Alice Han: Chinamaxxing

This week, Trevor and Eugene are joined by China expert Alice Han to unpack why so much of what the West believes about China misses the mark. They break down China's "Four Ds”: debt, lagging demand, an aging demography, and the threat of destruction over Taiwan. They also explore how the legacy of the one-child policy helped create a generation of wildly successful women, an extreme male dating shortage, and a booming market for AI boyfriends who always know exactly what to say. Naturally, the conversation ends with Trevor and Eugene wondering whether their next career should be running a Chinese matchmaking business.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  If you watch videos on Chinese TikTok,

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  There's a lot of.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Is that Weibo?

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Um, it's Douyin, like Douyin and Xiao Hong Shu, which is red note.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  That last part?

• 0:16Speaker 00

  Xiao Hong Shu.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  Right, it's a.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Xiao Hong Shu?

• 0:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Because sometimes I feel like you like you are Xiao Hong Shu.

• 0:22Trevor Noah?

  Xiao Hong Shu?

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Especially.

• 0:23Trevor Noah?

  I can roll like that. Xie xian, Eugene, Xiao Hong Shu.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Oh my god, you have such a good accent.

• 0:29Trevor Noah?

  Oh.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Thank you very much.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, seriously, seriously, you could you could go on to Chinese TV and be.

• 0:34Trevor Noah?

  Oh damn, damn. Oh, Eugene, excuse me. A wise man once said, compliments are best when they are shared with others. So please, Alice, please carry on, carry on.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Oh, yes, sir.

• 0:54Speaker 03

  This is What Now with Trevor Noah.

• 1:01Speaker 04

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• 1:31Trevor Noah?

  This segment is brought to you by Google Pixel. You know what's really frustrating? Knowing the exact information you need is somewhere on your phone, but still ending up wasting your time digging through five different apps just to actually find it. Thankfully, Google Pixel 11 is designed with Gemini intelligence, so it can proactively find the information I need right when I need it, like my flight info and travel days or my calendar when Eugene texts me to hang out. Oh, sorry, Eugene, I'm booked. Learn more about what Google Pixel 11 can do at googlestore.com. These AI features are available in select countries and languages for users 18 and over, and make sure to check responses.

• 2:16Trevor Noah?

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• 3:00Trevor Noah?

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• 3:38Speaker 01

  Alice was telling me an interesting story, but...

• 3:41Speaker 00

  You forgot.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  No, I didn't want to come and repeat it back here. Because also, there's one thing about compliments. They are better when they are shared.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Just like conspiracy theories.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Or sometimes charges when the big presser gets you. And you're like, "Him too, he was there."

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 4:01Trevor Noah?

  I've never heard that one. Compliments are like conspiracy theories.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  I made it up.

• 4:05Trevor Noah?

  No, that's what I'm saying. I've never heard that. I like that. I like, that's a fresh one.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Alice, go ahead, tell him.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  Oh, I got, so I got the email from you guys two weeks ago, and I legitimately thought it was a scam. I was thinking, "Why the heck is Trevor nowhere?" A, interested in China and B, why is his team emailing me? And so I sat on it for two days thinking this is just, this is probably another one of those AI scam artists that are just creating random emails out there for people.

• 4:32Trevor Noah?

  You, okay, you've made me realize something. I think you're not, you are not the first, second, nor third, nor fourth person who said this. I need to find a different way to reach out to people then. Because I, because

• 4:43Speaker 01

  DMs.

• 4:44Trevor Noah?

  Because many people think that when we're reaching out, it's a scam.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, but DMs are the original authenticator.

• 4:50Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  If someone DMs you, you know it's true, right? Alice, if you had gotten a DM from him, would you have thought it was a scam?

• 4:56Speaker 00

  He's got the blue tick verified. Yeah, yeah, on Instagram.

• 4:59Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, and I'm glad you didn't think it was a scam, or I'm glad that you were naive enough to fall for the scam.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  Well, I did, I did due diligence. So I went and linked in, profiled the guy.

• 5:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but this is too much.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  And then the team working, you know, your team and so.

• 5:12Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, this is too much work. This is way too much work and I apologize.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  No, not at all. I mean, it's just so fun to get to come here. I'm just really a huge fan of both of you.

• 5:21Trevor Noah?

  I mean, I'm a huge fan of your work because you, you know, as you said, you, you're an expert in probably one of the most complicated topics that the world has ever dealt with.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Relationships.

• 5:34Trevor Noah?

  Not relationships, but that is one of them, Eugene. But in many ways, actually, Alice is a relationship expert. It's just a different type of relationship, geopolitical relationship.

• 5:49Trevor Noah?

  No, but, but, but you, you, you are considered an expert on China, which is,

• 5:57Trevor Noah?

  am I correct in saying it is one of the most complicated countries to actually be an expert in because of how multi-layered it is?

• 6:04Speaker 00

  I completely agree. And we were just talking earlier how my pet peeve is the amount of white people that write about China without having ever gone or lived there.

• 6:13Trevor Noah?

  That is hilarious.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  And they have a framework by which they analyze China. They think it's the next Soviet Union. They think it's the next imperial Germany. And, and my real shtick is you've got to, and you probably understand this better than most people. You've got to understand the culture from the ground up to really. Really understand what the country is about and it's a very complicated diverse history and culture. It's it's entirely relevant in this new technological geopolitical age, but I think you're completely right. It's one of the hardest countries to get right and increasingly so in the last decade because A, people aren't traveling in the way that they used to be. Western journalists aren't living them there, some were kicked out. And C, just in general, people have this ideological framework.

• 6:55Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  And fear mongering about China without really trying to understand it.

• 7:00Trevor Noah?

  Did you see that that trip recently where a few US, I don't know if they were senators or just congresspeople, went to China, it was their first time, which also shocked me, by the way. These are.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  It shocked you that Americans left America.

• 7:14Trevor Noah?

  Don't do that.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  That they have a passport.

• 7:15Trevor Noah?

  Don't do that, bro. You, both of you, don't do that. Don't do that. Hey.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  I'm, I had a bento box for lunch.

• 7:22Trevor Noah?

  I don't know what that means.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  How close I am.

• 7:24Trevor Noah?

  To another country. You, you.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  To the culture.

• 7:27Trevor Noah?

  You had a Korean, you had a Korean meal and now you're close to China. You're part of the problem, buddy. No, I was shocked that lawmakers could go to China for the first time. And I mean, like, deep into their tenure, like, deep, deep, these people have been serving in Congress forever. This is their first trip to China. And then while they were there, they were, they were just mesmerized by everything. And they came back saying, yeah, well, I mean, China wasn't, I didn't expect it and I, I couldn't believe what they're doing out there. And, you know, I mean, there's a lot of things that I've got a new perspective on China. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait. I understand if an idiot like me is living at home and has an opinion on China.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:08Trevor Noah?

  That's fine. It's not great, but it's fine. If you are making laws and you're deciding policies between yourself and China and you know nothing about China. Like, what are we doing?

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 8:20Trevor Noah?

  Do you know?

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. And I love that imagery of Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, marveling at the ceiling as he goes into Beijing during the Trump Xi summit. But that really sums it up, is I think since Covid, people haven't really been traveling to China in the same way. Now, that's changed in the last year or two because there's now visa-free travel policies and now it's trending China maxing to go to China.

• 8:45Trevor Noah?

  Did that really happen because of I Show Speed?

• 8:47Speaker 00

  Well, I think, yeah, I think he was, he's a huge star, by the way, in China, and I love that.

• 8:52Trevor Noah?

  That's insane that that happened.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  But he's not the only one. There's a ton of American vloggers, you can see this across YouTube, who in the last eighteen months have been going to China, getting huge views, just showing, because China compared to Japan is way cheaper and it's one of those underdog tourism destinations. It's been so developed since Covid.

• 9:11Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  The internal domestic tourism industry, the logistics, the transport. So when people go there, they're so shocked that China's not the China of the 2010s. You know, remember the Beijing Olympics? And people were talking about pollution and it was still.

• 9:26Trevor Noah?

  There was so much smog that people were saying they were afraid that the athletes wouldn't be able to run. They wouldn't, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's changed a huge amount, even the last ten years. But my, to add to your point, Trevor, my problem is that they, A, don't go there and B, they don't really do the hard work of trying to understand both the intentions and capabilities of the Chinese government and the people. We'll give you a really good example. So the semiconductor policy that the Trump administration and the Biden administration put in, they thought it would be very, very easy to just cut off the hardware side of the AI development, mainly the chips, and that China would be behind. China would have no hope of ever catching up. Fast forward a decade and, you know, China's only a couple of months lagging behind the frontier models in America.

• 10:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Huawei just announced that by in the next couple of years, it will do under two nanometer chip production, which is as competitive as TSMC. That, I think, is so different from what people would have expected. Because they're not going to China, they're not understanding that what's actually happening at the government level, but also in the companies, the companies like Huawei, like Smic, which is another chip company.

• 10:40Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  Alibaba, ByteDance, they're hugely innovative companies, not just the kind of imitative China that we're so used to.

• 10:49Trevor Noah?

  Well, I think, I think it's because people keep an idea of a place or a people

• 10:57Trevor Noah?

  as they first learned of them.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 10:59Trevor Noah?

  And I think we're all guilty of this in some way, shape or form. Like in South Africa, one of the main things people would think about when they think about China is fake goods.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:07Trevor Noah?

  You know what I mean? Fong Kong.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Hey, hey.

• 11:08Trevor Noah?

  I'm a Fong Kong.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  No, no, no, I would have thought.

• 11:11Trevor Noah?

  What would you have thought?

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Bruce Lee.

• 11:13Trevor Noah?

  I mean, fine.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  But carry on.

• 11:14Trevor Noah?

  But, but, no, but I'm serious. You're not wrong, it was, it was Kung Fu movies.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  It was Kung Fu, yes.

• 11:18Trevor Noah?

  Kung Fu movies.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Drunken Master.

• 11:19Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, Drunken Master.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  Jackie Chan?

• 11:21Trevor Noah?

  Jackie Chan, of course, of course.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Jackie Chan came later, though.

• 11:23Trevor Noah?

  But, yeah, but I mean, for us it was.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  It was first.

• 11:25Trevor Noah?

  Bruce Lee, and then Jackie Chan, and then, yeah, all of this. I mean, this was like our world.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  Yes, then later on.

• 11:32Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, then it became fake goods.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:35Trevor Noah?

  And not even like a negative word, it was just like, they're just the best at making fake goods.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:39Trevor Noah?

  But I think a lot of the world sort of stopped there.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 11:41Trevor Noah?

  And they're like, oh, China, the place that makes things, cheap things, toys, and fake goods, and that's where China's identity stopped.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:50Trevor Noah?

  And to your point, it feels like either just in silence, or when nobody was paying attention, China just leapfrogged. I was watching a video, I was showing you, I was telling you about this. I was watching a video about some guy who lives in Shenzhen, and this is a white American guy who grew up in Colorado.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 12:11Trevor Noah?

  And he lived in like a small town, and he's just, he's not even like showing off the place. He's just like, hey, I just want to show you guys like how I live and my vibe out here. And the technology that he's showing, the lifestyle.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Cost of living.

• 12:25Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, the cost of living, the style of living. Like how people are, and he doesn't, he doesn't like flower over things. He's like, oh, certain things are really strict. And then he's like, other things, people are riding scooters, like mopeds wherever they want. So, so he's, he's being, from what I could see, relatively honest about his experience. But I won't lie. Even watching that, I was like, oh, man, I, I didn't know that about China, and I didn't know that about China, and I didn't know that about China, I didn't know that about China. And I was just like, have we been living in like a dark ages of China information?

• 12:55Speaker 00

  I like the way you said that. I think, I think so, but it's starting to change. Haven't you noticed on your TikTok, Instagram feed, there's a lot of discussion about, I'm living in a very Chinese time in my life, China maxing. People are drinking warm beverages.

