The Surprising Similarity Between the US and Chinese Internets

In the 90s, there was a lot of talk about how the Internet would be a liberalizing force in the world. Bill Clinton famously predicted that it would be impossible for China to lock down the Internet, and that this would have profound effects on domestic politics. Of course that didn't come true -- China has done a remarkable job of controlling what gets behind the firewall. But then furthermore, the Internet hasn't had the liberalizing effects in the US either. On this episode of the podcast, we speak to Yi-Ling Liu, the author of the fascinating new book The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. The book traces the rise of the Chinese Internet, and how its users navigate the "dance" between freedom and censorship. She talks about the early visions for the Internet in China, and how over time it became a hotbed of nationalism. We discuss what's similar and different, and also what happens when users in both countries are given the opportunity to easily make contact withe each other on social media. Read more: China AI Hardware Firms Trump Internet Giants in Growth Outlook Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Joe Weisenthal?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Tracy and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis, but sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and need to know what's moving markets and why. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and research get you up to speed on what matters and what to watch next. About the time it takes to grab a coffee, so search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs, and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting

• 1:07Speaker 01

  and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 1:48Speaker 02

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• 2:24Speaker 03

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• 2:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 2:44Tracy Alloway?

  And I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 2:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, you remember how like in the late 90s, like the internet was starting to become a thing? People thought it would bring like liberalism and democracy.

• 2:53Tracy Alloway?

  Utopia.

• 2:54Joe Weisenthal?

  I totally bought into that. Like I, you know, people look back at that and like, oh, they were naive. Like, I don't blame them. Like, I think I bought into that, too.

• 3:01Tracy Alloway?

  I mean, there was something very wholesome about the sort of mid 90s internet culture, where you could go to everyone's like little individual blog and people were mostly talking about their hobbies and things like that. Or at least that was my experience of it, probably colored by the fact that I was in middle school at the time. But it seemed very innocent.

• 3:19Joe Weisenthal?

  It was very cool. It was very decentralized, right? So now we associate the internet with a handful of tech oligarchs that control various kingdoms. Maybe you could even say within the internet, whether it's the meta kingdom or the Amazon kingdom or whatever. But it was very decentralized. Everyone with their own little sites cobbled together and so forth. And I totally bought that idea. It was just like, oh, we're all going to talk to each other. We're going to work things out. And there's no way that authoritarian governments could ever control this. And we will finally realize the true promise of democracy and all that stuff. I totally bought into it.

• 3:53Tracy Alloway?

  Fast forward to 2026. How would you describe the internet now?

• 3:58Joe Weisenthal?

  I mean, the word that always comes to my mind, and there are many words, is just this sort of like sheer like sort of tribalism and conflictualism on every level, right? Nationalism, racism, bigotry, antisemitism, sexism, et cetera. I was just like riven with that. It's riven with conflict and so forth. It's heavily centralized. All of this sort of utopian promise. I'm like, oh, it didn't really pan out that way.

• 4:23Tracy Alloway?

  I would say cesspool.

• 4:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Cesspool is a good one, too.

• 4:26Tracy Alloway?

  You have to try really, really hard nowadays to find like good and useful corners of the internet. And I'm not saying that. They're not out there, but it is interesting how far we've deviated from that initial utopian premise of the internet. The other thing that's happening, we're recording this on, let's see, January 27th. What's interesting is that we're starting to have even more discussion about the power of the platform.

• 4:52Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 4:52Tracy Alloway?

  So over the weekend, there have been some allegations that TikTok, for instance,

• 4:56Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 4:56Tracy Alloway?

  is censoring Minneapolis video or video of the Minneapolis shooting. And that's just after the new ownership.

• 5:04Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 5:05Tracy Alloway?

  Took control of the platform, right? So they spun off the US business and now it has all these new owners and people are starting to talk about, well, maybe they're censoring, or even if they're not directly censoring some stuff, maybe the algorithm is influencing what people see.

• 5:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Totally. And then there's one other dimension before we get into the conversation that I think is very important here, which is that the internet is splintering geographically, right? So we've known for a long time, of course, people talk about the firewall in China and the Chinese internet, but it's not just China, right? We see the UK establishing its own rules and we see Australia establishing its own rules. We saw the thing a couple of years ago with Brazil temporarily banning Twitter, et cetera. And so there's all these sort of intermingling of digital platforms and national sovereignty. And I really do believe to some extent that a lot of the leaders around the world are looking at China in a seemingly more controlled internet, like with jealousy, right?

• 6:03Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:04Joe Weisenthal?

  And they're saying, oh, we would love to like have this level of control over our sort of town square, et cetera. And, you know, some countries have the first amendment, so that makes it very tough, et cetera. But it really feels like there are so many aspects of the internet that are sort of not panning out. And people are like, we want to constrict what people can see. We want to tighten the algorithms. We want to curb some kind of discourse, et cetera. And I think this is going to be one of the biggest stories of our time.

• 6:30Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah. With China specifically, there's still a big question, which is whether or not the censorship of the internet basically allows it to act as a sort of like safety valve that lets people, you know, blow off some steam, but not enough. Steam to actually threaten the regime over there, or whether it's actually a tool or could be a tool of social change.

• 6:52Joe Weisenthal?

  Totally.

• 6:53Tracy Alloway?

  Because people are, to some extent, allowed to say some stuff. I think that question is like, still kind of unanswered.

• 6:59Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, I'm very excited to say we really do have the perfect guest. Someone who has written a fascinating new book all about the Chinese internet. We're going to be speaking with Yiling Liu. She is the author of the new book, The Wall Dancers. Thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

• 7:14Speaker 05

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 7:15Joe Weisenthal?

