This is NatSec Matters. I'm host Michael Allen with Beacon Global Strategies. Today I'm joined by Mr. Craig Singleton, Senior Director for China and Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Before joining the Foundation, he spent more than a decade serving in a series of sensitive national security roles with the US government where he was primarily focused on East Asia. Mr. Singleton joins us today for the first episode of our new series called the New Frontiers of the US-China Tech Competition. Here we will explore several emerging areas of tech competition with China and their implications for US national security. Stay with us as we speak with Craig Singleton. Thanks so much for joining NatSec Matters. Thanks for having me. It's great to be back. Well, we're so glad to have you. You're back by popular demand. Let's get right to it. Trade negotiations have been a big deal between the United States and China, even as President Trump is working any number of other international issues. Could you please sort of describe for us the status of the talks, particularly the most recent round of talks, and the so-called tariff truce? Yeah, I mean, we're going big way out of the gate here. I think the short answer is that we're in something of a tactical pause. We have a limited tariff freeze that will run through November and a little bit of a licensed drip in a few areas. The Chinese are approving where earth and magnet permits for many but not all US companies. I think this pause that we're in is driven largely by the White House's push for a fall Xi Jinping Trump summit. While for its part, Beijing is sort of just kind of running the clock. I think the best way I've tried to think about it is it's a mutually assured disruption. Both of these sides know the other's pressure points, but it feels like China's tolerance for this long-grinding supply chain pain is higher than Washington's tolerance for sort of market shocks. I think up until the summit and the photo op, I think things are going to remain relatively calm. After that, it's anyone's guess. Speaking of the US market shock, shouldn't we have known, it feels like a lot of us that watch this have read a million articles about the United States is vulnerable on rare earth minerals in particular magnets or the elements that go into magnets. It feels like we jumped into a trade war and predictably we were hamstrung by the lack of a US supply chain on rare earth. Is that fair? I think it's a fair criticism. I think there was genuine surprise in some corners that the Chinese were willing to go to the rare earth card so fast. Remember there was a sense that the president was amping up tariffs in a sort of a tit for tat fashion with the Chinese when they refused to get on the phone and talk to him like other countries were willing to do. But it didn't take too long, I think for the Chinese to recognize that they didn't want to engage in that sort of like emotional tit for tat back and forth. They went right for the jugular. It was shortly thereafter that the White House started to get inundated with requests from US companies and particularly in the automotive sector saying, hey, we're going to have to turn off assembly lines if we can get these magnets. I think that's when it all became pretty real and admittedly I would probably posit that the US and the White House in particular had to find some sort of a face saving off ramp here. The reality though is that the Chinese can throttle us on rare earths whenever they want and I suspect they're going to keep these six month license windows for the foreseeable future where they can constantly threaten that if the US takes competitive actions, they can turn off rare earths in a matter of weeks or days and that's going to be hanging over the head of this administration for quite some time. What feels like our leverage over them is semiconductors. How linked are these issues? Have the Chinese explicitly linked the two? I think we do have tremendous control over the Chinese when it comes to export controls, when it comes to capital outbound flows, when it comes to semiconductors and parts of the semiconductor supply chain. The Biden administration was keen to think through all the possible options and scenarios that could develop from a semiconductor supply chain war and maybe in certain cases overthought some of those questions. Maybe the pendulum has swung a little too far today where there's a sense that perhaps export controls don't work from certain voices in this administration or that we need to build a Chinese dependency on US or American chips so we shouldn't be using export controls. I think there's a good reason to debate a lot of those arguments. I don't think a lot of those arguments against export controls really hold up under scrutiny. But ultimately at the end of the day here, it does seem like we're developing some sort of like a niche and bespoke series of carve-outs for certain companies like NVIDIA at the same time that we are relinquishing a lot of our leverage on a supply chain and export controls in exchange for seemingly nothing. Let's go right there to NVIDIA because this has just been sort of ongoing back and forth here. But for the benefit of the audience, will you just explain