What Dan Wang Saw on His Last Trip to China

There's this weird contradiction that hovers almost all conversations regarding the Chinese economy. On the one hand, the growth and rising material prosperity is undeniable. And of course, Chinese industrial giants are at the frontier in all kinds of things, like batteries. On the other hand, you always hear about a soft domestic market, and a general state of unease among workers who fear that precarity is around the corner. So how is this contradiction explained? And how does it affect day-to-day life? On this episode, we bring back one of our regular guests Dan Wang, who recently returned from a long trip to Shanghai. We discuss his observations, the general ennui he saw, the signs of domestic weakness, and the way in which phone culture is reshaping Chinese society. Read more: It’s Too Soon to Breathe Easy on China’s Economy https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-06-24/it-s-too-soon-to-breathe-easy-on-china-s-economy?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=podcast&utm_campaign=odd_lots&utm_content=article Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox, plus unlimited access to the site and app. bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots https://www.bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots?in_source=oddlotspodcast See omnystudio.com/listener https://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.

• 0:00Tracy Alloway?

  There are some market stories where you want every detail. Joe and I have made quite a few podcasts on that basis. But sometimes you've only got 10 minutes and just want to know what's moving markets fast. That's the Barclays Brief Podcast. Every week, experts from Barclays Markets and Research get you up to speed on what's happening and what to watch next. Concise, focused, and brief. 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

• 1:08Speaker 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.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news.

• 2:08Tracy Alloway?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 2:11Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

• 2:13Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, I heard, I might have heard, you know, just a little bit that you went to China for the first

• 2:18Joe Weisenthal?

  I haven't been that obnoxious about it. I haven't like, no, but okay, can I just say one thing? I didn't like do, I've posted about it. I've talked about it. I have, I did not come home and do like a 20 tweet thread about like China's like future in the world, which I consider myself to be a heroic, heroic act of restraint.

• 2:40Tracy Alloway?

  So you're not a China expert after your one day in Shenzhen?

• 2:43Joe Weisenthal?

  I fully admit that I'm not a China hand after one day. And I will also say, I can't do that anyway because I got over the border on a tourist visa. So I'm not even, you know.

• 2:53Tracy Alloway?

  You know the China, the China expert pipeline, right?

• 2:56Joe Weisenthal?

  How does it work?

• 2:56Tracy Alloway?

  So you gotta, first of all, you have to go to China and be, be an English teacher for a few months. And then you have to move there and become a China consultant.

• 3:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes.

• 3:06Tracy Alloway?

  And then you have to start a YouTube channel and start, start calling yourself a Joe Wei or Lao Weisenthal.

• 3:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Someone said, Joe Shandao would be a good China, uh, sinification of my name, which I thought was decent. You know, that actually almost happened to me. There's a different version of my life. So when I was in college at University of Texas, I saw a poster on the campus. Now this was Taiwan, but I would have learned the language. It said, come be an English speaker in Taiwan. So I was like, I didn't have any plan for my life or anything like that. And I called the number and I didn't have a cell phone at the time because we just, so we just shared a house phone. And I called the number and I left it. And then the person on the other side called back, but one of my roommates answered the call and ended up getting the job and going to Taiwan. And I always think about that version of my life where

• 3:56Joe Weisenthal?

  I wouldn't be doing Odd Lots because I was home and answered that call. And would I be one of those people that like, you know, helped American businesses source parts in, uh, in Southern China?

• 4:07Tracy Alloway?

  What a segue, Joe.

• 4:08Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. Well, that's, you know, you, you, you showed, you reminded me that there is this, one of the various versions of my life, that that was actually kind of one of them.

• 4:16Tracy Alloway?

  All right. Well, I'm sure you have your own impressions of China for the first time.

• 4:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Based on 24 hours.

• 4:22Tracy Alloway?

  Based on 24 hours. I know you do because you did tweet about it a lot. But there's someone else we talked to when we want to get general China impressions. Take the temperature on the vibes in China, I guess. And that is the one and only Dan Wang. He's been on the show a number of times before. He is, of course, the author of Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future, also a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. So, Dan, thank you so much for coming back on All Thoughts.

• 4:49Speaker 03

  Tracy, it's great to be back home.

• 4:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Thank you.

• 4:52Tracy Alloway?

  So vibes in China. Well, first of all, was this your first time going back in a couple of years?

• 4:59Speaker 03

  It's sort of been my first time going back, so.

• 5:02Tracy Alloway?

  Give us the timeline of when you left and.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  I left at the start of 2023, right after the total collapse of zero COVID. And then I was back in Yunnan, just finishing my book, writing in the mountains in the south of the province.

• 5:16Tracy Alloway?

  Sounds so nice.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  And then this time I spent about a month in China between Shanghai for two weeks and then Yunnan for two more weeks. I think the big news when I was in China was there were two big things happening in New York. One was that the Knicks won some sort of sports ball. And then Joe Weisenthal.

• 5:36Tracy Alloway?

  A little bit about, just a little.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then Joe Weisenthal went to Shenzhen. That was, that was big news on Twitter that day.

• 5:42Joe Weisenthal?

  I watched the Knicks game from a rooftop bar in Shenzhen.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  No kidding.

• 5:45Joe Weisenthal?

  The one, the game where they clinched it, game five, which was wild. Just to give us your background, I mean, we've talked about your book and stuff like that. You're Canadian, right?

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:52Joe Weisenthal?

  So that's why the red and the red shirt today, you're wearing maple leaf colors to sort of represent your Canadian heritage on the podcast?

• 5:59Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 6:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay, I just wanted to establish that. Where did you go? And, you know, I, I'm not, no expert because I only spent 24 hours in like one of the world, the country's most advanced cities, but where were you?

