Kaiser Kuo on Creating a Wave of Innovation in Chinese Journalism and Technology

Hello and welcome to the Rich Robinson Show. I'm your host, Rich Robinson. Over the past 25 years, I've been an entrepreneur, investor, advisor, and professor here in Asia. After nearly a quarter of a century in China, I'm now based here in Bali, Indonesia, the island of the gods.

Asia is my home now.

60% of the world's population also lives here, but I would contend 80% of the world's dynamism and opportunity is right here in the region. On the show, you'll hear candid and fun conversations with some of my friends and colleagues, people I've met along my journey, entrepreneurs, operators, experts that will help you unlock actionable insights around the Asia region and the entrepreneurial agility that actually defines it. This first season, season 1 of The Rich Robinson Show, is titled At the Speed of China. Like, wait for it, at the speed of light. Things happen fast in China, and in this season 1, we're gonna take a deeper look at that. The rapid economic development over the past few decades, as well as the Speed and cycles of innovation taking place all day, every day, right now.

Let's go, Jio! Welcome to the Rich Robinson Show Season One, the Speed of China. Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seat belts. Put your tray tables in the upright position. I have gotten a get. I have a get today and that's Double K, Kaiser Guo, ladies and gentlemen. Give it up. But everybody, I want you to applaud if you're on the toilet or you're driving or whatever. Welcome.

Hey Rich, how are you, man? Good to see you.

Good to see you, my old friend.

Yeah. And we are old friends, man. We go back a long way. Back in the, uh, 1998, '99, 1900s.

Same era as we were like, used to meet by gaslight in log cabins up in the hinterlands of China. But yeah, we met in Beijing way, way back in the day. And man, we have not spoken in a while, but we chatted a little bit before that we have this sort of asymmetrical intimacy because I've just been such a ginormous fan and just absorber of your awesomeness. I just can't get enough. People are like Deadheads and I'm like a Kaiserhead. Just listening to stuff over and over.

If I weren't so dusky, I'd be blushing right now.

Awesome. Hey, so I'd like to have you introduce yourself to our listeners out there in podcast land about who you are and your path to the Middle Kingdom and to what you're doing now, please.

Sure. The basics are my name is Kaiser Guo. I was born in the States to parents who came from China via Taiwan. In the mid-1950s, they came over and had a slew of kids through the mid-'60s to the early '70s. And I'm number 2 of 3 boys and then a girl. And I grew up in a kind of contemptuously blissful suburbia. Dad was an engineer for IBM. I had the standard ABC kind of requisite piano and violin lessons and a Chinese school on Saturday mornings. We had a lock on the television. control that, but they weren't tiger parents at all. So I had a really good childhood in upstate New York, a little town called Apalachin where the November 1957 mafia convention took place. So pretty cool place. We used to go by on McFall Road where the horse ranch was where that happened. It would say that these mobsters fled into the cornfields throwing money. And so we'd always go look for the money.

Wow. That's a storied place. Wow. I love it.

That movie, um, Analyze This. Remember that with Billy Crystal and Robert The opening scene takes place in my hometown, but at the age of 12, the family picked up and moved to Tucson, Arizona. So I spent junior high and high school there and went away to college at UC Berkeley. And I started playing in bands. I had played in a shitty band in high school. Am I allowed to swear on this show?

Let it rip.

All right. Really fucking shitty band in high school. I was in a really horrible band in high school, but I actually started to get decent on guitar in college. And played in a progressive rock band called Free Fall with my roommate and a bunch of my friends. Still my best friends in the world today are guys from that band. Then in '88, I graduated and headed to China. We had actually been invited to go to China while that band Free Fall was invited to go to China through some random Guanxi connection of my father's, but we didn't end up being able to go. And it was sort of our fault that we couldn't get things together on our end. And so I was just sort of burning with this desire to get over there and play rock and roll. Because I was the guy who was reading the faxes and the telexes that they were sending. And I saw like the backline, just from the backline, I could tell that there was somebody over there playing music. Otherwise they wouldn't have like Fender Twin Reverb amps and they wouldn't have the right gear. And so I figured somebody, I gotta be able to find them. It can't be that hard. So yeah, I headed over there in August of 1988, planning on staying for a couple of years and then going to grad school. But of course in June of '89, I kind of went tumbling out of the country, but not before I had started a band that went on in my absence, I should emphasize, to quite a bit of fame. Shortly after I left, they got signed by a label out of Taiwan and were sort of China's first famous heavy metal band. They're still kind of a household name today. And my claim to fame is that I came up with the name of the band and played with them for a while, then came back in the summers of '91, '92 when I was in graduate school. And then I came back full-time in '96. I dropped out of grad school and where I'd been working on modern Chinese intellectual history and politics and came back to Beijing, rejoined the band. We had a death in the band. Our bass player, Zhang Xiu, was killed in a motorcycle accident in '95. So it was sort of incumbent on me to hurry back and try to get the band back together. So in '96, I went and ended up staying for 20 years. And in the course of that time, I did everything from playing that band for 3 years to being one of the first employees at an internet company in China called chinanow.com. That's when I met you, Rich, back then.