what the H20 chip is? Yeah, the H20 chip was designed specifically for the Chinese market. Remember, the Biden administration put into place a series of controls thinking about, they called it the AI diffusion network. But I think ultimately what they were thinking about was how do we prevent China from getting its hands on the most advanced semiconductors? And the reason, of course, is because there are clear indications that China's military and intelligence apparatus, and including Chinese companies linked to China's military, were placing massive orders for these chips and incorporating them into their supply chains and building new AI models. And that was, I think, fairly frightening to Democrats and Republicans alike here in DC. So some of those constraints were put into place to say, well, you can only provide certain chips to China that have certain parameters and certain characteristics. The H20 was sort of born from some of that slicing and dicing on just how far, just how advanced were we willing to let China go in terms of accessing US chips? Yeah, and it feels like there's a significant number of China hawks around town, particularly in the Congress, that felt like the NVIDIA H20 had maybe not the state of the art, but certainly enough capability that the United States should be nervous. Do I have that right? It's been called America's fourth best chip. Even the Commerce Secretary has sort of bandied about that line, but it really, really misses the point. It still leapfrogs anything that China can build on its own, or at least that we know about. And we have to remember that with capacity tight, every unit sent to China is one that's not available to US or allied developers. There are real trade-offs here, and ultimately, even our so-called fourth best chip is still their first best option. So why would we want our adversary to get their hands on something like that? And I think that Democrats and Republicans all understand what's at risk, and the idea that the Chinese could leap ahead in AI or really develop frontier experience is something that I think keeps a lot of people up at night. Is it a fair analogy to say we wouldn't sell to the Chinese our fourth best fighter? So why should we do that here? You know, there's a good argument to be made, and a few folks have made it around town. Matt Pottinger, Eliza Tobin, others, that would we have sold the Soviet Union nuclear missiles, and the counter would have been, well, if we don't sell it to them, they'll make their own. But I think in the case of China and semiconductors, that analogy does hold up quite well. China's push for semiconductor dominance and self-sufficiency began long before any of the current administration, even the prior administration, their export controls and their restrictions and their concerns about these, about semiconductor supply chains in the future of AI. And I think we just have to sort of ask ourselves like, whether we want to willingly provide this cutting edge technology to an adversary that is so clearly and explicitly weaponizing it and seeking to incorporate AI and its own AI stack into all aspects of its military modernization. Those are real risks, and there's plenty of evidence to show that these chips have ended up in China's military and in its supply chains that are linked to its intelligence apparatus, and even companies, again, so linked to the Chinese Communist Party that ultimately we would have to ask ourselves, why would we do that? Every chip sold to China is one not sold to the US or an allied country. We should probably be redirecting those chips towards ourselves, not towards our competitor. Yeah, and so NVIDIA argues, well, not only are we not giving our top shelf items to the Chinese, but the US semiconductor market needs, or manufacturing base needs a market like China because, and we've heard these arguments for years, we derive revenue for them, which allows us to pull it back into R&D, which allows us to keep our lead. I guess I'm asking, what's NVIDIA's best argument that this should be permitted? Well, I think they're primarily driven by profit more than anything else. It's hard. It's a little confusing to see press releases and tweets from company like NVIDIA with a $4 trillion valuation saying that it's been stunted by export controls and reduced its access. NVIDIA would like to say that for the US to maintain control of the AI stack, and we have to have chips everywhere, and we shouldn't be limiting them, we should build dependencies on the Chinese by providing our fourth best chip to them, to the Chinese, that would maybe hamstring China's indigenous attempts to catch up. Again, I think it's pretty easy point by point to break down a bunch of these arguments, and they're all pretty false. Ultimately, at the end of the day, the Chinese have made clear that they want to keep key and core technologies firmly in their hands, and they want to achieve high-level scientific and technological self-reliance from us. This is a mandate that predates US export controls on China. It's Chinese Communist Party doctrine. It's not a response to US policy. Ultimately, I would think export controls, which are a key US policy tool that NVIDIA seems to have serious questions about. I think those tools