Thread by @vtchakarova

I find this recent talk with Peter Thiel at the Nixon Seminar truly fascinating and I read the transcript already three times.
A thread with the most interesting statements I derived from this source follows on Twitter now. I recommend you the whole text nixonseminar.com/2021/04/the-ni…

"Tech is politically neutral, but can still be — if crypto is kind of libertarian, AI is kind of communist. China is willing to apply it & turn the entire society into a face recognition surveillance state that is far more intrusive & totalitarian than even Stalinist Russia was."

"Certainly in the 1980s I had the view that the Soviet Union could never be reformed from within, and that even Eastern Bloc countries would — you know, it was high-tech enough, you had the secret police with guns, they could break up any protest and it would never change."

"Certainly the history of late 80s suggests there is more possibility than we think, there are probably ways in which the Chinese governments certainly not acting like the technologies are that straightforward, they are reenforced w/ concentration camps & lots of secret police."

"one thought I always had was, why did it take us so long to wake up to the threat of China, to the way it was not becoming a liberal democracy and why we were able to tell ourselves all these fictional stories in the west for so long?"

"I think that there are basically two cutting edge semiconductor manufacturers, Taiwan Semiconductor and Samsung. There are probably something like 30 semiconductor companies that were cutting edge 20 or 30 years ago."

"But somehow the board corporate politics of Taiwan Semiconductor probably in some ways a proxy for all of Taiwan and Samsung is the other one in the mix. One of the very strange dynamics in Silicon Valley is people don’t do very much with semiconductors anymore."

"I would say in general where China’s at best is in parity mostly still behind us Huawei may be the one exception at least with all of the subsidies they have given the company. What do you think the alternative to Huawei is? Is it Erikson and Nokia?"

"Which I think of is not great, slightly sclerotic companies, but maybe that’s the best we can do? Or my sort of lovelight answer is maybe we should just say that 5G tech is overrated and we can be slower in rolling it out even though you can never say that in public seemingly."

"Make it harder for Chinese investors to invest in US & perhaps we should also make it a little bit harder for US investors to invest in China bc we have US investors that invest in China & become a big constituency for open capital flows."

"and doing this I think decent part of the Wall Street crowd is pretty bad in this regard. I would dial it back on both sides making it harder for US investors to invest in China is an almost equally important part of this."

"seeing China in an adversarial way would be a helpful start. And Silicon Valley has not been that good on this. Although, in some ways, it’s structurally better than Wall Street or Hollywood, or Universities, because Silicon Valley for the most part has been frozen out of China"

"Apple is probably the one that’s structurally a real problem, because the whole iPhone supply chain gets made from China. And Apple is one that has real synergies with China."

"I had a set of conversations with some of the Google people in the deep mind AI technology, “is your AI being used to run the concentration camps in Xinjiang?” and “Well, We don’t know and don’t ask any questions.”"

"You have this almost magical thinking that by pretending everything is fine, that’s how you engage and have a conversation. And you make the world better. And it’s some combination of wishful thinking. It’s useful idiots, you know, it’s CCP fifth columnist collaborators."

"In totalitarian society you have no qualms about getting data on everybody, in every way possible. And that’s where I think that makes AI very tricky tech where even if we’re ahead in theory, there are a lot of ways we don’t want to apply in US or West. And they will apply it."

"The geopolitical thing, I sort of wonder about is U.S. dollar is a reserved currency of the world. From China’s point of view, they don’t like US having this reserve currency, because it gives us a lot of leverage over Iranian oil supply chains & all sorts of things like that."

"They like — they don’t want the renminbi to become reserve currency, because then you have to open your capital account and you have to do all sorts of things they really don’t want to do. I think the Euro, you can think of is in part a Chinese weapon against the dollar."

"Last decade has not worked out that way, but China would have liked to see the two reserve currencies like the Euro."

"And, even though I’m sort of a pro-crypto, pro-Bitcoin maximalist person, I do wonder whether at this point Bitcoin should also be thought in part of as a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S. where it threatens FIAT money but it especially threatens the U.S. dollar."

"It’s China’s long Bitcoin, & perhaps from a geopolitical perspective, US should be asking some tougher questions about exactly how that works. But some internal stable coin in China — that’s not a real cryptocurrency. That’s just some sort of a totalitarian measuring device."