to actually look at concluding what's happened with the lab leak theory. Whether it was zoonotic at a wet market, whether it was a lab leak, or whether it was something else, China is covering up the origin of the virus. It doesn't matter what side of this debate you fall on. Everybody can accept the fact that China isn't being transparent with the single biggest global health problem that we've had in the modern era. And that that blows my mind. There's no recourse for us to try and get those people back. It's it's crazy.

• 11:43Speaker 00

  It's really terrible. And what China will say and does say about issues of Xinjiang and Tibet and others is, well, the human rights of Chinese people, that's China's own business. The rest of the world isn't a stakeholder. But the rest of the world is a stakeholder. The fact that the whistleblowers weren't able to speak out in the earliest days following the outbreak, whatever the origin of the outbreak, the fact that people, Chinese people who are asking questions are in prison. One of them, Zhang Zhan, is actually near death in prison. That's not just a Chinese issue. I mean, economists estimates that the number of total dead is due to COVID is between 15

• 12:27Speaker 00

  and 16 million. I would venture to say that regardless of the of the origin, a very significant percentage of those deaths are attributable to the pathologies of the Chinese state and to this cover up.

• 12:45Chris Williamson?

  So what's been some of the new realizations that have come out? Has there been any data that's arrived recently? Updates with regards to the origin of COVID?

• 12:54Speaker 00

  Oh, huge. And a lot has come out. And first, let me just lay on the table the two cases. The people who believe this has a natural origin, they will argue that that's how most pandemics have happened in the past. And nature is very creative. And so we just can't say what will or will not show up. The counterargument, which is certainly what I believe is far more likely, is that we have an outbreak of a bat with a horseshoe, I'm sorry, of a virus with a horseshoe bat backbone. It happens not where the horseshoe bats are, but more than 1,000 miles away where they don't have this kind of horseshoe bats,

• 13:38Speaker 00

  but they have the world's, China's first and largest, highest level virology institute, high containment lab, with the world's largest collection of bat coronaviruses, where they were doing research, not even at the highest level, at BSL 3 and 2 levels, designed to make these scary viruses even scarier. We'll leave the word gain-of-function aside for a moment. And then this virus shows up. And on day one, it's with no parent so far. Evolutionary history, it's ready to easily pass from human to human. And then they have the whole cover up.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Since the earliest days of the outbreak, we've had a lot more information. People in drastic uncovered information that was being hidden by the Chinese about a copper mine in Yunnan in southern China. In 2012, six miners were sent down to clean out bat guano, bat manure. All of them got sick with what look today very much like SARS, like COVID-19 symptoms. Half of them died, their blood samples were taken to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and elsewhere. Multiple sampling trips were sent to this same mine. And in those sampling trips, a number of many different viruses were collected, including

• 15:08Speaker 00

  one that is among the most genetically similar to SARS-CoV-2. And because there's a lot of recombination in bat viruses, just have to assume that similarity breeds similarity. So it's quite likely that there are additional similar viruses in the collection. Then the Wuhan Institute of Virology's viral database with 22,000 samples vanished. It first went offline and then vanished in late 2019. And that was also dug up. Then we had access to this organization, EcoHealth Alliance, which was a funding partner to Wuhan Institute of Virology.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  And they were engaged in all sorts of activities that certainly from the perspective of now seem questionable then. I could just go on forever, but I won't. And then we just found out through a leak, and a leak that I think was a deliberate leak from the US Defense Department that said, hey, we did the right thing. But that in March of 2018, so a year and a half before the outbreak, this organization, EcoHealth Alliance, along with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, applied for $14 million of DARPA funding. And one of the things that they wanted to do was to genetically engineer a furin cleavage

• 16:31Speaker 00

  site, which is part of the spike protein, basically how these viruses are able to infect human cells, a furin cleavage site into the backbone of a SARS-like virus. And so the Wuhan Institute of Virology was going to collect the viruses, and they did collect viruses from Laos, Cambodia, southern China, and elsewhere. And this work was supposed to be done at the University of North Carolina in the lab of Ralph Baric. DARPA correctly rejected that proposal, but there's a real question is, did the Chinese go forward anyway? I think it's actually quite likely, and that's

• 17:12Speaker 00

  basically in most fields of advanced science, that's what the Chinese are doing. They'll partner with international experts to learn as much as they need to learn, and then they'll just push forward doing that thing in China. That's why the first CRISPR babies were born in China and lots of other things. So we're really learning a lot, and the more we learn, the more this looks like it's very likely a lab incident origin. And the reason why we have this pandemic, it's the origin, probably, but not conclusively a lab incident origin. And then, as we said, regardless of the origin, a criminal cover-up was what exacerbated this crisis and brought it to scale.

• 17:57Chris Williamson?

  Would you say that COVID's helped China overall? Have they suffered more than other countries? How does that work out?

• 18:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think relatively, China's better off. China's relative power is stronger now. China is relatively stronger now than it was in the beginning. That doesn't mean it's been an enjoyable experience for them by any means. But to China's credit, they've managed the spread of the virus inside of China certainly more than has any other big country. Some people suggest that raises the question of, could this have been deliberate? I don't think it is. I mean, these are really smart people. It's like the dumbest thing ever would be to say, all right, we're going to release a dangerous, highly infectious pathogen.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  In our, you know, one of our big cities with the goal of infecting our city first and then the rest of the world will do a better job of locking down. I don't think that's, that's very likely, but I do think most likely there was some kind of accident followed by a criminal cover up.

• 19:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that crosses the line from aggressive and sometimes negligent to malicious and mostly psychotic.

