The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Discussing ＂The Great Heist - China's Epic Campaign to Steal America's Secrets＂ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_939)

00:00:00.000 Hi, everybody. This is Scott Saad. Rarely do I have more than one guest at a time. This is one

00:00:05.160 of those occasions. Today, I've got, let me just make sure I read your names, David Shedd and

00:00:10.640 Andrew Badger. I'll introduce you in a second. Thank you for coming on, gentlemen.

00:00:15.940 Thank you for having us.

00:00:17.340 Great to be with you. We're going to be talking about this little beauty that came out last week,

00:00:21.860 The Great Heist, co-authored by both of you, China's infiltration to steal all good things 1.00

00:00:27.540 from the United States. We'll talk about that. But let me just mention who you are. David is the

00:00:32.240 former deputy director and acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. That's only going

00:00:38.360 to increase my street cred as the unofficial head of the Mossad, by the way. You also serve as chief

00:00:47.280 of staff for the director of the National Intelligence and National Security Council,

00:00:51.000 senior director and special assistant to the president for intelligence under George W.

00:00:57.480 Bush. And Andrew Badger spent two decades serving as a DIA case officer. And then you

00:01:03.960 went to McKinsey and Company, which oftentimes my MBA students, that's their favorite place

00:01:09.420 to end up. So did I miss anything in terms of your bios that you want to add before we delve

00:01:15.040 into this beauty?

00:01:16.720 Not at all.

00:01:17.600 Sounds great.

00:01:18.500 All right. So let's start with just give us the big 30,000 foot synopsis of the book,

00:01:24.440 The Great Heist.

00:01:25.180 So why don't I kick it off and then pass it over to Andrew? The arc that we present throughout

00:01:33.240 the pages of this book is that China has been on a pathway of accelerating their stealing of American 0.71

00:01:46.360 intellectual property, know-how, data, and everything associated with enabling China to

00:01:55.180 do a modern version of the Great Leap Forward. And this is in large response to something put in

00:02:03.960 place strategically by Deng Xiaoping in 1986 in a seminal speech in which he really laid out how China

00:02:12.960 could coexist between a single party, that being the Chinese Communist Party rule, we would call it

00:02:22.400 authoritarian rule, and at the same time with controlled capitalism. And so that was essentially

00:02:29.280 the design under which now we have Xi Jinping since 2012. And the launch, and we really delve into this,

00:02:36.800 and Andrew, you can elaborate on this, the kickoff of Made in China 2025 in 2015, a 10-year plan

00:02:46.080 against 10 critical areas of innovation and the kind of capabilities that China needs in order to

00:02:55.300 move forward. To give your audience just an idea of what China has done, it has gone from a $1.3

00:03:02.960 trillion economy in 2001 when it joined the World Trade Organization, when the world, the West in

00:03:10.640 particular, had high hopes that they would play by the international rules of trade and so forth.

00:03:16.400 That has not happened as the book gets into it. To now a $17 trillion economy. Just to put that in

00:03:23.840 perspective, ours in the United States is about $27 trillion. And Xi Jinping has every intention to

00:03:30.720 move beyond that to about parity with the United States by 2035. And in doing so, we would say,

00:03:39.680 China's great leap forward could not have been done at this rate of speed, at this breadth and

00:03:46.400 depth of what it's done for its economy without stealing this intellectual property from the West.

00:03:52.000 Got you. Andrew, you want to add some stuff?

00:03:54.720 Yeah, I mean, there's that central question, right? How did China go from this agrarian, 0.99

00:04:00.320 third-rate power, you know, farmers, poor, one of the poorest nations on earth, to now they're

00:04:06.160 literally one of the strongest superpowers. I would argue they are a superpower in technology,

00:04:11.280 and they're a superpower in military force. They dominate these critical industries like

00:04:16.800 AI. They're dominating areas in pharmaceuticals. They're leading the EV market around the world.

00:04:22.400 They're dominating technologies like hypersonic aircraft or aircraft that can move really fast

00:04:27.280 and have military applications. So this is the question. Is it because of their command and control

00:04:31.360 economy? Is it because of these, you know, longer 10-year plans that are 1.3 billion people?

00:04:37.040 Our argument is that the reason why it's been so fast over 10, 20 years is because they've literally

00:04:43.120 stolen everything from across every sector, from agricultural seeds, to paint formulas, to Coca-Cola,

00:04:50.160 to Lockheed Martin, to GE, to Apple. And one of our biggest stories is how they stole

00:04:55.760 Tesla, the auto source code. And this is what it comes down to. Power has transformed in the 21st

00:05:01.360 century. It's now, it's not just tanks and planes. It's ones and zeros. It's digital code.

00:05:06.080 And with that thumb drive, you can stick in that thumb drive and steal decades of research and

00:05:11.440 development, you know, blood, sweat, and toil to develop these technologies. And boom, just like that,

00:05:16.800 they acquire them. So this book reveals all, reveals how they've done it. And it's the book,

00:05:21.440 we say, that the Chinese Communist Party doesn't want you to read, doesn't want it exposed.

00:05:25.680 So before I drill down on some of the fascinating content, am I to assume that you're both

00:05:33.200 not booking any vacations to China anytime soon?

00:05:37.360 That will not happen for me. I did some service there in my career. I will not be welcome back. And

00:05:44.560 my wife would never let that happen anyway. 1.00

00:05:48.000 I assume it's the same for you, Andrew.

00:05:50.160 Well, we've gotten definitely a number of phishing attacks increased, I think, against us. And we had

00:05:55.440 a few posts on Twitter, you know, that have gone pretty, you know, viral getting, you know,

00:05:59.600 hundreds, thousands of likes. And these Chinese trolls are coming out in force just saying, 0.92

00:06:03.760 this is, you know, all rubbish. It's the Americans have stolen everything. So I definitely think we've 1.00

00:06:08.640 probably hit a sore spot. I want to get into in a second, you know, why was this so easily done?

00:06:16.160 But before we do that, just a couple of maybe psychological and sociological comments about

00:06:21.120 the unique features of Chinese society that might allow them to do this. And I'm not sure if you

00:06:26.800 covered them and probably not in the language that I'm about to use. So when we talk about ethics,

00:06:31.760 there is a distinction between what are called deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics.

