Nathan Goes to China – Part 1: Tech & Agent Setup, Chinese AI UX, WAIC, and Attitudes on AI

Nathan returns from two weeks in Beijing and Shanghai for the first of three Chatham House–rules episodes on what China feels like at ground level: getting online, navigating an almost cashless society through WeChat, Alipay, DiDi, Trip.com, and Meituan, and weighing burner-device security advice against the practical reality that international roaming made the Great Firewall mostly irrelevant. He also describes using Claude at home as a semi-autonomous communications monitor while testing DeepSeek, Kimi, and MiniMax as tourist guides in China. The episode contrasts China’s striking digital convenience with pervasive observation, lower payment friction, and AI products that can be useful in everyday contexts yet still lose trust when the stakes feel medical or personal. It also surfaces Doubao’s mass consumer adoption and companionship role, suggesting that the most socially important AI in China may not be the model most discussed in the West. For full show notes, links, and references, read the episode page:https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai/nathan-goes-to-china-part-1-tech-agent-setup-chinese-ai-ux-waic-and-attitudes-on-ai/ Sponsor: Claude: Claude by Anthropic is an AI collaborator that understands your workflow and helps you tackle research, writing, coding, and organization with deep context. Get started with Claude and explore Claude Pro at https://claude.ai/tcr CHAPTERS: (00:00) Episode setup and caveats (Part 1) (12:34) Sponsor: Claude (14:26) Episode setup and caveats (Part 2) (14:26) Travel security setup (26:05) Super apps and payments (41:15) Agents and integration (54:31) Beijing AI tourism (01:09:30) Hospitality and service (01:19:10) Tech culture parallels (01:29:23) Ecosystem and incentives (01:42:05) Surveillance and safety (01:51:19) Comfort with contradictions (02:01:23) AI attitudes and diffusion (02:16:16) Resources and next steps (02:19:35) Episode Outro (02:22:49) Outro PRODUCED BY: https://aipodcast.ing SOCIAL LINKS: Website: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai Twitter (Podcast): https://x.com/cogrev_podcast Twitter (Nathan): https://x.com/labenz LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nathanlabenz/ Youtube: https://youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution-ai-builders-researchers-and/id1669813431 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyok3M3BjqzR0VB5MSyk

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

• 0:00Nathan Labenz?

  Hello and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution. I am freshly back from two weeks in China, which was a really incredible experience. And the feed has been quiet for about two weeks. I think that's the longest that the feed has been quiet since I started the show almost three and a half years ago now. So I apologize for the break. I didn't intend for the break to be quite as long as it was. We had one episode that was prepared and ready to go while I was away. And we had a little issue with that one that has it delayed and perhaps delayed permanently. We'll find out. And I was actually planning to do a little bit of recording from China, but I was so

• 0:42Nathan Labenz?

  busy over there, just doing so many things, that I didn't have a ton of time to really get my thoughts together and do that. And I was also advised that because I was there on a business visa as opposed to a journalism visa, that it might be easier for me and for everyone if I just waited to publish stuff until I got home. So in the end, it was a two-week quiet period. I kind of had the expectation that nobody would really much notice or care. And I think that's still a pretty good way for me to approach my work on this podcast, because honestly, it's been really effective for me to just chase my own learning and share it in a pretty unstrategic way.

• 1:25Nathan Labenz?

  And I'm really grateful for how well received that has been over time. But I did get at least one note from somebody asking if I was okay. And I guess that's a testament to how consistent we've been in publishing and how at least somebody noticed that I was gone. So I doubt that the ratio that congresspeople usually apply, which I understand is one letter represents 100 votes. Something tells me that doesn't really apply here, and I highly doubt that there were 100 people who were worried about me. But to the degree that anyone was worried, I'm sorry for leaving off without explaining the absence for the two weeks that I was gone. But excited to be back and excited to share the results of my, or not the results, but

• 2:07Nathan Labenz?

  the experience and the takeaways from my China trip with you all. One other thing I wanted to touch on real quick before diving into it is I introduced the last episode with David Ad, which got some very nice comments as well, with an introduction from Fable itself. And due to a little snafu in our production process, an intro to the intro, which I had recorded to explain what the heck you were about to see, was not actually included in the final version of the episode. And I was already on the plane and not able to review and catch that missing piece before it went live. So we just launched into it directly with Fable. A couple of people had said, what is this nightmare fuel? Why does it sound like this?

• 2:52Nathan Labenz?

  And the answer, which I had meant to give you the context on before you heard it, was that I allowed Fable to do its own thing in this case. I had it write the intro. I had it use 11 Labs' voice design to design its own voice. And then I had it use the LTX model to create its own video based on the audio that it had already generated with 11 Labs. I was rushing to get out the door and get on this China trip, so I let Fable do its thing. And I didn't really check to see if the output super faithfully represented Fable's intent. And one person asked, did it really want to be heard that way?

• 3:35Nathan Labenz?

  Or does it, does it understand what it sounds like to us when it speaks in that voice? And I decided I should go back and check what Fable actually intended to do and if it succeeded, or if it somehow got confused along the way. And I honestly am still a little confused by that. I went back and opened up, found that same thread and asked what prompts it had used for the voice design and what its intent was. And I would say its intent was not to be as sort of creepy and alien as the voice ended up sounding. And I agree with those who said it did sound a little kind of unsettling. The voice was intended to be more of a sort of warm and kind of reassuring voice. It actually tried out three different voice designs.

• 4:18Nathan Labenz?

  One, it called the luminous narrator, which it describes as an androgynous, mid-register, measured, quiet wonder. The other one it tried was the young scholar, which it describes as bright, earnest, crisp, a brilliant grad student presenting work they love. And then the third one was the low ember, late-night radio, old storyteller style. And it maybe went a little bit wrong by first generating those voices and then asking, asking Gemini, which can take the multimodal input, to evaluate the voices and evaluate them according to its intent. I don't know if Gemini really can do that.

• 5:01Nathan Labenz?

  I'm not sure sometimes when I put files into Gemini, if it's actually interacting with them as raw audio in a way where it could even understand or even process the tone of voice. But Fable asked it to do that. My guess is it just hallucinated the response and said, oh yeah, this is great. Because I don't really think that Gemini has that quality of multimodal understanding. And then Fable just took that validation and ran with that voice sound. And then I guess maybe the, the visual, it, Fable could see, right? Fable definitely can understand the visuals that are coming back from a video model.

• 5:42Nathan Labenz?

  It can't process video as video, but it was able to take frames out of the video and look at the frames. And it was okay with the way it looked. And it was impressed with the, or pleased with the consistency that it had throughout the video that was generated. But it was a bit weird of a, of an output in the end, no doubt about that. But it was Fable's own work from start to finish. If I had a little more time and maybe dug into that, I might have given Fable some feedback and said, I don't know if you're coming across quite the way that you want to. But nevertheless, that was the story behind that strange voice. I guess we should all be prepared for AIs to do strange things. Certainly, there were some strange news, and we'll get into that probably in future

• 6:27Nathan Labenz?

  episodes while I was gone. This is a low consequence example of that, but an interesting one where an AI, given some rope to express itself, came back with something not quite what it intended, a bit strange. Ultimately, I think it felt good about what it put out. And I leave it as an exercise for the audience to decide how you all should feel about that. With that, let's get into the China trip. For the purposes of these episodes, and I'm planning to divide this into three episodes. Today, I'm going to cover the kind of general experience of going to China and the use

• 7:07Nathan Labenz?

  of AI in China, the use of technology in China generally, and a bunch of impressions that I had of the technology environment there, technology companies there, and takeaways from a bunch of conversations that I had with people about AI and their feelings about AI. In the second episode, I'm planning to do a deeper dive into the state of AI safety in China. Spoiler alert, there is a lot going on in AI safety and governance in China, much more, I think, than Westerners typically assume. And then in the third episode, I'm going to try to do a analysis of the US-China relationship and what I think we can learn from China and what ultimately I think we should be striving

• 7:52Nathan Labenz?

  for in terms of a relationship as we head closer and closer to the singularity. And obviously, things are getting real, real fast by the week here. So I think that, that does have a lot of force in terms of potentially opening doors to new possibilities in the US-China relationship. And that will be the third in this series of three episodes that I plan to do on this trip. Across all three of these episodes, I am planning to observe Chatham House rules, not because everybody requested that I do that, but basically because it keeps things pretty simple for me and it ensures that I protect everybody that I interacted with. I would say people in general were not really afraid to talk to me.

• 8:34Nathan Labenz?

  I was very willing to ask questions that I wanted to ask, and people seemed very willing to answer the questions that I asked them. There was even one moment when I was having dinner with a couple of friends of friends. And there were two women at the table who both worked at big tech companies in go-to-market roles. And they each produced a physical recording device that they had been using in the course of their work when they go to meet with clients to record the meetings and just use the recordings later for their own purposes for follow-up and whatnot. And they both kind of asked, would it be okay with you if we, the Chinese people who were graciously hosting me, record this meeting so we can share it later? And I said, yeah, that's totally fine with me.

• 9:19Nathan Labenz?

  But it was a surprising moment. And that's certainly not the norm in the US for people to record their friendly dinner conversations. But they were comfortable with it. I was comfortable with it. And it was striking to me that they were comfortable going on to have a multi-hour conversation where I asked all kinds of questions about their beliefs, their views on politics, their views on any, any number of topics. And it was a striking data point that people, at least in friend groups, seemed to be quite a bit more comfortable talking than I might have thought going in. But some of the things that we'll talk about were definitely a bit sensitive. Certainly, I wouldn't want to put people in the position of representing their institutions. And so I thought, just to keep everything simple for everyone, I will just not attribute

• 10:04Nathan Labenz?

  the things that I've, that I will tell you about to any specific individuals or organizations. And obviously, that does diminish the credibility and the authority of my account a bit. And I think I'll just have to live with that. Hopefully, it'll still be interesting and informative. I'm also obviously very mindful going into this that the sample of people that I talked to is quite biased. All of these people, for the most part, spoke very good to excellent English. And that, that means they're from a certain class of Chinese society that I, that clearly is not fully representative. And then, of course, everything is feeding through my own understanding and lens, and there's plenty of opportunity for bias there. I've said many times on this feed that I'm always mindful of the old joke, which I tracked

• 10:48Nathan Labenz?

  down, actually, it apparently originated in the foreign press corps. Where the saying goes that somebody comes to China for a week, they think they know a lot about China, they stay for a month, they realize they know a little about China, they stay for a year, they realize they know nothing about China. So I don't want to put myself forward as somebody who has any sort of commanding knowledge. But nevertheless, I do think that going there, obviously, and experiencing some things directly and talking to a lot of people directly is a valuable learning exercise. And I definitely think more people should do it. So I want to share what a good time it was, what I learned. And if anybody wants to challenge me on it, I of course, welcome that. And if you want to go there and find out for yourself, I would absolutely encourage that

• 11:32Nathan Labenz?

  too. In terms of disclosures or conflicts of interest or anything like that, really, none to report. I paid my own way on this trip. And really, the only thing that I accepted from hosts and friends of friends that I was meeting along the way were a handful of meals. So nothing that I would say would be a significant biasing factor for me. In a couple of cases, I tried to pay for the meal and I got the old, oh, no, it's already been taken care of. So people were very gracious and very kind. Hospitality in general was excellent. All my interactions with people were excellent. And so again, might I be biased by the fact that I had a good time and people were nice to me? Yes. But I'm

• 12:14Nathan Labenz?

  not taking any money from any Chinese entity whatsoever. And the plane ticket and the hotels and all that kind of stuff I've paid for personally out of pocket. So there's no financial conflict of interest or anything major to disclose on that front. Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by Anthropic, makers of Claude and Claude Code. Over the last few months, Claude has helped me build and refine a personal deep context database that now contains all of my emails, Slack messages, tweets, DMs across platforms, video calls, and podcast transcripts, going back a full five years. On top of that, we've now

• 12:57Nathan Labenz?

  layered summary articles describing my relationship with hundreds of contacts, organizations, and ideas. And now that this exists, there's almost nothing that Claude can't help with. For my angel investing, Claude can now draft investment memos in exactly the form that my venture fund requires, based on the calls I've had and the emails I've exchanged with the founders. And when someone needs a favor, Claude can often do it as well as I can. Recently, a friend reached out to ask if I know anyone who might be a fit for a role that he is currently hiring for. Initially, nobody came to mind. But then I thought to ask Claude, and sure enough, it identified two great leads. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your

• 13:42Nathan Labenz?

  entire workflow and thinks with you. So for problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai/tcr. That's claude.ai/tcr. And check out Claude Pro, which includes all of the features mentioned in today's episode. That's claude.ai/tcr. Okay, so I'd say the first thing to tell you about going to China is it's actually a lot easier than it seems when you start searching online and even asking AIs for help. Search honestly was not very helpful for this. AIs, I think, struggled here much more than they do in almost any other domain. And I was initially quite confused and a

• 14:27Nathan Labenz?

  bit overwhelmed by the whole technology situation. That was not helped by the fact that when I mentioned to friends that I was going to China, I got very radically different advice on what precautions to take. On the one hand, I talked to a friend who works for a major international corporation. And he said, look, I go there all the time. We've got employees there. We've got an R and D center there. And we really don't take any precautions. We just take our normal phones. We do all normal stuff. And it's fine. We really just don't worry about it. I was like, you're not worried about IP or anything like that? He said, look, we have competitors in China. They are formidable competitors. He said, if anything, maybe we should be trying to steal their IP at this point. He

• 15:12Nathan Labenz?

  wasn't really of the, he wasn't taking that normal Western attitude that we have the superior technology. And if we're not careful, they might steal it from us. On the contrary, he felt like if anything, again, maybe they should be trying to learn from the Chinese competitors that they have. So that was one take. Don't worry about it at all. Then I talked to multiple people who are more national security coded people. A couple have worked in the US government in fairly senior positions. And their take was quite different. They basically said, if you're going to go, you have to promise us that you're going to take all these precautions on technology. You need to get a burner phone. You need to have all new accounts. You need to leave all your main accounts at home. Don't

• 15:56Nathan Labenz?

  even connect the burner phone to your home wifi. It needs to be a totally different, isolated technology profile that you set up. And you've got to assume that device, any device that you take to China is compromised. Even when you bring it home, it's compromised forever. You've got to decommission it, sell it, destroy it, whatever. But extreme precautions were advised. And I was like, boy, really? Do I need to do that? I don't have any trade secrets. I don't work for one of the frontier companies. I don't, I genuinely don't have any IP that these Chinese companies would want to steal, right? And I'm not like doing anything important enough that the Chinese government would need to know about it. Everything

• 16:38Nathan Labenz?

