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Dan Wong came on the show and he is one of the world's China experts and he's just written a new book called Breakneck.
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But what makes Dan unlike anybody else is he writes these annual letters that are just so darn good.
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And so I've been wanting to have this conversation with him for years.
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How do you write with such voice?
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How do you collect notes and travel in a way that just leads to insight and great stories and communicate that in a way that's both so educational and so entertaining?
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So that's what this conversation is all about.
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We get to the end and you'll notice the name Tyler Cowen come up a lot in the conversation and we say, "You know what?
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People dedicate books to people, but they don't dedicate podcast interviews.
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What's going on with that?"
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Tyler, we're dedicating this podcast interview to you because we are so grateful for all of your friendship, your mentorship, your guidance over the last decade.
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And both Dan and I very much feel like we wouldn't be anywhere close to where we are without your guidance and your mentorship.
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So Tyler, thank you very much.
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This episode is dedicated to you.
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Well Dan, I want to start off talking about your annual letters and there's two things that are really striking to me about them.
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The first is just the depth, but it's a certain kind of depth. it.
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Your writing style honors the smarts of the reader, but not in a way where you're using a bunch of big words and stuff like that, but it's you're really trying to investigate what's happening in China.
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And it was unlike anything else I'd seen.
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But the other thing that was interesting is the way that you mix personal observations with these sort of deep big insights.
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It made the style of the annual letters unlike anything else I'd seen.
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And I think that's part of the reason why I was drawn to your writing.
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I think the way that I thought about a lot of the annual letters was that I really just try to capture what was important about China in two respects.
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There's an element of China which is the formal official part of China which exists through top leader Cining speeches, party documents, everything that the party state really wants the people to know.
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And I think that part of rigid efficious official China contrasts tremendously with the incredible informality of general society.
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And what I really wanted to play up was a bit of the friction of uh simply living in a country that is fun and messy and bizarre and um just a uh really uh interesting and wonderful place to be along with sort of the um newscast the official uh party theory magazines view of China in which everything is immaculate for the leader pleasure.
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Um everything exists for uh party leaders and Ciin Ping to examine these villages which are um swept super clean for his personal pleasure in which everyone around him is always sitting with him straight backed and uh carefully listening.
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And then um as soon as uh he departs, shortly after he departs, people get back to their normal lives um in these villages in which they are not thinking so much about the party pronouncements.
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Um and I really wanted to capture both aspects of that.
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The formal aspect of China which is tremendously important, a vision of Beijing that is um trying to attain some degree of sovereignty, power, everything that every national government wants.
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Um but they combine that with a deadly seriousness along with the um you know informal aspects of life which is hardly serious um humorous uh and all sorts of wonderfulness um that is not captured by the newscast and the magazines.
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The word that comes to mind from your letters is texture. Texture.
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A lot of the writing that I read about China is big themes.
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these sort of giant tectonic plates of America verse China, the Uklades trap, stuff like that.
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And what is surprising about the way that you write is that you'll use like a soup that you had in Kuning or something like that as a entry point to talk about what's going on there. >> Yeah.
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I think that the way that I uh think about China is that it is not only um about the wishes of people in Beijing.
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Um and you know, China to me is just a country of a lot of different um dimensions that butt up against each other just as one would think of with the United States.
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I think these two countries are always going to be pretty directly comparable.
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directly comparable. um in the US um I think nobody would ever really try to understand um the United States purely through the lens of what's going on in Washington DC right >> and yet I think that is what a lot of people do with China I think if you wanted to write a little bit about the
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US you would uh go beyond Washington DC and go to let's say uh Boston as well where there are a lot of universities to Los Angeles with the um entertainment industry to California and um San Francisco with silic Silicon Valley, Austin, Texas, where which used to be your stomping grounds. And all of these
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And all of these are important um places to think about.
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And the way that I think about China is that um far beyond Beijing, uh we also have Shanghai, a major business center of 25 million people um which uh used to have extr territorial concessions for the British, the Americans, and the French.
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the French built these wonderful boulevards, leafy cafes, um, and, uh, excellent streets.
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You have, uh, the north, which I think is much more windswept and deserty, and Beijing itself is an especially Stalinist city.
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>> You have the southwest, which is, >> that's where you're from, right? >> My family heritage. Um, very mountainous.
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Um, people love spicy food, pungent pickles.
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Um there I think it is probably the most informal element of China which is especially far away from the imperial gaze which is in the northeast.
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Um and so I think you know you have to combine all of these different elements and not portray um China as a series of cliches as a series of great walls bumping up against Grand Canals and these sort of tectonic plate movements.
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And that that is again one of these things that I that I really want to capture that, you know, ordinary Chinese live lives that are much like ordinary Americans.
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It is often mundane, frequently stressful, um, often very aspirational, and people manage to have fun and carve out spaces for themselves in which they really try to live their lives in the best way that they can. >> Yeah.
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Well, what's cool about your writing is there's a real style there. There's both the style.
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The word that comes to mind is a kind of gracefulness that it's not surprising to me that you love music.
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I can see the influence of music in the rhythms and the flows and the patterning of your language.
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Um, but then also your style of analysis.
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That's sort of a right brain.
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And then the left brain analysis, the way that you go about doing it, it is very distinctive.
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So, how deliberate have you been about cultivating that?
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>> I am very deliberate about my writing style.
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And I wonder if um I I want to hear how you think about what my writing um style is because the way that I think about my own is that um maybe the I I'll start by highlighting two of my favorite uh cultural um artifacts.
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And the first is French novels um especially of the uh 19th century.
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My favorite writer, my favorite novelist is uh Standal um whose big works are the red and the black as well as the charter house of Parma.
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Um he was a French writer who was mostly active around the 1830s.
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I um just reread the red and the black um this summer and it was probably my fourth time reading my uh favorite novel.
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Was wondering how well it would hold up and I was glad that it held up really really well.
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Um I think there is something extremely humorous about Stendal.
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Um he is writing about um I think it is one of the best love stories um ever told.
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um the love story of a French peasant boy who falls in love with two successive women, commits these extremely stupid mistakes and triggers mistakes among the women uh as well.
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And he is um really good at skuring uh French society uh in the 1830s.
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So there's something I draw a lot of inspiration from that sort of um humor and ravishing beauty and the um storylines of Stendal in particular.
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The other uh influence that I uh think a lot about is Italian comic opera which is my favorite genre of music.
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Um this is known as opera pufa um in Italian.
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This is the these are the funny.
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is the these are the funny. This is the funny opera and this is essentially the musical line that runs from Mozart um his three Italian operas um which are Don Giovani, Kosifut and the marriage of Figuro that goes through Rosini, Danizati, Elini as well as Verde in
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which the Italians really prize cadence, they prize casing, pacing, they prize a sense of repetition and there are um showers of ornament that um drench the vocal line and there's something um I think they produce and they value a sense of um ornament for its own sake. You know, we're sitting um here in a
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You know, we're sitting um here in a beautiful French rook co space.
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David, I think you've um are always are able to pick the most wonderful spaces.
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Um, today I decided to wear my Austrian jacket because the Austrians have so many uh tie-ins with uh the the French.
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Marianuanet was a was was an Austrian princess.
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Um, and I think there is something, you know, baroque and beautiful about just um, ornaments for its own sake.
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And that is something that the Italians do.
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And I uh do like to have clean lines in my own writing, but also informed by a few flourishes and cadences that really create a sense of pacing um in which if you read it, I I hope that readers feel like there is a um sense of variation of um sentence structure, sentence length that um really tries to um propel the reader along in a thrust.
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Even more than sentence pacing and structure, one of the things that I find is that there's a experience of reading your writing.
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And it's sort of like the experience of looking at a flower where you can see the flower from afar and it gives you something, but as you come closer and closer, there's actually new levels of beauty that are that are revealed.
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And because of that, your writing is one that I would say you don't want to have it summarized for you.
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You actually want the experience of reading it.
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You know, we could talk here and we can say, "Oh, summarize breakback.
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Oh, there's the engineer society versus the lawyer society, but actually I find that the more that I zoom in to your writing, the better it gets." >> Yeah.
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And that is um I think one of these things that um I hope is uh the experience of people can um um take away.
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If there's one thing I hope that people can take away after this conversation, it is to go listen to Mozart's Italian comic operas.
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Um I think the um I think those are um by my standards the most beautiful works of creation um which um if we can think a little bit about Mozart.
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These three Italian operas um were all molded by an Italian libertist named Lorenzo Deonte.
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Um Lorenzo Deonte was a um very curious figure, lived in a brothel, was excommunicated by um the Catholic Church, eventually moved to Pennsylvania.
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And in the process of doing all of these, he was just this um Italian adventurer.
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Um he uh wrote these labrettos uh with Mozart that are tremendously playful that are uh extremely ironic in which um almost every beautiful piece of um Mozart opera you would hear now unfortunately mostly selling um accompanying commercials for selling pasta or something.
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But every piece of um a beautiful love song that Mozart has written is almost always highly ironic.
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Um the person usually the soprano singing it does not intend um for the um does not intend the love for the person that she's singing about.
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Um there's beautiful levels of irony.
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There's beautiful levels of structure in there.
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And that is a lot of also what I'm trying to achieve myself where I think what is most important is to have a few gags, a few little jokes um in there that does not have to be serious and pfaced because China itself is already um super serious.
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I think that official China is one of the least funny entities ever um envisioned by uh anyone.
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Um the leaders of the Communist Party are not only serious, they're self-s serious.
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They're tremendously poaced.
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And what I would love is for a a slight element of Mozart to be carried in so that um people have a little bit of a sense of uh irony and playfulness in in everything that they do. >> Yeah.
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Well, one of the things that I'm trying to square is when I think of ornament and when I think of all those little details, they always come out in the process of editing and revision.
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And that takes time, but it it comes out in round five, round six, round seven.
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But you've written these annual letters pretty quickly.
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My understanding is you have this giant list of notes.
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You look at the notes, you begin to compile a narrative.
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Hey, what's going on here?
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So, how were you able to get those things so quickly?
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Yeah, I think the so my annual letters um are written in a pretty simple and straightforward way.
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Um so I have a an annual deadline of um January 1st uh in which I have I will have written the previous year's notes and um this deadline is something I had to blow past um twice.
