Dmitri Alperovitch - Co-Founder of CrowdStrike | What Happens if China Invades Taiwan

You have an arms race, a conventional one, a nuclear one, you have a technology war, you have an economic war, you have a space race where both countries are trying to get to the moon before the other, and potentially then on to Mars. The one thing that is most similar and most dangerous is you have a regional flashpoint that can take the two powers into a conflict. The Berlin Wall actually stabilized the Cold War. China, I think, is actually a weaker power than the Soviet Union ever was doing the first Cold War. If you're a Western business, you can't operate in a place if you don't have access to, or as you can trust. At the height of 2008, right, at the time when we had our real estate bubble, real estate was about 10% of our GDP. Today in China, it is 30%. Just on a match in both sides, China has encircled Taiwan with these military exercises, but you have about 4,000 Chinese nationals crossing that border every single day. There's not 4,000 Americans trying to get into China every single day. Mission accomplished, pull out, and no one rusher bats at eye, and he's perfectly secure in his position, pal. Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. Very exciting news. HubSpots inbound converts is back, which means you got to clear your schedules, mark your calendars, get the sitter, three jam pack days from September 18th through the 20th live and boss, and you're going to hear inspirational narratives, candid interviews on the highs and lows of incredibly notable figures, business owners, politicians, you're going to learn from successful entrepreneurs like Ryan Reynolds and Serena Williams on how they reinvented themselves and their businesses to achieve massive success. They're going to gain valuable insights from industry leaders, visionaries on effective strategies for personal and professional growth, and there's so much more. And on top of all that, I'm speaking again, this is my third inbound, so I'll be doing a segment. So if you want to hear from Ryan Reynolds, Serena Williams, or you want to hear from me, go to inbound.com, go see the lineup, and grab your ticket today. I'll see you in Boston. Dimitri, I'm excited for this. I'm very interested in not only what you've built over your career, obviously massively successful, but your transition from somebody who has focused on building companies, on protecting companies to somebody who is looking at threats internationally. So I guess there is a little bit of a segue. There is a little bit of a common thread between what you've built and then what you focus on now. But maybe just talk to me about what you believe is happening with China, why you believe that we are currently in a cold war. Yeah, I believe we're fundamentally a world on the brink, which happens to be the title of my book. And we are on the brink potentially of a catastrophic conflict. You know, three years ago now, I was one of the first geopolitical analysts to have predicted that Putin was going to invade Ukraine months before it actually occurred. I came out publicly saying he's going to do it this winter before the winter was going to be over. And the reasons that drove me to believe that he would do this are the same reasons that I'm not seeing apply to the situation across the Taiwan straight, which she, I believe, wanted to invade Taiwan and conquer it. Not necessarily in the immediate future. I don't think this is imminent. This would be an incredibly difficult military operation to pull off, perhaps the most difficult in history. And he's simply not ready yet. But over the course of the next 48 years, I think you have a window that's going to open where he's going to potentially achieve a military balance of power in that specific region and that specific operation that could lead him to think that he has an advantage over the United States, over Taiwan, over Japan, over Australia, to potentially launch this operation. And I argue in the book that Taiwan is really existential to US interests in a way that I think most Americans do not pay attention to. I think in many minds, to the extent that people think about Taiwan and they think about semiconductors, I think wachips. And of course, Taiwan is the world's factory for production of semiconductors. It produces most of the advanced chips, but also a lot of foundational chips that you need for pretty much anything, any modern electronics that you might have to keep driver or economy. But beyond the chips, Taiwan's position in the region, the anchor point of the first island chain that helps to keep China contained is really, really vital. And it's always been vital to the US policy. In fact, General Douglas MacArthur in 1950, 75 years ago, said that this is an unsingual aircraft carrier. We'll hunt before the age of the, the dawn of the age of computing, long before semiconductors, it was that vital to us. And I do think that we're now in a new Cold War with China that plays out on a whole slew of battlefields. We have a global competition for supremacy and questionably taking place with China. There's economic, there's diplomatic, there's military, there's technological, and it plays out in every corner of the world, whether it's Latin America, Africa, Europe, and certainly Asia as well. You have an arms race, a conventional one, a nuclear one, you have a technology war, you have an economic war, you have a space race where both countries are trying to get to the moon before the other, and potentially then on to Mars. So you have all these elements of the competition. Of course, the one thing that is most similar and most dangerous is you have a regional flashpoint that can take the two powers into a conflict. So during the first Cold War, that was really West Berlin. People have forgotten already by and large because the Cuban missile crisis is so prominent in everyone's minds about this risky period in the Cold War, where you had a very high risk of nuclear war. But that was 13 days in October of 1962, and half which time most people didn't even realize there was a risk because that information did not get publicized by the Kennedy administration right away. But the summer before was actually much more dangerous or just as dangerous, I should say, because that summer, President Kennedy meets with Khrushchev in June of 1961. Going into that meeting, he once established a better relationship. He thinks that we've had 15 plus years of the Cold War, and that's enough, and it's time to set this relationship on a better track. He writes letters to him. He goes into the meeting, and Khrushchev wants to have none of it. He is saying, you need to pull out a West Berlin, you and your allies, where I'm going to invade. And Kennedy comes away shaking up from this meeting, and he gets determined to fight for West Berlin, even at the risk of nuclear war. He goes on television that summer. He warns the American public of a potential conflict that is coming. He outlines the case for why we're going to risk nuclear conflict over this little outpost of freedom surrounded by East Germany. And he even asks Congress to allocate money for fallout shelters to prepare for nuclear conflict, right? That was the entire summer. That was incredibly dangerous. You had more duck and cover drills and the like during that period. And then in August, at the end of that summer, Kennedy has woken up one day, and he's told that the East Germans are building the wall. And you know what he does? He celebrates. You know, 25 years later, you had President Reagan say, Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall, but Kennedy says, you know what, this is not a perfect solution, but it's much better than the war. And if he's building the wall, he's not invading. We have just pulled back from the brink. And the cold war actually stabilized, I mean, the Berlin Wall actually stabilized the Cold War and allowed us to get much later on, but then I follow in decades to detain to arms control agreements and really step away from the brink. And I argue today, we need, of course, a figurative wall across the time, one straight. We need to restore the military balance of power, power. We need to restore deterrence. We need to extract more economic leverage over China to deter this action against Taiwan that would be devastating for us, would be devastating to the world. And if you can do that, the Cold War wouldn't end. You would still have this global competition taking place, but we would not be very likely to go to a conflict with China because this is the only place where US troops will likely be committed to fighting China. President Biden has now set on four occasions that he would send Americans to fight for Taiwan. That will not happen anywhere else. That will not happen over some rocks, artificial islands in the South China Sea. That will not happen in these Senkakwa rocks that are disputed territories between Japan and China. We would find a way to de-escalate a crisis over