00:06:36.640 Deontological ethics, it is never okay to lie or steal. It's an absolute statement. Consequentialist

00:06:43.440 ethic, it's okay to engage in this behavior if the consequences are laudable, right? And so,

00:06:50.320 number one, I would, so I'm going to ask both questions and then you can answer. So I suspect

00:06:55.920 that from the Chinese perspective, they're not viewing themselves as, you know, nefarious and

00:07:00.960 diabolical evil thieves, but rather there is a consequentialist calculus that says, if we have

00:07:07.760 to do this for the greater good of our society, then so be it. Number two, the fact that they come 0.76

00:07:13.520 from a collectivist society allows them to create a delineation between us and them that's really firm, 0.99

00:07:20.640 so that all those bastard Yankees, who cares? Our moral code does not apply to them. What do you 1.00

00:07:27.920 think about those two explanations that might allow them to look at themselves in the mirror and say,

00:07:32.000 we're perfectly moral whilst we do this?

00:07:34.480 So let me take the first one and maybe Andrew, you take the second one. So I've given you the harder

00:07:39.680 one, Andrew. The first one is, you have to look at China from their perspective,

00:07:46.160 that they were held back and were kept weak intentionally by the West. And this is what we

00:07:55.200 lay out in the book in terms of this era of humiliation. And so when you look at their

00:08:03.440 rationale for doing what they're doing, it's exactly that subjective morality, if you will,

00:08:10.640 on what's right and wrong, when in turn, they then respond with, well, you kept us down in this

00:08:18.560 period of humiliation, never again. And so there is this whole concept of rejuvenation of China. And

00:08:29.120 in many ways, almost in a bespoke kind of way, they say, this is due to us. We are owed this from the

00:08:38.400 West for having these decades and decades of being oppressed by the West. The international order was

00:08:46.960 put in place under all forms of that post-World War II and post the long march of 1949 in China,

00:08:56.560 only then to have us suppressed in terms of our ability as the great middle kingdom that we have

00:09:04.640 in such a rich history. So there is this whole idea. And it's manifested in, and I'll just close with

00:09:11.360 this, with this whole concept of guanxi. The guanxi is this relational piece that gets things done in

00:09:19.120 China. If I know you and you have access to someone or something that I need, we trade on that. The values 0.78

00:09:28.480 aren't whether you're taking it from someone else and giving it to me. It is, frankly, almost a matter

00:09:35.360 of duty that may be a little strong, but not too strong, that there is a duty for you in the guanxi

00:09:41.600 to share that with me. And it's my right to get it. That's the interesting thing. And so the construct of

00:09:50.800 these joint ventures that have set up with the Western companies that have come in, 51% ownership,

00:09:56.480 China and 49% Western is, you know, what did you expect? Of course, we're going to capture what you 0.99

00:10:04.000 do. We're going to cage it in the mainland, and then we're going to replicate it. And we call that

00:10:09.840 the kill. I mean, so the chain is really pretty clear. Andrew? I agree. Gad, that's one of the best

00:10:17.200 questions I think we've received. I mean, this provides, I've been actually dwelling on this point

00:10:22.720 quite a bit the past few weeks. And I think China, they fundamentally view espionage in a completely

00:10:28.080 different way than us. I think when we think about it, it's something kind of slimy, it's something,

00:10:32.000 oh yeah, you might have to do. Policymakers view it as just kind of one more tool in the toolkit.

00:10:37.280 I don't think there's any type of moral reservations about espionage. I think it's actually,

00:10:40.960 yeah, like David said, almost this duty to do it. And this gives China a huge asymmetric advantage. 0.68

00:10:47.040 They basically are playing by no rules. I know a lot of people think, you know,

00:10:50.880 Western intelligences are pulling the strings behind everything. I can assure you they're 0.89

00:10:54.720 probably not. But there are, you know, there are rules, there are legal legislation, Congress,

00:11:00.000 oversight, etc. China has none of that. And I think a key point here too is that espionage is so embedded

00:11:07.120 as a critical tool for Chinese leaders. Xi Jinping looks at espionage as a critical enabler for his

00:11:13.600 plans. Like David mentioned, this great rejuvenation of China. That's basically China's

00:11:18.000 make America great again slogan, which they keep repeating over and over again. And, you know,

00:11:24.080 this goes back all the way to Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military philosopher, kind of their Machiavelli.

00:11:30.240 And he dedicates an entire chapter, which we kind of analyze in our book about espionage,

00:11:36.000 about how critical it is. And he says that a leader has a moral responsibility to do it because

00:11:41.760 espionage is one of the best ways to, you know, preserve your people's blood,

00:11:46.640 their treasure, to win wars quickly. So as a leader, you're responsible for your people.

00:11:52.400 If you can win a war quicker through espionage, you have to do it. You have a moral responsibility

00:11:57.040 to do that. And going to your point, Gat, about collectivism. So China passed a law in 2017,

00:12:03.280 the National Intelligence Law. Every Chinese citizen has to work with the intelligence service if they're 1.00

00:12:10.560 asked. There's no question. You have to do it. So 1.3 billion people, you know, 300,000 students in

00:12:17.280 the US alone, not alone Canada, the UK, all of those students, et cetera, they have to report back

00:12:24.000 to the Chinese intelligence service if they're asked. And they also have, they're willing to,

00:12:28.800 again, going back to this asymmetric advantage, they're willing to use blackmail. They're willing

00:12:33.040 to threaten your family and friends back home. They're willing to do things like honeypots,

00:12:37.040 which Western services don't really do. So we call this actually the Kaspersky Doctrine,

00:12:42.880 which goes back to Russia, which basically, you know, if you remember, they gave out all these

00:12:47.120 cyber security programs around the world. The Russian intelligence service then used all the

00:12:52.320 access to collect intelligence. China, with all their fingertip feel, all their nodes around the 0.94

00:12:58.080 global economy have now been transformed into intelligence collectors. And this is why we say that the MSS,

00:13:05.360 the Ministry of State Security, this is China's FBI, CIA, NSA combined, is actually now the most

00:13:11.680 powerful intelligence agency in the world. Wow.

00:13:15.440 Can I just add one other point? Please, please.

00:13:18.000 It's really important to recognize that this national intelligence law that was passed in 2017,

00:13:23.840 that Andrew is referring to, also requires every Chinese entity, company, small, big, or medium size,

00:13:32.720 to cooperate with them. And so if you choose to get into, for example, TikTok and the parent ByteDance,

00:13:41.040 when ByteDance is required then to assist the Chinese Communist Party with both the data and

00:13:48.240 the influence that obviously it can have with 1.6 billion users globally, 137 million in the United

00:13:55.520 States. It can't say no either. It's not only the individuals in this collectivism. It's the entities.