  I do, I pretty much talk about in public, right? What is the deal? They said, you might not be a target. That's true and probably fine. But you're connected to a lot of people who could be targets, right? You have connections at the frontier companies, and you could become an attack vector for them. I don't know if that's really as big of a worry as my friends made it out to be, even still, right? This is one of those things where it's, that's kind of the nature of spycraft is you don't really know what's happening even after the fact. So in all honesty, it didn't really ever feel necessary to me. But I did say to my friends, okay, fine, I'll listen to your advice. I promise I'll

• 17:19Nathan Labenz?

  do it. And, and so I did. I set up the whole alternate technology profile. Actually, before even getting into technology, I would say if you're going to go to China, you have a couple of ways that you can enter the country. This is not also super clear online and the AIs seem to be a bit confused about it. One way that you can enter the country now is you don't have to have a visa. You can enter on a visa free basis if you're planning to stay for no more than 10 days. I didn't feel super comfortable with that because I didn't want to show up with no visa, having flown all the way around the world. And then they say, oh, are you a journalist? Or you have a podcast, whatever, we're not going to let you in. I don't know how likely that is. Again, it doesn't seem super likely.

• 18:04Nathan Labenz?

  But I didn't want to take any chances, which just seemed like way too much hassle to go to all that trouble and then risk that happening. So I applied for a business visa. I did have, and you do need to have, I think, an invitation letter from a host organization in order to apply for a business visa. I had such a letter from an organization that I won't explicitly name in this podcast, just out of an abundance of caution. And I was able to take that letter to a local visa expediter who helped me fill out the forms, send things in. I was on kind of a short timeline. You could do it yourself through their website. But I figured, yeah, this is unfamiliar territory. Let me just get a little help. It doesn't cost that much and it'll help speed things up. They also

• 18:49Nathan Labenz?

  like hand deliver the visa to the consulate. The nearest one to where I live is in Chicago. So they actually take it there physically and delivered in person, pick it up in person, give it back to me by hand. So I thought that was a service worth pursuing. And the business visa process in the end was really quite simple. I had one appointment. It took a half an hour to fill out the form. They took the passport to Chicago. I got it back, I don't know, eight, nine, 10 days later. And boom, there's a visa. I can now enter China for up to 90 days for the next 10 years on a business visa. Very easy. I recommend.

• 19:25Nathan Labenz?

  Doing that process rather than just showing up and entering visa free. But that is an option. I was also able to buy, by the way, a one way ticket, which is something that people were like, is that really allowed? But my research suggested that it was allowed and I decided to do that because I didn't know exactly what my itinerary was going to be. And for those that are longtime listeners, you know that my son has had this whole cancer thing. We're like very confident at this point that he's cured and all better. And that's not really a worry, but there's always this kind of back of the mind thing that, you know, what if I have to, what if we do get some bad news or whatever and I have to fly home right away? So I bought a one way ticket just from Detroit to Beijing through Washington DC. And I entered the country with no return ticket and I figured that out actually on the fly while I was there.

• 20:09Nathan Labenz?

  So that's an option, at least if you have the business visa. And I was surprised that was an option because certainly some places that I have been, if you don't have the return ticket, they'll give you a hard time for that. So now going back to the technology. So, okay, you're going to set up an entirely new technology profile to go to China. What do you do? What I decided to do was buy an Android phone. I normally use an iPhone, but I decided I'll do something a little bit different and buy an Android phone just to experience an Android phone for the first time in a long time. That may or may not have been the best idea because I do think Apple in general works a bit better in China, like Apple Maps, for example, people say works very well. Google Maps, not as well.

• 20:51Nathan Labenz?

  There are local mapping alternatives as well that you can download and use. But you might have a little bit better experience overall with just all the little details with an iPhone because Apple is active in China. People in China do have iPhones. They do not have Google pixels really, and that's what I was using. But it ended up still being totally fine because the biggest thing that I think is a major point of confusion is that you're not going to be able to access. If you bring your international connection, you're not going to be able to access all the stuff back home because of the great firewall. And really in today's world, if you have a cell connection, that's not really an issue at all.

• 21:32Nathan Labenz?

  It seems that the great firewall is basically, I think by design, just really not an issue for foreigners who come in with a cell connection. And I'm not an expert in exactly how all this technology works under the hood. But my understanding is that when you go in with an international roaming plan, you are connected, of course, to the local cell tower with your phone. But that your traffic requests actually route back to your home carrier first, then they get processed out to whatever websites or services you're trying to use. And then they get routed back from your home carrier to the Chinese local carrier and finally to your phone. And so you're bypassing all of these content filters just based on the fact that you're

• 22:17Nathan Labenz?

  there with an international roaming plan. I wasn't 100% confident that was going to work, but increasingly I got more confident as I did more research and my experience in the end was that worked totally smoothly. I decided to have two phone numbers for a couple of different reasons. One was that I was trying to do this whole alter ego for the Chinese internet. And so I figured I should have a new email address. I created a new Gmail, which was my main Gmail with a dot travel on the end of it. I signed up for one month of Google Fi wireless, which comes with a good international roaming plan, which was said to work in China and that came with a new phone number as well.

• 23:00Nathan Labenz?

  And then I also, at the last minute, decided it's not such a big deal if they know my main American phone number. That doesn't really give them any, you know, ability to put spyware on my device or anything. So I also moved my main phone number over to the burner phone, which is just a pretty simple eSIM transfer. It's been a while since I've done that sort of thing, but it worked very smoothly, even across Apple to Android. The process of transferring an eSIM from one to the other was really pretty easy. So with that transfer, I had dual SIMs on the one phone, which meant I had two phone numbers. I could receive text messages. I could receive phone calls to both of them. I could make phone calls and send text messages out with both of those phone numbers.

• 23:45Nathan Labenz?

  And I had the two roaming plans from each of the carriers as well. The one carrier I used was Google Fi, which I just got for this month. And then I normally have T-Mobile and they also, I signed up for the month long international roaming plan for whatever extra charge that was. And between those two things, I have the two roaming plans, both of which have this property of you connect to the local cellular internet, but your traffic is routed immediately out of the country through your home carrier to whatever services you're trying to access and then back through that chain to you. And this basically meant that in practice, there was for me, no great firewall to worry about.

• 24:26Nathan Labenz?

  I did also get a VPN as a backup and that comes with its own eSIM and those are supposed to be like China smart. I never really had to use that, to be honest. The two main carriers just worked very smoothly and it was not a big deal at all. I did sign up for all the Chinese services with this alternate Gmail, which I created just for the trip. And it is really important that you get the Chinese services. People tell you have to do it all beforehand because the Google Play Store won't be available when you get there. And this is again, where the Apple experience might be a bit better because the Apple Store, the App Store is available because Apple is active in China.

• 25:09Nathan Labenz?

  But the Google Play Store is blocked in China to most Chinese users on the local services. But when you're using the international roaming plan, even the Google Play Store was available for me throughout and I did download some additional apps while I was there and I had no problem doing that. Nevertheless, I do think it's smart to set up your technology as thoroughly as possible before you go. So you're not fumbling around with it when you get there. And there are a few apps that you definitely will want to have and you'll really frankly just pretty much have to have a good time of it in China. The ones that everybody knows about are probably WeChat and Alipay. WeChat is the super app that kind of does everything in China.

• 25:53Nathan Labenz?

  It's like your sort of social network, address book, content. There's a whole bunch of content and a business and ability to transact with businesses, book businesses. I barely even got into that compared to the vast universe that it is. And it also handles payments. So that's WeChat. And then there's Alipay, which is another, you know, major payment network in China, which again, has tons more features and is a super app of its own that I didn't really use, although that's not used so much for connecting with people and communicating with people. WeChat is the thing that people use just nonstop where you have your own QR code, they have a QR code. And there's sort of the question, and when you're connecting with someone like, am I going to scan you or are you going to scan me?

• 26:36Nathan Labenz?

  But either way, there's this quick scan process. The apps recognize the QR codes so fast that you don't have to like tap on them or whatever. You just go into scan mode and you don't even have the whole QR code in frame for it to recognize the QR code. That that stuff works super well. So you need the WeChat to be able to connect with people and also make payments. You need the Alipay as kind of a secondary payment system. Those both now do support international credit cards. So you can load up a couple of credit cards into each one. And with that done, you're pretty much good to go for making the vast majority of connections and purchases that you might want to make in China.

• 27:19Nathan Labenz?

  The other app that you'll want to have for sure is Didi, which is their equivalent of Uber. And it works basically the same way. There's some kind of small but interesting differences where when you're quoted a fare, for example, at the beginning of a ride, if it's a small enough fare, you don't actually pay in advance. You instead get a sort of rough quote, you agree to that, and then you actually get the final number at the end and you pay after the fact. You actually don't pay until after the ride. So many times I was going to get my next ride and then it was like, okay, you got to pay for the last ride first. Interesting, small difference, didn't really make a, a big practical difference in my overall experience. In the big cities, and I was only in Beijing and Shanghai where I actually called

• 28:02Nathan Labenz?

  Didi's for rides, it's a very similar experience to Uber in a big city. It's a very liquid market, fast pickup, a bunch of, at this point, like a bunch of different levels of car that you can get from the most basic economy to priority faster pickup, to premium cars, to luxury cars, to XL. So that experience is like very familiar to anyone who's used Uber. And the biggest difference, honestly, is that it's really just cheap. Like, the number of crosstown 30, 40 minute rides that I took that came in the like $6 to $8 range is really pretty remarkable. It would easily be, in many cases, close to 10 times that much, if not fully 10 times

• 28:45Nathan Labenz?

  that much, for some of these rides in the United States. But that was simple to do and worked easily. One thing I can say is, it was actually hard for me to confirm that my credit cards were going to work. I loaded them up into the apps and they were accepted into the apps as payment methods. But then there's all these different ways that Chinese people use to move money around in the app that are not accessible to international cards. So I made a few connections on WeChat via just people that I knew in China. They introduced me to a couple of friends of friends and I got connected to them on WeChat even before leaving. And when you go in there, you can, the menu includes things like, "Send money to this

• 29:30Nathan Labenz?

  person." And so you try to do that, I was just trying to do it just to make sure that my credit card would not block a payment just because it was on this unfamiliar Chinese app. And all those features pretty much are not accessible to international users, for whatever reason. I'm honestly not sure why. And I'm pretty sure that's a WeChat, or maybe a Chinese government decision. It was not something that my credit card was blocking. It's just, you get to the final step in the app and it's, "Oh, your payment method is not supported to make this kind of transfer." So I actually wasn't able to do any transactions in WeChat before getting on the ground there. So my very first order of business, when I landed in Beijing at 3:00 AM, was I need

• 30:11Nathan Labenz?

  to go to some little kiosk or whatever at the airport and make sure that I can make a payment before I leave the airport, because I want to make absolutely sure that I was able to transact. China is pretty much a cashless society at this point. I did not see any cash at all while I was there the entire time. And I actually wanted to bring a few bills home for my kids, just as souvenirs. There was never an opportunity when it was like, "Oh, you have cash. Can I somehow get some cash for you, from you?" The one time when I actually did do it was when I met a friend of a friend for a meal

• 30:55Nathan Labenz?

  and I mentioned, "Is there anywhere I can get cash?" And one of the guys that I was having lunch with said, "I think I have some at my desk. Let me go up back to my office for a second. I'll see if I can get some at the desk." He was like, "We really don't use it," which I knew at that point, but he said, "I'll go see if I can get some." And sure enough, he did have some and I was able to exchange a few American dollars in cash for some Chinese cash. Other than that, I did not touch cash and I would have easily not touched or thought about cash the entire time. Online, what I was finding was that people were saying, "A lot of people don't even take cash." What I was told on the ground there is that the law is that businesses have to take cash.

• 31:35Nathan Labenz?

  So if you were to bring cash and change money at the airport, I guess that might work, but it would definitely put you in a very different user experience, let's say, than what people around you are doing. And I wouldn't be surprised if there are some places where they either don't want to take it, or if it's an automated thing, or it's just not set up to take it at all, if you're buying tickets or whatever in various places. I would imagine that there could be some things that could be quite tough to do with cash these days, because it really is super cashless, which is super convenient and also definitely enables a lot of visibility into what kind of transactions are happening in the economy. But yeah, maybe a little nervous showing up, not knowing if my credit cards were actually gonna be supported.

• 32:18Nathan Labenz?

  But sure enough, when I did land, went to the first kiosk I saw, picked up a fruit drink that looked pretty interesting. I think that drink was under $2 at the airport for a kind of fresh juice that would have been easily $6, $7, $8 at a US airport. And then I was fumbling around with my first transaction, trying to figure out, because it was a self-checkout, there was no person there to help. How do I actually do this transaction? So I scanned my product and it pulled up the price, and then I'm like, "Okay, what do I do now?" And eventually I figured out how to show my payment QR code to the camera in the machine. And it's actually by showing my QR code to that machine that it registers, "Okay, this

• 33:03Nathan Labenz?

  person is paying for this." And then as soon as you do that, you get the beep, and then you look at your phone and it says, "Processing payment." And a couple of seconds later, it's boom, "Payment is processed," and you're gone. That's quite interesting and quite different from, of course, how China used to be. A lot of people, I think, have either experienced themselves in the past, if they went years ago, or have heard that there's a lot of pushy sales going on in China, or that there's a lot of haggling, or that there's a lot of rip-offs. And honestly, I would say, none of that was an issue at all. In today's world, the economy is really very formal in the sense of, it's all pretty much by the book.