• 19:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yes. Well, yeah, I agree. I mean, I think, and so you, you start out at negligent. I mean, certainly ambitious and negligent, but then you get to the criminal cover up. And that's, that's the thing. And the cover up is malicious because lots of countries make mistakes. The United States, we had Union Carbide, we had Three Mile Island, we had the accidental bombing of the Beijing Embassy in, in Belgrade. Recently, there was a terrible, seemingly accidental killing of, of a family. And in Afghanistan, there

• 19:53Speaker 00

  was the whole Afghanistan debacle. Lots of countries make mistakes. I'm not pinpointing China as the only country to make a mistake, or as the only country to ever have a cover up. But I, what I am saying, in this case, it's, it's, the consequences are pretty awful.

• 20:09Chris Williamson?

  So, taking a broader view, what's China's overall goal at the moment for the nation? What do they want?

• 20:19Speaker 00

  Well, I'll just put it in their terms. I mean, what the Chinese strategic documents have said is they're looking to have global leadership by the year 2049, which is the 100th anniversary of the, of the Chinese state, the Chinese revolution.

• 20:35Chris Williamson?

  What's, what's global leadership and why did they say this?

• 20:39Speaker 00

  So, right now, historically, China has seen itself as the Middle Kingdom. It's, it's certainly a, or one maybe the great civilization of its region. And they had a relationship with the countries around it that was based on that understanding, which is very, very different from the principles of the post-war international order that were established by the United States and the UK and our allies in the aftermath of the, of the Second World War. And so China would like to have that freedom of maneuver. China sees the United States, I think, as a country that's trying to keep China down

• 21:20Speaker 00

  and sees that post-war liberal international order as something that is just a veiled threat. It's not something designed for the common good, but something designed to keep others down and as they see it, keep the United States in a role of primacy. And they want to get out of that. And part of getting out of that, at least in my view, is deeply undermining this system, the alliance system that emboldens countries like Japan and Korea and Australia to stand up to China. That doesn't necessarily mean that China wants to militarily take over the world.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  China says they never take over other entities, but that's just a bold-faced lie because you just have to have just a different view of... If I were to say America is the whole world, then America would never invade any other country because I had just declared that all other countries are America. If China just says the entire South China Sea is China, then seizing territory in the South China Sea isn't aggression, it's just this is ours. So they use kind of...

• 22:34Chris Williamson?

  It's the big brother, little brother, stop hitting yourself thing all over again, isn't it? Stop hitting yourself.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  Well, something like that, but the thing is, for them, yeah, I mean, for them, they're just making declarations. I mean, that's why for China, managing the information space is so important because the idea is, well, just declare some big crazy thing and then start defending that crazy thing and then you act according to that principle. And then people will say, hey, you're wrong. And you say, oh, no, no, we have a claim to the entire South China Sea, so this is just a dispute. This isn't aggression. We're not seizing territory. We're not attacking India. We're just part of this dispute.

• 23:24Speaker 00

  We haven't... I mean, Xinjiang and Tibet, Taiwan, China has... The government on mainland China has only controlled Taiwan.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  For four years since 1895. And yet, that claim, there are lots of other countries that have a much stronger claim to other places that have let bygones be bygones. But again, China asserts its reality and then tries to defend the reality that it's that it's created.

• 24:02Chris Williamson?

  What is, can you explain what China's doing in the South China Sea with its little island debts and how it's expanding territory?

• 24:10Speaker 00

  Yes, so a big vulnerability that China has is that the United States Navy is still more advanced and stronger. And the South China Sea is one of the main thoroughfares for trade. It's natural resource rich, not just fishing, but oil, and it's critically important. China has made this absurd, outlandish, and according to international law, illegal claim called the nine dash line to essentially the entire South China Sea. And then what they did is they claimed these, the essentially reefs in the middle of the

• 24:55Speaker 00

  South China Sea, seized them and have built massive military installations on those islands. And what they're doing, so the United States has aircraft carrier battle groups. And if you've ever seen them, they're just unbelievably awesome displays of power. But if you have military installations right in the middle of the South China Sea, that's like a huge aircraft carrier in one of the most important places where you would have an aircraft carrier. And if you have a land base, you can really do a lot. And the United States could neutralize those bases in a war scenario. I mean, they're just sitting there so you could, you know, attack them in a war.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  But all, most of life, and hopefully all of life, happens outside of a war, of a war scenario. So it's again, it's the same thing, China declares an imaginary reality and then starts acting as if the imaginary reality is, is real. And then, when people raise questions about it, attacks those, those people or those countries.

• 26:00Chris Williamson?

  Isn't there a rule to do with a particular radius around the islands? It's a 90 mile radius or something, so by China picking up these little reefs, they're slowly expanding that territory because they all intersect.

• 26:12Speaker 00

  It's the Convention of the Law of the Sea, and these little reefs, these little sunken natural structures, don't have, I mean, one, the claims are totally illegal. Two, even if they were legal, these reefs don't afford that kind of protection. But they take these reefs and then they're pouring cement and they're building structures on, on top of them and in order to make these, these claims. And, and what they're trying to do is just create realities on the ground that will transform the, the conversation. Because now, they have these military installations and, and they're, they're telling every, every other country, what are you going to do about it?

• 26:55Speaker 00

  Are you going to, are you going to force us to leave? And, and China has built up its massive military. They're now investing hugely in hypersonic weapons, in nuclear weapons, in attack submarines. And so it's not even clear that if the United States were to challenge those, those islands, at least at this stage, and there were some kind of military confrontation, it's not even clear who, who would win. So what China's trying to do is just change the realities on the ground regardless of the, of the legalities, regardless of what it does to any concept of a rules-based international order, and then just say, well, that's, that's the reality, get used to it.

• 27:41Chris Williamson?