00:14:02.800 Can you imagine that in the United States? Apple, you have to work with the US government. You have

00:14:08.000 to work with CIA. It doesn't work that way. Right. Wow. I just wanted to say one or two points more about

00:14:15.120 the cultural element. So in soccer, you know, you often will feign an injury to try to elicit the

00:14:24.400 referee giving you a penalty kick. That happens a lot more historically with South American teams

00:14:31.600 that have, it becomes an art form to be able to be duplicitous. It's not a ethical breach. It's actually

00:14:41.440 part of you being a good soccer player to know how to twirl as though you've been shot at from a

00:14:47.280 bazooka. And therefore, if when when Maradona scored his hand of God goal in 1986, he didn't have any

00:14:55.200 ethical, you know, existential angst. On the contrary, I'm smart that I was able to. So I think there's that

00:15:02.560 element and I'll link it to a personal story that I've recently been been telling. When we first moved to

00:15:09.200 Canada from Montreal, you know, in the Middle East, there is the culture of bachshish. Bachshish means

00:15:16.000 you grease somebody to get something done. And it's completely institutionalized within the DNA of

00:15:21.520 the society. Well, when my dad was receiving some parking tickets, his first reaction was, okay,

00:15:29.840 so who's the policeman that I have to see and solve this problem? And then to which whomever he was

00:15:36.240 speaking to answered, well, this is not how it's done in Canada. And then he answers in a very telling

00:15:42.880 way, well, what kind of barbaric society is this, right? So the fact that there wasn't institutionalized

00:15:50.480 corruption demonstrated that this orderly high trust society was barbaric. And so culture really

00:15:58.640 does matter. Okay, let me ask you about this. How much of all of the theft that you cover in the book

00:16:07.040 is, you know, successfully implemented by the Chinese as a result of human weaknesses, 0.96

00:16:15.280 the honeypot, let me get the gorgeous Chinese girl to, to, you know, to, to seduce the guy versus 1.00

00:16:22.240 just lack of, you know, cyber security. How much is it? Both of those, if you have to allocate 100

00:16:28.800 points, how much is due to human frailties versus technological frailties? Either.

00:16:35.280 Yeah, I'll kick it off again, just to say, I think it's a combination of the two. And I would,

00:16:41.920 I would put it that this, this whole society approach with the capabilities of this ministry

00:16:48.960 of state security that has now doubled in size under Xi Jinping to an estimated 300,000. Just

00:16:55.520 to give you an idea, the US intelligence community in its totality is maybe 90,000 to 100,000 at an

00:17:03.440 unclassified number, but that I obviously can't give you the classified number with precision. But just

00:17:10.160 so your audience understands the scale of the three to one, while at the same time enhancing their

00:17:17.040 expertise. The other thing, and I think you're, you're going to this, this issue started on the,

00:17:23.600 or God, on the, on the whole issue of, they play the long game. And the tools in their intelligence

00:17:31.840 toolkit is whatever works best. We are a society, particularly in the last, I've been out of

00:17:39.120 government now 11 years. And when I left government, it was starting to accelerate this,

00:17:46.000 this openness in terms of open source and the ability to tap into that. They take great advantage

00:17:54.640 of that. And they, whether it's on university campuses and research and development, working

00:18:00.960 with national labs, joint research that is undertaken and all those sorts of things. So is it the honeypot

00:18:10.000 all the time or predominantly? No. Is it, is it nefarious dark alley cloak and dagger? No, it's not that

00:18:20.080 either. It is much more relational. It's long term. They believe in a very interesting concept and that's

00:18:28.560 deep expertise. And I would say that's the one overlap that they have with the Soviet slash Russians of 0.97

00:18:36.160 today. They put in their, their KGB people in the Russian case, like the MSS for long tours of duty.

00:18:44.800 They'll be at an embassy for five, 10 years. They'll work a particular area for five to 10 years. We

00:18:52.400 don't work that way in the US intelligence business. We're two year tours, maybe with an extension of one

00:18:58.240 year and you're off to somewhere else. And that, so they, they deepen their roots in this relational piece.

00:19:04.800 So, and Andrew in the book really elaborates on his portion of writing on the MSS and their tactics.

00:19:12.640 So maybe over to you, Andrew, in terms of building off of that on the either or.

00:19:18.880 Yeah. And what's so amazing about the Chinese intelligence service is their creativity. They've

00:19:23.760 done collection methods that we've never seen before. So for one example, they do a VC startup

00:19:29.440 pitches. So startup companies submit their pitches, they're going to get investment,

00:19:34.000 they could win these competitions. It's not a real competition. They want to see what your startup

00:19:39.040 is working on. They want to look under the hood, see if it has valuable IP. They do talent recruitment

00:19:44.240 programs. Basically this massive recruitment say, we're going to recruit a scientist from Brazil,

00:19:49.600 the best scientists from the US, best scientists from Canada, bring them to China, have them replicate the

00:19:55.280 same research they were doing in that country, but here in China. So for one example, the chair of the

00:20:02.640 chemistry department at Harvard university, a nanotech, the leading nanotechnology expert in the

00:20:08.320 world, you know, these small particles that basically form all these advanced substances named Charles

00:20:14.320 Lieber. He was recruited under one of these thousand talent programs. So while working at Harvard, he set up

00:20:20.240 a duplicate facility in Wuhan, of all places, and was replicating his research without telling Harvard,

00:20:27.040 the FBI, and he was also getting DOD grants to do research for the US Department of Defense.

00:20:32.480 He was eventually caught and prosecuted. He did, I think, one or two year sentence. And the irony is,

00:20:38.480 he's actually now back in China and helping work on a university there.

00:20:42.240 And getting paid very well.

00:20:44.240 He got paid very well, 50,000 a month. But it's this creativity that the Chinese have with,

00:20:50.080 it's not just about, you know, back in the day, you know, it'd be a diplomat who's a spy who's under

00:20:55.440 diplomat cover, they go to a cocktail party, they recruit another diplomat, they go meet them in a car in

00:21:00.400 a back alley, and they're, you know, taking notes on secret meetings. This is a whole new experience.