• 33:47Nathan Labenz?

  Everything has a price. People really didn't hassle you much at all. I had just a very, a couple of very minor moments where anybody tried to talk me into buying something. And I did go to some tourist places, so it's not like I, I did go to some, I went to the Great Wall, so I went to some places where there were definitely the kind of souvenir shop places where in many parts of the world, you would be like aggressively approached and tried to talk into buying things. It really wasn't like that. It was very low-key, low-pressure. And when you did go to buy things, they had prices. You really weren't expected to negotiate or haggle at all. There really wasn't much opportunity for that. And there also really wasn't, in my experience, any rip-off. It was all just, here's the price, boom, here's the thing, here's the place to scan, here's the payment code, and boom, you're kind of done.

• 34:32Nathan Labenz?

  So in that respect, it was all extremely modern. I would say, honestly, in a number of ways, China feels like maybe the most modern place that I have ever been. One other app that you would definitely want to get is Dotcom app. This is kind of the national tourist platform for China, and it works in other places too, but it's the way to book things in China, whether that's hotels or attractions, plane tickets, train tickets. It's all kind of there and it's all pretty centralized. This is the theme in China in general. You're gonna use these very standard platforms that everybody uses, everybody's on, and

• 35:17Nathan Labenz?

  work, in my experience, really well. So Trip.com is another thing to download before you go. I booked a high-speed rail ticket on it. I booked a plane ticket on it at one point. I booked the ticket to the Great Wall on it, booked a bunch of different hotel rooms on it, and all super smooth. Again, your payment methods are loaded in there before you go, and then when it's time to book things, it's just a couple clicks. And then when you show up to places, you've got your tickets right in the app and you just open up your app. And again, it's usually a QR code and you kind of just be, boom, here's my QR code and you're admitted to things. So the level of integration and the sort of ubiquity of these platforms is really hard to overstate.

• 35:59Nathan Labenz?

  Obviously, in the US, we have very similar options where people can pay each other via apps. We've got your Venmos and your cash apps. But then they're a young person's game, they're not the kind of thing you can just expect that everybody is gonna take. In China, it really is, everybody is on the apps. Every person of every age is on WeChat. There was not one person who was not on WeChat that I encountered. And I don't know what percentage of the population is on WeChat at this point, but it has got to be super, super high. Similarly with the payments, of course, they're all on that, they're all on Alipay. All the businesses, everything you might be interested in from a tourist standpoint, are on these platforms.

• 36:40Nathan Labenz?

  And you really can manage all your business through the phone. Meituan is another one that I think is probably worth downloading, their delivery app. It's sort of an Amazon-like everything store experience, but with more of an emphasis on food delivery and just really quick delivery of all kinds of things. And it's cool and definitely a high, high-quality user experience. They don't, all the other apps that I've mentioned, WeChat has an English language interface that you can use, just need to switch the language to English. Alipay doesn't have a full-on English version that I found, but it does have a translate button that kind of hovers around.

• 37:22Nathan Labenz?

  I guess if it, I'm sure that's not there for everybody all the time, but it somehow identified me as maybe needing the translate option. And so there's this translate button that you can just press any time to see a translation of whatever it is you're looking at in the app. Didi has an English version, Trip.com has an English version, so all these things are very easy to use. Meituan does not, as far as I know, have a fully English version, and so that one can be a little bit overwhelming to use. I had a great experience using Google Lens, and this is actually one of the things that probably is a little bit nicer about the Android phone, is that you take these screenshots and then immediately you've got the Google Translate options to translate whatever text is in the image that you just took a screenshot of.

• 38:02Nathan Labenz?

  So at times, I was definitely taking a lot of screenshots of interfaces to see what it was that I was looking at. Even just to order in a restaurant, a lot of times you would kind of do it through Meituan or another app where you, they put QR codes on the table. To pull up the menu, you scan the QR code. To order, you do it in the app from the table. And then you pay again through one of the, you know, major payment platforms. All that happens on your app. You're not even ordering, talking to a server at any point in some of these restaurants. And then a little bit later, your food comes and that's it. That you're all, your entire transaction was mediated on the phone.

• 38:46Nathan Labenz?

  And in some cases, that involved a lot of screenshots and translations. So definitely recommend the Google Translate app. The Microsoft Translate app is also well used. And then everybody in China has the Translate app on their phone as well. Every DD driver, every service provider of any kind, certainly everybody at a hotel concierge. And usually at hotel concierge, you'll get decent English, although not always in my experience. But they always have the Translate app there and they're just super quick to record themselves speaking in Chinese and then show you what they just said. And you can go back and forth that way. And that works really quite well these days. It's strikingly easy to travel through a place like China and not really feel like

• 39:30Nathan Labenz?

  you're lost between the maps apps and the super apps and the translation apps. I would say it's still an adventure, but to imagine what it would have been like 20 years ago, 30 years ago, to go there and just be totally immersed in a very different place and constantly needing to ask people around you for help and trying to negotiate these situations in broken language back and forth. Basically, all of that is history now. It's really quite smooth. Just don't lose your phone and you'll be, and you'll be fine. And even then, we can talk, I'll talk a little bit about losing phones and how easy it is to get them back and how, how well a lot of their systems really work. So that was my whole parallel universe setup, right?

• 40:13Nathan Labenz?

  I've got this different phone, new Gmail account, a new Signal account, a new WhatsApp account with that new email and that new phone number, the WeChat account, the Alipay account, load up the credit cards into those, get the DD account for rides, get the trip.com account, load up a couple of cards into that so I can book anything that I need to book. And with all that stuff and with, especially having two international or two, two US or international phone numbers there, with the international roaming plans on, the tech experience was really incredibly smooth and, and highly enabling throughout the entire trip.

• 40:54Nathan Labenz?

  What I did for contact with home base, because I do have a pretty good agent setup at home, is I left my main computer on, I left my Mac Mini on, and I instructed Claude to monitor my communications, which it has access to already. It has access to my Gmail. I've done previous episodes about this. So if you haven't heard those, you could maybe go back to the Daniel Meesler episode to get a more thorough walkthrough of my particular agent setup, which is working quite well for me. Because of this pretty extensive setup that already happened, I was able to just tell Claude with a couple of prompts, I'm going to be gone for the next couple of weeks. Here's what I want you to do. Monitor my communications, send me a digest a couple of times a day.

• 41:36Nathan Labenz?

  Let me know if there's anything urgent, anything that is, needs my attention in general. And then I will be able to respond back to you from my travel email. I also set up an Outlook as well, because again, while Gmail in theory is blocked in China, Outlook is not. You can use Microsoft products and Outlook is available even if you're behind the great firewall. For me, this was not an issue at all. I never had to use the Outlook. I just used the Gmail and I had perfect access to it all the time because I was just using my roaming plan, but I did have that as a fallback. So I told Claude I might respond to the digests and I might also send an email. I might send an email to my own home address and I want you to respond to those emails

• 42:20Nathan Labenz?

  and do whatever it is that I ask you to do. We initially, it initially said, okay, we're going to need some sort of, Claude can get really into the security mindset. And I did have a fairly extensive back and forth of it about how much of this stuff do I really need to do and exactly how should I go about it? At one point it had a password set up where when I emailed in, I was supposed to give it a password. And I said, I don't think I want to be giving you a password every time. First of all, that if anybody is hacking my stuff, if they are reading my emails somehow on this burner phone, they're going to see the password. So that didn't make a lot of sense to me. I said, why don't you just apply a sensible filter? If you, if the requests seem reasonable, if they seem like they're coming from me,

• 43:02Nathan Labenz?

  if they seem like they're low risk, just run a check on all, all the inbounds that you get from me. And if it passes those checks, you can just do it. And if it doesn't, then you can issue me a challenge and do a sort of, ask me some trivia that only I would know the answer to or whatever, based on all the work that we've done together. And it agreed to do that. And of course, that never came up, but I had a pretty good time of it where I was able to get these digests. I had Claude responding from my main account. Cause one thing that I wanted to make sure is that if I got an email and I wanted to respond to somebody, I didn't want to have the response coming from a different address because might get filtered out of their priority inbox or whatever, or they just confuse them. So instead I had Claude respond as me, which I normally never do.

• 43:47Nathan Labenz?

  But I, when I say as me, respond from my address, but I just instructed it to introduce itself as Claude, which was funny at times. It was like, hi, I'm Claude, an AI assistant. I was like, okay. At one point I gave feedback because people know who you are, Claude. You don't need to tell everybody that you're an AI assistant, at least in the people, in the circles that I run in, that's known. But it would explain Nathan's traveling in China, I'm monitoring the comms, I'm copying his travel email here, he can respond. There were a couple of times where somebody sent me something where I was like, let's give, leave it up to them. You respond to them, tell them what's up. If they want to add me on this, knowing that I'm in China and take whatever risk is associated with that, which I think is pretty minimal, but we can let them decide.

• 44:30Nathan Labenz?

  There were a couple of times when we did that, but most of the time Claude is just monitoring, giving me these digests. There wasn't too much that was urgent that I needed to do. But when there was, I could respond to Claude and say, okay, in this case, it's fine. Loot me in or, or even just take care of something. And Claude did a pretty good job. I think there were a couple little rough parts, but we gradually ironed those out. And I think at this point, if I were to go back, it would be really easy to just re-enable Claude and have it monitoring my communications. And really the only thing that I had to even have anybody help with was occasion, a couple of times, I think it happened twice, my Gmail authentication expired. And so then I had to have it refreshed and it didn't seem to want to refresh its own

• 45:14Nathan Labenz?

  token through the browser. So I'm going to need to give it some instructions to be like, do it when you need to do it because it can use the browser, of course. But it was kind of getting a little stuck on that. So I just, when I spoke to my wife, I said, hey, could you do a quick re-off of my, just go to my computer, it's on my desk and tell Claude, hey, we need to, she would just open up a new Claude session locally in the terminal. I still use the terminal as opposed to the cowork. Type Claude, tell it, we need to re-off Gmail. It would pop up in the window. She would click the clicks and we're back in business and that takes two minutes. So that's my tech setup. I think for folks in the AI space, it's easy enough to do that, I guess it's probably

• 45:59Nathan Labenz?

  recommended. It's definitely recommended by people who know more than me about information security. So I guess I would just say it's not that much trouble. Know that the firewall is not really going to be an issue. I think having two lines and a VPN backup is probably just prudent. But with a, a cheap burner phone and an extra line and a VPN backup, you are in, I think, a very good place from an information security standpoint. And you can have your agents run your life from home. And for me, this worked really well. I am telling my parents who do some international traveling, now that my dad is retired, that they should go to China.

• 46:43Nathan Labenz?

  And what I would suggest for them is much, much simpler. I don't think they need to, they're not in the AI game at all. So I told them, maybe you could just get a second number if you wanted to have redundancy or the two of you, both with your own numbers, that, that is two numbers. It should be pretty good. Just download WeChat, download Alipay, get trip.com, get DD and you're good. Your internet will work. Make sure your international roaming is enabled. Make sure you have enough data to support the time that you'll be there and you're good to go. I don't think the average person really needs to do any extreme precautions, but for those in the AI game, the setup that I went through is simple enough and you can have it done, honestly, in just a couple of hours.

• 47:26Nathan Labenz?

  It took me longer to figure all this stuff out because I found, again, that the searching and the AI's answers were a lot of, a lot of FUD, a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt about what's going to work? Are you going to be behind the firewall? VPNs go in and out of business and they're illegal and it's okay, wow. But in the end, that, that setup was all pretty simple. So I would say you're, you can do that and you should be pretty confident that it's going to work pretty well. Couple of other little details there. The, you don't even need a, a power adapter in China. The outlets that they use, at least in all of the hotels and major places that I went, were universal outlets that would accept, I think, any major.

• 48:10Nathan Labenz?

  And of course I didn't try every major type of plug, but certainly the US standard two and three prong plug, they were perfectly well set up for, as well as a number of other types. And so I didn't even have to take an adapter. It really was super, super, super simple to, to just bring my normal device with normal charger, very easy. I think it is also worth bearing, talking a little bit about just the level of tech integration, just to drive home, like how much they really have tied everything together. And this is for good in the sense of a incredible user experience. It in some ways might be for bad to the degree that you're concerned about surveillance.

• 48:53Nathan Labenz?

  And I think the surveillance definitely has real upside, but also real downside potential for the Chinese public. But to just illustrate like how thorough the integration process has been. When you call a ride on Didi, as in Uber, it'll say, okay, we've matched you to a car. And here's your driver and here's their license plate, whatever, and the type of car that they're going to be driving. Okay, then you can see them approaching on their route in the same way that you can with Uber, as you're all familiar with. But when it is, when the car that you're waiting for is stopped at a red light, you can literally see the red light countdown clock in your app.

• 49:36Nathan Labenz?

  So that red light that has a timer on it is connected to some centralized system that Didi can in turn call. And you're literally able to watch the countdown until when that red light is going to turn green and your car can again, start making progress toward you. I thought that was really quite impressive and it's indicative of the level of integration that they have across so many information systems. Another one that was pretty interesting was in one hotel, as soon as I would put the key into the thing for the lights to turn on, right? Some hotels have this where you have to put your key into a little slot in order to enable the rest of the room to work.

• 50:20Nathan Labenz?

  As soon as I did that in this one hotel, the TV turned on and started kind of yapping at me, which I thought was a little bit weird and annoying. But then that gave me occasion to notice that the TV was showing me the status of the laundry room in the hotel. In this particular hotel, they didn't offer a laundry service, but they did just have a room downstairs where there were a few washers and dryers that were just free to use for hotel guests. And then of course, this raises the question, is it available now? And I wouldn't even think in the rest of the world of any other way to answer that question, other than going to the room and checking it out.