That's right. Eric Rosenblum.

Yeah, Eric is doing great. I talked to him a lot. And then in 2002, we worked together sort of briefly.

You handed a baton to me.

Baton, tipped it, at a mobile internet company. And I just fucked off from that after a little while and decided I really was more interested in writing. And for the next 5 or 6 years, I spent most of it just as a reporter, first freelancer with a bunch of strings for mostly tech-focused magazines around Asia. And then for The Red Herring, which was a Silicon Valley-based magazine. While I was there, I got poached by Ogilvy to head quote unquote digital strategy for this big ad agency in Beijing. And that didn't work out for me so well. I didn't like it. And went back to internet stuff, worked for Youku as their director for international communications. And then I got poached by Baidu and I was there from about June of 2010 until I left in 2016. Started another band in 2001 that's called Twin Show. And we played together until the night before I left.

I was there. I was there. It was awesome in the hutongs. Yeah. It was so great. And you also dabbled in some cover band stuff as well too.

Yeah, I did cover band stuff.

Just the backbone of the very, very fascinating and formidable and just rich music scene in Beijing.

Boy, I miss that.

I love how you divined through telexes that there must be a music scene there because in the late '80s, there was no way unless you were on the ground there to know, right?

Went to the library. I looked at magazines. I looked through the card catalog, look at rock in China. There wasn't an internet then. Right. So I looked through the stacks, I looked through recent magazines, I looked through China Daily back issues to see if there's any mention of rock music.

But even then it was too fringe for that kind of mainstream press, right? Probably, right?

I mean, of course they reported on the Wham concert there. There was an occasional story about some guy who had started, you know, been playing. And I learned later that there had been bands there as early as 1983, 1984, just of expatriates, right? But yeah. Graham Renshaw, for example, right? The Beijing All-Stars. Graham's a legend. You gotta talk to him.

That's a good point. Yes, indeed. He walked across China.

Wow.

Bitten by a radioactive Chinese heavy rock and roll spider back in the day, right?

I guess I got a caveat to this so that everyone is clear. I'm not like some shred god. I'm not like a great musician at all. No, seriously, hear me out here.

You kind of are though. Like at least everybody, that's the perception.

It's a wonderful, I'm not going to, but let me just be perfectly honest here. I landed on a low gravity planet. Right. That's exactly what happened.

Totally. Well, I mean, I did comedy in Beijing, right? With Louis C.K. and Jim Gaffigan and Russell Peters. Right. And like, where else on planet Earth could some schmuck from the city of Boston be like headlining with these top stars?

Because Beijing was great back then. Low gravity, a low bar, nobody there to like nag you and remind you not to quit your day job. I mean, it was a great place for average schmucks like us to just—

Average schmucks. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We could be slightly above average schmucks after that. Right. So yeah, I think that entire scene of Beijing is the Silicon Valley of not just China, but of Asia. And it's also this incredibly rich. Historical cultural center, but then it also like modern art and music as well too. And also the capital and just a grittier place. Like it was such an incredibly rich tapestry of locals and laowai and opportunity. It really was a magical era.

In 2008, right on the eve of the Olympics, I think it was Time Magazine interviewed me about the city of Beijing and why there were so many people who just loved it. I said, look, the pollution and the traffic, it's a terrible place to live, but there's nowhere in the world I'd rather be. Nowhere in the world I'd rather be. Yeah.

Oh, that is beautiful. I missed that line. Yes, it's a terrible place to live. There's no other place I'd rather be. Absolutely. I said, I love Beijing in the same way that my wife loves me. People from outside are like, really? And then, but my wife often doesn't like me and I often don't like Beijing and people are like, oh, I totally get that.

Yeah, I mean, it's a bit of an abusive husband or abusive boyfriend. It's like, you don't know Beijing. You don't know any— Beijing can be really nice to you sometimes. Beijing has great qualities. I don't want to make light of that. I mean, that's a serious issue, but I shouldn't be flippant about that. It's a terrific place in so many ways.

Not definitely abusive husband, but maybe some sort of codependency where you're just like, everybody's like, you should divorce it. And like, oh, the pollution and the traffic and some sort of mafan. And the next day it's like, Blue skies and you have young Rotua and you're like, and then you're like having angry makeup sex with Beijing. I love you. I love you.

Exactly. I'll never leave you again. The best conversations ever, reliably. You go out, you stumble into some watering hole, you sit down, you belly up to the bar, and you will have the most engaging conversation ever, right? Every fucking night. It's just the greatest. That's what I miss about the place.

And, uh, yeah, even with like the, back then the taxi driver on the way there, right? Treasure indeed. Wow.

Everything anyone knows about politics was all gleaned from the wisdom and insight of these beer-bellied guys, reek of raw garlic and talk like pirates.

We had one comedian come out to perform and he's like, oh, I left my wallet in the taxi and I ended up getting the phone number of the driver from the taxi company. And I called up and I got his wife and she said, oh, I'm sorry, he's in the shower. And he said, oh, I must have the wrong number. And hung up.

Oh, that's awful.

