Nick Denton: Our New Chinese Overlords

A chilling but riveting discussion on the CCP and Silicon Valley.

Nick is an entrepreneur and journalist. He was the founder of Gawker Media, the publisher of Gizmodo, and the editor of Valleywag. He began his career as a journalist with the Financial Times — as a derivatives and tech correspondent — and later founded a Silicon Valley news aggregator called Moreover Technologies. He’s now working on Maze.com, which hosts a network map of near-future timelines. He is also a huge China enthusiast — and he believes that if the Twentieth Century was America’s, this one is very much China’s. We are a bit player and will soon be a distant second to the next true global hegemon.

For two clips of our convo — on the growing dominance of China, and the Chinese outcompeting Elon Musk — pop over to our YouTube page.

Other topics: raised in Hampstead in the lower-middle class; a Jewish mom who fled the Communists in Hungary; growing up on sci-fi; Asimov’s Foundation; attending Oxford like his father; game theory; being a young reporter in London, Hungary, Romania, and Singapore; pioneering the internet in the ‘90s; Foundation parallels with Singapore; Lee Kuan Yew; Chinese pragmatism; Taiwan; EVs in China; Musk’s companies; tech theft between the US and China; DOGE and Trump reigning in Musk; Peter Thiel; Andy Grove; Uber’s Travis Kalanick; Kara Swisher; Oculus’ Palmer Luckey; how Silicon Valley is PR obsessed; Zuckerberg; David Sacks and crypto; Andreessen; drones; Ukraine; Thatcher; housing crisis in the UK; Orbán; the German Greens; Russian expansionism; the Poles and nukes; Trump’s tariffs; Tucker’s interview with Putin; the growing US-Europe rift; Greenland; AI and DeepSeek; and Nick’s predictions as a futurist.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Douglas Murray on Israel and Gaza, Evan Wolfson on the history of marriage equality, Francis Collins on faith and science and Covid, Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee on Covid’s fallout, and Paul Elie on his book The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s pod with Mike White:

Brilliant interview. I can’t believe he writes and directs the whole thing himself (he’s the real star of The White Lotus), and his characters are so authentic and well-drawn. Fascinating to learn more about him.

Another fan:

Great podcast, great interview. There’s something disarming about Mike’s almost stream-of-consciousness manner of speaking. The White Lotus is brilliant, and I’m glad you also loved Enlightened — an absolute gem.

And another:

I don’t listen to the Dishcast every week — Lenten obligations! — but my husband and I have been displaced by the Eaton Fire and are now living in a new area (but close to the grandchildren, which is a blessing). I had been sick for a week and got out of the house for the first time in five days and listened to you and Mike White. It was the best medicine ever. I love The White Lotus, as do my adult children, and we have wonderful conversations about it.

I just fell in love with Mike. It was just such a joyful conversation. I loved his talking about how you inspired him. It rang true. Just thank you again. I was trying to “fast” from politics and news, but when I read the description of that episode, I thought even Jesus would say, “OK, you need to listen.”

The fan mail keeps coming:

The episode was indeed “a blast.” I’ve been a fan of White’s for a long time but hadn’t ever heard him interviewed before. What a topic list: his dad (a hero of mine), reality TV (he changed my mind a bit), White Lotus (without giving decent credit to Patrick Schwarzenegger’s damn wonderful performance!), Camille Paglia, growing weary with Judith Butler … what a delight.

And while I can imagine some people might have had a hard time following him and his peripatetic thinking process, but I was well prepared, having seen Lily Tomlin in one of her finest early characters:

This is an episode for the vaults! Thank you!

Here’s a guest rec:

Very good to see you tackling the subject of lab leak and doing it so well. A conversation that might enliven the Dishcast would be one with Richard Ebright of Rutgers, who’s been on the side of the angels in this debate from the get-go. At last he’s now being vindicated ,as even the NYT (!) now admits it was had. Given that there is some evidence to suggest that the same WIV and “Batwoman” are now conducting similar experiments with even more lethal viruses (MERSS, for one), the outbreak of the next pandemic may only be a matter of time.