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But in general, I keep in mind that January 1st is when I have to write my annual letter in which it is um usually a the core part of it, the core essay part of it is something to do um to reflect about what I saw um that year mostly around China.
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But that is um I try to present a lot of analytical insight combined with some element of narrative in the core part of that essay.
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And then I write a little bit about um the books that I read that year that are uh interesting to me and maybe something else relating to perhaps food or opera or some of my other pleasures that I've undertaken.
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And the process of writing my annual letter is um pretty straightforward.
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Usually if you know that you have a uh product to ship uh on January 1st, you essentially your whole year is governed by um that deadline and that that cadence.
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And so there's no mystery about what I'm going to be doing uh at the end of uh December.
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And the process for thinking about all of this is that I have a um vast notepad which is just um it's just the Apple Notes app in which I am just throwing little notes.
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>> So what would those notes be?
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um I might um think about you know whatever happened a big event that happened um in any particular year.
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any particular year. So let's say in 2021 um what I wrote most about was this um crackdown that Ciin Ping initiated on China's tech sector in which he decapitated the um online tutoring industry hurt a lot of uh video game producers as well and that was definitely one of the big events of 2021 along with zero covid and so as I was
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observing a lot of these sort of things I would be thinking through well you know I don't have to be very newsy I'll leave bad for the Wall Street Journal to cover, but you know, here are my thoughts and I can, you know, continuously craft an evolution of my thinking about something like zero COVID or um the uh tech technology crackdown. And so, um I would keep dumping these
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And so, um I would keep dumping these notes um into just an um the notes app on my iPhone.
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Um, every so often, uh, if I am, uh, listening to Mozart or if I'm eating a dumpling, uh, whatever, whatever it is, if I have, uh, if I come if a, a great sentence drifts into my mind, I will also put that in.
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>> And, um, because again, I don't have a product to deliver until the end of the year, I have the space to really try to refine a particular sentence.
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And in some cases, I believe um for some pieces of writing, it is um not at all an irrational thing to construct an entire essay around a single beautiful sentence.
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Um in fact, I recommend it if we're able to have like one great sentence.
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I think it is um absolutely valid to try to construct everything around that.
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And um because I have the uh time and the space to do this, I try to refine everything as much as I can.
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Um but at the uh end of the year it is always still going to be a hasty process because I had a uh day job uh in which I was writing um notes for mostly financial clients and it was only really the last uh 10 days of the year uh in which I would have the space to really try to write my letter.
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And so, um, as much as one tries to refine all of this, um, the last 10 days of the year are going to be this hasty sprint in which I am taking this highly disorganized pile of notes, um, highly disorganized piles of sentences, really trying to distill a potential structure uh, out of all of that, and then to um, just write all of it uh, in a matter of haste.
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And I think I uh accept that though my letters could be good in parts, I feel like there's so many imperfections still with my letters every single year that um I wish it were um better edited.
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I wish it weren't um so hasty.
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I wish I could uh cut and trim quite a lot more uh than I than they currently are.
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But I also accept that as a writer uh one is never going to be satisfied.
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I feel like I am perhaps 85% satisfied with my book.
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Um, if I had something like another month, I would love to be able to refine, um, the the connections between the sentences, the connections between the paragraphs.
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I feel like I could do a much better job with that.
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But, um, I also take solace in the fact that no writer is ever very satisfied.
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I've um spent quite a bit of time chatting with some, you know, really good essayists, including people at the New Yorker, who would tell me that, yeah, no writer would ever get above 85%.
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So 85% is is is a good goal to actually achieve with two things.
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One, with the letters versus the book, it seems like there's something about the letters that kind of breaks you.
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When you would talk about the letters, it was never like, "Wow, I had so much fun."
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I was always like, man, this was really hard and I kind of got it over the finish line. This was my impression.
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Whereas, you seem to really enjoy writing the book.
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And I'm wondering what accounts for that difference.
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And maybe we can start there.
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And then I want to hear about your method of observation.
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You know, travel writing is one of the most eye rolling genre that there is.
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It's filled with cliches.
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it doesn't tend to be that intellectually engaging, but you seem to have figured out how to do something there.
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>> Um, I think the um letters were difficult.
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Um, and the book was also difficult, but maybe I was just uh slightly more complainy in a way that I think um is slightly unbecoming of someone who loves Mozart.
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And I think that um when I think about Mozart, you know, there is no musical question that he did not solve um to perfection.
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he did not solve um to perfection. um you know every he excelled at absolutely everything that he did in whether that was comic opera whether these were masses whether these were conertos um and Mozart furthermore made it all seem effortless >> and perhaps as a writer I am a little
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bit closer to Beethoven in which Beethoven obviously also uh made these incredible works but you can u detect a note of effort in most things that Beethoven wrote uh some parts of it uh often and feels slightly labored and you can um tell that he had these titanic struggles um as he um wrote his string quartets as well as his symphonies. Um
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Um so I um confess that um I have made the letters to be slightly more difficult um than they ended up being.
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A lot of it was because I um in the last final 10 days of the year when most people are relaxing over um Christmas or New Year's um or or or whichever holidays um they are really trying to not do very much.
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And I feel like that part of the letters that was challenging was that I was doing my hardest work when everybody else was in a state of perfect relaxation. Mh.
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>> Um, but I um definitely aspired to having a little bit of a um perfect air of perfect ease and grace that Mozart embodied.
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For the book writing, it seems like you would just kind of procrastinate during the day and then at night you'd have a ah oh my goodness, I need to write and then you would stammer the keyboard and get your writing done. Is that right?
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>> Yeah, I think that is um the normal part of my process.
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And I think um you know there's a million different writing processes.
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Let me know if you agree.
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And I think most writers would always tell you there is no right or wrong answer.
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There's some people who get up super early in the morning um at 4:00 a. m.
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like Jimmy Sony and then um have their own very wellprotected writing time.
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And then there are some people um like u Gustaf Flowbear um the French novelist who drank probably like 50 cups of coffee a day.
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This is a self-proclaimed thing.
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And he would also be writing at 4:00 a. m.
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um in the morning because uh he was uh staying up all night um and uh sleeping through the day as he was trying to have this sort of writing process.
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So here we have the the the great horseshoe convergence between uh Jimmy Sony as well as Gustav Floair.
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Um and I think you know some people write really early.
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Uh some people are like me to procrastinate throughout the day uh and then actually get to writing through um at the night.
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And uh it seems like among writers there is no invalid approach.
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All approaches are valid.
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You just need to put sentences on a page.
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One thing that's funny is I would have bet my life that you were a nighttime writer.
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I would have bet my life that you're a nighttime writer. And I'll tell you why.
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Your writing has the space and the rhythm of you're drinking whiskey with your friends and time is not an object.
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And what what you get there is it's not like a license to ramble.
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That's the wrong interpretation of this.
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But there is a license for depth and long conversation.
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And I think a this is total conjecture, but I think a morning writer tends to be more polished, more to the point.
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It's kind of I need to get my work done.
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And yours kind of has a sit back in the EMS chair and let's kind of let our thoughts flow kind of writing. Yeah.
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Well, uh, let our thoughts flow while drinking whiskey and being highly panicked about not having done any work throughout the day.
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Um, I think maybe just another writer to throw into the mix is um someone who did drink a lot of whiskey and smoked a lot of cigars, uh, Christopher Hitchens.
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I have not actually read a lot of Hitch, but the legend around him was that he would be drinking all night and then as he got back into his home um, staggering back nearly blind drunk, he would compose a perfect essay and then it is in totally publishable uh, condition.
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um the very next day when he sent it off.
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And so, you know, maybe that is a little bit more of my process.
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Um and I think as much as possible, I tried to be slightly more sane as I try to write my book.
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Um for me, the bookw writing process actually turned out to be fairly straightforward.
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And I um did not quite shift into being a morning person, but uh perhaps I did successfully shift to being more of an afternoon person at least.
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And the way that I tried to get this through was that every day I repeated my mantra to be a qualcom collected Canadian.
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And I um managed to achieve my deadline so long as one uh repeats this and actually believes in this uh and then actually uh you know have a little a modicum of discipline, a forkful of discipline in order to get all of this done.
25:58
Let's go back to the observation question.
26:00
Why is travel writing notoriously terrible and what are you doing differently or how are you intentionally observing the world?
26:10
You're right that a lot of travel writing just isn't um very good and I feel like I wonder if it's not insightful.
26:19
It's usually not insightful and it is often very self-indulgent >> and I personally believe that travel is just one of the very best ways to experience the world and um I think that um that would not be surprising to you um especially because you and I share a mentor in Tyler Cowen who is um one of the world's top top travelers uh and being uh super analytical uh in thinking through absolutely everything that he sees.
26:51
And Contra Agnes Callard whose work I tremendously admire um to write uh that travel is not great means uh for understanding the world as she did in I believe the New Yorker um is an essay I quite profoundly disagree with.
27:07
And but I think there is something to the idea that most travel writing is um not terribly worth reading.
27:14
And I feel like um there is an element in which a lot of travel writers um are um enjoying a degree of revelation um that they uh see throughout the world but are unable to quite convey that to the reader.
27:31
You know, you may have an ecstatic experience traveling through like let's say something like Peru or Vietnam, but it becomes really really difficult to actually convey your own personal ecstatic experience uh onto the page for the reader.
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The way that I try to do this was to not write about my travel experiences as such.
27:54
What I really tried to do was to uh combine that and um marry that with some degree of um analytical insight.
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Um you know these are the sort of tectonic plake movements that you uh mentioned earlier on in which you know I understand China as not only the formal elements of me going into the countryside chatting with people cycling around um getting to know them over a bowl of noodles.
28:22
Uh I think that um you know I am always trying to elevate that with what does this all mean for um Beijing's desires over uh its own people as well as um the world abroad.
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What might Cinping uh make out of all of this?
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And you know how do we combine the conceptual with uh the analytical with the observational with the pedestrian?
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And I think, you know, you really have to try to combine all of these sort of things.
28:52
And the trouble with um too much travel writing is that um people are really only thinking about what is in front of them.
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Um they're thinking a little bit about too much about what um they have just heard about from other people.
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And um there is a little bit of a sense I think this is the problem with a lot of um reporterly books which is that they're talking to an expert >> um about a particular topic.
