Mixed Signals and Emerging Technology with Amy Zegart

uh and we're going to figure out how this happen so you don't know what staffer is responsible for this right now well look a staffer wasn't responsible and look I take full responsibility I built the I built the group to make my job is to make sure everything's coordinated it's Wednesday March 26 2025 and welcome back to Goodfellows a Hoover institution broadcast examining social economic political and geopolitical concerns I'm Bill whan I'm a Hoover distinguished policy fellow and I'll be your moderator of today's show and I want to welcome welome back to the show he missed the last show but we have it back in our good graces that would be the international Man of History himself the historian Neil Ferguson sir Neil Ferguson I should say and also joining us one of our regular Good Fellows former presidential National Security adviser Lieutenant General HR McMaster we are not with John Cochran today John is in Japan Kishi John wherever you happen to be right now but standing in for John taking his place um welcoming her back to the show she hasn't been with us for a while is Amy zard Dr zard is the Hoover in institutions Morris Arnold and notae Cox senior fellow as well as a professor of political science by courtesy at Stanford University uh Amy is also a co-chair of the Stanford emerging technology review which we're going to talk about today this is a partnership between the Hoover institution and Stanford School of Engineering its purpose being to better educate policy makers on now artificial intelligence robotics Material Sciences and all other kinds of cool Cutting Edge stuff is going to change the world Amy is recently on Capitol Hill with Hoover's director cond Lisa Rice discussing emerging Tech with lawmakers I'm curious as to how that went Amy uh you'll have to share your insights on that but today she is indeed a jolly good fellow Amy welcome back to the show thanks for having me I guess I have to channel my inner grumpy Economist today to try to stand in for Cochran just don't take notes no Amy he's he's the Huggy Economist he's actually Huggy as you know I mean he's not really he is so Amy before we get into emerging technology let's talk about what might call errant technology and that is the current mess in Washington involving the Trump National Security team apparently taking to the chat app signal to have uh conversations about upcoming military strikes in Yin this is the classic Washington who done it what did they know when did they do it what did they discuss and the key question here Amy how did a journalist by the name of Jeffrey Goldberg he is the editor and chief of the Atlantic which is hardly a prot trump publication I would add somehow he got occluded into the chain so Amy your thoughts on what is going on here and perhaps you'd like to pose a question to General McMaster who I think has been through a few chats like this oh I for sure want to pose a question to General McMaster since he's lived through this look the reality is Bill as you know it's bad we can debate the niceties or the specifics of what's classified what's not who did what when did they do it is it bad to have uh you know specifics of targeting uh on a signal chat how did Jeffrey Goldberg get involved but the reality is this is incredibly valuable information and I think lost in the shuffle in the hearings uh this week in the Senate intelligence committee was a question question posed by the head of cyber command in NSA General Hawk and the question was If This Were a foreign government and we had access to that information would that be considered valuable and his answer was undoubtedly yes so if it's incredibly valuable to collect it's incredibly valuable to protect and so that's what we're dealing with here but I'd love to know from HR so how your view of how serious this is and and how you dealt with these communications challenges well you know we had our own kind of problems uh in Trump one early and our biggest problem was deliberate leaks by people you know and and uh and so what the Dilemma that puts you into is do you do you bring your circle even tighter right and exclude a lot of people for security reasons but then you deny your ability to access their points of view how they can what they can contribute to the analysis I think in this particular case uh where there's a very significant security breach it's really three issues I see the first is the decision to use signal at all and the reason they're doing that is for convenience right and and maybe there's some traffic you could put on an app like that but what we really need is you need like a government designed government developed app that gives you some degree of encryption for routine not sensitive uh Communications right and we don't really have that now that conforms with the presidential records act so the decision to go on to Signal first of all was a bad decision but I kind of understand they were doing it for convenience but the second key thing is like what were you putting on there you look at the sensitivity of that information at least what appears clear from from Goldberg's reporting that he left out being a responsible journalist you know he didn't put it in his report certainly that was too way too sensitive for for anything less than you know our highest level of government-based encryption and hardware and everything you can secure from any kind of potential breach but the third thing and I'd love to hear what you and and Neil think about this is is is the nature of that discussion and the degree to which it wasn't really a very effective deliberative process it was after the president's decision but still those discussions are best had in kind of like a semiformal setting and a lot of times that's not Donald Trump's you know not that's not Donald Trump's style but you need to be in the situation room and you need to say hey the purpose of this meeting is to determine whether or not to employ military force against the houthis to ensure freedom of of navigation in in in the Red Sea you know and then and then go through you know what the intelligence go you know what is at stake you know draft goals and objectives and then present the president with courses of action that integrate all elements of National Power uh and and then assess you know the risk and so forth the cost and and and the potential for accomplishing the objectives but anyway I think that's the way I'm thinking about it why you signal it all the decision then to put sense of information on it and the fact that hey it's not a good venue right or mechanism uh for deliberation I think that also raises is the question of what don't we know right we don't know what devices were used we don't know whether they have malware on them we don't know what other conversations may be taking place on Signal uh and whether there are sensitive things that are being discussed there which gets to your point HR and I think your book really lays out very well at we with ourselves a structured process to deliver options to the president