By the way, I enjoyed the Spinoza episode so much I bought the book.

Thanks for the rec, but Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee will be on the podcast soon to discuss their book, In Covid’s Wake. Another writes:

Longtime reader and listener here. I wanted to thank you for mentioning our campaign to enact ranked choice voting here in DC during your most recent appearance on Bill Maher’s show:

As you likely know, over 73% of DC voters approved Initiative 83 this past November. This was a real District-wide win; the initiative won a supermajority in all eight wards and a majority of all 144 precincts in the city (unheard of for a District-wide initiative).

April marks a real ramp-up of budget negotiations with the DC Council and the mayor’s office to advocate for full funding and implementation of Initiative 83. The mayor and the chair of the Council were and are publicly against Initiative 83 — and we are working to lobby them and the rest of the Council to respect the will of the voters and support funding for education, voter registration, and Board of Election implementation.

Good luck. Let’s hope our colonial overlords in the Congress don’t intervene.

Next up, a bunch of readers continue to debate the lab leak theory. First is “some dude who worked in a biochemistry lab for over a decade and now does philosophy”:

I saw you on Real Time last night and I appreciated your passion when speaking of preserving the rule of law in this country and concerns you expressed for the people that have been left behind by this economy. I also agree that it is vitally important for the average American to be able to trusts experts, especially scientists. And though I would argue the general lack of trust is due more to the anti-intellectualism, lack of curiosity, and deficient understanding of many Americans, the scientific community should stand up for the best evidence even when it is inconvenient and avoid politically motivated communications. I also believe that should go for journalists.

As such, I did have a bit of an issue with the certainty you seemed to project regarding how the first strain of SarsCov2 found its way into the human population.

Though the explanation has yet to reach a consensus, there are many significant reasons, based in the science of molecular biology, to be dismissive of the lab leak theory. Most notably: the presence of a furin cleavage site in early isolates of the virus; the similar protein sub-structures between COVID-19 and covid viruses in the area; the lack of evidence for recombinant DNA techniques; the complex role that the cleavage site loop length plays in the virulence in conjunction with the furin cleavage site; and the evolutionary distance between the most closely related bat coronaviruses being studied in the Wuhan lab and the earliest isolates. (A good summary of this evidence is provided here.)

If you could not immediately explain the biochemical basis of the statements I just made to another person, maybe you should pull back a little when making claims about the origins of the pandemic to a wider audience. Just citing two emails from British intelligence officers does not justify the level of doubt you cast on career scientists who work for the government.

The lack of transparency from Chinese officials is a concern. I would even remain skeptical of the Chinese scientist who presented evidence against the lab leak by providing the sequences of all the viruses in their lab, but being skeptical requires skepticism of your own biases as well. If scientists working for the government modulated their expert opinions for the sake of politics, that is also a huge concern, but we have to rely on evidence. When it comes to viruses, analysis of the genetic sequences and macromolecular similarities are the most reliable — not anecdotal evidence of the coincidence of some lab techs from the Wuhan lab falling ill around the same time.

My goal is to flush out the truth. I’m afraid the scientists who tell us we are not qualified to judge, as you just did, are not as on-the-level as I’d hoped. My column laid out the reasons why in a way an impromptu answer on a TV show doesn’t. A forthcoming pod with Francis Collins goes into all this in depth and I’m sure you’ll be interested in what he has to say. He too is adamant that there is no evidence for a lab leak. I push him and hear him out. I’m also going to talk to two Princeton professors whose new book, In Covid’s Wake, is pretty devastating to Fauci and Collins. We’re going to air all sides as we aways do. And I will have some reactions along the way that are, well, human. That’s me. I’m red-blooded and occasionally get mad when I sense someone I trusted has pulled the wool over my eyes.