29:19
Maybe that is the Danish pension reform system.
29:22
Um and yes it is really good to interview that expert and convey that expert's opinions but uh perhaps you should also uh read the literature on Danish pension reform.
29:35
interview several experts, look at the data as well.
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And a lot of travel writers aren't very good at um doing all of that.
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They're really good at conveying the um the thoughts of that particular expert.
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But what we should really try to do is to zoom in and out um throughout a piece to convey the data, the official, the unofficial as well as the observational.
29:59
It is funny because I agree with you that travel is one of the best methods for learning I've ever discovered.
30:11
And I'm curious to hear your method of travel in so far as your time on the road leads into writing.
30:19
What is the Dan Wong method?
30:24
The way that I try to do this in China is that um I really firmly believe that there is not a single boring place in China.
30:33
I was living in Hong Kong first and then Beijing and then uh Shanghai.
30:40
And these are China's uh three of its biggest economic zones.
30:43
Um and one could you know travel within Shanghai and find some you know um great urban neighborhoods.
30:51
What can travel just outside Shanghai and uh get into farmland?
30:55
There's some mountains around Shanghai that full of these tea mountains, full of these um beautiful little villages.
31:02
Or one could really travel much further outside of Shanghai and get into the hinterlands and the provinces.
31:10
And there's just so many interesting places in China to go.
31:12
I think about China's northwest um in the uh province of Ninia which has a completely Mediterranean climate to my surprise.
31:23
This is um you know very deep inland.
31:25
It has a climate very much like California's that grow a lot of grapes for wine production there.
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And this is um where you have a lot of um Muslims um who eat a lot of lamb and they are living in kind of California sunshine.
31:40
>> This the northwest of China.
31:40
This is part of the northwest of China.
31:42
You could go to other cities in um northeast China which has um these beautiful landscapes, but this is absolutely China's rust belt.
31:51
Um there is a lot of industrial decline.
31:54
This used to be um the site of um China's biggest state-owned enterprise sectors >> and they're really close to Russia and they have some of the lower um standards of living in China now.
32:06
But they have their own distinctive culture, their own distinctive food, and um they uh are a really fun and friendly people living in a beautiful landscape.
32:15
I think a lot about um the southeast of China, which is more typical of the culture of uh Guangdong um which is the the the center of the southeast is the city of Guangjo, which is not very far from Hong Kong, which people uh eat a lot of seafood.
32:35
They have a very deep mercantile sense.
32:38
Uh it is one of China's richest um areas and people there are supposed to be just really good at making a lot of money.
32:45
The southwest where uh my family is from we are mostly tea drinkinkers.
32:48
Um there's a sense where um people don't really like to hustle.
32:53
Um and I think that is um mostly true.
32:55
If you take a look at um the um my the the city where which I where my parents are from uh the city of Quining, there's just not that much um industry. It's mostly agriculture.
33:08
It is an economic backwater.
33:10
When my parents departed from China in the year 2000 and it's remains a backwater today.
33:15
And then there is um you know these um really mountainous places like uh Tibet um where the Himalayas are just out of this world um as beautiful and maybe even more beautiful than the Rockies or uh the Alps. >> Wow.
33:32
>> And then um there's just so many regions of China that is just tremendously interesting.
33:36
And my method for trying to understand and explore uh more of China was to simply go to these places by um bus, by plane, by train, by hook or by crook to just be in these places, have not much of an agenda um just to um book a hotel and simply walk around and see things and organize my uh day by the three or four eeries that I really want to try out. >> Okay.
34:05
tactic for visiting these places is >> yeah how do you find good food? It's just to eat a lot.
34:11
And often in these places, you don't need to find good food.
34:15
Um because these places are have extremely good food um in the corner noodle shop.
34:19
Um you know, it's um almost any normal place that has people eating in them.
34:24
It's going to be pretty good because they it would be um you know, this has been a cuisine refined by thousands of years.
34:30
And um essentially the task is to eat a ton because that is the central pleasure of life, I think.
34:40
um especially if you're if you're in China, >> walk as much as you can so that you can get to the next eery uh still reasonably hungry and uh eat a lot more.
34:46
Um and then um as you're walking in between the eeries, um the restaurants, the noodle shops, um whatever else, um you're just going to be um bombarded with insights when when you see when you walk around a city as dramatic as Chongqing.
35:02
Is it as crazy as I see in the Tik Tok videos these days?
35:08
It is far crazier than that really.
35:10
Um, you know, a city, it's gone viral.
35:14
>> It's totally viral because you have these cliffs.
35:16
You're able to enter a um building on ground level, go up uh nine flights of stairs, and then exit ground level again.
35:24
It's so crazy these Tik Toks.
35:27
I mean, the especially viral moment of um a subway going through the middle of a big apartment building.
35:31
Um I think that is like that is real. I've seen it.
35:34
It's um it is totally amazing to see.
35:37
Then as you're eating the um you know noodles and chonging which are my favorite um with minced pork as well as a side of chickpeas and it's like so spicy it um varies your auditory capacity. Whoa.
35:51
And then you see all of these super dramatic buildings set among cliffs as well as um two rivers, the Taling River as well as the Yangza River.
36:00
Um, you know, I think it is inevitable that you'll be bombarded by insight all the time and this is how I populate my um, uh, notes of, you know, man, this is so weird. How are they doing this?
36:13
This is what people are saying and they're thinking and that is just how I, um, build up a lot of the material that I have for an annual letter. >> Yeah.
36:22
Well, I think one of your foundational ideas, messages, whatever you want to call it, is that the world is very textured.
36:30
Reality has a surprising amount of detail.
36:32
And we're seeing it here in terms of how you do your analysis of China.
36:35
We see it in your repeated reminder of the importance of process knowledge in terms of what allows a culture to thrive.
36:44
And I think that that's sort of a call to writers to if you're writing about the world, how do you zoom in and just look deeper and experience things at a less abstract level and a more concrete one? Yeah.
36:59
And I think um it's not only the um concrete there there also has to be a level of ambition for writers to um also be abstract and conceptual and analytical.
37:16
Um and so um again there is an element of zooming in as well as zooming out.
37:21
And I think that a lot of what I tried to do with my letters was in every single year that I was living in um China, you know, I think there's a sense that um you know the common uh line about a lot of newspaper articles, a lot of reporters is that they're writing the first draft of history and then it is up to the historians to you know complete the final draft and debate their final drafts with each other.
37:43
And I wasn't a daily news reporter.
37:46
I wasn't doing things for Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal.
37:50
Um I was writing you know again one essay a year for the public and um I was writing perhaps call it draft 1.
37:57
5 uh of um you know my conceptualizations of the year and I've definitely gotten a lot of things wrong.
38:05
I've definitely um been embarrassed three times a day before breakfast um about um some of the things that I've um not quite gotten right.
38:14
But I think that I did my best to gesture at what are the big questions about China that year and also to try also tried my best at um providing as well as I could an answer to some of these big questions.
38:32
So again thinking about um I'm thinking about one of my lengthiest letters the um 2021 letter in which I try to address you know what is the difference between living in Shanghai Beijing as well as in Hong Kong in which the big questions that year was what was going on with the tech crackdown that Siinping had initiated.
38:52
That was uh one big question.
38:52
How is zero COVID in China going to resolve?
38:57
And we none of us had expected that it would result in a complete collapse um the next year.
39:02
And then the third big question uh was um the big slogan of that year.
39:06
What did common prosperity mean?
39:08
Um was the communist party very serious that they were going to go back into socialism?
39:13
And so that was uh that was what a lot of people had been interested in about China that year.
39:19
That was what um a lot of my financial clients, my clients who were working in endowments and pensions and hedge funds um had been asking me with.
39:26
Uh, and so I knew what the big questions about China were.
39:30
And I really really tried my best totally imperfectly with full of mistakes um to also offer answers to those questions because I think that writers should you know should try to get into like what is the most important subject that is animating them.
39:47
Maybe that is some element of biotechnology.
39:52
Maybe that is some element of civic reform in New York or San Francisco.
39:54
you have to figure out what you're super passionate about.
39:58
Um or you have to figure out like what are some of the big one of some of the biggest questions right now and maybe um you know for me one of the biggest questions then as well as at the present moment and I think for the next decade will be how will the US and China get along with each other if at all.
40:15
Um, and maybe uh, you know, some of the biggest questions right now uh, in San Francisco where we're recording is what is going on with AI?
40:24
And there's plenty of people thinking about that.
40:25
But let's get to the heart of what is animating you, what is animating um, the world and not just try to outline what the important pertinent tractable questions are.
40:35
Let's also try to have an answer around these really big questions. >> Right?
40:41
>> Right? What strikes me with that is it's not just David White talks about the conversational nature of reality where all of life is basically what do you want from the world and what does the world want from you and if all you do is say this is what I want from the world
41:01
you're kind of delusional and you're not going to be able to get things done but then on the converse if all you do is say what does the world want for me then there's not a sense of intrinsic joy in that and that true flourishing comes from the meeting of both of those things. What do I want
41:20
What do I want from the world?
41:22
What does the world want for me?
41:23
And that's what I'm hearing in your writing where you're saying, what are the big questions that are being asked?
41:29
So, I'm going to choose a big enough topic, but then also I'm going to do it my own way.
41:35
you have explored China in a distinctive way and you're writing about food and music and you you just don't shy away from saying no, this is what I'm really excited and passionate about.
41:49
This is my my lens on reality and I'm going to write in that way. >> Yeah.
41:54
Well, um I think that I can't write any other way, David, because I am I am who I am.
42:01
>> I think that >> Well, you've really leaned into it over the years, I think.
42:03
Yeah, I think the I mean maybe my um great gift was that I was not very well academically trained in um college.
42:12
I was a philosophy major.
42:16
Uh and mostly I had pretty bad grades.
42:18
Um I uh spent most of my time.
42:18
Um I uh spent most of my time. Um, my favorite part of the universe is probably um the uh basement of the library uh where I went to school at the University of Rochester in which I could just go and pick out a lot of novels and I could just spend long weekends um reading them and uh that was um that is probably my my happiest possible
42:44
experience um in university and I think that is not it's not unique to that particular um um university library because a lot of university libraries have these just the stacks as you call them just um uh places where there's all of these books and you can just grab one after the other and what an intellectual feast that you get to enjoy. >> Um but I spent too much time in the
43:04
>> Um but I spent too much time in the library um reading the books that I wanted to read rather than reading the texts assigned to me and that was why I had bad grades.