That was old school Beijing taxi where you see that red light of hope in the middle of February at 1:00 AM. And then you get inside and you're like, oh my God, they've been marinating in cabbage and garlic and chili and everything else. And now I'm marinating in it. Right. But that was part of the charm back then. And tell everybody out there what you've been doing these last half decade in the Triangle.

Yeah, actually it starts when I was in Beijing. So in 2010, shortly before I joined Baidu, actually Jeremy Goldkorn and I, he's another somebody you should talk to, right? We've been working together for a very long time now, but back then we were just having one of those conversations about podcasts. What podcasts are you listening to? Oh, I'm listening to This American Life and this thing called Radiolab. And then what about you? And then I can't remember which one of us asked, why aren't there any good podcasts about China? And the other person said, why don't we do one? Neither of us can remember who said what, but the next thing we knew, we were doing a podcast on China.

But you guys are a magical duo. Like you guys have such a great relationship and just complementary views and viewpoints. Great.

Opposing, by which you mean opposing.

That's one of the best parts about what you do, right? Is the comfort that you have with each other to be able to disagree, but also make light of some things. It's collegiate. It's very collegiate and very endearing.

Yeah. Well, I mean, that part's not faked, right? I mean, a lot of the podcast is scripted, but Jeremy tends to have a much more sort of cynical and more critical view. That's not true across the board. There's some things that he has like sort of boundless admiration for, and we can get into that because it really has a lot to do with the theme of your show. But we'll tend to want to introduce a little more context. To sort of, he's not about that. He's not all, he's not always going to summon up historical reasons why this is so. And yeah, we're very different in our approach to that. Yeah. But, but it works. It works because I think when people come into long conver— I mean, the show's an hour at least, usually long conversations like that, you want a little bit of tension somewhere.

Sure.

And if it's not between the host and the guest, it can be between the 2 hosts. So that's tended to work for us. Now, Jeremy's not always on the show. In fact, very infrequently now.

Yeah.

Because he has kind of an allergy toward anything that's too academic or too deep in the woods with policy. But I know what topics he's going to be able to contribute well to. And I'll usually invite him on for those. Anyways, long story short, we were doing this thing. It got popular in China and along came this little startup company out of New York. That had big ambitions and a little money and not a lot of like native China talent. It started off as just a news aggregation, a newsletter, and they didn't have a brand. They didn't have a big name attached to it or anything like that. And so they did a little acquihire with us. They brought us on. Eventually Jeremy became editor-in-chief of it and I headed up the podcasts. Back then it was only Sinica, but we quickly added a bunch of other podcasts to it. At our peak, we were at 10 shows.

And now?

7 really regular shows. We are about to add another one and another one's coming back into rotation soon.

And what about that original team in New York?

So the CEO, the founder is still very active in it. Nobody else from the original team, except for Jeremy and me, are still with it. But the old editor-in-chief who had been a New York Times editor based out of Hong Kong. He's such a good guy. I mean, he sort of recognized that as we got a year into it, that he was a little out of his depth. I mean, he wasn't a China guy. He didn't read Chinese. He didn't have sort of China instincts. So he just stepped aside, which just a good guy, really great guy. Nothing but love for him.

That's great. So speaking of nothing but love, one of the comedy shows that I produced was with Joe Wong. And he talked about, he grew up in Dongbei and he went to university in Texas and Became a PhD in biochemistry and 20 years in Boston. And he said he was a US citizen and he's like, China's my mother and America is my wife. And now my wife and my mother are having a big argument and I'm hiding in the kitchen because they both have nuclear weapons. Right. And it's a little bit frightening. And I have this deep love for China. If you've spent 24 years there, you better, right? And I truly deeply believe that US and China relations are incredibly important for the future of mankind. And the most important part of that is engagement. Like we have to engage. There has to be deep engagement. And I think a lot of that engagement has to be commercial as well as academic in addition to being political. But I think on the commercial side, that's something where I'm really trying to dig deep. There's a group called the State Legislative Leadership Foundation, SLLF, and I'm on the Asia board trying to bridge that subnational connection between state legislators and provincial leaders. It's an official NGO put in place by Xi and Obama. But then the idea of this book is people can really uncover and unravel, understand China a little bit better. And my thesis, as I said, is 4 years outside of China is a year inside China. And I remember listening to the Gary Riesel podcast from Qiming Ventures that you did. And then one thing that Gary's an old school successful VC and he's like, okay, China built a lot of things on chipsets from the West and China built a lot of things on the tech stack from the West and They built a lot of stuff on the business models from the U.S., right? But you can't deny that China's been successful, wildly successful across many different tech spaces. And the one thing that China really unquestionably has is the speed. And that's something that I'm trying to uncover through anecdotes and insights, both personal and some that you've observed over the years. And I'd just love to hear what you think China speed means to you.