• 51:00Nathan Labenz?

  But here they had wired it up such that the status of the laundry room washers and dryers was on the screen of the TV when it turned on in the room. So again, this just gives a flavor of how thorough the tech integration has been. The Meituan delivery experience is also another indication of the user experience that you can expect. I had a weird experience one night in the middle of the night where I woke up with basically an allergic reaction ongoing. And I never have allergic reactions, so this was quite strange to me. But the next morning I told my friends about it and we were going on a bus from one place to another.

• 51:44Nathan Labenz?

  And they said, would it be helpful to have some like Claritin or whatever? And I said, yeah, I guess it probably would. Hopefully it won't happen again, but if it does, I would probably benefit from that. Yes. Sure enough, when we get to the destination, it was only like 20 minutes later, there was Claritin waiting for us at the destination. The woman I was talking to had just gone on the Meituan app, requested this particular medicine, which is available over the counter, gave the address that we were going to and boom, it's delivered there, beat us to the place. So that's how fast some of these deliveries can show up. You can order ahead and have your allergy medications arrive at your destination with even just 20 minute lead time and they can beat you there.

• 52:29Nathan Labenz?

  So it was really very impressive in all those little touch point user experience sort of ways. Again, I did feel like it was the most modern feeling place that I had ever been from a technology perspective. And another kind of interesting thought experiment that I've been running is if you were just to go to New York or San Francisco or both, and then separately you were to go to Beijing and Shanghai or both, and you didn't know anything about the countries or the history and probably would also have to mask the prices because the price differential is definitely significant and just spend a week in each of these places and then ask which of these countries is the richer country?

• 53:12Nathan Labenz?

  I think it would be pretty clear to most people. I think you would get honestly, an overwhelming majority of people saying that China is the richer country because it does have newer stuff and more integrated, lower friction experience that just feels like the future. And it's ubiquitous across the, at least the major cities that I've been to. But from what I understand, it really has extended across China to a really remarkable extent. So we'll probably come back to that maybe a little bit later today and definitely a little bit more in the next two episodes that I plan to do about this. But kind of a bottom line, what does it feel to be there? Litmus test?

• 53:56Nathan Labenz?

  I think it does feel more modern and in some ways more developed than life in the United States does, which is a pretty remarkable accomplishment, obviously for Chinese government, Chinese society as a whole. Okay, so in Beijing, I did a couple of days worth of tourism when I first got there before the real AI focused part of the trip opened up. And again, a couple just high level comments, and I'm not going to turn this into a travel blog, but Beijing is absolutely a world-class city from a tourist perspective. If you're going there for no reason other than to see some history and see some famous sites, it is absolutely a world-class destination.

• 54:39Nathan Labenz?

  The number of incredible sites is enough to keep you busy for, I would say, easily a full week. And I would put it on the level of Paris in terms of just everywhere you go, you're looking at incredible, deep history with beautiful architecture, really remarkable sites all over the place. And mostly I did these on my own. Mostly I did them just either catching a Didi to the place and or walking to the place. And then with no tour guide, I did hire a tour guide one time and I'll tell a little bit more about that, but mostly I was just using AIs as the tour guide. I decided to leave my, because I had this whole alter ego strategy, I left my main

• 55:23Nathan Labenz?

  Claude and ChatGPT accounts at home. And I figured I'll just use Chinese AIs for this trip. So you don't necessarily need to do that, especially because you again, can, the great firewall is not such an issue if you're using an international Roman clan. But I figured it's a good opportunity to get a little bit more familiar with Chinese AIs. So I downloaded DeepSeek, the Kimi app and Minimax all to my phone before leaving. And those were the three AIs that I mostly used as I was going about my couple of days of tourism. So I used them as both kind of travel planner, like here I am.

• 56:04Nathan Labenz?

  Actually, I was planning to go to the Great Wall, the very first thing, directly from the airport, but it had been raining heavily. And so they actually closed a couple of sites at the Great Wall and I wasn't able to go. The, I had even booked a ticket, but again, trip.com, the integration is quite good. So I got a notification from trip.com saying, hey, you can't go to this thing today because it's closed, your ticket's been refunded, this is due to heavy rain, whatever, it'll be open again tomorrow. So I was like, okay, my plan is immediately thrown a little bit into into flux. I'll go to the AIs and say, hey, here's where I am in Beijing and here's what time it is and what day of the week it is and what should I do?

• 56:49Nathan Labenz?

  And they were really quite helpful. I think this, this stuff, these experiences do illustrate that you don't necessarily need frontier intelligence for many quite valuable use cases. I was using Kimi 2.6 to, to serve as my tour guide for all these different places as well as, actually there were of course, multiple, not of course, but if you're watching Chinese AI, you would know that there are a couple of notable model releases just in the last couple of weeks while I was there. Not a coincidence because I went in part for the WAIC event. And this was a big moment in Chinese AI and President Xi headlined the event by opening with a keynote.

• 57:33Nathan Labenz?

  So naturally a couple of model companies wanted to time their release to this event. So we got Kimi K3 right around the time of the event. But my little tourism was a little bit before that. So I was using Kimi 2.6. These were very good experiences that I found to be very useful and informative as tour guides. And the fact that there might not be frontier models capable of doing long horizon agentic tasks and capable of various cyber exploits or what have you, really wasn't relevant. They were perfectly good and really quite fast in their response, many, in many cases, perfectly good to educate me about what I was seeing.

• 58:13Nathan Labenz?

  So just going through all these different places from the Lama Temple, which is a Tibetan Buddhist temple right in the heart of Beijing, which was a surprise to me. I was like, oh, wow, we have a, wait, what? This is a Tibetan Buddhist temple? I didn't expect to see that here. It had pretty good historical explanations for how this came to be. And I was asking, how should I, people are. This does go to show my ignorance of China. I wasn't under the impression that there was no religion in China. I've seen enough stuff on TikTok to know that there is religion in China and people do practice religion. My sense is broadly, as long as it's not challenging the state, you're permitted to participate in most religion as you wish. And yeah, here we even

• 58:56Nathan Labenz?

  had Tibetan Buddhist temple right in the heart of Beijing. So I was getting the history on that. Then I went over to the Temple of Confucius and the Imperial College. And again, I had a lot of questions like, wait a second, Confucius, he's not a, not seen as a god, right? He's, he was just a philosopher, wasn't he? Like, why does he have a temple? And it does show some, some fundamental paradigmatic differences between Eastern and Western society where it's like, yes, he is a

• 59:31Nathan Labenz?

  man, he's not considered to be a god, but he also is revered and he's not worshipped, but he is the object of these ritual behaviors or ritual traditions that was not just something that some people did some of the time, but was even understood to be part of the obligations of the emperor. The emperor was meant to be sort of related to God, like the, the son of God might be a little too Christian framing, but definitely some sort of like divine connection. But the emperor also had duties and it was the emperor's job to do the right rituals in the right way. And those

• 1:00:12Nathan Labenz?

  over time came to involve giving offerings and whatnot at the Temple of Confucius. And so it's like a, it's kind of a colors outside the lines as we know them in terms of what is religion and what is state? Is this, does this blur the, the separation of church and state, but also it's not exactly religion in the same way. Kind of unfamiliar stuff, but really helpful explanations from the Chinese AI. I thought they were perfectly good. And by the way, I didn't even pay for them. This was all free usage across all three of these apps and I had a pretty good time of it. There were some issues with refusals and at times I thought probably even by the standards

• 1:00:55Nathan Labenz?

  of like what they wanted over refusals. So I would say like, we're not, Anthropic is not the only company that currently has an over refusal issue. I was asking some, I wouldn't even say sensitive questions, right? But when you get to issues of the question of Tibet, you're going to get, and Taiwan, right? That you're going to get some, they call it the three Ts, Tibet, Taiwan and Tiananmen. Those are obviously sensitive issues in the, the Chinese context. So I wasn't asking questions just to like probe at what will the AI systems answer or not answer. I was really asking pretty earnest questions about what's the deal with a Tibetan Buddhist

• 1:01:36Nathan Labenz?

  temple here in Beijing? That obviously touched on issues of Tibet in a kind of tangential way. I wasn't asking about the status of Tibet today, more history kind of questions. There was another question that I, because I don't know a lot about Chinese history. So I'm like, okay, who built this? And what's the deal? Well, you've got the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty. What's the deal with those? The latter is interestingly a, a minority dynasty that came in and, that came in and took over. So the Qing Dynasty was actually the Manchu ethnic group that was just north, I think north, northeast of kind of Chinese heartland. And they managed to come in and

• 1:02:20Nathan Labenz?

  take over the empire, conquer the place, and then rule it for hundreds of years, which is an interesting and obviously pretty impressive accomplishment. And this Manchu ethnic group, they have their own language. So you see this reflected in some of these artifacts where there would be multiple different languages. You would see the Mandarin Chinese, you would see the Manchu language, you would see sometimes the Tibetan language. I think sometimes also maybe a Western Chinese language, but there were often like four languages that were used and equally represented in these like monuments or sort of proclamations that were going out to the empire. And so one

• 1:03:02Nathan Labenz?

  time I asked, what's up with the man group today? Are they still around? Are they still a part of China? And there you would get the kind of classic old Sydney Bing experience where the model itself would answer the question and you'd see kind of the chain of thought. You might even see the beginning of an answer. And then sometimes like with this Manchu question, because again, you're touching on something fairly sensitive in the Chinese political context of ethnic minorities. The answer is in the process of unrolling in front of you and then you would get this pullback. You'd see the answer disappear and then you'd see, I'm sorry, I can't help you with that. Ask a different question or whatever. And again, this wasn't something that I think they really

• 1:03:44Nathan Labenz?

  even necessarily meant to censor. And not all of the apps censored it the same way. I was able to get some answers from some apps that I wasn't able to get from other apps. It's, it goes to show that in many ways, the, the Chinese ecosystem has a lot of the same things going on that we do, where people are trying to make sure that they're on the right side of regulators, on the right side of history, acting responsibly as they understand it. And at times that can go a little too far and it can interfere with the user experience. But this is also consistent with the reporting that I've seen in many places that the Chinese models themselves are, are not very censored.

• 1:04:22Nathan Labenz?

  It's the actual deployed application experiences that usually contain the censorship. And you could, you could see that as the, the answer was like partially there and then it would be retracted sometimes and you'd be hit with this, no, I'm sorry, I can't help you. So it was, overall, I'd say a very good experience with the Chinese AIs. And I'm, of course, I'm doing this all in English. They do have, some of them have weird quirks where I think it's in deep seek advanced mode with the best deep seek model. Yeah. If you go into expert mode on deep seek, then you can't attach any files and there's also no search enabled. That's kind of weird. I'm not sure why that's the case, but that is the case. Either use, depending on what I was trying to do, I might

• 1:05:07Nathan Labenz?

  just use the instant mode on deep seek. On Kimi, that issue is not there. You had the ability to have the model do searches, even with the best model that was available at the time. And Minimax, I think was probably the most consistent and reliable, just a very down the fairway experience. But I think I had probably the least over refusals from the Minimax app. So I did find occasion to use all three. I'd say for my taste, Kimi is the best of those apps, but there were times when I got better, if only for the over refusal issue, there were times when I got better answers from other apps. You might say Kimi is the most Claude-like and that obviously brings to mind

• 1:05:51Nathan Labenz?

  issues of distillation. I think I'll probably talk about that a little bit more in future episodes than this one. But Kimi, I would say had the best kind of vibes, the best taste. And that may be partially related to accusations of distillation from Claude, but I think it does run a bit deeper than that too. From what I know of the company, Moonshot, like they have a real aesthetic and their name itself was inspired by the Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon album. They've got graphics that, that echo the Prism art from the album, the famous album cover from

• 1:06:31Nathan Labenz?

  Pink Floyd. And they're definitely an organization that takes the aesthetics of the AI that they're building very seriously. So I think there's a lot there that is more than just distillation from Claude, although I do think that the case is fairly compelling that at least some distillation is going on. But get into that probably more in a, a future deeper dive into some of these US-China issues. I guess one other note about how much do I trust the Chinese AIs? Is that when I did have that allergic reaction in the middle of the night, which was a very, fortunately, very short-lived, but very strange experience. I just woke up and my hands were itching like crazy. And I was like, what is going on? My hands are so itchy. And then I got up and

• 1:07:14Nathan Labenz?

  turned on a light and looked at myself in the mirror and my kind of whole upper body torso was like covered in hives. It's like, yikes, that's pretty weird. What did I do in that moment? I downloaded ChatGPT because I did have the sense that, okay, for these tour guide things, I'm getting great answers. It's educating me. I'm pleased. I'm like happy with this, this experience. But now we're in a health, possible emergency. I didn't really know what was going on. I wanted my ChatGPT. I knew I've had Karen from OpenAI who leads health at OpenAI on the podcast. And I've been, like I say, a deep experience using it with my son's case. And I

• 1:07:55Nathan Labenz?

  just felt like, in this moment, I'm going for the best, right? And I, I, of course, it helps that they've made their best health experiences available to even free users. So I was just able to go in and ask my questions and I was very confident that I was getting the best experience that I could get. I did not even create an account. I did not pay for a new account. I did not log into my home account, but I wanted ChatGPT in that moment. And fortunately, this allergic reaction that I experienced just kind of passed. Even over the course of chatting with the AI for 15 minutes or so, a couple of rounds and, and just observing myself, I could tell that it was passing. So it went from, this is probably not an emergency, but you should probably go get checked

• 1:08:38Nathan Labenz?

  out now to, okay, if it's passing and you're feeling like the symptoms are already reducing, then you can probably just go back to sleep and sleep it off. And anyway, that's what I ended up doing. But I did think it was notable from an AI perspective that in that moment, you know, where I was like a little bit alarmed, I still wanted to go back to ChatGPT just for the confidence that this is probably going to be the best answer that I can get and was worth the extra effort to download the app to do that. Okay, let's see. What else do I want to talk about today? I think I'll just do some observations of Chinese society. I'm not going to, again, turn this into a travelogue. But I do think it's worth noting that people are just incredibly nice.

