What’s Next is a biweekly conversation between SDxCentral CEO Matt Palmer and a senior-level executive from the technology industry. In each video, Matt has an informal but in-depth video chat with a fellow thought leader to uncover what the future holds for the enterprise IT and telecom markets — the hook is each guest is a long-term acquaintance of Matt’s, so expect a lively conversation. During the second half of his conversation with Dmitri Aplerovitch — founder of CrowdStrike; an internationally recognized thought leader on geopolitics and national security; and co-founder and executive chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator — the conversation got deeper into the technology topics of what’s going on in data centers. Editor’s note: The following is a summary of the second part of this conversation, edited for length. To hear the rest, be sure to watch the full video above. Watch part one here. Matt Palmer: Dmitri, you've been in cybersecurity forever. I think we've both experienced some not-so-pleasant experiences of people doing bad stuff to our software and infrastructure. Let's talk a little bit about defending that innovation. What are you seeing as cyberthreats? Because there's physical war, which is horrific, cyberwar could be just as bad in different ways. Could you chat a little bit about your perspective on that? Dimitri Alperovitch: What drove the creation of Crowdstrike 13 years ago was China. So I have them to thank for the trajectory that my career has taken because in 2010, I got a call from a company called Google that all of you have heard about, and they wanted to cooperate with us on an investigation into hacks by China into their networks. It was January 8, 2010, and I'll never forget that date. And it turned out that, in addition to Google, the Chinese had hacked into dozens of other companies across technology, space, manufacturing, defense, and many others, and they were stealing intellectual property. It was the first time anyone outside the secret government classified realm realized that nation-states like China were breaking into private sector networks, not just government networks, to steal secrets. Espionage happens and is the second oldest profession in the world. But this was different. This was theft of intellectual property, theft of trade secrets for the benefit of China's commercial sector. And that got me really incensed that they were stealing everything that was not bolted down in our country and across our allies, and led me to start doing other investigations into the Chinese at Beethap. When I realized that this was happening on an unprecedented scale, I called it at the time the greatest transfer of wealth and history that was taking place. And it was really frustrating. At the time, I remember I was sitting in a situation room in the White House, briefing the team from the National Security Council on one of my latest reports on the Chinese IP theft and I was sort of banging the drum of 'you guys need to pay attention to this, this is very serious' and was getting a very elected response of 'well, as long as they're stealing they can't innovate, and we'll always be better,' which was a very arrogant and obviously wrong way to think about it. First of all, the Chinese people are no less smart than us. And their education system is quite good. And they're hard workers. And stealing actually helps you to innovate because it short circuits pathways that won't lead to anywhere. It tells you where you can make the most progress. And I knew that inherently from my background as an immigrant to America — because I was born in the Soviet Union, and I knew that the Soviets, of course, had stolen the secrets to the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project during World War II, but then developed their own hydrogen bomb with their own designs because they were able to get a lot of that early research, and then come up with innovative ways to get to to a new outcome. And that played out in many other areas as well, and I knew this would happen with China, and of course it did. Where you look around now, Huawei has the most advanced telecom infrastructure. The Chinese are dominant in battery technology. They're dominant in electric vehicles. They're doing some really innovative things even in the AI space and so forth. A lot of it has been enabled by IP theft. But a lot of it they've improved upon once they've stolen the technology and given it to their domestic sector. So I fundamentally believe that we have to even that playing field. We've paid very little attention to IP theft over the years now since the Trump administration. And now the Biden administration, we're focused on doing tariffs to prevent them from dumping those products onto our own markets. In a few cases like Huawei, we've made the case on national security grounds that we won't allow the telecom equipment into our networks. But we have to go beyond that and I believe that we have to sanction companies that have benefited from IP theft. And we're seeing this across the board, whether it's in aerospace where they have this new wide body/narrow body jet that they've built, the COMAC, that is based on a massive amount of IP theft from every supplier to our own Boeing jets and Airbus jets in the world. Well, we can't let that company sell those jets anywhere else, right? That will hurt Boeing. That will hurt Airbus. Let's sanction them. And anyone that attempts to buy those jets, we should do that to Huawei. We should do that to a whole slew of semiconductor companies in China that have benefited from massive IP theft over the last decade or so. We need to take a much more aggressive position, defending our innovation against the unprecedented amount of IP theft that's been taking place. Watch the full video for the rest of the conversation between these old friends, colleagues, and tech visionaries. You can watch Part 1 here.