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- [00:04]
A
Hello everyone, this is Tom Uren. I'm here with the Gruck for another Between Two Nerds. G', day, Grok. Are you?
- [00:10]
B
Good day, Tom. Finding yourself?
- [00:12]
A
I'm very well. This week's edition is brought to you by Trail of Bits. They're a consultancy company that does all sorts of clever work on things that are complicated, like blockchain cryptography, AI. If you're after some in depth analysis, go to them, find them@trailofbits.com so we got some, well combined love hate email Grok. And so the good news is that the person who emailed us, I'll call them Tim. They are fans.
- [00:46]
B
This the email from Peter that you sent to me.
- [00:50]
A
They're fans of Between Two Nerds. And Tim said, I was recently hate listening to a podcast by some Silicon Valley venture capitalists involved in AI. And this VC was expressing his bewilderment at graduating students booing commencement speakers who praised or even brought up AI. So I've seen a couple of these speeches and I'm like, man, just read the room like he really couldn't understand it and decided that it's all due to a Chinese influence operation.
- [01:28]
B
Bang. Well, thanks a lot, Tom. That's one of our shorter episodes, but now that we've uncovered that.
- [01:37]
A
Yeah, so that's what we're going to talk about today. I thought there was a couple of interesting aspects. One was just the psychology of someone who believes that anything bad happening to their field is because of, you know, malign foreign forces.
- [01:51]
B
Right. It's that like I, I know what is correct and true and if you have a different opinion, either you have not had it explained to you yet which would fix things, or you're under the influence of a malign foreign force.
- [02:08]
A
So that's.
- [02:09]
B
Those are two possible explanations of.
- [02:11]
A
Yeah, I think that's very funny and we can talk about that a bit. And then the second part is the Chinese state runs influence operations. It's been doing it for a long time. Does it actually make any difference? So those are the two broad topics we'll cover.
- [02:29]
B
If this were a Chinese influence operation, would be the.
- [02:35]
A
Yeah, well, I mean, like we've spoken about TikTok, right?
- [02:39]
B
Yes.
- [02:40]
A
I think both of us think that it is a potential vehicle for influence.
- [02:46]
B
It is. I've got a great example as well. Right. So in 2024 when there was a huge like Free Palestine movement, which obviously hasn't stopped, but there's this clip of either an artist or an influencer or someone like that doing this free Palestine free. Guam free. Hawaii free. And it's going on and on and on. And for some reason they never say free Tibet.
- [03:21]
A
Yeah. So the right so place I used to work, aspi, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, they did a research project into that kind of thing on TikTok and I wasn't involved. But the finding was there were sensitive terms that just never appeared on TikTok. And like my sort of secondhand sense from just talking to them was it didn't seem like the Chinese state was giving them a list of here are the things. But TikTok, being a Chinese company, had internalized them as things that we should not have.
- [03:58]
B
Oh yeah, it's. It's similar to. I remember this interview with a Fox News reporter who was saying, I was never given an ideology test. No one ever said to me, you need to cover things from this perspective. You know, I was never told how to do things. I was given free rein. And it's like, yes, because they hired people who already had that ideology and who already saw things from that perspective.
- [04:28]
A
Like, yeah, you've got to fit the organizational suitability. When I was at Aspie, we were perceived as an anti China think tank. And I actually, like, totally out of the blue, I got asked to do a TV interview by cgtn, which is the China Global Television Network, which is China's state sponsored news agency. It was about some particular cybersecurity issue. And I used to appear on TV all the time for just random cybersecurity stuff. And I was like, yeah, okay, it was a nice American guy. And I thought like, he's got no idea what ESPY does, otherwise I would, he would never be talking to me. Sure enough, we did the interview, never appeared on their television station for some unknown reason.
- [05:16]
B
Probably got cut for time is my thing.
- [05:18]
A
It actually had nothing to do with China.
- [05:22]
B
So it was amazing how you shoehorned so much anti Chinese rhetoric into it.
- [05:27]
A
I think. Like, so my take is it's just, this is an anti China think tank. We're not going to give them any platform.
- [05:34]
B
Right.
- [05:34]
A
Or endorse them in any way, even though it's not relevant.
- [05:38]
B
Absolutely. Fine. Right. Like that's what you would expect. I mean, in this case it's China and a particular think tank, but it's the sort of thing that you'd expect anywhere where there's like, we don't like our rivals, so we're just not going to mention them in any way. Yeah, we're not.