those things because they're not fundamentalistic to us, right? But this is, and this is that one place where you risking horrible war. So I appreciate the context and the thesis and the amount of research you've put into this, because like you said, I think a lot of people's memories are very short. Now, I also think that a lot of people are very ignorant and I think are so concerned with what's happening in their own backyard. They are not as wellverse. Some people are, but of course, as you are in what's happening overseas and what's happening with China and they maybe just see it on the news, but it's just another problem out there and it doesn't mean a lot to what's happening in my day to day. And I think that the majority of individuals are kind of just more selfish and focused on what's happening in their own life. So I'm curious, first of all, for you in particular, you made your whole life was spent in threat analysis and preventing threats. Why did you move from crowd strike? Why did you move from cyber security, understanding threats to businesses in the US and abroad into this geopolitical arena? Because you've gone so deep into this. What is, I can sort of see a common thread, but I want you to tell it to me because I want to understand where you take your career, why did you move from building businesses, investing in businesses? And I think you still have a family office now and you're still investing and that could be your full-time thing. But you chose to put a book out, write a book about this, invest in this, learn about it, understand it, sort of be a prominent voice for this particular subject. So walk me through that. Well, I've always been passionate about geopolitics, so this is not just something I woke up one day and decided to do. I studied in college, along with cyber security. So this has always been in the back of my mind. I always been a news junkie following. Russia very closely, following history very closely, always been in history junkies well. And in 2010, my life really changed. In fact, it was in January of 2010 when I was still an executive at McAfee at the time, one of the largest cyber security firms. And I get a call from a company called Google, you may have heard of them. And they told us that they were experiencing an intrusion from what they believe was the nation's state of China and that they wanted to collaborate with McAfee because a number of McAfee customers, really huge companies, were part of that whole intrusion. It was the first time really that the public, when Google would later come out with their investigation learned about nation states doing cyber hacks. Before that time, everyone was sort of focused on criminals, people breaking into bank accounts, stealing your credit cards, sending you spam and fishing emails, or activists are doing this for notoriety or some sort of political purpose, but not intelligence agencies, not armed services. And if anyone really thought about it, they would say, well, they're probably doing something but it's probably against national security targets. They're doing espionage and cyber like they've traditionally done against political targets and whatnot. And this was a private company, right? The set of private companies are hacked. And as I started pulling on the threads and that investigation ended up leading, calling Operation Aurora, realized that this was happening all over the place. That intellectual property was being taken by China. Later on, I've done investigations on North Koreans, of Iranians, of Russians, and really realized that the nation states were a huge part of this cyber ecosystem and I want to phrase back then that said that we don't actually have a cyber problem. We have Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea problem. And what I meant by that is not that every single hack is coming from those four places, but a huge number of them are and both from a nation state perspective, the intelligence services and the militaries of these countries doing this, but also cyber criminals are operating in some of these countries. And the reason that it's happening is because those countries are adversarial to our interests, obviously, and have been for many decades. And at a minimum, when they have criminals operating within their country, they're hacking American businesses, American consumers, and in minimum, they tend to look away and not follow through on prosecution requests from our law enforcement alike. And at a maximum are supporting them, potentially even recruiting them into their intelligence services, giving them taskings and the like. And it's not to say that there are no criminals, let's say in America or in Britain or elsewhere, they're doing cyber activity, but they tend to get caught quickly. And law enforcement in those countries tend to investigate them and prosecute them. And that does not happen in Russia, in China, in Iran, in particular, no real cyber crime in North Korea, it's all state-sponsored. And that's really the difference that you've been able to create an ecosystem of impunity that exists in these countries where both criminals and activists and ultimately, of course, nation state actors are doing all this stuff, where over time it became the majority of all the activity that we started to see against Western businesses. And geopolitics were at the heart of it, right? The problem was not a technological one. It was one of understanding who your attackers are, attribution was vital. That was the whole premise for starting CrowdStrike in 2011. When I realized that the nation states are a huge problem, and you need to understand the adversary, we had a tagline early on in the company's life, you don't have a malware problem, you have an adversary problem, and that was really game changer in the thinking about how to approach the cyber issue. And I ended up being involved in a lot of high-profile investigations. There were really geopolitical events that our country has gone through, whether it was the hack of the DNC in 2016, or the hack of Sony by North Korea in 2014, and many others. And this has always been a huge passion of mine of how do we actually think about this problem differently, not just as a technology problem. So when I retired from CrowdStrike in 2020, I wanted to focus full-time, or most of my time, on really addressing the problems that America faces in the geopolitical realm, primarily focusing on the competition with China that I believe will be the defining factor of the century, and how do we win this new Cold War? So in some ways, it was a very natural transition and a culmination of a lot of things that have done over a course of my life for the last 20-plus years. I'm actually curious. Have you ever worked with Keith Crack? Because I know that he also focuses on this post-tech career. So he's also focused on sort of the emergence of China and the risk they pose. So I'm curious if you've ever done anything with him, and it's totally a separate conversation, but it's interesting. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, absolutely. So he's got an institute, which I also do. I have one in Johns Hopkins. He started one at Purdue University, focused a lot on this global competition. He focused a lot on semiconductors, which we do as well. At my own think tank, Silverado. So we have some overlaps. So it's obviously, when you start to pay attention to it, you start to realize how big an issue it is, and you sort of had a front row seat because you were dealing with companies that were on the receiving end of some of these attacks. So I've listened to a few of your thoughts on this. Radalio believes that China will have an inevitable rise, and you disagree with that. And I'm curious about if you disagree with Radalio's view on China's inevitable rise, what do you believe can happen? At best case scenario, what does us winning this cold war look like? And what is the perfect set of geopolitical conditions that you hope to accomplish with awareness, with advocacy, with think tank, with policy influence? I guess I don't want it to just be doom and gloom. I want to have some sort of roadmap for where we can go, given that this is a real threat. Yeah, and you know, my book world on the brink America can be China in the race of the 21st century is actually very optimistic, believe it or not, despite the title because the first half of the book talks about the problem, the reason why I tell him on matters, the reason why we're in path to conflict. But the second part of the book actually talks about solutions. And it argues that we have every strength over China. China is much weaker than we think that they are. We are much stronger. China I think is actually a weaker power than the Soviet Union ever was during the first cold war. If we won that one, we can absolutely win this one. We have all the ingredients for victory. The only question is that we're willing to use them. Do we have the political will to do so? And look, the strategy for victory