• 6:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I've lived in the three major big zones of China. I was, spent two years living in Hong Kong, where I played board games with this new entrant to Hong Kong named. Tracy Alockway, remember all of these board games that we used to play?

• 6:29Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, that was so much fun.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  We were in all of these cafes and I spent two years living in Hong Kong and I thought, well, this really isn't enough real China. And so then I moved to Beijing for two years. Then I decided that was way too much real China. And then I decided I should have moved to Shanghai.

• 6:49Joe Weisenthal?

  Can I just ask a quick question? I don't know anything about how like Chinese immigration policy or visa policy works. As someone who is ethnically Chinese but a Canadian passport holder, what is required to establish semi-residency, either on like a part, full-time or sort of part-time work or whatever? How do you, are there any restrictions? How easy is that process?

• 7:17Speaker 03

  If you're Chinese of Chinese heritage, it's somewhat easier to visit China. There are these specific visa categories, namely family visit, which gets you multiple entry, probably for 10 years. That makes it really easy for someone like me to visit grandma. But I don't think for any other Chinese heritage people, it becomes much easier. They're not necessarily favored to actually live in China. And when I was visiting China at this time, what was really striking was how many more Russians and Russian you hear in the streets of Shanghai. You see more Arab folks walking around, presumably doing business deals, and how few Americans you hear on the streets as well.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  And so this has been like a really stark shift in the composition of the foreign people there. And then there's also just been a stunning collapse in immigration to China. And so this Irish guy, Sam Enright, came up with this figure to establish that China and Ireland, China has slightly fewer immigrants than Ireland does. So Ireland, a country of 6 million people, has about 1 million immigrants. China, 1.4 billion, has about 1 million immigrants. And so these are the sort of stunning things where it takes a few more Joe Weisenthal's visiting to prop up the foreign market there.

• 8:36Tracy Alloway?

  Lau Weisenthal, we're calling him.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  Lau Weisenthal, yeah, sounds good.

• 8:41Tracy Alloway?

  Why did you decide to go to Shanghai and not Beijing? And how much should I read into that as like a shift in the center of power within China? Or like more focus on tech and finance?

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love Shanghai. Shanghai is, I think, one of the great cities of the world. And Beijing is not. Beijing is not.

• 9:01Tracy Alloway?

  I really like Beijing. It has that sort of like northern frontier feel. I really enjoy it, but I've been to Shanghai too, and it is very impressive.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  Well, Beijing is this desert step city with Stalinist characteristics. And, you know, there's kind of this threat of apocalypse that hangs over there.

• 9:17Tracy Alloway?

  You don't like the ring roads down?

• 9:18Speaker 03

  I don't love the ring roads. These streets are way too long and they're way too wide. And, you know, I was in Beijing when this dust storm swept through the city where everything turned yellow. I thought I woke up sick that day, but I guess everything was yellow that day. So there's some charm definitely to Beijing. But when we were living in Shanghai, we were calling ourselves the Paris of the East. We were calling Paris the Shanghai of the West. And then we were calling Beijing Western Pyongyang. You know, why would you visit? West Korea. So, you know, these are the sort of things where, you know, we are happily dismissive of the Beijing life. There's definitely parts of the Beijing life which feels much more intellectual.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  You know, the Communist Party really is much more centered there. The great universities are much more centered there. Shanghai is much prizes, much more convenience and comfort. And that's in part because the French literally built a major section of the city. There are these leafy boulevards. You have these cafes everywhere. It's super walkable. You're never that far from a subway station.

• 10:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Which city?

• 10:21Speaker 03

  Shanghai is much, much better. And then Beijing was essentially designed by Stalin. So it can't be all that pleasant.

• 10:27Tracy Alloway?

  I will say Beijing is the only place in the entire world where I ever developed eczema. I had it for like three months just in Beijing, never had it ever again.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  I have these odd headaches that come at random times when I was living in Beijing. That was the only city where I actually had to experience that.

• 10:45Tracy Alloway?

  It's so strange.

• 10:46Joe Weisenthal?

  If we ever do a live episode of the podcast in China, I guess we don't have to do Beijing. I don't know, you kind of.

• 10:51Tracy Alloway?

  I would prefer Beijing to Shanghai. Shanghai might actually be the smarter choice because our audience is probably bigger there. But I really like Beijing. I don't know. I like the food.

• 11:01Joe Weisenthal?

  In my 24 hours, and you've talked about this, but in my 24 hours, there are many things that stood out. But the one thing that's, and I, you know, here I'm going to commit an act of modest journalism. The one thing that stood out that I can't get out of my head from visiting China that, you know, I saw kinds of head grade food. I saw the electronic smart, et cetera.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  No, tell us, tell us a little bit more.

• 11:22Joe Weisenthal?

  More than anything else, me, like it's, okay. So we're sitting here, the three of us are talking. I'm physically in pain right now, like that I haven't checked my phone five times. Like I, in this conversation, like it's very difficult for me to like go, we've been talking for nine minutes so far. So normally I would have checked my phone five minutes, but I could do it. But like, I have never been in a culture, in a city, et cetera, in which there was more just like constant phone use. Like that is the one thing I still just cannot get out of my head. I went to a nice dinner, everyone with their screen up, you know, which would be very, I think, like, if I, if you did that in New York, that would be considered really rude, I think, to have your phone.

• 12:01Tracy Alloway?

  And yet, Joe.

• 12:02Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I said like, to have your phone face up on the table. I was like really stunned and you've talked about this too. And I'm sort of like, I kind of want to talk about phone culture.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  Okay, let's talk about phone culture. Joe, what is the right number of times to check your phone in 10 minutes? Is it five? Is it 500?