Another Chinese scientist is highlighted by this reader:

Why were we misled?

I wasn’t. In 2020, Fox News had on a Chinese virologist, Li-Meng Yan, who said there was no way COVID 19 was evolutionarily possible.

The furin cleavage site was made to target humans and there were no evolutionary steps from known COVID viruses that could act as an intermediary. The caves in China where the bats live that are the origin of COVID viruses are a thousand miles from Wuhan. A thousand miles and no other animal or human was infected along the way? China had killed and frozen all animals at the wet market and guess what? Not a single one had the virus.

One of the many, many problems of the left is that they think they are smarter than anyone who disagrees with them. Such hubris still infects them. The day after the Fox interview, the machine came out in full force. With marching orders in hand and locked arms, Li-Meng Yan was to be discredited by any means.

From a dissenter:

I am really disappointed by your column on the lab leak. As a scientist and a civil servant (not in the USA), I get frustrated how people with no experience of these institutions criticize them. It isn’t that there aren’t valid criticisms to be had; it’s that there is a degree of ignorance such that the criticisms tend to dramatically miss the mark. In the lab leak case, it has been done again where research grants are seen as a bias that makes them want to defend the interests of Fauci.

I won’t say that something like this never happens, but it’s not how things are. For example, as an academic at a university I’ve done research funded by fossil fuel companies on biological impacts. It was neither an attack nor vindication of them, but research looking at effects. They don’t reach out to you demanding results. Persons like Kristian Andersen get many grants to fund their research, and no it doesn’t line their bank accounts. Tenured researchers get no pecuniary benefit from grants.

So why did Andersen switch from being suspicious about lab leak to suddenly not accepting it as plausible? Listen to Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Andersen (and scientists generally) do not claim that lab leaks shouldn’t have been explored, not at all. Rather, the scientific exploration of these issues has been politicised by Republicans with grievances of Fauci and public institutions, and pathetic left-of-center media organisations did their usual shitty job of conveying scientific probabilities as certainties, particularly to protect a “minority”.

And I must say, the description of Fauci’s actions that you find so damning sound more like a civil servant working in Yes, Minister. That isn’t a vindication of him either, just that when one is painted as malign, it is easy to search through emails and Slack out of context to demonstrate someone’s malicious intentions.

I recommend listening to this podcast by two academics (not biologists) interviewing the virologists involved in some of this controversy, including two of the authors of the “Proximal Origin” paper: Kristian Andersen and Eddie Holmes. They do a really good job of explaining their professional opinions as scientists based on the information available. They won’t tell you to never believe in lab leak; au contraire, they will tell you to look at the evidence:

Here’s the thing. Through FOIA requests, we have many contemporaneous emails from these very scientists from the earliest days saying that they think this is obviously a lab leak. Fauci and Collins tell us they soon realized they were wrong and reversed themselves. But weirdly, we have no emails from these people echoing that — and you’d think reversing yourself so swiftly would lead to some internal comments. We have emails from those who wrote the “Proximal Origin” paper that prove they knew they were distorting science for political reasons. This is from Andersen at the time he authored the paper:

I hate when politics is injected into science — but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstances.

How would you interpret that?

Another recommendation from a reader:

You should read Peter Miller on this topic, “The case against the lab leak theory.” The facts on the ground haven’t changed in spite of recent claims about probability from the Germans and the CIA. There is no coherent narrative for the lab leak, the various theories contradict each other, and the evidence we do have favors zoonosis. If nothing else, Miller is worth looking at to see how he models the world and tackles arguments. His intellect is relentless.

Further reading from another:

I had been leaning toward the lab origin for a while, after Nicholas Wade’s 2021 piece pointed out all the findings that seemed to fit with it. However, I read a more in-depth debate posted by Scott Alexander that has me now thinking that the natural origin story is probably true (low confidence — about 70-80%). It’s a long but very interesting debate, including which stalls at the market had viral residue, whether furin cleavage sites can arise naturally, and other minutiae. It illustrates that this is an unresolved question.