begins with keeping the cold war cold, right? We managed to do that for the first cold war. It was not easy and there were these very tense moments, of course, particularly in the 1960s, where the conflict risked escalation. But if we managed to do that with China, if we managed to keep them from invading Taiwan, their long-term trajectory is not great at all. I completely disagree with Ray Dalio. In fact, this was a common wisdom, you know, 10, even five years ago that China's rising is inevitable. America is in decline. I never believed that. Nowadays, more people, I think, are moving over to my side of the equation rather than his. Because if you look at just economics and demographics, China is really screwed, right? So let's begin with their economy, which is now stagnating on a relative basis. The era of double-digit growth is gone. For longest time, as they went on this historic growth path for 40 years, that double-digit growth, people were asking the question, would it ever end one day? Well, we got the answer, is yes it would. And the cause of that was middle-income trap, which, you know, most countries hit, right? You know, you had Japan experience at Korea, Taiwan, all these countries that experience rapid growth initially, eventually hit about $10,000 per capita and labor costs rise, productivity declines and growth stagnates or becomes much, much lower on par with all the developed countries. China right now is at $13,000 per capita. And the prompt for China is that they hit this middle-income trap too early, right? When Japan did it, when Korea did it, they were already developed countries. Most of the population was in middle class. And that's not the case in China. You still have a huge amount of poverty in China. You still have huge rural populations that have not participated in this boom and in this boom. And that is really the challenge now for them, how to manage their slowing growth when you've got enormous economic challenges that still remain in the country. And on top of that, you've got incredible mismanagement of the economy that's been taking place on decision being because this is a guy that doesn't understand economics. He's a traditional Marxist-Leninist, very ideological, and has driven away most of the bureaucrats that they've had for decades in power. They've now left the Paula Bureau, have been kicked out, and he's replaced them with security men, with hardcore power people because he's obsessed, of course, with population control with security, to the exclusion of economy. He's driven a lot of businesses away by cracking down on both the domestic tech sector, Jack Ma, for example, as well as foreign companies, many law firms, Western law firms have left the country. And of course, if you're Western business, you can't operate it in place if you don't have access to lawyers you can trust. So he's created a very unattractive environment there, which is why foreign direct investment in China has dropped 20% a year over year and is likely to keep continuing going down over time. And you have a huge real estate bubble just to give you a sense of what it's like right now. At the height of 2008, at the time when we had our real estate bubble, real estate was about 10% of our GDP. Today in China, it is 30%. Just on a manageable size. Now, it's a little different, they're not as leveraged as they are. The rest of the financial system is not as significant as it was for us in 2008 because guess how they're financing much of that real estate boom. They're financing it through the middle class because the way that development works in China, if you're a developer, you're getting huge deposits from people that want to buy apartments and you're using those deposits to actually finance the construction much of it. So as they've built me all these ghost cities as they've had this over capacity in real estate, it is not the banks mostly. They're in trouble. It is life savings of the middle class because in the middle class in China, where do you put your money that you've saved? You're not going to put in a bank in a state-owned bank, you don't trust it. You're not going to put in a mattress because you know that it can be seized by the government. You're not going to put it in the stock market because you believe it's rigged. In fact, it's remarkable that you've had this incredible growth in China last 20 years. The stock market has basically stayed flat. So that tells you that there's no new investment in equities in China. It's all gone into real estate for the most part. Those people are going to be wiped out. Now Xi Jinping doesn't care about that because he's got such an incredible surveillance state and control of his population, but it's not great for your economic productivity to have the middle class lose all their life savings. And on top of all of those challenges, which are enough to give anyone a headache and seem daunting, you are the population collapse that has already started to take place. They are already starting to lose people every single year. The death succeed, the birth rates, and it's escalating and is going to continue to escalate throughout the century. So they're going to go from about 1.4 billion people that they have today to conservatively speaking, around 550 million by the end of the century. An incredible decline in population, which by the way is highly deflationary, highly likely to cause further stagnation, and is an economic headwind that I don't know how you escape. So for all those reasons, I think over a long term, their economic prospects are not great. The growth rate is about the same as ours today. And of course, the economy is 25% smaller. And at that growth rate, unless something dramatic changes here or China, they're now going to eclipse us economically. So this idea that they're rising power with, decline power, I just fundamentally disagree with. And we've got every strength, right? We've got an incredible innovation economy, whereas most of the AI innovation that's taking place, it is here in America, right? Where do you have incredible access to capital, where companies like CrowdStrike is able to raise enormous money in the private markets and then later in the public markets? It's here in America, where you have incredible single market, the largest in the world, where selling a product in Alabama is exactly the same as it is selling in Seattle. That's not true anywhere else in the world. You go to Europe and it's a collection of, you know, almost 3,000 countries and with different languages, different cultures, different go-to-market strategies. It's a huge challenge to operate there, right? Unlike here in America, you have the greatest military in the world, you have the greatest alliance network, the world's biggest economy. We have enormous advantages, probably our biggest disadvantages are political system and the dysfunction that we have here in Washington DC. But aside from that, the strengths are enormous and China has these huge, huge problems. So I argue that if we are managed to avoid a war, which should be the defining priority for the United States foreign policy, if we manage to preserve Taiwan's de facto sovereignty and keep China contained in that region, we can weight them out, that they're going to experience more and more stagnation. The economic situation is going to cause them more and more problems, which is going to impact their ability to spend money on the military and threaten war and so forth. And their influence already, economic influence in the world is declining because the economy is not growing, so it's less attractive to invest in it. And they don't have extra cash to invest in projects like the Belt and Road Initiative. They wanted to spend about $8 trillion or a decade, a decade and a half on Belt and Road. They spent less than two and it's basically stagnating as well because they're out of cash. So for all those reasons, I disagree with Ray Dalia. No, I appreciate you walking through this. So the solution really, when you go through all those reasons, it sounds like a really China is not going to self-destruct completely, but they're hurting themselves significantly. So if you help preserve Taiwan's sovereignty, if you don't escalate into a war, if China's self-destructs just to put it in layman's terms and make it very simple and clear, then this is this is sort of the best possible outcome. But I'm curious if you think there will be a point where China starts to understand that they're declining and they already probably do to some degree, but when they understand they're starting to decline, if they understand that Taiwan is this linchpin for the US and so important, strategically and economically because of what they produce, do you think that or what is your opinion on how does the US preserve Taiwan's sovereignty and not encourage this knee-jerk offensive reaction from China when it sees that it's in decline and it almost lashes out to a degree. Is that some sort of concern that can be alleviated? Is that