• 12:18Joe Weisenthal?

  I don't know.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:19Joe Weisenthal?

  This is really, this is, I might, I'm totally up, you know, because the thing was, and I just like, I was like, oh, I don't want to be rude, but I want to take some pictures and maybe I want to tweet something. But like, I, but you know, I don't want to be rude. And then I would like look around and like everyone was on their phone. So I was like, I guess it's not rude. Yeah. I felt great. I loved it.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  I, I am much more New York culture. Stop looking at your phone, man. Let's have a debate about this, Joe.

• 12:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, great.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  So, um, you know, why, why do we need to check? What's, what's so important on the phone that we can't talk to each other about face to face right now?

• 12:49Joe Weisenthal?

  But I, no, I mean, look, I'm glad that we have this conversation where the expectation is that we have our phones down. But like, was my, when you went back to China recently, did you have the same sense that I did?

• 13:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. That I think that a lot of good friends would be around the table. And then they would start pulling their phone and what are they doing on their phone? It's actually totally trivial stuff. They're kind of just checking the progress of their JD.com or Alibaba deliveries. They're kind of scrolling through some photos that they just taken and deleting a few, selecting a few. And it's like, you know, um, not everyone is able to get together all the time. So, you know, is that the most important thing right now? Definitely phone culture has broken. Joe Weisenthal-Lauwes brain.

• 13:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  But hasn't it broken like hundreds of millions of people's brains?

• 13:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 13:41Speaker 03

  Across the world?

• 13:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  And there is something, I think, not to be a boomer about this.

• 13:47Joe Weisenthal?

  No, that's fine. That's great.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Important about attention, but what do you think?

• 13:50Joe Weisenthal?

  As much as I'm guilty of it, I don't think that the always checking of phones is a healthy part of New York society or American society. Like, I think I am participating in something that is unhelpful and not an anti, not pro-social every time I check my phone in a group environment, or even when I'm alone, I should be reading a book instead. And so like, I was just stunned by the degree of like, and then you walk into a store and every store in the mall has a girl live streaming on whatever the equivalent of TikTok is of like what's happening in the store. Like, the degree of like phone-ness was wild to me.

• 14:26Tracy Alloway?

  As someone who is often the victim

• 14:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, sure.

• 14:29Tracy Alloway?

  of Joe's phone addiction, I will say, it does make me sad when I'm talking to you

• 14:34Joe Weisenthal?

  No, of course it does.

• 14:34Tracy Alloway?

  and you literally like leave the conversation mid-sentence to go take a photo of someone's T-shirt and tweet it, which happened last week.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. Tracy, you and I are gonna have dinner and Joe can be off on the side like tweeting like a toddler and then you and I can have like a much more serious conversation. What do you think?

• 14:54Joe Weisenthal?

  This is why I'm actually glad I have this job, because it's an hour at a time throughout various times of the week.

• 15:00Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, okay.

• 15:00Joe Weisenthal?

  In which I don't look at my phone.

• 15:02Tracy Alloway?

  Let's get back on track.

• 15:03Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 15:03Tracy Alloway?

  Let's do China.

• 15:04Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 15:04Tracy Alloway?

  Okay, how much of the Chinese phone obsession, I'm thinking how to phrase this, but how much of it is just because your entire life is basically oriented on your phone now? And I know we could say something similar about the US, but I feel like, you know, payment systems, online shopping are even more endemic in China than they are here.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, so this is where we should praise, you know, what enables the phone culture. First of all, let's say you have this amazing mobile infrastructure where 5G is truly everywhere. And, you know, it is kind of odd to me that you head into pockets of New York, namely the subway, as well as many other places. Kind of remote parts and you just kind of drop out of cell access and I kind of wish that we had mobile access everywhere. And there is kind of this broader phenomenon in East Asia where people have super long commutes on the subway. Let's say like an hour to get into Tokyo, you know, an hour to get into central Shanghai or Shenzhen.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  And, you know, having mobile games and having phones is kind of just a great way to pass the time into our cool, well-connected subway. So there's some good things here. And you have basically a lot more apps that are highly functional. You're able to order absolutely anything you want into your door. You know, 15 minutes, you can get an amazing croissant. And so there are some good parts here. But let's also get into the bad parts. So the bad parts are when you're on, when you're in China, you're kind of constantly expected to be on for your boss all the time. And so, you know, if we were in China, we have like three producers sitting behind us. We're going to have Joe Weisenthal texting them all the time about, you know, pick up this or that. And so I think that is less pleasant.

• 16:51Joe Weisenthal?

  It does. Sorry, just to jump. It does seem self-reinforcing, which is that if everyone is on their phone, everyone then becomes expected to text back within the minute, which means you can't opt out of always looking at your phone. Anyway, keep going.

• 17:02Tracy Alloway?

  This is the other thing. So I know you're always on your phone. And so when I WhatsApp you and you don't immediately reply, I get insulted.

• 17:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Just DM me. Just Twitter DM me. Anyway, keep going. But yes, Tracy is, she's like, I know you're looking at your phone. I haven't responded.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:16Tracy Alloway?

  He has a very limited like bandwidth in which to reply.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  I know.

• 17:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Go on, just keep talking about Chinese.

• 17:21Speaker 03

  I can text Weisenthal like in 30 seconds. I know he ought to reply. So why isn't he replying within three minutes? But so, I mean, the good thing is that you can always use your friends and that's always good too. But myself, I think I'm much more of an American, whatever, European about this. I just silence all of my notifications. My friends can't really reach me. I think it's better that way. And I think I prefer it not to be reached whenever at anyone else's pleasure. But, you know, if you need to like call someone, you know, you know, they're almost always going to pick up.

