Michael Eisenberg: 

We're back for another episode of invested. And today I'm thrilled to have my friend, Jacob Helberg, with us. Welcome, Jacob. 

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Jacob Helberg:

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Mike, thanks for having me. 

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Michael Eisenberg:

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Jacob and I know each other for a bunch of years. We've also, let's say, been around the block a few times on a bunch of interesting issues, some of which we'll delve into today where Jacob has been a true leader.But before I start asking you questions, you want to tell our listeners who Jacob Helberg is? 

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Jacob Helberg: 

Yeah. So I serve on a bipartisan commission in Congress called the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission, which advises both Chambers of Congress – so the House of Representatives and the Senate – on laws related to the U.S.-China relationship in all areas. That includes political affairs, military affairs, economic affairs, technology affairs, diplomatic affairs. And it was created in the wake of China's accession to the WTO in the early 2000s because Congress wanted a mechanism to stay informed on whether China was complying with its WTO commitments. 

For a long time, it was a bit somewhat of an arcane institution and has really catapulted to the forefront of the China debate as Washington struggles with figuring out the best way to recalibrate America's trading and political relationship with China. 

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In a private sector capacity, I also serve as an advisor to Palantir CEO, Alex Karp, where I help provide support with public policy strategy and help inform the company's positioning relative to the changing geopolitical landscape. The company was founded in the early 2000s when a pervasive feature of international politics was the war on terror. Obviously, today, we live in a world dominated by great power rivalry, and so I tend to focus a great deal of my time on those issues.

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I also wrote a book called The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power, which came out a couple years ago now, and which basically made the case that the United States and China were in a two-front technology gray war: the software front and the hardware front. 

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In a completely private capacity, I also help run a private annual gathering called the Hill and Valley Forum, which brings together technology executives and lawmakers.

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Michael Eisenberg: 

Yeah. And, if I could add: you're also a senior adjunct fellow at the Center for National New American Security. You're also a senior advisor at the Center for Geopolitics and Technology at Stanford University. You're married to another good friend of mine, Keith Roboy, and you live in Florida, but you weren't born in the United States, is that correct? 

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Jacob Helberg:

I was born in Paris, France, actually. 

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Michael Eisenberg:

And this is kind of where I want to start, which is, you grew up part of your life in Europe and outside the United States. What did that kind of time growing up outside the United States teach you about America and teach you about –sorry for the word – patriotism?

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Jacob Helberg: 

It's funny because, in a way, growing up abroad gave me some distance and perspective and see looking at America from the outside. I grew up in France and came of age right around the Iraq war when Europe was in the grips of a huge wave of anti-American sentiment. You know, at the time I wasn't particularly, I had no political allegiances either to the Democrat or the Republican Party, but I felt strongly that America was a force for good in the world, so I often found myself embroiled in debates at school defending the Bush administration. Even if I didn't particularly identify at the time as a Republican, it quickly made me realize, it created a strong personal incentive for me to read up on a lot of international political issues because people would always ask me about them.

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By virtue of being Jewish and being American, the first question I would get was often: what do you think of the Iraq war, or, what do you think of the Israeli-Palestinian issue? And that's sort of the origin story of how I developed a passion for these issues.

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My grandparents were Holocaust survivors, which formed an indelible part of my worldview and natural skepticism of authoritarian governments. I think authoritarianism comes in different flavors, but authoritarian regimes always share a certain set of traits and features in common. And I think, unfortunately, that theory is proving true today, especially in places like China. And so, those are sort of the formative set of experiences that ultimately led me to where I am today. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

I want to double click on a few things. So, you said growing up outside of the U.S. informed your view that America is a force for good. Other than not being authoritarian, right – France is not authoritarian – what about that experience led you to the notion that America is a force for good? 

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Jacob Helberg: 

I think when you grow up in the United States, it's easy to idealize other countries and other places. For example, in the U.S., we've often heard political figures like Bernie Sanders hold up countries in Scandinavia as an example and a model that the U.S. should follow. When you grow up abroad and you have a little bit more proximity to how other parts of the world are run and some of the issues that other parts of the world face, you realize how unique and exceptional America is.

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That's not to say that other countries don't have their own benefits and strengths, but I've just always found that as a gay Jewish man, and as the grandson of Holocaust survivors, I've always been incredibly touched and moved by the idea of America, which really is inherently meritocratic. It doesn't care, it doesn't matter where you're from or what your last name is. What matters is who, what you're made of. 

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To a lot of people in the U.S., certain countries in Europe are beacons of health care services and equity and, to a lot of people who live in Europe, there are pervasive social and economic mobility issues. It's really hard to get ahead. Youth unemployment is in many parts of Europe at 25%. By the way, that's reflected in the fact that a lot of young, ambitious people have to emigrate abroad, including to places like the United States. Others immigrate to places like Tel Aviv. 

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So I guess I grew up with a much less rose-tinted lens view of the world because, as much as I loved and appreciated Europe for a lot of its qualities, it made me appreciate just this boundless sense of opportunity that people had in the U.S. Not to say that it's easier or that it doesn't have any flaws. You know, America is always in the midst of trying to improve itself. But the idea that  through hard work and through personal grit, people can really get ahead in this country. And I've always thought that to be incredibly inspiring. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

You mentioned twice now that your grandparents were Holocaust survivors. How does that impact you in both your outlook and kind of your day-to-day life? 

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Jacob Helberg: 

Well, there's an old saying that history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And when you look at authoritarian regimes and when you look at how we got to the Holocaust in the 40s, and how there was a bit of a boiling frog effect and how so much of the “intelligentsia” at the time said it would never be possible. It would never happen. And then consensus shifted from it would never happen to justifying why it was happening or simply not talking about it. And when you look at how there's so much groupthink in our current elite circles, combined with the fact that we have revisionist, revanchist, authoritarian regimes in different parts of the world who are absolutely committed to reversing the outcome of the Cold War, including in places like China and Tehran, and who've made it their common cause to band together to achieve those objectives, and who have a proven track record of being willing and ready to employ similar methods as some of the darkest chapters of the 40s, it really gives me a great deal of concern that a lot of the mantras that the world embraced that it would never happen again after World War Two, are actually easier said than done. And that we really need to be a lot less naive, and start to, we really have to grapple with some hard realities. And that Beijing is currently run by an authoritarian who has a lust for power, who cares about himself, his cronies and his country in that order, and is willing to enslave an entire population in Xinjiang in an open air prison. Estimates range between three and nine million people in those concentration camps.