  They're fucking about with anchoring bias and status quo bias and first mover advantage better than anyone that I've ever seen. As you say, by proclaiming a particular situation and then matching reality to that situation, and then saying, what do you mean? This, this huge concrete building has always been here on this island. It's always been our territory. Um, I mean, It's not the most subtle of strategies, but it definitely seems like it's being effective. And it's being rolled out, it's across everything, right? It's whether you're looking at controlling information, whether you're looking at the way that they are restricting dissident conversation. There's this new rule around algorithms as well.

• 28:24Chris Williamson?

  They've just made one of the most restrictive rules on algorithms ever. What's happened there?

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, so my friend Matt Pottinger has an editorial in the New York Times today on this. And basically, China has recognized, as many of us have, that data is the new oil of the 21st century. And so what China, first, they have laws to capture the data of their own citizens, making it illegal to export that data. But now they're having laws to try to capture the data of all of companies that are operating inside of China. And so what China is doing is building these massive data sets of everybody's information inside of China and outside. And there's lots of theft of records, including, I'm assuming, my records,

• 29:13Speaker 00

  because they hacked the White House Office of Personnel, which has all of my former security clearances and other things. And then there's no doubt that they're going to weaponize that information or certainly utilize to their advantage over time. And so there's the data, there are the algorithms. And China is certainly playing for keeps. They have a might makes right mentality. That doesn't mean that that approach is necessarily going to win. But it certainly means that those of us in elsewhere in the world who don't want to live in that kind of synocentric world, a world organized around those values, we need to organize ourselves.

• 29:56Speaker 00

  We need to manifest the kind of values that we articulate. And when we look at what's happening here in the United States and what's happening in the UK. And elsewhere, it doesn't really look like that. And so, yes, we can and should be critical of what China is doing. And we have to fight back. But one of the ways of fighting back has to be reinvesting in our own democracy, our own strength, our own strategic thinking about how do we make ourselves stronger and counter the challenges that we face globally.

• 30:35Chris Williamson?

  How much do you think that the civil discontent in the West at the moment is legitimate? And how much do you think is sowed by foreign actors like the Internet Research Agency in Russia or China?

• 30:50Speaker 00

  Well, we have these debates. We have these divisions, and they are mostly indigenous. But I think that the Chinese and the Russians, and maybe a few others, but certainly the Chinese and the Russians, they are throwing lighter fluid into this existing fire. And when you have these kind of critical turning points, like the election of Donald Trump and certainly other experiences that we've experienced here in the United States around racial tensions and gun rights and abortion, they're just throwing this lighter fluid into the fire and it's exacerbating things.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  But there's a challenge because having a healthy debate, even sometimes uncomfortable debate, is essential. And we have these new vehicles like Twitter that give a lot of people voice who haven't had previously voice at this kind of scale. But at the same time, we need to protect ourselves against malicious interference and malicious disinformation campaigns.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Sowed by foreign government actors who are wishing us ill. And it's really hard to do. And so we have to both fight those foreign actors. And I think we need to reinvest in building a culture of civility, a stronger culture of civility here in the United States. That doesn't mean that we can't have differences. We can, we should. It's natural for us to do them. But I think if we just get in this world where we're just breaking into these blocks and everybody is just flinging firebombs over their wall at the other guy, I just think that's not going to be healthy for anyone.

• 32:45Chris Williamson?

  The problem is that the difference between indigenously created conflict based on something that genuinely needs to be fixed and foreign actor created problems that manifests to look like something that was created internally, they're essentially impossible for us to work out. And another thing that I've been thinking about, I've been in Texas, I've been here for a couple of weeks. And although the atmosphere here is beautiful, from watching the US from the UK over the last couple of years, the difference in this sort of environment and the sort of climate that's been in the US for the last 18 months, from what actually happened to the kind of

• 33:28Chris Williamson?

  environment that Russia or China would want the US to have if they were going to try and take this country down, it's not that far away. You think about loss of national pride, hatred of the flag, increased divisions, lack of understanding around what truth means, lack of agreement around what truth means, lack of trust in news media, lack of trust in government and political officials and all that sort of stuff. So to me, there's only two things that could be happening. One is that this is fundamentally being fueled by foreign actors and they're patting each other on the back and saying, well done. The second one is that they're maybe throwing a little bit of lighter fluid on the fire, but looking at each other and going, was this?

• 34:10Chris Williamson?

  Was this us? No? And they're just clapping as America turns around and kicks the ball into its own goal over and over and over again.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the second is more likely, and you're right, it's hard to measure exactly what it is, because there are a lot of things that are just changing in our societies. So I wouldn't, I mean, it would be absurd to say that everything that's happening, all these divisions, it's just China and Russia is making us do it. I mean, that would take away all of our agency and all of our, and all of our responsibilities. So I think that we have to very aggressively counter what China and Russia are doing, and very conveniently, both of them are blocking and protecting their own information spaces at home and public information spaces. But again, we also need to reinvest in our own democracy. I

• 35:00Speaker 00

  think there are a lot of people who don't feel heard here, and we need to make sure that we have, that we create forums. And people, you know, we all interact within structures. We're not, we don't exist in some kind of vacuum. And part of those structures are algorithmic. I mean, I, it's hard for me to measure this, but I was telling this to somebody else the other day. So I have different parts of my life, and certainly I focus some energy, a decent energy on pandemic origins, and then part on thinking about the future of the genetics and biotech revolutions, and part on one shared world,

• 35:41Speaker 00

  and how do we think about building a better world for everybody. When I, when I tweet things like, we need to dig into the origins of the pandemic, China's engaged in an illegal cover-up, responsible for millions of unnecessary deaths, we have to demand a full investigation, blah, blah, blah, that gets a lot of attention. If I tweet, we need to come together to build a safer world for everybody, it's like two people, my mother-

• 36:09Chris Williamson?