  What is this book and why is it called The Wall Dancers?

• 7:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, so The Wall Dancers, the phrase comes from this term in Chinese, which is called dancing in shackles. And it was first used in the early 2000s by journalists to describe what it means to like, write and report under state constraints. But slowly became viral as a term that was used by, I've seen like, software engineers use it, musicians use it, science fiction writers use it. And it really resonated with me, this idea of the dance, because it captured this idea that to live and navigate Chinese society is a dance. It's this dynamic push and pull between state and society. It means living in this place that's, on one hand, rich with innovation,

• 8:02Speaker 05

  and yet, on the other hand, rigidly constrained. And I came to see that this dance was most dynamic on the internet, what we know as the space behind the Great Firewall. And the people that I thought were really good and adept at navigating this terrain, I came to know them and called them dancers.

• 8:23Tracy Alloway?

  So this was the really interesting thing about your book and the reason we wanted to talk to you. You tell this story of the Chinese internet through the perspective of individuals, rather than, say, the internet platforms that have come to dominate the space, or even from a sort of state-centric point of view. What do you get out of interviewing or following individuals versus taking that other approach, which, you know, there are plenty of books out there about the rise of Weibo and stuff like that.

• 8:53Speaker 05

  I think my main, the main reason behind this choice was if you look at Western news headlines or headlines in general about China and Chinese technology, it almost always falls under one of two binaries. It's reduced to very simple terms. One is China, the kind of sprawling economic juggernaut that's building humanoids and high-speed rail and it's a place of boundless opportunity. And then you have the techno-authoritarian oppressive regime where mindless people have no agency of their own. And I think the big issue here is that the Chinese internet is always framed through and seen through the lens of American national security and economic interests. And I wanted to force people out of these

• 9:38Speaker 05

  tropes. And the way to see China and the Chinese internet in all its complexity and contradictions is through people and through individual lives.

• 9:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, you start the book by telling the story of a gay man who is able through the internet to build community, find people eventually at a time when, of course, there was extreme repression, homosexuality was, I think, illegal at the time. Again, this seems, both in China and the US, what probably a lot of people were very hopeful for with the internet, this idea that, oh, people are going to be able to find community, like-minded individuals, find acceptance in these digital spaces. And I suppose in many cases, since this happened, but it is interesting how, in both the global context and the Chinese specific context, there were similar stories being told, there were similar hopes.

• 10:30Speaker 05

  Definitely. I think of the story of the internet in China, at least, as a romance. But I'm realizing, as you discussed earlier, the story of the global internet was also a romance. The story of the World Wide Web was also a romance. I certainly bought into the narrative that you bought into. I thought we were on this teleological arc towards liberalization. And I think a lot of people bought into that narrative, this idea that the Chinese internet, despite the fact that the firewall existed very early, was going to push people towards greater openness, greater freedom, greater connection, and it would just keep going on from there and there.

• 11:07Tracy Alloway?

  So talk to us about what is and isn't allowed on the Chinese internet then, because as you say, it's more nuanced than just outright censorship in many ways. Although sometimes it is just outright censorship and you can't say a specific word like Tiananmen or something like that. And I remember actually, now that I'm thinking about it, in the early 2000s, when I was in Beijing, the censorship was very obvious. Certain sites were just outright blocked. On TV, you'd be watching CNN and suddenly it would go black during a news story or you'd get newspapers delivered to you that had literally physical sentences crossed out with a black marker. But what is and isn't allowed?

• 11:51Speaker 05

  I will start off by saying that if I could answer that question really accurately, I would be a very rich woman right now. I think the reason being the censorship ecosystem thrives off vagueness. The fact that it's vague, the fact that there are no red lines is what allows it to function so effectively. I will say that it's changed quite dramatically over the last few decades, especially since you were last there, Tracy. So back in the day, I would say the lines were much clearer. A lot of people would say things like no Tiananmen, no Tibet, no Taiwan. They would call them the three Ts. So censorship back then was very much allowed about dissent against the government,

• 12:32Speaker 05

  criticism of the government, but most importantly, anything that would provoke collective action. So if there was news of a protest or news of people gathering or any type of unease that might boil into something bigger and bring people together into a physical town square, that got censored. But over the years, I would say particularly in the mid 2010s, that's come to encompass also anything that veers from the party's ideological agenda. So this is where you have statements coming out saying, "We don't want unhealthy marital values appearing on the internet." Like, we don't want, I think recently in 2021, "sissy boys" got added to things that needed to be taken down the internet.

• 13:13Tracy Alloway?

  No sissies allowed. I'm imagining like a hand drawn sign on a treehouse or something.

• 13:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, and you know, like, everything that comes, you know, everything that's part of its ideological agenda is now scrubbed off. And another thing that I add on there is like, the excessive flaunting of wealth. You know, that's something that's new. That used to be all over the internet back in the day.

• 13:34Joe Weisenthal?

  We need that here. It's driving people crazy. Because they look on Instagram, and I remember being, you know, during COVID, and I was like, in my house, and seeing like, all these people like flying around, I got very resentful. What about criticisms of the government, but not from an ideological perspective, per se? Because sometimes you read a story like, someone will have gotten hit by a train or a car, and maybe the police like didn't do an investigation, you see this big uproar. Talk to us about what's allowed, and how they, how the managers of the firewall, or managers of the rules, not the firewall, per se, think about these incidents, like, just, yeah, criticism of government handling of things.