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That's before you start to count Tibetans and  ethnic Chinese political dissidents. He's also made it an irrevocable part of his legacy to try to reunify Taiwan. So China is a competitor the likes of which the U.S. has never faced, both just in terms of its technological capabilities as well as its population, the size of its economy.

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We really need to… America can win this contest, but it's absolutely imperative that we not be complacent. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

I want to come back to China in a second, particularly your last sentence, which is “America can win this contest,” because I want to limb the contours of the contest also, and what it means. It's what I spent a lot of the time doing, but I just want to ask you two quick questions.

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On the last episode, I had Mark Rowan here. Mark Rowan said, “America doesn't have an anti-Semitism problem; it's an anti-Americanism problem. To which the byproduct on some level is also anti-Semitism.” You agree with that? 

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Jacob Helberg: 

I think there is this bizarre ideology that some people have referred to as wokeism, which I think is an apt name, that has really evolved into a 360 set of belief systems that includes a revision, the revisioning, of Western history through the most negative lens possible with a focus on racism, sexism and oppression that divides the world into oppressors and oppressed, that aims to erase any hallmark of concepts that is deemed to be unjust according to that ideology: from everything from statues to public squares. And that is fundamentally aimed at replacing the current set of elites in our country, that were based on principles of meritocracy, with a new elite that is based on a set of narrow definitions of identity, the definitions of which are constantly shapeshifting.

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And so I think there's something incredibly toxic about this ideology. It's unmeritocratic. It bends and deforms the English language to subvert concepts like justice  or equity or fairness. It's the most Orwellian thing where if you've read Animal Farm, you know there's passages in Animal Farm where you kind of see this play of the English language where they say, all animals are equals, but some animals are more equal than others, or war is peace and peace is war.And you kind of see similar things where these slogans are used to justify things that are actually completely at odds with the plain English understanding of the word. And so, yeah, I mean, I do agree with Mark Rowan. I think anti-Semitism is part and parcel of a broader anti-Western ideology that's incredibly toxic. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

So before I get into China, I have one more question for you harkening back to something you said probably five minutes ago about Europe. And you kind of said that they may have better health care or they may have health care as a value and a few other values, but ultimately the meritocracy and the ability to kind of get ahead and make something of yourself is what makes America so special.

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Part of the issue in America, as we know, is that a lot of the entitlements, which you kind of include in what you referenced in Europe is coming close to bankrupting America. And so I want to ask you a controversial question. As someone who grew up in Europe, moved to the U.S., as an astute observer of economic policy, do you think the social welfare state has run its course? Is it bankrupt and dead? 

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Jacob Helberg: 

I've always been a believer in the idea that people should be given a hand up.  I think there is a world – this is where I may not be quite as conservative as some of my Republican peers – but I do think, as someone who was raised by a single mom, who taught herself how to program at the age of 47, she benefited enormously, she was a stay-at-home mom for about 10 years when my sister and I were growing up. And part of what happened was when she reentered the workforce, she worked in the news industry, in the magazine industry. She was the editor-in-chief of a magazine in Paris in the 90s. Fast forward to the early 2000s, the industry had totally changed. So her way of reentering the workforce productively was to teach herself how to program. And she never asked for a handout or a permanent safety net, but her ability to have access to courses that allowed her to teach herself skills in order to reenter the workforce, was actually kind of key.It was only four or five months, and it totally changed her life and our lives in terms of her ability to self-sustain herself financially for the next 20 years.

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And so I do think that there is a world where the government could be a facilitator and give people a hand up, but I really think there's a fine line between giving people a hand up that allows them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get out of hard times, and start creating handouts that actually disincentivize work and create a lot of perverse incentives.

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One of the things that I've seen in France is – under the guise of compassion – the government has leaned so heavily in this massive welfare state that it's actually created an enormous amount of perverse incentives. And I'll just give you a few examples. 

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First, France has had effectively its own equivalent of UBI for several decades. So if you're 18 years of age and you're unemployed, you can claim that. It's roughly 1000 dollars, 1100 dollars from the government, which doesn't sound like a lot in the U.S., but in France the cost of living is much lower, so it actually goes quite a long way. And that's before you add different kinds of child care benefits and all that.

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What that does is a lot of young people who are 18, 19, 20, will claim those benefits and then work undeclared without paying taxes. They never really, there isn't that hard forcing function to actually go and work legitimately. And it creates really big problems, both from a tax revenue collection standpoint, but also just from a social integration standpoint.

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I grew up in, relatively, I was lucky in some ways, to have graduated without a student loan debt, but I really didn't have that many resources after graduating college and working was actually an incredibly formative experience. Figuring out, going through the process of figuring out what are the skills that the job market requires and wants, you know? It's not just about me wanting to study Latin American art history, but the world has needs and figuring out where you fit in those needs. So I think work is incredibly important. 

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The last thing I'll say is I do think our modern day culture – and this kind of traces back a little bit to this new woke ideology that I'm very concerned about – I think has created this and social media has made this worse: there is this myth among younger people that has emerged today that I've certainly seen emerge as a pattern: that if you work really hard, you're supposed to make it. And there's something deeply unfair if you don't make it right away, if you work really hard. I get that, but I think a fundamental difference with the ethos that I grew up with, is that working really hard is table stakes. That doesn't mean you make it. You have to be better than your peers, because it's a relative game, not an absolute game. There is no guarantee in life that you're going to be successful. And so you have to work really hard for a while and there's nothing– And the reality and the truth that our culture doesn't tell young people is that being successful is actually really hard. And so I think there is a bit of a lie in the notion that if you just look at inputs, you are supposed to get a guaranteed set of outputs. The reality is the individual responsibility and agency is actually critical. And people have to think about: what are my strengths relative to others? Life is going to be full of highs and lows, and all of these things are normal. They're a part of life, and they're a part of people's journeys. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

And just to follow that up, at a macro level, do you think the social welfare state with the UBI in France can survive kind of the upending of the demographic pyramid: the lack of birth rate among the French or other Europeans and the high-end provision of social services? Or does it kind of collapse?

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Jacob Helberg: 

Well, I think by every objective metric, the French economy has been in decline for two decades now. When I grew up in France, Europe's GDP was roughly, was actually a little bit bigger than America's, and today it has totally collapsed as a relative share of global GDP and as a relative share of U.S. GDP. And so when we think about collapse,  there has been this unbroken years of retreat from Europe's role in the world that I think has actually kind of proven that entire model wrong. I would say even that was actually even a core basis for my decision to switch to becoming a Republican because I just really felt like the Democratic Party in the U.S. was embracing a set of values and politics that was more and more reminiscent of the French left, which I believe has been the primary author of French decline. 