protect America's edge by targeting all the choke points that will decide which country is going to win the AI race, and it steers US capability away from high-risk users, including the People's Liberation Army, while I think raising some serious costs for China and stretching its innovation timelines. Yeah. President Trump gets involved, and on the one hand, I'm glad that we have a president who is involved in such issues and obviously cares a lot about the US-China competition. But instead of maybe saying, we need to bar the export of these particular items, which to me would have been directly on point, he said, well, we're going to take 15% of the gate here. What is that? I mean, I get it. I'm glad that the president is trying to get more revenue for the United States Treasury, if you will, but that didn't seem either here nor there when I first read about it. Yeah. Look, compute is the high ground here. Whoever controls compute is going to control the future, I would argue. This reported 15% profit sharing agreement, it's kind of troubling, I think to me, in a few respects. First, it monetizes risk. It turns export controls into a toll that tells Beijing and industry that at the right price, advanced US compute can flow to China. I think that really blurs a bright line and it weakens deterrence. I mean, a second, of course, there are, as I mentioned, like sort of some real supply trade-offs with capacity-type. Every age 20 or other advanced trip that we send and ship to China is one not powering US and allied companies. And so reports that Nvidia's CEO made direct appeals to the president underscores this push to reopen his company's access to this lucrative market. So the incentive is profit. The cost, though, is like a lot of policy coherence. So where do we stand today? I mean, it's, we've still, we have the government has the executive branch made a final decision here, are we pre-decisional? What would you say the state of play is? I mean, the devil's really in the details. And it's, I don't think it would surprise any listener that oftentimes there's a big headline announcement from the White House. And then we don't really get the details in an executive order or a press release or, you know, a federal register notice for days or sometimes weeks. Best we can tell, and there are serious concerns that have been raised about whether this 15% deal is legal or not. Best we can tell, they're still working on the details and sort of the final print, you know, dotting the I's across in the T's. But we haven't seen an actual legal determination that this 15% profit sharing agreement is in fact legal. Whether the chips are flowing on the licenses or approved, again, I think we're all sort of piecing it together. But it's about as clear as mud. Yeah. Okay. Well, so much more to come on this particular issue. Let's take you're in the same vein as semiconductors, if you will, a big part of the US-China technology competition. Tell us a little bit about polysilicon. And I know you recently submitted some comments to commerce about an investigation they're doing into that industry. But take it at the one-on-one level and tell us what it is. We're really going to nerd out here, I think. Let's do it. Yeah. You know. Sorry. So polysilicon is ultra pure silicon. It's like the feedstock for semiconductor wafers and the core materials and a lot of solar panels. That's what makes it a national security input sort of twice over. It underpins the defense department's secure mission-grade chips. Like think the radiation hardening electronics for satellites and communications. But it also powers part of this AI-era energy build-out that our economy and defense networks increasingly rely on. Now, Beijing has been subsidizing and overbuilding and consolidating this sector, leaving Chinese champions with really outsized market power. And a lot of that capacity actually sits in Xinjiang with forced labor risks that trigger a lot of legal and ethical exposure for US buyers. And so the result is a single point of failure of China squeezes polysilicon supply or prices. We feel it in both chips and power. So it's something that we really have to start focusing on a lot more. Okay, great. And so I get we've got it. It's a big national security issue. But tell us a little bit about the commerce investigation. Yeah. So I mean, one of the things that's most interesting right now is the series and the large number of investigations that the Commerce Department of the US Trade Representative's Office have undertaken on a bunch of issues that involve Chinese over capacity and dumping and price and market manipulation. This just happens to be one that they're really looking into. And I think rightly so. Look, China watchers have seen this movie many times over. It's, you know, China executes this sort of like a five lever playbook. It involves they source they have to source something right. So they source polysilicon in Xinjiang and other low cost hubs with discounted coal power and land tax holidays. Then they subsidize the producers via state banks and provincial funds to jumpstart production. Then they scale it by overbuilding across the supply chain to flood the market. Then they squeeze all of their arrivals with below cost pricing