• 14:16Speaker 05

  Again, like, I can't say with, you know, definitively, what's taken down and what's not taken down. I would veer on saying that whenever there's any criticism of any kind of local official, local government, that's technically looked on with great caution and taken down. But how it actually works behind the scenes is that some higher level top regulator say that the Chinese Cyberspace Administration, the CIC, will write a directive. So, maybe there's local corruption in some county, and news starts spilling out. And whoever is part of that regulatory committee will be writing a directive that says, hey, downplay

• 14:57Speaker 05

  this. Let's not have this appear on Weibo. That will then get passed on to Weibo censors, who then start scrubbing that off their news feed. Or it happens the other way, where Weibo's censors aren't even receiving that directive, but kind of proactively, like a student who is really nervous about upsetting their teacher in advance, will just go and scrub that off, even before receiving that directive.

• 15:22Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, interesting. So self censorship, basically?

• 15:24Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 15:25Tracy Alloway?

  So how labor intensive is the censorship process nowadays? Because, you know, I imagine, as you said, directives get made and someone has to enact them. But on the other hand, so much of the internet nowadays is ruled by algos and, most recently, AI. You could just, you know, design an algorithm that always downplays political scandal or something like that.

• 15:50Speaker 05

  I would say hugely labor intensive.

• 15:53Tracy Alloway?

  Armies of Wu Mao? That's what they're called, right?

• 15:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, so that specifically refers to the 50 Cent Army, Wu Mao. But that specifically refers to not necessarily state-sponsored actors or not necessarily state-paid individuals, but people who are kind of pumping patriotic content.

• 16:10Tracy Alloway?

  Hobbyist nationalists.

• 16:11Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly. So, you know, there's actually not too much of a difference between the Wu Mao and maybe some of the patriotic trolls and incels that you see on X today, right? To what extent is, are some of the people who are posting like pro-Trump propaganda on Twitter essentially the same as Wu Mao? There's this dynamic called flooding, which refers to when incels or a particular group of online individuals are pumping just content onto a news feed to try to get rid of news that they don't want people to look at. And that takes place in China all the time. But I think that's different from actual employees who work at places like Weibo or

• 16:56Speaker 05

  Douyin, who are just spending every single day deleting stuff off the web. And, you know, when I interviewed, actually, for the book, A Censor for Weibo, and he started working there in 2011, I think he was one of 150 employees. This was right when Weibo was founded. And he said, you know, by 2020, he had left already, there were probably like 10,000.

• 17:19Tracy Alloway?

  Wow.

• 17:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:35Joe Weisenthal?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Tracy and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis, but sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and need to know what's moving markets and why. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and research get you up to speed on what matters and what to watch next. About the time it takes to grab a coffee. So search Barclays Brief wherever you get your podcasts.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  But according to recruiters, advisors and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 19:24Joe Weisenthal?

  I mean, this is sort of what I was struck by reading your book, which is that, you know, you talk about these people who are, maybe they're bots, maybe they're paid, maybe they're just naturally impelled to join a mob and want to flood something. But some of these patterns do not seem distinct to China. It's almost like they're endemic to the internet itself, regardless of what the official rules are.

• 19:52Speaker 05

  Absolutely, right? We have no sense of whether or not these are kind of homegrown grassroots patriotic flames that are just amplified. And, you know, when I say that, doesn't that sound very similar to what's taking place on the American internet? I forget the name of that one American Twitter influencer who's kind of been talked about as Trump's right-hand woman. Do you know who I'm talking about?

• 20:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Laura Loomer?

• 20:17Speaker 05

  Yes, Laura Loomer. Really, isn't there like-

• 20:19Tracy Alloway?

  I was gonna say, you have to be more specific, because there's quite a few nowadays.

• 20:23Speaker 05

  But yeah, Laura Loomer, you know, when we read news articles on her, it's, is she being paid out, is she not being paid out? And, you know, that very much reminds me of the dynamic with a lot of Chinese patriotic influencers, like, they very much earnestly hold the views that they're sharing, but is there a cut being taken by amplifying those views and supporting those views?

• 20:43Tracy Alloway?

  Since we've mentioned Weibo a couple of times now, and, you know, you just gave us that anecdote about the number of censors they had, and they have experienced phenomenal growth. One thing I never understood about Weibo is the kind of origin story, because my understanding is they were basically born out of censorship. So there was unrest in a room, Chi, I think it was. And so a bunch of existing internet platforms either got, you know, repressed or taken down completely. And then the founder of Weibo was like, I know, this is an opportunity for me to get in and start my own platform. I never understood that mindset. What was it that he thought he could do that other platforms had failed to do?

• 21:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, so Weibo actually means little blog or microblog. And Weibo is shorthand for Sino Weibo, which is the full company's name. But before 2009, honestly, before 2011, there were many, many Weboas. There were dozens of companies that were all trying to be microblogging platforms. So there was a platform called Fanfu. There was a whole bunch. There was a platform called Renren, which was not really a microblogging platform. It's kind of like a Chinese Facebook, so to say, back in the day. People, people, right? Exactly, exactly. And the founder of Sino Weibo actually founded what is now known as Weibo in 2009. And he did essentially the same thing as all these other companies.

• 22:11Speaker 05

  He just did a better job of censoring. That's really what happened. As you mentioned, during the protests in Urumqi in 2009, he just did a much better job of scrubbing information off the Weibo feed in the time and didn't get shut down, or all of these other companies got shut down.

• 22:30Joe Weisenthal?

