China

“And then to keep an eye on is the list of Chinese manufacturers who are very aggressively pursuing this space. By the way trying to publish more deep learning papers than any other country on the planet.”

“Now that last statement's a very important point, because in China, when you're creating these official accounts, it's up to you as the brand of business to go get all of your followers. WeChat doesn't create a store or a list of top brands for consumers to fo…”

“In China, even five years ago, you could order McDonald's and get it delivered to your doorstep.”

“In fact, in China, in June this year, China announced that over 46% of the internet population in China used a mobile live streaming app.”

“There are now hundreds of restaurants in China that have QR codes pasted to the table.”

“Credit Suisse estimates it to be a five billion dollar industry, which is only two billion less than all of China's box office.”

“Again, things such as even paying their traffic bills are possible all with their smartphone.”

“In fact, now, if you go to a bunch of stores in China, paying through digital payments Will get you a discount, and it will actually be cheaper than if you paid with cash.”

“Now, when you think about this online and offline world, there are actually two components that are the plumbing to make the seamless mobile society work, and those two things are payments and QR codes, and they're actually very intertwined in China.”

“WeChat has over eight hundred million monthly active users. 90 plus percent of them are in China.”

“In fact, there are even cloud storage examples where if you take your phone and you shake it, you get an extra two megabytes of storage.”

“A third of the people who received this photo shared it on their WeChat news feed. There was a 30% increase And sales for items that were featured in this campaign. And Uniqlo followers went from 400,000 To over a million.”

“Today, I'm going to talk to you about trends in China, how it's becoming a mobile first, seamlessly mobile society, and how China is actually leapfrogging many technology platforms that we're still using here in the US.”

“The number I want to point you to on this screen is the six hundred and fifty six million smartphone users in China. That's twice the population of the United States.”

“In China, I fully believe that virtual reality will take off at a tremendous pace because people are getting access and exposure to these headsets in ways that we are not seeing here in the United States.”

“There is extremely high density in China, and density allows for new business opportunities. For example, take all the online to offline companies out there, whether it's on-demand delivery of food, floral arrangements, masseuses. These things can have great u…”

“There are already over 300 of these arcades and cafes in China, and HTC alone has pledged to build hundreds more.”

“Now, thirty nine million people in China watched this live stream at some point. Thirty nine million. And they even let people leave comments. They gave around 700 phones away.”

“Now, if I look at the number of people in the US and how many credit cards we have, there is more than one credit card for every person in the US. But then if I look at the Chinese population of 1.36 billion people, and I add up all the American Express cards,…”

“But in China, this is just very traditional advertising. You see the real opportunity is around brand engagement through official accounts and very unique marketing campaigns.”

“But also if you look today, the number of deep learning papers in China has outnumbered The number of deep learning papers, but the number of citations in those papers still tilts towards the West. The most influential papers are Western papers.”

“You can go two, three weeks and never have to use a credit card, nor take out cash.”

“I have a thesis that a lot of consumer mobile trends that we see in China today will start playing out in the US in one or two years.”

“If Craigslist was in China, they long ago would have added a number of other transactions, either built by themselves or through partnerships.”

“Did you know that all that mobile payment, all of that's happening with the camera. It's not happening with NFC. It's not happening with a smart chip. They're using their camera to scan a QR code to complete a payment.”

“But the reality is China actually has many examples of successful super apps.”

“Likewise, you know which products, market fits, and business models are doing incredibly well in China, and you can take those models to the U.S. Before the next Facebook or Google figures that out.”

“Without China, the Apple iPhone would not exist.”

“In 2015, China was 29% of Apple's total global revenues.”

“The media has trained us into thinking that the world is a zero sum game. If the U.S. Wins, then China loses. If China wins, then the U.S. Loses. This is the narrative that we've been sold because it's what sells magazines. It's what causes people to click int…”

“And China takes only, on average, four years for a company to become a unicorn. In the US, it's seven years, and you see a huge spike in year number two.”

“And so during the Cultural Revolution my mom's side of the family actually had their home raided and had their property seized.”

“There are over six million convenience stores in China. That's over 40 x the number of seven 11 in gas stations in the US.”

“China's new normal is mobile only. It's not mobile first.”

“So certain blockchains, like say, like the Bitcoin meme is that Bitcoin is fully decentralized and is extremely secure, secure to the point at which it'll be resilient even against attacks by nation states like China. But there are applications out there that …”

“China, which now has more smartphone users than the USA and Europe combined.”

“Penetration of e-commerce is actually quite a long way behind some other leading markets. China, obviously, is leapfrogging. There's a leapfrogging story there. South Korea and the UK, of course, are also well ahead of the USA although other parts of Western E…”

“And China has become not only mobile first, but mobile only.”