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Michael Eisenberg:

Really interesting. 

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Jacob Helberg:

Probably harsh to say, but that's the truth. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

That's actually a good segue. I really want to dig in on China now, but just to tee it up:you wrote Wires of War. By the way, I had John Pelson on who wrote Wireless Wars. On some level, you're two birds with the same feather. But I want to talk about the book for a second before we really dig in on the kind of contest we talked about before. 

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So you had a front row seat to –  for lack of a better term – Chinese PsyOps and Chinese actual ops in the digital sphere – what you call the gray war –  when you were at Google. I'd love for you to tell everybody about what your role was at Google,  what you saw that kind of lit up your neurons on this topic, and then caused you to write the book. 

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Jacob Helberg: 

I'll start with what my role at Google was. I led news policy at Google. There are two types of policy functions at large tech companies. There is what's called product policy and public policy. Public policy is essentially akin to government affairs. It's the state department for a tech company. How do you manage the company's relationships with external stakeholders? 

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Product policy is kind of like Congress for the company. So the company obviously enforces laws that governments require statutorily, but because a lot of the Internet is relatively unregulated, companies then also develop a set of voluntary self-imposed product policies to decide how they handle certain types of content information issues that come across. Everything from spam to violent extremism to  misinformation and the like.

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I focused a great deal of my time on the new issue of foreign interference, which some people over the years have kind of defined as everything encapsulating misinformation. During my tenure at Google, I had a much narrower definition of foreign interference, and I focused on the cases where foreign governments misrepresent themselves as domestic news agencies, basically. So it was a very narrow definition that really focused on the conduct of a given news site. I oversaw news policy for all of Google's products except YouTube. So that includes Google Search; that includes the Android feed; that  includes Google News, et cetera. One of the interesting things that I saw took place in 2016, 2017 was there was clearly this new trend – that was actually very new in Silicon Valley at the time – which was foreign governments increasingly using commercial civilian products that were deemed completely benign as tools to advance their geopolitical interest. They were doing this in ways that were extremely novel at the time. So much so that most executives initially thought that I was crazy when I was trying to explain this to them. I came to this conclusion through a lot of forensics work that I did with different teams at Google to  identify exactly what are the locations of different assets and so forth, to actually really get to the bottom of what the facts were. 

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The other interesting observation is it quickly became so Russia was the first mover. They really piloted and seed funded, if I should say, this whole news foreign interference space. China and Iran were rapid followers. And China, I would argue, is by now by far the biggest player.

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But the interesting thing is Chinese, Russian and Iranian news sources all parroted each other, so they all reinforced their own messaging and talking points, especially when they're targeting Western audiences. And it's always about discrediting institutions and Western politicians, whoever they may be, whether it's Trump, Biden, whatever. Trying to turn allies against each other, so they're trying to turn the U.S. against Europeans, Europeans against the U.S., the U. S. against Israel, vice versa. 

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Lastly, the other big takeaway and insight that I realized was that this was actually part of a broader strategy and a broader feature of international politics where these authoritarian governments were increasingly using commercial technologies writ large, both software and hardware – except that in hardware, the main player is China because hardware is very expensive – to wage political warfare. And the reason that this pattern had emerged and the reason they were doing this is because there was a paradox between the usability of a given weapon and the degree of destructiveness of a weapon. Just to kind of give you a little bit of a simple example: if you take nuclear weapons, they're highly, highly destructive, which also makes them not that usable in day-to-day political warfare between different countries. It's attributable; it's highly destructive. If you wage political warfare in the gray zone, beneath the conventional threshold of war, the degree of destructiveness is lower, but it's also highly usable because you can deploy it every day without triggering substantial repercussions upon yourself. 

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Michael Eisenberg:

It also compounds.

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Jacob Helberg:

 It compounds, exactly. And that was this paradox that kind of created a new landscape. Where  gray zone warfare had really become a pervasive feature of international politics, which was very new. Ultimately that was one of the reasons that I decided to write my book.

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Michael Eisenberg: 

So, you write this book which is really at the heart of information warfare. Pelston's book is really on the hardware side of this, particularly around Huawei. How did that both shape your views and actions? You leave Google not long, I mean, you write the book after leaving Google basically, and this has a major impact – as best I can tell from our conversations and from watching you – on your view of U.

S.-China economic relations and geopolitical relations. And so you start to work at this and you get in front of Congress and you get in front of companies on this topic. 

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Where are we going with this? We're in a great power rivalry right now. There isn't a new status quo, that's for sure. We're in a very uncertain time. The PsyOps operations continue. Your book woke up America, but it didn't deter China, or Russia, or Iran, in that matter. And so we're in this kind of heightened state of economic and security tension between everyone. 

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So first of all, where are we? And second of all, where are we going in the next 12 to 24 months on this and over the longer term? Right, the open internet's not going away. 

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Jacob Helberg: 

So the internet is changing its shape. China effectively ended the global internet when it erected its great firewall, which basically divided the world into two internets. And now you're kind of seeing this fragmentation continue because part of what China did is that it erased the dividing line between its public and its private sector, which meant its internet companies are now directly subservient to the Chinese state. Which means that democracies need to determine if it makes sense to allow Chinese companies in their market, which kind of prompted a lot of national security concerns around TikTok and Huawei and ZTE. And so there is a little bit of a bifurcation–

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Michael Eisenberg:

Let me just challenge that for half a second. So the ZTE, Huawei, TikTok thing – which we'll come back to – is almost an easy dividing line, but there is an asymmetric war here, which is that China's internet is closed to U.S. influence, whereas the U.S. or European internet entities are still wide open for the Chinese to play, and especially – the way you describe in your book – using the local actors. So we're not in the same,  we haven't solved the problem, so to speak. 

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Jacob Helberg: 

Yeah. And that's one of the reasons I've been an advocate of  legislative action against companies like TikTok, a proponent of banning Huawei and ZTE. For all those reasons. So we're not where we should be, in my view. I would push for much more aggressive action against these companies. And I don't believe that free speech is a legitimate reason to stall legislative action. We've taken lots of restrictions on commerce on grounds of national security when national security is at stake. 

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But in terms of your question about where we're going and where we're headed with this: when I wrote the book, I said that the U.S. and China were in the middle of a gray war and that it was untenable for Silicon Valley to remain neutral and be Switzerland, which was fundamentally where much of Silicon Valley was at the time. 