• 1:09:21Nathan Labenz?

  The hospitality that I experienced at every turn was outstanding. I don't mean to contrast this with the West. I think one of the more heartwarming trends of the summer was seeing people from all over the world come to the United States and travel around and go to some of the cities that hosted games that they probably wouldn't otherwise have ever gone to. And some people even just doing road trips from city to city. And people had a really great time and had really great things to say about the United States. So I think that our people are also very warm and hospitable. And the track record from this summer and the reports from World Cup travelers really supports that. So again, this is not meant to be a contrast, but my experience in China was outstanding.

• 1:10:06Nathan Labenz?

  People were extremely friendly. I had really, I would say, zero negative interactions. There was almost nothing that I would call problematic at all. As I mentioned earlier, very few even pushy sales interactions. I can remember a couple of short moments where somebody tried to get me to ride his bike taxi with him and I really didn't want to. And he kind of followed me for a couple of minutes, trying to get me to do it. I was like, dude, I'm okay. I'm happy walking. And he got the message and went on his way. In many parts of the world, you would have probably a lot more of that than you did in China. So it was like definitely impressive and very smooth sailing in that regard. Service also is just like generally really good.

• 1:10:51Nathan Labenz?

  And it's not a tipping culture. Like at no point are you invited to tip. The price is the price and it is a flat price. When you do a WeChat checkout or even a DD checkout, there's no moment in that flow where you're like, hey, would you like to add 10%? Would you like to do this or that? It's just not there. So they are not expecting tips and yet they are consistently delivering high quality service. Service at the hotels I found to be like really very helpful. I wasn't necessarily interacting with like concierge. A couple of the places I stayed at, one place definitely did have a concierge and was super helpful. In fact, one pro tip that I would give there is that the DD app, as it is served up in

• 1:11:33Nathan Labenz?

  the English version to foreigners, doesn't have quite all the same features that the native one has for people that are with Chinese identification and bank cards and what have you. And I'm not sure why, but it doesn't. So one of the features that the Chinese version of the app does have, but that my version of the app didn't have, is the ability to hire a car by the hour. And so for one of my like power tourist days, that was definitely the best option. I was at the Summer Palace, which is a beautiful, beautiful site created by the Qing Dynasty that was destroyed by Europeans at one point and then rebuilt. But it's a very cool and beautiful place to be.

• 1:12:16Nathan Labenz?

  I then wanted to go to the Forbidden City in the afternoon and then to the Great Wall in the evening. And I tried to do that all in one day. And to do that, I was like, I really need a driver who can take me to all these places. But how can I hire one? The concierge at this one hotel said, if you do it by the hour, it should be fine. I said, I don't have the ability to do that. They looked at my app and they'll go, yeah, I know you don't. That's weird. We can do it for you. Okay, great. How is that going to work? We'll just do it on our DD app here. We'll pay for it. You'll pay us. And then I'll also set up a WeChat between you, me and the driver, because the driver probably won't speak much English. But then if anything you need, if you need any translation help or whatever, you can

• 1:12:58Nathan Labenz?

  send a message into the group and we'll just monitor this throughout the day and help you out as you need it and it'll be great. And sure enough, that was extremely helpful in multiple ways. The fact that just renting the car in this way and having the driver who could take me to these places, and it was not expensive. I think the whole day's rental was, it was over eight hours and it was probably nine hours from start to finish that the guy took me around, waited for me the whole time outside of the places that I went to. I think that all together came out to something like $120, $125. Really very, very affordable, given what I was getting.

• 1:13:38Nathan Labenz?

  And yet they, the hotel paid, I paid them and they stayed active in the chat throughout the day, just making sure that I was able to effectively coordinate with my driver. And that was after I checked out of the hotel, by the way. That was on the day that I left the hotel. So I wasn't even coming back and they were still extremely helpful in doing that for hours to come. That, similar things happened at a couple of other hotels too, when I wanted to, for one night, for example, it was raining pretty hard and I was asking, oh, is there a place I can go out for food that's close? And like I had this one dish that I wanted to get that was a crab noodle dish. And that might've been the thing, by the way, that gave me the allergic reaction because it was later that night that happened.

• 1:14:20Nathan Labenz?

  But the guy at the hotel desk said, you could go here, but you can also order delivery. And I was like, yeah, but I don't really know how to do that. And he said, I'll do it for you, no problem. So he just, again, pulled up his phone, did it on his personal Meituan app and showed me what he was ordering me, showed me the price, said, is that cool with you? Yep. Then he was able to send me a little on the fly invoice from WeChat or Alipay. I was able to pay him. He got the money inbound for me and then he boom, hits the checkout on the thing and next thing I've got delivery coming. It was super easy.

• 1:15:00Nathan Labenz?

  Part of the reason that's possible, by the way, is that the transaction costs on payments in China are super, super low. They are like basically an order of magnitude lower than the transaction costs that we have in the United States, where it's like 2% to 3% of the credit card transaction goes to credit card fees, to the point now that we have in gas stations in the US and a number of, a bunch of businesses will be like, we either have a minimum or it's an extra dollar if you want to use a credit card, or it's an extra few percent if you want to use a credit card, or it's 10 cents more per gallon of gas or whatever. We've started to see this sort of businesses not wanting to accept that cost on their

• 1:15:43Nathan Labenz?

  side anymore and putting it back on the consumer. In the Chinese context, the transaction costs, from what I understand, are more like a quarter of a percent of transactions. And I'm not really sure how they're pulling that off. I did ask some AIs and one answer is they don't have rewards in the same way that we do. All your credit card rewards, all that kind of stuff basically ends up coming out of those fees. So I guess this is one way in the US where in a weird way, poorer users are potentially subsidizing wealthier users. We might have to go to patio 11 for a full breakdown of exactly what's going on there. But it does seem like rewards accrue to more affluent credit card users.

• 1:16:26Nathan Labenz?

  There's not really rewards for payments in China, so that's one thing. There's also credit. When we use credit cards in the US, by and large, we're like putting it on our tab and then we pay the bill at the end of the month. When they're doing WeChat payments, there's not really a credit element. There, there is an actual deduction from your balance. It goes to their balance immediately and they know that you're like good for the funds. Now, I had the impression for US credit cards that like it was the interest that you were paying on balances that was covering the risk that you might not pay. But maybe to some degree also the transaction fees are somewhat covering the risk that you might not pay. That's opaque to me. But again, that risk doesn't really exist in the Chinese context.

• 1:17:11Nathan Labenz?

  They're just debiting your actual balance. Fraud protection, as far as I can tell, seems to be about the same. You, and in fact, it might even be easier there because here we have this whole dispute the payment with your credit card rigmarole. There, you can dispute a payment directly with WeChat or directly with Alipay. And from what I understand, I never had to do this, you can often get reimbursed if there is any sort of fraudulent charge. And from what I gather, it happens much faster. It's a much more streamlined experience where in the US you're like waiting weeks and the sort of, the merchant can file their counter claim, whatever. It's a mess on both sides, frankly, both the consumer and the business side. I think neither one has a great experience with credit card disputes. It sounds like it's actually a lot easier to do that kind of thing, at least on the

• 1:17:57Nathan Labenz?

  consumer side in the Chinese context. And somehow it all adds up to dramatically lower transaction costs such that, and I think even peer to peer, there might be no transaction cost, which we do have some of that in the US as well, right? If I do a Venmo to my buddy, that he gets the balance and I'm not paying an extra fee on top. So I think when I was doing this stuff at the concierge, I think there was just no money lost at all and they were happy to do that. And that happened a couple of times. I also got tickets to a soccer game one time that way by just going up to the concierge desk and saying, I want to go to a soccer game. I have no idea what to do. Can you help me buy tickets to a soccer game? They ended up doing it all on their account and then I just paid them right as they hit

• 1:18:41Nathan Labenz?

  the checkout button for the tickets and boom, we're good to go. I thought that was all pretty cool and again, just makes for a great overall experience. Another interesting thing about China, I would say, is there's just really a ton of things that you see that you're like, boy, that is really similar to what we're familiar with at home. For example, the Apple aesthetic.

• 1:19:07Nathan Labenz?

  Is very prominent in China. I went to a mall and went to a number of different technology company stores, including Huawei and Xiaomi. And both of these companies sell phones and laptops and they look like exactly like iPhones. And the stores are set up exactly like Apple stores. If you walked into these things, not knowing where you were, you would like definitely, if you just open your eyes, you would immediately think you're in an Apple store. You would maybe start to notice that you're not in an Apple store, obviously because the signage is in Chinese, but also because these companies both sell cars as well.

• 1:19:50Nathan Labenz?

  So there's like, you're imagine an Apple store that also sells cars. Imagine if the Apple car were actually a thing. That would be the experience of going into a Xiaomi or a Huawei store. But the aesthetic is like strikingly Apple like. Another thing that jumped out at me is that they have a similar, you might call it cult of the founder type attitude toward the leaders of their tech companies. You could maybe say like the cult of the, maybe Confucius is like the ultimate cult of the founder. There's still a temple to Confucius in Beijing to this day. And I was interested to learn that Confucius's direct descendants, now 79 generations on,

• 1:20:33Nathan Labenz?

  still identify, they've tracked their lineage back to Confucius, they still identify as his direct descendants and they still do like certain ceremonies or rituals, whatever, to honor him, I believe on his birthday. 79 generations on, that's pretty remarkable. Cult of the founder. Mao is maybe another example of the cult of the founder in that Mao is still what cash there is, which is not much, but when I was able to get my hands on a little cash, Mao's face was on all the bills that I saw. But it also happens at the tech company level. The founder of Huawei is talked about in a sort of mythical sense. The founder of DeepSeek is talked about in this way.

• 1:21:13Nathan Labenz?

  The founder of Jipu or Z.ai is also talked about in this way. And it very much echoed the way that people in the US, and I would say probably more positively actually, but there's definitely a sort of parallel to the Bezos and the Zuckerberg and the Elon. Elon would be of course, the paradigmatic example of this in the US. They really do have a, there's a very strong sense in which they look up to these tech founders and leaders that I think absolutely parallels our own.

• 1:21:52Nathan Labenz?

  Going to WAIC also, just really striking, this was at the Shanghai Expo Center. And I've actually never been to CES, but I'd say in terms of scale, it was probably CES scale is a huge event. I did go to Nvidia ETC conference last year and that was like the most recent big tech conference with like these mega booths from these huge companies. And this was exactly the same kind of vibe at the Shanghai Expo Center. Again, if you just opened your eyes and you were like, where am I? You might think you were in Las Vegas at a big trade show. The booth structure, the aesthetic, like it's all very, very similar.

• 1:22:35Nathan Labenz?

  Not really too much to speak of from the actual WAIC like trade show itself. I thought it was so familiar that in some ways it wasn't really that interesting. You saw all the big companies that you would expect to see. They had booths that showed all the things that you would expect to see them show. And it was remarkable mostly for just how similar and otherwise unremarkable it was to be on the trade show floor. One thing I was expecting and maybe didn't see as much of as I was expecting was like really cool robot demos. You do see more robots just out and about in China, certainly than you do see in the United States. At one of the hotels that I stayed at, there were a couple of robots that were in use to

• 1:23:19Nathan Labenz?

  deliver meals that were delivered by Meituan to rooms where the customer was ultimately going to receive them. So that was interesting. I also saw some robots just going around in parks, kind of sweeping robots. These were not humanoids. They were more like little R2-D2 style droids that either had a compartment to hold your food or a compartment to hold the leaves and the pine needles or whatever that were being swept up into them. Those were like pretty basic. I think they were probably programmed either to the specific space that they were in or they were programmed with like relatively simple rules of like go slowly, don't bump it, otherwise just kind of cover space. It was a little bit like your iRobot, R I P iRobot, things like we've had in the US,

• 1:24:01Nathan Labenz?

  but just deployed in public places, more, more prominent, more visible. So you did have those kinds of robots, but they weren't particularly advanced in terms of the tasks that they were doing or the way that they were moving about. Now, back to WAIC, I did have a chance at the Tencent booth to sit for a brief robot massage. And this is the first time a robot ever touched me in any meaningful way. But I sat down in the chair and the robot put its, I guess it was doing a sort of Chinese pressure point sort of thing, where it had one hand on my, on the front of my chest and one on the back, just kind of on the inside of the shoulder. And it did a pressure point circular massage.

• 1:24:46Nathan Labenz?

  It was a pretty short experience. It was maybe a one to two minute demo. It felt okay. I would say I didn't get any human massages, but I would say the human massage would still be the preferable experience. But it wasn't just phoning it in. It did have like real pressure on me and it was kind of interesting. Aside from that though, as I walked around, there was certainly a ton of robotics companies. And one can expect that China will dominate the human, at least the sort of scaled production of all kinds of robots, including humanoid style robots. And that humanoid could be wheeled or it could be with legs, whatever. But, and of course Tesla is going to give them a run for their money.

• 1:25:28Nathan Labenz?

  And we have other companies that are really working on the AI, the general purpose AI to power these sorts of robots. At the Robot Expo Hall, it was a little bit weird. It was like, there were so many robots and so many demos set up, but not that many demos actually working. A lot of them were paused. It was like, oh, here's a robot that's set up to cook, but it's not actually cooking. One that I saw was going to do a magic trick. And there was a guy there that was like shuffling cards and he was the human magician. So he spoke good English and I started chatting with him a little bit. And I said, so you taught this robot to do a magic trick, huh? And he's like, yeah, I, I did. And I said, what did that take?

• 1:26:11Nathan Labenz?