  It's interesting, hearing you describe. We did an episode, actually it was last March, with Kaiser Quo of the Sinica Podcast. We were talking a little bit about how Chinese policymaking works and this idea of this sort of decentralized, centralized, like KPIs, right? So Beijing will put, this was in the industrial policy context. Beijing says, we want more solar production or more electric vehicle production. And then all the provincial leaders figure out what that means in the context of their region and then work quasi-autonomously to satisfy that. It sounds similar to some extent with the rules around censorship, especially when you describe some of that preemptive self-censorship of everyone trying to figure out the right level or approach that is consistent with the broader level mandate.

• 23:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, that's a really good point and definitely a parallel that I would draw. You know, for example, if they were to release industrial policy, a tech company CEO will then like read that policy very carefully and be like, okay, how can we align our company's direction with the rhetoric of this policy directive? The same goes with censorship, you know? So one of the subjects that I profile is the CEO or was the CEO of this game. Dating app blewed. And so if they release a censorship directive saying we don't want sissy boys on our platform, he's going to go and look very carefully at the platform and see how are we going to make sure there are no sissy boys on our app. Right. And so there is definitely

• 23:55Speaker 05

  this sense of, I don't know if you have read Harry Potter.

• 24:00Joe Weisenthal?

  I never did.

• 24:00Tracy Alloway?

  I did. Did you not?

• 24:02Joe Weisenthal?

  I never did. I never did. But Tracy will get it. Ninety nine percent of our listeners will get it. So feel free to use the analogy. It'll go over my head.

• 24:10Speaker 05

  This analogy really hit at home for me, but you remember Dolores Umbridge?

• 24:14Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah. Oh, she was creepy.

• 24:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. You remember how she would like post these decrees and then all of the, and she would just post them on the wall and then they would be kind of vague and then students would freak out and scramble and, you know, people like Malfoy would aggressively over interpret and that, I think that's the dynamic.

• 24:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 24:34Tracy Alloway?

  I think this is an under appreciated point sometimes, but like the vagueness in the decrees is done on purpose. Right. It's so that like, you're never really sure what is and isn't allowed. And so you do start self censoring and also, you know, if the government wants to go after you, they can do it because the rule is purposefully vague.

• 24:55Speaker 05

  Yeah. And it also means that like each of these companies have these huge keyword databases of censored words and those are extremely valuable. They're like proprietary assets where, you know, they, that is how they keep their company alive essentially. Right. If you have a better keyword database than the company down the road, you're going to have a better chance of surviving.

• 25:20Tracy Alloway?

  So just on the keywords, this is one of the most fascinating things about the Chinese internet. And I think a lot of people know about it at this point, but you know, internet users are very creative in bypassing the censors. So they're always coming up with codes, some of which sound very funny if you don't know the context, like, isn't there one horse mud, horse mud or mud grass horse or something, fighting a crab?

• 25:44Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 25:45Tracy Alloway?

  Winnie the Pooh. Yeah, there we go. Winnie the Pooh would be the obvious one. This is sort of tangential, but do you think that, I guess, do you think that kind of creativity or like code wording? Do you think that's related to the Chinese language itself and the fact that a lot of the words are very literal and also you have a lot of homonyms?

• 26:06Speaker 05

  Definitely, like a huge part of it is like each character can have multiple meanings. So for example, the most famous one that you mentioned that emerged as early as the early 2000s was this idea of the grass mud horse, right? And so grass mud horse in Chinese is cao ni ma. And just depending on the tones, you shift the tones, it becomes cao ni ma, which means basically [BLEEP] your mom. And so, you know, it became this like rally, because ironic rallying cry, pushing back against, you know, authorities who are being, who are overstepping their bounds. But it's funny and punny at the same time.

• 26:45Joe Weisenthal?

  I do think even like on Twitter, you see certain communities, particular more extremist ones, like you see their esoteric communications and you see their code words. But it does seem like especially with the prevalence of very subtle homonyms, et cetera, the creativity for esoteric expression probably gets taken to a whole new level.

• 27:05Speaker 05

  Definitely, definitely. Though, an interesting dynamic that I'm now seeing is that a lot of the terms that are being used on the Chinese internet are actually, you know, echoing a lot of the sentiment that, of the terms that are being used in the American internet.

• 27:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Say more.

• 27:19Speaker 05

  So, one term that I've noticed come up, it's not hugely viral in either place yet, is this idea of the NPC.

• 27:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, or the non-player character. And I didn't realize this was like resonating on both sides.

• 27:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 27:32Tracy Alloway?

  That's interesting.

• 27:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Do you know that one, the big chess party, or are you familiar with that term? Or the 3D chess party or something like that?

• 27:40Speaker 05

  I'm not sure.

• 27:41Joe Weisenthal?

  There's one I like that I saw that I started using, which is people who are so defensive of the leadership that every, everything they say is like, no, no, you don't get it. They're playing 5D chess. So you don't get it. And so I think they, the term was a big chess party or something like that. I think we need to, we need to start incorporating that more.

• 27:59Speaker 05

  That's a good one.

• 28:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it's a fun one.

• 28:00Tracy Alloway?

  But actually, on this note, how difficult is it to keep track of all the different code words or to learn the new code words? Because, you know, on the one hand, if you're saying Winnie the Pooh instead of Xi Jinping or something like that, it allows you to perhaps bypass censorship. But on the other hand, if you're talking in code constantly... I imagine it means some people like just aren't getting the message. It's not resonating with a certain sector of society. So how difficult is it and what are the pros and cons of having to keep up with all these keywords constantly?