“Expanding your sources of revenue versus just growing a singular revenue line is actually a lens to drive product thinking.”

“China basically skipped over the PC and the credit card era.”

“Between 2016 and 2017, book sales in China for digital books rose by 35%, whereas in the U.S., it trended the opposite direction.”

“And I believe by studying China, we can get inspiration and insights for how we can evolve our own business models that can eventually result in better product experiences.”

“They've kind of got their own internet, and it's just as good as ours, and actually, it's much more innovative in some ways.”

“Google Play, I believe is less than 10% of Android app downloads.”

“Something that's misunderstood about China is that the second and third tier cities are very different than the first tier cities, and oftentimes if you go to a third or fourth tier city, they don't have a local mall, a local drugstore that's within driving di…”

“There's two-thirds of Android, which is the one that Google gives numbers for, is outside China, and then there's another third of Android, which is in China, and doesn't have Google Play on it or Google Maps on it”

“So for something like messaging, I think they're ahead. Something like logistics, I think they're ahead. Online video, I actually think they're more experimental as well.”

“What you have is these very strong portal models, and particularly on mobile, you have, for example, Baidu building a Maps app in which you can book restaurants, and you can book cinema tickets, and you can not just book cinema tickets, but choose the seat in …”

“Apple's, you know, foray into China was supposedly the five C, and that really didn't go anywhere, and the six plus with fablet seems to be the right way to potentially go into and get into Asian markets finally.”

“When it shades into hubris and risk taking, it's a problem. And I just say that because that could ruin everything. Putin can't ruin everything. And, you know, ISIS can't ruin everything. That could ruin everything.”

“Often what you see, and you see this in China and other places, is that the local imitators who get a first start actually innovate in directions that are more appropriate for the local constituency.”

“So on the one hand, something like 96, 97% of all live Android phones outside China Where Google isn't present, but all the ones outside China that are therefore mostly connected to Google. Over 95% of these things have the latest player version of Google Play…”

“It's very difficult to function now in some of the top tier cities without having a WeChat account. When you meet someone, they're not necessarily likely to give you their phone number or their email address, but they will share their WeChat account with you.”

“For so many people in China, the mobile was and is their only access to the internet.”

“Voicemail might not be common in the States, but leaving an audio message on WeChat is super common in China.”

“Anyone born after 1979 is an only child. And so loneliness is a very real problem in China.”

“One is email penetration is actually much lower in China than it is in the States.”

“Well, I think one area of app design that's very common in China, but not as seen in the States, is the usage of QR codes and the usage of the scanning feature in any app. And WeChat is actually it's heavily reliant on the scanning feature. So, for example, yo…”

“They've gotten twenty million users. Ten million of them are intense users who have multiple conversations within a day”

“You look at China, portals did work.”

“China was incentivizing people in their prisons that they would give them shorter prison sentences if they were able to file patents.”

“As far as the Chinese were concerned, quantum computing is their number one priority. It's not water. It's not population controlled. It's not food. It is quantum computing. There is no budget. Which means there's no limit to the budget. It means not that ther…”

“It's a misconception that some people have that you're always naturally going to get the best talent just because you're a global brand. That's definitely not the case in China.”

“I think a lot of companies, if they want, if they go into China and they have realistic expectations of maybe only getting five percent market share, that could still be millions of users.”

“That world is also changing very quickly and maybe innovating at a pace that's faster than what I see happening in Silicon Valley.”

“I'd say in China, I don't know if mature is the right word I would use for it, but I would say it's far more advanced than what I do see in the States and probably what's happening in India.”

“I do think there's a lot of elements in execution that's quite different and local to those markets. That's very different from The U.S. So it's not necessary that a U.S. Player going into those markets has all the advantages. I think there are local advantage…”

“I think if you look at internet usage globally, like the number one country is China. As Connie mentioned, it's like six hundred and fifty million users. The number two is India. So United States is actually number three.”

“If you have some kind of partnership with WeChat, that is Almost instant guaranteed success for any startup.”