  And he said, oh God, it took six weeks of just a ton and I did the trick over and over again. And I said, so you're not worried about robots taking your job anytime soon as a magician? And he said, oh God, no, it's a long way off. They were only going to do, from what I could tell from the signage, they were only going to do this robot magic trick demo one time. And it was like the next day at 11:00 AM or whatever. And I was like, only one time? You're only going to do this, you went to all this trouble, you're only going to show it off one time? And I couldn't figure out why that was. It's possible that I missed something, that there was maybe some rule or they were trying to have different companies stage their demos out at different times. But I never caught any wind of that. It just seemed to me broadly that like the robot hardware is certainly coming along

• 1:26:56Nathan Labenz?

  and people see the opportunity and the government has said that like, this is a priority and so people are trying to answer that call. But the actual autonomy did not feel that far along yet. And this maybe suggests, and this could be something to come back to in a later episode, but I think there's maybe some opportunity for real complementarity between the Chinese ecosystem and what the American ecosystem is currently leaning on. I suspect that outside of maybe Unitree, which certainly has cool robots and does some incredible demos, I suspect that the American companies are farther ahead on the actual model development

• 1:27:38Nathan Labenz?

  for general purpose autonomy of these humanoid and other similar robot form factors. I didn't get the sense that the models on these Chinese robots were really all that good. There was some teleoperation. There was one time where I was walking down the hall and a robot was walking toward me and. I extended my hand as if to shake its hand. And then I looked up and there's a woman behind the robot controlling it with a robot, with a remote control. And she looks at me and sees me and she just shakes her head like, this thing is not going to shake your hand, buddy. So I didn't really expect it to, but it was just kind of, okay, this is not an autonomous demo. This is showing that the robot can walk, but it is walking with teleop.

• 1:28:22Nathan Labenz?

  And I think that was kind of where most of these companies were at. I didn't see much that led me to believe that they were very far along in autonomy. And just the fact that they were only going to do this magic trick demo once, it still kind of made me feel like, is it some sort of, like, what, how, is this sort of a sleight of hand within a sleight of hand? Because I felt like, if you could really do that magic trick at all reliably or without some sort of really convoluted setup, you'd probably do it a few times over the course of a four day major event like this. But as far as I could tell, it was only going to happen the one time. To be continued, I think, on robots. But I think there's definitely some opportunity for complementarity there. Other things that jumped out at me as like being extremely, almost uncannily similar,

• 1:29:07Nathan Labenz?

  the Chinese hyperscalers and the role that they play in the tech ecosystem really reminds me of the role that like a Google or a Meta play in the American ecosystem. I had the opportunity, actually, this was just through a LinkedIn connection. I had my local Claude, before I left, go through all messages that I've received on all platforms, basically, and say, who am I connected with in China? Even just like who follows me at Chinese frontier companies? And I just sent probably 20 DMs to people that had either reached out on LinkedIn or that followed me or whatever. And one guy that had connected with me on LinkedIn works at a Chinese hyperscaler.

• 1:29:48Nathan Labenz?

  And so I reached out and said, hey, I'm going to be in your city in Shanghai and I'd love to meet. And he said, could you come to our office for lunch? And I said, yes, I can. I'd love to do that. So I took my DD over there and it cost me seven bucks or whatever to get across town. And it was exactly like having lunch at Google. Like, it was so similar. And I don't think that's an accident, right? I think they're taking inspiration from Google in many ways. But big cafeteria, bring a friend, just swipe them in. I'm not sure what kind of registration process, but I had a guest badge swiped in over abundance of like all kinds of different foods. Everybody just eating in big tables in the cafeteria.

• 1:30:31Nathan Labenz?

  I've had lunch at Google a number of times over the years. It felt exactly like having lunch at Google. This was, of course, all Chinese, but an extremely similar experience at pretty much every step. And then after, during the lunch, I was saying, okay, so what else is going on? What do you think I should do? And the guy said, actually, tonight, we have a event for startups, which you could come to if you want to come. And so again, my mindset in life, and particularly when I'm traveling, is say yes to as many invitations as possible. So, okay, let's go do that. So later on, that same day, I went to this startup mixer and it had, again, an uncannily

• 1:31:11Nathan Labenz?

  similar structure to a mixer that a, a big tech company might throw in San Francisco. You got tons of founders running around. They are all pretty early stage in this context. Most of, some of them had launched, some of them hadn't even launched. They are all like, super eager to pitch you on what they're doing. They're all hustling. The big tech company is providing the space, providing the food, providing the drink. Actually, another interesting thing is that there was very little alcohol in China, in my experience. Now, that's obviously a small slice. But in the same way that people have been saying recently that alcohol is out of fashion in Silicon Valley, there wasn't a lot of alcohol at any of these AI or tech events

• 1:31:56Nathan Labenz?

  in China either. I think I had a drink and mostly honestly, when I was hanging out with other Westerners from the AI safety community, like, two times. Aside from that, there was just not much alcohol going on at all. Clean living, I would say, is also a commonality right now between the San Francisco AI scene and the, and at least the Shanghai startup mixer that I attended. And yeah, again, you could just, you could feel so, so many similarities. Structurally, the way it was provided by this big tech company that wasn't selling anything or trying to get you to make any commitments to them. But if anything, they were like, maybe going to give you free credits to sign up with their

• 1:32:40Nathan Labenz?

  cloud or sign up for, with their AI inference product. And these, these folks all running around hustling, it's just like, boy, this is very much an echo of Silicon Valley. There was another instance that, again, was pretty similar. I don't know the university tech transfer dynamic in the US super well. And I obviously don't know anything in China super well. But I had an opportunity to visit a, what I would describe as kind of a tech transfer office, that they described as sitting between academia and commercialization. They described, and I don't know to what degree this takes inspiration from Peter Thiel,

• 1:33:19Nathan Labenz?

  but they described the technology process as going from zero to one, one to 10, and one to 100. And zero to one, they said, that's really at universities. That's like professors, that's research groups. They're trying to figure out what tech has any possibility of working. Then they described themselves as sitting between the researchers and the market and trying to understand both what enterprise customers want, what the market at large wants, and what the technologists in the universities are actually getting traction on, and trying to bridge those two and helping, helping these technologies go through this kind of cross the chasm sort of thing, if you will, this one to 10, where you validate

• 1:34:04Nathan Labenz?

  that, yes, this technology probably can scale, not to actually scale it, but that it can probably scale, and that it meets the commercial needs that people have. And then, once they do that, that's when a company actually gets started and spun out to, to go do its thing and go from 10 to 100. And again, that felt pretty similar to what I've seen in American tech transfer contexts. There were even some kind of social dynamics that I thought notably similar, and I wouldn't want to overstate this, but in the US, we have this phenomenon where women are outperforming men on educational attainment indicators.

• 1:34:47Nathan Labenz?

  The majority of people going to college these days is women. You've got this sort of phenomenon of women feeling like, where are the, the eligible men that are in my same social or economic class? And that also seems to be going on in China. There's a similar phenomenon where younger women are achieving at higher rates educationally than their male peers. And at a number of the different places that I visited, the most senior person that was representing the organization was indeed a woman. And you don't see that necessarily all the way up the, the very, very highest echelons of power in Chinese society, which also you don't necessarily see it in the very, very highest echelons in American society either.

• 1:35:31Nathan Labenz?

  But it was notable to see that there was this kind of similar thing where women are outperforming men. Where are the men that are on my level was a question that they're asking and they're, the women are going places. Can the men kind of keep up? It was a question, I think, in both societies right now. Definitely some differences worth noting, too. One big one is that the way things happen in China with respect to how you advance in the political system, it's, that is very different, and I think it's actually quite important. There's something in China called the mayor economy, which certainly you can find better experts to explain than I can.

• 1:36:11Nathan Labenz?

  But the, the key insight is that to advance your political career in China, you have to please the party. You have to please the higher ups. There are no local voters in general that you have to please and get their votes. So this creates quite different incentives from what we have in the US in a lot of cases. In the US, of course, if you're a mayor of a city, You are accountable to the voters of your city. And it's up to you to figure out what strategy you want to play to win support from your voters. If your voters don't like the current president, then you can get ahead by attacking the current president.

• 1:36:56Nathan Labenz?

  If, as we saw in California with respect to Elon, there's a super successful business person in your jurisdiction, but you think you can make political hay by attacking that person, you can do that. And maybe if they're Elon, they might leave, but maybe that still redounds to your benefit. Maybe you have a voter base in your particular area that supports you for speaking truth to power, or whatever, however they would see that. In China, it's very different in this respect. If you are the mayor of a local city, you are essentially in competition with the mayors of other cities to prove that you are the best at running a local city government and, to some extent, the economy.

• 1:37:41Nathan Labenz?

  And of course, there's tremendous market activity in China. So this is not a command and control. And hopefully, that's been clear from everything I've said so far. It is hyper capitalist and hyper competitive in some ways. But the the local political leadership sees itself in competition with other similar level people. And the people they have to please are above them. There are no voters. They want to make the citizens successful and prosperous. But it's doing that that will get them the approval and the promotions from the people higher up in the party. And so I do think that creates quite a different dynamic where, obviously, you're never going to have local officials trashing the national officials.

• 1:38:25Nathan Labenz?

  That is probably obvious. But also, I would say the relationship between government and local businesses is also quite different, where the the local mayors or whatever kind of local officials we're talking about, they want to see their local companies succeed. And so they're investing in them, they're trying to help them in whatever ways they can. They want their local electronic vehicle maker or their local robotics maker to be one of the ones that ultimately survives. And you'll have this sort of, the way that technology proliferates in the US, in some ways, you could draw an analogy like, I tell the story all the time of how cable companies happened in the US.

• 1:39:10Nathan Labenz?

  It happened in one place, and then people said, hey, that's a pretty good business model. I'll go start up the cable company in my city. And so initially, we had just a huge number of cable companies. And we still do have quite a lot, but there's been a lot of consolidation over time. There's something kind of similar that happens in China where it's more often like a kind of strategic directive that like, hey, we need to lead in electronic vehicles. We need to lead in humanoid robotics. This is important. Okay, that message goes out. And now it's entrepreneurs that start these companies. But it's also the mayors of the cities or the provincial leadership, whatever, that is also thinking, okay, I want to get promoted.

• 1:39:53Nathan Labenz?

  The big man says electronic vehicles and humanoid robots are really important. How can I help my local companies succeed? If I can do that, that's going to be a major feather in my cap. That's the kind of thing that's going to get me promoted. And so the incentives for local leadership, I think, are very different. And in some ways, more pro-business than they are in the United States. Of course, we do have incentives for local leaders to support local business in the US as well. But I think it's a little more complicated. When you look at like what Mamdammy is doing in New York, his rhetoric is not super friendly to some of the biggest taxpayers in his jurisdiction, right?

• 1:40:36Nathan Labenz?

  I wouldn't say anybody thinks he's a great friend to finance. He's not necessarily attacking finance as much as you might suspect based on some of his other democratic socialist principles or pronouncements. But he's certainly not like championing finance either, even though it's a huge taxpayer and it's just a major industry in New York. I think in my, and again, tell me if you think I'm wrong, correct me in the comments, but I think the mayor economy creates a more supportive business environment because people know that the competition is going to be intense. It is not, it is not the case that you have, with maybe some exceptions in the older state-owned enterprises.

• 1:41:18Nathan Labenz?

  But these days, when China wants to enter in a new industry, it is doing it with private sector innovation. And the local political leadership knows that this is happening all over the country, and most of these companies are not going to make it. So if we want ours to make it, we better do our part to support them. And that did feel like a quite different vibe from what I was able to learn from the American context. Another funny thing was, just in terms of surprises and also like notable differences, an unbelievable number of generally remarkably clean public toilets in, especially Beijing, but I think in major cities throughout China.

• 1:42:01Nathan Labenz?

  This was something that the the national government decided was a priority at some point, or at least one, one of their priorities. And so they've built a lot of clean public toilets. In Beijing in particular, I was just astounded by how often you are passing a public toilet. And when I used them, they were really quite clean. And I was like, and there was no fee or anything attached, just public toilets available everywhere, clean, ready to go. That is obviously not the case in a New York or San Francisco. You got to find a business that you want to make a token purchase from or whatever, if you're going to use the, their bathroom in many cases.

• 1:42:41Nathan Labenz?

  In Beijing, and again, I think in most of China, but in Beijing, to an amazing degree, there were just a huge number of public toilets always available. Another big difference, of course, is like surveillance. They do have, it's obvious, I think, to everybody that there's just a huge number of cameras around all the time, indoors and outdoors, even sitting in a restaurant. You look around and there's like multiple cameras covering the inside of restaurants. They're covering the outside on the street. Basically, anywhere that you go, that's not like your own private room, you're, you should assume that you're on camera. And on top of that, you also, especially as an international visitor, you need to bring your passport to a lot of things.

• 1:43:26Nathan Labenz?

  To take a train, the high-speed train required check-in with the passport. Going to the Forbidden City required check-in with the passport. Going to parks, even just public parks seemed to, in some cases, require passport. Or in some cases, they maybe said they did, but they didn't always. But there were fees, small fees for public parks in many places, which I found to be surprising. Truly like very small fees, like two yuan or whatever. This would be 30 cents, something along those lines, basically a nominal fee. And then I also noticed that if you wanted the annual pass, it was only like a small multiple of that. So you could get the annual subscription or the annual pass to parks for a dollar or two. But why were they even charging at all?

• 1:44:11Nathan Labenz?

  I wasn't really sure. One theory was that this was just another way that you can track people. If they are going to enter the park, you know who paid what and when, and so you know who's entering the park. I'm not sure if that's really the right answer. Maybe it was just for revenue. They certainly keep things very clean. There were a lot of people sweeping the streets. Again, especially in Beijing, I was really amazed by how many people I saw sweeping sidewalks, sweeping the park areas, sweeping, keeping the public bathrooms clean. And obviously, that has to be paid for somehow. So maybe the park revenue is going to that. Didn't seem like they were charging enough to really cover that. So I'm not sure that's really the right answer.