43:11
I never even considered going into grad school because I had already suffered academically um as a college student.
43:18
So, how in the world was I going to make it uh in a much tougher academic environment?
43:23
>> Um, and so the way that I tried to do this was not to write so much academically, not to write so much for a specialist audience.
43:31
It is to be a little bit more autodidactic. Yeah.
43:33
To really try to um treasure uh good writing as I understand it as inspired by Mozart Rosini as well as Dendal and to you know try to capture these big questions and ultimately um to be synthetic.
43:49
So >> synthetic >> that's right to have a synthesis of um all of these um really big ideas.
43:54
You can also call it syncretic.
43:56
Maybe that's the better word for thinking about it.
44:00
to, you know, again, um, combine the big with the small, the formal with the informal, >> the rational with the irrational.
44:07
Really trying to find, you know, what is the right sweet spot for all of these, not to be captured by a genre, not to be captured by a method, but to do it in your personal distinctive way because, um, how else can you do it? >> Yeah.
44:21
You're talking about captured by genre.
44:23
Talk to me about the difference between trade books and academic books. >> Yeah.
44:28
So, um I wrote a uh trade book.
44:28
Um my publisher is uh WW Norton in the US and Penguin uh in the UK.
44:37
And so these are books that are um meant to be read by a broader audience.
44:43
These are typically the sorts of books that you uh find in a Barnes & Noble uh in your in your account.
44:50
And that I think there's um you know before I do anything to a book these days um I take a look at um whether it is written for um the general audience um in a um trade press or if it is written for mostly a specialist scholarly audience as published by an academic press like Yale University Press or Stanford University Press or Oxford University Press and there's no hard rules about um whether um trade books or academic books are good or bad.
45:25
Um there are some really terrible um uh academic books and there's some really awful uh trade books uh as well.
45:29
And I think you know as a writer now who has written for a trade audience I'm much more discerning about what are the pitfalls uh involved with both um trade books as well as um academic books.
45:43
And I think you know let me try to beat up on my um own publisher just very slightly a little bit.
45:49
I think the um level of um derision that one could have around trade books is that all of them are written by celebrities um for a really general audience.
45:59
This is uh Salt Bay trying to capitalize on his um one moment of fame um to uh you know really try to have a book out of it.
46:07
And uh all of these books are ghostritten and tremendously unserious and not meant for a um uh not really meant for to be read by anyone.
46:18
And the derogatory term here is um a an airport book.
46:20
This is kind of what the academics and the scholars would dismiss as um as as a bad uh trade book.
46:29
And I don't want to let the academics off the hook here because um academic publishing also produces all sorts of um pretty terrible books.
46:35
um books that are published by um the press and there's about a thousand of these copies um ever published and probably you know not more than a few hundred are ever actually properly sold before they're given to the libraries and I think I think a lot about what are the structural incentives for authors in both of these categories.
46:56
So, you know, I think the convention among trade books is that you want to have a bigger audience.
47:02
You want to um make a lot of money on the book, uh a lot of money through your advanced or royalties.
47:07
And so, you know, you're writing for, you know, you're you're you're maybe not writing for the most sophisticated people.
47:16
>> And I think that is a really unfair characterization among a lot of trade books.
47:20
Um but I think there is also an unfair characterization one could make among a lot of academic books which is that um part of the reason that uh professors produce these academic books is that it is a requirement to achieve tenure.
47:35
You have to have written at least one book >> right?
47:39
>> It doesn't really matter u whether this book is any good.
47:41
It doesn't really matter if um no one but your uh mother bought this book.
47:47
It doesn't really matter uh what exactly you say but as a requirement for tenure um especially in the humanities you need to have written at least one book and this is why um a lot of these books are uh really boring.
48:02
They have um no real life to them.
48:02
A lot of it is just obsessed with um defending uh one's discipline um with defending one's positions um you know not really trying to figure out what are the big questions out there and really trying to um answer um some of these big questions out there.
48:18
And so I think these are the these are the uh conventional pitfalls of um both types of books.
48:22
And I want to say that um again there is no hard rule with um these books.
48:28
Um what is um important is to find the books that really transcend their own genres. Okay.
48:35
>> Um there are certainly these incredible um academic books just as there are these amazing trade books.
48:40
Um and there are plenty of scholars uh writing excellent trade books.
48:46
I think of um someone that I work with Steven Cotkin um who is writing uh a uh biography of Stalin.
48:54
He's already written two volumes and now he's written writing working on his third in which um he uh as a professor at Princeton University for the last 30 years and now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution could very easily have written a super niche scholarly uh specialist study of Stalin.
49:14
Instead he went with Penguin Press which is the biggest press in the business um to really try to you know shed his scholarly light um to a much broader audience.
49:22
And I think there are a lot of um um academic books that um really distill an academic's life's work um in written in a um an analytical narrative- driven way that is not obsessed with um the smallest questions trying to defend um one's positions against one's immediate peers.
49:41
Um and these are obviously also some of the treasures of uh of bookw writing as well.
49:46
And so again, there's definite pitfalls with every sort of writing.
49:50
Um, but I think what we should really try to do is to find the authors that managed to transcend the the own problems of their own industry. >> Right.
50:01
You mentioned that as you were writing Breakneck, you became a better reader.
50:05
And one of the things that was striking and it relates to what you're saying because when you're working in a genre, there's a sense of I'm supposed to do this and I'm supposed to do that.
50:14
And it seems like what you became aware of was a kind of x-ray vision to know when a writer was writing about something that they were actually passionate about versus when they were writing about something out of a sense of obligation or something like that.
50:31
I think um being becoming a writer and writing a um serious sustained work is a great way to train yourself to be a much better reader because um I mean first of all you know having this insight of you know what is the um difference in the production culture of academic books as well as um trade books only really became super obvious to me as I understood the industries as well as the incentive systems.
50:56
How >> and the other part of you know writing a um a book is that you know I think in every book you have to have to some degree a potted history of something that um may not be tremendously important to you.
51:13
important to you. I think for anyone who writes about modern China um you know they cannot but um you know at least gesture a little bit towards some of the most important um aspects of modern Chinese history let's call it the cultural revolution under Mao or reform
51:30
and opening under Duncia in which um you know some of the conventions of these uh have been rehearsed a million and one times and it is um not necessarily terribly important to get into but you know you kind of still have to set the context text um for the stage. And I
51:44
And I think I suspect that one of the reasons that uh our friend and mentor Tyler Cowan is able to read so fast is that he does have exactly this X-ray vision to know, okay, well, here is the potted history.
51:58
We don't need to get into that.
52:00
Let's just try to find the um key analytical phrase uh within um each of these sentences.
52:05
and he's able to zoom into these really really quickly and get to know um what is the most important part of every um page.
52:12
And so, you know, developing that sort of um vision of, you know, knowing when the author didn't really want to get into this, but was kind of made to by um his editor.
52:23
kind of made to by um his editor. um knowing you know what are sort of the uh conventions of academic press and trade press and trying to you know really try to figure out you know what is what is actually animating the writer um what is
52:38
um his favorite aspect I think that that is something that writing a book would actually really teach you to do >> as you've spent time with Steven Cotkin and interviewed him what what would be your fundamental gripe with history books and then what would what would the antidote to that be? >> That's a great question. I think the um
52:58
>> That's a great question.
52:58
I think the um fundamental gripe with a lot of history books more of the past not in the conventional um scholarly genre today is that historians have been accused of writing a lot of just so stories. Okay.
53:16
Um, oh, of course, Napoleon was faded to be defeated because he had made exactly the series of mistakes which he in fact made.
53:26
>> Um, of course, uh, Hitler lost World War II because of these series of mistakes.
53:32
And so, um, history has tended to become this, you know, series of just so stories that perfectly elucidate why, um, the, um, you know, history shook up, uh, in the way that it did.
53:45
And I think, you know, there has been a reaction against a lot of that, uh, among historians because, um, the best historians uh, imagine counterfactuals.
53:57
They have a very strong sense of history might be contingent.
54:00
Um, you know, sometimes, you know, the world really was thrown probably off course by um a series of um unfortunate and bizarre and coincidental events.
54:10
you know, the murder uh of France Ferdinand in World War I that triggered World War I really was uh in part driven by, you know, uh his own driver taking a wrong turn and having him be exactly in um at the foot and steering him exactly towards the assassin who never expected to be able to um murder Archduke France Ferdinand.
54:36
And so sometimes you do have these um sort of strange coincidences in um history that didn't have to shake out in exactly that way.
54:41
But I think a good historian would be able to synthesize um a lot of these um you know archival documents, imagine the counterfactuals and really try to be uh very very analytical.
54:54
And so I think that that is the sort of history work that I love to read. Yeah.
54:57
Yeah, I was watching an interview with David McCulla one time and he was talking about his book on the Brooklyn Bridge and he was like, "Now you look at a Brooklyn Bridge and you're like, "Yeah, it's just a bridge from Brooklyn to New York." He's like, "No, no, no."
55:11
At the time, people didn't know if it was possible to build a bridge like that.
55:15
And you have to remember that on every single page that the future had not been written yet. >> Yeah.
55:22
>> We don't know what's going to be true one year from now, one month from now.
55:25
We don't even know what's going to happen tomorrow.
55:26
And I think my sense is that a lot of historians almost think that the future was contingent or something like that. >> Yeah.
55:37
I think that there is um an issue which is that you know every event feels kind of impossible before it takes place and then right after it takes place it feels obvious and necessary for something like this to have happened.
55:54
And so that's something that u we might think of with the collapse of the Soviet Union say in which um at the time uh absolutely nobody expected that the Soviet Union would implode as it did um spectacularly throughout the you know basically the years um 1989 to 1990.
56:08
Um but rather you know we have to really try to imagine um at the time that nobody expected this and afterwards everybody uh sort of just assumed that of course this communist system full of political sclerosis with a broken economy of course it was going to fall apart.