that's what the president deserves that's what the president needs is that happening or are we seeing sort of an erosion of that uh fome discussion in a room you know we talk students right this is a conversation this is not a chat don't email me this talk about that it's the same thing in the NSC you want to be in the room together hashing through the the the pros and cons of different options and when you're doing that via chat in the middle of the day it's really hard to get a coherent conversation I have a question for you Amy because this is really right up up your street technology has changed in our lifetimes extraordinary rapidly but in a way the the problems are familiar it's easy to mock uh Mike Waltz and Pete Heth and JD Vance because this conversation ended up all over the Atlantic and it does seem absurd that Jeffrey Goldberg of all people should have accidentally been brought into the conversation as Bill said the Atlantic has been tearing chunks at the Trump Administration uh in round one and in round two so it's bizarre that he was in the chat but it seems to me we shouldn't be too quick to rush to judgment because blunders with Communications technology have been happening to Republican and Democratic administrations for a long time I happen to be in the midst of pouring over the Nixon tapes now the Nixon tapes make this look like a completely trivial thing because hours and hours and hours of incredibly sensitive presidential conversations with tape by Richard Nixon in the belief that at some point they would be valuable when he came to write his self a grandis Memoirs but it turned out to be a catastrophe that brought his presidency down Hillary Clinton's emails spring to mind as another example it feels to me as if we've been failing to manage new technologies for at least half a century inside the White House and inside the Federal government and and so I'm I'm I'm a little disinclined to just Heap scorn and appr probium on these guys because this is not new it feels like every Administration has at least one major fail withth technology right I mean we've seen this before Neil I always love talking to a historian about these kinds of issues you're you're absolutely right although I would I would argue that Nixon's a different case right Nixon deliberately chose to use technology he he banked on the idea that it would help him it turned out that it hurt him with with respect to Hillary Clinton's server in her house and what we're seeing now I think it's a different challenge it's the Need for Speed in decision-making which is ever present the availability of technology that facilitates that and then the counterveiling demands for security so we see this across the government right things are happening faster than ever events are moving faster than ever we all deal with this oh do I have to do two-factor Authentication oh do I have to log into the secure network and it's a it's a productivity killer right so it slows down the process at a time when decision- making needs to accelerate that's the broader challenge you're absolutely right that this Administration is grappling with how do we get to a decision quickly and we have technological tools that enable us to do that but there are downsides to that and so you're seeing and to hr's point we don't have good technological options to optimize the security and the speed and we need to develop those well the the other thing Amy I would say too is you know they've been on the road all of them right and of course this is one of the aspects of the security risk here is that you know uh uh you know Steve wickoff was maybe in in Moscow you know at at the time but uh you know you've got the vice president who's off on it given an economics talk they're all everybody's scattered everywhere now there are ways you can do this though you know with secure Communications you have staffs who can do it but one of the things that I that I I was always which what surprised me uh when I was National Security advisor is a degree to which there's really no training or orientation for people when they come in to a new administration because they hit the ground running right they just got confirmed and there's not really time A lot of times for the staff to say hey here are your Communications capabilities here's how you can use your staff to rapidly connect you with with anybody and and of course they will default to what is easiest as you mentioned you know and security does make it a little bit harder you know I'm thinking of that in Maxwell Smart when he's talking to Chief in the cone of silence right which was was very secure but they couldn't hear each other I am deeply concerned about the conference room what I'm concerned about the conference room you know what you need are are technological capabilities that that provide you security but have a high degree of convenience I wonder AB HR is there a kind of element of ideology here that this Administration is a coalition between the Maga movement and red pilled Silicon Valley in many ways personified by not only Elon Musk but others in the Tech Community who strongly backed Trump last year and JD Vance before he decided on Politics as a vacation did his time in the valley uh as a venture capitalist with Peter teal I sense that the whole atmosphere in this Administration is is the bureaucracy sucks whatever they recommend is uh is tired but we're wired so we're on Signal is that part of the problem here that that kind of pret the fundamental assumption is if the guy in state or defense comes up to you and says sir this is the way in which we are going to encrypt your every communication with 10 Factor authentication and and your response is duh this is exactly what doge is here to start we're going to we go with signal because because that's how we communicate in in Tech bro world is that part of it hey I think so I'd like to ask Amy about this too because you know you're very much ATT tuned to the tech culture here in Silicon Valley and Broadley but you know I kind of see a parallel again you know hashtag predictable for historians to look for the historical analogy uh with uh with John F Kennedy in the Kennedy administration coming in in 1961 you know the Whiz Kids you know you know disregarded kind of the formalistic decision-making and policymaking process of the Eisenhower Administration they were going to move fast and break things you know they were gonna you know they were going to put into place a fundamentally new approach to to National Security and and they had a very small group decision-making uh with very informal discussions and you know I mean sadly what what came out of that is the Bay of Pigs you know so so I think you know there there is a tendency an early in administration to say hey we're not going to do things that the old away we're just going to forge ah head on our own uh and then you know I think we got off light or they got off light on this you know what I'm hoping for is that you know I don't want to see anybody's heads roll out of this I want to see them just say hey we learned