00:21:05.680 And one final point is this crowdsource espionage. So a lot of Chinese control over these intelligence 0.82

00:21:12.320 sources, you know, people who are stealing secrets from a company, or governments, etc, is about

00:21:17.520 implicit rewards. They, they kind of hold out these lures, and they say, hey, if you steal that

00:21:22.560 technology at that new battery company, or, you know, at a new AI company, you know, if you come back

00:21:29.200 to China, we'll help you start your own company. And, you know, so it's not, they're not directly

00:21:34.000 controlling it per se, but they're benefiting from the theft of those secrets. And just to your point

00:21:39.600 about human versus cyber, they do both. But the most dangerous one is human enabled cyber,

00:21:46.720 because just your average cyber hack, you know, they can only get so far in terms of even the

00:21:51.360 best hackers, if you have strong defenses, you can usually repel them. But if you have an employee

00:21:57.040 inside a company who can put a thumb drive into a secure system, it doesn't matter how good your

00:22:02.480 cyber security, cyber security is, they're going to download all those secrets. And again,

00:22:08.080 with just one thumb drive, you can get decades of research, decades of R&D, and basically entire

00:22:14.400 US military arsenal has been stolen at this point. Amazing. I want to link your book and all of the

00:22:21.760 theft that you document in the book to and I'm not doing this to to plug my own forthcoming book,

00:22:27.680 but you may or may not know that I have a book that's receiving a lot of buzz global buzz,

00:22:32.400 called Suicidal Empathy. And so for the people who may not know what it is, and perhaps I don't know

00:22:38.000 if you do or not, in the book, what I'm arguing is that the biggest, all of the big domestic and

00:22:44.720 foreign policy insanity that you could think of stems from this pathological, dysregulated,

00:22:52.080 suicidal empathy. Empathy is a beautiful thing. It's an evolutionary-based virtue because we are

00:22:58.320 social species. We expect to be empathetic towards our, you know, co-species members. But

00:23:07.040 like Aristotle explained to us several thousand years ago, everything in moderation. So empathy has to be

00:23:12.320 deployed in the right amount, in the right situation, to the right targets. Otherwise, it becomes suicidal.

00:23:18.400 We care more about MS-13 gang members coming in so that they can live the American experience than

00:23:24.720 we care about American vets who lost their limbs. That is suicidal empathy. We presume that all

00:23:30.240 immigrants are equally likely to assimilate because it would be mean to do otherwise. That's suicidal 0.99

00:23:34.960 empathy. I can't help but think without, I've only very quickly gone through the book, but that,

00:23:41.200 and not trying to wish to, you know, put my framework into this. But a lot of this wouldn't

00:23:48.880 have happened had we not been an open society that is also committed to being a suicidally

00:23:56.080 empathetic society. Does that make sense? Well, just again, I think Andrew will elaborate on this.

00:24:03.120 I'll give you a great example. Again, you nailed it on the head. I don't want to go off a tangent,

00:24:09.840 but I'm sure you read Tom Holland's Dominion. I think, you know, he explains how Christianity

00:24:14.720 has formed this Western mind. And I think it's a fascinating subject you're writing on. But I'll

00:24:18.960 give you one example and I'll turn to David. But so in 2018, President Trump administration,

00:24:24.400 this first term, set up a task force at the Department of Justice, and they called this the China

00:24:29.920 initiative. And these task force, we spoke to a few, we interviewed a few of the leaders of it for

00:24:34.880 our book. They're really important because they set up a task, they set the priorities for basically

00:24:39.680 all the different FBI agents, all the attorneys, they say, hey, this is important, you should marshal

00:24:44.480 your resources to go after it. So they said this task force, they had a few successes, one of them being

00:24:50.080 Charles Lieber, this Harvard professor, etc. The Biden administration shut this task force down.

00:24:56.800 And the reason political correctness, they said, oh, this is going after, you know,

00:25:01.440 ethnic Chinese, unfairly, etc. This DOJ insider who led the program, they said they did a thorough

00:25:08.000 review, they didn't find any form of discrimination, but they still shut it down, nonetheless. And it goes

00:25:13.760 again, to this point, like you said, about, you know, this, that is a suicidal empathy, we, we,

00:25:18.800 we prioritize these kind of feelings, or, you know, making someone perhaps uncomfortable,

00:25:25.040 versus the national security, the secrets that these are stolen, they're not just abstract ideas

00:25:31.880 that are cumulative effect. And this is one of our main arguments is that they tilt the balance of

00:25:36.240 power, imagine a war between the US and China. And like it is today, their missiles are now better than 0.99

00:25:41.860 ours, because they stole all of our research, and we lose a war. So we're comparing war, you know,

00:25:49.140 the survival of nations compared to political incorrectness. And it's really just baffling.

00:25:55.620 Wow.

00:25:55.860 Can I add another layer on top? Yeah, another layer on top of what Andrew is saying, and that unit in DOJ was

00:26:03.860 such a great example, as we as we talked to the chief prosecutor from that, and he allowed his name

00:26:10.980 even to be used in the book, is that there is somewhere between naivete and hubris on the western side

00:26:20.180 of looking at a China, there's almost a jingoistic view of another society that is, as Andrew earlier

00:26:29.860 pointed out, this agrarian society, look what a disaster Mao had with, you know, the cultural 0.99

00:26:36.580 revolution and all that. They're dumber than we are. Well, the North Koreans have proven they're not 1.00

00:26:43.940 dumber than we are. They may be more basic in what they do, but they present a huge threat not to go off 0.99

00:26:51.940 on a tangent on North Korea. But with China, this naivete, I mentioned the joining of the World Trade 0.99

00:26:59.700 Organization in December of 2001, both the Republicans and the Democrats, but led by

00:27:06.500 President Clinton in the 1990s, drove the initiative with the full expectation that China would play by

00:27:16.020 the rules. And we stood down operationally in dramatic ways, and I can attest to that, in the

00:27:24.820 90s, 95, 96, 97, if, in fact, it was going to have a knockoff effect that would actually undermine

00:27:34.260 China joining the WTO. So it's a little bit of the reverse of the suicidal empathy in the sense that,

00:27:43.140 oh, we'll just bring them in, we'll coddle them, and they'll behave like they should, because now

00:27:49.140 they're part of the international order, and all of that, and the rules will apply to them.

00:27:54.100 And they said, they made it very clear they were never going to play by the rules. That's the

00:27:58.660 interesting thing. They never said publicly, we're in, we'll do it all right, now we'll start to steal.

00:28:06.100 They were doing knockoff products on the sidewalks of Shanghai and Guangzhou and elsewhere long before

00:28:13.460 they joined the WTO and never stopped it. This is just, the scale of it now is different,

00:28:20.260 and the sophistication of it is materially different today.