even a concern? And if so, how would we alleviate that concern? You know, it's got you absolutely nailed that this is absolutely the challenge. Now what we have going for us is that they're so unbelievably arrogant, she's been in particular. I'm pretty convinced that he does not believe he's in decline. He's listening to Ray Dalio and wanting to listen as long as possible to Ray Dalio and others that think China is rising and its rise is inevitable because as long as they're that self-confident, he will think that he has time to deal with this issue of Taiwan. And the longer, the more time we have, the more we can spend it on building up defenses and reversing this military balance of power that has become more even in the last few years. It's not because China has become so strong. Yes, they've modernized the military. Yes, they've invested in a lot of these capabilities. But more importantly, we've taken our eye off the ball, right? For the last two decades, we've been distracted. We've been fighting wars in the Middle East. We're now immersed in this conflict in Ukraine. We're doing, you know, back in the Middle East, we're trying to confront Iran and so forth. And this was their singular focus from a military buildup perspective for literally the last 45 years. And Taiwan's taken their eye off the ball because they've gotten complacent, particularly in the 2000s and early 2010s, where they thought that better economic relations with China would preserve their de facto sovereignty and the threat to them has gone away. Well, now everyone's woken up. In fact, thanks to Xi Jinping and thanks to his aggressiveness and thanks for just threats, you know, just in the last few weeks within the inauguration of a new president, Taiwan, last month, China has encircled Taiwan with these military exercises. Well, that is having the opposite reaction to what they think because it's getting the time when he used to care more about their defense to invest more to build up capabilities. And this is incredibly difficult to pull off, right? I want to give you one historical case here. So this month was of course the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the largest amphibious operation in history, 160,000 allied troops crossing English channel to land on the beaches of Normandy, 160,000. Today, this year is also the 80th anniversary of another amphibious invasion that never took place. And that was the invasion of Formosa, as Taiwan was called at the time, that was prepared as a plan by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And that was never executed because it had called for 300,000 personnel to invade the island to fight through for months against entrenched Japanese positions on the unbelievably challenging terrain. You've got mountains, you've got rivers, you've got forests on that island, you've got very rough and shallow waters surrounding it. And when Roosevelt looked at this plan with Douglas MacArthur and others that was his senior military advisor, he said, no, this is too risky, this is too hard, we're not going to do it. We're going to bypass it and invade Okinawa instead on the way to the invasion of Japan, right? So even back then, 80 years ago, this was considered incredibly hard, we harder than Normandy, right? It has only gotten more difficult since then because over the last 80 years, the advancements in military technology have largely benefited defense, right? You've had all these asymmetric abilities have been developed from, you know, javelins and a tank, guided missiles to stingers, to air and to ship missiles to all sorts of sensors, air defense batteries that are highly capable and so forth, right? So it is now easier than ever to defend the silent that has always been incredibly difficult to conquer in the natural fortress. And the only reason why right now the threat is so cute is because the Taiwanese have dropped the ball, we've dropped the ball and not focused on it. The longer he waits, she, the more time we have to restore that military balance of power, which we're trying to do as fast as possible, right? We're spending billions of dollars on building up our capabilities in the region. Our allies are doing the same thing. The Taiwanese are rapidly increasing their spending, the Japanese are as well, the Philippines, the Australians. So if we can get more time, this is going to be much better for us and worse for him. And as long as he's delusional, as long as he thinks the time is on his side and he is arising power, the better it is for us. Because I think that the delusion leads him to think at any point, he can just snap his fingers and Taiwan is his. I think that that's probably what's in his head right now. But you're saying that even though it's such a small, like geographically small sovereign nation, it would still be incredibly hard, especially with allies in the region, for them to be taken over. That's phenomenal. This may not mistake about it. If he goes for it, this will be the most complex military operation ever taken place in history. Obviously, the Chinese don't have a history of it, don't have the experience. The last war they fought was in 1979 against Vietnam, which did not go over well. So the challenges for him are numerous. And unlike Putin, the stakes for him here are very, very high and he knows it. So Putin, I argue, could lose an equine because the goals are so ambiguous that he's defined. He said, deenatification, demilitarization, what does that even mean? I've argued for two and a half years now that he could declare victory tomorrow, mission accomplished, pull out, and no one rush about tonight. And he's perfectly secure in his position power. Xi Jinping does not have that luxury. For him, this is a binary outcome, right? You either take Taiwan or you don't. And if you don't, and you go for it, this can endanger, and personally, this and an Israel power, this can put the CCP under existential risk. So if he goes for it, he needs to know that he has a high chance of winning this thing. And winning it quickly because he doesn't want to see a drawn out conflict like what Putin got in Ukraine, where you're spying for two and a half years, that is, he looks weak if he looks weak, if it does that. And well, not just that, but you know, the world economy gets destroyed, Chinese economy gets destroyed. This is really the stakes here are so much bigger than they are in Ukraine because Taiwan, of course, in the Taiwan state, are such a huge part of the global economy. You know, if China is fighting America for Taiwan, there's no imports going into China. There are no exports going out, right? So this is going to be catastrophic for them, catastrophic for the world. The world will be instantly in global depression. He wants to have sort of a quick ripping off the band-aid and operation in the last a few weeks. And it's over, right? And ideally, he keeps America out where he only has the Taiwanese fight and he knows that they likely will not sustain themselves for long. If that had a situation, I just want to take a second and thank the HubSpot podcast network for sponsoring the show's success story. We've been part of their network for the past three years now. If you're a podcast fan, you have to check out some of the other incredible podcasts in the HubSpot podcast network, like my first million hosted by Sam Parr and Sean Perry. They feature famous guests like Alex Hermosi, Sophia Emma Russo, Hassan Minhaj, sharing their secrets on how they made their first million and how to apply their learnings to capitalize on today's business trends and opportunities. Listen to my first million wherever you get your podcasts. I was going to ask, so you mentioned, you mentioned a few times like there has to be some decoupling from businesses focused on doing business in China, but also the US as well because we're all interconnected. So how do we achieve this decoupling? I thought about this because Keith speaks about this quite often. Keith Krakhi speaks about how we have to start to become less dependent on doing business in China. I think this is actually what he advises companies to do. He advises them to have a China policy to a degree. So what is the playbook for a private business and for just the US in general to start to decouple and become less integrated with China? Yeah, so I don't believe in decoupling for two reasons. One, China is too big to decouple from and even if we somehow did it here in the United States, not of our allies would fall us over that cliff. The opportunities to do business in China, to produce in China, they're just too great. And two, it's actually counterproductive to decouple because if you decouple completely, let's imagine you could do it, you have no leverage over that, which is ultimately not what you want. You want to have as much leverage over their economy as possible to try to enhance your deterrence and you want to decrease their leverage over you so that it gives you freedom of operations, so that Xi Jinping does not delude