from this right and we're GNA adjust our procedures and we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna have you know decisionmaking with a much higher degree of Security pay more attention to operational security and so forth but yeah I think you know this is like the Whiz Kids uh the the first the first chapter in in a book I wrote about how why Vietnam became an American war is in titled the new frontiersmen and the old guard and the new frontiersmen of the of the of the Kenny administration were really anxious to disregard uh the procedures and and and the decision- making processes of the Old Guard but I mean do you think there's a cultural aspect here I think there's partly a cultural aspect here which is just as as Neil described right this is we're going to do things differently we're going to move fast that's the Silicon Valley way and by the way there there's real Merit to that approach that the bureaucrats get in the way they slow things down but the historical period that Springs to mind for me is Barack Obama when he came into the White House remember the president's Daily Brief the single most important highly classified document that goes to the president every day used to be delivered only on paper and Obama's like you got to be kidding me can't you bring me an iPad like why can't I interact with this in a more modern way and that's what proded the bureaucracy to say you know what maybe we need to get into the 21st century so I think Bureau racies like to do things the same old ways that's why we have them there's some merits to standard operating procedures but the downside is they don't adapt fast enough even when they need to if I remember correctly I mean I think one of the first fights Obama had with his AE was over uh whether or not he could keep his own iPhone or not had a big back and forth it was his BlackBerry he was his BlackBerry a long time ago was it different era okay let's close out the segment with this question uh to the panel one do we think this deserves a gate on the end of it that classification of scandals in Washington if it gets a gate uh but secondly how do we get all the answers to this should Congress look into it further should Susie WS the chief of staff investigate how do we get all the answers here HR well you know this is tough right because it involves executive privilege in the white house right and one of the things no president wants and and we've seen that how bad this can be in the early Trump Administration when the FBI misused its power with you know trapping Mike Flynn and everything else is you don't want the FBI you know coming into the White House right there's no White House Council who wants that to happen uh and and so investigations involving the White House are really tough I really think that the white house needs an investigative team I mean I this is something that I wish I had when I was National Security advisor again mainly because of the leak situation that I inherited you might remember I came into the job about a month after the administration came in and two presidential phone calls had leaked you know one with uh the uh uh one Australia and one to Mexico so you know I was very much interested in making sure we knew how the hell that happened and shut down the possibility further leaks but man I was never able to beat it you know because of some of the Dynamics there I we used to joke like hey how long is it going to take this meeting to leak you know so I think that there's a real Gap in capability and and there needs to be an investigative body in the White House that the president has confidence and Trust in it can use for these kind of things um but you know what I'd like to see I'd like to see them just come clean on like yeah we screwed this up this was bad okay you know we just came into this job we're going to learn from this instead of the kind of just the denials that you've heard from some some of the people who are on the chat yeah this is no big deal and I think the media desperate for a a scandal we're not even a 100 days in uh these are inexperienced uh players uh with if you think of the accumulative years of experience in the executive branch it's it's a pretty young it's a pretty Green Team and I think they should just uh they should just admit they screwed up and learn from it I don't think it's a scandal in fact I think it's it's it's noise the real signal that isn't really being addressed is what it tells us a about their attempt to restore deterrence I thought that was a very interesting part of the conversation and I think a legitimate concern uh there's been a chronic failure to deal with with the houth uh secondly very interesting to see the divisions of opinion about what it implies for the US policy towards Europe I'm more interested in that content which we got a glimpse of than I am in the fact that they inadvertently Jeffrey Goldberg on their chat by the way we're all on chat groups I'm in multiple chat groups and half the time I have no idea who the other people in the chat group are Amy HR am I am I not making decisions that invol that put soldiers in herm's way so I think I disagree with you a little bit look yes it's a new team the key question the key word here is learn is the team going to learn and fix the problems that are evident now so it's not that it's nothing it is something but the key is what's the administration going to do what's the most productive path forward to make sure this was a near Miss Right fortunately it was Jeffrey Goldberg it wasn't XI Jin ping or it wasn't someone from hostile power in the Middle East that could have taken action that could have killed Americans involved in this uh operation so you know Lindsey Graham said it yesterday we dodged a bullet and so the key thing is you know if Congress investigates it's going to be a political circus so how can there be a thoughtful investigation to figure out how to learn and improve right the best teams in any sport look at what they did wrong and they fix it and they learn from it and they get better and that's what we want and I think that's best done inside the administration okay well put all right let's shift and let's move on to the Stanford emerging technology review which Amy is a co-chair of uh they came up with a report in February as I mentioned Amy went to Washington with Ki rice to talk to Congress about this um in the report itself Amy you identified and I quote 10 key Technologies and their policy implications I'm not going to put you on the spot and ask you to name all 10 that would be cruel uh I will quickly rip through the 10 for the panel they are alphabetically artificial intelligence biotechnology and synthetic biology cryptography nobody's taking notes Here lasers Material Sciences Neuroscience robotics semiconductors space and sustainable energy Technologies okay Amy 10 key Technologies is any of those 10 Paramount does one rule over the other nine and among those 10 Technologies Amy is there one that we might call a sleeper in other words we'll be thinking 20 years from now where were we focused