“You gotta give credit To the China market for letting this thing up in the air. And learning to test it, and that's like a huge thing, because like, I don't even know where, you'd have to go to like White Sands, New Mexico to test something like that in the US…”

“So what happens in China or India or Africa, I think could actually be, you know, even, even more change, you know, Kind of like, you know in a way, let's say, we'll jump over the old internet and go purely mobile, and the ways that will deliver services is pr…”

“When I think about China, innovation to me means survival. And I say that because there are so many people in China, 1.3 billion people. There's a huge population of entrepreneurs in China right now. And you match that with a huge abundance of capital that's a…”

“If you argue, though, that innovation can mean the first person to scale a company, scale a product, The first person who can figure out a distribution model or a business model that allows the product to be given to millions of consumers, then I would say the…”

“Getting that scale in, in something that works like a city rather than a country means that the kinds of applications that rely on density, any app that has to do, anything that has to do with delivery, anything that has to do with transportation, anything tha…”

“You have people from all kinds of backgrounds who really believe that if they work really hard they can make something huge. And when you pair millions of people with that mindset, and then you pair that with access to a lot of capital, you get the ingredients…”

“When I was in government, we declassified a national intelligence estimate, which we tend not to do. Well, we declassified a national intelligence estimate that actually put a number on the amount of intellectual property theft taking place because of cyber at…”

“When WeChat first launched official accounts, a lot of them were more text-based as well with very Simple very simple graphics. They didn't have the menus at the bottom just yet, and a lot of official accounts weren't focused on the WebView concept and the app…”

“It's like 25% of China's GDP still comes from the exports generated in the special economic zone.”

“So in practical terms, if you're sitting in Beijing or Shanghai right now, you're not able to get on a half a dozen information sources, news sources, data sources that you could have three years ago.”

“I think we will be caught flat-footed if we under-appreciate what China is able to accomplish, because you can actually change the nature of a product by changing the way that it's produced, by making it available to a larger number of people, by sort of makin…”

“So the biggest change over the last five years in some ways among that gets to where is the political system going is that five or 10 years ago. It was the foreigners who were complaining about the air quality in Beijing and Shanghai and other big cities, and …”

“I think that the, it will take time for the following reason. Like there are a lot of people in China today who still remember just how bad things were, how recently. I mean, there was, we forget that during the Cultural Revolution and during the famine that p…”

“This set of restrictions, which is generally described as the HUCO system, which is the household registration system, is one of the biggest, I think everybody agrees, obstacles towards a more organic, innovative system that drives talent From around the count…”

“It is a country where you can get rid of plastic bags, like, in a week, and you can actually make a big headway on stuff like smoking.”

“And in fact, this is the part that I find really interesting is that if I pay with cash, It's now a little bit of a negative social stigma.”

“China achieved in human development progress and in physical infrastructure development in the span of 10 years what We did in 30 years or 50 years and a whole variety of measures, whether you're talking about, you know, concrete usage, for instance or how muc…”

“And it, that evolution, it just happened faster even than we would see in the U.S. So you can go from being, you know, a non-existent company to being the leader to being gone in the course of a couple of years.”

“The education system as it's constituted today is not encouraging kids to be disruptive and wildly innovative. It just is not.”

“One of the clearest signs that China was beginning to take IP more seriously and regard it differently was when a company like Huawei, for instance, was hiring a lot of lawyers, because that meant they were suing other people to defend their own IP.”

“When they build a building in a week, It's often not a great building, and you can adapt that metaphor, meaning it's structurally unsound, or it doesn't wear well, or it's not creative, or it's not architecturally significant, or any of those things”

“That's very, very common. So that's not even, whereas here we might like think twice about, you know, can your boss text you when you're not at work in China? That's not even a thing.”

“Yeah, so one of my hypotheses was that the internet's infrastructure is in English. URLs are in using Roman characters that don't really correspond to Chinese, and so a lot of even like large Chinese companies will have URLs that basically look like fxyjjj.com…”

“I think in the long run, it counts as an advantage to us that the Chinese are so state directed on some of these things.”

“I think China right now is its own worst enemy.”

“I think in China, they kind of skipped the PC era and went straight to the mobile phone era. By some assessments, that has made them more sophisticated without having these legacy technologies.”

“In the case of avocados, you know, the price of shipping a box of avocados to China is more expensive than the box of avocados itself, because of perishability, you have to air freight them in.”

“The idea that everything lives in one app is actually seen as a good thing in China because it's less friction at the end of the day.”

“We put the top aligned labels above the form fields and we had like a 20% increase in conversions or something like that.”

“Americans typically contrast their own nation with Western Europe. That's the tradition. And then America feels so dynamic, because Western Europe is even more sluggish. And stagnant. And that's a big mistake. The notion that you should stop being Tocqueville.…”

“Mini programs is something that they've launched, which I actually think is totally underappreciated. And you haven't really began to see, you haven't begun to see the power of the mini programs concept in China yet.”

“In China, what really helped it take off is WeChat made it front and center, a primary way of adding a friend. So as opposed to having to scan for a particular username, because a username is not even required when you set up a WeChat account or knowing their …”

“They're simply really interested in things that are in the news. So if you look at things like China and Russia that don't impact most organizations, they want to know who's attacking and where they're from, what they're doing. And to be honest with you, that'…”

“But China's not going to grow at 10% a year for the next Half century. It's becoming much more like a normal, mature economy in which the growth rate is a couple of percent a year, and that's all they're going to be able to expect.”