00:28:24.180 Got you. Andrew, you mentioned earlier Biden, so it's, in a sense, it's a segue to one of the

00:28:29.380 questions I was hoping to ask you, and I'm not trying to politicize this, but, you know,

00:28:34.420 once political orientation colors, you know, their behaviors in life, is there anything,

00:28:40.980 you know, that increases, so for example, if we take suicidal empathy,

00:28:48.980 the leftists in general are much more likely to succumb to suicidal empathy for a wide variety of

00:28:54.260 reasons. So, in general, is an administration that's Democrats less likely to have an auto-corrective

00:29:05.300 mechanism against the, you know, the big, large, massive theft versus Republicans, or is everybody 1.00

00:29:12.020 equally deluded and naive and idiotic and suicidally empathetic? 0.99

00:29:18.660 Just real quick, I mean, one issue to kind of play a bipartisan 0.99

00:29:22.340 criticism is President Trump, you know, wanting to increase the number of Chinese students. I think

00:29:26.740 he threw on this number, 600,000. And there was a little bit of an activity there about,

00:29:31.140 hey, look, they already have 200, 300,000, and they've been stealing advanced, advanced research,

00:29:36.180 and we want to double that number in the U.S. system. So, there is a little bit of both sides.

00:29:40.180 Just real quick on a tangent there, University of Michigan, they caught two University of Michigan

00:29:44.980 students trying to smuggle in a highly toxic cereal fungus, which can wipe out your crops. They had,

00:29:53.220 you know, tied up in these little duffel bags that they weren't legally allowed to have.

00:29:56.820 And then showing, again, how weak we are in response after they were caught with this. Again,

00:30:02.420 this type of fungus can literally wipe out crops. There was actually an outbreak in the 80s in South

00:30:07.140 Dakota. It took them years. It had recycling, recurring periods of famine from it. And all we did was

00:30:14.340 ship them back to China. We said, your student visa is revoked, you're going back. That was a form of 0.99

00:30:18.740 agro-terrorism, potentially. Wow.

00:30:20.820 And that's all we did. So again, unfortunately, on the Republican side, I think it's a little bit

00:30:25.380 more around commercial greed. China's 1.3 billion. It's a huge market. Hey, we've got to engage with

00:30:31.300 them. We talk about some of these companies like Tesla, Elon Musk. You know, he knew that if he went

00:30:38.260 into China and worked with them, his IP would get stolen, but he did it anyway. He thought that he

00:30:42.660 could out-innovate them. That turned out not to be the case. And when we go through this Tesla story,

00:30:48.100 and it really kind of sums up our whole argument of Tesla was once, you know, the giant of the EV

00:30:53.780 world. They were the power for electronic vehicles. China was, again, a backwater. Fast forward to today, 0.51

00:31:01.220 BYD, China's leading EV company, is the market leader in the world. They're out-competing Tesla,

00:31:07.860 and now they're actually out-innovating Tesla. And that was in part because of all this different

00:31:14.580 stolen IP ending up back in China, undoubtedly. And one of the great ironies here, Gad, is that

00:31:20.900 the main, one of the main investors for BYD was none other than Warren Buffett, you know,

00:31:26.340 the oracle of Omaha. And Charlie Munger, his right-hand man, you know, once said, you know,

00:31:31.560 BYD was one of his best investments ever. So on the Republican side, we have this, you know,

00:31:36.580 kind of greed. And then on the left, you know, the Democrats, there is this kind of just this,

00:31:40.820 you know, uncomfortableness about confronting this threat, which the majority of these spy cases

00:31:47.180 are Chinese nationals. The MSS, their spy service will often appeal to ethno-nationalism, hey, 0.89

00:31:53.960 come back and help the motherland, the homeland. And, you know, some of their pitches when you're

00:31:58.320 trying to recruit a source, oftentimes they'll frame it as, hey, you know, China's been a third

00:32:02.280 world power. You know, it's only fair that we catch up scientifically. You know, that makes sense

00:32:07.720 with a lot of these professors. And yeah, that, I think that's trickled down. And we also saw that

00:32:12.960 in the U.S. as well with this revulsion to doing an investigation into the origins of the COVID-19.

00:32:20.860 I was going to say that.

00:32:21.720 In Wuhan, it was the same dynamic. I knew one of the Democrat congressmen who was initially leading

00:32:27.140 it. And then, you know, he got hammered for this is insensitive, et cetera. And the Democrats backed

00:32:32.220 off from it. So it's a challenge on both sides of the fence.

00:32:35.140 Anything you want to add, David, to that exact question?

00:32:38.520 Mike Gallagher, former representative, was very helpful in the interviews. But as chairman

00:32:46.000 of the Select Committee on China, in our conversations with Mike, he made it very clear that

00:32:54.520 sort of behind closed doors, really strong bipartisanship. And we saw it in the case of

00:33:01.480 TikTok, which I've already raised, really pushing that forward because of the nefarious activities

00:33:08.680 in terms of the data collection on the 130 million users in the U.S. and then the ability

00:33:16.100 to influence hearts and minds around it, only to have now this repeated extension and now

00:33:23.500 this deal that would allow them somewhere on the order of 20% ownership in terms of ByteDance

00:33:29.860 to hold on to that. You have the algorithms, you control it. It doesn't matter. So the

00:33:36.260 idea that, so the bipartisanship piece is, it's interesting how Andrew was describing, I

00:33:43.200 was thinking to myself, I think intellectually, both sides get it. They're somewhere between

00:33:49.720 overwhelmed by the problem. And then when the Main Street or Wall Street issues kick in,

00:33:55.860 then I'm far more or less likely to kind of want to pay the price for doing that. Look,

00:34:03.220 the balloon that crossed the United States, why wouldn't it shot down over Montana when it first

00:34:08.340 is, you know, but then it just sort of passes. We don't want to ruffle China's feathers and all that 0.99

00:34:15.300 and so forth. And it's so interesting, most recently, when the new Prime Minister of Japan spoke up about

00:34:23.700 what would occur if Taiwan went into a war scenario with China, with an invasion from China. Only for the 0.81

00:34:37.300 second time did Beijing through Xi Jinping in this case, but as the leader, reach out to the US president.