• 18:04Joe 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.

• 18:30Speaker 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.

• 19:13Speaker 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.

• 19:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Talk about influencers. Because this is like, this was when I, when we were in Shenzhen. At one point, the guy who I was going around with was like, oh, this is a really nice apartment. It's like all the influencers live there. Talk about like influencer culture there.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, this is also one of these things that make China increasingly highly unpleasant to me now. The extent to which everyone is just photographing themselves as kind of, as kind of the main thing. So I usually go visit Shanghai and Yunnan, which are, I think, without a doubt, the two most beautiful parts of China. And the good thing about being in beautiful parts is that you have a wonderful city. You have this wonderful province. But what sort of distresses me is how many cafes in Shanghai are just places where young people, overwhelmingly women, park to take photos of themselves. Perhaps a group of seven might order one or two coffees to the disappointment of the cafe owners.

• 20:50Speaker 03

  And then they park themselves there for like an hour or so, taking photographs. And so many of these Shanghai city blocks have been almost re-architected to be photo spots, whether these are outdoors or whether these are restaurants. And so, you know, that's just a lot of photography. Have you noticed something like this?

• 21:09Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:10Joe Weisenthal?

  I mean, I would say this describes the West Village in large part, too.

• 21:13Tracy Alloway?

  For sure, for sure. I still remember the very first time I went to Dominic Ansel in New York. And everyone was taking photos of the food. And I was like, oh, like food is now performance art, basically. But, okay, so is influencer culture that's standing in the way of Xi Jinping's drive to increase consumption? Is that what we're saying?

• 21:35Speaker 03

  I think that's must be a part of it. Because at some point, you wonder the extent to which phone culture becomes a substitute for real spending on holiday. So as I just mentioned, you know, you have cafes, you may have cocktail bars in which a gaggle of people come over and then have buy two drinks and then they spend the rest of their time photographing themselves. Maybe you can say that the constant photography is a boon for live streaming. And so that promotes some aspect of consumption. But I think overwhelmingly, people are substituting away real experiences to, you know, let's say have like a super nice, you know, travel experience when they could just photograph themselves. Because the other part of being in Yunnan, which is in the southwest, this is the region where my family is from.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  You know, this is highly mountainous. It's essentially Tibet in the north. It's part of the Himalayas, literally in the north. And then in the south is basically a giant rainforests. And in between, there are basically twenty five of China's nearly sixty official ethnic groups. And so what these rich, richer, again overwhelmingly girls from Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, would do is that they go to Yunnan, dress in this ethnic garb, pretend that they're Tibetan for a day, take some, you know, a snowdrop, you know, snow-covered mountains as a backdrop. There are parts of New York, Miami, LA that have been re-architected, but I think phone culture is much more extreme. But Joe, did you consider dressing up as a Tibetan?

• 23:05Joe Weisenthal?

  No, but I know that if Tracy and I ever go to China together, I'm gonna have to take a lot of, uh, like Tracy's gonna make me do that.

• 23:13Tracy Alloway?

  For sure.

• 23:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Absolutely for her Instagram.

• 23:14Tracy Alloway?

  You're a good, you're a decent photographer.

• 23:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Thanks.

• 23:17Tracy Alloway?

  So, you know, it, it helps.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  You know, I'm maybe part Tibetan myself. This is part of the family lore. When the Tibetans come up to me, they always say tashada le. And so, you know, maybe I,

• 23:28Joe Weisenthal?

  What does that mean?

• 23:28Speaker 03

  Just their hello, standard greeting. And, you know, maybe the three of us can do an awesome photo shoot. This is one time I'll do a photo shoot.

• 23:36Joe Weisenthal?

  This is now, we're gonna do a road trip and we're gonna make this happen.

• 23:39Tracy Alloway?

  I would actually do that trip. Um, you described this as mostly girls. And this is also a phenomenon in the West, but why, like, what is the ultimate goal of taking all these photos and sticking them on social media? Is it, you know, dating? Is it building a professional brand? Is it just socializing with your online friends?

• 24:01Speaker 03

  You know, Tracy, I don't look at these photos. So it's only speculation for me. But I think it has to be all the same phenomenon where, you know, women everywhere feel like they have to perform for the gram or in the case of China for the xiao hong shu. And I think the added layer in China is just that it's kind of a cheap way to have fun and to establish that you've been there. And, you know, these are kind of beautiful things and you do spend a lot of effort on makeup. And so I think it is, it could be kind of fun, but so why not? So when I am sometimes upset by the photo culture, I remind myself, you know, these ladies aren't harming me. So what I'm, no skin off my nose. They should have a great time.

• 24:42Joe Weisenthal?

  They're not harming you. No skin off your nose. On the other hand, I don't really know much about like, how are your, how are your male relatives doing in China? And the only reason I ask is actually because I'm aware that in Korea, which, you know, totally separate country, the people talk about the gender gap in politics here in the US, that the gender gap in politics in Korea specifically is extraordinarily large and that the, you know, the sort of four chanification of politics in Korea seems like even far more advanced than it is in the West. There's no electoral politics in China. So we don't really get to read articles about how these feelings express themselves at the ballot the same way.

• 25:26Joe Weisenthal?

  But how do, how would, how would, you know, the Dan Wang's, your cousins or friends, male friends, how are they feeling?

• 25:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I think you guys have done this remarkable job of keeping this conversation on track. But I think we need to get this back on track.