himself into thinking that, oh, there's so depend on my economy, there's no way that they're going to fight me for Taiwan, I can take it all my own. And to do that, I argue it's not about decoupling, it's about what I call in the book, in a directional entanglement. It's creating that asymmetric dependency where China is more dependent on us economically and we're less dependent on them, particularly in the areas where it really matters for the 21st century. Look, ultimately, if you take the long view and sort of set Taiwan aside, I believe that whoever wins the 21st century is going to be the one that wins it economically, of course, which was also true in the last century. And to win it economically, you have to win it technologically. And I believe there are four critical technologies that are essential to that victory for the 21st century. They are AI and autonomy and you know, probably self-explanatory to your audience, why that's important and that's going to be really groundbreaking. The second one is closely related. It's biotech and synthetic biology, which is going to be revolutionized by AI, most likely not just in the areas of medical sciences, but in things like bioenergetics, the development of new energy sources in a lab, development of new materials and biomefactoring that could be more durable, more lightweight, less carbon-intensive, really incredible innovation that I think we're in the precipice of having. The third one is space, particularly low-orthorbit, and you've seen the revolutionizing a space with the advent of low-cost lift into space with the invention of reusable rockets by Elon Musk, and now Jeff Bezos and others, and particularly the innovations you're seeing in low-orthorbit, with these very small cheap satellite constellations that are being deployed, they're revolutionizing communication, navigation and positioning, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and all sorts of applications we haven't even invented yet, that you're going to have in low-orthorbit weather latency to the satellite is very low, and you can have very cheap satellites that are numerous being deployed there. And the last one is green energy, and as we're transitioning away from fossil fuels, trying to address climate change, the technologies like batteries and wind and solar and EVs are going to be the new oil, the new energy sources of the 21st century, and I believe that we have to try to dominate as many of these sectors as possible, technologically, and try to reduce our depends on China and all of them. Now, in these four sectors, specifically, this is sort of the mission, mission critical. They're mission critical for the economy, they're going to be defining, I think, economic growth over the course of the century. The good news is that in the first three we're leading, in AI and autonomy, we're by far the leaders. It is not an accident that virtually all of the companies that are producing these foundation models, these huge LLAMs, are all American companies. We have not just the talent base, but the access to capital that you have available in very few countries. It takes hundreds of millions of dollars now to train these models at the cutting edge. That is likely to go to a billion. In fact, the interesting thing about AI is it's probably the first technology that humans have invented. I can't think of any other where the cost goes up with every single iteration, right? In everywhere, everything else, whether it's Moore's Law with computing, whether it's the internet or production of cars or anything like that, the cost always drives down with scale. Here are the effects of the opposite, right? You need more and more money to produce these models very quickly. I think a year or two out, it will cost you a billion dollars to produce these models. Well, there are very few places in the world that could raise that type of money, and mostly it's China and the Middle East, right? The problem that China has is that they don't have access to chips, which are essential for building these models because we've banned the export of high-end GPUs to China, and we've banned the export of equipment that you need to manufacture those GPUs, and they're falling behind more and more every single day. In biotech, we're also had, and again, I think biotech will be completely upended by AI. That is a future, so if you're leading an AI, you'll likely be leading in biotech. Space will be leading as well, thanks to SpaceX, thanks to Amazon and its Kuiper constellation that's going online shortly. The lead is not as great, but so far we're ahead, and the good news is that the first mover advantage is really significant because there's only so much space in space, particularly in low or thoroughbites. The projection right now is that you'll have about 50,000 satellites in low or thoroughbite by the end of the decade. Well, if you get that many, and they're mostly American satellites, no one else is really going to have a lot of space to put theirs up there because of interference issues and the likes, so if China doesn't get their act together soon, they may find themselves without anywhere to go, at least in Leo orbit, which is incredibly advantageous. And the last one we're losing badly, they're dominating in every single part of that green energy sector, whether it's EVs, batteries, solar, wind, in part because they've stolen so much IP, I've dealt with that over the course of my career, CrowdStrike, and elsewhere where most of these companies that we've had in these sectors have had their technology stolen by the truckloads through Cyberspinage, they are leading because of dumping and subsidies and our capacity that they're creating in these sectors, and we're trying to desperately adjust to that, trying to student tariffs both in this country and our allies are looking to do the same as well, to prevent that dumping on our shores to allow our businesses to innovate and to not be driven out of business. And then with those four technologies, you also have two critical components that are essential, right? I mentioned one of them, semiconductors, you can produce any of these things without chips, and critical minerals as well. So everything from lithium, a coal ball, the nickel, obviously the rarest as well, and here it's a mixed bag as well because in critical minerals, we're losing pretty badly because China is refined and processing so many of these minerals, about 90% of them, depending on the mineral. And in semiconductors, it's very much a double edged sword because we've been able to curtail their advancements in the high end chips, in the leading edge chips, but we've let them dominate what I call the foundational chips, 29 meters and above, which are essential to just about everything and over the next two to three years, they can be by far the leading producer of those chips. So there's work to do here. I think fine large, I would say we are like a B minus in this race, but we gotta do a lot better. So one more piece that I'm very curious to get your opinion on because I'll explain where this thought came from. And we can talk about TikTok and we can talk about China's cultural influence on the US, but I'm actually more curious about the inverse. I'm curious what the not members of the CCP or people that are close to the government, but the middle class or just the average individual in China culturally is the US impacting them or influencing them so much so that they actually feel like they would be more akin to or would like to adopt more US culture, which could lead to some sort of benefit, intangible benefit if we can influence them in some way. That's not just technological. So yes and no, I would argue that we're influencing them sort of by default because if you look at what's happening in our border and I'm not a fan of open borders and uncontrolled immigration, but I do think immigration is ultimately strand of hours, but you have about 4,000 Chinese nationals crossing that border every single day. There's not 4,000 Americans trying to get into China every single day, right? So it's unmistakable that we are the attractive one. Now again, this is uncontrolled immigration that is ultimately counterproductive. Probably a number of them are intelligence operatives, not just people looking for better life, although I think majority probably are, but we should be having a merit-based immigration program. We should be controlling immigration and figuring out how do we pick the best people from all these countries to come here and help it out in a way that I was able to do because I'm entering into this country as well. But that tells you something about the fact that we are still the beacon of innovation, the beacon of opportunity for the rest of the world. Many people from across the globe want to come here, want to immigrate here, want to have a better life for their kids here. At the same time, you also have this rising nationalism that has been accelerated under Xi Jinping. And if people are not