56:28
Um but we have to you know really try to navigate between these traps to really try to think about how people at the time was conceptualizing these sort of things and to understand the contingent elements because it didn't have to shake out in the way that it did. >> Yeah.
56:42
One of the most encouraging things about your work is that basically you tell me if this too big of a stretch but in many ways you built a name for yourself through seven six or seven annual letters.
56:55
So you had one writing product a year that you gave a lot of time and attention to that you were very deliberate about and then you published that and that's how you built a name.
57:06
And there's something very encouraging about that, right? >> I hope so. >> Yeah.
57:11
I mean a lot of people think ah you got to write all the time, you got to publish every single week.
57:14
But you're saying, "Hey, I wrote for 10 days a year.
57:17
I spent all year basically prepping for that and then I poured my heart and soul into it for from December 20th to the time I said happy new year."
57:26
I think um and this is something that I would really encourage more writers, young young writers especially to try to do.
57:33
I'm a big fan of Substack.
57:33
I think that Substack is a um excellent product and I think that Substack has really enable enabled a lot of writers really to make their uh lives and make a career out of um writing itself.
57:46
There's plenty of people in San Francisco now who are able to be self-supporting um be able to live in San Francisco um by u writing out on Substack.
57:56
My gripe with Substack is that it like every other technology that comes before it is really encouraging people to write at a more frequent cadence at a more frequent pacing.
58:09
The tragedy of a lot of modern technologies is that it is really trying to you know make um posts and thoughts as short as possible and as frequent as possible.
58:18
And the apotheiois of this is Twitter.
58:21
But I think the the um Substack model is really trying to encourage people to write a piece a week, a piece a month.
58:28
And I was trying to bring down the average.
58:30
I was trying to write one piece a year.
58:32
And I think, you know, for most writers um now I can't keep up with most writers who are um coming up with a post every other day.
58:39
Um and what I would really like to do is to read most people's thoughts every quarter uh perhaps every month.
58:48
um every week is a is a bit of a stretch.
58:51
Um but you know what I really want to do is to read a writer's most considered thoughts.
58:59
>> Um the reflections, the well-crafted sentences um you know looking past the immediate headlines in order to you know um deliver a product uh at the end of every year.
59:11
And I was doing that uh in conjunction with doing my day job which involved more frequent pace of writing for uh financial clients.
59:19
Um um you know people working in hedge funds who really wanted my um quick takes on stuff.
59:24
But that was for a um that was for my work audience.
59:29
Um, and my public product was much better considered and much more personal because I I'm pretty sure that my hedge fund client would give um uh no figs about um whatever I was uh eating at the noodle shop in Quiming.
59:42
But I think I would also really love it if um you know people were able to slow down a little bit and you know be a little bit more deliberate.
59:52
Doesn't mean that you can't do your day job.
59:54
can't do your day job. it doesn't mean that you can't um you know write every so often for magazines as I was doing at um you know in the year that I wrote um you know my 2021 letter and also published in the Atlantic as well as foreign affairs as well as the New York
1:00:08
Times and so I think that is um you know that is the right pacing for a lot more people and I hope many more people would uh write their own annual letters >> I think there's something really encouraging about that there's something really encouraging about that talking about AI. AI
1:00:24
AI seems to be something that that you're using all the time and yet you were like, I'm not going to use it for the book.
1:00:31
So, what were you thinking about there?
1:00:34
>> AI is something I've only really started to use after the book was done.
1:00:37
Um, and that's in part because I think 03 was kind of this big breakthrough from Chachi PT that really um allowed me to see how things could be really good.
1:00:49
But for the most part when I started playing around with chat GBT I guess it was um GPD3 I was disappointed conventionally like a lot of people had been that there were too many hallucinations the everything was flat.
1:01:04
It wasn't really connected to the internet and so it didn't really seem like it could be all that helpful to me.
1:01:10
Now, I think that um I think if I were writing another book, which to be clear, I hope I do not have to do for another couple of years, I think I would be much more in conversation with um the AI to try to find um some pieces of research.
1:01:27
But I also conceptualized um AI as being a um helpful tool that I should use after the book.
1:01:34
uh mostly because I think that there's something um important about delivering one last big project before letting this um super tool uh into my life.
1:01:51
>> Um I think a lot about um Tyler's remark in which he said that uh the internet sort of dropped into his lap about halfway through his life.
1:01:58
He had already gotten his PhD.
1:02:01
he had already taught at uh UC Irvine at George Mason before the internet became a really big thing in the late 90s essentially.
1:02:08
And I was thinking about this and I'm thinking like I'm right now I'm 33 years old.
1:02:12
Um it was you know Chachi BT really blew up um when I was uh 30 and I could say that I lived half my life without AI and I will let the super tool take over my life um in in the second half.
1:02:26
And so I think there um is something maybe important about um maybe being 30 when Chachi PT comes out is kind of the perfect age >> because how old are you David? >> I'm 30.
1:02:40
Um I think what that you're you still count you're still good it but um I think what is um useful is to live life um before it uh without it and just go to the library and just you know check out the databases on um the St.
1:03:00
Louis uh FRED uh economic data database. >> I love that website. >> I love FRED too. Do some spreadsheets.
1:03:07
Do some PowerPoint presentations.
1:03:07
Learn a lot of these basic skills.
1:03:09
a lot of these basic skills. learn how to read and then this super tool comes on and uh you can really turbocharge your life with it and I fear that a lot of the you know Stanford undergrads which I see as a fellow at the Hoover Institution you walk around the
1:03:24
libraries and um it is a lot of students using Chachi PT to um check through everything that they want to do and then once they're um done with that they're uh you know watching some Tik Tok short videos and that just doesn't feel like that's the very best form of learning to me. And so I think we should all be
1:03:42
And so I think we should all be using AI in some way that makes sense to us.
1:03:47
Um and then I use it actually now mostly for restaurant recommendations or to have a conversation um about, you know, a piece of music that I've seen and heard.
1:03:57
It is so good for music, >> right? Oh my goodness.
1:04:00
Like as someone who doesn't know a lot about music, I will ask it about a song to break down, hey, what should I listen to?
1:04:05
And actually like in terms of a counterfactual of what I couldn't get before to what I can get now, it might be the place with the biggest delta in all of the AI world.
1:04:15
For me, it's really good for music, for art, for thinking through a novel and thinking through, you know, after you after I read um Standal's The Red and the Black um this summer, I um decided to interrogate it about the novel and, you know, understand a little bit of what literary scholars and critics have said about the novel.
1:04:37
And that turned out to have been a really um excellent experience because I think a lot of the you know cultural experiences that we would get whether that is to listen to a Beethoven string quartet or uh read through a novel it is necessarily individual and um you know it is necessarily very personal.
1:04:54
Even if you go to a concert with um your friends or anyone else, they probably will not have an identical ecstatic transcendent experience of the sort that you've just experienced, right?
1:05:08
Not everybody gets exactly the same thing out of a novel.
1:05:12
And I think you know the AI is really really good for thinking through a lot of these different sort of things.
1:05:18
And so I view it primarily as a form to enhance my consumption, whether it is to use AI to find a really good noodle shop or to use AI to find a piece of clothing that I really like um or to really try to engage it musically.
1:05:34
Um but I don't really view it as a um perfect alternative to research.
1:05:39
I still love going through books and going through databases.
1:05:43
Um, and I am um I think I will try as much as possible and perhaps even declare it verbotton not to let AI get into my writing.
1:05:54
I I don't want it, you know, prompted to have any sentences that I could actually just use.
1:05:58
I want the sentences to come from within myself. Hm.
1:06:02
It's interesting that you use the word thinking through because there's a a lot of people when they're signaling caution about AI, they're like don't ask AI for all the answers.
1:06:16
But what I think that what you're saying is I have these theories, these hypotheses, these different rabbit holes that I can go down.
1:06:24
And it's almost like a sparring partner that's really smart that then you can kind of work together with to collaboratively find an answer that then improves your consumption. Is that fair? >> Yeah.
1:06:39
And um I'm sorry again to bring up our joint friend and mentor Tyler Howlet, but I sorry to implicate you Tyler, but >> he's the best.
1:06:47
Uh I think the there's something about the um Chachi PT which has been very much influenced by Tyler um by by by his writing style and his thinking style in particular and I think this is um on the record I believe and this is kind of established that um Tyler Cowan thought has um influenced a lot of how Chachi PT communicates.
1:07:06
Um, and you know, the way that I treat ChachiBT, um, is as my friend Tyler, who I, um, you know, maybe see once every couple of months in DC or in New York.
1:07:21
Um, but if I really wanted to have an instant Tyler-like reaction, um, to a novel that I've just read or a piece of music that I've just heard, um, you know, I just ask Chachi BT and it is able to give me some really good answers.
1:07:34
And I feel like, you know, my experience sometimes with ChachiBT has actually approximated a lot of my interactions with Tyler.
1:07:40
Um when um you know I I when I was um you know thinking through different questions I um I I would keep a among my notes is a running list of questions that I have for Tyler for the next time I see him whenever that might be.
1:07:57
So you do exactly >> the only person I do that for. >> Exactly. Right.
1:08:00
And so, um, I keep a running bank of questions and I think he somehow expects that I would be bombarding him with a couple of things that I that I've been thinking.
1:08:09
Um, and you know, there's something like a a question that I that I come back to.
1:08:13
I This is one of my first um really good experiences with Chachi BT was uh to ask why did the um Spanish Catholic Church develop such a virulent inquisition whereas the Austrian Catholics had no inquisition.
1:08:29
There's something about um Spanish Catholicism to me that feels gloomy and uh slightly violent and um a little bit dark.
1:08:40
Um whereas Austrian Catholicism to me feels actually bright, joyful and um much more respplendant and much more crimson rather than um than than very black.
1:08:51
And I asked, you know, why did the Spanish develop such a virolent inquisition and the Austrians did not?
1:08:57
and Chad came up with this excellent answer that felt that felt right.
1:09:01
And so this is the sort of question that I would ask Tyler.
1:09:03
Um, and now I have um I have a very Tyler-like creature uh in my pocket that I'm uh able to have better conversations with.
1:09:12
And that's the process of thinking through things.
1:09:14
That's the process of um trying to figure out what are the right uh questions and what is the right approach, what is the right observational style that I now have much better access to.