and then they force consolidation into national champions. And then finally, they steer demand with domestic content rules, sort of like long term offtake contracts, and they channel all the purchases to PRC firms. And when they do that, we all inherit a choke point. And that's what's happening on polysilicon. On polysilicon, would you say that China already dominates the sector or we're trying to get ahead of the game before they do? This is an area where they have a pretty far ahead lead. They're in a position to dictate price and pace for all of the feedstock behind trusted mission grade chips and the solar capacity powering all these AI era data centers that we're establishing. So because they can throttle us, you know, can create program delays, it could be coercive leverage in a crisis for them. And of course, there are these persistent forced labor exposure concerns for US buyers. And so it's a little bit of a scenario in which something seems very cheap today, but we're held captive tomorrow. And I think, again, China Watchers have seen this movie many times over. It should be no surprise here, but there are still, I think, an opportunity for corrective measures. But we really do need to start moving here because US and allied companies won't be able to continue to compete with these market manipulations and price controls that ultimately could put US and allied suppliers out of business. So as you ably explain, this is the typical Chinese playbook. Am I right? They have some sort of advantage. They subsidize it. They undercut everyone, drive everyone out of business. And so we're doing an investigation which would enable the president to be able to put tariffs upon this particular industry in China so that they don't swamp us, basically, right? Yeah, that's a big part of it. We're trying to think about what tools in our toolbox do we have to address this as we start thinking about polysilicon as one of these key inputs. We talk about different types of rare earths and magnets and all of these obscure sort of materials that are becoming a normal part of our daily lexicon here in DC. Polysilicon is one I think we're going to be hearing a lot more about just because it goes into these critical semiconductor wafers and then also solar cells and just a myriad of other things that have critical national security significance. Okay, well, let's continue in this vein. I like this. We've been talking in Washington generally speaking on quantum AI and of course, semiconductors, but let's go into a couple of other areas which are integral to the US technology race. Let's talk about LiDAR. LiDAR is, I think, something we've been hearing about in the tech world, intelligence world for some time. Tell our listeners what is it and where does it sit in the strategic technology race? Yeah, I mean LiDAR really does sit on the front line of the tech race as a decisive edge sensor. So LiDAR is a laser based ranging system and it builds these precise 3D maps in real time, which is why it's just become a standard technology in autonomous vehicles and ports and rail yards and smart city traffic systems. And those same capabilities are really migrating across to the battle space too. So ISR and terrain mapping and target acquisition and autonomous logistics and loitering munitions, these are all areas where you see LiDAR being incorporated and the reality is that Chinese firms heavily subsidized and integrated into China's military civil apparatus, they hold a large share of the global LiDAR market and that creates two risks. One is supply chain leverage, which we're seeing in the magnets in polysilicon and others. And also like sensor as entry point vulnerabilities, right? Think about these sensors, they get remote updates, they have data exfiltration opportunities and there can be shut down risks, especially if their hardware rides inside US infrastructure or defense systems. It's very similar to some of the fears that we all have about Chinese cranes at US ports. And so the bottom line on LiDAR though is that control of LiDAR supply and standards is going to shape who owns all of this critical infrastructure awareness. And if we trust, you know, sort of source everything from a trusted vendor, we can harden ourselves against this threat. The good news right is that policymakers are just really starting to dig into LiDAR. It suggests that we could see some solid momentum on this issue in the next year or two, maybe just in time to prevent China from completing a total market takeover and for us to have to live through that movie in one more sector one more time. Yeah, that's something else to worry about. So these technological maturities that you're talking about between the US and Chinese, let's call it the leading companies. I mean, how do they compare? Is the United States in the lead now or are we about to lose it? Yeah, I mean, it's a bit of a split screen, I'd say like US and allied firms can often lead on like performance and assurance, but unsurprisingly, PRC firms lead on volume and I guess price. So like US companies, they all come with strong safety certifications and far better cyber and firmware assurances and anything the Chinese can offer, of course, and these are probably the right fits for defense