• 13:08Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  China is living in twenty thirty.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, living in the future, you know, that it's safe and clean. Uh, it's, it's starting to pivot. And what's interesting in some of the polling data uh that came out from Pew is that in particular, on both sides of the aisle, Dems and Republicans, Gen Z are way more favorable than the Boomers. That makes sense. But that, that's starting to change in the sense that they are getting over time more favorable towards China. That's pretty interesting to me. I don't know how much of that is social media, you know, content driven by the stuff you see on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. But certainly, I feel like in particular, in the last year or two, we've had a change in, in opinion at, at just at the popular level about China, and that's across the board in Europe too.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  Uh, China's unfavorable readings were really high during COVID because obviously a lot of people blame China for it. China seemed to be screwing up the process, the response to COVID. Uh, but since then, it's, it's rebounded remarkably in terms of favorability.

• 14:05Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, you know, that's, that is probably the strangest thing about China. Like, when I try and read about it and try and understand it's. On the one hand, it seems like China runs, you know, the way the Chinese government runs the country is really structured and, and rigid. That's how it feels for me when I see it. I'm like, okay, they, they, they have an idea of where they're trying to go. It's multi-generational. It isn't constrained by the next election or democracy, or like a thing that's gonna like throw it of course.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Campaigning or elections.

• 14:36Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, they're like, no, no, no, this is our long-term plan. It's gonna last longer than we're even alive, and this is where we're trying to get to. But it seems very rigid. It's like strict parents. That's how I feel like. I feel like China's government is like strict parents. But then, at the same time, I'll see things that China's doing where I'm like, that seems fun and rock and roll, and it doesn't match up with the idea that I have of a homogeneous, like, strict parent, if that makes sense. And I don't know, how should, how should we be thinking of China? Like, which, which China is the real one? Is it the place where everyone's building everything and they're, they're moving forward? And, you know, there's, there's just like a boom happening in terms of manufacturing, et cetera, et cetera? Or is it the China that has like the strict government that defines how people live their lives every day?

• 15:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's honestly a cop out answer, but both. This is gonna sound very wonky. There was a great paper by a Chinese economist over a decade ago in which he has a framework that China is a regionally distributed authoritarian regime. And what he means by that is that, yes, you have the central government, which historically in China has been the emperor.

• 15:36Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  Um, there's a phrase in Chinese, which is that the mountains are high, but the emperor is far away. And that suggests-

• 15:42Trevor Noah?

  Wait, say that again. The mountains are high?

• 15:43Speaker 00

  The mountains are high, but the emperor is far away.

• 15:45Trevor Noah?

  I'd love that on my bio. The mountains are high?

• 15:48Speaker 00

  And the emperor's far. And what it means by that is, yes, you have central command and the emperor, or in this case, the central government says, you should do this. These are the targets for semiconductor output.

• 15:58Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  This is what growth we want. But local governments have a degree of latitude to interpret what that means. And, and at the same time, they are also experimenting. So China, from the eighties onwards, had, as you probably know, these special economic zones. In particular, the eastern provinces like Shanghai, Shenzhen. Uh, they are experimenting with innovating, uh, being pro-business, bringing more private market entrance uh, into the economy.

• 16:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  And that really drove, that was really the responsible driver for growth in China. That cannot exist without a central government is willing to give a degree of latitude to, uh, to the local government. So, yes, China is like a strict Asian parent, and I know this from my own personal experience. But there's a degree of-

• 16:44Trevor Noah?

  You have Asian parents?

• 16:44Speaker 00

  I do have Asian parents.

• 16:49Trevor Noah?

  Uh, you see, my friend Eugene here-

• 16:51Speaker 00

  We can draw a bond if you want.

• 16:52Trevor Noah?

  Eugene doesn't, Eugene doesn't see color. That's what I love about Eugene. Eugene, uh, doesn't say, uh, yes, um- Ellis is Asian Eugene, so.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Because also I was raised by my TV and it was a Sony. So we have a lot in.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  Japanese parents.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Asian parents.

• 17:10Speaker 00

  Asian parents, yeah. But yeah, so it's it's and this is my thing with a lot of Western analysis, it has a very formulaic and sometimes ideological approach to China, which is, oh, it's communist, it's Marxist-Leninist. You see this in the language, this is what they say.

• 17:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  But really, you know, there's so much to your point, innovation and chaos and diversity, even you know, the number of ethnic groups in China, the different cuisines, the different dress codes. People in Shanghai behave very differently from people in Yunnan, which is tends to be a more hippie kind of area where people wearing, you know, a lot of linen and and and drinking tea and eating mushrooms. And not drug mushrooms, but actual mushrooms.

• 17:52Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  It's the most biodiverse place in the world, mushrooms.

• 17:54Trevor Noah?

  Wait, really?

• 17:55Speaker 01

  How you explain?

• 17:57Trevor Noah?

  Wait, how do you spell it?

• 17:58Speaker 00

  It means literally means south of the clouds. Yunnan.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yunnan.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  And it's.

• 18:01Trevor Noah?

  Is that H U I?

• 18:03Speaker 00

  Uh, no, Y U N N A N.

• 18:04Trevor Noah?

  Okay, Y U N N, okay.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  And it borders Vietnam, Cambodia, it has a lot.

• 18:08Trevor Noah?

  And it's a totally different vibe.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Totally different vibe. And has the densest amount of minority groups in China, including Muslims. So you you I think people have this kind of idea that China is very homogeneous.

• 18:20Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  And yes, most people look like me and they have the dark hair and and this kind of skin color.

• 18:24Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  But people have different, you know, come from different religious backgrounds. They practice different traditions, they, you know, eat different foods.

• 18:34Trevor Noah?

  It's it's it's interesting because when when you talk about China or when I when I read about China, because I'm consuming Western media, the the criticisms of China will always be. Uh, yeah, China seems to be doing well, and yes, they've built a lot of cities, and yes, they've built a lot of infrastructure. And yes, they're doing really well in technology, and yes, they basically run the world's manufacturing, yes, yes, yes. But remember, there are still parts of China that are experiencing a lot of poverty and people are not moving out of the middle class and there's no boom, etc. Then what I find myself struggling with is I go. It's just interesting to me that that framing is used to label China's entire system as a failure.

• 19:17Trevor Noah?

  But the same thing is not levied in Western countries, especially in America. So they'll go. The US, you'd be like, yeah, but people live here paycheck to paycheck. Most people are one paycheck away from poverty. Like, it's like the number, like the percentage of people in the US, one paycheck away from poverty. People who cannot afford their standard of living, even with a full-time job, is like one of the highest. But then people here will make it seem like, when the media writes about it, they'll make it seem like people have failed. They don't make it seem like the system has failed.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:48Trevor Noah?

  So they go like, yeah, well, I guess, you know, some people, I guess, have chosen the wrong jobs, or I guess they've got the wrong degree, or they've got the... So.

• 19:57Trevor Noah?

  I wanna know how China views its problems. And like, where does it diverge from the way the West portrays China's issues or problems?

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Well, the West, insofar as I understand, portrays it a lot as, you know, this is the problem of authoritarianism. It's a massive struggle between democracy and authoritarian regimes.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  They still see that Little Red Book.

• 20:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. They have this kind of Maoist Marxist-Leninist framework, whereas in China, they're thinking about structural issues. So what I have called the four Ds are the real problems in China that policymakers understand.

• 20:32Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  And those four Ds are, number one, debt. You've got debt north of three hundred percent of GDP. That's just a little bit lower than Japan, but that's a huge amount of debt, more than the US.

• 20:43Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  That, why does that matter? It matters because it crowds out investment in more efficient areas of the economy, and it crowds out domestic demand, which is the second D. You know, consumption has really underwhelmed and actually is underwhelming relative to pre-COVID trend. Because household savings rates have gone up, households are less, you know, less keen to spend like Americans, for instance. They don't use their credit card. There's no sort of tradition of using credit cards. People are more conservative when it comes to, you know, spending durable goods, for instance. And that has obviously gotten... Lock on effects for the rest of the world because it means that if China wants to keep growing at five percent of GDP, then it needs to export even more to the rest of the world to maintain that growth.

• 21:28Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  So it's the other side of this demand and debt problem.

• 21:32Trevor Noah?

  So so if China's population is not bearing the brunt because it's not spending as much, it's not creating as much for China's economy, then China has to get that spending outside of China.

• 21:40Speaker 00

  Exactly. And the strength of the American economy is that it is consumption and services based. You you guys spend so much.

• 21:57Speaker 00

  But so the the policymakers, they want to get to some version of America where they want to be more consumer services led.

• 22:04Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  But they're not willing to see, you know, a massive slowdown in growth, meaning, you know, winding down exports in order to achieve that rebalancing in the economy to be more like the American model. So it's a very difficult balancing act for the policymakers. And then the third one is one of the, I think, most challenging issues is aging population demography. The third D is demography, the fact that, you know, now we have the lowest birth rate since nineteen forty nine, since record on record, since the communists came to power.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  And that's why I think you moving back home would be good.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  Increase fertility.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Nice young man, settle down, leave the four D's alone.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  I didn't know this was going to be this kind of podcast.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  Too many tech bros that are talking about pro-natalist policies.

• 22:57Trevor Noah?

  Oh, wow.

• 22:58Speaker 00

  Speaking of, there is this one guy in in China who's fascinating. Just a side side note. And I will talk about the fourth D.

• 23:06Trevor Noah?

  Is a side note.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  A side note.

• 23:07Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Feel free.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  Good. So there's a demography professor who is also the chairman and founder of Ctrip, which is China's big trip booking platform.

• 23:17Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  And he is now paying his employees fifty thousand dollars per baby because he's so worried about the demographic issue in China. Uh, you know, China's uh, you know, uh, replacement rate is now about one, meaning that the population is shrinking.

• 23:33Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  By twenty forty, one in three people will be above sixty. Just think about.

• 23:37Trevor Noah?

  Cause Germany's, Germany's is currently like one point four.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  Slightly higher than China.

• 23:41Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, and then like, and then like Japan is low.

• 23:44Speaker 00

  Lower.

• 23:44Trevor Noah?

  Isn't it low, isn't it below, below one?

• 23:46Speaker 00

  One, yeah.

• 23:47Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, so Japan is not replacing people.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  It's not replacing people.

• 23:50Trevor Noah?

  So China is at one.

• 23:51Speaker 00

  At about close to one, exactly. And that, uh, that's a huge implication for growth because if you have an increasing number of, of the economy above sixty, one in three by twenty forty, then who's gonna pay for their healthcare? And, yeah, exactly. And who's gonna drive productivity when you have, um, you know, ever shrinking labor force and uh, ever shrinking uh, youth population? So that's the demographic challenge and they try, they're trying to subsidize by giving people more money to have babies, but, but women, this is the thing that's understated, I think, in western media. And this is why it's actually, uh, if you uh, watch um, videos on Chinese TikTok.

• 24:32Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 24:33Speaker 00

  There's a lot of.

• 24:34Trevor Noah?

  Is that Weibo?

• 24:35Speaker 00

  Um, it's, it's Douyin, like Douyin and Xiao Hong Shu, which is red note.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  So that last part, that last.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  Xiao Hong Shu.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  Right, it's a.

• 24:42Trevor Noah?

  Xiao Hong Shu?

• 24:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Cause that's, sometimes I feel like you like, you are Xiao Hong Shu.

• 24:46Trevor Noah?

  Xiao Hong Shu? I can roll, I can roll like that. Xie xian, Eugene, Xiao Hong Shu.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  Oh my god, you have such a good accent.

• 24:53Trevor Noah?

  Oh, thank you very much.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, seriously, seriously, you could, you could go on to Chinese TV.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:58Trevor Noah?

  Oh damn, damn. Oh Eugene, excuse me, a, a, a wise man once said, compliments are best uh, when they are shared with others. So please, Alice, please carry on, carry on.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  Uh, what was I saying? It was demography?

• 25:14Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, you're talking about demography and you're talking about on Chinese TikTok.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  Oh, okay, oh, so girl bossing is a, it's a huge trend on Chinese TikTok.