on that back of the day yeah thanks for the really easy question there bill you know I love all my Technologies like I love all my children so there's not one that's more special than the other the one that's getting all the attention right now is obviously artificial intelligence and so I often like to say it's all about Ai and it's not all about AI so AI is an enabling technology it's a general technology that is superpower in scientific discovery so AI enhances you know bio uh bioengineering AI enhances Material Science but the arrows go the other direction too these Technologies affect each other so AI relies on semiconductors so semiconductor technology is crucial semiconductors in turn rely on advances in Material Science and so you know one of the challenging things and and the exciting things about this moment is that these Technologies affect each other it's not just all about one driving progress in all the rest of them so if I had to pick I would say in the near term AI is the critical enabling technology but we can't lose sight of the others and in terms of what's the sleeper hit of the summer that we should be paying attention to but we're not biotechnology biot both in terms of the opportunity to biomanufacture Goods that are currently made by regular manufacturing processes today oh and by the way biomanufacturing can happen anywhere so Think answers to your supply chain problems right uh and the bio risks of you can manufacture good things and you can manufacture really scary things so I would say biomanufacturing bioengineering Neil I want to ask you Amy about space because I have been doing some reading recently including by uh a manuscript by Hoover fellow Ike Fryman uh on the Indo Pacific military challenge the United States faces and the thing I came away thinking was gee our whole military capability is highly dependent on satellites in fact without those satellites our armed forces are blind and I had underestimated the extent to which the US military has come to rely on those satellites for everything uh for targeting for communications for surveillance of the enemy I could go on so talk a bit about that because I feel as if we talk relatively little about this issue but when it comes down to I don't know the war games that I here discussed the classified ones that I just here alluded to the point of failure often seems to be Chinese or Russian Knockouts of our satellites uh talk a bit about that so I'm so glad you mentioned space Neil So in the tech policy accelerator which is the umbrella outfit uh that I lead space is a major uh line of effort understanding developments in space so historically and HR knows this even better than I do we've relied on a handful of very expensive H uh space satellites right so a billion dollars a piece the size of a bus and they were not designed to be protected in space right because the thinking was space is hard uh we don't need to think about having them be mobile we don't need to think about defenses because once they're up there they're ours that is no longer true and so what we've seen is in increasing Reliance on space-based capabilities as you say but also a decentralization of capability across countries so lots of countries are in space now we've seen a massive proliferation of space-based Assets in the commercial sector I think Elon must starlink for example and so space has become congested space has become contested with all sorts of military Maneuvers in space is that really a satellite that's moving around or is that a off ensive weapon that the Russians just launched for example or that the Chinese have launched and uh and so we're dealing with a lot of challenges at the same time it's not just the military that relies on Space based assets for everything it's all of us your banking your GPS your Communications the financial system we are incredibly riant on space and we take it for granted that it's always going to be available when in fact it is very much a Battleground between countries today HR you have thought about this too well you know one of the first briefings I asked for when I was National Security advisor was on space and and what we did is we we uh very deliberately shifted our approach to space because even under the Obama Administration they had clung to the The Hope right that space could remain an uncontested domain and uh and it was already contested right we knew that with the you know the Chinese anti-satellite demonstrations but also we knew that what the time was classified a lot of this has been Declassified since then a whole range of offensive capabilities that the Russians and the Chinese were developing so we we convened the space Council the vice president vice president Pence did a fantastic job with this by the way uh and and one of our uh senior directors in our defense uh division uh the later Lieutenant General Bill Lori who became the first Deputy commander of of uh of the space force right and Spa and and a lot of time in space command fantastic guy and that strategy uh there's a public one that you can you can look at I think was extremely well done uh on the defense side and there was a there was a classified part of it that that we put resources on of course we had all the OM people the office management budget people involved in all these discussions to ensure we could get the resourcing we needed uh to make our space capabilities more resilient and ensure you know our our continuous and unobstructed access to these critical these critical assets and and am you mentioned what those were four you know Communications and surveillance capabilities and and so forth so we're in a much better place for a number of reasons because I think that strategy has been resourced and I would imagine the Trum Administration will continue but also what Amy mentioned is the commercialization of space and the degree to which private sector capabilities like starlink for example give you a degree of redundancy uh you know the the the to understand the situation you know I think you you should go to uh there's a company called leolabs which is right down the street from us here you know which has terrestrial based space surveillance capabilities and it's unbelievable what they built in terms of visibility in the space and when you look at their at their products you just think how can so much stuff be up there and now you and so you have the the threat you have the congested nature which Amy mentioned uh but now you've got increasingly a space debris issue as well so you know hey it's a fascinating area to track I'm glad you brought it up Neil and we take it for granted you know we take it for granted um and we and we can't afford to can I ask the the target audience for the Stanford emerging technology review because my sense is that the policy Community knows about this there are people who live and breathe this at the Pentagon but the public uh and indeed the academic world has essentially not taken it seriously indeed I think when you say space force to the average undergraduate or the median voter they're more