“One of the most dangerous development in the, on the horizon today, what's happening on the North Korean peninsula, and why is it so dangerous? Because it's an element in this Thucydidean dynamic.”

“Chinese, ah, conception of order is extremely different than American conceptions of order. In the Chinese conception of order, you have basically a hierarchical dominance. In which somebody's at the top of the pyramid, and everybody else is, is located in rel…”

“So basically, I would say, interestingly, we now virtually have a Cold War in cyber between the U.S. And China.”

“If you go around the ASEAN countries, or you go around Northeast Asia, the principal buyer, the principal seller, the principal investor is China.”

“Business as usual in the relationship between the US and China will likely produce history as usual.”

“Four years before that, five years before that, Xi Jinping became president of China. And what does his banner say? If colloquially, make China great again.”

“Both China and U.S. Have this sense of kind of manifest destiny”

“International economies, and I believe the best yardstick is purchasing power parity, which is also the yardstick that CIA and IMF think is the best yardstick. By that yardstick, China is currently the largest economy in the world.”

“The Chinese Not only have economic power, but they exercise economic power. So when the Philippines behaves in a way they don't like, they say, I think your bananas that you're importing to China may be suspect. So they just leave them on the dock till they ro…”

“Maybe we took a one decade pause in automation, and maybe now that wages have risen so much in China and things like that, maybe now we're going to get back to the task of automation.”

“The reasons China was cheap, I mean, cheap wages were part of it, but they were subsidizing energy. They were giving everybody really cheap coal without worrying about the environmental impacts. They had very low labor standards, and they had a bank finance sy…”

“The China shock is over. China unit labor costs are now at parity with the United States labor cost, and there is nothing on the horizon that looks anything like China.”

“China's no longer undervaluing its currency. That was very mercantilist. They were building up their U S dollars. They're like modern day gold. They were doing that in the 2000. They have stopped now and have actually been propping up their currency instead of…”

“In fact, in economic models, the gains from trade will look just like productivity. And there's a complete equivalence between those and a lot of models. So basically, if you have a robot to do something cheaply, you know, from the consumer's perspective, that…”

“People are talking about TPP and TTIP, which is basically a trade treaty with, you know, Japan and Korea, a trade treaty with Europe. Those are trade with rich countries, and that's not going to look at all like opening up trade with China did in the 2000. It …”

“There are countries who heavily, heavily regulate their geospatial data. You know, China is one, South Korea is one. There's actually a whole bunch of other countries who... Explicitly Forbid exporting geospatial data. You cannot move data out of South Korea a…”

“What we're now seeing in Asia is that a lot of countries in Asia, including China, their digital revolution is not much more than two to three years behind what's happening in California or in the West.”

“China's just announced that they were investing 2.1 billion dollars to open up a new AI research center that is all consistent with their strategy of military civil fusion.”

“It's not Silicon Valley software company versus dumb Detroit guys. It's Silicon Valley software company versus 20 other Silicon Valley software companies plus China.”

“So it is going to happen in China. I have no doubt about it.”

“In China, it's like an extremely competitive career path. Very few students are accepted to teaching schools. Very few of those graduates get accepted to actual teaching jobs.”

“IResearch says that right now online education in China is a hundred fifty million users and expected to grow to nearly three hundred million by year 2020. It's a forty billion dollar industry expected to grow to seventy billion dollars.”

“The largest group is not K through 12. It's not even college students. The largest groups of students who want to do self-improvement in online education, they are 26 to 35.”

“China has a national top-down goal to be the number one country in AI by the year 2030.”

“China, India, and the Islamic empires were a lot like the Merck, Pfizer, and Novartis of today. They were global, everywhere, dominant. They're phenomenal at franchises. So in India, you've had the Taj Mahal. You know, in China, they built the Great Wall and j…”

“Five G has become an actual geopolitical battle. Like, it's actually a very interesting twist. It's become actually a primary, like, you know, if the Cold War between the US and the USSR was like defined by the space race, like at least the sort of nascent Col…”

“And today, they're responsible for booking over 50% of the hotel nights in China. And the previous big player Ctrip is down to low 20%.”

“And I think, quite honestly, we really need a revolution of patriotism in business as well as in the tech sector, but as well as across the greater American public to recognize that, you know, we are unfortunately in a kind of Cold War type challenge.”

“The Chinese, as you all know, are using all elements of their capacity, government, The private sector, academia, in complete unison to advance their capacities, whether in biotech, or AI, or you name it.”