and US critical infrastructure programs that need reliability and range and secure update pipelines. China and like companies like HSI and others, they ship the largest volumes into this auto market. They use very aggressive pricing, fast iteration and very tight integration with domestic OEMs. And what that does is it sort of amplifies this concerning like sort of military civil fusion here. So I think the Chinese are catching up technically, but their edge today is really cost and scale, maybe not frontier performance, but because they're cheap, they're everywhere. I think if we're going to sort of compare the two, you know, there are really credible non Chinese options on the market today. And the risk though is that all of this Chinese volume and price setting sets up a de facto standard and it crowds out all of these other trusted suppliers who who really can't compete. And this is going to be something that we start thinking about, especially as LiDAR gets incorporated into nearly every aspect of our daily life, whether it's the car you're in, whether it's the drones going over our pipelines to check for deficiencies, whether it's mapping wildfires, whether you hit the gas at a four way stop. I mean, this is really the technology that's going to be incorporated into all of our lives and almost no one knows anything about it. Yeah, that's interesting. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back with more of our discussion with Craig Singleton. Beacon Global Strategies is the premier national security advisory firm. Beacon works side by side with leading companies to help them understand national security policy, geopolitical risk, global technology policy and federal procurement trends. Beacon's insight gives business leaders the decision advantage. Founded in 2013, Beacon develops and supports the execution of bespoke strategies to mitigate business risk, drive growth and navigate a complex geopolitical environment. With a bipartisan team in decades of experience, Beacon provides a global perspective to help clients tackle their toughest challenges. Drill a little bit down further into, let's say, the military applications thereof. Maybe maritime is a big deal, certainly aerospace, but see if you can explain to our listeners a little bit more about why this is a critical national security issue. Yeah, I mean, so next generation lidar is really, I think of it like a force multiplier at sea and in the air, because it delivers this very precise 3D awareness that is independent of anything that's with GPS. And it has this very serious, very fine resolution, more fine than most tactical radars. So if you think about maritime applicability, airborne lidar can map literals and minefields and enable a safer amphibious operation. It can be applied to ships to track small low profile sort of threats like fast boats and underwater sea vehicles, even on piers and ports. It can fuse lidar with cameras or autonomous security and logistics to protect them. And that combination really speeds like mining countermeasures and harbor defense and autonomous swarming. All of it's automated as well. I think aerospace is another one where we start to sit back and think about lidar gives us terrain following and it's sort of map of the earth navigation without GPS. So it builds these high quality maps that could be used for strikes or UAV swarms. And why it matters is like as military forces field this high performance lidar, the militaries that have it are going to be able to sort of see first fly lower, strike smarter and even defend closer in contested electromagnetic conditions. That's why this technology on the edge is just so critical and we're going to start to see it incorporated into warfare. I mean, it already is. Okay, that's terrific. So one last question. Is this already subject to US export control restrictions or even SIFIAS? Yeah, I mean, we've only scratched the surface here. You know, SIFIAS has scrutinized some PRC stakes in US lidar startups and the US has designated one Chinese lidar leader called HSI as a 1260H or Chinese military company, which is really a warning flag for federal procurement. But there's no commerce entity list action, no lidar specific export controls in place and no FCC covered list barring these sensors from US networks. And I think what we really do need now is to think more about adding major Chinese lidar vendors to this FCC covered list that makes it so that their sensors can't operate on or be funded through US communications and critical infrastructure networks. We need to be thinking about these commerce tools you mentioned the entity list, think about military end use rules to control sensors and firmware and, you know, all the things that go into lidar. And perhaps we need to go as far as to condition federal grants and procurement for the Defense Department or Transportation or DHS to source lidar for their systems only from trusted suppliers and to sort of require regular updates on what that looks like. So I think we have a lot of time to do this. There are plenty of allied alternatives, but we really do need to close these gaps before Chinese lidar becomes embedded across all of our defense and critical infrastructure. Okay, I like this. We're on the frontier