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Today I think we've entered a new phase. I think we are in an incredibly accelerating technological arms race with China, that is moving on every front from biotechnology to hypersonics to quantum to artificial intelligence, material sciences, space exploration. The narrower the gap gets between us and China, the less stable the world gets. Ultimately, if you believe in basic deterrence theory, if we want peace, the best policy is to stay ahead and widen that gap as much as possible.

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I really worry that we are taking the right steps, but we are also slow. Ultimately, one of our biggest Achilles heel right now isindustrial. We are awakening to the fact that our hollowed-out industrial base, it creates a massive problem for our country that has repercussions on almost every sector of our economy. My hope is the U. S. government starts to consider pretty drastic steps to reboot the industrial base quickly because, ultimately, the hourglass is running out. I believe that the narrower the technological gap gets, the higher the risk of war, and, China's not that far behind anymore.

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I really worry that if the Chinese government starts to feel like it's gaining an edge over us, it's going to feel really emboldened to roll the dice and try to attempt a move of force in the Pacific, which could really throw the world into an incredibly deep crisis..

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Michael Eisenberg: 

“In the Pacific”– you mean Taiwan or you mean–

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Jacob Helberg: 

Taiwan. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

Philippines, or you mean… Taiwan. 

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Jacob Helberg: 

Well, Taiwan is the war that everyone is expecting, which naturally makes me a little bit  skeptical that maybe they're going to try something different. But, I think whether it's in Taiwan or whether they try to prompt some sort of unexpected other regional conflict, I just think that they're going to try. If they feel emboldened, if they think they can win, they're going to try to make a move in some capacity. And they might actually try to incite one or two additional regional conflicts in other parts of the world to further drain the West's resources, attention, before trying to make a move in the Pacific. 

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But I think they're really playing three-dimensional chess. And I think unless we come to grips with the fact that these regional conflicts are already a global challenge– I mean, Tehran carried out the October 7th attacks,  Hamas carried out the October 7th attacks under the direct direction, assistance and so forth of Tehran, which itself was completely subsidized and sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party's 50 billion dollars a year oil purchases. Some of the equipment included Chinese-made drones. Hamas obviously built thousands of kilometers of tunnels under Gaza, allegedly many of which were with the help of China's engineering corps.

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So it's really hard to isolate these problems in a vacuum. And so I think unless we get a little bit more realistic about that, we're just not going to have an effective long-term strategy. We're going to play whack-a-mole and fight the symptoms and not address the ultimate root cause. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

So you made the comment earlier that we're in an all-out technological arms race and it behooves – my word, not yours – Silicon Valley to be on the side of the Patriots here. 

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Before I come to your conference, which I want to talk about, I want to ask: how do you win a technological arms race? And for what it's worth, it feels to me, at least in the current U.S. administration's view of all this, is these are a series of skirmishes and you need to win each one by a little bit to kind of keep the Chinese at bay. And then ultimately there's not a winning strategy here because of what you described, which is this is a kind of technological arms race that is not a kinetic war.

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Jacob Helberg: 

Yeah, that's exactly right. My basic view is winning this technological arms race is going to take three big steps. On the one hand, we need to build our capabilities as rapidly as possible. Second, we need to stop China from stealing our stuff. China is estimated to be stealing half a trillion dollars in intellectual property from the U.S. every single year. The commander of Cybercom referred to it as the biggest transfer of wealth in human history. We, our companies, spend years and almost a trillion dollars a year in research and development. It's just going to be really hard for us to win if everything we develop, they take by the back door. We need to figure out a way. 

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Michael Eisenberg:

But how do you stop that? We're not playing by the same rules. How do you stop it? 

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Jacob Helberg:

We have to figure out a way to stop it. And that could include increasing, enhancing FBI programs to identify Chinese spies in Silicon Valley, of which there are many. Obviously it has to include some sort of border policy where it's hard to stop spies from coming in if 13 million people just walk in through the front door. 

Michael Eisenberg:

Terrorists, too. 

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Jacob Helberg:

Terrorists, 23,000 Chinese nationals, several thousand Iranians. It's a bit of a free-for-all right now. But we really have to figure out some way to stop it. 

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And then the third is we need to make ourselves less technologically dependent on them. It's just not tenable for us to win this if we are entirely, if our supply chains are entirely reliant on the Chinese. We have to decouple technologically from China. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

So I'm appointing you the new advanced technology czar on the war on China. And you've got to kind of work geopolitically on exactly the things you described. Right now, what are the three things you do, either in technology policy or geopolitically, to make that happen?

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Jacob Helberg: 

Well, first of all, working with the countries, so, when you look at artificial intelligence,  I'd say the first thing is I would favor tariffs on Chinese hardware writ large. I think that actually helps reshuffle the macroeconomic table. That creates an incentive for companies to move their stuff out of China.

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One of the challenges that, frankly, our economy faces, is we are so dependent on China for manufacturing that a lot of companies that make drones, that make a lot of other types of hardware, don't even know if some of their vendors, they might have vendors in Mexico who themselves use vendors in China for different discrete parts. And so we don't even totally know the full extent of what is sourced and made in China. 

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And so it's not realistic for us to ban individual Chinese manufacturers, but what you can do is create a macroeconomic environment where you basically tell corporate America: you can keep buying stuff from China; it's just that Chinese-made things are going to now cost a lot more money. And that way you're basically telling the private sector: if you want to make stuff in China, it's going to cost you more. And you can figure out what makes sense for your business, if you want to make it in Vietnam or in India or in other places. The private sector is actually really good at making decisions, making rational decisions that make sense for themselves. And so if you just change the incentives, that will really go a long way. 

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So I'm a big believer in instating steep tariffs on all Chinese hardware, across the board: made by Chinese companies and geographically made in China. And you have to do both because the Chinese are very good at creating offshoots in places like Mexico.

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The second is I would further tighten what I call in my book “cyber sanctions against Chinese software companies.” It's for all the reasons that I favored a divestiture ban of TikTok. If you do that, you help address the IP leakage issue, you help address China's infiltration, from a propaganda and surveillance system, into our society. And so I'd be in favor of tightening the screws on Chinese software companies. 

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Third is, I'm also deeply in favor of removing regulations that impede the U.S. government taking in privately developed technologies. I think we have some of the very best private technologies in the world. Where we tend to consistently fall behind is our capacity to convert those technologies into hard power. So we need to have a zero-based approach to regulations and defense, in my view, and just really rethink the incentives and the culture at the DoD that impedes the modernization of defense.