• 28:37Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I mean, it's hugely difficult. It just means that these words become more and more obscure. You know, I'm someone who has made a career out of studying the Chinese internet and I'll often read social media posts and have no idea what's going on. And their entire teams, there's actually this excellent team called China Digital Times, nonprofit organization that literally study this.

• 28:57Tracy Alloway?

  They have a lexicon.

• 28:58Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly. And I have to consult that because sometimes I'm reading stuff and I have no idea what it's referring to.

• 29:04Joe Weisenthal?

  I want to get into more this sort of like, especially like how an American or internationally we might learn more generally about what's going on in the Chinese internet. But before we get to that, I want to ask, there is this trope or this thing that gets repeated a lot, and you heard it a lot in the TikTok debates, and it smacks of a certain racism or exoticism or orientalism, et cetera, where people say, oh, on American TikTok, they're all like, it's all a bunch of garbage and rage bait and slop. But on the equivalent in China, it's they're learning mathematics and learning how to play violin and all these sort of stereotypical things. Can you talk to us just a little bit about like, how similar or dissimilar do these

• 29:48Joe Weisenthal?

  platforms feel from a sort of day-to-day content standpoint, setting aside sensitivities about politics?

• 29:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I'm like kind of torn about that statement. Because on one hand, it kind of like glorifies, I mean, depending on who you're looking, who's saying those statements, right? You're either glorifying and kind of like projecting a lot onto the Chinese internet. It really reveals more about, I would say, like, American conservative anxiety about what's appearing on their own internet and projections. Because the Chinese internet is full of like crazy slop, too.

• 30:20Joe Weisenthal?

  But this is what I'm like, yeah, my assumption is that the gap is like massively overstated, but I've never, you know, consumed whatever the Chinese version, the original TikTok is. So I just have no sense like how real these stereotypes are, whatever.

• 30:33Speaker 05

  Exactly, like when a young student, you know, in China is just like scrolling through Douyin, they're not just getting wonderful math content. It's gonna like help them excel at school. But what I will say is that definitely within the Chinese censorship context, there is this emphasis on what the party likes to call positive energy. Okay. So it is definitely much more sanitized than American social media platforms. Like, you are not going to see quote unquote unhealthy marital values. Or like that is taken down, right? And so while on one hand, I don't want to say like they're completely different, they definitely are different in terms of, you know, what appears there and what doesn't.

• 31:13Tracy Alloway?

  Since you mentioned students, have we seen any efforts by the party to, I guess, crack down on internet use in general? And I'm thinking back to, you know, the video game crackdown where there was, you know, a censor, a directive that kids were spending too much time playing video games and they should be learning important and useful things. Do you see a similar attitude towards the internet, just out of curiosity?

• 31:39Speaker 05

  Not as much, but I would say the video game piece is the one that, you know, comes to mind when you bring it up. I think the issue being the internet is just such a vital part of daily operation and just getting around, like you can't really tell a young person to get off WeChat if that's both how he communicates with his mom and his teacher, you know, and to buy basic goods. But you can say, well, let's get rid of video games for X amount of hours every weekday because that's clearly a net debt.

• 32:30Speaker 01

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• 34:23Joe Weisenthal?

  If I spoke Chinese, could I open up a Weibo account from here? Would it be easy to just start joining and posting with everyone?

• 34:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, definitely.

• 34:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Talk to us about, I should do that. That's a good reason to learn Chinese. Which is one of my 2026 goals, is to start taking lessons, so we'll see.

• 34:39Speaker 05

  Good luck, good luck.

• 34:40Joe Weisenthal?

  Thank you, thank you. Talk to us about that five-minute period in history in which TikTok was banned in the United States and suddenly there was a flood of American users to that other app, Red Note, or something like that. I forget what it was called. Well, talk to us about that experience and whether anything interesting emerged from that. There was 10 days where that happened or whatever.

• 35:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was incredible moment. I remember it very clearly. But essentially, there was news, impending news that TikTok would get banned in the US and all these TikTok users.

• 35:13Joe Weisenthal?

  It was banned for like a day.

• 35:13Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 35:13Joe Weisenthal?

  It was one day, it wasn't accessible, yeah.

• 35:15Speaker 05

  But in the, in lead up to that, TikTok users were freaking out. And they essentially, I think millions of American TikTok users started to flood Red Note, or as it's known in China, Xiaohongshu, which is, you know, people call it China's Instagram, but that's not quite the right equivalent. It's almost this Instagram meets Pinterest meets Yelp type social media platform, mostly used by young urban women. It has a slightly more liberal bent to like catch up on lifestyle news. Now it's all kinds of news. But I was both, on one hand, struck by the irony of the situation, you know, that the American internet had somehow become so closed and siloed and controlled

• 35:59Speaker 05

  that the way to escape it was to then jump to arguably the most oppressive.

• 36:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Because it was sort of like, it was sort of like a reverse Berlin Wall moment in which the West, the West Germans were the ones flooding into the other side after this, uh, I don't know, something like that. It was very, yeah.

• 36:17Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 36:17Joe Weisenthal?

  It is irony.

• 36:18Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 36:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Isn't it?

• 36:19Speaker 05

  Right, it's like.

• 36:19Joe Weisenthal?

  We were the ones that had the restriction placed on us in America. And so then suddenly like we spill up, find a new hole in the wall to spill over onto the other side.

• 36:27Speaker 05

  Exactly. Which is why they were, you know, like I think American users were looking for their Chinese spies, kind of ironically, and Chinese users were teaching them how to get around Red Note censors. But I think like, key to that was just like, I felt a lot of delight from that moment because it was the first time there was this like really sincere and earnest exchange between users on both sides of the internet. And I hadn't felt that and seen that in years, if not decades.