inclined to joke about it than take it seriously so is part of the point of the Stanford emerging technology review to just widen public understanding and reach a an audience that is currently a little bit asleep at the wheel Neil that's part of our objective but it's not the main one so you mentioned policy makers in Washington so one of the main threats of our effort is the idea that policy makers aren't just just in government offices anymore policy makers include leaders you mentioned universities so the people inventing these capabilities need to understand the geopolitical context in which they're operating and private sector leaders like we just talked about the commercialization of space are you a combatant or a non-combatant if things go bad in space who's protecting your assets what responsibilities do you have uh how do you collaborate with foreign countries or the US government so private sector leaders are policy makers today you've written about this I know Neil you know they have the power of states right countries in times uh Gone by so you know Elon Musk is deciding whether and where Starling can be used on the battlefield between Ukraine and Russia he alone is making that decision so it's a it's an expansive set of decision makers that need to understand both the technology and its implications and the geopolitical context in which they're operating so we're our audience is both government and private and academic leaders and we're trying to translate between the scientific developments and the geopolitical realities Amy can you talk a bit about the Synergy between research and government funding in this regard we're in a state California which has been trying to build a train for 15 years now and has barely laid track it's just pathetic the technology world does not deal in years as does government it deals in muts so you're going to Washington you're talking about getting the government involved in merging Tech the lawmakers understand the necessity the speed at which this works in other words when you're talking to these lawmakers I'm curious about this as well you're talking to lawmakers how many of them get a biry tech understand this or are you and Dr Rice unfortunately there with hand puppets trying to explain a lot of the stuff well some get it very well many are learning right we only have a handful of engineers in the entire US Congress uh and so this is it's it's hard to understand and so one of the reasons we have this Flagship report Stanford emerging technology review is it's 101 here's what this technology is here's how it works here's what's happened recently here's what's Over the Horizon so we need to do a better job of communicating these developments in near real time to decision makers who need to know so there are some people that are very focused on these technological issues you see um and we have Senator young uh in the Senate Senator rounds Senator Booker there's a bipartisan group of people in Congress that actually are very interested in this but it's small to be sure so um one of the things that we found when we were in Washington was the and this is true by the way in the valley there tends to be uh a thing a thought that all investment is the same all research and development is the same and that's not true so what does our Innovation ecosystem actually look like that has made the US The Innovation superpower of the world it has two parts to it the first part which is the part we often forget is the federal government funds risky long-term F foundational research mostly in universities right and that is no commercializable product that you can foresee in the future it's basic things like what are the laws of physics and how do they operate in the universe how does the human immune system work and only the federal government can invest at scale and over long periods of time that's part one of our Innovation model part two is universities then publish that research openly and the Baton goes to the private sector and the private sector does its thing so almost nobody to your earlier point about the public almost nobody would know that the federal government invested for years in fundamental research in universities about this thing called a digital library sounds very boring right but everybody knows Google and that's what resulted from those years of of fundamental research in universities so I think we need to do a better job in the university community of explaining what the Innovation model is and how universities and fundamental research are a core part of our economic Innovation engine when Condi and the team and I were in Washington and by the way the team included engineering colleagues the chairman of the electrical engineering department at Stanford Mark Horowitz F Lee computer scientist AI godmother and Allison okamura who's a mechanical engineering professor and a robotics expert and when we went around town we kept getting asked what's your ask what do you want and our answer was we're here to help tell us what you need and we will provide the expertise to help you understand these Technologies and uh and assess What policies might be best suited to advance American interests and values and that was in some way surprising to us that that was new to them uh but has proven incredibly valuable and so a lot of our follow-on work with the emerging technology review is responding to those requests in very specific policy domains and technological areas Amy what we have here is a unique one-of its kind program in Academia the question would be why is it a one-of-a-kind program why is only Stanford doing this and why Stanford and the Hoover institution well bill I think Stanford is uniquely positioned in three key ways to lead an initiative like this and there's a reason no one else has done it the first is we have the best engineering school in the world and so this is a partnership between the Hoover institution and our school of engineer and each of us is more than a hundred years old and this is the first time we've collaborated in such an integrated way and that's very exciting so we have the technological expertise in all of these emerging technology areas and so we can lead the policy discussions with experts in those fields and that's critically important so that's Advantage number one advantage number two is our neighborhood we're not just anywhere in the US we're in the heart of Silicon Valley and as I often say to policy makers we didn't we don't just happen to be here we made Silicon Valley so our ties to Industry to investors and inventors and executives are deep and they are Broad and so we can harness that ecosystem in understanding across sectors how technology is moving and what the implications could be and then the third is that we're the Hoover institution and so we have deep policy expertise we have a combination of social scientists even some historians right and others across technological Fields where we care about the policy impact that we have those three things are an invaluable and in my mind unique combination that give us a leadership