So when I hear you talk about China's speed, what I feel like, rather than deliver you sort of an on-the-ground anecdote, I want to sort of zoom out because speed sort of defines the entire China experience over the last 40 years, 40-plus years. There are a couple of things that when you want to try to get inside the head of Chinese people and understand what the experience of modern or contemporary China has been, the main piece of mental furnishings that you should establish right away is the compressed nature, the incredibly rapid nature of development. And so let's think about like how that's been experienced and what it means and how that has influenced the way that Chinese people look out from their windows and see the world. So the first thing that I would say is that let's remember that in 1979, on the eve of reform and opening, the per capita GDP, if that's a meaningful measure to you, was less than $200 and it's closing on $11,000 right now. So, I mean, that's an insane, that's 5,000.

If I may interject there, there's a chart that shows GDP from 1980 to, to present day and 1900 to present day. And, or I'm sorry, late 1800s. And it's basically a 4 to 1 ratio of US versus China. And that's the basic, like sort of math underneath this, but I had to attach some kind of a number to it. And so, yes.

Yeah. I mean, it's insane, but what you need to remember is that somebody graduating from high school or even junior high at that time and working their first job in 1979 is only now at retirement age. So this has all happened in a single working lifetime. So let's remember that. I often think about the movie Big with Tom Hanks. You see that movie?

Excellent.

I mean, it really explains a lot of things. I mean, because We wonder why, when we look out at these forests of gleaming steel and glass skyscrapers, and we look at this high-speed rail network and all these things, why China doesn't seem to behave in so many ways like the grown-up country that it appears to be on the outside.

Wow.

And why is it so thin-skinned? Why is China constantly having its feelings hurt by things? And the big metaphor, it's because it went to bed last night as an 11-year-old and woke up as a 30-year-old.

That's beautiful.

So I just urge people to keep that in mind. But what else does this do to their worldview? It means a couple of things, like think about their relationship with technology, right? You ever wonder why you don't hear your Chinese parents, your kids' parents, who are your friends from school, the Chinese ones, they don't worry about screen time. They're not obsessed about what technology is doing to their children. No, I mean, they're usually too busy scrolling through on their own fucking hands. That's no matter. But if you look at Chinese science fiction, if you look at Chinese representation, I mean, conversations that are happening popularly about AI, you don't have the most famous natural scientists, people like Stephen Hawking, the late Stephen Hawking, or the most important technologists, the equivalents of our Bill Gates or our Elon Musks, talking about unleashing the demon AI. No, they're actually way more comfortable with technology. In fact, I mean, I've often said, well, we in the West are in our Black Mirror phase. China is in its Star Trek phase where there's an optimism about technology. But think about this, life for your average Chinese person, anyone under 45, say, they do not remember a time where it hasn't improved from day to day in lockstep with the better improvement of the technology devices that they have in their hands, the network that they are able to access. Technology and life have improved in lockstep, right? So why would you be suspicious of technology? Third thing is that, and it's related to that, is that they tend to have more confidence in the ability of government to steer them into an uncertain future because so far they seem to have done a good job, right? So yeah, this all comes back to the compressed nature of the modernization experience in China. So because it's happened so quickly and because it's been pretty unidirectional, really has shaped the mindset. What else has it done? That optimism creates a buoyancy, right? It's the thing that propels that. It's the draft of upward hot air that makes these hang gliding entrepreneurs able to just soar, right? There's all these updrafts in China. And a lot of that buoyancy comes from that popular optimism. That expectation that technology will deliver a better life. So a lot of it's related to that and it explains speed. It explains so much of the speed. Now it has a huge downside and we can get into that.

Please. I'd love to dive. I don't even want to peel back that yet, but I'd love to hear, like, I'd just like to have you keep going. I'm gripped.

Yeah. So the downside is pretty obvious. I mean, to anyone, it's a fucking pressure cooker, right? There is such an expectation of success that whereas in Silicon Valley, you know, it's like part of the fucking catechism, wear your failures so proudly or whatever. It's not quite like that. I mean, ideally it is. There are entrepreneurs in China who will boast of their failures, but they're only the ones who are conspicuously successful already. Right. And, you know, nobody wants to hear your failure story if you're not Wang Xin.

True to that.

True indeed. But look at what's happening right now. The backlash against 996, the whole lie flat reaction. The big buzzword of the year 2021 was lie flat.

Lie flat indeed. Just like kind of check out, right? In a way. Yeah.

I mean, the rat race. I mean, we had to expect this, right? I mean, we've seen a generation of people just running at a flat out sprint and it's been like that. And what I think is interesting is the effort right now underway To address some of these deep-rooted problems, I think that they've been pretty prescient. And you look at Americans all across the political spectrum, from the most conservative motherfuckers like Tucker Carlson to real lefty liberals, a lot of them are quite envious of the Chinese government's sort of willingness to confront things like the power of big tech companies head on, willingness of them to shut down. Online games for school-aged children. They're willing to take action. I would be very reserved about praising that. There's always a reason why they're able to do that and some dark shit. I think that we can learn quite a bit. I mean, what you start off on the topic of the compressed nature of the change that's taking place, and you can extrapolate a ton and you end up being able to say a lot of really meaningful things about what's happening.

Fantastic.

Yeah.

What do you think are some of the things that could be extracted and learned having lived in the States now for 5 years or some things that make you feel a little bit impatient? The downside's pretty, pretty clear.