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In the past, and during the rearmament period of World War II, we saw the creation of an industry board that helped supervise, bring in some of the most iconic figures of the private sector to help coordinate the mobilization effort and to increase production towards the war effort. We need to have a major plan and strategy to have a manufacturing surge in this country and in an allied space.

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Obviously, not everything is going to be made in America, and that's okay. We need the most essential things to be made here. And then we need things that are important, but non-essential, to be made in some sort of allied space. So figuring out a strategy to do that, and we have to do it in concert with our very best innovators. 

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And I'll just illustrate this with one example. SpaceX reduced the cost of a launch by 100x. You know, we spend more on defense than everyone else in the world, which a lot of people gloat about, and yet we're short on everything. We're short on munitions. We're short on artillery shells. We're short on ships. At some point you have to stop measuring the inputs and you have to start to look at how China spends less money than us, but they have more ships. They have more missiles. 

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And so we have to be able to start bringing the costs down and accelerating timelines. The only way to do that is if you modernize the way that things are made. And you have to do that with tech. Tech is the essence of doing more with less. So I'm a big believer in bringing some of our very best technology founders to bear on this issue. As you know, as a technology investor, the bread and butter of tech investing is, often, you make a bet on a founder. The founder identifies a big picture problem. As an investor, you're going to make a bet on this person: does this person have what it takes? You don't always have the detailed plans and roadmap, ever figure it out from day one, but you make an assessment based on whether this person is going to actually produce and deliver. I think we need to have a little bit more of a founder-driven culture and ethos in the government to solve some of these problems. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

Before I move on to the Hill and Valley Conference, which is directly related to what you said now, I just want to tee it up with trying to get what the stakes are here. You used the word ‘contest’ earlier. And so, to kind of really sharpen the question, tell us what you think the doomsday scenario is if we kind of look forward the next five to 10 years, both in terms of China winning, and the economic and national security impacts of China winning the contest, as you call it.

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Jacob Helberg: 

Well, the doomsday scenario is you have a world that's run by China, which looks drastically different than the world that you and I grew up in. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

How does it look different? Be specific. 

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Jacob Helberg: 

Well, America will no longer be able to borrow the way that it has. And that has drastic implications for our day-to-day way of life. That's obviously number one. 

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Number two is the very way that we express ourselves starts to be completely turned on its head where all of a sudden Chinese censorship rules and privacy rules basically become the de facto norm and standard for the world. So that includes, you know, you could go online and send a text or post something online and all of a sudden your posts get scrubbed or get flagged by Chinese authorities.

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The head of Interpol, who lives in Europe, got kidnapped by Chinese authorities. You could have, if China runs the world, you could imagine a world where you do something that is unsavory to the Chinese Communist Party, you take a trip to Bora Bora and never come back, because you get kidnapped by Chinese authorities. I mean, that's really the dark world that we're facing down and that we're trying to prevent. 

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It means a world where China controls global shipping routes and sea lanes and if your government has a politician that the Chinese government doesn't like, it could cut off the flows of goods to coerce your government into compliance.

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So it's a drastically different world. China has a foreign policy doctrine concept called the tributary system. The basic U.S. concept of world order is based on a horizontal concept of sovereign states, which engage with one another on a relatively equal footing. The Chinese system has a vertical tributary conception of the global system, which has China at the top of a hierarchy and countries paying tribute to the Middle Kingdom. What that means is, if China succeeds in reshaping the world order to its image, much of the world will be subservient to the whims and wishes of the Chinese Communist Party. And so it would be a very dark world for all of us to live in. It would be reminiscent of the thirties and forties, except even more so, even worse, because this authoritarian regime would have technological capabilities that Hitler and Stalin could have only dreamed of. 

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So, ultimately, if there's anything our countries should stand for, it's the very basic foundational ideas and values that we all agree on.

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Michael Eisenberg: 

Who should be the natural allies? Which state should be the natural allies for the United States in this battle? 

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Jacob Helberg: 

So I think we often in the foreign policy community have a little bit of a puritanical approach to this, where we only want to partner with countries that have perfectly clean hands or are democracies.

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Those democracies are obviously natural allies, but in reality, I also think we need to work with countries who are strategic and may not be perfect. And that's just the reality of the world we live in. That's kind of how we won the Cold War. I mean, we had partners that weren't perfect and that weren't angels, but we need to, I'm actually a proponent of having a more realpolitik approach that includes partnering with countries who have their own problems and who aren't necessarily totally democratic, but if they're willing to play ball with America and help advance our interests, then there could be partnerships to be forged. 

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Michael Eisenberg:

Such as?

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Jacob Helberg:

Well, for example, Saudi Arabia was an ally to the U.S. for a long time. Still is. If we move away from Saudi Arabia, that could create a vacuum that China could fit that China would be all too happy to fill. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

We need that oil in order to kind of keep the dollar as the core currency. It's not backed by gold. It needs to be backed by petro. By oil. 

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Jacob Helberg: 

Yeah, exactly. I mean, there are some real benefits in terms of checking Iran's influence in the region, for so many different core interests of American foreign policy. Saudi Arabia is not perfect. And obviously, they have a terrible human rights record. Still, there are a lot of interests that we want to advance that will be set back significantly if we start to hold them to an ultra-puritanical standard, that is simply completely out of step with where that region is as a whole. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

By the way, I think they would argue that they understand the Muslim Brotherhood way better than the West does. And so their human rights record is actually good because what they did was take on the Muslim Brotherhood in large measure and they're making progress. And you see this from a lot of Emirati and Saudi bloggers and officials these days, including the foreign minister of the UAE, saying: I warned you about the Muslim Brotherhood. The approaches that maybe work with –  take your pick – criminals in New York, don't work with the Muslim Brotherhood. They say this is more humane for humanity than anything else. You don't realize who you're dealing with. 

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Jacob Helberg: 

My theory of politics is you need to forge coalitions. You win when you build a coalition and that politics is a game of addition, not subtraction. Picking fights with everyone is not a realistic strategy. You have to prioritize what fights you want to pick and win. Ultimately, I think that was the successful strategy we took during the Cold War. And I think how we're going to win this contest again.

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Michael Eisenberg: 

I had the fine fortune of attending the conference you now put on annually in Washington, D.C. It was a week and a half ago, I guess, called the Hill and Valley Forum, which brings together tech people and investors from Silicon valley, and I guess little old me from Israel, and political leaders in the U.S. and every year it gets a bigger turnout, which I think is both a tribute to you and an indication that the message that you tried to convey a few years ago is actually getting through: that this needs to be a partnership and that patriotism in the tech sector is important. 