1:09:23
No, I will never take any of um Chachi PT's generally super flat sentences um you know into something that I would ever write myself.
1:09:31
Talk to me about China's influencer culture and it seems like you're going around seeing a bunch of people on their phones during meals, taking selfies in front of famous statues and whatnot. What's going on there?
1:09:46
And why is it such a headscratcher for you?
1:09:48
I think my maybe my least favorite part of um contemporary China uh in among informal society is just absolutely how much the phones have taken over uh everyone's lives.
1:10:02
>> Is it more there than here?
1:10:04
>> I think it is much more than normal Americans.
1:10:06
I think it is much much much more.
1:10:09
If you are going, it is not quite common to um go to a Shanghai cafe and see people barely drinking coffee, barely chatting with each other.
1:10:19
Um they're mostly taking photos um of each other.
1:10:23
If you take a look at some of these really pretty buildings, iconic buildings, there's something quite like the uh flat iron building um that the sort in Manhattan that um is exists also in Shanghai.
1:10:34
just at all points of the day there will be people um gathered there to take photos.
1:10:40
There's so much of um China's uh cities have been transformed into photo spots.
1:10:44
Um China doesn't have uh Instagram really um but it has this local alternative named Xiaoong Shu um also um named Red Note or Little Red Book in which people are just um really on display all the time.
1:10:58
And there have been parts of China that have been rebuilt and remolded especially for um people to take photos in front of.
1:11:07
And this is something called Wong Hong architecture.
1:11:09
Wong Hong means simply famous on the internet um in Chinese.
1:11:15
>> This is a specific architectural style.
1:11:17
>> This has become a specific int um architectural style in which people just really get in front of these buildings um and then they're especially photogenetic.
1:11:26
And this is just for the photo spots.
1:11:28
I think this is not quite unique to uh China.
1:11:30
I mean, there's a really well-known neighborhood in um Miami.
1:11:35
There's this art district. I forget the name of it.
1:11:37
Um I forget its name now, but there's just a lot of street art.
1:11:40
And there's um >> Wild Wildwood.
1:11:42
Is that what it starts with a W, I think. >> I know what you mean. >> Something like that.
1:11:45
And people are just um you know, taking photowood. >> Windwood. That's right.
1:11:48
People are just um you know going up to these places.
1:11:50
So imagine like you know a lot of parts of China are a big um Miami windwood uh in which people are just you know taking photos all the time and I feel like you know that in itself doesn't really matter.
1:12:02
I mean it's fine if people want to have more beautiful street art.
1:12:04
to have more beautiful street art. I think the part that is corrosive in society is that you know you would have a business meeting um or you would have um you know be chatting with friends and people could be on their phone like a lot you know they're they're they are listening to you but people are just on
1:12:20
their phone a lot and I find that just not very um fun that people are just texting their other friends on wechathat all the time and when everything becomes a photo opportunity I find myself um kind of annoyed when people you know walk into a restaurant and just kind of are trying to film absolutely everything. And you can see this even
1:12:39
And you can see this even when Chinese are um touristing abroad.
1:12:44
If you're in especially I was in Europe for most of the last two months, a lot of photogenic spots and there would be a lot of mostly Chinese people walking in already with their cameras and smartphones um poised in order to uh you know film absolutely everything.
1:12:59
And so the the aspect of Chinese people's relationship with their phones I find is um just really really terrible.
1:13:06
And um I think this is probably my least favorite part of uh Chinese culture today which so many people's relationships have been mediated by their devices. >> Yeah.
1:13:17
Well, it seems like if I look at the course of your writing because I've been reading you now for 10 years, it seems like there is a consistent thread of humanity has become like this and I wish that was a little bit different.
1:13:34
You know, one of the ways is with Silicon Valley a lot of people building apps.
1:13:38
Hey, you're saying let's go a little bit upstream and let's look at semiconductors and some of the technologies that actually enable that and focus on those things.
1:13:46
And then also going back to definite optimism as human capital, a real understanding as one of your early foundational pieces of the way that we think about the future and the way that we interact with our world has major downstream downstream implications for the kind of life that we get to live.
1:14:14
I'm sorry for not being more articulate here.
1:14:15
I kind of need your help putting words to this.
1:14:19
Yeah, I think I I have thought a little bit about this and I think the reason that I feel like the world ought to be a lot better is not only that we all need the world to be a lot better right now.
1:14:31
Our world is has so many problems and it is so unjust in so many different ways.
1:14:37
But I have this perhaps perspective in particular because I have felt myself an outsider in various ways.
1:14:45
So, um I'm from the uh city of Quinning um in the southwest and typically if you meet a lot of Chinese Americans um here, many of them have grown up in the most prosperous parts of China, whether that is Beijing or Shanghai or Shenzhen.
1:15:02
And so within China, I was a slight outsider um because I'm was from the periphery rather than the prosperous coasts or the imperial corps.
1:15:13
And also as um in the US I you know we moved to Canada when I was seven years old.
1:15:19
I mostly grew up in Ottawa and you know growing up in Ottawa.
1:15:27
The US is incredible to me, but also disappointing to me because so many of the most ambitious Canadians move to um the US.
1:15:36
And I feel like I went to one of the better public schools um in Ottawa, Lisker Collegiate Institute, which has produced some prime ministers and stuff.
1:15:44
And I was attended it only because I lived pretty close to it.
1:15:46
Um, but I went down this LinkedIn rabbit hole uh one time, probably five, ten years ago now, quite a few years ago now, and found that among pretty much all of my smartest Canadian friends, um, all of them have ended up uh, from high school, all of them have ended up in um, New York or San Francisco.
1:16:07
York or San Francisco. And um you know but the issue is that you know when you're in Ottawa and you think of these um great American cities whether that is San Francisco or New York or DC or something else you know you have a pretty keen sense of the disappointments of Ottawa and then you think oh if I
1:16:28
move to one of these places will be great >> amazing >> and here we are sitting in San Francisco and this is hardly the most functioning city in the world um the Imperial Center of Washington DC has all sorts of problems and New York is just in many ways not that livable of a city and so >> it's so dirty. >> It's so dirty. The subways are so loud. >> It's so dirty. The subways are so loud.
1:16:47
There's so many um different problems and so I think a lot of >> although I love New York, >> I love New York as well.
1:16:52
And but in as a city experience, it is just so far behind a lot of other urban experiences, right?
1:16:59
New York is amazing because of the culture and the people, not so much because of its hardware. >> Yeah.
1:17:04
And I feel like a lot of what I have done is to try to communicate my disappointments with being from the periphery whether that is within China or you know being a part of the provincial outposts um in Canada moving into the imperial center uh whether that is New York, San Francisco, DC or Beijing or Shanghai and then feeling very profoundly disappointed that the people here are have the wrong values.
1:17:31
they're not functioning at such a high level and trying to indict the elites as in the way that I uh feel and um can't share perspectives on you know and to really say that um you know why aren't you why aren't our elites why aren't you know these people much better in some
1:17:50
way and so to some extent I feel like I have been a lot of my writing has been driven by disappointments it is to try to introduce um better error correction um because I am in part an outsider and because I feel disappointment that things aren't quite so good. >> Can you keep get more concrete with the
1:18:06
>> Can you keep get more concrete with the values and indicting the elites?
1:18:09
Like what is it that where are we at and where do you wish we were?
1:18:16
>> I feel like let's just stick with American elites since I know them a little bit better. >> Yeah.
1:18:23
Um, I feel like it has not only been a blessing for me to have not done super well academically because it pushed me out of school to um, you know, try to live my life as best as I can in the way that I understand it.
1:18:38
Um, I went to the University of Rochester in upstate New York, which is not a tiptop school.
1:18:46
Um, let's call it a second or maybe even third tier university.
1:18:49
Um and I contrast myself a little bit with some of the people um that I see now on uh different campuses.
1:18:59
Um I am now pretty familiar with three particular campuses.
1:19:04
I wrote this book substantially at the Yale Law School and I came across these um you know Ivy League students who went to Yale.
1:19:11
Um I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan where I also interact with a lot of folks at the University of Michigan where my wife teaches and now I'm a um fellow at the Hoover Institution and I get to meet a lot of Stanford kids as well.
1:19:26
>> So these are all much more elite kids.
1:19:29
So just thinking about you know the life of a typical Stanford student.
1:19:31
I think that um you know the gift of being a Stanford student is that as soon as you graduate you are more or less gifted this excellent network of people that have already that treat you better because you're a Stanford kid that you're already plugged into some of these parties in San Francisco.
1:19:50
You already have a scene that is very well laid out for you.
1:19:55
>> It reminds me of the LeBron James tattoo on his back. It says chosen. Chosen.
1:19:57
You know, that's how I think of a Stanford graduate. It's like here we go.
1:20:01
you've been gifted everything >> and you know they have a golden path kind of laid out for them.
1:20:06
Uh for me uh graduating from a second tier university um far up in upstate New York where the name University of Rochester does not necessarily inspire uh some you know great feelings about a particular graduate.
1:20:21
I really had to fight um and to build this network.
1:20:25
to build this network. I had to fight to have uh any sort of a recognition and um this is um the way where I'm going with this is that I feel like um it is really easy life is um almost on easy mode after you've uh gone to Stanford um
1:20:40
because you don't necessarily have to fight so hard and I feel like among the graduates of the Yale Law School where I was previously a fellow I really love that experience but there are many distinguished graduates of the of the Yale Law School especially serving in the Biden administration. Biden
1:20:56
Biden administration was full of Yale law grads >> who did not, you know, let's say, produce an amazing outcome.
1:21:03
Um, during the their four years in the Biden administration, several cabinet um, secretaries went to the Yale Law School.
1:21:12
Several of the key uh, assistants and deputies in the White House went to the Yale Law School.
1:21:16
And I would say that their performance has not been amazing.
1:21:20
And so, um, you know, this is kind of where I this is where I want to be a little bit more critical of America's elites.
1:21:27
They sort of start coasting, um, after they've had an excellent, um, college education experience.
1:21:33
Um, they are indeed very smart.
1:21:36
They are indeed uh, very very ambitious, but I do feel like they tend to have a lot of in-group dynamics.