Nevertheless, I agree with you that Fauci was trying to cover up that his recklessness may have contributed to killing millions. It’s a very natural impulse to want to avoid blame, but it’s disappointing that he lacked the integrity to accept responsibility for the bad outcome of a decision that he thought was right at the time. A better man would admit error and lead the push for stopping or at least greatly reducing those kinds of experiments. As it stands, he has greatly tarnished his own legacy and the reputation of science for much of the public.

This next reader looks to the “racism” rhetoric surrounding the lab leak:

I learned many things from your column about the scientific-political machinations around COVID. The use of racism charges to silence the lab leak theory seem very odd to me, since the “wet market” theory that ultimately prevailed and was promoted seems objectively “more racist” if one were to compare the two. At the time there were plenty of charges, loud ones, about not being allowed to believe the wet markets might be a cause for the same reasons. To me, the distinction between the two is not necessarily between racist vs acceptable explanations, but between blaming ordinary people vs blaming a powerful nation-state.

Your quote here is most salient:

More persuasive to me is the idea that no Western politician wanted to start a massive fight with China when their cooperation was so essential.

Simple greed and avoidance of personal liability were the engines driving this narrative, as they always are. The wet market theory is the perfect scapegoat because it randomizes, anonymizes, and socializes the blame, ensuring no lab, agency, or government would need to be bothered to alter their course in the wake of such a disaster.

Trust, indeed, needs to be restored. I have no idea how to do it.

Another also quotes me:

More persuasive to me is the idea that no Western politician wanted to start a massive fight with China when their cooperation was so essential. The lab leak theory terrified them — because it could mean serious conflict. And so they downplayed it. Appeasement of China is the subtext of all of it.

In those early days of Covid, Australia’s then government called for an inquiry into Covid’s origins. That did not go down well with the Chinese buyers of our iron ore, wine, lobsters, and plenty more besides. Besides that trade war, China called Australia’s leaders racist and arrested Australian citizens in China and more — all to intimidate our government into kowtowing to them.

It took a change of government in Australia and yes, some quiet appeasement, for China to slowly relax its trade barriers. However, it is very hard to point to any gains for China out of the whole imbroglio. As is the way of commerce, many of the Aussie businesses impacted found new markets. That is not to minimise the pain of transition, but rather to highlight that major powers may not always be as powerful as they think.

Another notes:

There was a lab leak in a stateside WMD lab in the summer 2019 that deserves a mention on the Dish: “All research at a Fort Detrick laboratory that handles high-level disease-causing material, such as Ebola, is on hold indefinitely after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found the organization failed to meet biosafety standards.”

One more reader on lab leak:

One thing that people don’t seem to realize is that compared with the natural emergence theory, the lab leak theory, if true, is overwhelmingly good news. Why? Because we can actually do something to prevent lab leaks — basically upping the biohazard ratings of labs conducting GoF research. By contrast, naturally emerging pathogens can’t be similarly controlled. So it’s deeply ironic that people are moving to cover up relatively good news in favour of really bad news.

On another topic, a reader dissents:

This line really got my hackles up, in your response to a reader last week: “The only way to cut the debt is to tackle Medicare and Social Security.”

Perhaps you don’t realize the sleight of hand within this “truth”. Yes, this is the biggest part of the budget, but ask yourself why? The massive amount of fraud, waste and abuse by the for-profit health care industry with no government oversight and the hand of Big Pharma pricing drugs out into the stratosphere is why Medicare is so damn expensive. To simply say Medicare should be the target without really getting to the bottom of why these programs need to spend so much money is lazy. Don’t be a tool to these industries that have no oversight, are hugely bloated, and do whatever the fuck they want!

Also, people have paid into Social Security for many, many years and deserve that program when they retire, and the way it’s funded absolutely should be revisited.