- [05:55]
A
Yeah. So we've said that. Yes, TikTok so it seems to me that it could swing issues in a slow, long term kind of a way.
- [06:07]
B
Right.
- [06:08]
A
And it's not. I don't see that it would be particularly useful for data centers because.
- [06:17]
B
Or would it?
- [06:18]
A
Like, my initial reaction to this email was I agreed with Tim who was very skeptical that an influence operation would make any difference. Yet I kind of think that TikTok's important, yet I think he's right. I don't think it's making any difference for data sources or I'm going to
- [06:36]
B
push back on the idea that China would want this to happen. China is stealing so much AI tech from the west that they probably want more development and research because that allows them to accelerate faster as well. Right, right. Like it doesn't benefit them to slow down the US at this point. Right. Like there's too much happening in frontier research to hamstring one of your sources of info.
- [07:09]
A
It also.
- [07:10]
B
Yeah, like it would be counterproductive is what I'm getting at.
- [07:13]
A
Yeah, yeah. It also seems to me that like any western country seems to have problem building a whole lot of stuff and so an influence operation would be fiddling around the edges. This is already somewhere where China has a huge advantage. So.
- [07:29]
B
Right. Where do you think all that data center stuff is coming from? Building data centers is going to be full of equipment that's shipped over from China. So I'm not sure they're against it.
- [07:42]
A
Well, so it seems like in terms of electricity, for example, I've seen some stat where they have some huge many fold advantage over building new electricity supply. The US does.
- [07:54]
B
They've rolled out more than the US has in like the last five years or something like that.
- [08:00]
A
Yeah. And so an influencer, you know, maybe it would influence, you know, to degrade that by, I don't know, 5%, 10%, even 20%. But when you're winning by five or tenfold, what's the point?
- [08:14]
B
You could be winning by 5.1 fold, I think. Right, right, right. But I agree and I also think that that's not where China would focus their influence operations on. Like, that's just.
- [08:32]
A
It feels very.
- [08:33]
B
Right, exactly. And I was going to say, like it feels so egotistical to think that China would care about the thing that specifically interests me as opposed to China would care about its own state interests,
- [08:43]
A
which happen to very important.
- [08:48]
B
I guess the other thing is like, it's just to be so profoundly oblivious to the fact that people do not like AI stealing jobs, particularly amazing. Particularly young people who are facing a job Market where you have to send 2 or 300 applications before you get an interview to have the notion that there's like more things coming in to take away entry level jobs when you're graduating with so much student debt. Like, that's not a great prospect. And it might have absolutely nothing to do with Chinese ops. Yeah, there might be some organic dislike there.
- [09:28]
A
Yeah. The statistics about AI and data centers in terms of public approval are pretty bad. Like very, very bad. And so. Yeah, and I think for all those reasons, like, they just totally make sense to me. And like this email I got from Tim, it's like a nice email. He spent some time writing it or he's a very good writer. It was an entertaining read, even though it's a fairly straightforward. Just produced it in really nice research as well.
- [09:59]
B
Right.
- [10:00]
A
And then I got this AI summary at the top and it was like, oh, this AI summary, I hate it. It takes. It sucks all the life out of that email and makes it totally like just something I would. Except that I'm diligent you would want to chuck away because it's like, oh, this summary is. It actually made me feel distasteful.
- [10:19]
B
Yes, yes. Like, I have that all the time. There'll be people who use AI to write tweets, which means that now there's tweets which are like 100, 150 words long. And it's really annoying because most of the time it's not something that needs that much space to develop. But also they don't have any, like, they don't have any rules that strip out the AI quality of the writing. So you get all of that just incredibly uncomfortable stuff where it's like, it's not X, it's Y, you know, along with. But here's the point. Or like, you know, just these, like all of these phrases and things that put your teeth on edge. And I have like. I don't know why you have, like. I have a very visceral reaction when I read AI text. It makes me.
- [11:15]
A
I think you get sensitized to it. Yeah. And then it's just. I find it just annoying because I didn't feel that way like a couple of months ago. So we've looked at. We both agree TikTok is a thing. I mean, notionally that's solved because, yeah. At least in the US and then we think that data centers, AI are just not a particularly valid or sensible target.
- [11:42]
B
I don't think it's salient in China as a target that they would go after.