“To the extent that, that many companies are making compromises and accommodations to Open the Chinese market and expand their foothold in the Chinese market, doing things that quite frankly, in my judgment, advantage China in this competition, but then won't b…”

“Well, China is not only using human assets, as you just described plants or moles, but they're also using cyber tools, as we know, to steal intellectual property and exfiltrate data.”

“It's actually a lot larger that some of that excludes a big chunk of China and India and a couple of the markets. Easily north of three billion.”

“In China, for example, like people their COVID codes are used. The red and green zones are often marked as like COVID red, and then they can't travel. Their WeChat doesn't work.”

“People will say, oh, China's authoritarian. That's why I can build fast. We're a democracy. We, you know, they're basically making a virtue out of incompetence, right? That's actually not the case because, quote unquote, the U.S. Was a democracy. I mean, if yo…”

“It takes years to build a train station in the Bay area and it takes less than a day in China. That is not a, oh, they're 10% faster. They are literally a hundred X faster. Maybe a thousand X. If you're talking one day or like, let's say nine hours, right? Ver…”

“In reality, we're probably so far away from doing that, that if we have one conflict with China, where we expand most of our ballistics inventory, we might not be able to remake it for like five years.”

“90% of the solar panels in the country are being made in China by basically slave labor where millions of minority and immigrant women are being chemically castrated every year and forced into servitude.”

“You know, even, even if you're an EA type of person or, you know, you're a pacifist or whatever, or if you're into climate change or like, you know, pick, pick any industry that you think is important. Like good luck running compute on GPT-III if there are no …”

“But if we have one conflict with China where we expand most of our ballistics inventory, We might not be able to remake it for like five years. Then we're basically standing around, you know, with our hands tied behind our backs.”

“And I think that is something That the Chinese will never be able to match, so we should be very proud of that, and we should make use of it.”

“Over the last, ah, several years, last four years, China's been launching, doing more space launches than any country on Earth, including the United States, which I think is a fact people just weren't even aware of.”

“DOD is still largely using the same energetic material developed in the 19 forties. And a third of that material is produced overseas with supply chains reliant on China, of course.”

“Russia, China Iran, North Korea, they are building up their electronic warfare capabilities. They are jamming GPS. They are jamming communications, which are traditional assets that we've become so reliant on, our predator drones, our, you know, our smaller ve…”

“China and Russia and our adversarial nations are not waiting and have, in many ways, been much more successful at adopting commercial technology into their military process.”

“And the result of this is that today, in almost every war game that the United States simulates against China or their proxies, the United States, ah, if we don't lose, certainly end up in a very, very bad situation.”

“I could give a whole talk on how the executives of Silicon Valley used the vocal minority of their rank and file as a smoke screen for their dependence on China, but that's a different talk for a different day.”

“Well, one thing that the US has never done is true escrow and a lot of other countries like in China, for example, they really do escrow where you have to accept the item. To basically release the funds. In essence, in the U S the difference is that we have cr…”

“So last mile logistics is a tremendously difficult thing in most of the markets that we're talking about right now, as it has been in China as well.”

“There's actually stories about VCs who were able to catch some really fantastic companies in China that were targeting more like second, third, fourth tier cities. By literally just talking to waiters and waitresses and asking them, those who were working in B…”

“Because the market's so big The pie is so large that it does actually warrant that crazy risk taking, that even if a company is already doing well, I might just give a ton of money to another competitor because if they win, the pie is so much bigger.”

“When you look at the population in a lot of even the larger countries, like places like Egypt and Indonesia and all, a large swath of the population is still in a Cairo or in a Jakarta. The second or third cities there are large, for sure, but not in the same …”

“There is such a difference between first, second, third, fourth, fifth tier city in China, a much bigger difference than in the U S from state to state. I can take a state in the Midwest, compare it to New York or California. And that difference is far less th…”

“Still so much slower than China though.”

“Then you have Xiaomi in China, the second biggest phone company, and they're successful because they have a thousand super users that vote on what features should go into the new phone, and they get the phone early and can boast to people, look, I voted, and a…”

“What I'm finding a lot of people in D.C. Right now is they, they're kind of, they're a little schizophrenic on this, which is if they don't have to talk about China, then they talk, They get very angry about figuring out how to punish and regulate, you know, U…”

“There are people who have been close to China over the last 20 years who are starting to wake up and realize that they probably made a big mistake because the moral valence of China is changing in real time as the U.S. Becomes more anti-China, as China becomes…”

“The way he governed so I mean, well, it created certainly an economic miracle of the likes that, you know you know, maybe we've never, ever seen before. He pulled many people out of poverty.”