• 25:20Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  So women telling other women, don't go and get married and have kids, find a younger man and just enjoy your life and focus on your career.

• 25:29Trevor Noah?

  Really?

• 25:31Trevor Noah?

  This, you know, you, you know, this is the funny thing about like the world.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  You know, you're gonna make sight and look.

• 25:38Trevor Noah?

  No, it is. You know why? Second system effects. You know, I love them.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:41Trevor Noah?

  Right? The concept that we, we never know what the effect of something will be, the second effect of something will be.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 25:48Trevor Noah?

  Okay, so we know that we're gonna make a computer.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 25:51Trevor Noah?

  We don't know that the computer will lead to the internet. We know that we'll have the internet. We don't know that the internet will lead to e-commerce. We don't know that e-commerce will lead to, we don't know, we don't know, we don't.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 26:00Trevor Noah?

  You can do anything in life, but you don't know what the second system effect will be. You can't always predict it. One of the things I think we've taken for granted with choice in general, for men and women, contraception, all of these things that we've, we've come up in society is people now can choose whether or not they wanna have kids. And we're, we're basically living in like the first sort of generation where that, that's a possibility.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:23Trevor Noah?

  If you think about like the, the last maybe hundred years, maybe even less.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 26:27Trevor Noah?

  It's the first time where people can like choose how they wanna live their lives before life just happened to you. And now if people choose how they live their lives, it might not go well, is what we are learning. But we don't know how it's gonna end.

• 26:43Trevor Noah?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 26:46Trevor Noah?

  Thank you. What? How, how do you, how do you say, uh, how do you say like, I get it?

• 26:51Speaker 00

  Uh, 我懂了，我懂了.

• 26:53Trevor Noah?

  我懂了.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  我懂啦.

• 26:54Trevor Noah?

  我懂啦.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  我懂啦.

• 26:55Trevor Noah?

  我懂啦.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  So, but you are part of the problem.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  Or you could say that the men may be a part of it. Terms of ownership.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  You are at your prime, you're doing this incredible work.

• 27:10Trevor Noah?

  Eugene was sent here by your parents, by the way.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  The thought of settling down here now, where are we at with it? Because I'm sure if they see someone who's in your position doing what you're doing, doing it, you can influence some people into having kids for fifty thousand dollars.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Be an Asian trad wife.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Well.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  The Asian version of a secret life woman.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  But why, why, why is it not fashionable anymore for young women who are successful and professional in China to aspire to having a partner and having children?

• 27:43Speaker 00

  There's a couple of reasons. You see this as a global phenomenon. Once you get to a certain degree of, you know, per capita GDP or economic outcomes in a country, and that translates to education outcomes for women, they, they decide that the trade off of having babies versus incremental growth in their career becomes, uh, you know, uh, not an attractive prospect. So they focus on their career as opposed to having more babies. Uh, but in the China context, I have a hypothesis, which is that you, the one child policy, back to your point about unintended consequences.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  Meant that you had, for the first time in Chinese history, uh, because China is a country, I'm sure you guys are familiar with, uh, this concept of, of having many children is, is, is a fortuitous thing, especially boys, door to door fridge is a Chinese expression. The more boys you have, the more lucky the family is.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  Change, they changed that with the one child policy, which is government intervention. And then I think, I don't think of any other country in history where you have mass concentration of, uh, parental time, energy and resources on one kid. And if that's a, if that's a girl, then you were expecting that girl to go out and conquer and, you know, get a PhD, run companies.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Oh, because now she became.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  She's incentivized.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  The one child.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, she's incentivized to be successful financially.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  The one child. All resources are pulled towards her.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  Towards, towards her as opposed to a brother, you know?

• 29:09Trevor Noah?

  That's something we, we take for granted as well is when we live in a world where everything has become hyper competitive, getting into a school, getting a job, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It means that it's safer for you to put all your resources into one child.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 29:25Trevor Noah?

  Than to disperse your resources amongst many. Cause if you have one child, you can afford their tutor, you can afford their extracurricular activities, you can afford their piano lessons, you can afford. But if you have many children, you now risk having a wonderful Brady Bunch who just like plays with toys and has fun, but they may not be elite. You can't afford to make them all elite.

• 29:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:46Trevor Noah?

  You know what I mean?

• 29:46Speaker 01

  I, I see it happening in South Africa. And if you look at. Mostly female users of TikTok and Instagram and not not Twitter that much. On in South Africa is it's usually professional women. Um in their late twenties or early thirties who do not have children.

• 30:03Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Who are maybe on weekends are running um doing some cooking content and decorating. And you think to yourself, this is a generation that was raised by two parents working government job. Or maybe sometimes even in retail in the township. And they mostly are the first generation to leave the township, be in the suburbs, become an accountant, a doctor. But it's so rare that they use five times of what their parents used to earn combined.

• 30:30Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  To just facilitate the lifestyle of hobbies.

• 30:32Trevor Noah?

  Oh, interesting.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  So I usually do this experiment. When my daughter was younger, I would look at race. I would go Africans people versus black people. So black people in a private school, you'd see them driving one child in a fancy car. Africans people, Africans women would drive four kids in a crappy car. So they would spend most of their money educating the kids that they have. And then the black people on the other end, you would see spending most of their money in a lifestyle for one child. So we see that happening over and over again. There's more single affluent black women than there are in the other way around. And it's becoming more and more trendy for people to climb the corporate ladder instead of prioritizing families.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  And I find it weird in our country because I'm like, us in our early forties, we are products of those women.

• 31:19Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, we are.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Who are earning very little, but managed to have more than one child.

• 31:24Trevor Noah?

  Uh huh.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  That went to a public school and managed to find their way in the world. And I'm thinking to myself, where did it all go wrong?

• 31:30Trevor Noah?

  Actually, what what is what is the the the breakdown while we're still talking about demographics in China? We're seeing this trend around the world. Is it the same in China where the men are now becoming less favored in the workplace? Or are finding themselves? In a hyper competitive world where they're actually like losing a bit of the race. Is that also seen in China or is it different?

• 31:51Speaker 00

  Not to the same degree and it's not talked about as much as it is in the West.

• 31:54Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  But the uh uh and certainly not as much as as Korea where I know there is a right wing incel movement that is anti-women because to your point.

• 32:04Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  They they feel as though the deck is increasingly stacked against them. That quite hasn't quite happened as of yet. Uh but I think more importantly is this kind of um you know consternation, especially amongst men that they can't find women. Because one like one of the other unintended consequences, although you could have easily predicted this based on human nature, is we've got a massive um skewed towards the male population as opposed to female. So there are way more men in my generation in China than there are women.

• 32:35Trevor Noah?

  Because of the one child policy.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  Because of the one child policy and people favored they would rather have one one one son rather than a daughter.

• 32:41Trevor Noah?

  Oh boy.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  And and as a result, dating is just really tough. The the the barrier to entry to date as a Chinese man historically and still is present today is you've got to have your own apartment, your own car, a really stable job. Uh and that's really, really tough. And that's why we were talking about this earlier. There's been a trend um on um social media in terms of vloggers, but it's been happening really since Russia Ukraine of of um Chinese men going out and finding Ukrainian women and bringing them back to China.

• 33:12Trevor Noah?

  No ways.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  And the Ukrainian women have really popular vlogs saying how great China is compared to.

• 33:17Trevor Noah?

  No ways.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  Russia or Ukraine and how great Chinese men are compared to Russian men because they they're responsible financially. They take care of the kids, they they take care of their women. It's it's it's a fascinating thing. One last data point, I was in Shanghai a couple of weeks ago. Uh and in uh Tamora Square, which is right in the central of Shanghai, there are now um these matchmakers that just sit out there and I literally saw hundreds of them in the square.

• 33:44Trevor Noah?

  In the park, I've seen this, yes, with posters of their children.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  One seventy man.

• 33:49Trevor Noah?

  I like this.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  This is the income.

• 33:51Trevor Noah?

  Seen this.

• 33:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, but not even a picture of them, it's just that.

• 33:54Trevor Noah?

  The profile. The data.

• 33:56Speaker 00

  The data.

• 33:58Trevor Noah?

  Wait, so they said, I saw this and I thought like.

• 33:59Speaker 00

  It's like they're bordering, the people are like.

• 34:00Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  If someone comes in and goes, I've got a.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've got this guy.

• 34:03Trevor Noah?

  It's sort of like an auction as well, right? Like, people are like, I'll pay you this for this, no, I'll give you this much, I'll give you this much. And it's like a whole, I didn't know there was a real thing, but now you made me realize, maybe, maybe the, the, the solution to the world's problems is.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Dating.

• 34:15Trevor Noah?

  We just need to figure out, yes, that, but also, we just need to figure out where everybody's, um, polar opposite answer lies.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  In arranged marriages.

• 34:26Trevor Noah?

  Maybe, but what I mean is this, who would have thought the perfect companion for Ukrainian women was Chinese men?

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:32Trevor Noah?

  That's what I'm saying, all along. So I'm saying, wherever you are out there, you are a Chinese man, or whatever you are. You are, you're a Ukrainian woman, or whatever you are. And you might be struggling in your market, as you say. Little do you know, there's a market out there that is pining for you, and is more perfect for you.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  What a business opportunity.

• 34:55Trevor Noah?

  Do you get what I'm saying?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, hundred percent.

• 34:57Trevor Noah?

  We could start this, the three of us.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  Where, where would South Africans go? What would, would you pair with them?

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Ah, leave those ones.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  They've done enough.

• 35:07Trevor Noah?

  What we need to focus on is the, is the anti-in-the-park auction. No, but you know, you know, you know, what's actually funny is, I actually think South Africans are lucky in this regard because we have such a melting pot. So if you look at South Africans now, I would argue, our generation, more than our parents' generation, has intermingled. So, we, like, our parents' generation was more likely to be, your mother was Tosa, your father was Tosa, your mother, and there were a few outliers here and there. But I think over the years, it's become more common for people to cross-pollinate and say.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:37Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I like those men from that culture because they're actually more like this, and I like those women from that culture because they're more like that. And so people will find themselves, you know, Zulu, Tsonga, wherever, they just find themselves mixing in a different way.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Weird phenomena that happened when apartheid ended and the world opened up a little bit, is when South African white men started traveling to Eastern Europe. Eh like Bosnia and Czechia after the war. And then there would be hotels and then this hot blonde would just come in and they were like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, you work here? And the person would be like, yeah, that's what I do.

• 36:08Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, they didn't, they didn't know that was a thing.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  You're coming home with me.

• 36:10Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, they didn't know that was a thing at all.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  And then they would be now, most of them are the owners of these B and Bs and these fancy neighborhoods that obviously got gentrified and acquired so much value. And when you ask most of them where they came from, they're like, I met my husband on a business trip when South Africa opened up and they came to South Africa and were like, I appreciate all of what you're doing. You work hard, but a woman from here would have never seen your value. But I think that's what's happening now in China, right? When Chinese men go out there, they're like, yo, you don't know how hot I am in, in Ukraine.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  I'm Shenzhen all day long.

• 36:42Trevor Noah?

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• 37:26Trevor Noah?

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• 37:55Trevor Noah?

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• 38:40Trevor Noah?

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• 39:25Trevor Noah?

  It's effortless. So, find your next four favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. Hello over there. Oh, and if Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was What Now with Trevor Noah. It's the best way to support the show.

• 40:01Trevor Noah?

  How easy is it to um to move to China? Because from what I've read, China is not necessarily like an immigration country.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  No, no, but I think Japan is less of it. Well, Japan's starting to change now.

• 40:12Trevor Noah?

  When I was in Japan, sorry to cut you off, when I was in Japan, there were newspaper articles. It was interesting because the our tour guide was translating it for us. But there were whole.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  You made your tour guide translate newspaper articles?

• 40:24Trevor Noah?

  We didn't make, please. I didn't make anyone do anything, Eugene. He as the tour guide was, I was just saying, what's in the news today? And then he was telling me some of the stories.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  And then he said, ah, not much.

• 40:34Trevor Noah?

