The Case for (and against) Cold War II (Robert Wright & Dmitri Alperovitch)
Robert Wright's Nonzero
Nonzero
4.7 • 618 Ratings
🗓️ 30 July 2024
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
1:13 Dmitri’s new book, World on the Brink 9:26 Is America’s behavior more destabilizing than China’s? 17:22 China-Taiwan compared to Russia-Ukraine 28:00 Is the US making a Chinese invasion of Taiwan more likely? 41:31 Should the US try to maintain global hegemony? 55:06 The “autocracy versus democracy” framing
Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Dmitri Alperovitch (Crowdstrike, Silverado, World on the Brink). Recorded July 24, 2024.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero podcast. You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero Podcast. |
| 0:27.5 | Hello, Dimitri. |
| 0:31.3 | Good to have you here. |
| 0:34.5 | Let me introduce this. |
| 0:35.3 | I'm Robert Wright, publisher of the Non-Zero newsletter, to which everyone can subscribe. This is the Non-Zero podcast. You are Dimitri Alperovich. |
| 0:44.1 | Now you're the chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, think tank. You were also co-founder and former, I would stress former CTO of CrowdStrike, which means you bear no responsibility |
| 0:55.8 | for last week's events, right? Yeah, I've been retired from the company for several years. |
| 1:01.1 | Okay. Okay. If there's anybody in here, there was an ill-advised update was sent to many computers, |
| 1:08.4 | and it left, wound up causing trouble um but you bear no |
| 1:12.9 | responsibility anyway you're also the author of world on the brink how america can beat china in the |
| 1:18.5 | race for the 21st century um i'm really looking forward to this conversation um because for one |
| 1:23.5 | thing i've followed you on twitter for some time uh well since the invasion of ukraine |
| 1:27.3 | which you predicted a couple months before it happened which one thing I've followed you on Twitter for some time, well, since the invasion of Ukraine, |
| 1:32.7 | which you predicted a couple of months before it happened, which was before most people. |
| 1:39.3 | And so you were one of my follows. I learned a lot. I also listened to some of your podcast conversations with Michael Kaufman. Learned a lot. And now we're going to talk about China, where we disagree, which should be good in illuminating. |
| 1:52.2 | I'm not a China Hawk. I would call you one. I assume you don't object to that designation. |
| 2:00.7 | I think it's fair. Okay. I worry call you one. I assume you don't object to that designation. I think it's fair. |
| 2:01.9 | Okay. I worry about the costs of a sustained Cold War. Whereas you think we just might as well |
| 2:10.5 | dig in and do a good job of fighting one. And I almost get the sense that you think it was inevitable. |
| 2:16.6 | We're in one. |
| 2:22.4 | So, you know, when you're in a bar fight, you know, you can surrender or you can choose to fight. |
| 2:25.4 | I guess you can surrender if you're in a Cold War already. |
... |
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