1:21:45
They're very protective of other people within their in group and just by the level of performance that we can see in the United States which has just so many problems again today it has not been inspiring and I want American elites to do a lot better than they have.
1:22:03
How do how are the relationships different among Chinese elites and American elites with their relationships with writing?
1:22:14
because there was one year where you read all the journal entries from the the magazine, I guess I'd call it, of the Chinese National Party.
1:22:24
And I was thinking about that.
1:22:29
I was like, is there even an equivalent of that for American elites?
1:22:32
Like, when I think of the people who are in power, I don't usually think of them as being writers.
1:22:40
So, how's it different between America and China?
1:22:42
Oh, David, did you miss the latest Donald Trump essay in New York magazine?
1:22:50
Yeah, I I missed it, too.
1:22:50
Um the uh I think there is um I think while certainly it is uh not the case that Xiinping has ever written um any of the articles in the main theory magazine which I was reading.
1:23:06
>> Um so >> what's it called?
1:23:08
>> Which means seeking truth.
1:23:10
>> Seeking truth in Chinese. Yes.
1:23:10
So I mean the way I understand China and the way that I understand one of the core instruments of the Chinese Communist Party is the propaganda department.
1:23:18
So the propaganda department is one of I would say the three most important um instruments for Leninist rule.
1:23:26
Um it is perhaps the most important instrument because um the Leninists are really interested in mobilizing the entire party state in order to modernize the country.
1:23:39
I think that is the core essence of what uh Londonists understand themselves to be doing.
1:23:42
You need a um dedicated cadre of revolutionaries to lead the people into some sort of a greater paradise.
1:23:49
Um and the second core element of the communist party is the organization department in which they're judging personnel and trying to figure out whom to promote upwards.
1:23:59
And then the third element of a Londonist party is just all the coercive elements to maintain discipline within the party and maintain security. among the population.
1:24:10
But I think the first and most primary element of the Chinese Communist Party, you'll love this, David, is the propaganda. It is the writing. >> Okay.
1:24:18
>> It is the newscast um every night which uh airs at 700 p. m.
1:24:21
uh in which you know they have the theme song and then you have the anchors reading the news >> and people actually watch this tune in.
1:24:32
>> I think something like >> it's not like just bread and circus.
1:24:35
Everyone knows it's fake.
1:24:35
I think people genuinely watch it because um first of all you have not that many channels um on TV in China.
1:24:42
There's something like you know you don't have cable TV in China which you have a the equivalent of an MTV or HBO offering alternatives and at 7 p. m.
1:24:52
many of the core channels are airing the same news and people genuinely do watch this um when they're eating dinner or something at night.
1:24:59
And would I be wrong as an American to just be like a just propaganda?
1:25:03
these people are completely deceived about what's going on.
1:25:07
They don't know that they're being brainwashed.
1:25:08
Like that's sort of where my brain goes.
1:25:11
But that seems like a very superficial read on what's happening.
1:25:15
>> I think you would be partially wrong.
1:25:18
Not fully wrong, but partially wrong because I think the propaganda apparatus is extremely sophisticated about um trying to establish some measure of credibility for itself.
1:25:28
Um they know not to put out complete nonsense.
1:25:32
Um they're not I think like the South like the North Koreans as we understand them which the glorious leader is correct in every instance. Yeah, he played golf. He got 18 hole at once.
1:25:44
>> I mean, it's not absurd on that level.
1:25:46
You know, I think they are pretty regularly airing the some challenges.
1:25:50
You know, there's a natural disaster, but then we send in the troops to rescue everyone.
1:25:54
Um, oh the, um, you know, there is now a trade war.
1:25:57
Um, but we are, uh, trying our best to support our exporters.
1:26:01
So, they do report the bad news, but then they immediately also follow it with what the party state is doing to, you know, make life better for people.
1:26:09
And so I think they are pretty well aware that they need to establish some degree of credibility.
1:26:14
Now my view is that their credibility is pretty thin but um you know they they are pretty conscious of this.
1:26:20
So they have the newscasts, they have the newspapers, there's a lot of core newspapers.
1:26:24
The biggest one is people's daily um and then I decided I'm not going to watch the daily news.
1:26:30
Um um which goes up to something like 300 to 400 million people every night.
1:26:35
Um, and there are some good parts of having a lot of people tune in every day.
1:26:40
Um, you know, when I was first, uh, when I shortly after I first arrived in um, China, I did tune in to the local newscast and I found uh, a 7 minute segment something like that of a giant breakthrough that China had made around quantum satellites and quantum um, communications.
1:26:57
And so imagine beaming that into something like 400 million households of people who might have been watching that night over dinner.
1:27:04
you probably radicalized a few million kids to really try to understand something about quantum mechanics and to really try to understand something about satellites that um they never would have come across before.
1:27:17
>> And dare I say that's not such a terrible thing >> because uh you know how do we get any science education uh in the US?
1:27:21
science education uh in the US? Well, it is whichever influencer uh might be interested in something like satellites and really try to go viral with that and that's really difficult right and so you know they have the newscasts um they have the newspapers what I was doing was uh mostly reading the um theory magazine seeking truth which comes out twice a
1:27:43
month it's a beautiful magazine um every magazine looks identical it has two characters seeking truth um it is always red and white and uh it always leads with some sort of an essay or a speech from top leader Xinping um in a different font from the rest of the magazines and then the rest of the uh magazine is uh basically essays from the rest of the party state. You might
1:28:09
You might be the party secretary of uh Gujo province to write about whatever you built that year.
1:28:15
And this is mostly meant to communicate to you know local cadres um officials retired people to give a sense of what the party state is thinking um at any given moment.
1:28:26
And we can certainly um be sure that Xiinping wrote absolutely none of these.
1:28:33
There is a giant apparatus um within the communist party to write his speeches and write his um write his essays.
1:28:38
But I think there is something meaningful about um having a top leader write lengthy essays or or under his own name to try to organize the rest of the party state and trying to um have his impat on different things and that is one essence of leadership.
1:28:58
Now in the US um you know Joe Biden and Donald Trump give speeches and I think that is the alternative but maybe we should have a a few more written documents that we can read from them.
1:29:08
I think that would be quite interesting as well. Yeah.
1:29:13
>> What's going on with writing and censorship there?
1:29:16
I mean, are there people who get censored?
1:29:23
And how do you feel about going out and sharing all of this now that you would next time you go back to China, would you be a little bit more sweaty at the uh immigration counter? You know what I mean?
1:29:40
Uh there is uh extensive censorship that pervades throughout Chinese society and it has gotten worse a lot worse over the last 10 years.
1:29:51
you know, at the start of uh Russia's invasion of Ukraine, um going on three years now, I've been a I was a little bit surprised when I came across this news headline that Putin had arrested a lot of uh Russia's independent bloggers, many of whom who were against the war.
1:30:08
And I was thinking, what sort of amateur-ish authoritarian regime is this?
1:30:13
um they still had independent bloggers that were able to publish um under uh their own name and uh you know relatively freely.
1:30:23
China had squeezed out all of these people um essentially about 10 15 years ago and I am friends with a lot of Chinese journalists um journalists who have been writing a lot on the mainland and pretty much there is no such thing as independent media in um China in any bigger more organized way.
1:30:42
uh there pretty much every um newspaper is formally owned by the Chinese state or the communist party um or they are very extensively censored by um the by the propaganda department.
1:30:59
There is no real um investigative journalism that does not um get filtered through afterwards to make sure that uh such a thing is publishable.
1:31:11
There is no independent media.
1:31:12
The censorship apparatus uh in China is absolutely staggering.
1:31:16
A lot of way posts uh can be censored.
1:31:18
This is the China's equivalent of Twitter could be censored really really fast.
1:31:23
Um they are able to censor pretty much everything.
1:31:28
There was a I think a lot about this single viral video um called Voices from Spring, which was a um video in protest of the Shanghai lockdown uh in 2022 um in which people try to um keep sharing this video to protest the lockdown.
1:31:45
They try to turn it upside down.
1:31:47
They try to encode it into the blockchain and still the sensors um have managed to get through a lot of the stuff.
1:31:53
And so yeah, I think the the most important thing I mean we can get into all sorts of specifics.
1:31:57
There's a lot of organizations tracking China censorship but the most important thing is that um it is big pervasive and getting worse.
1:32:07
Um and they in addition to you know having the party crafted messages in seeking truth in the newscasts in the party newspapers they also really strangle anything like independent media even on social media. a lot of these voices.
1:32:21
I strongly suspect that some of the biggest departments um some of the most human intensive departments uh among China's internet companies like Tencent or Bite Dance probably their biggest spend is on human sensors tracking through everything looking at everything that's gone viral and trying to make a decision about whether to censor um something like that before anything gets too uh viral and critical.
1:32:45
Um they do censor a lot of voices including light.
1:32:47
So, in um 2022, one day I woke up to find that my personal website was blocked in China.
1:32:53
Um the um usually China blocks a lot of really big websites like Wikipedia or Facebook or the New York Times.
1:33:03
Um and I was pretty surprised that they would go on and block a rinky dink website like mine, just danwong. co.
1:33:12
And at that point I decided um you know I had to go see the uh Canadian council general in Shanghai and ask whether there's a pattern of behavior here whether I needed to depart in a hurry um in part because um two Canadians had already been taken hostage by um Beijing over uh a retaliation of Canada arresting the CFO of Huawei um at the behest of the Trump administration.
1:33:36
And so, um, there have been threats in particular of Canadians over their personal safety.
1:33:44
And, um, what we decided was that, you know, it's not clear what's going on.
1:33:48
It's not clear that they were really targeting me.
1:33:51
Maybe there was some sort of an algorithmic keyword here that set someone off.
1:33:55
The challenging thing about censorship in China is that there's no door that you could knock on of a sensor, a local friendly sensor, um, to ask uh, what was going on.
1:34:04
Did I do something wrong? What happened?
1:34:06
these people will absolutely not communicate with you.
1:34:10
And I think you know the other part of um you know the China discourse that is often very frustrating is that people know that a lot of things can be censored and people know that police um may be reading your social media posts and maybe asking you to come in and question you based on what sort of criticisms um that you have been offering.