  It's not as fun, it's not as exciting, yeah.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  And, but I, so it could be that people are just seeing it and say, well, I don't care about building a safer world. Or it could be that the algorithm is somehow weighting the different things differently. And so I do think that we need to think about the structures in which our communications are happening, because the structures have inherent biases. And it's not that these are intentional biases. It's just that these biases play out over time and then have big implications.

• 36:41Chris Williamson?

  Well, they're reflections of our mentality, right, and our psychology. The limbic hijack, the fact that if it bleeds, it leads, is something that catches our attention as opposed to some lovely fluffy aphorism about one love. It's just not going to grab people's attention in the same way. Another thing that I was looking at was anti-US propaganda. Have you done much research into this from China?

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Well, certainly, there's a lot of anti-US propaganda. I can't say I've done a huge amount of research, but you look all around the world. What China is essentially trying to do is undermine the United States and highlight the very real failings of the United States. The United States didn't monumentally screw up in Afghanistan because of China, and we did it ourselves. We have a lot of self-inflicted wounds. And what China is doing is both highlighting those shortcomings and seeking to amplify the things that China actually does pretty well. I mean, we have to credit where credit's due.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  I mean, China has brought hundreds of millions of its own people out of abject poverty. They've done a great job of building physical, hard infrastructure. There are a lot of things that China does pretty well. And so that's China's game. And the United States needs to be cognizant of that, but also needs to be thoughtful and measured and strategic and inclusive in responding. I mean, it can't be the United States versus China. It has to be a coalition of people all around the world who share a positive vision of what we'd like the future to look like.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  And then China has a choice, either join that vision or not. And that's why, for example, it was so tragic when Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the earliest days of his presidency, because that's what it was. It was a bunch of countries getting together and said, Can we build a model of what we'd like trade between our countries to look like? And what are the standards? And then, once we have that model, we'll have a lot of leverage to China to say either you meet this standard or not. And that was why I thought it was a great idea. There was a lot of pressure against it. Hillary Clinton, unfortunately, during her campaign, even though negotiating this had

• 39:10Speaker 00

  been, according to her, one of the things she was proudest of, had, in my view, erroneously said that she was no longer for it, and then Donald Trump withdrew. That was a huge victory for China. And so, yes, you know, China is trying to, to use your metaphor, you know, kicking a lot of balls at our goal, but we're also kicking balls into our own goal, and we've got to change that.

• 39:38Chris Williamson?

  One thing I was thinking about to do with the popular media representation in China, let's say in their cinema, of the sort of colonialists, imperialists, like awful sort of classic Western depiction of Americans. I wonder whether that's ethically much different to how the US was portraying the classic evil Russian in a turtleneck and a black cap, you know, throughout the 80s? Because that was part of the US's rhetoric then.

• 40:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was. I mean, certainly, looking at who are the bad guys and how are they portrayed is part of just understanding how societies function. And in many ways, I think China, which, I mean, again, it's about shifting realities. China's now accusing the United States of having a Cold War mentality. But China has had a Cold War mentality against the United States, even from the earliest days. I'm just finishing a book called The Long Game by Rush Doshi. And it's pretty incredible because it looks at the Chinese sources of how they were articulating what they were doing. And even at the height of US efforts, when the United States was saying, "All right,

• 40:55Speaker 00

  we need to integrate China into the rules-based international order. We need to create a space for them so that, and that over time, their society will evolve, and we can work together." It was, I'm sure, it wasn't so pure as that. But that's what the story that the United States leaders were telling ourselves, and I was in government then. But from the Chinese sources, it was like, these guys want to screw us. We have to sneak in, we have to use their institutions to undermine them. I mean, really, from day one, according to Chinese sources, the goal was not to integrate into a global system for the mutual good. I mean, China thought that that was too beneficial to the United States,

• 41:40Speaker 00

  but to simulate engagement with those institutions in order to undermine and weaken them.

• 41:48Chris Williamson?

  China is playing so much of a longer game, it would feel like, than, you know, it is the chess versus checkers analogy. Was there a, um, I feel like I saw-

• 41:59Speaker 00

  I think Go versus checkers.

• 42:02Chris Williamson?

  Go versus checkers, yeah, yeah, good way to, good way to make it ethnically appropriate. Did I see an interview where you mentioned that one of the ideas behind the US enabling Chinese trade was that by raising living standards and by raising, bringing their population out of poverty, the presumption is that democracy kind of comes along for the ride, that you have this educated populace, they have better living standards, and then they start to, once they've got food and water and heat and shelter, they start to look at these bigger questions. But what perhaps we hadn't accounted for was the power of a very authoritarian regime with technology to deploy its means.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's exactly right. There were people like Tom Carruthers and others, who certainly in the, in the later, mid to later 90s, were making this argument that once people get to be around, have around $7,000 in annual income, they start to make demands and it forces governments to change to meet the demands of those empowered public. And in my mind, it's a little bit of the arrogance on our side to feel, and it was the same thing with the Francis Fukuyama argument about the end of history. They just assumed that there's just one path, and we know it, and we're on it, and we had that kind of arrogance. And frankly, that arrogance hurt us, because we thought, well, all we need to do is help

• 43:33Speaker 00

  China get rich. We just need to open our systems, and we just need to have an open internet. And then the pull, the structural pull of all these is going to be so transformative that there's nothing that the Chinese government can do. Bill Clinton had a famous line, we talked about the Chinese internet, he's trying to control the internet, he's trying to nail Jell-O to the wall, good luck with that. Well, China's nailed Jell-O to the wall, they've done actually a great job. They've gotten rich, their average income is above that level, and they are pioneering just a different model of organization. And in many ways, it's working, in some ways, for the people who are living in China, as

• 44:18Speaker 00

  I mentioned. Different estimates, 700 million people brought out of abject poverty. We talk about realizing the Sustainable Development Goals, most of that work has just been done by China, not because the United Nations declared these standards, or Jeffrey Sachs helped think them up, because the Chinese government, for its own purposes, was doing what it wanted to do to improve the well-being and status of China and the people in China. So, it was almost an arrogant view on our side.