- [11:47]
A
So you're thinking there'd be a bigger picture, like an actual.
- [11:51]
B
I think that, for example, they might be very excited at the idea of what's happened recently with the Mythos fable, blockade or shutdown. Like that strikes me as something that Shining would be more interested in encouraging because.
- [12:12]
A
But it seems to me if they wanted to encourage that, they would try and lobby the Trump administration directly rather than like, so traditional.
- [12:21]
B
For the cost of an influence operation. You could just bribe the Trump administration and it'd be far more effective. Like you buy crypto tokens or you contribute to like the Ballroom Fund or whatever it is. There's just so many more efficient ways to achieve a policy outcome these days than trying to.
- [12:47]
A
I don't know, it's a new thing like agit.
- [12:50]
B
Prop the masses to create a movement to influence the like wipe. But just.
- [12:58]
A
Yeah. It's a new era of transparency and government responsiveness. So seriously though, I think that the lobbying, however you want to describe it, is just more direct and yes. Would be more tractable. Like it's the sort of administration, this
- [13:19]
B
one in particular for sure. But at any time. Yes. Like, I wouldn't, I wouldn't give it. There's not a two year lifespan and then it's gonna have to be something else is what.
- [13:29]
A
Right. Yeah. It feels like influencing a small group of people to make a particular decision. Like you just focus on that small group of people.
- [13:38]
B
Right.
- [13:38]
A
Whereas the kind of things I think TikTok might be good for in the long term, I don't know, maybe Taiwan nationalism, you can.
- [13:47]
B
Yeah. You can do big shifts in generational opinion, Which.
- [13:53]
A
Yeah. Over 10, 20 years and it might be. We just don't want to be involved in any foreign wars anymore. We don't want to get involved in defending Taiwan. That's not our problem.
- [14:05]
B
I think it's Right. So like I, I think it has that potential on the far end. Like on the. The one side it can do these big generational shifts. I do think it's tactical as well. I think that you don't need to generate content. You just need to make sure that some content surfaces 10 times more often than others. And you can shift opinions very rapidly. But there's not a lot of senators that have TikTok that watch it regularly for hours.
- [14:37]
A
Well, there was a time when TikTok was in trouble at some point and they actually sent push notifications to people and asked them to contact their senators and put. I can't remember if they put contact details. It's just so stupid. Because it at the time demonstrated how TikTok could be used for foreign interference
- [15:03]
B
in the most clumsy, terrible way possible, the most self defeating way you could imagine. Now hypothetically, could you think of another self defeating approach by a company?
- [15:20]
A
Yes. So I wrote about Anthropic and today the recent news is that they released two new models, Fable 5, Mythos 5. And then they got into a dispute with the Trump administration and it like the details I don't think really matter. What I think this is interesting is it's an example of the same kind of thinking that we spoke of earlier. Like the I'm right, you're wrong and you just don't understand why you're wrong.
- [15:51]
B
Exactly. Allow me to explain it one more time because clearly if you understood it the way I do, you would just agree with me because I'm right. So.
- [15:59]
A
Yes. Yeah, so I thought that that was the title of the article. I said that Anthropic just doesn't have any. It's got artificial intelligence but not emotional intelligence. And so it doesn't know how to deal with someone with a different worldview as a company.
- [16:16]
B
I also think to a degree that they've played themselves. They did spend a lot of time going be like, oh, our thing is too powerful, our product is so good. Gee, I really hope our product which is so powerful doesn't fall into the wrong hands. Our amazingly powerful product which is probably the best there's ever been or whatever. It would be so bad if anyone got a hand of it coming now for only $1,000 a month.
- [16:45]
A
That's right. We've worked on guardrails, they're really very good. Right, right.
- [16:51]
B
Then followed up with the it's okay, we've made it safe, anyone could use it now. Like the first time someone says we can bypass them, it's all over. Yeah, Like I quite honestly think that they did play themselves. Like to a degree, they have no one to blame but themselves. However, it's still the wrong decision. But anyway, let's.
- [17:14]
A
Yeah, yeah. So I thought the psychology behind that was interesting. It seems that kind of thinking seems to be overrepresented in tech and maybe, no, surely not over represented in AI. But anyway, I just find that amusing.
- [17:34]
B
VCs are probably not exactly the most aware of other people either. Like once you assuming that you're successful, you're probably not interacting with a huge number of people who don't think exactly like you do.