• 25:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  And talk about my male pseudo relative, Joe Weisenthal Lawis, slight time in China. And I noticed, Joe, you know, for those watching on camera, you have a Chinese ethnic garb yourself. You have an Anta shirt where on you. So we're going to ask you to, you know, talk a little bit more about your impressions, 24 hours, though they may be. And I'm just going to offer one more proverb, a well-known ancient Chinese proverb here about visiting China. So, you know, the, everyone knows that, you know, you visit China for 24 hours, you feel like you can write a book. Visit China for a week, you start, you know, having some doubts. You live six years in China and you realize you know nothing.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  So, you know, what's the book in you, Joe, that you're gonna give to us?

• 26:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I, I, I don't mean to brag.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:36Joe Weisenthal?

  But I actually like do not hit, like, I feel like very viscerally that I only got the tiniest slice. And I maybe just because I've been doing media for a while, like, I really do not feel like I could say anything useful about China from 24 hours.

• 26:49Speaker 03

  Just tell us.

• 26:50Joe Weisenthal?

  I can be honest.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  How you felt, how you felt?

• 26:53Joe Weisenthal?

  I mean, I had a great time. It's like, all the cars are real, that all the cars that we see on social media, they're all real. The food is all great. The, I spent a night in the Park Hyatt, which was probably one of the top three or four hotels I've ever spent a night in. And it was $250, which would be like the grimmest hotel off of Times Square, like, but it was your 24 hours.

• 27:14Tracy Alloway?

  Cool, like tech stuff as well.

• 27:16Joe Weisenthal?

  I went to the tech mall and like I bought for $15 this eye massager.

• 27:22Joe Weisenthal?

  I almost bought a suitcase that could double as a scooter for a grown adult person and ride around the airport. But I was worried about like the batteries and like.

• 27:31Tracy Alloway?

  I wish you'd gotten that.

• 27:32Joe Weisenthal?

  I know my son would have loved it. Like, if I told him, if I showed him a video, he'd be so upset that I didn't get that for him. But like, you know, all of this, like, basically in that 24 hours, it was like all the social media stuff that like I'm inundated by. Like, I was like, oh, all of it is at least in this one city incredibly advanced. An entire city as big as New York, where all the offices are about as feel like the new JP Morgan headquarters, like, yeah, it's extraordinary.

• 27:58Speaker 03

  What did you not like about this experience, walking around?

• 28:03Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I liked, I actually didn't, like, I really, I found it to be very pleasant 24 hours, including I went and bought some cigarettes for friends. I don't smoke, but some friends do. And currently in New York, Chinese cigarette, Chinese cigarettes are very highly sought after. Yeah, this is the thing for sure.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  What's the brand?

• 28:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, I got a Chung Wa, I don't know.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 28:23Joe Weisenthal?

  But there's, I bought a bunch of other brands. I'll show you the box. I mean, they don't have the labels on them.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  We're gonna go out for a smoke after this.

• 28:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that's fine. Um, but like when I went to the cigarette and liquor dealer, like you walk in and the first thing you just starts pouring tea for everyone and opening packs for you to try. I was like, this is great. This is a night, this is a, this is a good life.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:41Joe Weisenthal?

  But you're the guest, so you gotta tell, you gotta tell us, like this is.

• 28:45Tracy Alloway?

  Liquor and cigarettes.

• 28:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, after this, we're gonna, you know, drink some Bai Zhi. We're gonna have a Hua Zhe, which is kind of how you refer to a cigarette there. And then, um, so I mean, they, my, I, I don't love Shenzhen. I really feel like Shenzhen is America's answer to San Jose. You know, we kind of talk about, um, Shenzhen as the Silicon Valley of China. And I think, yeah, you know, it's just kind of the San Jose. It's kind of these big, it's kind of big midtown buildings. It's a lot of office parks. I mean, the nice thing about it is it's really green, but it's, um, you know, the parts of the, the city is really centered between the east and the west. And to get between them, you have to get on this big highway. So.

• 29:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's on that highway.

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Urban design is not great. And so this is why I think, you know, Shanghai is still much, much better. And I think that, you know, when people are in China, I think the, you know, the, the, the central contradiction, as the Marxists like to call it now, is that, you know, what I feel on this trip is that this is kind of, um, people have a bit of a serene discontent with their lives. So.

• 29:45Tracy Alloway?

  On we, sort of.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  Uh, sorry.

• 29:47Tracy Alloway?

  On we, kind of?

• 29:48Speaker 03

  Uh, maybe everyone does, but I think it is a little bit more extreme in China. So on the one hand, the products are really, really amazing. So you have these, um, you know, amazing, you know, suitcase rollers that you can sit, um, and roll around, um, you know.

• 30:05Joe Weisenthal?

  No, it's all real.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  Paul Blart, Mall Cop, Joe Weisenthal, Lao Bai Airport Roller, um, guy. And, you know, when I was in Shanghai this time, I was really struck by the amazing food, uh, culture there. I mean, just in terms of, you know, the coffees now all have these infusions that make them look almost like, um, caffeinated cocktails without the alcohol. So, you know, why not have your coffee being infused with some sort of honeydew melon and rose water?