role in these areas he could you tie this into something that you've done recently written about you and your colleague AJ Gallow I had the pleasure of doing a podcast with him recently on this and that is the concept of economic statecraft right well you know Andy gr did a fantastic job on that it was uh uh was fun to work with him and you know essentially what we did is tried to lay out principles for employing the tools of economics statecraft and and really the the main problem that we took on and and you know so many Hoover fellows and people who who are expert in this helped us with this and and whoover economists who are skeptical about any application of the tools of economic statecraft helped us tremendously uh is is really to address the problem of of you know how to compete with China's status mercantilist economic model effectively uh without you know stifling any of the advantages associated with our free market economic system and our sort of unbridled uh entrepreneurship and and uh and I think this is really an important question to to ask and uh and what we Pro provided in is are really guidelines you know for uh for employing the tools of Economic statecraft and doing it in a way that that accomplishes th those objectives but um you know Amy Neil I know this is this is a you you're aware this is a a debate we have on Good Fellows and and John Cochran was uh uh was very helpful to us in in sort of uh providing his perspective and strengthening that report but Amy how do you see the landscape in Washington in terms of applying those tools you mentioned the importance of investment in in basic research that's under kind of some duress right now uh but where where do you see the the pendulum swinging in the areas of you know export controls inbound and outbound investment screening and maybe efforts to to secure the research Enterprise which you mentioned you know the tennessy for for scientists is he publish it they want everybody know and they want to collaborate internationally uh but now we have adversaries who could weaponize a lot of the technology that we're developing against us what are your feelings about that so you've that's it's a broad landscape HR I'll take a stab at it so I think there are many things that are happening at the same time with economic statecraft and I think at the risk of of offending my historian colleagues on this show I think we are using we are stuck and Antiquated thinking about our policy tools so history is beneficial for some things and counterproductive for others so for example export controls what's the purpose of export controls well in the Cold War as you know the purpose was to deny capabilities to our adversaries deny them fistle material deny them weapon systems well today export controls are designed to delay our adversaries from accessing Technologies we've seen this play out with deep seek and it's a real question did export controls work did they backfire how do we know and the answer is we don't know yet right but you can certainly see that deep seek right the Chinese startup that really revealed uh some pretty sophisticated engineering outputs where they could have a frontier large language model with less compute than the hyperscalers in the US we can debate how much less compute they use but they they did use orders of magnitude less compute well that was with an export control regime so now I've heard everything from we didn't export control enough to we export controlled too much so there's a real debate there and what we need to do is actually figure out what is the evidence that we need to collect to make a decision one way or the other um you mentioned HR this question of research security I think one of the Tendencies we have is to think it's only our decision whether the best and brightest foreign Talent comes to the United States and we need to now uh you know make sure that our research Enterprise is secure it's no longer our decision right so foreign Talent from China in particular uh is going to other places they don't have to come to the United States anymore and so I did a with a research assistant did a wonderful analysis of the talent behind the Deep seek papers there were five papers there were 2011 authors and she found all publicly available information about where they went to school where they worked when they did it what countries and guess what it is a homegrown Talent story half of the authors of those five deep seek papers half of them were educated and trained nowhere outside of China nowhere so I think we need to face facts that you know the everyone will always want to come to the United States we'll get the best and brightest uh foreign Talent has a vote and we need to think not only about securing the research Enterprise but attracting the best foreign Talent from countries that are allies and partners and developing our own expertise K12 is a national security issue in a way it's never been before and so there's a lot of talk on the immigration side and not enough talk in my view on the crisis in K12 stem education that is a national security rest to us if I can just defend the historical profession against your scathing commentary Amy actually a really nice bit of historical research by by former student Chris Miller in his book Chip War showed that it wasn't export control that stopped the Soviet Union being able to build computers they stole all the semiconductors that they needed but they just couldn't do it uh and so with the the idea of Jake Sullivan's small yard with a high fence if the fence has got a hole in it called Singapore and the gpus are getting through which they clearly are then ultimately the whole strategy of technological containment doesn't have a strong historical Foundation at all in fact struggle to think and I'm often asked this question so I'm forced to think about it of any successful Enterprise strategic Enterprise based on technological containment I mean it was tried repeatedly people throughout history have thought ah we have the wonder weapon now we must just make sure or the Wonder technology must just make sure that the dastardly Spaniards or the Dutch don't get it and it never ever works because if something is as valuable as say artificial intelligence large langu models uh you're not going to stop uh the Chinese being able to develop them especially as you said because the Chinese have massive homegrown AI Talent by the way this was anticipated by some excellent work done uh in the macro po reports which you may know showing that the flow of AI Talent which was initially massively from China to the US is much less decisively uh from China to the US now so I've just been in Asia and here here's a question for both of you I came back struck by not just the confidence over AI I mean Kaiu Lee's line is pretty clear we may not be able to compete on training but we can win on inference and adoption and I think that's turning out to be true the other thing that is really striking is that China thinks it's won the AAL competition it's won the EV race and byd is going to eat the world