leaving, and mostly they're leaving because of economic dislocations that have taken place in China and unemployment is skyrocketing. And so forth. But if you're not leaving, you're probably very, very proud of China and what it's been able to do, which is remarkable, right? Over the last 45 years, the greatest rise, economic rise of a nation in history. You're very proud of its growing military power and its growing diplomatic cloud. And you've also been kind of making fun of the United States for the last 15 years as well, both with the financial crisis in 2008, all the political dysfunction that you've seen us have, the pull out of Afghanistan and so forth. So you've been laughing at our expense quite a bit lately. And you're seeing this play out in the Chinese market right now, where the other encouragement certainly of the CCP and the government there, but also because of the growing nationalism, the attractiveness of American brands, whether it's the traditional brands that people associate with America like Coca-Cola and McDonald's and so forth or even Tesla and Apple is decline rapidly. And people are preferring domestic alternatives for nationalistic reasons. And because they're increasingly getting aggrieved at America and what they see as Americans attempts to contain China, which we're absolutely are doing, right? We're not saying it, but we're 100% doing it and I argue we should be doing it. So, you know, if you want to have a better life, you're going to come here, but if you don't, you're going to sort of fall back on, we want to be the greatest, we were the greatest country in history, China, for much of human history, right? For much of human history, human civilization, they were the most powerful, the richest, most populous country, and is only in the last few hundred years with the advent of the Industrial Revolution when that changed, right? First, Europe eclipsed them and now America, and they think it's their rightful place to assume that mantle of being the first, and they see us as trying to contain that, which we are. And they're antagonistic towards that as to be expected. And as there is there any benefit to even entertaining some sort of cultural war that we can win to assert more influence or is that ship sale? I think it's very difficult where you don't have a free market economy. You have full control over the information space, right? The great firewall and the censorship that's taking place, they're incredible surveillance networks. So I think the best thing we can do, and this is not just related to China, but really the rest of the world, is not to be moralistic and lecturing to countries about democracy or human rights or any of those values. It is to live our ideals and to have the most vibrant, reductive, innovative economy in the world that everyone wants to be a part of, right? It's lead by example, not to lead by moralizing and lecturing as we've done really for the last 45 years. I think that creates resentment. That gets people to push back, you know, when they hear us say that we're the world's greatest country, the most free country, they're saying, you know what? I don't believe that. I don't agree with that, right? And you know, there'll be many people in Europe who will say, really, like you're the most free country, not quite, right? And it's just very tone death when you approach it that way. But if we live our ideals and not, you know, engaging these missionary activities to promote, promote them, but promote them essentially by default, that's ultimately way more attractive than what we're doing today. And the other thing is it's not as provocative because the last thing we want to do is actually make Xi Jinping and the CCP feel threatened, right? That goes back to your thesis where you just want them to just think that they're killing it, think that they're, you know, in control, that's and give us time. That's really the goal. But also you don't want them to think that we're trying to undermine their regime in China because, you know, I don't know about you, but I'm done with regime change adventures. I'm kind of full of it. And certainly we can change the regime in China, nor should we try. So you don't want them to think that we're trying to cause that in China because that could get them to be more provocative, more aggressive, and actually trigger a war that you want to avoid. So if you are, you know, applying the Teddy Roosevelt mantra of speaks softly, carry big stick, we've done the opposite, right? We are speaking aggressively and we're carrying no stick because we've let, you know, the military balance in the region atrophy so much. So we got to get back to the basics here. Very, very smart. And then what I just mentioned about cultural influence, obviously TikTok is huge topic right now. Do you feel like, what are your thoughts on TikTok? Do you feel like it is, it is some sort of foreign technology that's actually trying to disrupt American culture and society? Is it something more malicious than that? Something that it really is not malicious at all? Because it's just so in the news all the time and now it's now there's support for banning it and obviously everything is going through the government. So I'm curious about your take on on that. And also, not just TikTok, are there other things that the average American individual in a Western country should be more aware of and TikTok is maybe just a distraction? Yeah. Well, as you know, Congress passed this bill, a present Biden sign to force a divestiture of TikTok right from by dance. It's not a ban of TikTok. If they divest in the next, you know, year or so, there's not any ban on TikTok. And I'm supportive of this bill, but I also think it's a distraction. I'm supportive of this bill because TikTok fundamentally is not a social media company. It is a media company for us, right? Yes, the content on TikTok is user generated, but the algorithm and frankly, let's face it, human moderation decides what you see and what you don't see. Editing is really, really vital. And you don't want a company that is controlled by an adversarial country to have that level of leverage over the American public. You just don't, right? Imagine it from the Cold War, we said, you know, we want the prov, the, you know, the main newspaper of the Soviet Union to have the circulation of the New York Times. You know, if that were happening, we would take netchers against it, right? In fact, we did because we have foreign media rulers ownership rules in this country, particularly when it comes to television stations, which, you know, you know, most concerned about or have been traditionally. And, you know, in the 1980s, when Rupert Murroch is an Australian citizen wanting to buy the Fox network, not Fox News, but the actual Fox network, he was told, no, until you become an American citizen, you cannot do that, right? Even though he was coming from a friendly country, right? Australia is an ally of ours. He was preventive from doing so. And even as an American, if he or anyone else wanted to buy about 40% of the television markets in the United States, the local television stations, they would be preventive from doing so because of regulations that talk about concentration of media ownership. Well, here you have a media company, TikTok, that self-admittedly says that they have users that are basically half the American public, right? That's a problem. Now, I don't think that's the biggest problem we faced with China. I can think of 100 things that I would do long before I worried about TikTok. But, you know, as long as you're confronting them and TikTok is potentially an influence platform that they can leverage, I have no problems with that. It's a challenge that is dominating so much of the conversation, and you can't confront the other things that China is actually doing, like on overcapacity of semiconductors and trying to take over our energy sector with dumping of all these green energy technologies unlike. But it's still a problem, and we should absolutely address it. I was thinking about just one last thought on sort of different influence from China. And I thought about when Jack Ma obviously from Alibaba was sort of silenced by the government. I thought that was interesting, and it was interesting to me because you would assume that the government would want to support people like that and create. And I guess this goes back to the sort of their ignorance as to how powerful they are, how successful they are. But you think someone like Jack Ma would be a good spokesperson for China and be a good representative and reflection of success and innovation. Is that another thing that China has a hard time doing almost once you get too successful, limiting that success to a degree of that success is not directly correlated to the government? Well, it's not China, it's Xi Jinping. That's ACCPS, right? Yeah. I've argued that Xi Jinping has been just godsend to us, to America. Because everything he has done has been to the detriment of China