• 30:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 30:34Speaker 03

  All these amazing things and they taste really good. And I'm thinking, oh, why am I getting a standard Americano when I can have something like this? The croissants are really, really amazing. I love baked goods. And so, you know, the Shanghai's croissants are like approaching Parisian, maybe Copenhagen levels of quality, Tokyo levels of quality. I'm, you know, I spend a lot of time talking about how China builds a ton of electrical power, solar, wind, nuclear, et cetera. And then I learned how much it costs to charge your electric vehicle to the full range of about 600 kilometers. It's about like $12 to have essentially a full tank of gas. And that's kind of totally amazing. And so people are able to have a really good life. They have access to cheap noodles.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  Cities are amazing. And yet, and yet, take a look at how people are, especially young people. Youth unemployment, according to the official data, is, you know, north of 15%, trending close to 20%.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  The main source of wealth for most people is parked in property, something like three quarters of the wealth is in property. Property has fallen by 25 to 30% across all these big cities. This was the first time in Shanghai where, you know, friends have told us that there are sort of these homeless people wandering through the outskirts of Shanghai because all of these migrant workers, they have nowhere to go. Based on all this macro data, migrants are kind of returning to the countryside because they can't find great jobs. The college educated young people, mostly men, are doing delivery drivers because they can't find great jobs. Everyone's kind of, all these young people are sort of living with their parents, which

• 32:19Speaker 03

  is kind of a fine lifestyle. And for me, the most, you know, amazing fact about China now is that Shanghai is such an amazing city and no one wants to have kids. No one wants to have kids. So the national TFR rate in China, and this is the official data, is 1.0. And Shanghai is 0.6, which is on par with Taipei and Seoul. And there are aspects, the richest parts of Shanghai, the TFR, official TFR is like 0.4. And so, you know, how can this function when, you know, in a couple of years, in something like, I think, 20 years, half the population will be north of 65. How can the city function when half the people expect to be retired? And how can the country function when there's no young people?

• 33:02Speaker 03

  And this is something that I used to be a little bit more sanguine about the demographic cliff. This is where, you know, are we going to see a completely different China in 15 years? That's I'm much less sanguine about that.

• 33:29Speaker 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

• 34:11Speaker 01

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• 34:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Seeing these global stats and being at a place where it's like, okay, it's not so expensive and transport is very easy with children, et cetera. And yet still, you know, fertility is collapsing like that. Unfortunately, it definitely makes me more skeptical of a lot of the claims that like, if only we had like free childcare in the US or whatever, that that would like make people more inclined to have families and stuff like that. Like, it doesn't seem like these physical, material affordances actually do much on that front.

• 35:28Tracy Alloway?

  Well, I was gonna ask Dan, what's your theory for declining birth rates in China? Because you hear all these different things about, you know, like the work culture is too intense. The educational culture is too intense. Life in general is too intense. What do you think?

• 35:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, yes. And I mean, the first thing to say is that China is not an outlier in East Asia.

• 35:51Joe Weisenthal?

  It's not an outlier anywhere. It's ahead of the curve, but there is not a place in the world, including Africa, including Central and South America, et cetera, where we don't see fertility rates basically falling off a cliff.

• 36:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I mean, the, I mean, I think, I think there may even be a qualitative difference between TFR of, what is the US now, 1.6, 1.7 and, you know, 1.0. And so the, the exponential math here really starts doing their punishing math. So, you know, in East Asia, you know, Japan is actually now, you know, kind of is something like 1.2, 1.3. And they have, they're further down the demographic curve, but they're have a higher TFR at the moment. And they're much more open to immigrants. And so, you know, should we be more optimistic about Japan or China? You know, Japan is more open to immigrants and has higher TFR. So maybe that's that.

• 36:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Can I just, on a statistical methodology question, does that TFR, does the national Japanese TFR include the immigrant population, which presumably, which might have a higher TFR than the ethnically Japanese? East population.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  Surely, but I suspect that the immigrants are not that big a part of the population really to affect that. And, you know, I think the East Asian problem, if I had to boil this down to one thing, and obviously, life is complex, but the one thing has to be the educational culture, where, you know, people feel like, you know, if they, if their kid can't get into the right university, then their life is over. And therefore, they need to get into the right kindergarten, to get into the right university. And if they can't live in this particular section of Shanghai or Xinjiang, then they might as well not have a kid at all. And I think it's also worth acknowledging all of these other pressures that families pile on the kids, that, you know, your life is so oriented

• 37:43Speaker 03

  towards education. And then, you know, after education, it's so oriented towards getting a great job in finance or tech. And then, you know, once you've checked off that box, you know, the parents are telling you, you know, women face only one question in China, you know, when are you going to marry to the unmarried? And when are you going to have kids to the, to those without kids? And just, you know, you, this, all of these social pressures that keep reproducing themselves. I think it's like a wonder that anyone has children.

• 38:13Joe Weisenthal?

  This actually gets to something that I wanted to, that I regret not talking about. And it's the last time we had you on the podcast, which was last year, and we were talking about your book, Break Neck. And around the same time that I read your book, I also read Eva Do's book about Huawei and like the culture they had there. And one thing that she really emphasizes in that book and other, like about this extraordinary company is like, this sort of, yes, of course, they have like plenty of brilliant engineers, et cetera, but they also have like this, this, this culture that probably is a sort of silhouette of CCP culture, maybe is a way to put it, and how

• 38:55Joe Weisenthal?

  like the company's founder instilled a certain like willingness to die within the company's cadres, and they would therefore win the contract to build 5G in Iraq, or win the contract to build 5G in Afghanistan, because they would not leave the country while everyone else would. And there are these certain like that strikes me as like a cultural change or a difference in corporate culture that is not simply about, say, the engineers versus lawyer brain that you discuss in your book. And so when you talk about some of these like intense cultural forces about getting into the right school, et cetera, when you read about this sort of like imbuing of the Huawei ideology within the company, et cetera, is there something

• 39:38Joe Weisenthal?

  else going on that drives these companies to the technological frontier, to success beyond just, you know, the sort of engineering mindset that you discussed, there are ideological components?

• 39:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, Eva Do's book is great on Huawei. I blurbed it. I think everyone should read it. And, you know, to read these descriptions of the wolf culture, I think is the term on Huawei, you know, they rush towards Afghanistan.