00:34:46.340 Do you know when the last time was? Right after 9-11-2001. They never call except when, in this case,

00:34:55.940 the protests. And what did President Trump do? He reached out to the Prime Minister, said,

00:35:00.900 got to, got to, got to tone it down. So it kind of goes on both sides right now. And now this whole

00:35:08.740 thing of NVIDIA and the H200 chips, a much more advanced chip than the H20. I'm, I'm deeply concerned

00:35:16.740 by it. I mean, so both have the frailty of not handling the China problem. Well, for different reasons,

00:35:24.740 that's for different reasons. Exactly. Got it. And one final anecdote to drive the nail home. So in July,

00:35:30.580 it was discovered that the Pentagon for their own cloud service systems was using digital escorts

00:35:37.380 to get remote access support from Chinese engineers. We were using Chinese engineers to help troubleshoot

00:35:44.500 in our Pentagon's cloud system. And this was only discovered and finally dealt with by Pete Hegseth

00:35:50.660 at the Department of War in July of this year. After everything we've seen from China,

00:35:55.620 it really just underscores how, how unserious we've been about it.

00:35:59.540 It's unbelievable. So in, in, in suicidal empathy, I have a chapter titled cultural theory of mind.

00:36:06.980 And let me explain, it's a, it's a phenomenon that I've coined at the cultural level. So at the

00:36:13.140 individual level, there is something called theory of mind. It's a, it's a component of cognitive

00:36:18.180 empathy. Theory of mind means that for us three to have a, you know, fruitful conversation, we need

00:36:25.140 to put ourselves in each other's minds to, to know what we each think and so on. And it's an indelible

00:36:30.740 part of being a social species. By the way, autistic children, usually you diagnose them, not,

00:36:37.140 there is no blood test for autism. If you diagnose them by giving them a theory of mind test,

00:36:42.340 which they invariably fail, right? Okay. Now I'm going to take this principle. I'm going to apply

00:36:48.420 it at the cultural level. So I argue that cultural theory of mind is something that the West lacks.

00:36:56.180 And I'm going to apply it to Islam, but we could easily apply it to, to the West. Okay. So if the

00:37:01.780 West is magnanimous, compassionate, tolerant, generous, empathetic, that should be a good thing. Here is the

00:37:10.180 ear with which the, the, the Islamic societies hear this weakness, weakness, weakness, weakness,

00:37:18.420 weakness, and weakness. So by the West, not having the properly calibrated cultural theory of mind,

00:37:25.540 we do end up speaking completely different languages, not just the literal language,

00:37:30.420 but the cultural theory of mind language. My feeling is that a lot of what you guys discuss

00:37:37.540 in this book, we could pin it on lack of cultural theory of mind of the Western naive mind.

00:37:47.060 Yeah. And I think what's interesting just real quick is that the Chinese actually 0.72

00:37:50.260 understand our mindset better. I think that we understand theirs and they weaponize it. So

00:37:54.660 there was this famous meeting between secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, the first meeting with

00:38:00.100 the Biden administration, they meet in Anchorage, you know, this is the two global superpowers coming to

00:38:05.860 the table. And the Chinese side, this is in the wake of 2020. And this kind of, you know, America

00:38:12.500 tearing itself apart. And the Chinese weaponize it, they say, how dare you lecture us on human rights

00:38:18.740 for these, you know, literal slave farms in Xinjiang and Western China. And they say, well, you know,

00:38:24.820 African Americans are discriminated against it. And Anthony Blinken, and you know, they couldn't really

00:38:30.500 respond because they had weaponized, like you said, the suicidal empathy, and they twisted it against

00:38:36.260 them. And they use that as a leverage. By the way, before before I turn it over to you, David, if you

00:38:40.820 want to add anything, there are Arabic, so Arabic is my mother tongue. There are Arabic words that,

00:38:47.860 and there is no equivalent in English, that speak to that ability to the Chinese. And I'll say it in 0.94

00:38:53.220 Arabic, in case there's an Arabic speaker, okay, it's called w'hane and nesnase. It's, it's a type of

00:39:01.060 kind of duplicitous, viperous way, where I sort of speak from this side of the mouth, knowing that you're 0.99

00:39:08.260 too dumb to get it, and so on. And they have it in droves. And the Westerners walk around going, 0.99

00:39:15.060 doom, doom, doom, I'm just a moron. And I'm not trying to hit on the Western mind. But I see it in my 0.99

00:39:20.420 interaction with, with Islamic folks, where because I come from that culture, I completely 0.99

00:39:26.420 see what they're doing. And the Westerners go, but, but my friend, Ahmad, he's gay, and he's married to 0.92

00:39:32.060 a Jewish guy. So Islam is peace. It's just unbelievable. Do you want to add anything to that 0.78

00:39:36.660 point, David? The only thing I would say about the Chinese mindset, building off of what Andrew said,

00:39:44.080 they're committed to understanding us far more than we are committed to understanding them.

00:39:50.420 I speak fluent Spanish, I have Portuguese, and I have French. So you go, you already think

00:39:58.320 differently as a result of that. I was born in Bolivia, raised mostly in Chile and Argentina and

00:40:04.200 Uruguay, before I finished there. And I mentioned just before we got on this, having just arrived back

00:40:10.240 from Sao Paulo, I put myself in their place as cross cultural in understanding it. But it's under a

00:40:19.460 rubric of a parent company that I will leave unnamed, because that would not be proper, but who do not

00:40:30.000 understand Brazilians. And they make the terrible mistake that Brazil's Portugal. I'm just giving you 1.00

00:40:37.440 just an example. And in my tour of duty of work in China, I can tell you, time and time again, I got

00:40:45.600 this sense that there was this fear of going outside the fence, the embassy premises, you what do you

00:40:55.360 mean, I have to talk to them? Yeah, you, you have to, you have to read the local press, you have to watch

00:41:01.540 the local media, again, and all of that. And in our embassies, they were fortresses. But they wouldn't leave

00:41:09.220 the compound, so to speak, literally in Beijing, the compound, but so I'm all with you. And it really

00:41:17.920 has has led to really misunderstanding and underestimating what they can do and have been

00:41:24.960 doing to us. I want to keep as the last question, some of your prescriptions, because that way, people

00:41:31.560 end up on a on a sort of optimistic note. But before we get to that last question, I, I, I said that I would

00:41:38.380 ask this question. And so I'm going to stay true to the promise. If we were to stay up at night

00:41:43.060 worrying about existential threats, there are several we can worry about. One of them is this

00:41:50.020 kind of stuff from China. But we can also worry about this beautiful, peaceful and tolerant religion

00:41:56.520 called Islam. I tend to spend a lot more of my time worrying about Islam, not to imply that China's

00:42:05.460 threats are not necessarily as big. If I were to ask you in a competitive game of who's the bigger

00:42:12.480 existential threat, Islam, by the way, before I finish stating that question, it seems that the 1.00

