In this episode of GREAT POWER PODCAST, host Michael Sobolik speaks with Geoffrey Cain about Big Tech in America, how these corporate giants have enabled Beijing's rise, and what policymakers should do to reign them in.

Guest biography

Geoffrey Cain is an award-winning foreign correspondent, author, technologist, and scholar of East Asia. His first book, Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech, from a decade of his coverage of the world’s largest technology conglomerate, was longlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year award, and was named a Cult of Mac best tech book of 2020. His second book, The Perfect Police State, received the citation for the “best non-fiction book on international affairs” in 2021 from the Overseas Press Club.

A former correspondent at The Economist, Cain is a regular commentator in The Wall Street Journal, Time, Foreign Policy, The New Republic and The Nation, a contributing editor at The Mekong Review, and a frequent guest on CNN, MSNBC, BBC and Bloomberg. Cain writes about the ways that technology is upending our lives, communities, governments and businesses. His work takes him to the world’s most authoritarian and far-off places, from inside North Korea to the trans-Siberian railway across Russia, from investigations into genocide in Cambodia to experiments in technological surveillance in China.

Cain is sought out as a consultant on government, business and technology, having advised the World Health Organization, Open Government Partnership, the United Nations humanitarian affairs office, and major multinational corporations and hedge funds. A Fulbright scholar, he holds a master’s with distinction from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and a bachelor’s at The George Washington University, which he attended on a music scholarship. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, a tech think-tank.

Resources from the conversation