• 36:56Tracy Alloway?

  So, one of the debates that's constantly ongoing when it comes to TikTok is what the algorithm is doing and what content it's actually surfacing. What are the like parallels with, I guess, censorship in China? Or where do you see key differences in terms of what the algo can do to influence the general population?

• 37:18Speaker 05

  So you mean like between the algorithm in China and the algorithm in the US? I would say that, you know, the algorithm, it's always really hard to say to what extent the algorithm is playing a role in censorship, censorship of the content, right? And I think that's one of the big issues or the big criticisms that's playing out right now with this TikTok sale. Even though vast majority of the ownership is American, the algorithm is still owned by ByteDance. So to what extent does ByteDance still have influence over what American users are seeing? That's up to question. I think the difference is in China, there's just a lot more tools externally to kind of control what happens after that.

• 38:01Speaker 05

  It doesn't matter how the algorithm is dictating what appears on the feeds. You know, there are still content moderators who can come in and deal with the content that is posted online after, you know, it's already posted.

• 38:16Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, I feel like I need to make a public service announcement.

• 38:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Go on.

• 38:20Tracy Alloway?

  Actually, a public service announcement recognizing someone for their public service, which is Sam Rowe.

• 38:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:26Tracy Alloway?

  Who does the dirty work of trawling through TikTok on a daily basis.

• 38:31Joe Weisenthal?

  And finding the only good ones?

• 38:32Tracy Alloway?

  And then crossposting the good videos onto Instagram for everyone who doesn't actually have TikTok like me.

• 38:38Joe Weisenthal?

  People should follow him.

• 38:39Tracy Alloway?

  Genuinely a public service.

• 38:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Genuinely. I want to go back to this sort of, kind of where we started at the beginning, but I think it's a question of some pretty significant stakes. You know, you talk about the rise of this sort of like very nationalistic impulse that you see on the Chinese internet these days, which again, very similar to here. And I would say, and many people would agree, that if you look at the US government right now, you're like, the pathologies, the dysfunctions, et cetera, it's like almost downstream. The internet has shaped the US government in many respects. Max Reed, who we've had on the podcast, who has a really good newsletter, talked about how it's like the comment section is one. And all of the people who are in power in the US government are the people who like 10 years ago were angry

• 39:25Joe Weisenthal?

  about having been banned from the comment section. And now they have the last laugh on everyone else because now they hold the levers of power. Talk to us about the emergence of the sort of strong nationalistic undercurrent on the Chinese internet. When did that like start to emerge? And how does that sort of like reinforce the political direction of travel within Chinese politics?

• 39:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, I would say similar to what has happened in the US. That patriotic undertone has always been there as early as like the pre-internet period of like the eighties and nineties of people who, you know, perhaps were speaking of a patriotic China in a more liberal sense. They wanted strong man rule. They didn't want, you know, a lot of the leftists in China, as we think about them in China and not in the US, wanted, you know, China not to be kind of swept up by liberal influence and needed a strong state to be in charge of the economy. But I would say similar to the US, that nationalist voice was very fringe. It was niche. It was kind of seen as radical. So, you know, as

• 40:32Speaker 05

  early as 2008, for example, there were, as you mentioned, like the 50 cent army, but also what was known as like angry youths or feng sheng. So 2008 was like a hugely pivotal moment for China in that the country was stepping onto the world on the global stage as this international presence and it wanted to present itself as super liberal. But at the time, there were these like very angry youths who were online and being like, look at how China is being presented by CNN. We're being kind of smeared by Westerners. But they were small. I would say today, the Chinese internet is largely fencing. They're no longer

• 41:14Speaker 05

  called that. But, you know, I would say in 2016, there's an emergence of what we now call little pinks or xiaofenghong. And it's like you merged the fencing or you merged the patriot with the stan or the online fan where, you know, like

• 41:32Tracy Alloway?

  A softer nationalism?

• 41:34Speaker 05

  Exactly. Or not even softer, but they use the tactics of online fandom. So, you know, like they use the same tactics of like a group of Justin Bieber fans would do to take down Justin Bieber's nemesis where, except they're doing that with maybe like Taingwen, who's the, who was the leader of Taiwan. And so I would say there's this like fusion of

• 42:00Speaker 05

  Online internet celebrity culture with online patriotism. And you know, it's not so much different from like the Reddit itself.

• 42:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it feels very similar. I just want to, just to go down this road a little bit further. Last year, I read Kevin Rudd's book about Xi Jinping. And one of the points that he makes, you know, a lot of people think of, okay, Xi gets into power and then sort of takes this nationalist turn. And he makes the point that actually the sort of more nationalist turn in Chinese politics, some of the anti-liberal started under the late Hu Jintao years, which makes me again wonder whether there was this brewing force partly cultivated by the internet that was started, you know, that rather than, okay, Xi Jinping comes in and presses the button and turns the internet in a more nationalist direction, that this was already an emerging

• 42:50Joe Weisenthal?

  thing and helps explain Xi Jinping's durability and ability to consolidate power and so forth, that there's this sort of, that it's a bottom up phenomenon as much as it is a top down thing.

• 43:01Speaker 05

  Absolutely. And this is why I keep coming back to 2008 as this huge turning point. And Kaiser, who's one of your guests, has made this point a few times, which is, you know, in 2008, I think the big thing that happened at the time was A, the Beijing Olympics, and B, the financial crisis. So at this moment, when, you know, Chinese people were standing up and for the first time, a lot of like the great firewalls was getting taken down. So a lot of Chinese internet users in Beijing could see the news for the first time. They were seeing two things. They were seeing CNN, you know, posting news about the Tibet protests and not covering the Olympics. And they're also seeing eventually news of the financial crisis.