00:42:19.400 Chinese do understand the existential threat of Islam. And they sort of implement that understanding 1.00

00:42:27.140 of the threat in rather brutal ways. So if I were to cede that question to each of you,

00:42:33.180 take it away, Islam or China, what should we be staying up at night for more often? 0.71

00:42:40.200 I'll kick it off. Having worked a lot in the Middle East and and focused on countering the 1.00

00:42:48.320 weapons of mass destruction, that was my portfolio in which I did it. Then the association with

00:42:55.060 counterterrorism on the counterfinance piece of it as well. What I would say with Islam is that we still

00:43:04.520 found a lot more partners willing to work with us in the areas of extremism, including the kingdom,

00:43:16.880 Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia, obviously Egypt and others, that I don't see an inclination by the

00:43:25.200 Chinese to do the same thing. They promise things in the Rose Garden, no more cyber attacks, it doesn't

00:43:31.240 mean anything. Fentanyl precursors, they promise it, it doesn't stop. And there isn't a sense going back

00:43:40.000 to sort of their version of a manifest destiny of overcoming the humiliation to this rejuvenation,

00:43:48.800 much of an area of finding common ground, as you would with the non-extremist elements of Islam.

00:43:58.960 It's just an opinion, but in my working with it, and since 9-11, we haven't experienced a similar

00:44:08.180 attack. And there are good reasons for that. And I obviously can't get into them. China, I don't see

00:44:14.820 for the very things we've already said, there is a reluctance to confront them. There is a reluctance

00:44:21.660 of our friends and allies to always stand with us, even when we want to take on something like

00:44:27.720 Huawei and ZTE's expansion. And that, I mean, Andrew's in the UK, he sees an aspect of this

00:44:37.500 firsthand. I see it here sitting in the US, and I just don't see, and we will get to those

00:44:45.560 recommendations and sort of what are the remedies associated with this, in the way that for 25 years

00:44:54.360 in the counter global war on terror, focused on the Islamic extremism piece, we've actually been

00:45:02.640 quite successful.

00:45:04.480 Okay, so you're tending towards China. Andrew, take it away.

00:45:09.240 Yeah, I think in the short term, right, counterterrorism is number one threat. I mean,

00:45:13.020 we're suffering tax all across Europe. One of the points we talk about in the book is that the US was

00:45:18.240 so distracted by the global war on terror for the last 20 years, we ignored this great power

00:45:24.000 competition with China and Russia. So that was one of the reasons why China was able to rise so 0.76

00:45:28.660 quickly is because we were focused on, you know, fighting these counterterrorism wars in Libya and

00:45:33.520 Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan. I mean, but I think, though, when you step back, and you look at the

00:45:39.820 civilizational struggle, and I think, again, when you try to get inside of the minds of Xi Jinping,

00:45:44.380 they're looking at this as a civilizational level. This is Samuel Huntington, the clash of

00:45:49.320 civilizations really for them. And what's most dangerous about China is one, I think they're 1.00

00:45:53.760 completely unified. I mean, this is 1.3 billion people who obviously not completely unified, but

00:45:59.540 significant unification. They're all, you know, it's interesting, we look at Nazi Germany, and we

00:46:05.860 condemn it for being this kind of, you know, radical socialist, ethno-nationalist state.

00:46:10.800 How is that really different from China? They are a radical socialist, you know, government

00:46:16.780 control over the economy, ethno-nationalist state promoting the Han Chinese people. They're not 1.00

00:46:22.040 accepting large millions of immigrants. They persecute minorities, like, at a scale that we can't even 1.00

00:46:29.000 really fathom. The left's worst nightmares about Trump compared to nothing to what the Chinese have 1.00

00:46:34.180 done to Muslim Uyghurs, to Christians, etc.

00:46:37.480 The other aspect of it is the size of China's economy. They control so much leverage over the

00:46:44.000 global supply chain, etc. I mean, they had Europe with these rare earths that they control. So the 0.67

00:46:52.180 rare earths go into everything from magnets for your washing machine to drone. They control all of

00:46:57.820 that. And they shut that off in this trade negotiations with Trump and Europe's economy. A lot of these

00:47:02.440 factories in Germany literally ground to a halt. And so China has that ability now to literally pull

00:47:09.020 the strings of the global economy how they want to. And then finally is the surge in technology.

00:47:15.960 And they are capturing the commanding heights of things like AI. They have stolen all of our data.

00:47:23.220 They stole all the health records from health companies. They stole all the financial records

00:47:27.380 from companies like Equifax, which affected almost half of the adults in the United States.

00:47:31.300 They stole all the government classified security background checks in 2015. They combine all this

00:47:37.620 data and it's given them this competitive advantage because data is really like the uranium for a

00:47:42.620 nuclear reactor for AI. You have to have all this data to train your AI models. We've seen China 0.87

00:47:48.340 surging in AI. We've seen China surging in EV, battery technology, things like quantum computing,

00:47:53.980 things like nuclear technology. And most dangerously, again, going back to this point

00:47:58.320 about military technology, they held a large parade in September, this victory day parade over Japan.

00:48:04.540 It was down Chong'an Avenue, which is kind of their time square. You had, you know, president of Iran

00:48:10.120 there. You had president of North Korea or Russia. It's kind of access resistance and Xi Jinping with the

00:48:15.960 red drapes watching this parade. And they rolled out significantly advanced military equipment,

00:48:22.060 autonomous drones, underwater autonomous drones, hypersonic missiles, which again, move really fast

00:48:28.460 and are almost impossible to shoot down with current technology, which can carry nuclear weapons and

00:48:33.380 potentially hit the United States. Just to put that perspective, the U.S. basically shut down,

00:48:38.020 we shut down our hypersonic missile program. And the Chinese are now leading in that. And when we go into 1.00

00:48:43.760 the real quick detour, we go into the book about Los Alamos, which is America's number one research

00:48:48.960 facility, which where we developed the atom bomb. China had one of the top hypersonic researchers at

00:48:56.400 Los Alamos left, went back to China, and then started recruiting postdoc students, staff employees

00:49:03.440 to come back from Los Alamos for somehow they were working there to China. He recruited over 160. And

00:49:09.920 the Chinese started calling it the Los Alamos Club. So it's just this, this fascinating, but this shift in

00:49:16.100 balance of power, where, you know, we could potentially get into a nuclear armed confrontation

00:49:20.960 with China. It's extremely volatile, all the understandings we have about MAD, mutually assured 0.97

00:49:26.480 destruction, etc, have all been upended. They're all really Cold War relics, we don't really know how

00:49:31.500 these interactions are going to happen with these new technologies. Imagine real quick, an outbreak of

00:49:36.640 a war over Taiwan, China invades, the U.S. decides to respond, you could get to a nuclear situation

00:49:43.300 quite quickly. And that's going to lead to potentially annihilation of both countries and 0.98

00:49:48.060 the whole world. Well, with that unbelievably dark, then I'm really glad that we're going to end

00:49:57.300 with some actionable prescriptions, because otherwise, I'm worried whether I'm going to survive

00:50:02.760 tomorrow. So either of you, both of you, please give us some hope.