“The moral valence on China is shifting in real time right now on both sides of the political aisle in Washington, in the same way the moral valence on the Soviet Union shifted in the late 19 forties, early 19 fifties, and I think there are people who have been…”

“My understanding is, you know, in China, it's actually, like, a pretty big phenomenon is, like, AI will be the track, but it won't be the lyrics.”

“Most recently in China, you know, there's a direct correlation between the degree to which the Chinese Communist Party kind of takes its boot off the throat of the people in terms of their ability to engage in markets. And engage in trade and the extent to whi…”

“I'm persuaded that cutting edge semiconductors belong in that garden. I have not been persuaded of basically anything else.”

“If we don't get the hard power side of the equation right, we may stumble into war on someone else's terms, and it's going to be horrific. It will look the current, it will make the current crises in the Middle East and Ukraine look like child's play in compar…”

“Ultimately, I think in the Sino-American competition, 90% of the questions that matter are about America, not about China.”

“We know that China is, you know, investing in similar technologies. We know they're going to move out on it,”

“Right now for instance, there's a country that, that very much would like nuclear reactors for energy in the US is not allowed to sell into that country, and currently the only other country bidding on a reactor is China.”

“It's a hundred percent going to be the case. There are two AI tech stacks and there are two AI governance models, and there are two AI, you know, deployment, you know systems.”

“Look, if there's a unifying issue, there's basically two unifying issues in Washington. One is they don't like China and the other is they don't like big tech. And so, you know, this is a winnable war. Like, this is a winnable war on behalf of startups and ope…”

“With kind of misguided regulation You know, we could actually force our way from something that, you know, is open source, open weights. Anybody can build it. We'll have a plethora of this technology. We'll be like, use all of American innovation to compete, o…”

“There's a software side of the problem, which we're ahead on, but there's a hardware side of the problem where China has a major, major lead.”

“If we go to war with China over Taiwan or something crazy like that, like these drones could all become weapons that are used against our own soldiers.”

“If you think about what we're concerned about in terms of our AI policy, which is really at the federal level, almost a hundred percent kind of competitiveness with China. We're probably focused on entirely the wrong issue because the real issue competitively,…”

“My nine-year-old's favorite toy slash companion right now is a 1500 dollar robot dog from China from a company called Unitree.”

“The AI version of that is, you know, Eliezer Yadkowsky's version of that is we must bomb data centers. Like, if there's a data center that we think might take off, like, if the training run starts to go too well, like, we need to send in the Air Force and be b…”

“If you're really worried about China, then, you know, I think we need to deal with what we talked about last time, which is the robot supply chain where we are really behind.”

“I'm a hundred percent a believer that, like, we're in Cold War II. Now as Neil Ferguson calls it, it's you know, it is the defining geopolitical conflict of the 21st century is U.S. V. China in the same way that the defining conflict of the 20th century was U.…”

“Probably the one thing we could do to lose to China is try and use policy to beat China.”

“China just you know, put a sanction on getting kind of supplies to Skydio, which is the leading U.S. Drone company.”

“The single best stat for this is they are running hundreds of tests a year of hypersonic weapons. The US is running, like, four.”

“If you want to look at a place to arbitrage really smart, educated people and relatively low cost, it's hard to beat China globally, right? And so they definitely have access to a bunch of, you know, potentially highly educated annotated data, which is very re…”

“China is a lot of very smart people. They're incredibly capable. They're great researchers. They can build stuff as great as well as we can, and they can open source it. We did not enable them. They do this even with export controls on chips. Right? So there's…”

“China has not shown that they can actually continue to play ball, ah, pushing the frontier of AI.”

“For Deep Seek specifically, there was the part that limited speech about politically sensitive topics in China. So this is stuff like, you know, Taiwan or Tiananmen Square, that kind of thing. And it's pretty clear that that was Basically a separate system fro…”

“It was more of a surprise for the people in Silicon Valley, many of whom who still had funds that were operating in China. It was more of a surprise for them. And now I don't think it's a surprise for anyone. I think everyone's gets the thesis and is, is on bo…”

“And, you know, as a country, we basically outsource manufacturing to China. And I think that that was a, you know, a series of policy decisions, expediency on the part of business. That was a mistake from a military standpoint, because one of the major themes …”

“I think that the industrial capacity of China is Fearsome. And try as we might, I think that's gonna be a very difficult thing to close out in one year or even a decade, and, you know, I, I'm an optimist, and, you know, I like to, I'll always like to believe t…”

“Other firms, you know, were investing in China and had all this other activity and, you know, now they might be a little bit Johnny come lately and like excited about defense, but they used to say no way to defense, no way to those things”

“The existential threat is not a degree of temperature change in 2100. The existential threat was Iran getting a nuclear weapon, ah, and losing the AI arms race to China. Those are the two top order bits in terms of priorities.”