- [17:49]
A
Right. I guess it's a massive selection filter. Right. So the people who end up in those Positions willing to take a lot of financial risk, had a lot of success backing themselves. And so that I imagine I've not had that much financial success, but I imagine it must be a huge boost to your own ego.
- [18:13]
B
Yeah. This is purely speculative, but
- [18:18]
A
so moving on. One of the things that I thought was interesting is that most of the Chinese influence operations I've come across, like they're just not very good.
- [18:31]
B
No, they are. Oh my God, they're so bad. It's funny actually, because there's been. I'll try and track them down, but there's been a couple of recent announcements of Chinese backed or Chinese led, basically Chinese state influence operations that have been dismantled in the last month, I guess, and there's been two of them and both of them were sort of notable for two things. One of them was the sort of sheer size.
- [18:58]
A
Right. So they were big, they were huge.
- [19:01]
B
Right. So I think one of them was like 1,500 or 2,000 websites, something like that. Like, it was just, it was massive and it had like maybe 57 visitors a day. So these are the two things. They're huge and they have no traction.
- [19:21]
A
Right.
- [19:21]
B
Like they just like it's, it's clear that a lot of money went into creating something, but not necessarily creating something good or something effective.
- [19:31]
A
Right.
- [19:32]
B
And you sort of, you wonder why that is. Like, what is the problem that they have with creating good things? And like, understandably it's hard. I'm not saying it's an easy thing, but advertisers seem to be able to do it.
- [19:47]
A
Yeah. So that's the conundrum I've got as well in that Western advertising seems to work. Like you can get people to buy products. So maybe. And like the amount of political advertising spent in the States is huge, for example. So I don't think that they spend that money because it doesn't work. Right, Right. I think that people have metrics on what is good.
- [20:16]
B
Especially Google and Facebook are massive companies and they do advertising.
- [20:22]
A
Yes.
- [20:22]
B
Yeah. So clearly people think it works and it does. Yeah, yeah.
- [20:27]
A
And I kind of conceptually think of advertising and influence operations in the same bucket, even though, yes, they are obviously the exact technical mechanisms of how you push an ad is different. But not a necessarily though.
- [20:42]
B
But yeah. So anyway, I do have one theory and it could be I might be overreading it. So I think one reason that they might be getting it so wrong is that they might be saying like, based on Marxist, Leninist, Maoist principles, here is how we will agitate the masses to agree with us. They have these preconceived notions of how you make the people believe in something and then do something. And it worked during the Chinese revolution when you were getting a whole bunch of peasants to pick the side that got rid of the bandits and stop the outright abuse of the KMT, which might not translate as well to a TikTok campaign or a website or a news source.
- [21:43]
A
Yeah. My theory is that they come from a particular information environment which is the status in maybe not total control, but has very firm grip. And so, for example, if there's a topic that the Communist Party doesn't like, they can, like, shut it down, and they can also have topics that compete with it. Right. They overwhelm it with something else, and they've got mechanisms to do that so they're in control and they don't have to develop. I would call advertising an attractive power. Maybe.
- [22:24]
B
So I think of it sort of maybe as an evolutionary environment. Right. So if you're in the west and you're a marketer, you have to compete with a lot of other marketers. Yes, all the time.
- [22:34]
A
Right.
- [22:35]
B
And so if you don't get good and stay current, you'll go out of business because there's just so much competition,
- [22:43]
A
and people can measure things as well, much better than they can. Right.
- [22:46]
B
And yeah, obviously, if you come from an environment that doesn't have a lot of predators and you show up as, you know.
- [22:53]
A
Yeah. So I was involved in a couple of reports that analyzed at the time. They were large Chinese influence operations on Twitter, as it was back then. And some of them, for example, were organized against a Chinese billionaire who lived in New York. He moved out of China.
- [23:15]
B
I remember that guy.
- [23:16]
A
Yeah. Gwen Gui, I think his name was. And a lot of the tweets were just like, gwen Gui is a terrible person. That was it. He's really bad. And then they'd have a unflattering cartoon of him. And some of the targets were the Hong Kong democracy movement. And it's, you know, the democracy movement is terrible. It's upsetting the rule of law.
- [23:43]
B
Oh, they had a rap about that, which we can get into later.
- [23:47]
A
Really?
- [23:48]
B
Yeah.