• 44:59Speaker 00

  So I don't think that democracy, liberal democracy, is in any way inevitable. But if we believe in it, if we believe in the rules-based international order, we need to think about, well, how do we grow it? How do we grow it in an inclusive way? And again, I'm American, and I'm certainly a patriotic, in my way, American, but that doesn't mean that I think America has done everything right. We certainly did a great job of helping win two world wars, and organize the world after the Second, and defend it. The free world for a long time, but massive flaws, massive shortcomings,

• 45:39Speaker 00

  massive selfishness in terms of our our use of natural natural resources. And there's a lot to criticize on all sides. And I think we need to, we need to do that. And we need to articulate what's the kind of world that we'd like to live in. And then try to to build the best path from here to there.

• 45:58Chris Williamson?

  Here's the thing, man. It may end up being that a modern society really struggles to flourish under a democracy. That the, I think about this all the time, that the principles of freedom genuinely might be some sort of old and worldly, hark back thing that is really, really challenging to wrangle when you have technology and ubiquitous communication and all this sort of stuff. Now, I don't disagree that it makes for a more flourishing life. I think that that is how you can maximize a human's enjoyment of their days. But we're not talking about that here. We're not talking about enjoyment. We're talking about effectiveness. And it may end up being that an authoritarian regime like the CCP is so much more effective

• 46:42Chris Williamson?

  that without correct checks and balances, without correct sanctions, without correct foresight and long term planning, that it, they're so much more effective that you can't compete with them with a freedom based society. You know, I mean, all of the time that's been spent with political infighting and divisions in the US, if all of that had been put toward moving in one direction as a unified front and going together, imagine how much more progress we would have made. Now, the problem that we have is because it's a democracy and because people have freedom, they are free to disagree, which causes people to take one step forward and one step back, as opposed to in China, where if you want to disagree, you just go do forced

• 47:26Chris Williamson?

  labor, like you're you're just unpersoned for a while. And that means that everybody is moving in the same direction. So, yeah, that that really concerns me. The fact that freedom may be fundamentally incompatible with a modern technologically advanced world when you have a CCP like party there competing on a global scale.

• 47:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, so democracy is not an end in itself. It's a means to the end of good and accountable governance, and it's got to deliver. And certainly, the argument that you just made, we've heard it before. People were making that argument with the United States and the Soviet Union, and especially in the early years, how can we compete when they're all on the same line, like moving in the same direction with North and South Korea in the early days. North Korea was developing faster than South Korea, and people in South Korea were saying, well, how can we flourish with democracies? So people have made that argument repeatedly.

• 48:30Speaker 00

  Economically, when Japan was taking off, and they had their famous NITI Ministry of Industry and Technology, people were saying, well, how can we, with our messier economy, compete with Japan? And in all of those cases, democracy and open society flourished. And I still believe in open societies. But that doesn't mean, and connected to what I was saying before, that that success is predetermined. We've got to make it happen, and we've got to make sure that our open societies are able to deliver. And then when we talk about open societies, they really are open societies.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  And that's why we need to make sure, at least here in the United States, that our democracy functions. And that's also why it concerns me so much when I see that elements of the Republican Party, for example, seem to have a strategy of disenfranchisement, of kind of trying to reduce the electorate in order to achieve a different goal. And I'm sure there'll be listeners to this podcast who disagree with that. But we need to make sure our democracy works. We need to make sure that people feel it works, and we need to make sure that it's delivering. I talked about China bringing 700 million people out of abject poverty. We don't have 700 million people here in the United States. We have a lot of people who are living in abject poverty.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  We have a lot of people whose life prospects are way less than other people, and we can't afford to throw people away.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  There are people now who are being born in terrible situations, slums, who have the potential to be Mozart's and Einstein's and John von Neumann's and Isaac Newton's, whatever you want. But we're not allowing those people the opportunity to contribute in the ways that we need them to. So I know open societies can and hopefully will win in the end, but it's not on autopilot. Every person has a role to play in realizing that future.

• 50:36Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that the Chinese citizens are happy where they are? Because I'm always struck by the resilience and the adaptability of our systems to wherever it is that we go. And very quickly, we just become acclimatized to whatever the environment is that we're in, whether that be political, cultural, the temperature that we live in, the weather that we live in, as I've found coming from the UK out to Texas. And I wonder just how differently people feel in China. You know, I mean, I read the other day that the Chinese government's got gate analysis technology that's 96% accurate. So this means that a video camera can work out who you are with a 96% accuracy

• 51:21Chris Williamson?

  without seeing your face, simply by analyzing the biomechanics of how you walk. I mean, that is, and then social credit system, the tracking of internet, basically no state versus business, private, all of that stuff, right? Have you got any idea about what it's like to be a Chinese citizen living over there under this sort of regime and the happiness?