“30% of the world's electricity today comes from coal. 60% of China comes from coal. China's added close to a hundred gigawatts of coal in the last 12 months.”

“Right now China's controlling 85% of the refining of the rare earth minerals and the critical minerals.”

“Our adversaries are actually trying to deploy their software into allied ports. Like, the Chinese are really good in making sure their software runs in ports. They're giving it away for free, and there's a reason why they do that.”

“The point is, how do you compete with China on global manufacturing? And the answer is, with software and AI and robotics that give the American worker superpowers.”

“You can go to the dealership and try, you know, assisted, assisted parking in a way that does not exist anywhere in the West.”

“In China, this is, you know, this is the reality. Engineers software engineers are very senior within the party and within the defense apparatus, and they are making these decisions”

“A stable equilibrium is certainly not one where we just turn our back on a bunch of allies, because China's definitely has enough of the compute resources to try to export great models like DeepSeek to the rest of the world.”

“If you can, if you think about the last 20 years, the way the cloud evolved was that the vast majority of cloud infrastructure basically existed in two places, right? China and the US.”

“Just a year before DeepSea came out, you had a number of, like, tech leaders in Washington testifying that China was, like, five to six years behind the US, with confidence, on the record. And then DeepSea comes out 26 days after OpenAI puts out the frontier.”

“They only agree on two things. They only agree on big tech and China. This is the only two things they agree on, but they really agree on those things.”

“Apple would just argue there was no way we could even have started the iPhone anywhere else.”

“That was really the start of designed in Cupertino, manufactured in China.”

“All the experts in 1999 were like two things. Yay for global trade. This is what we all want. And also, don't worry. China, they're going to stay a third world dictatorship forever. They couldn't have been more wrong.”

“So the point of no return was basically, I would say, two years into the iPhone, the scale was such, there was nowhere else.”

“All of a sudden, drones are the most important thing, and like, all of a sudden, we were like, we don't even, we don't, not just, we don't make the drone, we don't make any of the parts for the drone. Yeah. And they're all made, the only person who makes them …”

“The Clinton administration had really pushed for China to come in, and it actually split the Democratic Party. People today, their heads would explode if you tried this out, and it turns out the Republicans were split too. Yeah. Because half the Republicans we…”

“I think that the mistake is either thinking that China is about cheap labor, or the mistake is thinking that for things to be made in the U.S., it has to recreate three hundred million migrant workers on buses working temporarily and going back home.”

“I think it's very, very easy to say China doesn't respect intellectual property, so they can't be part of the world stage, flat out. I mean, they've crushed the pharmaceutical industry that way. You know, what they've done with BYD and Tesla, Arguably pretty r…”

“What China was doing was taking all the hundreds of millions of poor people and letting them live temporarily in all the factories of all kinds, clothes and cars and computers, whatever, and live for part of the year, and then bring massive amounts of cash bac…”

“I believe they said Apple invests fifty-five billion dollars a year in, in China. And I think the author said that's equivalent or maybe even bigger than the entirety of the Marshall Plan is, is just astronomical.”

“As Tim Cook says, people think that China is about cheap manufacturing. It's the skills they have.”

“And like, we met once with and so the car companies, if you just fast forward, they all are out of China now. These joint ventures, they could never get their money out. They lost all their IP, their manufacturer. It's just horrible to, like, Volkswagen, Ford,…”

“Like, we had to shut down Hotmail for forever because, like, we wouldn't let them see the data center servers, which weren't even in China, and all sorts of complexities.”

“A lot of the existing AP 1000 technology is quite good, and other countries can do it quite cheaply. China is using a very similar design. The UAE just built one for incredibly cheap.”

“This is an island country. That is, you know, seven days away from a total energy block, blackout if they get an oil and gas blockade from China so that they can't bring in ships to deliver oil and fuel.”

“Being cut off from being able to buy batteries from China is incredibly punitive to a company, and we've certainly seen that happen with some of our startups, and then they have to go, you know, then you find out quickly that the ability to procure and source …”

“Our supply chains are highly reliant on China. It's a huge problem. We have to figure out how to address it. And that means investing in mining in the US again.”

“The supply chain for like a new pump in Australia could take, you know, 30 weeks and getting that exact same pump but with a mine in China, it shows up in, you know, a week or three days.”

“In California, elections are held, but the party always wins, exactly like China. Okay, Democrats destroyed democracy in California.”