- [23:50]
A
And so these were very declarative. They're not trying to really mobilize any latent feeling or movements in the audience. They're just, like, sending messages.
- [24:05]
B
X is bad sort of thing, as opposed to, like, have you ever noticed how X is always out for himself?
- [24:12]
A
Right.
- [24:13]
B
Which. So here's the funny thing, Right. So back in 2020, there was this milk Tea Alliance. And it came about sort of by accident, as these things do. There was a Thai actor who tweeted an image that showed Hong Kong as a separate country, which upset the Chinese. So they sort of unleashed their citizen militia against him. The Thai people responded in support of, you know, their guy.
- [24:45]
A
Yeah. This is like Internet, what I think the term is brigading. Right. When they get a whole lot of.
- [24:50]
B
Yep, yeah, exactly. And because this was during the lockdown, everyone just had a lot of time to spend online. So it's a bit of a perfect storm. Right. And then because this was a sort of Hong Kong related thing, the. The Hong Kong people showed up. And then because it was clearly this now, it was the sort of anti China thing, the Taiwanese people showed up. And so you got this smoke tea alliance of basically young people versus a state sponsored or a state backed and directed organic campaign. The. The Wu mao army, the 50 cent army, so called, because apparently that's what they get paid per post or something like that. Right. And it was just like, it was not a fair fight. Right. You had this very diverse and young and savvy crowd of people on one hand and this group of people from China on the other who were sort of told, like, you have to say that Hong Kong is part of China, like the one China policy, versus these other guys who are just like, you're a dumb, dumb head.
- [26:07]
A
Right, yeah.
- [26:08]
B
So there was stuff like the Wu Mao people would be like, your country sucks. And other people would be like, yeah, it does, you're right. Like, and it sort of. It just, it wasn't working for them. So it was very, very funny. And they sort of descended into just saying nm ls was it?
- [26:32]
A
Or nmsl. Yeah, yeah. Like, I think. I'm not gonna. I don't know that I'm pronouncing it right, but it's looked like your mother's dead or your mother's dying.
- [26:41]
B
Yeah, it's.
- [26:42]
A
It's just. Yeah, yeah. So that was a common sort of
- [26:44]
B
just generic insult sort of thing that they would abbreviate. And so that started getting made fun of. Right. So they're just. They memed the Chinese to death. It was absolutely hilarious. And I think that sort of. It's one of those things of like, it's very, very hard if you're not part of that culture to attack people in that culture using that culture's infrastructure and technology.
- [27:11]
A
Right.
- [27:12]
B
Like, it's very fish out of water.
- [27:16]
A
Right.
- [27:16]
B
Sort of thing. And I wonder to the extent that that carries over, if you have the state backed. You know, we will. We will make them see things our way. Here's your official talking points. And then you sort of go out and you're in this dynamic environment where there's, like, not exactly the marketplace of ideas, but it's certainly a space where there's competing narratives and messages.
- [27:42]
A
Right, yeah, right, yeah. So the Chinese propaganda system, they basically do put out talking points.
- [27:47]
B
Right.
- [27:48]
A
And so the. I can't remember what the department is, but you can see those flow out. Right. I don't know, list of 10, 12, whatever. Yeah. So that may be another reason why those influence campaigns, like. Like, it's kind of advertising by government bureaucracy.
- [28:09]
B
Yes.
- [28:10]
A
In the bad way of bureaucracy.
- [28:12]
B
Right.
- [28:13]
A
You know, advertising in the west works, but government advertising is notorious relatively rarely.
- [28:20]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you're absolutely right that they have this thing and it's that they. They don't necessarily understand the mediums that they're trying to use. So for a while about just under 10 years ago, there's this phenomenon known as Red Rapid, where because rap music was popular and China wanted to, like. They wanted to speak to people sort of outside China and get this message across to people. They were paying rappers to make songs on Chinese talking points. And very few of them were listenable. Like, you couldn't really listen to most of them. There were like one or two bangers. But, like, to me, there's one that's very funny that's called Made in China, where it's quite catchy as a song, but it could never catch on because it's all in Mandarin except for the chorus, which is Made in China. And it's one of those sort of very. Of the time, very typical sort of things of like, you know, I've got an suv, I've got like all this gold, I've got all these, like, all of these things, these material possessions that are made in China is the sort of a friend. And I thought that was very funny because it's true. And like, here's this thing, right?
- [29:39]
A
Like, nowadays, do you even need a song about it?