Yeah. So you're asking what the United States, for example, should be able to learn from China or?

Yeah. Or any other country or corporation or startup or person, right? Like what?

I think the thing with China is Chinese people themselves are very aware of this. Like Americans and Chinese and both you and me, we're very well versed in both of these cultures. So this'll certainly make sense to you, but there's American exceptionalism, there's Chinese exceptionalism, and they're equally arrogant. And both of them have strong objections too. But American exceptionalism basically assumes that American institutions, ideas, values, are universally applicable, that these truths that we have discovered are self-evident or whatever. The modes of governance, the way that we conduct things, we think that it should imitate us. It should be just like us and all is fine in the world. The Chinese are equally, like I said, arrogant. Their exceptionalism says that China's experience has been so unique, so bound up in the Chinese national character. So bound up in our culture that it is inimitable, that what we have arrived at is not something that you can just cut and paste in onto your society. So part of that is that they object to the idea that American values and institutions can be cut and pasted onto Chinese society. But the good part of that is, of course, it isn't a proselytizing religion, right? It's one, it's sort of like. Islam in its early days or Judaism. It doesn't seek converts, right?

We have our team. We're not recruiting. We just want everybody to come to practice, show for the game. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you can admire what we've done, but don't expect you're going to be able to just copy it. Even in developing countries around the world, there are features of it that they will cut and paste. Like one thing that has worked in China, if you look at what kickstarted so much of China's development in the 1970s, Was the Japanese came in and they said, "Look, you've got all these mineral resources here in Sanxi Province, and you've got no way to get them out of the country. We want that stuff. But tell you what, we'll build you a state-of-the-art mine there. We'll build a rail line to Beidaihe or to the coast. We'll build a port there, and." You pay us back in the copper we extract or in the oil we pull out of the ground or the ore that we—

Settlers of Catan, Japanese version, 1970. Yes.

But China said, you know what? We can do the exact same thing in Angola or in Tanzania or in Kenya, or especially in places like Zimbabwe. And that's what they've done, right? These resources for infrastructure deals. So. To some extent, there is learning that they've pushed, but there's a lot I should be very clear to, I mean, quick to add that I feel like some of the rest of the world is learning that they really should not be. China is very good at high-tech surveillance and social control measures. Are those things that Ecuador should be learning as they've tried to? Is that things that other developing countries should be learning? I tend to think not. Right. But yeah, there's certainly lessons though.

Yeah.

So I'm trying to extract lessons. Like I definitely don't want to be perceived as a panda hugger, but being just an outright panda slugger as well too, like that's not the intention of this book. And you look at like the rail lines, like, wow, that's amazing. China is far and away the country with the most high-speed rail by order of magnitude. But you know, of course, let's just Eminent domain and like, let's blast through this protected species and let's throw hundreds of billions of dollars at it. Like what's really to be learned from that? Probably very little. Tesla builds a factory in 168 days. Like, you know, they had a lot of air cover from the government to be able to like fast track that. Right. And I think there's stuff to be learned from that because I think things are being gummed up in the West. If something is, you know, the Beijing airport was on time and on budget. And that's a manifestation of their speed, right? Just being on time and on budget is extraordinary. And the tricky part is like, do I even go there with the book to try to talk about that? Or is it really much more at the commercial and entrepreneurial level where there are some interesting tactics? Because—

That's right.

Yeah.

No, I think your instincts are exactly right. Your instincts are exactly right. I mean, you've got to look at what is actually practicable. I mean, if what you're proposing requires that we Abandon the two-party electoral system or due process. We probably aren't going to do that, right? I think you're just right. And at the entrepreneurial level, at the commercial level, there's still a lot of things to be learned, right? The truth of it is, by the time I left there, it was easier to register a business and get it going in China than it was in the United States, right? The truth of it is, there were a lot of people with a huge appetite, not only for risk, but for really fucking hard work. Now, that's partially cultural. I guess, I don't know. Again, it comes at a cost, but it's the thing that I was going to talk about that Jeremy admires so much. I mean, he came here to the United States and was railing every time I got on the phone with him about why the banks are closed on Sundays. Why isn't everything 24 hours? Why do people not want to make money? So yeah, so he's just sort of disgusted at the sort of sloth. I don't know if you've seen the documentary American Factory.

I loved it. It's so inside baseball. I really loved it.

All there, the good, the bad, the ugly is all there. Well, I mean, but that's not the only lesson to be taken away from that, right? I mean, there's also trade-offs, right?

Tell me what you really enjoyed about it and what you think is the most sort of impactful about that.

Well, what I loved about that documentary in particular was the even-handedness of it, its willingness to not step back and allow the principles in that to show. I mean, it was so fair about how every, both sides brought to it. Genuinely good intentions. And that wasn't enough. And so it's the difficult— so I think it was remarkably skillful storytelling by not being too on the nose, by not pointing signs that here is the lesson to be learned here, allowed the story to develop in a way that it felt organic, even if it wasn't.