• 43:44Speaker 05

  So there was this sense of like, well, you know, we expected to engage with the outside world and instead the West is criticizing China and can't get its own ship in order. And so there is a sense both among kind of ordinary people of this growing patriotism, but also the leadership itself, because they were thinking, well, maybe liberalization is not the way. To go, right? Maybe like liberalization leads to unruly financial markets and we need to steer the ship in a different direction. And so we see both kind of a nationalistic turn, but also in a liberal turn. And that very much precedes Xi Jinping's rise to power.

• 44:26Tracy Alloway?

  Hmm. I think people forget what a huge moment the 2008 Olympics actually were, like actually physically changed Beijing and then also changed a lot of Chinese society. But I'm still, I'm still annoyed that they got rid of all the fake DVD stores because those were fun. Anyway, we have to get in an AI question. So with the advent of AI, a lot of the technology which is coming out of China is very impressive. Does censorship become easier?

• 44:58Speaker 05

  I would say yes. I mean, AI has always been, or it has been long used in Chinese censorship capacity, not just with the advent of generative AI. So, you know, the censor that I interviewed, he said that, you know, before he even goes in and looks at what's being taken down a, you know, automated process first flags all of the sensitive words. I imagine that just makes that process significantly easier.

• 45:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Is there any way to gauge sort of public opinion about the internet or like, because I think there are a lot of people in the US again, who would say like, yes, this would be great. I would love to make rage bait illegal. I would love it if people weren't flaunting their wealth. I would love it if there were not pornography easily available on the internet, et cetera. I think a lot of people hear this and it's like, yeah, sounds pretty good. Is the, is there discontent with the state of moderation? Is there discontent with some of the restrictions? Is there no like, is there a way to like gauge some of these questions?

• 46:00Speaker 05

  There's certainly discontent, but I think it's just very hard to gauge

• 46:03Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 46:04Speaker 05

  public opinion in China in general. I would say broadly speaking, there is like embrace of technological change and embrace of technological progress that's more elevated in China than in the US. But, you know, there are people who are unhappy with the censorship regime and people who Having those controls. I will say at the heart of that kind of debate or that envy is just like, what are the governance mechanisms that we can put in place at this moment with AI? Right? I think everyone's freaking out about this uncontrollable new technology. And China, at the very least, seems to have a governance mechanism in place. So, for example, there is a algorithm registry where essentially every single company

• 46:47Speaker 05

  that has an AI tool needs to submit their algorithm to authorities. And that is then listed in a public registry and no equivalent of that exists in the US. And that's actually, I think, you know, that's actually a pretty interesting form of governance and maybe something that other countries can learn from.

• 47:07Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, I mean, people have criticized algos here for being essentially black boxes.

• 47:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 47:12Tracy Alloway?

  Just coming, I guess, full circle back to our intro. The surprising thing here is, you know, the US and the Chinese internet have followed a very similar evolution despite very different governance regimes. So I think to some extent, you could imagine, all right, Chinese internet heavily censored. Obviously, there's going to be a surge of nationalism, right? Whereas in the US, I guess maybe it's more surprising. But what's your overarching thesis for why we sort of ended up in the same place despite having very different systems?

• 47:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I would say first, we were pretty naive about the fact that technology even moves in the direction of freedom, right? That's kind of like based on the assumption.

• 48:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 48:05Speaker 05

  That's just the direction that we're going to go in. I would say probably my overarching thesis is that we've allowed too much of technology to be centralized within the hands of a few people. And it doesn't matter, you know, the US and American systems, people often talk about the differences, but actually they're remarkably similar. It doesn't matter if it is government that has centralized its, you know, the power of technology in its hands, or as you mentioned, like a handful of tech oligarchs, right? At the end of the day. How different is Elon Musk's control over X or Twitter different from, you know, the Chinese government's control of Weibo? The whims of one man essentially dictates the way a platform plays out.

• 48:50Speaker 05

  And I think that's the key problem is that we've taken this like decentralized technology and made it highly centralized. And it doesn't matter under what political system that actually takes place.

• 49:02Joe Weisenthal?

  One thing that I think anyone who, again, the word that always pops into my head is sort of the tribalizing effect of the internet. People start to, they hate each other. They start to hate people who aren't exactly like them. Are there cleavages within Chinese society that are deepening or widening because of everyone in the mix together? Are there sort of demographic aspects or whatever in which you could see these sort of team tensions build and sort of domestic stability? Because I think you see that all the time on the American internet.

• 49:38Speaker 05

  I think the biggest cleavage that I've observed is just along the lines of wealth and inequality. And that's like another parallel that I'm seeing today. And the biggest parallel that I see is between those who are building the new technologies and those who are using and being used by it. So, you know, funnily enough, when I visit China, I have a very similar experience of when I visit Silicon Valley, where everyone who is talking about or building or investing in these new AI tools are really hyped. Or, you know, like there, there's like an occasional doomer in the mix, but they're very excited about it.

• 50:16Joe Weisenthal?

  They're still working to build it.

• 50:17Speaker 05

  Exactly. Like, there's a sense of agency. There's a sense of competition, like we are the builders and makers of the future. Whereas when you talk to just anyone who is just using the technology is not aware of how it's built or involved in that process, there's this kind of deep sense of pessimism or a lack of agency, you know, which brings me back to this like NPC meme. There's a sense of, well, I don't actually have a role in this process. Like, I'm a non-player character and, you know, I have no say. And so that actually is the biggest cleavage that I'm seeing, both in China and in the US.