of the US China technology competition. Let's do one more. And I noticed that you had an article in the national interest. It was about Chinese dominance in display technologies. Talk, are we talking about the F 35 helmet display or what are we talking about? And what does this mean for our competition with China? Yeah, we really take displays for granted. You know, advanced displays aren't these sort of nice to have consumer parts anymore. They're the they're sort of the visual nervous system of a lot of our modern tech and defense. So you have OLED and mini LED and micro LED and all of these now shape what what our military operators see how fast they decide and whether critical systems can stay online in a crisis. So think about it this way, like there's an operational hedge to these displays, like very you can have these very strong high contrast low latency displays that enable very clear cockpit and helmet mounted displays, right? Think better night vision. And it affects everything like targeting and de-confliction and I mean, they're we're talking about like medical triage and military or battlefield ICU. So you have this operational edge that comes with the display. And then you have a cyber physical risk, right? Because the Chinese produce the majority of these display panels, firmware or these update pathways, they become these potential attack surfaces for, you know, remote breaking or blackouts. And those could turn all these screens that we take for granted into sort of strategic kill switches for our aircraft and our ships and our hospitals. To vulnerability, if we don't dominate the market or we don't have confidence in our own technology, it's a cyber almost vulnerability. Cyber and then there's the supply chain leverage. I mean, Beijing's dominance extends to all the inputs into this market as well. Think about like the specialty glass and the oxides and the gases that go into making these things. So even if you get past the Chinese being a massive producer of displays, they can throttle us like they have on rare earths and magnets on all of these inputs. And that could be weaponized against us. And that would have some pretty serious industrial consequences, right? Like they can price everything low, they can power them by subsidies, right? They could squeeze out these trusted competitors, they can tilt the standards. And that leaves our Defense Department, which is already spending hundreds of millions of dollars on mission display exposed to this single country choke point. And that country would be China. Yeah. So what are the, are there any companies that are rising to the top here, Chinese companies that we need to know about? Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch. And again, we always get into a little bit of an alphabet soup here, but you know, BOE and CSOT and HKC, right? These are all these companies that have come out of and been born out of massive Chinese subsidies and state backed support. Now, these are not necessarily always, maybe we shouldn't think of them in the same way per se as like a Huawei or Tencent. These are really the sort of like component kingpins and they control the hardware, the panel hardware and these key inputs through this heavy state subsidy and China's military civil fusion. And so the leverage is quieter, but I think comparable, right? So if Huawei holds network control, all of these firms in the display market hold the screens from phones and TVs to cockpits and command consoles, that gives Beijing just tremendous pricing power, supply choke point threats and potential firmware attacks across global systems. And that's something we need to really wake up to. So looking across all of these issues, I mean, we've talked about semiconductors, we've talked about polysilicon, which is related to that, LiDAR display. This is just kind of giving me a sense that this US technology competition is just a lot broader than is in the common everyday discussion about the US strategic competition with China. Yeah, I mean, tech competition has sort of turned, it feels like, they sort of turn export controls and industrial policy into grand strategy just by other means. And I think one of the key aspects here that we have to think about is allied coordination. It's certainly better than it was, but the coalition's discipline is I think pretty fragile here and then has grand sort of geo strategic implications. I think a lot of the moves like the recent H20 carve out confuse our partners. We tell them not to sell into China's compute stack, then we appear to green light US sales and that whiplash invites a lot of hedging that I think is really counter productive to US national security long term. Yeah, we're doing that maybe to our allies in a couple of areas that I can think of, I can see how it could come back to us. So just a second on, and I used to work some of these issues when I was in the government, but it just feels like this is really, really broad. Do we have enough US government expertise across the board to be able to track all of this? Are we getting, do we have the public private partnerships with US non governmental experts to be able to understand these things? Are we in a good position to be able to win the race on this expanding