- [29:40]
B
Right. It's just so. I thought that was very, very funny.
- [29:44]
A
It's just a fact of life.
- [29:47]
B
Yeah. But some of the things are like, you know, I've got a watch, it's made in China. It's like, that doesn't seem like a bragging point, even. Even if you're from China, You know, I've got chopsticks they made in China. Like, that's okay. But by far the funniest One, and not in a good way, was this one called Two Sessions, where I forget the specifics, but something like, rather than one plenary session of the Communist Party meeting per year, they were going to do two. And so they have this guy rapping in English about how China is better now because it has two sessions, like two party sessions every year.
- [30:37]
A
Right.
- [30:38]
B
And he does it. There's an entire rap in two sessions. And it's just.
- [30:43]
A
I mean, it. It seems like to me music can be. It can sum up a movement, it can become the anthem for. For something. But it doesn't seem to me that music is ever the star. Right.
- [30:56]
B
It's not the kernel of a creation.
- [30:58]
A
Right, yeah, that's right. Right. Like it can get picked up because it resonates with the message that's already there for some reason, but. Right. Not the other way around.
- [31:09]
B
Yes.
- [31:09]
A
So, I mean.
- [31:11]
B
And there was not a Two Sessions organic movement that they glom onto. That's right.
- [31:19]
A
So in Australia, we went through a period of some really quite intense lockdowns and we managed to get the country Covid free during the middle of the pandemic. And the premier of Victoria, one of our states, he was giving an interview and he said, oh, well, I'm to celebrate that they had come out of lockdown because they'd been locked down for quite a long time. I'm going to get on the beers. And that was turned into a rap. And that was actually quite catchy and very successful. But the, you know, the underlying sentiment was we've gone through this lockdown and now we're free to go about and do things. I think that makes sense as an example of a song that picks up on an underlying feeling or zeitgeist or whatever.
- [32:05]
B
Right, right.
- [32:07]
A
It was by itself. It's like, meaning.
- [32:09]
B
Yes, sort of. I feel like it's not the sort of thing that would become popular today.
- [32:16]
A
Right, no, that's right, yeah.
- [32:17]
B
So I sort of. I wonder in a way as well, if part of the reason that advertising is successful is not only the sort of training and all that, that you'd get to do it, but that unsuccessful advertising doesn't stick around because it's just not working. And that is that evolutionary sort of pressures thing.
- [32:41]
A
So we only see the ads that are successful and are making a difference
- [32:45]
B
and we remember the ones that the
- [32:47]
A
Chinese state just funds hate messages.
- [32:51]
B
Well, it's sort of that because they don't have those pressures. It's not like there's 100 Chinese states trying to get their own Message across competing and the one that's successful will sort of catch on everywhere.
- [33:08]
A
Well, I was thinking about Chinese. They get influencers who promote positive Chinese messages that are positive about China. That seems to be a lot more effective than the kind of, I guess, destructive influence campaigns like, you know, we hate Guo and Gui, Data centers are terrible. Whereas some of the influencer stuff is actually quite, it can be quite naive, but it can also be, when it's effective, is quite organic.
- [33:44]
B
The way that they do their companies is actually very clever. It's the same way that Silicon Valley does stuff of like you just fund a whole bunch of startups and for the Chinese, they accept that there's going to be a bunch of corruption and all of that at this early level and they're fine with it because there's going to be 100 EV companies and some of them are going to be just corruption things set up for people to get money. Some of them are going to be legitimate, some are whatever. And they will compete with each other in China, which is a very large market and they'll end up being a very, very few that are left at the end. And in the process they'll be absorbing all of these other ones that go defunct. They'll be taking over their factories for extra space and hiring their people and stuff like that. And then when they release them to the world, they've now had these companies which have sort of grown quite big and battle tested in a very competitive market.
- [34:43]
A
Yeah, I guess what you're saying is that the time to watch out for Chinese influence operations is when the government, or at least it's his grip on the information environment and it's just a free for all. Yeah, then we probably won't have to worry about the Communist Party, it'll just be China, Chinese Democratic Party.
- [35:01]
B
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm thinking is the time to worry about Chinese influence operations is when the Chinese stop trying to have influence operations and just allow them to happen organically.
- [35:12]
A
That's right. Yeah. Thanks a lot, bro.
- [35:15]
B
Thanks a lot, Tom.