• 51:44Speaker 00

  Well, certainly I've visited China many, many times before I was condemned by the spokesman of the Chinese Foreign Ministry by name from the podium in Beijing. And so I'm not sure if I can go back now or ever. But it's hard to tell because on one hand, you know, up to 50 million people are dead as a result of Mao's disastrous policies and the Chinese Communist Party. declares publicly all the time that they are the inheritors of Mao's legacy. And so, I mean, most everybody in China has a relative who's dead because of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party. Everybody recognizes that you can speak freely.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  But when they do opinion polls and there's an open question of whether people are, can speak freely, people have a lot of confidence in their government. People in China recognize that their material well-being has ma- on average has massively increased compared to their, to their parents or certainly to their grandparents who were living in, in abject, in abject poverty. So, yes, nobody, I would say, nobody likes to be surveilled to the extent that people are surveilled in China. China, as much as their spending on national security spends even more on domestic security.

• 53:04Chris Williamson?

  No way. So they, they outspend international security spending internally.

• 53:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 53:11Chris Williamson?

  That's crazy.

• 53:13Speaker 00

  All, but factoring in all of those things, are Chinese people on average happier or less happy than people here in the United States? I don't know. I mean, certainly, there are a lot of reasons for people in China to be happy and unhappy. And certainly, there are a lot of reasons for people here in the United States to be happy and unhappy. And it sometimes feels that there's a lot of energy going into amplifying unhappiness and, and anger. And that's, Steven Pinker has been kind of the person who's, who's one of the people who's kind of carried this, this banner. It's like, hey, let's just look at things. We're more educated, healthier, living longer than ever before.

• 53:58Speaker 00

  And things are really just getting better. We do live in an open society where we can constantly, and we do constantly, throw the bums out. And, and as angry as, you know, people on, on the left were about Trump, and now people on the right are about Biden, at least, and I hope when we have a functioning democracy, there's, there's a feeling, well, I'm going to fight for it. But by fight, if fight means that we're going to go attack the Capitol and smash the window and try to... Paying the vice president, like that's, that's what it looks like in, in banana republics, where you have, you know, forced coups, or people manipulate the structures of the electoral

• 54:42Speaker 00

  system and, and no, and people don't feel that governance is legitimate. So, long way of saying, I believe in open societies. If we want to keep ours, we have to invest in it, because every morning that we wake up here in the United States, that's the new record for the longest democracy in human history. Longest, and so, we don't know how long democracies can, can survive. Maybe there's some, we'll learn in a thousand years, there's an inherent rule of democracies, that they can only last 300 years, and it happens over and over. Or maybe we'll learn that democracy as a form can really succeed, but it'll have to rejuvenate itself.

• 55:27Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about this tennis player that just got disappeared in China.

• 55:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, Peng Shuai is a, is a very famous Chinese tennis player. She's been in three Olympics and a real superstar. She then put out a message on, on social media, essentially accusing somebody who had actually had been her, her off and on lover for a decade, but who was a, a very, very senior Chinese official of sexual assault. And then she disappeared. And so, there, there's been a big international outcry. More recently, there was a call set up between her and the head of the International Olympic Committee, which didn't really, really

• 56:15Speaker 00

  resolve anything. So here's how I, I see that issue. It's a big deal in China for a high-profile celebrity to make any kind of public claim that's not aligned with government interests, let alone to accuse a member of the, a former member of the Chinese Politburo of a sexual assault. From the Chinese government perspective, I think the reason why they moved so aggressively to squash her and her message is I think they're afraid of a Me Too movement in China. Because in China, like in many other countries, I can give you a 100% guarantee

• 56:58Speaker 00

  that many senior members of the Chinese Communist Party have assaulted women over time and abused their power. There's a 100% chance of that. It's not just in China. It happens in countries all around, all around, around the world. If there were a Me Too movement, as happened in the United States, in France, and in many other places, the Chinese government fears that could get out of hand. And it's exactly why with Falun Gong, which is kind of like a spiritual yoga club, and China attacked them and has imprisoned and killed many members of Falun Gong. The Chinese Communist Party is afraid of any kind of social organization not sanctioned by them.

• 57:43Speaker 00

  And they're afraid of any person getting the ability to deliver a message contrary to the message of the Chinese Communist Party. So that's why Jack Ma, the richest man in China, he criticizes the Chinese government and he vanishes. Fan Bingbing, who's one of the lead actresses, is accused of not playing by the rules. He disappears and has to come back much later, groveling and asking for forgiveness. We've seen this story over and over and over. And the theme of it is the Chinese Communist Party will do anything to control its narrative. And that's the connection with the COVID origin. They have their story.

• 58:25Speaker 00

  They'll do whatever it takes to defend their story. And that's why with Peng Shuai, they're willing to crack down. They don't want to lose the Olympics. But it's great that there are people like Inez Kanter of the Boston Celtics, who are, who are raising really important questions and challenging China.

• 58:45Speaker 00

  And on COVID origins, that's why we have to demand a full investigation, just like we have to demand that China be, that if they want to host the Olympics, if they want to get this opportunity to be part of the international community, it comes with obligations. And that's why, more broadly, I've called for every media organization that's covering the Olympics to spend 25% of their full media time covering issues of Tibet, Xinjiang, South China Sea, human rights in China.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  Every corporate sponsor that's spending on the Beijing Olympics should spend 10% of its full spend supporting the victims of these atrocities. And whether they're Tibetans, Uighurs, or investing in supporting organizations fighting for democracy in Hong Kong and many other situations.

• 59:47Chris Williamson?

  It is crazy that China can be a part of a global movement, which is the Olympics sport. It's the Winter Olympics they've got next year, right?

• 59:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 59:54Chris Williamson?

  And yet, not play by the rules that the rest of the world adheres to or says is fair. There is something, yeah, there's something icky about the entire China situation, which I guess is that we require them to keep the capitalist machine moving forward. There is also perverse incentives, people being monetized. You saw that ridiculous turnaround. Who was that wrestler that gave the?

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 1:00:26Chris Williamson?

  John Cena.