• 1:44:55Nathan Labenz?

  But yeah, you're just kind of, it's clear that as you go through life, you are like being watched and you are also being logged at all these different touch points. The upside of this is that it is incredibly safe. You have Basically, no worry. The attitude there is like, there's no crime in China. That's pretty much how people approach it. And I certainly felt totally safe. I've also heard from women and from families that it's very comfortable to be out at night as a woman in, in a way that it's not so comfortable in New York City. Or with kids, you can take your kids anywhere, kids at any time of night. I went to one section of Beijing fairly late at night. It was like 11 o'clock and there were just tons of kids out.

• 1:45:40Nathan Labenz?

  It felt, and I felt that in Mexico before as well. Supposedly dangerous Mexico, and certainly Mexico does have some, some dangerous parts. You go to a small town in Mexico and kids are out late at night in the public square. And China has a similar vibe. It just feels like you're safe wherever you go. This is also super useful if you do lose your phone. I heard multiple stories of people leaving a phone in a cab. And this can be a huge problem if everything is on the phone, right? I was kind of thinking, man, in the end, I did take a computer, which I didn't really need. And I never really used, but I just wanted to have some other device that I could use if I lost the phone. So I had recently replaced my laptop.

• 1:46:25Nathan Labenz?

  I wiped the old laptop, took it back to factory settings and basically just took this clean laptop just to have this backup device. But what I heard from multiple people, multiple times was, oh, I left a phone in a cab. I went immediately to the police. And there's, there's a lot of these little police touchpoints around the way. So I went immediately to the police. I told them what happened. They pull up the security camera footage. They're able to say, you point to where you were, you should maybe show on a map where you were. They're able to get a, a visual of you getting out of the cab very quickly. They're able to then see the license plate on the car that you were in. The information integration is such that they can then identify who's driving that car.

• 1:47:07Nathan Labenz?

  They can call that person's phone number and say, hey, your previous passenger left a phone in the car. We need you to bring it back. And people get their phones back seemingly like within an hour, maybe an hour or two, with almost perfect reliability. I actually did not hear of a story of anybody leaving a phone in a cab and failing to get it back. I heard multiple stories of how quick and easy it was to get it back, going to the police. So this was pretty impressive. And obviously this surveillance does create some, some downside risk potential as well. I precaution I on, on the AM had a whole discussion not too long ago about how if we move to mass surveillance with our current laws, which are, or at least our current, like policing

• 1:47:52Nathan Labenz?

  environment, our current enforcement environment is premised on the idea that not everything is going to be investigated, not every break of the law that happens is going to be prosecuted. That, that somehow flips because like all of a sudden AI is reviewing and surveilling everything and reviewing all the documents and putting two and two together. That we're going to be in a weird place where like, people had the expectation that this was all kind of loose and suddenly it becomes tight. In China, it's like pretty tight. The expectation is that you are being watched, that you don't have digital privacy. And the result is that crime is low. The potential for abuse, I think, is like pretty high. But from what I saw as of now, it seems to be working.

• 1:48:35Nathan Labenz?

  I think there is definitely, you know, one way to, to model what is happening there in terms of risk is that they may be putting a lot of risk into the future. One question that I asked people multiple times is like, what happens when President Xi retires or what would happen if he were to suddenly die? And basically, as of now, nobody has any idea. There's no successor that anybody can identify. There could be a real power struggle. Obviously, the apparatus that they've created and the ability to surveil people, if there was a power struggle, if there was dissent or whatever, the potential for abuse could be like extremely high. I think it's, it's already, you don't step out of line, right? So as of now, things are under control and people are playing by the rules.

• 1:49:20Nathan Labenz?

  There's not too many people that are stepping out. And so there's not too much need to, to abuse. It's all under control. But this does, I think, create significant risk for the future if things were to go haywire. But for now, it's working quite well and the experience is really good. And you feel safe and you feel like you're not getting ripped off. You don't, you, your guard is down. I would say my guard was, I love traveling. I love going to different places and I'm not concerned about it being a little bit dangerous. I went to Brazil the last two summers. People would say all the time, oh, it's dangerous. You got to be careful. You can't take your phone out on the street. And sometimes I did, but there's a lot of phone theft that goes on in Brazil. They, by the way, are also introducing more and more network style surveillance to try to stamp that down.

• 1:50:05Nathan Labenz?

  It does seem to be working. I actually visited the police station in Sao Paulo as part of a walking tour that I did one day there. And it's quite China-like and it does seem to be really having an impact. It does seem to be moving the needle on crime statistics from what I've read. This is something that with AI able to review all the tape and AI able to put two and two together and all the face, facial recognition and just how scalable all this stuff is becoming. I think this is something that all societies are going to have to figure out where they want to land in, on the spectrum of how much surveillance versus anonymity versus freedom, et cetera. But China has definitely picked its place. And for now, I think it is working for them. You can go around with a very comfortable feeling.

• 1:50:50Nathan Labenz?

  What happens in the future, if something changes, I think is a serious risk. But for now, it's a pretty awesome experience. Okay, almost to the end for today. One observation that I made that somebody said, you know, that's an astute observation. So I thought I would relay it to you is that in some ways Chinese society is a little bit more comfortable with contradiction than I am used to. I think, speaking for myself, but I think in a representative way of Western thought, when we see contradictions, we feel like they need to be resolved, where they need to be interrogated, they need to be taken apart. We want consistency.

• 1:51:32Nathan Labenz?

  We want logical consistency and coherence in our systems, in our account of why things are happening the way they're happening. In China, I've noticed a few different ways where that didn't necessarily seem to be a requirement. One of the things is when it comes to religion, it's like people participate in multiple religions. They don't really seem to see a contradiction in it. You have people that'll participate in like Christian and Buddhist stuff and like consider themselves atheist all at the same time. And it's fine, even though some of these religions are maybe, especially the Christian religion is meant to exclude participation in others, they don't seem to mind blurring those lines.

• 1:52:17Nathan Labenz?

  I'm also reminded of a China Talk episode that I cross posted, actually. The title of the episode is, is a US-China Thucydides trap unavoidable? And this is from a China Talk cross post with Professor David Kang. This is from a little over a year ago in April 25. And one of the interesting points that I remember being made in that episode was that the whole China, Taiwan thing, part of the struggle kind of comes from the fact that everybody now is living in this Westphalian paradigm where nation states are a binary thing, either you are one or you aren't one. And you have these very particular criteria that make you one. And if you're not one, then you're not one and you're either sovereign or you're not.

• 1:53:02Nathan Labenz?

  And the argument that the guest on that episode made was like, if that paradigm hadn't been imposed by Western thought on the world as a whole, and it was just left to Chinese people across China and Taiwan to figure out their relationship, you might see something different emerge where there's a, you know, contradictory understanding where we could say, yeah, we're independent, but we're like part of China. There's kind of one China, we'll pay a tribute to you, or we recognize that you're the, the prime power in the region, but we also have our own thing going. And that might be okay. And it does seem like there, there is reason to believe this in a bunch of different ways,

• 1:53:41Nathan Labenz?

  that there's just a little bit greater comfort with this, this sense of contradiction that for Westerners, I think is uncomfortable. Other examples of that are just PNs. It's illegal to use a VPN, but everybody does it. And not only does everybody do it, now everybody, the people that I met with all do it, right? They, and you might have noticed, of course, there's a lot of Chinese people on Twitter, a lot in the AI space, like, wow, how are all these Chinese AI researchers at Chinese companies on Twitter if Twitter is blocked by the great firewall? The answer is. They use VPNs, even though it's technically illegal. It's accepted to the point of being commonplace. And companies even provide them in some cases.

• 1:54:26Nathan Labenz?

  They have a company VPN that they can use that is official. It's officially provided by the company to them. So it's not just random, one-off people downloading apps and circumventing the rules. It's like, the company is giving you a VPN and this is a fairly well-known company. So what's up with that? People are not worried about getting busted for their VPNs. That was like, they're very comfortable with it, open with it. Never heard of anybody getting into trouble. Somebody said it would be like getting struck by lightning. They were like, has it happened? Could it happen? Yeah, somebody maybe could be made an example of if they stepped out in some other way. But it's fine. They were not worried about it at all. And similarly, on the censorship point, there was this notion several times that I heard where it was like,

• 1:55:09Nathan Labenz?

  people were sort of decrying the censorship regime, saying, complaining about it. Also, all the while, they're like getting around it via VPN. But then in the next breath, they would say, but it is kind of necessary or it is, there are good reasons for it because we wouldn't want the whole Chinese public. People aren't so educated. You're talking to me, I'm a worldly person. I've spent time outside the country. I can handle this access to information. And so it's annoying to me that I'm officially denied it and I have to go through this VPN thing. But I do that and I'm also not worried about being caught. But I'm also, maybe I don't think they would necessarily go as far as saying they're glad that other Chinese people don't have the same access. But definitely they feel like they can understand why the government is not giving

• 1:55:53Nathan Labenz?

  the same unfettered access to everyone. Because maybe not everybody can handle or not everybody would be able to properly interpret or contextualize these more sensitive stories that they themselves would not want to be unable to access. Kind of strange, paternalistic, something that everybody that I spoke to, not everybody. I'm not sure everybody wanted to defend the censorship. But certainly it was like multiple voices said, yeah, I kind of do see why some of this stuff exists. We wouldn't want to cause panic among the broader population. Two other examples of this like comfort with contradictions thing real quickly. You may have heard that there's an emphasis on the low altitude, AKA drone economy in China. Okay, that's cool, but drones are also banned in Beijing.

• 1:56:36Nathan Labenz?

  And there was one university professor that I was talking to over lunch at one point, who was pretty freely criticizing this policy, not dissenting at the macro level from the government's legitimacy, but basically saying, just pointing out some weird contradictions and saying how it was silly. And he was very comfortable speaking about that. But it was like, we're trying to promote these, this technology, but we've banned it in the capital. And I, there was some kind of weird catch 22 thing where he already had a drone when the ban was introduced. And then it became illegal to have the drone. But you have to get your permit for the drone before you can have it. And he already had it, so he couldn't get the permit. It was a very, you can only fly it outside of Beijing.

• 1:57:19Nathan Labenz?

  But for him to take it out, there was like some, some issue where he catch 22 eyes, couldn't get the right permit. And so he was just freely saying, this is just ridiculous. But also again, in the next breath, like, but I do understand why we might not want to have drones flying all over the capital. We got a lot of sensitive stuff there and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Finally, there's just this also really longstanding combination or mix of an extreme commitment to fairness with a long history of corruption. This goes back a long way. At the Imperial College Museum, one of the more interesting exhibits I saw the entire time

• 1:57:59Nathan Labenz?

  was a museum of the history of the civil service exam, which you probably know, you know, goes back a long time. They have for many centuries in China, chosen the civil service members via this really difficult exam that people studied for years for. And like a vanishingly small percentage of people actually managed to pass all the way through to, to get into these very coveted positions. But one of the reasons these, so this is extreme fairness and they would go to these, these lengths in terms of ensuring the fairness of the exams. Couple of details were like, you had to sleep in a, in basically a little prison cell kind of thing

• 1:58:44Nathan Labenz?

  to take the exam. You would go into the cell, you would be in there for three days at a time. The exam itself took nine days, but you would have three day periods. Then you would be able to leave for a day and come back. During those three days, you're in your little cell by yourself. Your exam materials are in there. You're cooking your own food over a little personal flame that you have in there. And you're using the bathroom in a pot in your own little cell. They had a replica of one of these cells. And this was all to ensure that the exam was fair. They even at some points in time would have scribes individuals exams so that the examiners couldn't recognize handwriting.

• 1:59:28Nathan Labenz?

  That's how much of a commitment to fairness and how much of an investment in making the exam fair they've been going to for literally hundreds of years. But then again, part of the reason that they, these positions were so coveted was that then there were opportunities for corruption. So the sort of strange juxtaposition of fairness and rectitude in the selection of these civil services with kind of the expectation that they might also be a little bit corrupt on the back end. Strange, there's, all societies, of course, contain their contradictions. I don't think this is totally unique to China. But it did seem like the comfort with it and the willingness to leave some of these things

• 2:00:09Nathan Labenz?

  in tension, as opposed to feeling the need to fully resolve them, felt a little bit noticeable to me as a foreign observer. And I do think that gives you some wiggle room, right? Why do I even bring that up? In the next couple of episodes, when we get into things, especially around US-China relations, I think that this, this comfort with ambiguity or this lack of a need to resolve everything to the point where it's fully coherent or fully consistent, I think that can give some wiggle room. We have this a little bit too with our strategic ambiguity around Taiwan. But I think there's room for kind of multiple truths to exist in superposition in the Chinese system

• 2:00:49Nathan Labenz?

  that also gives them some wiggle room to make deals with us that, you know, on the face of it, if you assumed or insisted that everything is going to be fully logical, fully consistent, that might not be possible in the same way. Okay, final section for now, attitudes on AI. Of course, I talked to a lot of people that are in the AI space. But for here, for the moment, I'm going to talk about kind of attitudes of people that are like somewhat outside of the core, core AI community. I hired one tour guide the entire time I was there. It was at the Forbidden City. This woman came up to me and just kind of made her pitch that I should hire her as a tour guide. And I really liked her vibes. She just seemed to have a good kind of fun attitude and she spoke pretty good English. And I said, you know what? I haven't done this on any other site. You're on, let's do it.

• 2:01:32Nathan Labenz?

  Naturally, I had got my historical context from AIs. I decided I might get some perspective on AI from my human tour guide. So I asked her a bunch of stuff, I told her what I do and to the best that I, of my ability to make it clear what it is that I do, which is not always clear to people who I can speak to in native English either. I tell them like, I'm a full-time student of AI. I'm an industry analyst. I'm an AI scout. What are these things? Nobody really knows. I'm a podcaster. I have 10 part-time jobs. I say all those sorts of things. But when she understood that I worked in AI, her immediate reaction was to kind of light up and be like, oh, it's a good job. It's a good job. So she was very much cognizant of, this is where the action is. This is where the energy is. People are making money in this space.