Another on entitlements:

I must strongly disagree with your statement that the only way to cut the deficit is to tackle Medicare and Social Security. The way to cut the deficit is to raise tax rates on the wealthy, so that they pay a fairer share of the cost of the government that allows the accumulation of their wealth. Tax rates on high-income people have been much higher in the past.

In addition, adequate funding of the IRS to allow proper review and audit of complex tax returns of wealthy individuals and large corporations would yield a VERY disproportionate return on such an investment. At the moment, the IRS has next-to-no staff or computer power to even begin to look for the large tax payments that go missing every year. Instead, audits are often done on returns of those claiming the earned income tax credit — just peanuts in return to the government, but extremely costly to those being audited.

Thanks as always for your column and for sharing the comments of other readers.

One more email for the week:

Your reader wrote:

I felt like issues surrounding “wokeness” prevented you, Andrew, from seeing the forest for the trees when it came to the much more important issues of respect for our democracy and democratic institutions, the separation of powers, etc.

On the one hand, I think it’s clear that this reader speaks out of genuine and heartfelt concern for our country; but on the other hand, I find it increasingly amazing that people are still talking like that. Anyone who really does value our “democratic institutions” must oppose both the extremism of Trump as well as the extremism of wokeness (or whatever you want to call it). Trump is, after all, just one manifestation of the illiberalism which constitutes the challenge of our times. And recognizing the danger posed by Trump while minimizing the threat of wokeness is like saying that we need only concern ourselves with only one section of a raging fire.

Every media outlet (including the NYT, WaPo, NPR) that published a DEI page or a diversity statement of some kind deeply discredited our free press — a vital democratic institution. Instead of analyzing the antiracist ideology, they proselytized it. And by doing so, they betrayed the public trust by wantonly abandoning any pretense of objectivity.

Every college and university system that demanded diversity statements from prospective faculty signaled for all the world to see that they were more interested in promoting their preferred ideology than in any unbiased pursuit of knowledge and wisdom. No one, not even Trump, has even come close to damaging these institutions as much as they have damaged themselves. With the unshakeable faith of fundamentalists, they have recklessly aligned themselves against all who dissent from their leftist catechism. And the toll that their epic self-destruction has inflicted on what will hopefully remain our open society may take generations to fully understand.

As you indicated in your own response to the quoted comment, we’re dealing with a fire that keeps feeding on itself. Trump and Musk are busy radicalizing more resistance just as fast as a radicalized left mints new woke crusaders. The only way out that I can see is to promote, and vote for, as much of a moderate alternative (Democrat or Republican) as we can find.

Amen, my brother.

Thanks as always for the great emails, especially the dissents, and you can send yours to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

You can also sound off in Substack Notes. This week, I commented on the following clip of NPR’s Katherine Maher getting grilled with her own radical tweets and statements:

This is an extremely rare example of a member of the media establishment actually being forced to be accountable for the critical race theory racism they foisted on all of us for years by coercion, gaslighting, indoctrination and bullying. Maher is recanting. But she still running NPR. A proud, anti-Western racist running a publicly funded institution.

I covered this anti-Western racist more extensively in my April 2024 column, “Katherine Maher Is Not A Liberal.” I added in Notes this week:

Defund NPR before USAID please. The former really is a non-stop propaganda machine which has every right to exist, and flourish. But why I should pay a cent for it is beyond me.

To which a reader responded:

I’m no fan of NPR, nor do I believe it should receive public funding. However, conservatives’ obsessive focus on NPR is misplaced. Even if all public funding for NPR were eliminated, it wouldn’t make the slightest dent in the federal budget or national debt. It’s not even a rounding error. The real focus should be on major expenditures like the military and entitlements. Once those are addressed, we can turn our attention to small potatoes like NPR.

The fact that this administration is more focused on gutting funding for culture war issues rather than tackling the real drivers of our debt, underscores just how unserious it is about fiscal responsibility.

Read my reply to that reader and others here.

Lastly this week, your moment of Zen from the dog park:

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