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I'd like you to walk me through three things and I'll be quiet for a while while I listen to you.

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Describe, and kind of concisely, why it's important for these policymakers and the tech people to come together.

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The second thing is: how is AI redefining warfare, and why is this kind of critical for national security, the AI race? 

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And then last, I'd just love to hear your general takeaways from the conference and then I'll chime in with two of my own. 

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Jacob Helberg: 

So, I think it's important– in our system, unlike in China, we don't have civil-military fusion. In my book, I even joked that we have civil-military confusion because at the time when I wrote my book, the relationship between Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill was, in large part, still very much dominated by a great degree of distrust and, frankly, discontent. 

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In the book, I explained that one of the reasons was there was a massive cultural gap. A lot of people in Washington view the world through the lens of having a legal background. The average age in the Senate is that senators are in their early sixties. In Silicon Valley, people have a background in engineering for the most part and are in their early thirties. So there is a generational gap, a gap in terms  professional training and life experiences, and that led to a very different culture. 

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But both communities are fundamentally in the business of building the future. Innovators use the laws of nature and science and lawmakers use the laws of man to build the future. 

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And so I viewed it as a critical national security issue to do whatever I could to help improve that relationship in some way, because we rely on voluntary collaboration between the private sector and the public sector in order to bring private innovations into our public sector. And so I started the Hill and Valley Forum. 

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In the U.S., the private industry spends almost a trillion dollars a year in research and development, which completely dwarfs public sector spending. That, I think, is kind of the marquee figure that really encapsulates why we really need those private innovations to convert into hard power.

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Right now there's been so much talk about artificial intelligence and how it's transforming nearly every industry. It's a buzzword that's been thrown around that I think a lot of people in Washington are still kind of wrapping their minds around  what does it mean for defense and national security specifically.

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To a certain extent, we're still learning what it means exactly. But one of the things that we're seeing play out in Israel and Ukraine and in other places is that it is actually drastically compressing the windows that generals and military commanders have to respond to things because now with AI, decisions that used to take days and weeks to make, based on the collection of information and intelligence, are now taking minutes and seconds because information is flowing back to central headquarters really fast. It gets processed and swift through billions of data points. It is accelerating the tempo of war in a way that is quite unprecedented. 

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Also, war always used to be characterized by a fog of war effect.  When you're in a conflict, there are information asymmetries and communication disconnects that create a fog of war. One of the things that we're seeing with AI is that it's actually dissipating that fog of war where now you have more and more visibility into the terrain in a way that you didn't necessarily have a few years ago. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

The only people still in the fog of war is the United Nations who somehow can't get the numbers right of casualties because they're in the fog of war, these guys. They’re actually supporting the terrorists, but whatever. 

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Jacob Helberg: 

Yeah, exactly. They probably get their data from UNRWA. It's a little hard to get accurate data when your staff is directly working with Hamas. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

Yeah. Or is Hamas. 

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Jacob Helberg: 

Yeah, exactly. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

Yeah. 

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Jacob Helberg:

The last thing is, it's also decreasing the human costs of war. We're seeing the adoption of more and more, autonomous systems and effectively robots, whether it's air-based drones or sea-based drones. 

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We're now seeing this race in the development of humanoids. China's Unitree just announced the release of a 16,000 dollar humanoid robot, which is obviously incredibly cheap. That robot can run at 11 miles per hour; it could swing a bat; it can pull a trigger. It's totally dual use. You can use it in a warehouse, but if it can outrun a human and if it could pull the trigger of a gun, it could also be used on a battlefield. And when you include more robots into warfare, it means you're going to have less civilian casualties, which also means that the decision to launch a conflict is actually going to be different. Part of what used to be a deterrent to waris having your domestic population see a lot of body bags come back from the front and absorbing the human cost of war. And if that human cost goes down, it really changes the incentives that generals and politicians have when they decide whether or not to launch a conflict. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

By the way, I'll take the other side of that. I think that it appears to have less human casualties, but over time it'll have more. If you think about the kind of 300 missile and UAV attack by Iran on Israel. They were all intercepted, yes, but that just encourages them to send 5,000 next time. 

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Jacob Helberg: 

Yeah. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

And so, kind of, as you iterate through this, it may have a much, much larger toll. 

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I’d like to, I even want to, give you my two pieces of feedback, or big takeaways from Hill and Valley. 

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Jacob Helberg:

That's a great point.

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Michael Eisenberg: 

So I'll give you my two takeaways from the conference that you ran and then I'll ask you a few more questions. Number one is that the number one issue facing democracies and kind of getting the technology you're talking about converted to hard power is procurement. And we'd have a larger discussion on speed of procurement and ability to procure from startups and from innovative companies. Palantir's obviously made some inroads here, Andrew is making some inroads here, but foundationally this is still way too hard and way too slow, way too bureaucratic, in order to keep up with countries like China. And so there needs to be a big focus on procurement speed and process.

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And the second one is you need a second conference. This one is really good because it's really America-focused. I think on a half-yearly mark, you need to bring together some of the people in the Hill and Valley Conference, and then we should pick seven, eight countries – my own list would include India, UAE, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany, UK, US, and pick one or two more – where you bring technologists and policy makers from there together in this kind of international group. Because I think this is – to the point you made earlier – this is a bifurcated world right now and I think we can kind of accelerate a lot of this technology arms race through cooperation to really understand the issues that frontier nations are having, especially as you described earlier, which is China can start another conflagration somewhere else in the world to kind of tire the West. So we need to bring both private and public together. If you decide to do that conference, count me in; I'd love to do another jaunt on that. 

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I think the work you're doing on this is so critical. It was an incredible day, by the way, Started at noon, I could have stayed 24 hours easily. I'm not sure the politicians could have sat that long, but it was a super valuable event. So thank you for leading on that. 

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At the conference,you interviewed Alex Karp, and you are an advisor to the CEO of Palantir, which is Alex Karp. Alex has kind of aggressively and steadfastly supported Israel since October 7th. He's been an unabashed patriot in the United States. I first want to understand: how did Alex – and I think I know the answer – but how did Alex make the call to do this and stand up? He's been an incredible voice of moral clarity. 

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The second thing is: there was an article in Fortune suggesting that some employees left Palantir because of the support of Israel. And so I wanted to know if there's been any significant impact on the business because of that.

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Jacob Helberg: 

I would defer to my colleagues on the impact or lack thereof on the business, but with respect to Alex and the incredible moral clarity that he's demonstrated post-October 7th one of the things that's really important to remember is Palantir's very origin story started after 9/11 and to help the U.S. and the West prosecute the war on terror and the emergence of terrorism. 