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  John Cena. It was, I actually tweeted against him. I mean, it is, let me just use this opportunity to condemn John Cena. John Cena, if you're listening to this podcast, you are a scoundrel. You're supposed to be a tough guy. That's your entire brand. And China criticizes you and you get on your hands and knees and bark like a dog. Show some backbone. Talk to Enes Kanter. That's what courage looks like. Standing up for things, standing up for people and standing up for human rights. And I challenge you, John Cena, to come on this podcast with me. And let's have the conversation about China. If you think that the Chinese Communist Party is doing such a great job.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  If they are supporting human rights so much that you'll do everything you can to support them. Come and make that case and let's have a conversation.

• 1:01:20Chris Williamson?

  You heard it, John Cena? Yeah, I mean, it's, man, it's so, it's, it makes me feel so icky. It makes me feel so uncomfortable generally, the whole situation around China. Going back to Peng Shuai and the other people that kind of get disappeared for a while. What do you think happens? Do you think, I mean, are they being taken away and tortured? Are they being taken away? And what is it that?

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  Not taken away, so the Chinese government is very sophisticated. I don't think that Peng Shuai or Jack Ma or Fan Bingbing, none of them were tortured. As a matter of fact, I'm certain of it. But the Chinese government has a lot of levers over people like that. They can destroy their lives. They can imprison their relatives. They can take away their means of making a living, of communicating with their, with their fans. So they really have a lot of leverage. And they're fully willing to use that leverage when they feel it's, it's necessary. Including against other members of the Chinese Communist Party.

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  Who get on the wrong side, like, well, I mean, like many of them. And so that's what they're, that's what they're doing. And that's frankly, why the many scientists, who I believe almost certainly have a lot of relevant information of the origins of the pandemic. They don't dare speak. And certainly they've been threatened by the Chinese government. There are laws preventing them from speaking. But if they speak, even if they make a run for it and get outside of the country and speak. Their families will be in very significant danger. So this, this is a very thorough control mechanism.

• 1:03:02Chris Williamson?

  When you saw the first photos of Peng Shuai and she was surrounded by animals. People can Google this if they want to try and see. I think she posted it on WeChat, which is kind of like Chinese Facebook. And um. It's the most sinister looking room for somebody that's been missing for a long time to arrive in is all of these weird children's toys on a shelf behind her. And then there's a selfie of her holding one of them. It's the proper horror movie shit.

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  And so I have no idea whether that's actually her room or it's a it's a it's a movie set. But regardless, let's just say that that is her room. Let's we'll give China the benefit of the doubt. Some crew from the Chinese propaganda department came there and set up that.

• 1:03:51Chris Williamson?

  There's a photo shoot with you and all of your soft toys.

• 1:03:54Speaker 00

  You know, it's it's it's just sinister and it's gross. And we have to be honest about it. We have to condemn it and we have to hold China accountable.

• 1:04:04Chris Williamson?

  Did you see this new ruling that they've brought in to do with video games for teenagers?

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:04:09Chris Williamson?

  Oh, man.

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, no, I don't know. I did. I did see that. I did see that. And so what I what I will say is that China looks at other countries around the region and around the world like we'll use Korea as an example. And then says, well, here's what we would like to be like, and here's what we don't want to be like. And so we don't want, according to China, is a bunch of kids spending their life playing video games. And we don't want a bunch of young people modeling themselves after what what we from a Chinese perspective see as effeminate Korean movie stars. And so what China does is pass rules. This is the way it should be. Men should act like men. Kids should not watch video games.

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  And and every parent in the world faces this kind of thing. Like when your kid is on playing video games or on social media all day, or they, you know, start wearing funky clothes or whatever, every parent says, well, maybe we should have a rule. And I just think that with China, their whole thing is everything. I mean, it's a it's a country largely ruled by engineers. They have an engineering for their government has an engineering philosophy of life, social engineering, environmental engineering, the Three Gorges Dam and the South to North Water Diversion Project and all of these other things. Everything can be engineered according to them. And again, that's why those of us who believe in open societies, and I do.

• 1:05:38Speaker 00

  We just need to really invest our energy in making sure that our open societies can function.

• 1:05:44Chris Williamson?

  What does this masculinizing, this manlying of the Chinese population look like? They're just trying to create a breed of alpha males walking around. What's going on there?

• 1:05:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it looks like it. I mean, when you... So I think it's a contrast. What they're trying to do is contrast to at least their perception of Korean and Japanese men. And there's just a popular kind of way of looking for Korean movie stars, male movie stars in K-pop, that I think China has a lot of disdain for. In Japan, which had kind of an overemphasized vision of kind of aggressive masculinity in the 30s and the first half of the 40s. Now, there's a popular model, I can't remember the exact word, but it's something like vegetarian men who are perceived, and I would love to vegetarian, who are perceived as these kind of wimpy men

• 1:06:42Speaker 00

  who go to these, whatever they're called, mistress cafes or whatever, and remain virgins until they're 600 years old, or whatever the stereotype is. And I think China is trying to say, well, that's not what we want. I mean, our model are these rugged people, rugged founders of the state who were engaged in the Long March. And again, because China's history, the Chinese Communist Party's history, is in many ways a fabrication. They have to over-invest in that fabrication.

• 1:07:25Speaker 00

  And that's why China, every year, they have these massive World War II victory parades. And it's true that Chinese people fought in the Second World War, but the Chinese Communist Party played a very minimal role in fighting the Japanese.

• 1:07:43Chris Williamson?

  Hang on, Jamie, roll it back for a second. China has a World War II victory party. Every year?

• 1:07:51Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:07:52Chris Williamson?

  What the fuck?