  No.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  Then he said, no, really? What's in the news today?

• 40:37Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I was just asking because I'm curious. I wanted to know what's happening in Tokyo while we're there.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:43Trevor Noah?

  And one of the big stories in the newspaper was a continuing discussion where they were. Essentially, the headline was, should Japanese people be less xenophobic? Because they're fully, they're fully like, we don't want anyone who's not Japanese here. Don't bring them into our country. We're not mixing cultures, we're not. But then the article is like. It was weird because the article was basically like, we agree. We shouldn't let anyone in, but it's not working. But we agree we shouldn't let anyone in. But what are we going to do about this? Should we maybe bring, maybe we should start bringing people in who want to learn Japanese and want to learn Japanese culture and they want to become Japanese. Maybe we start with them.

• 41:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:25Trevor Noah?

  And then we were, we were out having sushi at a, you know, those tiny, tiny, tiny little place like, like beautiful sushi places can only seat six. And I was there with a Japanese man and his wife who had offered to take me with them.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Wait.

• 41:39Trevor Noah?

  And while we were there.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Wait.

• 41:41Trevor Noah?

  Wait, what?

• 41:43Speaker 01

  You, you were there in a six seater Japanese restaurant?

• 41:46Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  In Japan? Because it's just a restaurant, it's not a Japanese restaurant.

• 41:49Trevor Noah?

  This is true, you're right, yes.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  And this couple wanted to take you out for dinner?

• 41:53Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  And where did you meet this couple?

• 41:55Trevor Noah?

  I'd met the husband in San Francisco. And so he said, if you ever come to Japan, look me up.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  You did?

• 42:01Trevor Noah?

  I don't think he meant it, but I looked him up.

• 42:05Trevor Noah?

  And then he was like, wow, you're here. And I was like, yes, I would love to go and have sushi. So he took me. We went to this place. The chef is making the food. It's amazing. Some of the best sushi I've ever had. And then, um, I think they were Americans. Yeah, but the, an American couple walked in. And then the chef was like, no, we're closed. And then they're like, oh, and they looked at us and we're guilty with our chopsticks. You know, you're like mid. And they're like, we're closed. And they looked at us like, you can't be closed. And we, I was like, yo, I'm not trying to not get the sushi. I was like, yeah, I mean, whatever's happening here. They left. And then the, the chef said to them, uh, yeah, I, I don't allow non-Japanese people into the restaurant.

• 42:51Trevor Noah?

  But it was interesting why, he said, because I do not believe that I can provide the best level of service to people who do not understand me. And I don't understand them.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:58Trevor Noah?

  And so if I don't speak their language, this is not going to be the, the, the experience it needs to be. And so they, I don't allow them in here. And there were many places like that in Japan. But then I asked, I was like, yeah, but how does that do for business? And he said, well, we're actually struggling because of that. Because there are many sushi spots that are allowing foreigners in. And I can only rely on the locals and, and we're struggling. And so it's interesting to see how this thing is like. All over the world, like how, how much immigration do you allow? Because without it, you can't replace your population.

• 43:30Speaker 00

  Maybe robots. But I think this is where cultures really, cultures are, uh, table robots in a second.

• 43:36Trevor Noah?

  We're definitely not gonna forget robots.

• 43:39Speaker 00

  Especially not sex robots in Japan.

• 43:42Trevor Noah?

  Why don't you just lead with that?

• 43:44Speaker 00

  So you would have been.

• 43:46Trevor Noah?

  Economists, sex robots.

• 43:50Trevor Noah?

  Advocate, nazo, treva prindelup. We're going to China, my friend.

• 43:57Speaker 00

  It could use the most robots in the world. Okay, so, so, sorry, guys.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  So this is where culture is really important. So Japan historically, you know, you had the Meiji Restoration is closing off of Western influence because they feel very fearful of that and very strong and convicted and they should in their traditions and culture. Uh, but I think if I compare it to China, which is by no means perfect, there's China has culturally and more curiosity and open mindedness towards the West. This is why it was able to invite a lot of foreign investment in the eighties and nineties. Obviously copycat it, imitate it and then iterate on it and make it better. Um, but you also see it at a, uh, in terms of an anecdotal level, like I go to a bookstore in China and I see Elon Musk and his mother's face everywhere, May Musk.

• 44:46Speaker 00

  Like she's a fricking star in China. They are obsessed with the family. Uh, but that goes to show you the reason I cite that and he apparently he was offered a green card by the then premier a couple of years ago before COVID because they just loved him so much in China when he started building the Shanghai Gigafactory.

• 45:03Trevor Noah?

  Right, right.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  But that shows you that that Chinese culturally have a very pragmatic, utilitarian approach to foreigners, which is like, oh, you're going to bring me money and business. You could come, I'll serve you. And oh, by the way, I'm gonna try to make it better than you.

• 45:17Trevor Noah?

  Right, yeah, I'm gonna learn from you, yeah.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  In a couple of years' time, I won't need you, but please come so we can, you know, learn from what you're doing and then build EVs. China now builds seventy percent of the world's EV production. And this is only in the last five years, which is insane that they've really ramped up that level of production. But

• 45:35Trevor Noah?

  So that was, wait, so I'm just trying to make sure we don't, it was the, so that the, I think we're on the third D, right?

• 45:40Speaker 00

  Oh, this is the third D. And then the fourth D, actually really quickly before the fourth D is the robot question.

• 45:45Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  Is whether or not robots can fill up some of the gaps in productivity that will be caused by aging. We can discuss that later, but that, that's, that's a huge question. China is the biggest producer of robots in the world. Eighty percent of robotic installations are made in China.

• 46:02Trevor Noah?

  Eighty percent.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Eighty percent. That's bigger than the next four countries combined.

• 46:06Trevor Noah?

  Damn.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  It's so that's really dominating. And I just heard recently in China that they have over a hundred thousand robotics companies in China. That's again, that misconception people have is that China's not super competitive. It is a super competitive ecosystem where companies are very cutthroat. They scale very quickly because there's a huge market.

• 46:27Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  You know, this is 1.4 trillion people compared to the 300 billion or so in, say, the US. It's like a huge market that they can service. So maybe robots, I'm a little bit doubtful, but that's another kind of.

• 46:38Trevor Noah?

  Oh, we'll get to the, okay, we'll table robots.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  And then D, fourth D is destruction, which is the other challenge. It's related to Taiwan. Are we going to have in the next couple of years, a big showdown over Taiwan?

• 46:50Trevor Noah?

  How real is that, though? Because it feels like that's been on everyone's lips. For the longest time. It's in the same way, and you know, not to flatten these, these topics down, but like, in the same way, the world has been warned about Iranian missiles, like for decades. People, Iran, Iran's going to make a nuke, Iran's going to make a nuke, Iran. And it's like, here we are decades later and they still haven't made a nuke. How real is the threat of China invading Taiwan? Because to me, it seems imminent, but I remember even when I was like on the Daily Show and we were covering it, it felt like it was weeks away. And then weeks later, it felt like weeks away, and then it was weeks, and then it was like, oh, it's been years and still weeks away. And then even now, when I read the news, they're like, I think it's happening. I think it's happening next week.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:32Trevor Noah?

  I think it's happening next week. I think it's happening next week. And then I remember watching videos of people who live in Taiwan. And then they were just like chilled.

• 47:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:42Trevor Noah?

  But the media that I was consuming in America was going, oh, man, it's very stressful. It's about to happen, it's about to happen. So like, how, how real is the threat?

• 47:50Speaker 00

  I certainly don't think it's real in the next two years.

• 47:53Trevor Noah?

  Huh?

• 47:53Speaker 00

  There's a lot of internal politics that I can get into in just a bit in China.

• 47:57Trevor Noah?

  Two years, though.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  In the next two years, I think it's highly unlikely.

• 48:00Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  But fast forward 10 years or more, I think the probabilities go up. Uh, mainly because, uh, you know, the Chinese will start to have superiority in terms of the military balance of power.

• 48:12Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  Uh, especially if the US doesn't do more to really invest in military defense capabilities. Uh, and, and certainly you've seen in the last couple of years that, uh, the spending on debt has outpaced. The spending on the military, this is a law in history by coined by my boss Neil Ferguson called Ferguson Law. So shout out to him, which is that he looked at empires through history.

• 48:34Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 48:34Speaker 00

  And whenever an empire was spending more on repaying its debt, its debt interest payment growth was outpacing how much it was spending on the military, that was the number one signal. Red li- uh, red signal that they were in decline. And this happened in the British Empire, the Dutch Empire, the the Spanish Empire.

• 48:52Trevor Noah?

  So you can go back and trace an empire.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  Back in time.

• 48:54Trevor Noah?

  As soon as they're paying more.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  On this repaying their debt.

• 48:57Trevor Noah?

  Than they are for their military.

• 48:59Speaker 00

  They're in decline.

• 48:59Trevor Noah?

  What is, what is the correlation? What, why are they in decline?

• 49:02Speaker 00

  Because they are spending more on repaying how much they owe to their creditors. Instead of building up their military capabilities.

• 49:10Trevor Noah?

  What I, forgive me, I don't understand why the military is the key signifier, like why, why the milit- why not like they're spending more on their debt versus more on, I don't know, infrastructure and manufacturing, why military specifically?

• 49:22Speaker 00

  So in, in historical periods, and it's questionable whether or not it's relevant today. You know, empires were overtaken by other powers.

• 49:30Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  Through military campaigns.

• 49:32Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  So seeing things like the Bri- uh, the British win against the Spanish and the Spanish, uh, sorry, the Spanish Armada.

• 49:38Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 49:38Speaker 00

  In fifteen eighty-eight, um, you know, these military campaigns oftentimes spell a decline in the milit- uh, in the, the economic power of a country because if, if Britain has more ships and is more powerful than Spain. And Spain's not able to get more, uh, more control of the seas and trade goes down. Not enough, they can't get, uh, the same amount of silver from Latin America. Um, and meanwhile, Britain, because it has more ships out there. Um, it can develop trade routes and control those trade routes via the British East India Company, for instance, you know. Uh, so there you have the, the mix of both the military and the commerce, right? So the question is, is that relevant today? I, I do think it is because ultimately

• 50:23Speaker 00

  the Taiwan question is both a political and a military question. The military question is, will the balance of power shift in, uh, the region in Asia-Pacific in favor of the Chinese? Right now, the Americans still have supremacy when it comes to naval um equipment, um you know, nuclear submarines. Um uh you know, uh air air denial systems as well. China is massively catching up, though, and the next couple of years may have more PLA ships than the Americans. Uh but also related to that, America has more operational experience during combat.

• 50:57Trevor Noah?

  America's been fighting.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  It's been fighting.

• 50:59Trevor Noah?

  America's been fighting. America stays in the gym, bro. Don't play with America.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  It does.

• 51:03Trevor Noah?

  Don't play. You know what I learned? I saw this with Russia, Ukraine. Russia has just been talking, and then when it came down to it, you're like, ah, ah, ah. You haven't been, yo, America stays match ready all the ti- you wanna go to war? America's fighting one right now. Where? Doesn't matter. Ready, baby.

• 51:19Speaker 00

  Hmm. Yeah, but then.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Those D J two guys we meet in the elevator going down.

• 51:24Trevor Noah?

  Always ready.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  It's like those guys on steroids.

• 51:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 51:26Speaker 00

  Because then you question whether or not they have the will to keep fighting. That's the big pro.

• 51:31Trevor Noah?

  That's why you are single. You question too much.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  That's the problem with the US.

• 51:40Trevor Noah?

  I love your brain.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Oh, man, that was so funny. I have to the world to keep fighting.

• 51:46Speaker 00

  It's like, it's like wrestle, it's like wrestling, where it's a lot of show.

• 51:49Trevor Noah?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 51:51Speaker 00

  Then you can, you know, the question is, you know, why did they lose Vietnam? Because they didn't have the political will to keep fighting.

• 51:56Trevor Noah?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 51:57Speaker 00

  Domain, which is the politics. Like Taiwan is way more important to China than it is to the media and US voter.

