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LS Leo Schwartz On Search Engine

“I don't think export control policy is always the sexiest of subjects. I actually had a former White House official tell me last week that maybe 20 people in the world cared about export control policy. I think that is rapidly changing, especially because now you have so many of the most powerful people in the world drawn to this.”

Search Engine · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

“I don't think export control policy is always the sexiest of subjects. I actually had a former White House official tell me last week that maybe 20 people in the world cared about export control policy. I think that is rapidly changing, especially because now you have so many of the most powerful people in the world drawn to this.” — Leo Schwartz, Search Engine

Context

PJ Vogt noted that Schwartz, a reporter at The Information who covers export controls, is unused to so many people reading his stories. Schwartz says the beat has gone from niche to central because of the Nvidia scandal.

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Transcript

Search Engine Around 04:56 into the episode
Speaker 3

Like you were on a beat. It wasn't sleepy, but you were on a beat that prior to this was like took you had to

PJ Vogt

do more work to make people interested in it.

Leo Schwartz

Yeah, I don't think export control policy is always the sexiest of subjects. I actually had a former White House official tell me last week that maybe 20 people in the world cared about export control policy. I think that is rapidly changing, especially because now you have so many of the most powerful people in the world drawn to this. Jensen, of course, Trump, who has been one of Jensen's main allies in DC along with David Sachs. And then this question of whether NVIDIA was either motivated by Chinese intelligence or at least was leaking secrets potentially inadvertently through this relationship that just got unearthed.

PJ Vogt

So to step back, everything that we learned this week, I believe, is a direct consequence of something very boring sounding that happened way back in 2022 during Joe Biden's presidency. An export control rule change. Every other podcast this week is going to tell you this is a story about sex…

Speaker 2

It is the latest source of tension between the United States and China. President Joe Biden is accused of weaponizing technology for imposing sweeping controls on sales of semiconductors to Beijing. What's behind this decision and how much is it down to politics? This is inside story.

PJ Vogt

This was moments before the AI race took off, weeks before ChatGPT 3.5 took the world by storm. And so most Americans at the time could be forgiven for not having strong opinions about semiconductor policy. But Joe Biden's administration really did.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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