including Tesla there's immense self-confidence in China about their capacity to win these technological races and I must say I'm struggling to think of why they won't there's mounting evidence that they're ahead in multiple domains the Australians have a great study on this which you're probably very familiar with how worried should we be how worried are you in you think about this more than I do I mean I just came away from my asent tri thinking we're losing in many many domains that we thought we would win in I well Neil I as you know I naturally go to the dark corner of every room so yes I'm very worried I think we should be even more worried than you say not just because of the BDS of the world but where is China Investing right so uh China is investing in fundamental research this is we we harvest the seeds that we plant in fundamental research 253 years earlier and so yep they've conquered batteries they look like they're ahead in parts of AI but they are invest investing investing investing in biotech and fundamental research across the board so the US is spending the US federal government is spending a third of what it spent in fundamental research as we did in the 1960s one third of what we used to spend China is spending six times faster than the United States and will overtake Us in funding and fundamental research within a handful of years so you don't have to guess what the CCP thinks they tell you what they think and where they think the Battleground is so not only I think are we falling behind in today's Battleground Technologies we're falling further behind in tomorrow's Battleground Technologies and that really concerns me Amy let me close out the segment with a question to you um time flies by here in California Silicon Valley and before you know it you're going to be looking at another review put up by the Stanford emergy technology review another report um the question to you Amy is a year from now if you're looking at the next review the next report what would you like to see in the way of progress so Bill I think the the report is our Flagship product but it's not our only product so let me talk a little bit about what we want to do and then what progress I'd like to see just on the policy domain um one thing that we want to do is you know the the review in many ways I think of as a first date right we're sending it out to Washington we're briefing uh officials in Washington and in the valley and then we want to know give us homework right what more can we help you with uh what second dates can we get right now we're inundated with second date requests that's a good thing it's a good problem to have uh Second Date requests from injury uh from industry second date requests from the administration and from Congress and I think that's a really positive development because we want our experts to weigh in on policy to help uh decision makers make better policy so it's inbounds the second thing we want to do is scale right we want to scale our Outreach we we're we we have a podcast that we launched with the Council on Foreign Relations called the interconnect which looks at specific Technologies and their implications we have a great Hoover team that has a terrific go to market strategy so we're going to be coming soon to a theater near you with the Stanford emerging technology review hopefully you'll see it in lots of places uh and we want to build the stable of engineering leaders here at Stanford that want to work with us at Hoover to help policy makers so this is all about human Talent uh and we need to harness the human Talent across this campus and there's tremendous enthusiasm from the engineering side of campus to do this work with us so I think that's exciting what do I want to see on the policy side a year from now I think the Trump Administration is already heading in that direction the vice president gave a fantastic speech on AI opportunity soon after he came into office I think that is the right frame we need to run faster not regulate more and so I think the administration is heading very much in the right direction the second thing I'd like to see a year from now is a Rejuvenation of the contract between the federal government and universities on scientific research we're at a crucial moment here universities have done themselves no favors with the political issues on our campuses and the protests after October 7th but science has to continue uh and we have to ensure that we're investing in the Technologies of tomorrow so if I got those two things AI opportunity investment in fundamental research I would be a happy woman sounds good uh for those who want to know more about the emerging technology review uh there's a website it is s.stanford.edu s.stanford.edu Amy thanks for the conversation enjoyed it thanks so much but don't go anywhere we want to have some more fun with you okay anytime let's now shift to our B Block and uh what I call the art of the not art of the deal but the art of the cave and like to play a game with the three of you if you're willing a game that we call big deal little deal or no deal at all and Amy the way this works is I give you a matter and you tell me is it a big deal a little deal or no deal at all I think Neil likes to play this game so here we're going to go two issues here I want you to discuss number one Columbia University facing a $400 million cut in federal funding it caves into Donald Trump and it agrees that in the future when they Pro Palestinian protest on campus protesters cannot wear masks Columbia will beep up its security force and if Columbia doesn't go along it loses its Federal funding Neil big deal little deal or no deal at all it is a big deal partly for what we've been discussing I mean if universities have been Central to research and development in the United States if they were key to American success in the first Cold War it's kind of a problem if the federal government and universities are in a kind of war with one another I hear great protests from the scientific Community about what is happening and I must admit my response is the universities had this they brought this upon themselves and it's not good enough to say but I was in my laboratory when crazy stuff was happening uh if crazy stuff was happening on your campus and you were a tene professor where were you uh this has been a long time in the making over 10 years the elite universities it's not just since October 7th it's been a decade long the elite universities have turned themselves into clown shows of wo activism and Donald Trump signaled throughout the campaign that they were going to pay a price for this this is no big surprise there were clear statements in the Trump campaign that the universities were going to be hit hard and this is just the beginning there's way more to come and nobody should be under any Illusions the endowments are going to be on The Hit List too it's not just going to be the kind of funding that that Colombia has been threatened with losing so I think this is a huge deal and I'm not going to sit back and have it all blamed on Donald Trump