battlefield? I think the answer is a little bit of yes and a little bit of a no. The number of these core cutting edge technologies, we seem to be adding a new technology to this list all the time. And that's just because the private sector is innovating so quickly and being able to scale and get to market new cutting edge technologies that are really going to drive the next industrial revolution here. So that's the good part of this. I mean, there's a tremendous driver of growth and employment and prosperity in the United States, but we are going up against this very capable competitor that has very clearly outlined the core cutting edge technologies that it wants to control in its hands. The Chinese have mobilized themselves from top to bottom through policy doctrine and subsidies and state backing and personnel and their education system. They have oriented themselves towards controlling these key factors. I'm not so sure that we have. Now, I don't think we need to sort of out China, China here and mirror them entirely, but I do think we need to get more serious. And whether that's about hiring the right specialists in the US government with technical expertise, really making sure that the US government can lean on and potentially bring in temporarily experts in these fields to explain the technology to bureaucrats and to folks who are looking at licensing applications to understand the potential risks here. We have to be thinking about where we make smart investments here in our national infrastructure, our defense industrial base. It's something you talk about a lot like we're letting it atrophy. Where do we spend the taxpayer dollar correctly and appropriately? These are all great questions. Congress seems all about them. We have a president that is focused on American dynamism. So I think the stars are aligning for some big moves in this space. Time will tell whether or how fast we can sort of speed up here at the same time we want to slow down China. Well, as we begin to wrap up here, are there any other emerging or under appreciated technologies that are coming on fast in the US, China strategic race? I think one we didn't get into is biotech. I think it's really underappreciated. I think it's the next semiconductors. I think Beijing treats genomics and gene editing and synthetic biology as strategic industries under firm CCP control. They like to marry the civilian labs to the People's Liberation Army through biosecurity laws and military civil fusion. And the risk is big. It's data and tools. PRC companies are seeking our genomic data from hospitals. They want to choke us on sequencers and reagents. And so we really need to understand where is all of our information going and that because it enables surveillance and coercion and maybe even tailored biological threats or human performance programs, super soldier programs, these are real things in China. And I think the policy play to me in biotech is pretty straightforward. We want to keep these PLA-linked firms out of US healthcare in our research systems. We want to require maybe domestic study custody of genomic data. I went on my DNA held in the United States. And I think we want to friend shore some of these critical biotech inputs because if we let Beijing set the terms of what is the bioeconomy, I think we'll end up importing both the tools and their rules. Kind of handicappers as your last question. We, you know, I have seen for years ASPE, which is the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, always has a breakout of where the US and China and others stand in some of these technological competitions. But have we lost decisively in any of the main areas in the strategic competition? Are we still in the race on most everything? In other words, we haven't lost anything yet, have we? You know, I think like there's never, what is it, science has never settled, right? There maybe are settled scientists, but science has never settled. I think so many of these technologies are adapting and moving and innovating so fast that even things that we have on our current list may or may not be applicable so much in the future. I don't think we've lost, but in some of these, some cases, we're pretty late. China is sprinting. It feels like the US is jogging. China has all these advantages, scale and subsidies and state directed strategy. But our edges in alliances and our innovation ecosystem trust in markets. The risk, I think, is that we are sleep walking into certain dependencies. So, you know, the race isn't lost, but it's being decided right now and whoever controls compute and biotech and all of these next gen materials, they're going to control the drivers of the next industrial revolution. We're not losing, but we're losing time. Got it. Craig Singleton, thanks so much for rejoining the podcast, Netsack Matters, and we look forward to having you back again soon. Yeah, thanks so much. That was Craig Singleton. I'm Michael Allen. If you enjoy listening to Netsack Matters, please leave us a rating and a review. We'd love to hear from you. If you're interested in becoming a sponsor, please email our team at bgs at bgsdc.com. You can also find this email in the show notes. Please join us next week for another episode of Netsack Matters.