• 52:05Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  Most Americans don't know what it is or why it's important.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  They can't even separate.

• 52:10Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 52:10Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, because to your point, you even see it like now with Iran. The appetite that the American, the average American person has for the war in Iran, first of all, even before it started, they didn't want it. But people are like, I don't know what, why we're doing this, and I, I don't want us to be doing this, right? But to your point, they have more leverage in America's politics than the Chinese media would in China's um expansion if they went into China. Into Taiwan.

• 52:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:40Trevor Noah?

  That's, oh, that's an interesting way to think about it.

• 52:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then Xi, Xi has time, Xi Jinping. The president has time on his side. He's seventy two this year. He's he's built.

• 52:48Trevor Noah?

  Still a young man.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  He's still relatively young.

• 52:50Trevor Noah?

  Still a young man.

• 52:51Speaker 00

  Compared to American presidents.

• 52:52Trevor Noah?

  A fresh young lotus. That's what he is, huh? Living his dream, Xi Jinping. Is it, are we saying it right when we say Xi Jinping or is it like, is it, is it backwards? Is it?

• 53:01Speaker 00

  Um, oh, no, it's right. Xi Jinping. It's the last name first.

• 53:03Trevor Noah?

  Okay, it is Xi Jinping, because I remember when we, when we found out like Shinzo Abe, it was Abe Shinzo and we were saying, we were basically saying his name backwards the whole time. And then all of a sudden, someone was like, no, it's wrong.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  No, it, he, he's got it, he's got it right. Yeah, exactly.

• 53:18Trevor Noah?

  What, what is, what has made him so successful? Like, it seems like every, again, when you read Western media, and this is something, by the way, that I, I think is interesting to your point. I only realized the other day, China is one of the few, like, major countries where its news is also being written in its language. So if you cannot read Chinese or Mandarin Cantonese, whichever one is being written in, you are missing out on a lot of the nuance and the actual reporting and storytelling that's happening in the country. Does that make sense? So you're just going like, oh, we're looking at numbers, we're looking at data, we're looking at numbers, but we don't go there physically. And we also don't read or listen to what the people are actually saying.

• 54:02Trevor Noah?

  Like, that's, that's another thing that I, that I was thinking about. But again, from what I read, that is in English, they'll say like Xi Jinping is, he's just leagues ahead of his predecessors and he's, he's got like a, an iron grip on the country and a focus that no one has ever really had in the, in the modern age at least. How true is that? And, and why is it that he's being so successful in implementing his vision of what the party is trying to do?

• 54:29Speaker 00

  I, well, the fastest way to answer that is that he has elements of Mao. And I, and I don't say there's a form of criticism. If you look back in history, what Mao understood and part of the reason why he was successful, even though he had a wilderness period in the fifties where he was out of the party for a bit. Or he's still in the party, but he was not in the elite, uh, party leadership. He came back because he understood that power lived not in the elite. Uh policymakers, the elite CCP apparatchiks, but in the people. So he had this concept of the mass line where it's like from the people to the people. That that if you if you um and this obviously led to some of the bad parts of history like the red uh the red guard.

• 55:14Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 55:14Speaker 00

  The Cultural Revolution, because you want to stir up political fervor and nationalism. He understood that if the people love you and they see you as this charismatic leader, that's the only thing that matters. And and part of what Xi has been successful in doing relative to his two previous successes is to build up this sort of cult of personality.

• 55:34Trevor Noah?

  Yep.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  Uh and to build up this nationalist fervor. He calls it the the Great Chinese Dream. And he even said it in the in the in the summit, that state banquet when Trump was there. That he said, uh America, make America great again can coexist with his own slogan, which is the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. So he has these very patriotic, jingoistic language, which, you know, to to some extent, other authoritarian leaders like Putin and Modi have as well. But he's been able to leverage that um to have a mass appeal. And obviously, what's helped him is that he has now this external aggressor. You know, this this, you know, in in traditional Chinese communist terms, this this paper tiger or imperialist power, which is America.

• 56:19Trevor Noah?

  Right, okay.

• 56:19Speaker 00

  And only a strong man like Xi, who has the will of the people, uh who can see the future. He calls himself the Great Helmsman. He can he can uh help course uh

• 56:30Trevor Noah?

  Shut the course.

• 56:30Speaker 00

  chart the course in these very choppy, difficult geopolitical waters. And then the last bit, which I think has has made him successful, is that like Deng Xiaoping, he understood, he understands politics, uh the game of politics. And he has been leading these anti-corruption campaigns and promoting his own people uh in order to again consolidate his power through all arms. Whether it's the it's not just the party, it's also the PLA, it's the intelligence system. Uh it's it's really all levels of the party. He he he has been raising a lot of loyalists and that again consolidates his power within the party. So in in some respects, he's a combination of both leaders.

• 57:14Speaker 00

  But I think he's been uh very successful in building himself up ultimately as a charismatic leader.

• 57:21Trevor Noah?

  Do you do? I mean, I wouldn't say, do they see it? Because I guess they do. But like, it feels like America is withdrawing from the world. And in that withdrawal, it feels like China is filling in the void. So many Americans, I think, sometimes will take for granted that part of the reason America is as powerful as it is and has been as powerful as it has been is primarily because of its soft power. America didn't go around the world blowing up the world to get the power it had. It went to Africa with things like USAID. You know, it helped European governments build themselves up after World War Two. It gave low interest loans. It really became the benefactor of the world. It helped with trade, it inspired.

• 58:05Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, it was really the sugar daddy of the world. And that made the world like America and aspire to America. Over the past few years, we've seen America take a step back and go, hey, America is America. We don't want anything to do with the rest of the world. Don't involve us. And that's that. And then you see it in Africa, like China has gone in and, you know, has built ports and built roads and railways and airports and created these interesting agreements where like the Chinese will never lose in the deal. You know, so it's like either they get their money back or they now own infrastructure in Africa.

• 58:38Trevor Noah?

  We've seen the Chinese reach out to like Brazil and create new deals that never existed for like soy exports, etc.

• 58:46Trevor Noah?

  Within China, what do you think they are seeing with America pulling back? And what do you think they're trying to do? Like, is there a concerted effort to fill the gap? Or is it just them creating another version of a Silk Road?

• 59:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. Lots of people talk about policymakers in China as being majority engineers in the way that is different from the US where they're majority lawyers. But the other thing that I think is interesting about policymakers is that they are very keen historians. A lot of them read history. And they have looked at American history and gone, actually, it's not that great to be everyone's enabler and sugar daddy. You know, there's just a lot of these commitments that you have to make.

• 59:27Trevor Noah?

  Obligations.

• 59:27Speaker 00

  On obligations. You know, it's far better if, you know, actually, we have. Trade with all these different countries and we help them build infrastructure that it actually accelerates trades. They buy more of our products and we can have get more commodities like cobalt and lithium from Africa. So that we don't have any supply chain problems like the Americans and Europeans have had. So we can really dominate across technologies and supply chains. That is the the thinking, which is let's have more influence globally, but maybe more preeminence regionally in Asia. Where we're looked to as within a tributary system, we're looked to as the center. But I don't think policymakers have this view that it's worthwhile or worth their while to become the next global policeman.

• 1:00:12Speaker 00

  The next sugar daddy, because they've seen what that means, you know, costly battles, increasing deficit spending. In the American context, and they increasingly look at the model in America and see a lot of problems. But one last thing I'll say, which I think is underappreciated. So in the nineteen nineties, the G seven countries comprised about seventy percent of global GDP.

• 1:00:35Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  Today, the global, today, that's only forty percent, G seven countries. And the global south now represents about forty percent of global GDP and rising. The global south, so countries like South Africa, Brazil, India.

• 1:00:52Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  China.

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  And by the population is eighty five percent, which is crazy. Eighty five percent of the world lives in the global south.

• 1:01:02Trevor Noah?

  South.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  And China's big bet is the global south, back to the demographic thing.

• 1:01:07Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, that's where growth lies.

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  That is where there's a young labor force, that's where economies are still growing. And that's where you have markets that could still grow to buy your goods. So I don't think that's understood enough in in the West, where we have a very navel gazing approach, which is like. The only game in town is the G seven. It's increasingly not not true, the the balance of power is shifting.

• 1:01:32Trevor Noah?

  Anything. We've got more. What now, after this? Everybody has that oddly specific thing that they're curious about. Maybe it's restoring old watches. Maybe it's Japanese ceramic making. Maybe it's watching someone explain why one bridge in a remote area of Norway is secretly better than all the other bridges in the world. YouTube always has exactly what you're looking for, even when you didn't know you were looking for it. With YouTube Premium, those deep dives feel even smoother. You get ad-free viewing, but you also get background play when you need your hands free. And you get offline downloads, so you can keep watching wherever you happen to be, even if you happen to be off the grid.

• 1:02:16Trevor Noah?

  It's everything you already love about YouTube, just somehow even better. Yeah, one of my favorite YouTube Premium features is Smart Downloads. Because how many times have you gone somewhere and realized, "Ah, I forgot to download anything!" And now you're on the way to the airport and you're like, "Download, download, download, download." You're on the plane, "Download, download, download, download." There's no Wi-Fi. "I wish I downloaded." Now, all of those things that you were gonna watch are just on the internet. Smart Downloads basically thinks ahead for you. It automatically downloads recommended videos based on what you like to watch. So even when you forget to prepare, YouTube Premium didn't. I love it. It's like packing for a trip and discovering somebody already remembered the thing you always leave at home. It's always the underwear.

• 1:02:59Trevor Noah?

  If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Sign up now for your free trial at youtube.com/premium. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. Earth can be a lot sometimes. Heat waves, gas prices, bad hair days. Why not go where life is good? Escape to Pluto TV. Turn off your problems and turn on your favorite movies and shows. You know, the ones you already love. From Anchorman, the Legend of Ron Burgundy, to Dirty Dancing, to Top Gun Maverick, from Alias to The X-Files. It's all here and all free. Go where the TV is always good. Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.

• 1:03:48Speaker 05

  Oh, look. You just got added to a meeting. About coordinating another meeting. To prepare for the pre-meeting. Ahead of the follow-up meeting. Which will, of course. Require a recap meeting. And then, another meeting. Hit your booking point? Book with Southwest and enter airplane mode.

• 1:04:21Trevor Noah?

  How do people on the ground feel in China? Because, again, that's another one of those things where if you just like read the media. They'll always make it seem like Western media makes it seem like people in China are clamoring to get out. Yeah, they're not having a good time. Clamoring, they're like you thank your lucky stars that you don't live in China because, oh. They would dream to live in a country where there's 600 TV channels and 15 kinds of nut and milk. You don't understand how tough it is. Starbucks in every corner. You don't understand.

• 1:04:49Speaker 00

  By the way, that exists already in China, just so you know.

• 1:04:51Trevor Noah?

  That's hilarious. But that's, yeah.

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  There's more variety, actually, in certain foods in China. Just so you know.

• 1:04:56Trevor Noah?

  But this, so, so what is the average Chinese? I know you're not speaking for everyone, but like what is the average Chinese person experiencing of China? And what are they like? Do you know what I mean? How are they viewing China?

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  So there's a good side and the bad side. The good side is, you know, everyone, everyone else is having a worse time. Look at, they have this narrative, okay? There's just so much crime and guns in America.

• 1:05:21Trevor Noah?

  Damn.

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  And racism increasingly. They don't want people like us, you know? And, and you know, Trump has just put in this new green card policy that makes it harder for people to stay while they're getting their green cards.

• 1:05:31Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yes, now you have to go, you have to leave the country. Which seems like a trap.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And, and then, and, but the flip side of it is, you know, people do feel like the economy is slowing down. There's this concept you always hear in the media in the West. This concept of lying flat, tumping, which is, you know, why would you be in the rat race and work super hard when you can only get so much money? And, you know, deflation is happening in the economy. And there's not as many jobs, you know? Youth unemployment's still close to 20%. So, young people in China feel a little bit depressed about the economy and where it's heading relative to their parents' generation, which was in the boom years. Uh, but they still look at the rest of the world and go, well, I'd rather this than unsafe, unstable

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  systems where you don't know if you could, you have a very right wing government that comes in or a left wing government that changes all the policies and trains don't work and run on time. You know, that's the social contract, which is they'd much rather an efficient, stable, safe system than, just to put it very simply, the kinds of democratic liberal freedoms that people in the West say are, you know, of prime importance.