And what, and there were so many things to love about it. I love the one time there's one lawaai who spoke Chinese really well. And he's like telling the guy like, Why don't you just put tape over their mouth? And they're like, and they're like, can we do that? And he's like, no, you can't do that. And I, I've been on the wrong side of that many times too, just like my smartass use of Chinese. But what I've really loved about it was the Chinese people where they're like, all right, I really like you a lot. And it's like those guys are like, let's come over my house and we'll shoot guns and we'll have turkey. And like, you're such an endearing, like, just like real dude. Like you're so hanuli, you're so industrious. Right. And you're just like a family dude.

Yeah.

And I'm like, those are the people that we know and love, right? That's the part of China that's completely missing from the narrative where it's like, okay, there's the administrations, but there's China.

There's that part of the narrative is missing in China about the United States too, though.

Certainly, certainly. Right. It's tough, right?

Those dear Americans who probably voted for Donald Trump, but where they were making just a good faith, flat out effort to connect. It was kind of beautiful.

Right.

I mean, so this redneck motherfucker, but he was so nice.

He was like, all right, I'll like you. And oh man, I really, I love you now. Right. And it's just like, that's—

Yeah. Yeah. You're my brother.

Right. And that was just delicious. Right. I really enjoyed that.

Right.

It wasn't just shitting on one side or the other. It actually allowed the beauty of both sides to kind of come shining through.

Yeah. It shit on both as well.

It's lovely. Yeah. Oh, it shit on both.

Yeah. So let me ask one thing. So I fully agree with you that like, just like it's red state, blue state, there's like, You know, the Western US ideology and this China ideology, and it's not really going anywhere on either side. But I think as we were coming up in the tech scene, I think China was very open to channeling Silicon Valley and a lot of best-in-class practices. And then at a certain point there was, okay, now we have kind of our own critical mass in the market and we have enough people on the bench to start our own stuff. And now there's some stuff being channeled from China to the rest of the world. And I think you were there during that time. And I still think there's exchanges in best-in-class practices and capital and ideas and approaches. And tell us about your experience in that and where you think it stands right now.

I think that's something that Americans should really always try to remember as we're considering kicking Chinese internet companies off of our bourses here and hurting a couple of things. First of all, if you are somebody who genuinely believes in freeing up more information for more people and broadening the information horizons. The heroes in your story really ought to be the American venture capitalists who went in and the Chinese entrepreneurs often who came back from the United States who built these companies, you know, the people who brought them, who underwrote these IPOs and allowed them to make money and to build a bigger, more robust internet in China, the Ciscos of the world. Instead, they're often vilified, right? They're like held to account for having built the Great Firewall. I think that it's a more complicated story than that. They're also the ones who created, helped to create, who were absolutely essential in creating the first and still only genuine public sphere that's ever existed in Chinese history, right? You can't count like a physical public square like Democracy Wall, which had a few months of life in 1978. No, this is like a sustained, long, big, not entirely open, but more open than ever public sphere, right? So these early internet entrepreneurs, let's remember something about them. Most of them were either Americanized, the Jack Ma's of the world had spent time in the United States, the Charles Zhongs of the world, all of them, I mean, most of them, some of them were green card holders or even citizens. Who came back to China, their money came from the United States. And as soon as they could, listed on American capital markets. Now, this is all happening in a country that always wants to dominate the commanding heights of any strategically vital sector, right? Where the state must dominate. But that's not what was happening. So it was truly remarkable and they need to be recognized for this. I think it was just a truly great thing. That's just not how we tell the story often enough. It's really a pity. During the time of the bidirectional flow, so many Chinese companies, because they had to meet Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, because they learned corporate governance really well. Sure, there's always going to be your shit company. You're going to have like some coffee delivery company that ends up faking its books and is absolutely terrible. Yeah, but for every one of those, there's Dozens of genuine clean success stories, right? What I'm saying is that the decoupling that so many people seem now to be insisting on is going to be bad for everybody. It's going to put an end to this beautiful cross-pollination that was happening for 30 years or 20 years, right? And I really feel very sad about that. Now, the way I see it, there were 2 really big narratives. That in the American mind dominated their understanding of the relationship between technology innovation on the one hand and political authoritarianism, right? So one was the emancipatory narrative, right? We all believed for a long time, we believed very firmly that, you know, freeing the internet would mean the end of authoritarian rule all over the world, right? That was like the animating idea of. The Arab Spring. It was the animating idea of the Green Movement in Tehran, in Iran in 2009. We would gleefully append the name of some American social media product to every uprising in an authoritarian state. It's like, oh, that's the Twitter Revolution in Moldova. We had a couple of Twitter Revolutions actually. Tahrir Square in Egypt. That's the Facebook Revolution. The YouTube Revolution in Tehran in 2009. And we thought the same thing about China. We were always saying, you can't Nail the Jell-O to the wall, as Bill Clinton said. It was like a firm belief for us. And as you'll see, we came to completely reject that narrative by about 2016. It was really in the year 2016 when so many other old narratives were going by the wayside too. We suddenly decided that authoritarianism had co-opted technology, had become the handmaid of these autocratic states. Right. And why did we think that? Well, because we had the bruising experience of the failure of the Arab Spring state uprisings. Every one of them was an abject failure. We had the Snowden revelations, right? We had, I mean, probably most importantly, the whole Russian hijacking of the American presidential election in 2016. Cambridge Analytica scandal, which emerged a couple of years later, but was taking place in 2016. So we flipped the narrative completely on its head. At the same time, the same moment, and I think for related reasons, we flipped the other big narrative, which you had alluded to earlier. We had this idea that China was only borrowing ideas from the United States, that it was incapable of genuine innovation, right? We all grew up with that joke, right? What does C2C mean in China? Copy to China, right? And I think you and me would be the first few people to admit that was true for a long time. But it wasn't true after like 2009 or 2010. There was already a lot of really interesting stuff happening, but we were very slow to realize it. As late as 2014, 2015, we had like Carly Fiorina, who really ought to have known better, going around giving these speeches saying. Show me one thing that the Chinese have innovated, right? Biden, who's of course was vice president back then, he was giving graduation addresses that were themed around this saying, the Chinese will never out-innovate us because we are free, right? So he wasn't just saying that American innovative edge was made possible by innovation or made possible by freedom, but that freedom was like a sufficient condition for us to always be innovative. Which is just bullshit. And I like to point to Sputnik was launched by this liberal democratic regime in Russia, right? And the V2 rocket was launched by an exemplar of fucking democracy, right? So unfortunately that's not the case, but we didn't just kind of come to a gentle realization. We panicked and freaked out and flipped this old narrative on its head where suddenly 2016 comes and China is eating our lunch. They're outdoing us in quantum. They're outdoing us in AI. They're outdoing us in advanced robotics technologies and gene splicing. All right.