and to the benefit of us, not just by ruining the Chinese economy and cracking down on the innovators like Jack Ma, but also pushing businesses out. And of course the aggressiveness of his diplomacy, this wolf warrior diplomacy has literally driven all these countries in the region into our arms. There's a great quote by the Singaporean foreign minister this past weekend. There was a Shangri-La conference, the Sengal Defense Conference, in Singapore, where the United States comes, China comes, all the regional countries. And the foreign minister from Singapore said, you know, all these countries in our region are running to us arms, not because of us policy, but in spite of it. We have not done a whole lot to make ourselves more attractive to them. We've not engaged them as much as we should, but they see themselves as having no choice because they're looking at China, they're looking at the aggressive actions they're taking in South China, see in East China, see in their wolf warrior rhetoric, and they're saying no things. As much as we don't like America, and let's face it, we've got lots of problems, lots of wars, and lots of people don't like us, and jealous of our success, they would still prefer us or China. And I already in the book, by the way, that this pursuit of wanting to be loved that we have in this country, wanting to be seen as the world's greatest power, you know, as benevolent power, the shining city on a hill, is an obsession that we need to give up in this country. We don't need to be loved. It would be nice, but you know, the reality is that powerful countries, companies, people are never loved. People are always jealous of their success and want to take them down a notch for it. But as long as people hate China more, that's a win, and that's what we should strive for, right? And Xi Jinping has been a great gift to us in that sense, and I sort of joke that if he's not on the CIA payroll role, we should pay him because, oh my god, almost every policy he's undertaken has been to the detriment of China. Now, this is all fun and games, up until a moment he invades and causes a global conflict, so hopefully he doesn't take it too far, but so far it's been great because he's walking us up, and he's walking up the rest of the world. If, you know, there's people that are listening to this, that are business leaders that are building things, and after listening to this, I know that you said we shouldn't decouple from China. But the average entrepreneur that would be listening to this podcast would be very scared about going into China. It's like, it's very stressful. It's just anxiety inducing. It seems like a headache that if I get to that point, I'm sure they'll have the support and the resources to navigate it, but just coming from you, obviously you don't want to decouple. You want to increase leverage. How can a business leader or an entrepreneur, of course, if you're already in China, I'm sure you have your ship figured out, but say you don't. Say you are growing, you want to scale outside of North America and outside of Europe and APAC and Amia. I guess it would be APAC, excuse me. What would be the playbook? What would be the strategy to do this thoughtfully and carefully so that you don't open yourself up to liability? You don't do the wrong thing. What's the words of wisdom for an entrepreneur that wants to go overseas? Yeah, so let me be clear what I mean by we shouldn't decouple. The top imports from China today into America by value are toys and apparel. I argue that it's fine to buy cheap sneakers from China and toys as long as they don't have lead in them, so that would be nice to not to have them poison our kids. These are not strategic resources. When it comes to advanced technology, absolutely we should not allow China to have access to our technology, particularly in those critical areas that I mentioned and to prevent them as much as we can from advancing in those areas through export controls on production of semiconductor manufacturing equipment, for example, and the like. If you are a business that is looking to go into China or is looking to expand operations in China or thinking about the future of operations in China, you should absolutely be thinking about the geopolitics here, right? As the saying goes, you may not be interested in geopolitics, but geopolitics is interested in you. And even if you think there is 5% chance that I'm right and we're in a path to catastrophic conflict here, that 5% can be pretty existential to your business. I was meeting with a major fortunate one on a company recently. They've seen executive and they told me, you know, if the scenario outlined in me tree plays out, our company will cease to exist. My response was, what kind of sounds bad? Maybe we should do something about that. And I believe that most companies need to have a China strategy that is minimizing the risk to them, to their companies from a potential conflict. And by the way, even if you think that conflict is unlikely, if you think the future doesn't know what he's talking about, this is never going to happen, guess what? The economic relationship between the US and China is only going one way, right? tariffs are only going to go higher. Export controls are only going to be put more and more into place. And that is not getting reversed, right? There's bipartisan consensus in this town on China. Trump started in 2016, Biden largely continued and expanded on it. Then Trump, you know, if he gets in, again, is talking about going even further. So this is not changing, where there is fundamentally realignment in the economic relationship that's taking place. And business need to need to take that into account. The environment, being able to do business with China is getting harder and harder. And you need to weigh the opportunity costs, you need to weigh the risks. And frankly, they tracked it in the sellout market, right? So if that market is only growing about 3%, still a huge market. And you may still want to have some access to some exposure, but it may not be as important as other markets as, let's say, India or Indonesia, which, you know, is the fourth most populous country and has enormous opportunities in front of it, Vietnam and so forth, Mexico. So, you know, you need to be thinking about this and whether it actually makes sense to operate in China, particularly China, there's becoming more nationalistic, more adversarial to our interests, and increasingly, it's telling its population, do not buy American, right? Both through influence campaigns, but also through directives. So for example, there is this directive A, so-called directive A, that the Chinese government has issued in recent years that tells their government agencies and state-owned enterprises to basically have an ex-couple years to remove any American software or American hardware from their networks, right, to decouple. And by the way, if the government agencies are doing this in the state-owned enterprises, you know that that's going to percolate elsewhere, because, you know, as if figuring out how to get just all sufficiency, they're going to push that on everyone else. So your time in China is highly limited, right? And when I see companies like Tesla, for example, and German automakers, you know, really doubling down on China, I'm sort of saying, what in the world are you thinking? Because the goal, stated goal, they're not even hiding, is to kick you up and ultimately, right, is to replace you with an existing indigenous vendors. And to subsidize those vendors to make life much more difficult a few over time. So yeah, you may have a few years of great returns and an opportunity to make money, but I hope you're using that to do risk and to invest in other parts of your business that are not relying on China, because that bananze is coming to an end. And in some areas has already ended, right? And you've seen this play out in virtually every sector that they've considered to be strategic, and it's going to play out in others as well. No, very good. You know, you put this book together, you interview a whole bunch of individuals on geopolitics as well. This is sort of where you spend a lot of your energy and your time. I'm curious if people were going to put the link for the book in the show notes, you can probably get the book wherever you get your book. So Amazon will link your social as well. Is there anything even fast forward to today that you wish you had put in the book that highlighted a certain thing that you didn't put in something that you wish you added that's just like a mission critical thought or just something that has really been just sort of percolating in your head recently? Yeah, anytime you write a book, you have to cut a bunch of stuff, by the way. I know, it never ends, right? One of the things I did talk a little bit about in the book, but I actually expanded since then I published a piece in one of the rocks on this issue is this idea that's becoming more and more prevalent in national