• 50:54Joe Weisenthal?

  All right, Yiling Liu, author of The Wall Dancers. Congratulations. Phenomenal book, and I really appreciate you coming on Outlaws.

• 51:00Speaker 05

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 51:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, I really enjoyed that conversation a lot, and it really was not until...

• 51:19Tracy Alloway?

  I know you like talking about the internet, Joe.

• 51:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I love talking about the internet. I love the internet, even though it is, to your words, and I would agree, in many respects, a cesspool. But thinking about how similar the American and Chinese internets are, despite ostensibly being very different in the legal sense, is like probably one of the more fascinating threads I've thought about in a while, I think.

• 51:41Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, I was thinking during that conversation, I was gonna ask what's scarier, an army of little pinks coming after you, or an army of K-pop fans? And it's sort of a facetious question, but on the other hand, it highlights this point, right, which is the internet and the way people behave on the internet has been remarkably similar across geographies. It doesn't really matter like what group you're in.

• 52:06Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I think that's 100% correct. And, you know, again, the K-pop stand as their own tribe, probably one of the less harmful ones, right? Like probably like...

• 52:17Tracy Alloway?

  They are vicious when they want to be, Joe.

• 52:19Joe Weisenthal?

  I never, right. I actually, I think I tweeted about K-pop once, and I was like, I'm gonna mute this.

• 52:23Tracy Alloway?

  Never again.

• 52:24Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm muting this thread right away. But this is what we do, right? I mean, it feels like we, as people, naturally are drawn to this sort of, I would say, mob behavior, right? When presented with these new technologies in which we can connect with like-minded people, whether they share a taste for music, or whether they share sort of national impulses or whatever else, this is what most people, a lot of people, fall into, maybe. And so I think it's like really interesting that for all, yeah, for all this like talk of different rules and so forth, that the patterns just sort of propagate everywhere.

• 52:59Tracy Alloway?

  The other thing that struck me, and this has come up before in other episodes, but it's the sort of... You know, people think about China as this big centralized entity, and it is to some extent, but the way that centralized entity actually executes policy ends up being very decentralized.

• 53:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 53:20Tracy Alloway?

  Right? And I think that's kind of underappreciated how much scope individual censors or individual local governments have to enact specific directives and how they go about doing it.

• 53:33Joe Weisenthal?

  It's interesting that Weibo's competitive edge was essentially

• 53:37Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 53:37Joe Weisenthal?

  being the best at censorship, right? And that was the one that survived and sort of anticipating and so forth. And it's a little sad. I liked the decentralized internet. That was fun, going to different people's websites and seeing what they're all about. And you could theoretically still do it. But it takes effort in a way that doesn't feel worth it when you could just have an algorithm deliver straight what your sort of id appeals to you, like directly in the moment.

• 54:05Tracy Alloway?

  It was a great time.

• 54:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 54:06Tracy Alloway?

  Late 1990s were the peak of humanity.

• 54:08Joe Weisenthal?

  Unironically, unironically that.

• 54:11Tracy Alloway?

  Are you really going to learn Chinese?

• 54:12Joe Weisenthal?

  So yeah, one of my New Year's resolutions is to take Mandarin classes this year, and I will do that.

• 54:18Tracy Alloway?

  I really liked learning Mandarin back, way back in the day when I did it, because there's very little grammar, and I hate grammar.

• 54:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah, nice.

• 54:25Tracy Alloway?

  Because I had to learn German, and German grammar is the worst. And also, as you learn words, one thing I really like about it is it's very literal. So a lot of words have meanings that sort of reflect the thing being talked about. So for instance, if you're talking about America, so America is Meiguo, which means beautiful country. So that's sort of like

• 54:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, interesting.

• 54:50Tracy Alloway?

  meaning is imbibed into these individual words. Or Austria, because that's my other half, is Aurieli, which means Eastern Empire.

• 55:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Huh.

• 55:02Tracy Alloway?

  Which, you know, again, very descriptive of what you're talking about.

• 55:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, the German is Osterreich, right?

• 55:09Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 55:09Joe Weisenthal?

  So that also means.

• 55:10Tracy Alloway?

  It's a literal translation. Yeah.

• 55:12Joe Weisenthal?

  That's interesting. You know, both of us have pretty big followings on social media, particularly Twitter. Wouldn't it be fun as a personal challenge to like, let's start from zero again on Weibo and see if we could do it all over again. It's like, we weren't just lucky, we were really good. Let's start from zero and make names for ourselves on the Chinese internet.

• 55:30Tracy Alloway?

  I think your definition of fun maybe differs from mine, Joe.

• 55:34Joe Weisenthal?

  It's like, I need to prove to myself that it wasn't just luck. And I need, so I need to start from zero and try again.

• 55:40Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, man. Do it in Mandarin.

• 55:42Joe Weisenthal?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 55:42Tracy Alloway?

  Do a real challenge.

• 55:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Do it on hard mode this time. Yeah, where I have to do it in a different language.

• 55:47Tracy Alloway?

  All right. Shall we leave it there?

• 55:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 55:49Tracy Alloway?

  This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.

• 55:54Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow Yiling Liu. She's at Yiling Liu 95. And definitely check out her new book, The Wall Dancer: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armin, Dashil Bennett at Dashbot, and Kel Brooks at Kel Brooks. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots, where we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 56:26Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we talk about the internet, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

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