• 1:07:52Speaker 00

  It's a commemoration. No, no, well, I mean, lots of countries do that. I mean, the United States has it. But the thing is, the Chinese entity that spent a lot of its time and energy fighting the Japanese was the government under the nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek. The communists under Mao hardly fought the Japanese. And what their mission was to was to maintain their power so they could fight the communists, which they did, particularly after the Second World War. So it's preposterous that the Chinese Communist Party is celebrating this victory over the Japanese, that they didn't play a significant role in in bringing about.

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  But again, it's this point where China has this kind of imaginary view. And then they work to to try to make it real. Again, like when China, when the Chinese Communist Party talks about, well, China has this ancient civilization, which is absolutely true. But they hardly mention that during the Cultural Revolution, China was destroying its own history. It was burning and destroying its own manuscripts, smashing its greatest art. And and so in many ways, and then murdering so many people representing the older, the older systems. And so in some ways, China is really a startup nation.

• 1:09:19Speaker 00

  And there are benefits to being a startup nation. But again, China has these fake mythologies. And then the government just invests enormous resources into turning these fabrications into things that people feel are real. And maybe every country does that, but China does it at an industrial scale.

• 1:09:40Chris Williamson?

  Isn't there a concern about if China was to invade Taiwan? That there's quite a lot of Chinese historical artifacts, museums, that would then be part of this destruction. Is that right?

• 1:09:53Speaker 00

  I don't know if they'd be part of this destruction, but when Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists retreated to Taiwan in 1949 after they'd lost the Chinese Civil War, they took the treasures, the greatest treasures of Chinese civilization with them, which are now part of this incredible museum in Taipei.

• 1:10:17Chris Williamson?

  Have you been?

• 1:10:18Speaker 00

  I have been. It's spectacular. And so China, which, again, under Mao, destroyed its own history. I mean, there was a lot of great stuff that was left. And again, the manuscripts were burned, the treasures of art were smashed. The people who carried those cultural legacies were ostracized or even killed. And so, yeah, absolutely. So China is now claiming all of those artworks and masterpieces from Taiwan. Ironically, if Chiang Kai-shek and lots of problems with Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists hadn't taken those masterpieces with them, most of them would certainly have been destroyed.

• 1:11:03Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, man. I don't know. It's, um, roll the clock forward for me then. Roll the clock forward over the next sort of 10 to 20 years. I know that you're not able to bring out your clairvoyant crystal orb and see what's happening.

• 1:11:17Speaker 00

  I have a little of it.

• 1:11:18Chris Williamson?

  What do you reckon's gonna happen?

• 1:11:21Speaker 00

  So I don't know what's going to happen, but there are some different options. And there's some bad options and there are some good options. Here's a bad option. China continues its efforts to undermine the rules-based international order. The rest of the world doesn't do a sufficient job of fighting back and standing up for the principles that we believe in, including by making our own societies stronger and better. And we live in a world that looks much more like history, where there is a kind of a central power, a colonial power, that's exerting its influence over everybody else. We've seen this story over and over.

• 1:12:06Speaker 00

  The British did it, the Mongols did it, the Romans did it. And that doesn't mean it's all terrible, but it means it undermines this, again, this post-war liberal international order that I actually believe in. So that's one. There's another story where the rest of the world really reinvests in our open societies. We come together, we exert a lot of influence, and we have enough pressure and influence and unity to give a message to China. You have two options: either to play a more constructive role in the world, or you're just going to be more and more isolated, even though you're a big country. And then China has a strategic choice.

• 1:12:50Speaker 00

  There's a third option, which is a very real possibility, which is war. I think war and military conflict is on the horizon. You can't have countries building all of the tools for a massive world war and just assume it's never going to happen. We're moving in that direction. And then there's the fourth, and it's the utopian One Shared World view, is that we all realize that there's just a better way to do things, that our human society has evolved, and that we need to find a way to balance our narrower interests as citizens

• 1:13:33Speaker 00

  of single countries and consumers of products made by single corporations, and our broader interests as humans sharing the same planet where our fates, as the pandemic and climate change and other things have showed us, are so intimately intertwined. So I don't think that's going to happen in 10 or 20 years, but I certainly hope, and that's why I and we founded One Shared World, that there's just a lot of energy of existing movements, like the Greta Thunberg and the climate movement and all sorts of movement. We think there's a unifying principle, which is a recognition of the mutual responsibilities of our deep global interdependence, and that if we can all, all of these groups and all

• 1:14:17Speaker 00

  these people around the world rally behind those principles, if we can create a strong enough magnetic field to draw people in China, who are wonderful people, I think everybody in China, most everybody in China, would like to be part of the world in a constructive way. There's just an issue of governance and government. Then I think that that's a more utopian version. It's going to be harder to achieve. But if we don't articulate where we'd like to be, we'll never get there. I mean, Henry David Thoreau has a quote that I use all the time, and embarrassingly, it was in my high school yearbook in Kansas City, which is, if you've built castles in the

• 1:14:59Speaker 00

  sky, your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now build the foundations under them.

• 1:15:07Chris Williamson?

  Where should people go? They want to read more about the work that you do.

• 1:15:10Speaker 00

  So I hope they'll go to my website, jamiemetzl.com. There, there's links to, I have, if you print it out, it's 50 pages on pandemic origins. I've written five books, and you can learn about them there. My most recent is hacking Darwin, Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity. But you can, why, I had a short story, A Visit to Weizenbaum that was made into a film, and you can watch that short film. It's only 15 minutes on my website. JamieMetzl.com is the key to everything else.

• 1:15:45Chris Williamson?

  Jamie Metzl, ladies and gentlemen. Jamie, thank you so much for today. It's been awesome.

• 1:15:49Speaker 00

  Thanks so much, Chris. Really my pleasure.