security community circles that China is not going to invade Taiwan because of all the difficulties of military invasions that we've talked about, and it's going to take Taiwan through a blockade or some sort of gray zone operations that they are increasingly doing right in the Taiwan straight. And I debunk that narrative in a very detailed fashion this piece in one of the rocks because the reality is that there's no modern precedent in history, at least in recent times, of even a city, much less a country and nation falling and capitulating because of a blockade, right? You could look at the siege of Lenin grad by the Nazis in World War II, two and a half years and a million, 1.1 million people starved to death and they did not surrender. More recently in the 1990s, 30 years ago, you had the siege of Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs, 65,000 casualties, they did not surrender. And as I read in the piece, Taiwan is way more sufficient, but self-sufficient than most people think. On food production, they are basically self-sufficient. Yes, they import a lot of food, like every other country does, but most of their food imports are things like beef, for example, that is coming from the United States. Well, you can do without beef if you had to. They have a hot pork industry, so you could get not necessarily a lot of cow meat, but potentially pork beef, but they also have a lot of fish in their waters, in their lakes, in their rivers, and surrounding waters. They produce a lot of rice, they produce a lot of vegetables, they produce a lot of pineapples, and other fruits, so they are not going to starve to death in a blockade scenario. They're not going to be leningrad. It won't be the greatest diet, the most luxurious diet, they won't be dining in caviar and have intuna and the like, but you can sustain yourself. Even when you look at some energy where they do have a big problem because 98% of the energy is imported, largely LNG and oil. They do have some self-production of energy sources. They have nuclear, although they're kind of moving the other direction. They've shut down half of their reactors and they want to shut down the rest next year, but if push comes to shove, you can potentially reopen those. They have a bunch of hydro, they have increasingly more and more solar, they have a bunch of wind farms off their coast as well, so they have some production of energy, and fundamentally it's a tropical place, tropical climate. Unlike let's say Ukraine, where the Russians have been trying to destroy the energy sector and make Ukrainians a little at freeze to death, and by the way, they're not surrendering even though electricity is out in a lot of these places continuously. In Taiwan, you're not going to freeze to death, so you're not going to starve to death, you're not going to freeze to death. Economy is going to be in really terrible shape, but again, like terrible economies do not lead to capitalization. You can look at our own sanctions policy against let's say North Korea or Iran or Iraq during Saddam Hussein times, right? We've largely destroyed those economies and nothing happened. These countries did not adjust their policies even much less surrender. So this idea that China through just pressure is going to make these people, their democracy, their freedom loving, they are very proud of their nation, they're very proud of their heritage and history, which is very distinct from mainland China's, that they would just let them, that they would just capitulate to that pressure, I think is just really ridiculous, and it's a fundamentally misunderstanding the Taiwanese people and their resiliency, and that's why I think China hasn't yet done it because they could do tomorrow, they could have done it 10 years ago, right? Blocking in Taiwan is fully within their capabilities, but they know that it's not going to achieve that effect. It's going to ruin China's economy because of their own reliance on semiconductors coming from Taiwan, and also because Taiwan has reciprocal measures it can take, it can try to blockade China, for example, it has missiles that can reach most of the largest Chinese ports. It can, again, institute a counter blockade of chips into China, so there's lots of things that Taiwan can do to respond to blockades and make this a really terrible situation for China. So that's why I think that the main threat to Taiwan is that of invasion as difficult as it is, and I think Xi Jinping knows this, we know that he's given the order to the Chinese military to be ready to invade by 2027. It doesn't mean that they will invade in 2027, or they will be ready because obviously we know that you can give many government agencies deadline, whether it's in America or in China, and it doesn't mean that they're going to meet it, but that's the intent, right? And it's an indication of that intent, and I do think not necessarily 27, but like we 28 through 32 is that dangerous window when you could have his really last term in office. He's coming up for Communist Party re-election 27, very likely to win it, almost certain, unless something dramatic happens. That term ends in 32, and he's going to be 79 and 32. And unlike perhaps our system, the Chinese people don't tend to elect leaders into their 80s. We could learn something from that by the way. But he may be thinking of that as the potential twilight of his power, of his life maybe even, he's not the healthiest by the looks of things. So if he wants to do it on his own watch, as I believe he does, I think he's really ego-driven, he wants to go down into the pantheon of Chinese history as a great leader that accomplished this rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, as he calls it, the taking of Taiwan, something that Mao could never do, right? That's his probably window of opportunity. And as I mentioned, that you weigh much longer beyond that, and the balance of power militarily really starts changing, and potentially even economically, if we take a range of actions that are suggest we take, and things get much worse from him. Amazing. Well, not amazing, but a very fascinating, wrong word. No, this is incredible. I just want you to tell people where they can connect with you. I mean, your book, World on the Brain, Cow America, can be China in the race for the 21st century. That's going to be everywhere you can get books. Do you have a website or social or anywhere that you'd like to send people to just consume more, learn more, interact with you? Absolutely. So I'm also podcasted, called geopolitics decanted. We're talking regularly on these issues of war and Ukraine, China, and the like. And on obviously X, I'm DL Paravatch, my first initial and last name, and LinkedIn and so forth. So connect me with me there. Perfect. Okay. And last question I like to ask everyone, and this is less about geopolitics is less about China. This is just more about you and just some last words of wisdom for the audience because you've had such an incredible career. You've built incredible companies. I mean, and this is sort of what you've dedicated your life to now. So you've had success in multiple fields. You've now you've written the best-selling book. If you could go back and you could just tell your 20 year old self one thing, one one piece of wisdom or word of advice, what would that thing be? Everything will come together. You know, I've never had a career plan, if you will. I always assume that opportunities would come along as long as you recognize it. And it comes at the right time. You can seize it. And it's always worked out well for me. I never planned to start CrowdStrike. It just sort of happened when, you know, I had this experience with Google. I led this major investigation. It opened my eyes to what was happening to this country with all these nation-state attacks. And I said, wait a second, the industry is really not responding to this. There's an opportunity here. Let's start a company. And I never planned to start a thing tank or write a book. But I've been passionate about this issue and had an opportunity. Obviously CrowdStrike became a huge success. We took a public, decided to retire and focus my full energy on this issue and try to give back. But also on the book side, I was one of the first ones to have predicted the war in Ukraine as I mentioned months before it occurred. And that really drove me to write this book because I said, you know what, if I turn out to be right on that issue, if there is even a small chance I'm right here, we need to raise public awareness. We need to try to build consensus to try to confront this problem that is staring us in the face that we have a little bit more time to try to solve, unlike with Ukraine. And that became the opportunity to write this book, which became a national ambassador. So, you know, it's important to not over-plan, I think, or at least it has been important to me and to just be always on the watch out for the opportunities that get presented and to grab them when you can.