• 40:04Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 40:05Speaker 03

  And so I think that there is definitely an element here that is very real. And I would say that this is more kind of a developing countries hustle mindset. Because, you know, who else had this culture? New York City of 100 years ago. Joe, you still live in the Lower East Side?

• 40:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I still do.

• 40:21Speaker 03

  I hear there's a lot of people there.

• 40:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 40:23Speaker 03

  You know, where there's a lot of people, you know, Lower East Side 100 years ago, when there were like 15 people living in a single room or, you know, so, you know, and US definitely had this.

• 40:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  And so the US, you know, people would rush forward. And so this is where I think this is kind of just capitalism. And my view is that if you want to appreciate capitalism red in tooth and claw, you go to Shanghai, you go to Shenzhen, you go to Beijing, you go to all of these places where people just really work their asses off because they believe that there is, you know, something worth pursuing for. And the US used to have this. And I think that the China very, very deliberately picked up as much as it could from the United States, you know, the, the cities are kind of built more like the US cities, much more of a car culture, you know, my phone charger plugs into the US and China more easily than

• 41:18Speaker 03

  it plugs into anywhere in Europe. So, you know, they, they copied the US a lot. And they copied everything from the US aside from the political system. And so they've decided that they got to hustle. And so maybe, you know, you're a New York hustler, Joe, and, you know, this is what attracts you about China today.

• 41:35Joe Weisenthal?

  In an earlier stage of my life, maybe I was. Now I'm sort of just like, I'm fine to.

• 41:40Tracy Alloway?

  Right. Since you mentioned the wolf thing, what's the nationalist temperature like at the moment in China?

• 41:50Speaker 03

  I think that is fairly steady. And I think that they're, my sense of, you know, part of what, part of what ails the Chinese economy right now is that Xi Jinping has his wish come true. And I think that top leader Xi Jinping's main goal is to militarize and harden the country for great power competition with the United States. And I have a chapter in my book called Fortress China. And I think this is much more of a fortress mentality in which, you know, everything has to be about pursuing the semiconductors and pursuing the batteries and, you know, making sure that social pressures are not, you know, blowing off a lid.

• 42:35Speaker 03

  And I think that, you know, it seems to me like the top levels of the Communist Party is pretty comfortable with where things are in spite of the collapse in property, in spite of youth unemployment being, you know, almost 20% because they're getting their, they're having their wishes come true on the chips and the batteries and on all of these high technology pursuits. And, you know, when President Trump visited Beijing, you know, the, you know, White House social media was, you know, almost treated Trump as a supplicant. You know, there was these photos.

• 43:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:12Speaker 03

  Which Xi was pointing the way and Donald Trump is kind of nodding along. And so, you know, there's all of these things where this is much more about great power versus great power. And in great power, the little people don't really matter all that much. And so this is much more about the elite, you know, 10%, 1%, 0.1% of the engineers still being able to achieve everything that they want to achieve. And all of these resources are funneled towards them and power is made really cheaply to them. And so, you know, they, they want to pursue it.

• 43:42Tracy Alloway?

  So one thing we've talked about before is the lack of cultural exports from China. La Booboo's notwithstanding.

• 43:51Joe Weisenthal?

  I thought this was gonna be the one. I just thought this was gonna be the one, and that lasted about five minutes.

• 43:56Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah. What do you think is needed to sort of unlock a cultural explosion in China? Because like, the impulse must be there, right?

• 44:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, how about some marijuana? And I don't think that this is something that...

• 44:11Tracy Alloway?

  I didn't expect you to say that, but go on.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  Marijuana and the dropping of censorship. How about that? And I don't think that is going to be real anytime soon. So I was pretty deliberate on my trip to Shanghai this time. I went to go see a lot of stand-up comedy in Shanghai, which is something that's really booming. And so they have kind of more of these online specials now, which comics are, you know, doing shows, and then offline is actually a real phenomenon as well. And I went to shows, you know, one of which was English-speaking. I didn't choose that, but it was just happened to be there that day. And it was kind of these, you know, American expats who were English teachers mostly, who were giving this show. And for the most part, the audiences were amazing.

• 44:59Speaker 03

  Like, you know, they love to play along, you know, they give amazing joke answers back. I think the Chinese audience is really, really fun. The comics were not as funny as I hoped. I mean, I don't see that much comedy in New York, and so it's not really good comparison. But the Chinese comic that I saw was essentially telling a series of skits. And it wasn't, it's not stand-up as I understand it. You know, he was essentially telling these elaborate jokes, which kind of he constructed, which didn't really happen to him. And so it wasn't all that funny to me, but I think like it would be great if there were more Chinese jokes out there. But the, you know, fact of Shanghai comedy was that, you know, something like three years ago, one of this really big comic in China

• 45:41Speaker 03

  made a pun of one of these core military slogans. And what happened? What happened to him? Well, all of these comic clubs in Shanghai were shut for, I think, something like four months. And they all closed down in Shanghai. And across these festivals, across all of these public performances, the comics have to submit their scripts to the censors before they can do their routine. And so how can that possibly be not excellent for creativity?

• 46:11Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, this actually gets me to one more question. In addition, the other book that I read last year, the other China book that I read last year was the book about Xi's dad.

• 46:21Speaker 03

  Torregian.

• 46:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, which is great. And I guess he's like your Hoover Hoover Institute colleague. And one like my reading of that book, which I thought was very interesting, and it speaks directly to this, is that one way to think about the sort of post Mao era is how do you keep a hard line while not tipping into true Cultural Revolution territory? And this fear like, because what you described where it's like, and you know, there was a story in the Wall Street Journal recently about Xi Jinping cracking down on people who are into mysticism and so forth. And and like, but it's easy to see how these things spill over, right? Because if you're my boss and you tell me to stop with the mysticism, then I'm going to bully the 10 people who are like a little bit mystical in my arena.