“Blue America was disrupted by the internet, and so they began wokeness to take a piece of Red America's pie, and the tech clash to try and take back control from the internet. Red America was disrupted by China, so the trade war was against China, and Trump wa…”

“What's happening in China is more due to the fact that you have the system of financial repression, which redistributes money and also currency manipulation, which basically redistributes ordinary people's money to these to basically producing one EV maker in …”

“I would say that already most of the things he predicted have been invalidated or made irrelevant in the last year and a half, like, and especially in terms, like all the comp stuff about competition with China you know, like it turns out filtration was able t…”

“What I would like to see happen between the U.S. And China, basically, is, like, the equivalent of some red telephone during the Cold War, where you can communicate Look, we noticed this, especially when AI becomes a more integrated with like the economy and g…”

“China's basically been running the American system playbook.”

“And AI is only happening in two places. It's only U.S. Versus China.”

“What China is trying to do is commoditizing our strength. And so the release of a bunch of open, pure open source, open weight models coming from China is specifically designed to go after a rigid or complacent American view of AI, which is, you know, cloud ho…”

“And then you forward by a year, and they've got the best models by far, and we're way behind.”

“No empirical evidence at the time that this was, that AI was creating net new marginal risks, and just factual inaccuracies that we were ahead of China, because if you just paid attention to what's happening, DeepSeek had already started to publish a fantastic…”

“They're subsidizing the semiconductor industry to the tune of like, 152 hundred billion dollars a year through SOEs, through CapEx that's not generating revenue, et cetera.”

“Hurting Japan and Europe more than we hurt ourselves, but hurting both of us actually just lets China win. So it doesn't seem like a credible threat to me.”

“Relative to their GDP, our trade imbalance with them is, is as large as it is with China.”

“For example, if you had used tariffs as a kind of bargaining tool to force China to stop undervaluing the Yuan, which it did to a significant degree in the 2000. That might've worked. In fact, I think we should have done that.”

“Not, not all the tariffs on, I would say strategic industries with China. I don't think we, you know, need tariffs on Chinese clothes because if China makes clothes, that's not a national security threat to us.”

“Historically, China's just not been able to build software, at least for, like, the prosumer enterprise market, which is kind of my world. They've just never really been able to do that, and so I think that, you know, their ability to compete at, like, a softw…”

“Manus is a great example. They just announced a ninety million annualized run rate. And if you look at their traffic, it's number one Brazil, number two US, and number three China.”

“The more that we lock down obviously American products, the more Chinese, the Chinese will enter those markets and sort of take a land grab in that space.”

“Had we done the same thing in AI in that period of time, then you don't have the medical advancements. You don't have the breakthroughs. You don't have all of the things that come from this that are incredible. But beyond that, we lose to China. Full stop.”

“I think they'll be able to ramp. I think it'll take a little bit longer and there will be, like, a sort of a gap in between where China probably backtracks and says it's fine.”

“China, because they wanted, they sort of, like, wanted to stockpile lithography, and they were worried about the coming ban, they were importing lithography at a much higher rate than that, right? Like, 30, 40% of their equipment imports were lithography, and …”

“I think that unless it goes hot in 28 is going to be 10 to 15 years. And as long as we can Hold them off there. Then their population drops off and we're good for another 300 years. Like that's kind of how I view the equation.”

“Where there's something like 250 times the shipbuilding capacity you know, massively, massively, probably thousands of times on the weapon side. You know, it is just on drones. It's massive. Like, you just, kind of look category by category, massively outpacin…”

“China has definitively more industrial independence and the ability to continue production absent, you know, kind of like their choke points are quite a bit more, more mineral minimal, right?”

“My thesis on this is because of the one child policy is going to really drop off China's population very quickly at a certain period of time. It creates this forcing function where in my opinion that the Taiwan scenario is more likely to happen because if they…”

“Otherwise it's just the playing field is so uneven that no amount of technology can catch up to like the China cost.”

“As of right now, if you look at, like, the PlayStation five as a product, like, that is effectively, I would say, 90% of fully automated production line, and, like, writ large across the board, people really miss this, and I think it's, like, strategic CCP com…”

“China has strategically kind of strangleholded that, you know, not only did they have the processing of those rare earths, but now they've exported, controlled, so they don't allow the export of magnet-making technology. That is now a restricted national techn…”

“What I want to say is that the competition, I believe, between the U.S. And China will Last for decades. It will not be solved or resolved through any single technology, not even a technology as crucial as artificial intelligence.”

“Over the last 15 years, the U.S. Has a lead on software, no question about that. But its manufacturing and hardware has not gotten that much better. So the Chinese are learning at a much faster rate and patching up their deficiencies than the Americans are.”

“What Xi Jinping did was that he elevated a lot of the leaders of China's military industrial complex, the people who ran China's crewed space missions, the people who ran China's biggest weapons companies, and he elevated them to be provincial party secretarie…”

“And so here we are today, and I think there's 18 cities with ten million.”