• 1:06:43Trevor Noah?

  I mean, yeah, look, a simple example is you look at California has been saying they're gonna build a high-speed rail system for more than a decade now. They still haven't gotten it done. Yeah, not even the hyperloop was Elon. They were saying they're gonna build one, I guess it was going like all the way up to like San Francisco. So it was supposed to. And this project was supposed to happen and it's just money and nothing's going on. And then in the meantime, China has interconnected like all of its cities with insanely fast maglev rail that's, but, but again, is that, is that an accurate, because I haven't been there. Is this an accurate depiction of it?

• 1:07:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, then the gigantic structures in Chongqing, they just had the world's biggest elevator. It's the longest elevator in the world. It takes, sorry, escalator, not elevator.

• 1:07:30Trevor Noah?

  Oh, escalator.

• 1:07:31Speaker 00

  It takes about twenty, twenty-five minutes to go from bottom to the top.

• 1:07:34Trevor Noah?

  Twenty-five minutes on an escalator? Yo, bro. Imagine you, imagine you drop your bag on that escalator. Have you ever dropped a bag on an escalator?

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Drop yourself!

• 1:07:45Trevor Noah?

  Eugene!

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  After fifteen minutes, you're like, ah!

• 1:07:48Trevor Noah?

  Eugene!

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  Because the elevator goes up and you go down and you go nowhere.

• 1:07:52Trevor Noah?

  You know, you know, he's fallen for so long that people have time to process their grief. Eugene!

• 1:07:59Trevor Noah?

  I mean, we lived a good life with Eugene, if we're honest. I mean, it was a good one. It was a, he was a great guy. He was a, yeah, man, it was a twenty minutes on an, man.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Thirty, eh?

• 1:08:12Speaker 00

  No, twenty to twenty-five minutes. I can't remember the exact distance, but you should look it up. It goes from the base to the top of the mountain.

• 1:08:23Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 1:08:24Trevor Noah?

  It really does. Yeah, it feels like it feels like China is just doing like impossible things most of the time. Like in in every, I was reading about BYD the other day. Oh, maybe this is, yeah, this is you're the perfect person to ask this.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  Why?

• 1:08:34Trevor Noah?

  Why was I reading about BYD?

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  No, why is she the perfect person to ask?

• 1:08:37Trevor Noah?

  Because she knows about China and she knows about economics.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:08:40Trevor Noah?

  And you know none of these things.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  Carry on.

• 1:08:42Trevor Noah?

  Even though I ask you about them every day. You don't try and learn shit. Out here telling me about beard oil.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  That's the real BYD.

• 1:08:55Trevor Noah?

  So. Beard your dreams. So, um. Uh, BYD for a long time was considered the laughing stock of.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:09:05Trevor Noah?

  Car manufacturers, right? I there's like one video of Elon Musk in particular, like laughing in an interview. They go, what about BYD? And he's like, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Well, have you seen their cars? And then you you fast forward a few decades and BYD, you see. Not only do they have one of the most successful cars, one of the best electric cars. They've got superior battery technology in terms of range, in terms of charging speed, in terms of like how they use it in the car. You then you see even the the pipeline they've created where they've got their own ships, shipping the cars to Brazil, to Canada, et cetera, et cetera. And and then I was I was reading this really interesting story about like how they're saying, oh, it's not gonna last. BYD is not gonna last like this because right now they're being subsidized by the government.

• 1:09:50Trevor Noah?

  And the Chinese government is doing a good job of propping up many of its industries to make it seem like they're doing better than they actually are. Now, I'm not an economist, but the first thought that came to my mind was like, yeah, but many countries subsidize their industries. So I I I couldn't really understand what the issue was. But I I I wondered if there's any truth to the house of cardsness in China's economy or if this is being overblown.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  So to unpack that, you can't deny the fact that BYD is now the biggest producer and exporter of EVs. It's overtaken Tesla.

• 1:10:23Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:23Speaker 00

  In the last couple of months. Uh, and if you've been in one, you understand why it's so appealing.

• 1:10:28Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:28Speaker 00

  It's cheaper, but it's still.

• 1:10:29Trevor Noah?

  My first one was in like Singapore, it's insane.

• 1:10:30Speaker 00

  It it's a great user experience.

• 1:10:32Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:33Speaker 00

  Both as a driver and and a passenger. Uh. Yes, there were huge subsidies that had been put in place to support the EV sector. That has been part of the ability for the EV sector and in particular BYD to scale so quickly.

• 1:10:46Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  But they are starting to walk that back. So in the last couple of uh months in particular, they're trying to get rid of some of the subsidies, the export tax rebates.

• 1:10:55Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:56Speaker 00

  Then again, trying to make it a bit more uh competitive domestically and globally because they now understand, hey, the Europeans and Brazilians don't like, don't like the fact that we're, you know, giving them cheap EVs. We would have thought they would like it because this is great for green technology. But now they're starting to understand it's not just about um green technology and and market competition. It's also about a lot of these countries fearing the flooding

• 1:11:21Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  of Chinese goods. And so now you're starting to see them get unwind some of these subsidies for, but for the sector. But in general, I think the the problem is that the subsidies are so large. This is the subsidies that China puts on, whether it's solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, batteries.

• 1:11:39Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:40Speaker 00

  Uh. Much larger than, say, even the Europeans or other countries put on on to support the sector. Um. That it is no longer seen as fair competition by a lot of these other countries. And because China is is still acting in the framework of a developing economy, even though in many respects, because of its technology boom, it's no longer a developing economy. It uses that as an excuse to have the massive subsidies that it has for the green technology sector.

• 1:12:08Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  And that's the big, that's the problem that the Europeans and Brussels have, or say the Brazilians or the G seven countries like Canada or Australia have about sort of the flood of of cheap uh electric vehicles is that the government um has historically done huge, you know, amounts of subsidies to support its local industry.

• 1:12:28Trevor Noah?

  It's a, it's a, it's such a fascinating time because.

• 1:12:34Trevor Noah?

  China always seems to be looming. But you never know when the threat will ever be realized, or if it is even a threat. Because what, you know, sometimes people talk about China as if it is waiting to take over the world. But then whenever I listen to what Chinese politicians will say publicly at least, they're like, China has no interest in taking over the world. China's interest is in making China the best in China. And they'll always say like, we've been around for 5,000 years. We have no interest in going anywhere. Look at how big we are. Our goal is just to make this the shining beacon in the world. And and it's it's interesting to see how different those two viewpoints are. You know, the one viewpoint for most of the West is when a country is that big and that powerful, it's inevitable that it goes out.

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:20Trevor Noah?

  And then the Chinese leaders will be like, no, no, no, you go out. We don't go out. We we are going in and we're trying to extend our tentacles to grow this thing as big as possible. Where where does where does the truth lie as you see it?

• 1:13:31Speaker 00

  Historically, it's control the home base.

• 1:13:35Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:37Speaker 00

  And now more in in the last couple of decades, it's about having influence globally. You know, we talked about commodity supply chains, even to some extent geopolitics. But I I look to history. So the last time China, you know, went out to Africa in imperial history was in the Ming Dynasty in the 1500s. There was this Muslim eunuch captain who was, you know, an amazing figure in Chinese history, who went out all the way to Africa and brought back a giraffe to the the emperor's emperor's court. And that was the last time. After that, they decided, hey, why are we going to Africa? It's too expensive. We should just focus on our own, you know, great culture and economy and and system.

• 1:14:18Speaker 00

  And the other thing that I would say is that I think this is understood enough. Historically, China has been. Controlled, if you go to imperial history, by non Han people. Han, so the Han Chinese are the majority of the Chinese.

• 1:14:33Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:14:33Speaker 00

  You know, I think close to ninety percent of the population. But, you know, if you look at the Qing Empire, which was the last empire in China, that was the Manchurians. You know, that area that is border as is the Korean Peninsula.

• 1:14:46Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:46Speaker 00

  And northeast China. They are not ethnically the same as the Han people. They were basically foreigners who invaded and, you know, took over the country. And imposed things like the queue. You know, that in Chinese, you've got the shaved head and the long braid. That is not a Han Chinese. That is not a, that is a complete Qing Manchurian.

• 1:15:08Trevor Noah?

  Your hand is still in the braid.

• 1:15:11Speaker 00

  Import. And then you also know that the Mongols took over.

• 1:15:14Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yes, of course.

• 1:15:14Speaker 00

  Centuries before that and founded their own dynasty. So, so China doesn't have that same historical legacy of going out and wanting to invade other countries and have an empire. In fact, it has more of a historical experience of other countries wanting to try to.

• 1:15:29Trevor Noah?

  Take it over.

• 1:15:30Speaker 00

  Take it over. The British tried, obviously, and to some extent failed in the eighteen hundreds. But they did manage to take Hong Kong, for instance. So it's just a different, it's a different frameworking, a different historical legacy. But I think in the last two decades, the Chinese understand, and I think this has really been borne out by the Iran crisis.

• 1:15:52Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:52Speaker 00

  Is that you need to have influence a little bit everywhere.

• 1:15:55Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  Like with the Gulfis, with the Africans, with the Russians, you know, have negotiations and deals everywhere. So that if like this is a strait of home use crisis and fifty percent of hydrocarbons gets taken off the table for a period of time, then you can find resources to replenish your stockpiles and import from other places around the world. So that's the, that's the way that I look at it is it's less of an empire and it's more of a network of influence on trade, on geopolitics, on supply chains.

• 1:16:26Trevor Noah?

  So do you, do you think China is going to look to the robots? Is that, is that a conversation that they're having?

• 1:16:32Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, for sure. Is that robots are going to help with the demographic challenge and robots are going to be the next major export. Like E Vs and solar panels and batteries were a decade ago.

• 1:16:44Trevor Noah?

  But uh uh help help help me understand what solutions or what what problems the robots are actually gonna be fixing. Because I understand, okay, there's there's the decline in terms of people's age and their ability to do things. So I guess robots taking care of people, is that one aspect of it?

• 1:17:02Speaker 00

  Taking care of elderly people.

• 1:17:03Trevor Noah?

  Okay, so robots taking care of elderly people.

• 1:17:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then you have more task specific, you know, uh robotic installations and already happening in factories.

• 1:17:12Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:17:12Speaker 00

  So dark factories that are completely uh devoid of humans, basically, and it's just machines. Uh robotic machines. Uh then you have a certain hospitals and pharmaceutical. Uh uh companies that use, again, robotic arms to pick, you know, pick out somebody's orders or prescriptions.

• 1:17:31Trevor Noah?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:17:31Speaker 00

  Without a human as well. Uh that's happening. Um and then some really interesting stuff that is more in. In the brain chip interface that's happening, both invasively and non-invasively. So on the non-invasively front, they have. This um this device that sits on uh the skin that basically is able to control the brain. Um so that you can control uh an arm, a robotic arm, an external arm. So if you have an amputee, there's a company called Brainco that's doing it. If you're an amputee, then your brain is able to, it's able to pick up an electric electric signal from your brain. This chip device that sits on the skin.

• 1:18:09Trevor Noah?

  For intention.

• 1:18:09Speaker 00

  And then and then move move your fingers and infer intention. And there's another one that's uh more invasive, which is the chip in. Into bed into the brain.

• 1:18:17Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:18:17Speaker 00

  That is helping people um who have spine injuries can't walk to to walk again. Um that's more in the kind of blended environment, not not purely robotics. Uh but I I I I suspect that we're gonna see, uh you know, not just the humanoid robots that Elon wants to see. But different, you know, task-specific robotic installations, you know, the stuff that I mentioned that. Uh, you know, the arms that are picking up orders.