• 47:05Joe Weisenthal?

  And then they'll, you know, and everyone replicates the bullying. And then suddenly you're back in Cultural Revolution territory. Like, that's it seems how the way these things propagate to me. And I'm sort of curious, like, when we look at the fortress China that you talk about, do you think it's inured from a future Cultural Revolution at some point in the future by the way these things propagate?

• 47:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, this is quite a chain of dominos you've constructed, Joe. You know, first you take away everyone's tarot cards and then the Cultural Revolution erupts a little bit later.

• 47:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, everyone, you know, you take away my tarot cards, then I'm like going to prove that I'm even harsher on the people I know who like, you know, look at astrology websites.

• 47:43Speaker 03

  Perhaps, perhaps. Now, I think that, you know, I think that, one, and I'm spending more time in Silicon Valley. And, you know, the opening line of my letter this year was that one thing that Silicon Valley shares with the Communist Party is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed completely humorless. You know, the Central Committee is not a bunch of yucks. And I think it is our misfortune, our global misfortune, that we are ruled right now by Silicon Valley on the one hand, and the Communist Party on the other. And these are completely humorless people that are determining, that are kind of reshaping a lot of what we buy and what we think. And that is kind of. Kind of nuts to me. And I think this is also why, you know, how great are Silicon Valley's cultural exports?

• 48:27Speaker 03

  I don't know. I don't think it's it's great products and just like the Chinese and there are some great products. I think there's going to be, you know, Chinese marketing has not really kept up. You know, we don't really have amazing associations with Chinese brands as such. But I think that will change because the quality is going to improve. But I think if you're looking for any sort of a bottom up culture, it is still remarkable how stunted Chinese cultural exports are relative to, let's say, the Koreans with, you know, all of this K-pop, Squid Game, all of that. You have Americans who are much more eager to study the Korean language at college now. I think that is actually outpacing people studying Chinese in college now.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  So, you know, China might do much better, but I would say by any measure, it is an underperformer relative to its population and its economic growth.

• 49:16Tracy Alloway?

  All right, Dan Wang, thank you so much for coming back on Odd Lots and giving us the vibes, the vibes in China.

• 49:22Joe Weisenthal?

  A true Chinahan. Thank you so much, Dan. That was fantastic.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's let's have some photo shoots in China and we'll get on some yaks. We'll look like Tibetans and then we'll have a we'll have a great time.

• 49:32Tracy Alloway?

  While drinking lychee flavored coffee, right?

• 49:35Joe Weisenthal?

  And smoking cigarettes. The three of us are gonna do a road trip one day.

• 49:38Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 49:39Joe Weisenthal?

  We're gonna make this happen. I can't wait. Thanks so much. That was great.

• 49:56Tracy Alloway?

  Always fun to catch up with Dan, Joe.

• 49:58Joe Weisenthal?

  I love talking to Dan and that was a different one, you know, we didn't talk too much like, what is the secret recipe of like batteries and stuff like that?

• 50:04Tracy Alloway?

  Building giant infrastructure projects.

• 50:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I like to talk about influencer culture and then that last anecdote about stand-up comedy was really interesting as well.

• 50:13Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah. So stand-up comedy, obviously very different in China versus the US, although maybe the US is heading in that trajectory in some ways. But What stood out to me in that conversation is actually like, there are a lot of similarities, I think, between like, some of the cultural, or not cultural, social ennui

• 50:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:34Tracy Alloway?

  that we have, we seem to have in the US and the, what did Dan call it? Silent discontent or quiet discontent in China?

• 50:43Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, I just, sorry, before going on to that, I don't follow, I happen to follow a, I think she's Kyrgis, Kyrgostani stand-up comic on Instagram. And it's really funny, because she like makes these jokes about like, other, like distinct ethnic pockets with a you know, it's like, so and so men do this and stuff like that. Anyway, I like seeing like these, these patterns like replicated all around the world. But I do think this is very interesting, that there are certainly like, let's say the collapse of fertility. They say that's a pathology in some way, or something like that, or everyone, like, these are like, these are global phenomena. And maybe the East Asian countries are just sort of like, the most further along down this trajectory

• 51:27Joe Weisenthal?

  for one reason or another, the phone stuff, the influencer, it doesn't, and then also, you know, and I remember we, when we did that episode earlier this year about like, the Chinese internet and like, people to, oh, there's like this more nationalist flavor. That's the same here.

• 51:42Tracy Alloway?

  I know.

• 51:43Joe Weisenthal?

  So it does, I think to your point, like there's

• 51:45Tracy Alloway?

  It feels like it's convergence.

• 51:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, there's sort of like cultural, global cultural convergence that everyone is sort of regard, in, I guess what I would say is, even in very different economic conditions, there is this sort of cultural convergence happening. And you say it's like, okay, the Chinese economy is like, clearly done so well from a standpoint of lifting people out of poverty and material abundance, so it's so well over the last 10, 20, 30 years. Obviously better than any other country in the world. And the fact that it's still roughly replicating the same moods, et cetera, as anywhere else, I just think is like a very like, As Claude would say, a point to sit with for a moment.

• 52:27Tracy Alloway?

  All right. Shall we leave it there?

• 52:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's leave it there.

• 52:29Tracy Alloway?

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

• 52:34Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our guest, Dan Wong. He's at Dan W. Wong. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand Dashel Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots or the daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 53:00Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you want us to do a road trip through Yunnan with Dan Wong, 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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