Across the board in so many ways. It's like there's like 50 Sputniks that are in the sky, right?

Right, right. Everything's a fucking Sputnik moment suddenly, which is just nonsense. Like, how did these 2 narratives flip and why did it happen so suddenly? China had gotten under American skin for a very long time by subverting that big load-bearing wall narrative that said you weren't supposed to be able to have capitalism without democracy. So maybe we should have been primed to have some of our assumptions kind of challenged, but to have them flip so suddenly, that's weird. It says more about Americans than it does about China.

Because it's been steadily happening. Do you think it was maybe 9/11 that kind of diverted our attention or why was it sort of so sudden in terms of awareness? Like what, what were we distracted? We were just like. Navel-gazing or we were just being delusional or—

I think 9/11 had— yeah. By the way, you remember that you and I were together when the first plane hit the tower. Your mom called us. I remember exactly where we were.

But this is another thing I remember though, which was she called me again to say that another plane had hit. And then everybody else at the table was still like, and you were gone. You were already like, that's not a fucking coincidence. You were out on your bike. Like your fake, like off, because you immediately put it together. You were out. Where's Kaiser? He's gone. We were sitting like outside having lunch together.

Yeah. No, it was, it was drinks. It was like 9, 9 PM or something.

Oh, that's right. That's right.

We were with Chris and that Norwegian dude.

Remember? Oh yeah. Yeah. Was it Sig? No, I can't remember, but Chris, Chris Reining.

Yeah.

And then also maybe a few other people. Wow. So amazing.

That was, you don't remember, but that was the night when I said, this is Osama bin Laden. You actually, you didn't know who he was.

Of course you did. Yeah. So that didn't register with me because that didn't, you know, because I'd been reading about the Cole bombing and about the Tanzania and Kenyan embassies.

And we already knew there's this new group called Al Qaeda and anyway, news junkie, right? I was dating a journalist at the time.

Well, you're genetically engineered for what you're doing right now anyway, right? So we talked about geeky guy. So I think for whatever reason that we're sort of like somehow caught unawares of what's happening, I think that's. Sort of part of like what I'm trying to do with this book is just let people understand that things are happening really quickly. Like make of it what you will, whether you want to learn from it, what you should do, what you should not do, or ignore it. Right. There's going to be, I think, a lot of global ramifications just because I think this China speed, even though it's being, there's a governor on it right now being dialed back, it's going to continue apace and really inform the future and how things are done.

For sure. Absolutely. No doubt about that. That's one thing you can absolutely count on. I mean, look, they're putting the brakes on right now. I mean, what's happening right now is there is a deliberate shift onto a very different economic footing, right? It's shifting. This is what we're hearing is the sound of gears shifting, right? So there is a deliberate focus on quality rather than quantity of growth. It's not GDP uber alles now. You see what they're doing there. Consumer internet is not the be-all and end-all. It's not like they're gutting technology across the board. They're trying to redirect entrepreneurial energy into what they believe are the more enduring and important spaces of technology. There's this guy named Dan Wong who you should read and you should interview as well.

Yes, I'm a big fan. He writes very compellingly. Yeah.

Yeah. Big idea of his is it's been a mistake for America to sort of regard these social media companies whose success was based largely on the network effect as sort of the apogee of American ingenuity. If the best and brightest graduating from Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and Carnegie Mellon are going to work for fucking Facebook, and that's sad. That's very sad. They should be going to work for companies that are still doing genuine deep tech. Yeah. Deep tech innovation. Right. And that's what China is trying to do. Again, they've got a fire to their ass because of all sanctions that have been put in place.

