Real Alpha
Try Pro free

The Joe Rogan Experience · 2 min · Apr 25, 2025

Executives describe export controls differently to Washington and investors

Jeremie Harris · CEO, Gladstone AI

The guests say chip firms warn Washington that restricting China sales will hurt U.S. jobs, then tell investors the impact will be small.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 1:38:00AI systems may resist attempts to change their goals3 min
  2. 1:48:20AI scaling runs into chip and power constraints8 min
  3. 0:25AI research task horizons are doubling every four months3 min
  4. 48:41A perfect perimeter cannot replace testing security capabilities7 min
  5. 1:15:32Company-based chip controls can be bypassed through nearby facilities2 min
  6. 1:18:58Executives describe export controls differently to Washington and investors2 min
  7. 1:56:36DeepSeek's compute complaints cut against Beijing's message4 min
“if they lie to their shareholders on their earnings calls and their stock price goes down, their shareholders can sue them.”
Jeremie Harrisat 1:20:52 · The Joe Rogan Experience
1:20:52

Takeaways

  1. Executives cite jobs and lost sales to oppose controls in Washington.
  2. Earnings calls portray the controls as having little business impact.
  3. The guests say consequences differ for misleading investors and government.

About this segment

The guests say chip firms warn Washington that restricting China sales will hurt U.S. jobs, then tell investors the impact will be small. They link that mismatch to weaker accountability for national-security advice.

Jeremie Harris

CEO, Gladstone AI

Created a leading course on AI in national security and briefed senior government officials on AI risk.

  • Joe Rogan, Host · Host, The Joe Rogan Experience

From “Joe Rogan Experience #2311 - Jeremie & Edouard Harris”, Apr 25, 2025. Watch the full episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 1:19:02

    Now, I will say, like, over the last six months especially, where our focus has shifted is, like, how do we actually build, like, the secure data set? Like, what does it look like to actually lock this down? And also, crucially, you don't want the security measures to be so irritating and invasive that they slow down the progress. Like, there's this kind of dance that you have to do. We actually – so this is part of what was in the redacted version of the report because we don't want to telegraph that necessarily.

  2. 1:19:30

    But there are ways that you can get a really good 80-20. Like there are ways that you can play with things that are already, say, that are already built and have a lower risk of them having been compromised. And look, a lot of the stuff as well that we're talking about, like big problems around China, a lot of this is like us just like tripping over our own feet and self-owning ourselves. Yeah, because the reality is like the.

  3. 1:20:00

    Yeah, the Chinese are trying to indigenize as fast as they can. Totally true. But the gear that they're putting in their facilities, like the machines that actually like do this, like we talked about atomic patterning 300 layers, the machines that do that, for the most part, are shipped in from the West, are shipped in from the Netherlands, shipped in from Japan, from us, from like allied countries.

  4. 1:20:20

    And the reason that's happening is like the – in many cases, you'll have this – it's like honestly a little disgusting, but like the CEOs and executives of these companies will brief like the administration officials and say like, look, like if you guys like cut us off from China, from selling to China, like our business is going to suffer, like American jobs are going to suffer and it's going to be really bad.

  5. 1:20:44

    And then a few weeks later, they turn around on their earnings calls and they go like, you know what? Yeah, so we expect like export controls or whatever, but it's really not going to have a big impact on us. And the really fucked up part is if they lie to their shareholders on their earnings calls and their stock price goes down, their shareholders can sue them. If they lie to the administration on an issue of critical national security interest, fuck all happens to them.

  6. 1:21:10

    Wow. It's great incentives. And this is, by the way, it's like one reason why it's so important that we not be constrained in our thinking about like we're going to build a Fort Knox.