this is this is something the universities have brought upon themselves because of a decade of abysmal governance and total irresponsibility on the part of academics as well as administrators who seem to have forgotten that universities are not a political project so that's my view it's a big deal and the universities have brought it on themselves HR yeah I think it's a big deal I think it's you know the pressure is being applied to research and Sciences but of course the problem is in the humanities where the curriculum of self-loathing has become prevalent uh so you know I think it's important to administer a corrective and and again to incentivize I think University leadership to to be responsible to recognize that the mission of the university has been compromised by you know their failure to lead and their failure to call out this Behavior which was you know which was you to to advocate for violence uh against members of the student body and then to obstruct the very mission of the of the University by you know occupying buildings and and uh and and intimidating students maybe big deal but for some different reasons that what my colleagues have said I completely agree universities have brought this on we have a freedom of inquiry problem on University campuses not just free speech free inquiry some views are tolerated and celebrated and other views are not we have a monoculture on our campuses by the way our students want to hear disagreement they want to hear contending views they ask in class for more of that and universities haven't given it to them and we've and that's the essence of education is to examine issues thoughtfully rigorously from a variety of perspectives and be able to debate them civil and we and we have lost our way on that completely agree with that but there's a question about what's the right approach to correct for this endemic problem and I am concerned that the Trump Administrations approach which is single out individual universities hold them hostage for hundreds of millions of dollars of funding I agree with the merits of what the Trump Administration is asking Columbia to do let's put that aside for a second but when you hold uh universities hostage you're not just punishing Colombia you're punishing America because you're impeding the research that is going to enrich our economy Advance our science find cures for cancer and you're setting a precedent so let's imagine a Democratic president comes into office and they too want to hold universities hostage for hundreds of millions of dollars to pursue particular policy aims I think we have to imagine that a future president would use the same tools in the same way and while I might agree with the president today I would not agree with the future president in using that that method to exact change there are other ways that could be more productive to get Colombia to do the right thing but Amy what are these other ways because all one saw over the last 10 years was continual failure by trustees by Presidents by provosts by tenured faculty by administrators they they didn't reform themselves when they had the chance do we seen the president use at least two really powerful mechanisms to great effect already in quite a short period of time executive orders right and the bully pulpit most of America agrees with a lot of the a lot of the policies that he's talking about with respect to higher education he's articulating them and people are agreeing with him so you're seeing a lot of change already before he decided to withhold the $400 million of funding for Colombia I agree universities have been moving far too slowly but I think the president's justice department investigations of title six violations absolutely should move forward executive orders and using the bully pulpit I think those have been really productive in a short period of time H do you see a similar outcome in Philadelphia where the University of Pennsylvania is looking at losing I think $1 175 million if it doesn't change its policies on transgender Sports yeah I do and you know I think this is an area also where you know the private sector got involved you know a lot of money was pulled you know from those universities by individuals you know who were who were dissatisfied with the leadership of of uh of those universities yeah I mean I you know I think that um you this is a really important period of change I hope it administers a corrective I think it's important with all these you measures to make sure that the cure is effective you know you don't want the cure to be disruptive as Amy said there's a downside to it uh but I think there's a way to mitigate that you know a way to to like with Colombia incentivize them to make the decisions that the leadership of the University should have made long ago and then once they make those decisions are on a path uh then to be able to restore funding uh for research in particular okay I want you to tell me if it's a big deal little deal or no deal at all the law firm Paul Weiss it's tied historically to Democrats and Democratic causes the president signed an executive order Banning uh lawyers in that firm from representing clients doing Federal Business it takes away security clearances I think for partners as well and then the law firm turns around and lo behold it agrees to do $40 million in Pro boto work for Trump friendly causes Neil big deal little deal no deal at all it's a little deal because it revealed them to have no courage whatsoever I mean there are moments where you have to stand up and they just decided to lie down so you know kind of pathetic really but not a big deal in the way that the last topic was HR you want to pile on the lawyers too no not I mean not really I I'm related to too many lawyers hey but but you know the uh I I think as as Amy said you know the you know it's it's important to evaluate the objectives right in which case this is might be a good objective but also to pay attention to the means that are employed because it's not going to just be the Trump Administration who employs the these kind of tactics in the future it could be you know another a future Administration who has you know much different agenda so I mean I'd just be cautious uh about these kind of coercive measures because they could establish a new president and we could be unhappy with the way they're applied in the future yeah Amy goose and Gander right yep I I mean I would it's a little deal for I mean this is the private sector and they can you see different law firms taking different approaches to the same challenge um so I think we're always better off when we have a robust set of Institutions that have the capabilities to ask questions of the state right okay now let's turn our attention now to three nations three lands that may or may not cave to Donald Trump down the road first up Neil Greenland well I can't tell if this is trolling or for Real uh I think it's some combination of the two my take on this is that uh we have to look behind the sad of

2025-03-29 18:39

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