• 2:02:17Nathan Labenz?

  And she was enthused and excited for me. It seemed like that I was in the AI space. When it came to her use of AI, one of the more interesting things that I heard the entire time, honestly, was about the AI Doba. Doba is from ByteDance, the same company that makes TikTok. And Doba is, as far as I can tell, the most broadly diffused AI in Chinese society. A couple of people actually said, the excitement about DeepSeek is way more popular in the West than it is in Chinese society. Somebody also said like the QN models, nobody in China uses them, certainly not at the retail level. They're popular for fine tuning and for cost efficiency among Western startups.

• 2:03:01Nathan Labenz?

  But the attitude that I heard about the QN models was like, we don't really use those in China. What do people use? They use Doba. Something like 150 million users. And it's a very voice native thing. It's very sort of companion. And people really seem to like it. If you're outside of China, you can't use Doba. They have another version called Dola, which is the international version. In the same way that like Douyin was the original, you know, native Chinese TikTok. And then TikTok is actually the international product. They have a similar thing going with Doba and Dola. But you can't even get Dola in the US. So when I was on my international carrier roaming plan to go through the App Store, I register as being in the US. Dola is not available in the US.

• 2:03:46Nathan Labenz?

  Actually, one of the few times I had to turn my VPN on was to make it look like I was in Singapore or whatever, so I could download Dola, so I could experience this Doba thing that everybody was talking about. I didn't end up using it very much because it was too much of a rigmarole and the VPN seemed to slow my connection down in general. But I did manage to actually get in there a little bit and have a little bit of a conversation with Doba. Doba is like the, it's the, it's the sort of, maybe the closest thing to ChatGPT in the sense that it's the thing that tons of people are using for free. It's maybe the sort of Facebook in the sense that it's like, it's the thing that the boomers are using. I heard a couple people tell me, who are maybe in their late twenties or thirties, that their parents used Doba.

• 2:04:29Nathan Labenz?

  And two women actually said that their moms had made some comment to them like, look at what Doba said to me. Why can't you be so nice and sweet to me like Doba is? So there's definitely like a companionship element to it. And this tour guide woman at the Forbidden City said, in Chinese society, there's some things you can't really talk about with anybody, but you can talk about those things with Doba. And nobody will judge you. Dabao won't judge you. And I was like, what, what kind of things are we talking about? And she said, maybe you have a boyfriend, for example, and you decide that you don't like that boyfriend anymore. You want to change your boyfriend or whatever. That's the kind of thing that you would talk to Dabao about.

• 2:05:14Nathan Labenz?

  And I said, what would you have done in the past with no Dabao? And she said, nah, just keep it to yourself. I have no idea how representative that is, but it was interesting. And it was interesting that she found a lot of value in Dabao and that it seems like that's a pretty common thing. And I also heard this, nobody will judge you, both in the sense that Dabao itself will not judge you, but also that people will not judge you for using Dabao. The idea that you're, you have some sort of emotional connection or you get emotional support or you have a real relationship, real being whatever you want to mean by real with Dabao, that seemed to be tolerated, accepted, understood as kind of an increasingly normal part of society, even among people of various age groups. This was not just young people.

• 2:05:58Nathan Labenz?

  It was like young people's parents that are doing this. So I think that was like really quite interesting. The, nevertheless, there's also some reason to believe that the enthusiasm for AI that we often talk about in the West, where we're like, oh, are we in the West are like pessimistic about AI, China's more optimistic. I think that's true, but it might be overstated a bit. Several people said, in an economic sense, people are not that confident in the economy. They are worried about losing their jobs. They're worried about being outcompeted. And to some degree, they're running to AI on the kind of famous rationale that it won't

• 2:06:42Nathan Labenz?

  be AI that replaces you, it'll be somebody using AI that'll replace you. And so if you want to be secure economically, you've got to be a good early adopter of AI. So some of the, there's some sense that some of the survey data or whatever that shows enthusiasm about AI might be capturing this kind of run to the thing that you're afraid that other people will use better than you if you don't get on it quickly. And that may cause some of the sentiment, some of the pro AI sentiment to be overstated. I did hear one story about a Didi driver, in other words, an Uber driver, who used to be a software engineer, but lost his job for AI reasons and is now driving an Uber

• 2:07:27Nathan Labenz?

  or a Didi, in fact. Was that, was that even a real like story? The, I don't know. I heard that in English from a seemingly credible source, but I think if nothing else, it reflects a certain amount of economic anxiety or, or sense of insecurity, sense of the economy is not that good. Nobody's starving in China, obviously, these days. So it's not like a total panic fear of losing one's job, but nobody wants to lose their job. And people do feel that the way to get ahead is to adopt. Maybe just a couple of little final points. Diffusion has been like discussed a lot, right? Which, which country has the better ability to diffuse?

• 2:08:11Nathan Labenz?

  And there was this story of OpenClaw going viral in China. From what I saw, OpenClaw was not super deeply penetrated into Chinese society. But what is happening is diffusion via the platforms. And this is again somewhat similar to what we have with Google, right? Like, how do most people use AI most of the time? Arguably, the number one thing might just be that you get AI summaries coming up in search. And it's now integrated into Gmail and it's, you've got it now on Facebook and all their surfaces. So even if you're like not seeking it out or trying to do anything really, it's coming to you via the platforms.

• 2:08:53Nathan Labenz?

  And that is happening in China as well, but even to a, I would say, potentially much more transformative degree. Maybe a little slower in some ways, but I think potentially quite a bit more powerful when it does happen. WeChat is working on their agent. There is not, and this is also creating all kinds of tensions and competitive dynamics among the Chinese tech companies. I believe it was ByteDance that created an agent that would, was an attempt to be like the super agent that would sit on top of all the super apps. And that would include the ability to use WeChat for you. But then WeChat blocked it. WeChat in turn is trying to create its own agent, which will be native to WeChat.

• 2:09:37Nathan Labenz?

  And because WeChat is so ubiquitous and literally everyone and everything is on it and you can book appointments on it, you can pay for things on it. The degree to which you can really run your life out of WeChat is not really matched by any app in the West. There's no super app that has the ubiquity and the depth of services all in one place that WeChat has. So they're in, I didn't get a chance to use it, but they are in the beta, semi-public, semi-private, whatever, beta test stage of the WeChat agent. And this is expected to be a huge deal because since you can do everything in WeChat, your

• 2:10:17Nathan Labenz?

  agent is just naturally going to have access to your accounts, access to your context, ability to do things with your money, ability to make appointments, that really exceeds anything that we have out of the box here in the US. There's no single service that you could add an agent to that would give you the kind of Swiss Army knife into real society that WeChat and its agent is going to give its users. So I think the WeChat agent launch, which I think is coming up pretty soon because it does sound like they're in pretty late stage testing, might be one of the most important agent launches in history because I think it's going to have the opportunity to serve.

• 2:10:58Nathan Labenz?

  And we'll see if they can actually, you know, compute, this is compute analysis and what should be done about things like export controls or whatever, we'll save that for a future episode. It's not entirely clear to me that they're going to be able to serve a billion plus users right out of the gate with the compute resources they have. And maybe that's part of the reason that it's not already launched. I'm really not sure. We'll have to kind of wait and see. I heard, I heard conflicting reports about the degree to which companies can scale usage, but certainly going to a billion plus users, that's not going to be a trivial amount of compute, even for a giant like Tencent. But that agent is coming soon and I think it will potentially be the sort of switch

• 2:11:40Nathan Labenz?

  flip that brings AI to, you know, basically the whole Chinese public in a really useful way that will take us a long time to catch up with in the West. Because we just don't have anything that has that kind of integration and that kind of reach. When they turn that on for everybody, it's going to be another like major step up in the quality of the user experience and the things that you can do. And as far as I know, like literally everyone is on that app. So I think that's definitely something to watch for. The WeChat agent coming, not exactly sure, but can't be too much longer, is going to be a huge deal. They also have some interesting things when it even comes to medicine.

• 2:12:24Nathan Labenz?

  The Ant Group has an AI doctor. Ant Group is the company that does Alipay. And so they're, they're making huge amounts of money, even with their super low transaction fees, they're making huge amounts of money just by processing ungodly amounts of transactions throughout China. And what are they doing with their profits? One of the things they're doing is building an AI doctor. There is a lot of concern about the aging population in China. Multiple times I heard people talk about the hope that robots might help take care of seniors. This was like discussed both in the context of a young person talking to their parents about their future and what kind of care and support the parents were going to need and who was going to provide it, maybe a robot.

• 2:13:06Nathan Labenz?

  It was also certainly something that came up in the robot exhibition hall. And in the context of medicine too, like there's a huge question of where are all the doctors going to come from to take care of these aging people? They've had, the, the one child policy has been over for quite some time now, but they've basically had two full generations of one child, either because of policy or just because it had kind of become the norm. And what that means is you've got Four grandparents and two parents that only have the one kid, or for the grandparents, they only have the one grandkid. So each kind of young person today, with exceptions, of course, because there are families that have more than one kid.

• 2:13:49Nathan Labenz?

  But for the most part, most people you meet in their teens and their twenties and their thirties, they're the only child and they're the only grandchild for all of their grandparents. And that is a pretty profound thing, right? That's going to be a big inverted pyramid for these people to support. How are you going to support four grandparents as one grandkid? That's a lot to take on. So we need robots, we need AI doctors. Ant Group, this is the kind of thing that they're investing in with the enormous profits that they have. And their AI doctor very much echoes the sort of AI doctor spirit that we're seeing from ChatGPT and from Claude to some extent as well and from Gemini 2. It's free.

• 2:14:34Nathan Labenz?

  They're really concerned about reliability. They're really concerned about not wanting to position themselves as replacing or competing with doctors, but as a resource that both serves the doctors and serves the people and hopefully makes everything better, all in a very non-threatening way, all with lots of disclaimers, all with lots of points about, make sure you double check this with your human and this, we can't prescribe you medicine, but we can hopefully guide you. All these very, very similar echoes of how things have happened in the West thus far with respect to AI doctors. So, and again, that comes available from Ant Group,

• 2:15:16Nathan Labenz?

  which has Alipay, which is installed on just about everybody's phone. So this is something that they can kind of push to an incredibly mass audience if they choose to, when they feel that it's ready, in a way that I think is not impossible to replicate in the West, because we certainly do have apps that have very deep penetration. But the ubiquity of these things in China just allows them to push on the diffusion lever in a way that I think is going to be kind of hard for us to replicate. And so that'll definitely be very interesting to watch. The WeChat agent launch in particular, I think, is going to be a big moment. I think for today, that is plenty. I've been at it for a long time. And if you've listened this far, you've heard a lot about China.

• 2:16:01Nathan Labenz?

  I would definitely encourage you to learn more about China through other more credible and expert sources than me. But, and I would suggest, for example, China Talk, which I've been a long time listener of and crossposter of, the Seneca Podcast with Kaiser Go, whose name I'm hopefully saying close enough to write. I'm really not good with the tonality of Chinese words and names, but I've been a huge fan of the Seneca Podcast for years as well. I picked up another few podcasts on this trip that I would recommend, a few Chinese history ones, which is pretty, which were pretty cool to listen to if you're like interested in that angle. The China History Podcast and the History of China, those were both informative.

• 2:16:45Nathan Labenz?

  When I took my ride up to the Great Wall, I just searched in those two history feeds for the Great Wall. And I had a couple of podcasts that I listened to on the like 90 minute ride to the Great Wall, which gave me a really good historical background context for what I was about to see. I think that's just a great travel tip in general. But two other ones that I would recommend, Empires, which is a really different kind of podcast. It's like a semi-dramatization, somewhat of a fictionalization. They create multiple voices. There's sort of a narrator that tells you some of the story, but then also there's like the voices of key individuals in the story. And they do five-episode series about major Asian companies,

• 2:17:28Nathan Labenz?

  not just in China, but some in China, some in other Asian countries. So I listened to one on Huawei, really interesting history. You can hear the voice, quote unquote, of the founder. It's not the real founder's voice, but they say, of course, we don't know exactly what they said or felt in those moments, but it's all based on research. And I found that to be both like entertaining and like quite educational. And then I also really like the podcast Ascent, which is like by two women who do deep dives into Chinese businesses and their history and their strategy and their like current market position and product lines. And it's a mix of history of business, but also business strategy.

• 2:18:12Nathan Labenz?

  That's Ascent, A-S-C-E-N-T. And there's quite a few good ones on that as well. I think that's part of where I learned how much respect and admiration the founders of these big Chinese companies have earned, because you can definitely hear that in that particular podcast. And again, it's like, it's very educational. So of course, there's many more resources than that, but those are just some of the few that I used in preparation and during this trip. The next two episodes that I'm going to try to do again, are going to be a deeper dive into the state of AI safety and governance in China. And then the third one will be about the relationship between the US and China, how I understand the Chinese perspective on that relationship,

• 2:18:57Nathan Labenz?

  having spent a couple of weeks there. And again, what we might be, what might be prudent for us to do on the Western side of the relationship as things get real, real, real fast. Thank you for being part of the Cognitive Revolution.

• 2:22:27Nathan Labenz?

  If you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to share with friends, post online, write a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just leave us a comment on YouTube. Of course, we always welcome your feedback, guest and topic suggestions, and sponsorship inquiries, either via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network. The Cognitive Revolution is part of the Turpentine Network, a network of podcasts, which is now part of A16Z, where experts talk technology, business, economics, geopolitics, culture, and more. We're produced by AI Podcasting. If you're looking for podcast production help for everything from the moment you stop recording to the moment your audience starts listening, check them out and see my endorsement at ai podcast dot I N G.

• 2:23:11Nathan Labenz?

  And thank you to everyone who listens for being part of the Cognitive Revolution.