• 1:18:44Trevor Noah?

  Right, right, right. Just doing one specific task and just moving forward with that.

• 1:18:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, so for instance, I was just in Beijing. I don't know if you guys have it here, Heidi Lal, which is the hot pot. It's the Chinese hot pot chain.

• 1:18:55Trevor Noah?

  No, I don't know Heidi Lal.

• 1:18:56Speaker 00

  Okay, I highly recommend it if you guys go. Really, really great hot pot chain, the most successful hot pot chain in the world. And run by a Chinese woman as well. So it's, you know, it's a great story.

• 1:19:08Trevor Noah?

  Is she single?

• 1:19:10Trevor Noah?

  Sorry, sorry.

• 1:19:10Speaker 00

  Asking for a friend.

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  She might be too old for you.

• 1:19:14Trevor Noah?

  I can eat.

• 1:19:17Trevor Noah?

  This is not your Ukraine. Relax, you cheat.

• 1:19:22Speaker 00

  Ukraine, Ukraine. Is they have these robots that are picking up on people's orders. So whatever, they know exactly what people's orders are and then they will put it on a train, deliver it. And then I was just touring Alibaba last year and they have this sort of logistics wing of their company. Cause they started off as e-commerce.

• 1:19:40Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:19:40Speaker 00

  Where the robot is already able to sense the optimal, and I wish I had the skill. The optimal way to arrange packing. So that you use the least amount of paper, you use the least amount of product.

• 1:19:53Trevor Noah?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:19:54Speaker 00

  So like, like the robot has already figured out, the machine and then the robot have figured out. How do I like, kind of like, um.

• 1:20:01Trevor Noah?

  So you can optimize your wastage, minimize wastage essentially.

• 1:20:05Speaker 00

  Exactly. Cause they can like 3D optimize space and figure out, okay, so this is how I put it all. And this is the smallest box that I can use for, for this order.

• 1:20:15Trevor Noah?

  So you see, everything you're saying there is what's terrifying most people around the world. Cause they go, I work in a factory. I should be doing that. And I work in a pharmacy where I get people's medication. And I work in, in a, you know, logistics company and I, and I, and I, and I. And in America, what they're being told is, well, look, we'll figure it out in the future. And the truth is, the robots are taking your jobs and AI is taking your job and there's nothing you can do about it. But hey, man, we'll figure it out. Let's, let's, let's do it and we'll figure it out. The other day I, I read an article where they said the Chinese government. Put forward a law saying that companies cannot fire people only to replace them with AI.

• 1:20:55Trevor Noah?

  Which, again, now you wanna talk about like the, the, the perspectives that people have or, or perceptions that they have of other. I saw many Americans, British people were going like, oh my god, yeah, why is the Chinese government doing this for its people, but our governments? You can do this, you can just make a law, and the Chinese government's just like, yeah, you cannot replace people, you cannot fire them just because of AI.

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, because they know that they're gonna be dead in thirty years anyway.

• 1:21:21Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but what I'm saying is though, like.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  So you're not trying to depress them while they're going up a twenty-five minutes escalator to the great beyond.

• 1:21:30Trevor Noah?

  It would be crazy if the escalator just went to heaven, and then you get there and you're like, ah.

• 1:21:36Speaker 00

  Robots everywhere.

• 1:21:37Trevor Noah?

  Ah, guys.

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  The escalator is like, I am the robot, I took you there.

• 1:21:42Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but, but you see, like, is, that again, to me, seems like, it seems like the Chinese government, again, pragmatically looking at a situation, saying, on the one hand, we have to modernize, but on the other hand, if the people are completely left behind, then this thing falls apart. Is, is, is that like how they think about everything? Is that even how they think about this situation?

• 1:22:05Speaker 00

  Exactly, and there were two court rulings, which you're also referencing, uh, in the last year or so, one in Beijing and one in Hangzhou, in which they, the court ruled on both accounts, it was illegal to fire someone on the basis of AI.

• 1:22:17Trevor Noah?

  You're right.

• 1:22:17Speaker 00

  And, um, China in the last couple of years has been at the forefront of AI regulation in terms of, um, data protection, but also in terms of deep fake technologies, where I don't think we're getting enough attention. Like, you can't just copy somebody else's voice, or, or, or use somebody else's image and impersonate them, uh, and monetize off of that. There's regulations against that, and I don't know if that's the case in the US as of yet, but.

• 1:22:45Trevor Noah?

  There's, there's a few states that have imposed a few laws, but they, they, obviously they apply to pornography and then other one, but they, but it's not like a federal thing yet.

• 1:22:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the, the Chinese government look at technology, uh, with a kind of, I would say, more balanced approach, but also they have the power to do that in the way that. I, as I understand it, in America, they don't because there's a lot of, you know, vested interests.

• 1:23:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, there's lobbying.

• 1:23:10Speaker 00

  Get funded.

• 1:23:10Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:10Speaker 00

  There's lobbying.

• 1:23:11Trevor Noah?

  Is that, is that not a thing in China?

• 1:23:13Speaker 00

  No, if you lobby the government, uh, if you're lobbying an official, you will, that official will probably be ousted for anti-corruption.

• 1:23:21Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, that's, because in most of the world, what we call, uh, they call lobbying in America, we call it bribery.

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:27Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, here it's legal. You, you can lobby people with gifts and trips and everything, and that's just normal. And it's so funny, because when I was growing up, I always used to think Africa was the most corrupt continent, because that's what we were told.

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:41Trevor Noah?

  They'd be like, Africa corrupt, so much corruption, so much corruption. And then when I moved to America, I was like, oh, yes, you are right. There is way more corruption in Africa, because we didn't think of calling it lobbying.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:23:53Trevor Noah?

  You are completely correct. You got us on that one. You got us. You know how you get rid of crime? You just stop saying it's a crime. That's the number one way to get rid of crime. You just say it's not a crime, and then now your crime has gone down.

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  I'm more interested in the future use of, um, robots to fill in the gaps. We've spoken about industry, we've spoken about how they can be useful in healthcare.

• 1:24:14Trevor Noah?

  When one shoulder of Eugene goes up, it means sex is on his mind.

• 1:24:20Trevor Noah?

  That's a, that's a tip I'll treat, I'll teach you about my friend. As soon as one shoulder goes up like this, you're like, oh, yeah. Eugene is stepping into the romantic sphere. Oh, yeah, here's Eugene. Sorry, my friend. Maybe I was wrong. Please, ask your question. Ask your question, Eugene.

• 1:24:41Trevor Noah?

  Let me not, let me not, let me not tarnish.

• 1:24:44Speaker 01

  You know what Trevor's like? He's like that friend at the bar. You're talking to a girl and he's like, oh, your wife tried to call you.

• 1:24:52Speaker 00

  He's the opposite of a wingman, the opposite.

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  Oh. He's a tumor man.

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  You're gonna.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  You're gonna tell us about um relationship robots.

• 1:25:16Trevor Noah?

  Is that a big, it's not big, Japan is more big, right?

• 1:25:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, Japan is a big, it's also AI ro, uh so AI boyfriends.

• 1:25:23Trevor Noah?

  Companions, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:24Speaker 00

  It's a big thing. It's happening in China. So this is another thing that's stopping women from, or both sides, but women in particular, because now they have these amazing AI, thoughtful AI boyfriends.

• 1:25:34Trevor Noah?

  Damn it. We're being replaced.

• 1:25:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, replaced by AI boyfriends that would check in with you and know exactly what to say.

• 1:25:40Trevor Noah?

  Damn.

• 1:25:40Speaker 00

  And make you feel good about yourself. Uh that's already happening in China. Yeah.

• 1:25:45Trevor Noah?

  You know what? I I will say this. We we are quick to say that it's a bad thing, but maybe this is the future that we should be living in. A world where everyone has their AI perfect partner and then.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  Men don't want an AI.

• 1:25:57Trevor Noah?

  In order, in order, you speak for yourself. And then all we do is we'll just create like sperm banks and like embryo banks and then people can just have kids. But your AI perfect partner is just there with you.

• 1:26:09Speaker 01

  No, men don't want an AI perfect.

• 1:26:10Trevor Noah?

  Why don't men want an AI perfect?

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  You think we wanna talk some more? You think that's what we wanna be doing?

• 1:26:15Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but your AI partner won't, won't, won't make you talk more. Cause it's a perfect partner. It'll do whatever you want it to do.

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  Then it's not a partner.

• 1:26:23Trevor Noah?

  No, it will be the partner you want it to be. Picture your perfect partner. That's how the AI will be.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, but men want companionship, not partners.

• 1:26:31Trevor Noah?

  It will also be.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  Partnership means we have an equal say in what we're doing, in what we're thinking, in what we're not doing.

• 1:26:36Trevor Noah?

  It can be that as well.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  Companionship means there's something or someone next to you.

• 1:26:40Trevor Noah?

  So I'm glad you said a something because Alice and I will like to introduce you to a little robot that we call Companio Bot.

• 1:26:50Trevor Noah?

  We'll be shipping it to your house, Eugene. And it's got a great, great host of features. It's got a soft outer shell.

• 1:26:57Speaker 01

  One.

• 1:26:58Trevor Noah?

  Right? Uh it's, it's got all the knowledge of you that you need.

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  Two.

• 1:27:02Trevor Noah?

  Uh and most importantly.

• 1:27:03Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:27:04Trevor Noah?

  Uh it knows how to read your shoulder cues.

• 1:27:08Trevor Noah?

  Let me, let me ask you a question. One, one.

• 1:27:14Trevor Noah?

  Because, you know, I, I realize this when talking to an expert like yourself. Sometimes we don't know what questions we should be asking because we don't have the expertise to know what the questions are. What are the questions you think people should be asking about China that they're not asking?

• 1:27:30Speaker 00

  I love that question. I think that people should do that more in general. I would say, especially in the AI realm, talent flows really matter. And I don't think people, because they're in such a haste to focus, this is my other pet peeve, on compute. You know, everyone's saying, oh, US compute is the biggest in the world. We have an advantage in the frontier models. But at the end of the day, what really matters is having top tier AI talent. And the fact that the plurality, and actually in some respects, the majority of top tier AI talent is Chinese nationals in the US.

• 1:28:05Trevor Noah?

  Really?

• 1:28:06Speaker 00

  Is astounding. So thirty eight, nine percent of top tier AI talent in Silicon Valley is Chinese nationals. They're not even American born Chinese. It's Chinese nationals. And thirty eight percent are American born engineers. And then there's the rest of the world. So if you think about that alone, and then you couple that with the fact that China has forty percent of graduates every year in STEM, as opposed to in the US, it's twenty percent of graduates every year is in STEM. Five million of STEM graduates graduate almost every year in China and enter the workforce. I don't think people understand enough how important that just scale, but also the talent of these top tier researchers are for, for AI development, for technological development.

• 1:28:49Speaker 00

  I think that's really understated and does not really capture it in economic models, but super important when we think about innovation in the next frontier.

• 1:28:57Trevor Noah?

  And, and what do you think some of the questions are that we're not asking about? Like China's vision and its demographics and its sort of future plans as a whole beyond the space of AI and technology?

• 1:29:10Speaker 00

  So beyond AI and technology, I think the big question is what is going to happen to, and again, it's tied to to youths, is like, what is going to happen to the Gen Z in China? Because the boomers and the millennials kind of really got to write the coattails of China's economic rise. And in the next couple of years, I believe there will be upwards to five trillion US dollars of intergenerational wealth transfer from the boomers to Gen Z in China. So that's a lot of change that is going to be transferred over. And the question is, how are they going to invest it? What are they going to do with the money? Are they going to decide to work as hard as their parents?

• 1:29:49Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, will it affect their work ethic?

• 1:29:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, are they going to be motivated to get married or not? You know, how are they going to think about their economic development, you know, in a slowing China? I think that is the big question. We haven't figured it out yet because both narratives of like the youth are checked out and mailing it in, but also the youth are really hardworking and excited about AI. Both realities coexist. And then the big question is, which pathway do we take? Like, will Chinese youths and the industry get super excited about AI? And will China be not just a near peer competitor with the US, but a leader? Because maybe it's not just L L Ms that matter. And maybe there are other innovations that that young Chinese people can design.