00:50:06.760 So I'll kick it off with a preview for the readers of the book or listeners of the book.

00:50:14.560 There are two chapters toward the end that lay out scenarios, one that is, and they're both fiction.

00:50:22.960 This is the only part of fiction in the entire book, one being the National Security Council,

00:50:28.060 where the president is briefed on all these things. And there's sort of a great awakening

00:50:33.560 to the threats that are posed by everything we've spoken about for the last 50 minutes.

00:50:40.500 And then there's a corporate board meeting, of which I'm very familiar with, in which a competitor

00:50:48.780 is taken down through a series of actions taken by the Chinese, leading to the demise of this fictional 0.93

00:50:56.620 competitor and all the means of it. But where the really heart and soul of the recommendations

00:51:03.160 are settled on is in the epilogue. And it starts with, and this I would say are the bookends,

00:51:10.600 and I'll turn to Andrew to fill it in. The bookend is, we are advocates for a partial decoupling,

00:51:21.220 a decoupling on those things that we would argue are the crown jewels, where you cannot do joint

00:51:27.580 research. You cannot share that information, whether it's on university campuses, national laboratories,

00:51:34.020 or within the US government or Silicon Valley, for that matter. Why? Because it's so protected

00:51:41.380 that the distinct advantage it would give China would be significant enough that it would have a

00:51:49.000 material effect on our ability to defend ourselves and so forth. So, and it encompasses

00:51:53.980 the nanotechnology all the way to the microbiology aspects of pharmaceuticals and that sort of thing,

00:52:05.140 all the way, of course, to the things that Andrew was describing with hypersonics and that sort of

00:52:10.400 thing. The other end of the bookend of these seven pillars is the establishment and the elevation of

00:52:19.320 economic security or national security level council, but the national economic council established in

00:52:31.260 the national security council, which I served on for nearly five years in 1947 in the aftermath of

00:52:37.900 World War II, to bring the elements of government and industry together on these key areas that we must

00:52:46.180 protect at all costs. And then there's security around the perimeter from cyber and all of that.

00:52:53.600 But Andrew, why don't you talk a little bit about how then that's fleshed out?

00:52:58.080 Yeah, so I think three things, God. First is the crown jewels. What are the crown jewels of 21st

00:53:03.620 technology that we absolutely have to identify and then protect? First and foremost among them is AI.

00:53:10.160 You know, these AI model weights, et cetera, if they're stolen, they can supercharge China's economic

00:53:16.500 power, its military power. We're starting just to really understand. Some say it's a little bit

00:53:21.960 overhyped, some say it's underhyped, but there's no doubt that AI is going to be a critical component

00:53:26.000 and we really have to protect those secrets. Some startup working in Silicon Valley, what they're

00:53:31.660 working on is just as sensitive as DARPA or Los Alamos or these classified systems in Washington,

00:53:37.900 D.C., and they have to be protected in a lot of the same ways. Second, and I think you'll appreciate

00:53:43.060 this, is universities. We really need to crack down on China stealing our university tech research and 1.00

00:53:48.380 development. This was a big issue. A report just came out in the U.K. where the university, I think,

00:53:52.780 I believe, of Manchester was doing, again, hypersonic research with a Chinese partner who then has 0.97

00:53:58.740 secondary, tertiary links to the PLA, the People's Liberation Army. But to be frank, every institution,

00:54:05.680 every individual, every company in China works for the government directly or indirectly, helps

00:54:10.820 benefit the military. We've really got to crack down. We've almost, we've got to hold these

00:54:15.200 universities really as accountable as a company or a government in terms of protecting these secrets

00:54:20.360 and they need to suffer, you know, the consequences if they're not vetting their students, if they're

00:54:25.220 allowing them access to, for example, Department of Defense gives millions of dollars to these

00:54:30.040 universities to do this research. And then they're allowing Chinese post-grad students to take that

00:54:35.460 and go back to China with that research. And then finally, like David mentioned, is we have to really

00:54:40.740 elevate this to the forefront of our national security thinking. And again, this goes back to the

00:54:46.660 way China views espionage. It's not just one tool, a toolkit. It is front and center with everything

00:54:53.700 they do to advance their national power. They have no moral qualms about it. They're completely,

00:54:58.820 and it gives them this asymmetric advantage. They're willing to do whatever it takes.

00:55:02.840 We have to respond and kind, we really have to elevate this issue. And while China is doing this 0.69

00:55:07.860 whole of society approach, every aspect of their society is focused on this issue of stealing

00:55:12.620 intelligence, we've got to kind of do the whole of nation approach to counter that. And in the West,

00:55:18.340 we've had this, you know, great wall between the public sector and the private sector. But really,

00:55:24.740 we need those two to come together if we're going to confront this threat. And it ultimately,

00:55:30.440 we say this last paragraph of the book, it comes down to will, you know, do you have the will

00:55:36.200 to take on this threat and issue? I won't lie, a lot of the damage has already been done.

00:55:41.240 China is now innovating on their own, they've kind of got that super charge they needed from the get 0.98

00:55:46.560 go of the race by stealing the technology. Now they're, frankly, they're innovating, they're

00:55:51.440 securing more patents, these critical technologies than we are. But we can at least stop the damage,

00:55:57.440 and rightfully secure our place in the West, and especially in America as the world's leading

00:56:02.160 innovation superpower. Well, at the very least, you can go to bed at night knowing that you've done

00:56:08.300 your part. Here's the book, folks, go out and get it the great heist. Thank you so much for coming

00:56:13.860 on. Stay on the line so we can say goodbye offline. Best of luck with the book. Thank you for the work.

00:56:18.380 Thank you, Gad. Thank you, Gad. I really appreciate it. Cheers.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - December 15, 2025

Discussing ＂The Great Heist - China's Epic Campaign to Steal America's Secrets＂ (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_939)

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