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So, from its earliest days, Palantir was actually predicated on the idea of taking a side, which is a very different premise than where much of Silicon Valley had been for the last 20 years, which was, fundamentally: we want to be Switzerland.We want to be neutral. We don't want to get involved in geopolitics. We want to have good relations with everyone. Palantir was always on:we're on the side of the West. We believe there are such things as good and evil in the world, and we want to be the closest to the good as possible. Acknowledging the U.S. isn't perfect, but  when we do have excesses, we talk about them openly and in a free press and so forth, and we're ultimately a force for good in the world.  I think that Alex's commitment to Israel really stems from that philosophy. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

And earlier you talked about the importance of kind of fusing Silicon Valley and the Hill. There've been a small number of noisy employees at many of these tech companies to the point you made, made them try to be Switzerland and not involve the geopolitics. How many people is this really at companies that have kind of taken over woke? You know, you see some of these AI biases that have come out recently, and you also obviously see the noisy protesters. Do you think this is a big cohort of people, and how do you think the CEOs in Silicon Valley have handled these noisy cohorts? It's not just about October 7th, it's about selling to the U.S. government as well. 

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Jacob Helberg: 

So I think the interesting thing is, I think there is a little bit of a difference between– a lot of executives in Silicon Valley are actually very politically in the center more often than not. It's the rank-and-file employees who skew very woke. And one of the challenges that we're seeing both at large tech companies in the Valley, but also at places like elite universities, is that DEI has been institutionalized in these places through programs and offices and all kinds of feedback loops and mechanisms. It's made it really hard to just undo. You have to basically dismantle this DEI infrastructure that keeps enforcing this ideology at all these places. I think unless you address that, it's going to be really hard to reverse this ultra-woke culture.

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Michael Eisenberg: 

Do you think that there's any hand of Russian PsyOPs or China in any of this kind of institutionalization of DEI? 

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Jacob Helberg: 

Well, if you look at a critical technology like AI, I think one of the interesting things that Gemini proved – obviously in a way that was much to the chagrin of Sundar – is there is an inverse correlation– So if you believe we're in an AI race, you want the U.S. to have the best AI possible. What Gemini proved is that there is a perfect inverse correlation between how woke an AI is and how useful it is. I mean, if you type, “I want a historically accurate image of a 15th century British prince” and you get some sort of Native American person, it's just not useful. It's not accurate. It might conform to the various DEI algorithms that are built into the source code, but it's just not going to be useful. 

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And so, ultimately, if your goal is to slow down American AI development, I'm sure the Russians and the Chinese are all too happy to let these DEI efforts indoctrinate young people with anti-American ideas, with AI algorithms that are absolutely not useful at all. It serves their bidding for sure. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

But do you think they had a hand in it? Or do you think they have a hand in it in the universities? 

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Jacob Helberg: 

It's hard. So at big tech companies, I do think big tech has a spy problem and has ducked its head in the sand and been too unwilling to actually stamp out spies in their midst.

I really do think that's a real issue. 

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Ultimately, I think the establishment of these various DEI offices and programs, the buck stops with the executives and they should go ahead and undo them. They bear responsibility for the sustaining of these offices.

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At universities, I think it's a bit different because I think the reality is the sources of funding that universities get from foreign sources remains highly opaque. When you look at campus protests and you see that the material that all of these students have: they have matching tents. They have incredibly fancy banners  and thousands of them. Pamphlets, leaflets… I mean, all these things take money. And so there is a real question as to where do they get the funding to orchestrate all of these different protests with the various resources that they bring to bear. And universities aren't forthcoming about the foreign sources of funding that they get.

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I had a meeting with a university president whom I won't name, but who came to my house to pitch funding for his university. And I started asking him about the university's relationship with China. And he said – this was not long after the spy balloon incident – he said the spy balloon incident really caused a little bit of a kerfuffle between the U.S. and China, but don't worry, things will get back on track very soon. We're going to get all the funding we need from China very soon. 

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I just looked at him thinking, what planet does this guy live on? I mean, the fact that he didn't even know, have enough self awareness to realize that I was asking this question because I was concerned about Chinese sources of funding, not because I was trying to encourage them to take CCP money – I think it just speaks for how much these administrative university officials live in such an echo chamber. 

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In a way, it's funny, because in the government, there's such a high level of paranoia around conflicts of interest. If you're in the government and you have had any past life in the private sector, people are paranoid about what your ties are, what your financial interests are. When you're in academia, you could be taking tons of checks from all kinds of foreign sources and people never ask questions, which I think is the craziest thing. There's such a dichotomy, but you're an academic, so it's totally fine.

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Michael Eisenberg: 

If you control the minds and the indoctrination, you actually don't ever need to fire a shot.

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Jacob Helberg: 

Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

I'll argue that perhaps the most significant thing you've done over the last five years was help to shepherd the TikTok divestment bill through Congress. I think it's a stunning piece of public service for our children, our grandchildren, the United States and the West.

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But the question I want to ask you – having stated that – is, do you think it's actually going to be effective? Will it get implemented is probably question one. And question two is, okay, if it's not TikTok, it'll be the next one. You know, back to our conversation about the open internet in the West. 

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Jacob Helberg: 

I was hugely supportive of this legislation and was over the moon when it passed.

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Michael Eisenberg: 

You weren’t just supportive. You did incredible groundwork and you've been a thought leader on the topic and I really admire you for it. 

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Jacob Helberg: 

Yeah, I was really involved in conversations on Capitol Hill. I approached it like a political campaign and so I talked to everyone. Republicans, Democrats, it didn't matter what stripes they were from. If they were interested in talking about the issue, I talked to them. I spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill and talked with literally in the hundreds of elected officials in Congress.

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So it was incredibly rewarding when this passed, but also it really renewed my faith in our system because there was so much skepticism about whether this bill would pass. People said: It's too late. TikTok is too popular. Congress will never take the political risk of passing something that’s a restriction on an app that's used by 170 million Americans.

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And ultimately, the national security arguments won the day. Primarily because members of Congress had a foundational question about whether TikTok was controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, and TikTok never satisfactorily answered that question. And it was really because of the substance, and it didn't matter how much money TikTok spent on lobbying.

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So to answer your question about whether I think it's actually going to go through or not: the bill is passed; it's law. What it says is TikTok has to divest within a certain window or it will face a ban in the U.S. And that's the law. And so it almost doesn't matter who's president. The law is the law and TikTok is mentioned by name in the law. So it can't try to claim that it's somehow out of scope. They have a finite window now to operate in good faith and pursue an orderly divestiture. 