• 1:30:34Speaker 00

  Because they've already shown, Chinese companies have already shown that they're not just good at iteration, but also good at innovation and making very viral stuff. Like, who would have thought a couple of years ago that the most viral videos and content AI-generated would come out of China?

• 1:30:49Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:50Speaker 00

  From TikTok. No one would have thought that. And that gave birth to a whole rise of content creators and influencers.

• 1:30:57Trevor Noah?

  Damn, it really is going to be exciting.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  Very exciting.

• 1:31:02Trevor Noah?

  It's like, uh, yeah, I mean, we, to see the China that we grew up with.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:31:06Trevor Noah?

  The China that we're living with now.

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  The China that we've been told about.

• 1:31:10Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, the China we've been told about and the China that is. Uh, if we go to China, where should we go first?

• 1:31:16Speaker 00

  I'm super biased, cause I'm from Shanghai.

• 1:31:18Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:31:18Speaker 00

  So you have to go there. It's like the Paris of China.

• 1:31:21Trevor Noah?

  Oh, Shanghai is like the Paris of China.

• 1:31:22Speaker 00

  It's really.

• 1:31:23Trevor Noah?

  People are irritated that you're there when you're not.

• 1:31:25Speaker 00

  Well, they're kind of arrogant. They're arrogant. They think they're the best people in China.

• 1:31:28Trevor Noah?

  Okay, I like that.

• 1:31:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, they like look down on everyone else.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the parent. People are just like, what are you doing here?

• 1:31:33Speaker 00

  They dress better. They, they look down on everyone else in China.

• 1:31:36Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:31:36Speaker 00

  And they just think that they're culturally superior.

• 1:31:38Trevor Noah?

  Okay, cool.

• 1:31:39Speaker 00

  But, but you get the best, I think you get some of the best restaurants. It's super cosmopolitan for a mainland city in China. And there are some areas historically where there's like beautiful, um, art deco, Spanish revival buildings. Cause remember, in the republican era, so the early nineteen hundreds in China, there were a lot of westerners who were living there. They had different concession areas or zones. So there's a French concession zone.

• 1:32:00Trevor Noah?

  Oh, so they could like build their own, they.

• 1:32:02Speaker 00

  Architecture and they did their own thing.

• 1:32:03Trevor Noah?

  It's the opposite of Chinatown, ironically.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, French town.

• 1:32:06Speaker 00

  It's a European, French town, American town, British town.

• 1:32:08Trevor Noah?

  That's wild. That wanna go there.

• 1:32:10Speaker 00

  And where they had their own laws. They had their own laws. So you, they, the Chinese government couldn't interfere with them.

• 1:32:14Trevor Noah?

  Damn.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  Like in Hanoi, it's more French influence, right?

• 1:32:18Speaker 00

  In Vietnam, yeah. And then the other.

• 1:32:19Trevor Noah?

  The French and so it's all these like places in the world where.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  Huh, they have their own laws.

• 1:32:24Speaker 00

  You're the extraterritorial laws in the nineteen hundreds, which is crazy. Yeah. And then the other place I would definitely go, do you like spicy food?

• 1:32:31Trevor Noah?

  Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Do I like spicy food?

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  Finish with your list. I've got my list for Alice.

• 1:32:38Trevor Noah?

  Do I like spicy food?

• 1:32:39Speaker 00

  Does he like spicy food?

• 1:32:39Speaker 01

  Cosmopolitan snobs, yes.

• 1:32:41Speaker 00

  He doesn't like spicy food.

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  No, he does. Does he?

• 1:32:44Speaker 00

  I can't tell.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  You think you got those pink ears by mistake?

• 1:32:47Trevor Noah?

  Do I like spicy? Let me tell you something. If you can find me.

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:32:52Trevor Noah?

  Eugenio always tell me not to call it this, but pig feet. I just call them pig feet. Pig trotters. And Eugene would say pork trotters. Pig feet. Pig feet. Yeah, like, is it, is it, how, am I pronouncing it correct? Is it Hunanese cuisine?

• 1:33:07Speaker 00

  Hunan, yeah, Hunanese, yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:09Trevor Noah?

  Hunanese?

• 1:33:09Speaker 00

  Very spicy.

• 1:33:10Trevor Noah?

  Very spicy. The, the pepper that like makes your mouth feel like it's flipped upside down?

• 1:33:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a good way of describing ma la.

• 1:33:16Trevor Noah?

  That's, that's like-

• 1:33:17Speaker 00

  The Sichuan peppercorns.

• 1:33:18Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, the Sichuanese peppercorn where it like flips everything and then you, you, hot is cold and cold is hot and, and sweet is sour and like, have you ever, have you ever had it? You're dating history.

• 1:33:31Trevor Noah?

  As you can see, I love spicy.

• 1:33:34Speaker 00

  You know in Chinese, like if you, to describe a sexy woman is she's spicy.

• 1:33:38Trevor Noah?

  Oh, look at that, okay, okay.

• 1:33:40Speaker 00

  And women, and women in Sichuan are particularly spicy.

• 1:33:43Trevor Noah?

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 1:33:45Speaker 00

  But I used to go to the panda, if you're not into women, you've got pandas there.

• 1:33:48Trevor Noah?

  Ah, ah, Eugene, I guess your list is now being dealt with. As you see, my list, my list with women was done, Alice moved on to- You see what you've done now? Alice moved on to the panda bears, so sorry, Eugene, you can go with your list. I'm more of a koala guy myself. Furry is furry.

• 1:34:15Trevor Noah?

  Okay, wait, wait, no, no, my, my cities, okay, Shanghai, and then where else should I go?

• 1:34:19Speaker 00

  Um, Chongqing, which is in Sichuan province.

• 1:34:22Trevor Noah?

  Okay, there, I'm gonna get all my spicy food.

• 1:34:24Speaker 00

  And then if you go very close to that is Chengdu, which is also in the same province, that's where the pandas are.

• 1:34:28Trevor Noah?

  Okay, I do love pandas, I can't front.

• 1:34:30Speaker 00

  Amazing, and then I think that, uh-

• 1:34:33Trevor Noah?

  All pandas in the world are owned by China, did you know that? All of them. All of them, there's no panda in the world that is not owned by China. No way. They don't allow anyone to own a panda bear, that you can have it and look after it, sort of lease it from them, but the Chinese government goes, this thing represents us and it is our animal, we're not gonna let you, you're not allowed to breed it anyway, you're not allowed, not that you sort of can, because you know they're notorious for not wanting to, to smash, but, um, so, but panda bears are all owned by the Chinese government, just fun fact, I love panda bears. That's crazy xenophobia. I love panda bears. I really, really love panda, I'll show you my, my WhatsApp, um-

• 1:35:07Speaker 00

  Is it a panda bear?

• 1:35:08Trevor Noah?

  This is, that's my, this is my WhatsApp.

• 1:35:11Speaker 00

  Oh, that's huge.

• 1:35:12Trevor Noah?

  Profile picture.

• 1:35:12Speaker 00

  That's huge.

• 1:35:13Trevor Noah?

  So, I love Panda Biz, but okay, so.

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  That's him early in the morning.

• 1:35:15Trevor Noah?

  Okay, and then one other city?

• 1:35:16Speaker 00

  Um, well, this is might be underrated, cause most people go to Xi'an, Beijing, but I love Yunnan, which is the one I mentioned.

• 1:35:24Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:35:25Speaker 00

  Um, because.

• 1:35:25Speaker 01

  Where they wear linen pants?

• 1:35:26Speaker 00

  Where they wear linen pants and they're super hippie. They have amazing cafes. It's like, it's like the hippie cafe central part of China. Where people, people love just sitting out and having coffee.

• 1:35:37Trevor Noah?

  How long does it take you to get around when you're in China? Like, if, if you, if you're in Shanghai, how, how quick is it to go somewhere else? Are, are we taking the train?

• 1:35:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a high speed. So Shanghai to Beijing high speed is around four and a half hours.

• 1:35:46Trevor Noah?

  Man, that's amazing. How, wow.

• 1:35:48Speaker 01

  And that's with a high speed?

• 1:35:49Speaker 00

  It's a high speed.

• 1:35:49Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but what is that distance, though?

• 1:35:51Speaker 00

  That's huge.

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  How far was it before the high speed?

• 1:35:53Trevor Noah?

  Ah, days, my brother.

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  No wonder Genghis Khan gave up.

• 1:35:59Trevor Noah?

  No, it's days, my man. But, but what is the distance? It's, um.

• 1:36:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:02Speaker 00

  It's, it's hu- I think, I, I don't wanna butcher it, but it's like, it's definitely bigger than New York to Boston.

• 1:36:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, it's way, way further.

• 1:36:10Speaker 00

  It's way more. I think it's more like, I'd need to look it up. I'm not really sure.

• 1:36:14Trevor Noah?

  Hmm. Okay, that's, that's me.

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  That's your list.

• 1:36:16Trevor Noah?

  And, yeah, any questions you have? Any?

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  Alice, if you could, for an intrepid traveler such as myself, and a humanitarian at, at most.

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  Where I could assist the Chinese population.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  The most. Given my, you know, acquired skills over time, where would you?

• 1:36:42Speaker 00

  What are the acquired skills?

• 1:36:43Trevor Noah?

  Eugene wants to know, Eugene wants to know where he can earn fifty thousand dollars. That's, that's what Eugene wants to know.

• 1:36:49Speaker 00

  Oh, you could be, you'd be, like, there are a lot of African influences in China.

• 1:36:52Speaker 01

  Aye.

• 1:36:53Speaker 00

  That, that are doing really, really well.

• 1:36:55Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no. Eugene specifically. Remember you said someone pays fifty thousand dollars for a specific act?

• 1:37:02Speaker 00

  Go and work for Ctrip. He'll pay you fifty thousand dollars per baby.

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  My resignation

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  is now officially intended. See you.

• 1:37:13Trevor Noah?

  Alice, this was amazing. Thank you very much.

• 1:37:15Speaker 00

  Thanks so much.

• 1:37:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I think one of the biggest things you've left us with, and I hope everyone will walk away with this, is take everything you get, not with a grain of salt, but with the understanding that it is limited by the fact that it's not made from the place or by the place. It's not the language of the country. It is not the news of the country. It's not the people of the country, and you've never been there. I even say this as a South African, the amount of times I've had to like correct people's perceptions on South Africa because they have an idea from the media, which most people will have. So, you know, I'm not saying it's a sinister thing that people form is a good reminder, but man, we've got to go to China and just see this for ourselves. Escalators, spicy food, and robots.

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  You'll be walking the talk by being there.

• 1:38:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, no.

• 1:38:03Speaker 01

  And living there now.

• 1:38:04Trevor Noah?

  For sure.

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  Oh, man, all the best.

• 1:38:06Speaker 00

  You guys really should go. Do a comedy show. It's getting popular again in China.

• 1:38:10Trevor Noah?

  You spoke to the wrong guys. We're there. We're there like a panda bear now underwear.

• 1:38:15Speaker 01

  I thought you forgot that rhyme.

• 1:38:18Trevor Noah?

  My friend, there's nothing panda bear related I've ever forgotten, Eugene. Ever.

• 1:38:22Speaker 01

  But the one with the smear?

• 1:38:26Trevor Noah?

  Alice, this was so much fun. Thank you.

• 1:38:27Speaker 00

  It was so fun to be here. Thanks, guys.

• 1:38:29Trevor Noah?

  No, this was great, man. Thank you very much.

• 1:38:33Trevor Noah?

  What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Day Zero Productions in partnership with Sirius XM. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jess Hackel. Rebecca Chain is our producer. Our development researcher is Marcia Robiu. Music, mixing, and mastering by Hannes Brown. Random other stuff by Ryan Harduth. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode of What Now.