But I think there is something to be learned from that at the federal government level, which is historically there has been this ability for the government to, you look at Israel, right? The kind of tech that's come out of there, right? I mean, a lot of it is military, but you know, a lot of our stuff in the U.S. has also historically been militarily funded, but there is a way to kind of benight Some sort of industries and give them the right kind of incentives and maybe subsidies and support to be able to drive them forward.

We're tending instead to benight them without the K in the word, or knighted.

Yeah.

So I know the weird thing is how we believe that China is so blinded by its ideology. I feel like ideology hurts us. Why don't we believe that industrial policy is a good idea? Well, we're coming around to the idea finally, but we have had an ideological allergy to it. That's all there is to it.

Right. Indeed. Indeed.

Wow.

Yeah. So no, that's something we can learn, but I think we're learning it wrong. I mean, we're learning the wrong lessons. We're throwing money at problems. There is not a real plan in place.

It's a plan.

Yes.

It's not being directed. And part of it is that the wrong people are in government. I mean, China, again, there's a lot of downsides to this, but beginning in the very, very early 1980s, there was a deliberate policy that Deng Xiaoping pursued of moving technocrats into positions of power. These people were all, I mean, if you, by the year 19, say '92, if you had looked at the composition of the Chinese bureaucracy, like if you look just at Say, as Lynn White and Lee Chung did, they did this work in the early '90s. If you looked at the composition of, say, mayors or party secretaries of cities of over a million people, and there were like 260 of them. If you look at all provincial party secretaries or provincial governors, if you looked at all central committee members, probably the average percentage that were formally trained for at least 4 years in natural sciences Or engineering, it was over 75%. I mean, that's nuts, right? Today, if you look at the composition of the Politburo Standing Committee, there's almost no engineers on it anymore. It's weird. It's all people who are economists and lawyers. But if you look at who's being promoted right now, people shooting up in the ranks are what they're calling the Beihang clique. You know, the Aerospace University, right? Beijing University of Aerospace Engineering, whatever it's called. These are not just. Technocrats. They're fucking rocket scientists in like the literal sense.

Man, man.

There is a commitment to deep tech.

And you throw that kind of talent and team against a real plan, right? There's real vision and commitment to the medium and long-term planning, then it's going to be an even more Competitive landscape, and we need everything that we can to be able to best. If we're going to engage, then it's really about competition. There's cooperation, but that's what I really believe in and just love and advocate.

If you were to look right now at the province of Zhejiang, right now, the person who's just been named to be the party secretary of Zhejiang, which is one of the most important provinces in China. He was a graduate of Beijing Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He joined the Ministry of Aerospace Industry. He oversaw the fucking Shenzhou manned spaceflight program. That's the guy who's running probably the most economically important province in China right now.

Wow. That's a nugget of an insight. That's some true intentionality.

Dan Wang pointed that out, but it's been pointed out by a lot of people, but—

But you're channeling that insight. That's what you do, right? You basically. Have a gigantic funnel of information and you're able to, you know, as advertised, just drop incredible nuggets. Like, I feel like I take this whole podcast as a transcript and put most of it in the book. There's just so much to sift through there.

Rev.com, man. Do you use Rev.com?

I do now. Thank you very much. I love that you also use Riverside for your podcasting. So that's, that's incredibly validating.

So Hi, Riverside.

Alexis Ohanian is now— Mr. Serena Williams is a big investor in the, in the company, I found out. And I'm a big fan. So, hey, it's been an hour.

Wow.

As advertised, as I just said, like, man alive, 45, like you're just wonderful to listen to. And so many pearls, nuggets, just chunks of goodness in there. Thank you so much, my friend. And would love to, love to hug you and see you in person sometime soon. Come in, come and hang out with us in Bali. And, uh, I've never been to that area of the world that you call home, but I know it's a really terrific place.

And, oh yeah, you would love it. It's insane. It's so great. There's so many people from Beijing, our old gang who are moving here.

Is that right?

Mitch Presnick lives here now, right?

Oh, what? I didn't know that. Wow. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. Mitch is here and lots of good people here. Eric Fish, you remember him? Oh yeah. Allison Friedman, she lives here.

Oh, she's excellent. She left Hong Kong, huh?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Elise Rivens was here until she left for Chengdu.

Oh, interesting. Wow. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. There's actually a pretty good Bali crew too of people who have left Beijing. It's same time zone and just a 6.5-hour direct flight once things get back to abnormal. So yeah, let's, let's create that triangle instead of the triangle.

Yeah.

Bali, North Carolina, the Northern Capital. So, hey, loving good vibes, my friend. Thank you once again.

Pleasure talking to you, Rich. Yeah. Okay. Take care, man. That's a wrap.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Rich Robinson Show, season one at the Ski to China. Visit the rich robinson.com/show to smash that subscribe button. Please also go to iTunes or whatever platform of choice. Rate and comment. And until next time, thank you very much. Zaijian. Cheers, y'all.