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Ultimately, Americans will know very soon if the Chinese government is in it for the money or if they're in it for the influence. If they're in it for the money, they will take the money and allow a divestiture to take place. If they're in it for the influence, they'll choose a ban. 

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Michael Eisenberg:

What do you think will happen? 

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Jacob Helberg:

Well, it seems as though the Chinese government has already signaled that they won't allow the export of Tiktok’s core algorithm, which, you know: selling TikTok without the algorithm is kind of like selling a car without an engine.

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Some American buyers have floated the idea of doing something creative around buying the brand and the platform without the algorithm and rebuilding the algorithm. Honestly, I actually think that will be much easier said than done because the reality is TikTok's algorithm – whatever it is that they did – is incredibly potent. So much so that it's just more potent than Instagram and its American counterparts.

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If it was easy to rebuild the algorithm, Instagram would have already done it. And so I'm a little bit skeptical about how easy or feasible it will be to rebuild an algorithm that'll be the same. It doesn't mean we can– you know, we can have TikTok, an American platform with a different algorithm, but I think where the rubber will meet the road is if the Chinese government allows the sale of the brand and the platform without the algorithm. American buyers will want to buy that at a much cheaper price, because most of the value comes from the algorithm.And so TikTok might end up getting banned if the Chinese and the Americans don't agree on price, basically. If the Chinese ask for this 200 billion dollar or whatever it is crazy price tag for a platform without the source code, I'd be shocked if Americans bought that, basically.

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Michael Eisenberg: 

Three rapid-fire questions to finish. I was struck as you were talking this entire time –  and I'll back up by saying that my wife's grandparents were Holocaust survivors like your grandparents and my wife's grandfather would say he was paranoid till the day he died – and I wonder whether a lot of your early awareness of the Chinese threat comes from some sort of deep-seated paranoia that came from your grandparents who are holocaust survivors. 

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Jacob Helberg: 

Yeah, that's potentially– 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

I don't say paranoia in a negative way, by the way. I say it in a positive way. You have kind of heightened sensitivity to it. 

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Jacob Helberg: 

You know, I guess you could say it's paranoia. I would kind of view it as a lesson learned in the sense that there was always this idea that it could happen again. And so, yeah, I guess it definitely was part of that. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

Yeah, I think that's a super valuable lesson to kind of listen to instincts and family history that we take along with us. Because, like you said at the beginning, history does rhyme, and I think your tentacles were way attuned. Ironically, I wonder if anybody else sitting in the same seat in Google who didn't have that past would have picked up on these things. I'm not sure. 

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Jacob Helberg: 

Honestly, it was when I first joined Google, I wrote an article about China and the various national security risks related to China that I never published because at the time my viewpoints were so fringe and out of the norm that I was concerned it could completely derail my joining Google. And today it's like those viewpoints are consensus and plain vanilla. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

I think, by the way, there's a big lesson in that. I was back and forth with Joe Lonsdale on this as well. You know, there's a lot of people have been sounding the horn about woke and lack of meritocracy for a while. They sounded like fringe or racist or whatever it is for a while, but this has become mainstream. So, curious to hear that.

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The second kind of quick question is: I know Sam Altman officiated at your wedding or something like that. And like the only thing that seemed kind of in my head is: did he use AI to write his speech? 

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Jacob Helberg: 

I think his speech was very heartfelt and written by himself. 

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Michael Eisenberg:

You say AI is not heartfelt then, right?

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Jacob Helberg:

You know, it just doesn't quite have the beating heart that a human has. 

Michael Eisenberg: 

I tried to prompt Keith Roboy to give me a question to ask you, but he didn't respond. So what's the question he would have asked? 

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Jacob Helberg: 

That's a tough one, actually. A question that he would have asked on this podcast?

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Michael Eisenberg:

That he would have told me to ask you.

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Jacob Helberg:

I think he would probably ask a tongue-in-Keith–

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Michael Eisenberg:

Tongue-in-Keith!

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Jacob Helberg:

–tongue-in-cheek question. 

Probably about how, when he and I first met, I was a Clinton Democrat and  now supporting President Trump and his re-election. So I think he – and he obviously is a lifelong Republican – told me for a long time that  I would come around. At the time I said that was crazy. On that issue, like on so many other issues, he ended up being prescient, ahead of his time and totally right. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

He would have told me then to ask you: how could you have been a Democrat? Or he would have told me to ask you: what did it take to convince you? 

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Jacob Helberg: 

Yeah, he would have said something along the lines of: what took you so long?

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Michael Eisenberg: 

Then the last question I'll ask you, it came from Jordan Hirsch, and I think it's a very apt question, given our conversation. I should point out, by the way, that Jordan also pushed me to ask you about your upbringing in Europe and how that's affected your outlook. Jordan said to ask you: what motivates you and gives you optimism?

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And I want to kind of broaden the frame of the question, which is, you deal with what I would call dark things all the time, right? A lot of what got the TikTok thing going was the October 7th massacre, but not only, it's been going on for a while, but that kind of brought a lot of hashtags into quick view. And you’ve spent the last six or seven years of your life dealing with pretty nefarious people. And when you describe the doomsday scenario of what could happen with China, it's pretty dark and bleak. 

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And I know you. You're an optimistic guy, generally. So what is it that gives you this optimism and motivates you every day?

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Jacob Helberg: 

So part of what gives me an enormous source of optimism is a deep-seated belief that we're on the right side of history and we have all the ingredients to win. When you look at autocrats like Xi Jinping in Beijing, they surround themselves with rows of soldiers and military brigades and military weaponry, and yet they are terrified of an ounce of free thought and words. And I think that really highlights the Achilles heel of their entire system. They are terrified of the truth, and, ultimately, I think that really serves as a constant reminder that we are on the right side of this. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

That is a fantastic way to finish this conversation.

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Jacob Helberg, thank you for joining me on Invested and I want to leave everybody here– I highly recommend you follow Jacob, by the way. He's on X at Jacob Helberg, which is J-AC-O-B-H-E-L-B-E-R-G. Highly recommend you follow him on X. 

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Thank you for joining me today and, really, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for our friendship and thank you for the leadership role you've taken, particularly the last seven years, on these issues that are absolutely critical for our people, our planet and people of the West.So thank you. 

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Jacob Helberg: 

Thank you so much for having me and thank you for our friendship, Michael. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

Great to see you.

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