1:34:30
And um you know I think that does um really structure a lot of people's lives if you're chatting with them in China because they are pretty persistent to um they're pretty reluctant to really express their core opinions because they are afraid and they're rightly afraid of um the police coming after them if they write the wrong thing or say the wrong thing especially to a foreigner.
1:34:54
And I find that especially unfortunate because that is really hurting the critical thinking skills of a lot of different people.
1:35:04
I'll offer just one more example of censorship, which is that um because of a uh joke that a comedian made in the year 2023 that kind of played off of a common army slogan uh along with a joke about a dog.
1:35:18
Um this guy was extensively fined.
1:35:22
I believe he was detained for a couple of uh weeks and pretty much all comedy clubs in Shanghai, China's biggest city, were shut down over the course of a few months because of one joke that went slightly viral. >> Whoa.
1:35:36
And so this had met the toxic combination of a lot of um online nationalists that made a big fuss out of this um especially since it involved the people's liberation army which is one of the you know most powerful powerful powerful uh entities in um China.
1:35:52
Um a lot of people felt that you absolutely cannot insult the troops.
1:35:57
You cannot insult the troops anywhere not in the US um or not in China.
1:36:01
Um, but their reaction was, "We are going to close down a lot of comedy clubs in China's biggest city, which has been, you know, a rising source of tourism for for for Shanghai."
1:36:13
>> Um, and we're going to close all of that down.
1:36:15
And this is just how insensitive the engineering state um is.
1:36:17
They don't understand a lot of things.
1:36:20
They really don't want to have any jokes or mockery.
1:36:24
And I find that uh totally pathetic uh that they are unable to treat anything with humor.
1:36:30
And I do um am afraid of um you know the how the Chinese might react to uh my uh writing.
1:36:36
I decided I was going to write the best book and the most honest and the most truthful books that I can.
1:36:42
Um but you know I and therefore I did not shy away from uh indicting uh Beijing over some of its biggest mistakes like the one child policy and for um carrying zero COVID to excess.
1:36:57
I absolutely do not want to shy away from what I think have been generational level traumas that the communist party has visited upon the people.
1:37:05
Um right now I do not have a visa to China.
1:37:07
I plan to apply for one uh in a couple of months and the um Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs can have a good long think um and about my writing and and about whether they welcome me into the country and if they uh give me a visa I would be uh glad to visit.
1:37:26
If they do not give me a visa, then I will have no choice. And so, no surprises.
1:37:30
Um, they can think about whether uh they like my work and um are are tolerant of my work, let's say, and um are uh able to welcome me into the country.
1:37:40
So, my characterized view here would then be, wow, America is so free. China is so repressive. Thank god I live here.
1:37:49
But in what ways is China intellectually free where America is constrained?
1:38:00
I would say that maybe in some ways um China I would say mostly function better um in the creation of highly functional cities where subway stations are not very far where the infrastructure works really well and the logistics works really well and you're
1:38:22
able to get on a high-speed train and you know you have public order within the cities and so and to some extent that is an element of freedom um that you know it is just feels very bizarre to me that San Francisco is just so rich and um it works so poorly. None. No one, None.
1:38:37
No one, David, would accuse San Francisco of being a Florence, would they?
1:38:45
>> Want to hear something crazy?
1:38:45
I was talking to a friend and uh in San Francisco.
1:38:49
And I said, "Hey, it was night time."
1:38:51
I said, "Hey, can you leave the car keys on the counter and that way I can just grab them easier?"
1:38:55
And he said, "No, we keep them in a drawer in case somebody breaks in in the middle of the night.
1:39:02
We don't want them to also take the car keys."
1:39:04
And this is just like a standard way of living in San Francisco.
1:39:09
And I was like, "Are you serious?"
1:39:10
And he was like, "Yeah, that's just how we think here." >> Yeah. Uh what?
1:39:14
For for for a place as that's generating as much wealth as San Francisco, that is so bizarre.
1:39:21
It's uh bizarre and I would say terrible.
1:39:26
And so many people have had their cars broken into because they left a backpack or something in the car seat. >> Yeah.
1:39:33
When you pay for parking here, the app tells you, notifies you, do not leave valuables in the car.
1:39:38
Like the city app is the city has just said, hey, this is just we're going to tell our people cuz it's such a way of life here. >> Yeah.
1:39:47
And so, you know, we don't need to get into too much into the dysfunctions of San Francisco.
1:39:50
We could have three more podcasts about that.
1:39:52
But I think when um you see these things which are real you know and uh you know this stunts even a lot of New Yorkers right of of the poor level of public order and public safety here and then when the Chinese see it you know the propaganda officials have a field day and you know looking at this app and saying oh you look at look at how messy America is.
1:40:13
You have the center of wealth creation in California and nobody feels safe leaving their car keys in the kitchen counter at night because they're afraid of break-ins.
1:40:21
And like that should be a solvable thing such that the propaganda officials don't have such an easy time making fun of Americans and frankly everybody should feel safe leaving their car keys in their own home.
1:40:33
Um and so I think there are ways in which the Chinese may be freer in that.
1:40:39
But I would not defend any proposition that intellectually um China is could be more free because I feel like there is very extensive censorship from above that keeps getting worse and worse.
1:40:50
That is in part why China is such an underperformer in the creation of cultural products because movies and uh plays and comedy clubs and books are so extensively censored.
1:41:03
Um and I also feel like there is a lot of nationalist energy bubbling up from below uh such that cancel culture is also very real in China.
1:41:13
Um there is a very strong sense that you know if you say the wrong thing the mobs from waybo will come after you.
1:41:19
Um and this is not even necessarily directed by um you know anyone from above anyone from the government.
1:41:24
This is really just a nationalist social media really trying to take your scalp.
1:41:32
talk to him about the bundle of skills that are needed to write a book.
1:41:34
You know, you'd say, "Hey, Dan published a book. What'd he do? He sat down.
1:41:38
He wrote 288 pages and that was that."
1:41:39
No, but what you're saying is actually there's a lot of things.
1:41:44
There's skills that are required at the beginning, in the middle, and the end. Break that down for me.
1:41:49
There's three hard parts of bookw writing, and it is the beginning, the middle, and the end.
1:41:53
Um the beginning I think if you're writing a trade book like mine um you need to have a pretty clear idea of what you might write.
1:42:03
I think if especially if you're working in non-fiction um you really need a great structure uh over which to pin through a lot of your thoughts.
1:42:11
Um because otherwise if you don't have a structure, a throughine, a narrative, um all you're really doing is moving pieces of facts around and that does not make a great book.
1:42:24
And so the first thing to do is to be a writer to be able to conceptualize um the throughine for all of this.
1:42:31
You need to be able to convince a literary agent uh for throughine.
1:42:33
Um, and I was, um, really blessed to have an excellent literary agent, um, uh, Toby, who, uh, was really good at helping me think through everything that it would take to, you know, write a book proposal, which consists of something like 40 to 50 pages.
1:42:50
Some could be even longer if you have an initial chapter in there that really outlines what your project is, who you are, and what you expect the chapter outlines um, to look like.
1:43:01
Um and then the literary agent will um handle the pitching process.
1:43:04
I think um you know what is would be really good is your literary agent has worked with a variety of publishing houses you get more than one of them interested and if um more than one publishing house >> more than one publishing house is interested then you can have an auction and then you can have a bid and that's the fun part right >> and then the long middle is the actual writing process.
1:43:28
This is where I think um many people should be listening to your uh podcast, David, to actually figure out how authors write. >> Yeah.
1:43:36
Subscribe to How I Write.
1:43:38
>> Subscribe to how how how I Write from David Pell.
1:43:40
And I think that um you know, there's no wrong method, but I think you just actually have to, you know, do what you promise the publisher to do.
1:43:48
And I did it by um repeating to myself, I'm a Qualcomm collected Canadian, and I was going to meet my deadline.
1:43:54
I had a um an excellent um supportive partner u she was a writing buddy my wife who had written her own book before and um something that uh my wife did was she created some writing retreats that helped punctuate um being at home um I wrote at my home in Ann Arbor at my office at the Yale Law School and then um Sylvia made sure to bring us out to some um beautiful spaces.
1:44:20
We spent a week uh writing in Austin actually which we um you know rode during the day, ate some barbecue. >> We're in Austin.
1:44:28
>> Um just south of the river. Yes.
1:44:28
I I it was a it was a wonderful neighborhood. We rented an Airbnb.
1:44:33
I did a lot of my work in um Daang in Vietnam.
1:44:37
I wrote a lot of my proposal in Barcelona.
1:44:41
And so just varying it up slightly um was a way that um Sylvia was very right in actually making me um right.
1:44:49
Wow, I need a wife like yours.
1:44:51
That's a that's a good wife.
1:44:54
You should get one, David. So, I I recommend it.
1:44:56
Um, and then I think the um the post-production process turned out to be uh involve a little bit more work than I had expected.
1:45:04
Not so much the revisions.
1:45:08
I think my revisions was um was a process and I went through it, but um I didn't have the title that I it took a really long time, almost last minute until we figured out the title of my book.
1:45:19
title of my book. really >> initially we thought of um titling my book rather than a break neck to have the title move fast and break people >> China's quest to engineer the future a bit of a mouthful and the publishers uh didn't love it um and then eventually we
1:45:36
settled on breakneck which I think is wonderful just a single word um breakneck is this uh amazing English word which um has mostly positive connotations we fixed the bridge at breakneck speed >> we made the vaccine scenes at breakneck speed and but the literal connotations of that are brutal. >> Yes, it's this threat of violence coiled
1:45:55
>> Yes, it's this threat of violence coiled inside the word itself and I think it's untransatable because it's a uniquely English um wonderful word and I I really like my title and I really thank my editor Caroline for helping me come up with this um excellent title.
1:46:10
And then we had a lot of um we spent a lot of time thinking about what the cover was going to look like.
1:46:15
Usually a lot of Chinese books have a lot of uh dragons on the cover, something like a high-speed train.
1:46:24
There would be something red uh on the cover.
1:46:26
And I wasn't into some of these conventions of the genre.
1:46:30
And so we we took a lot of time coming up with um the right cover photo, which I'm I'm also really happy about.
1:46:37
There's a um woman standing below a giant structure that looks a lot like uh the Tower of Sauron.
1:46:43
Um, and I think that really captures something about the wonders of building an infrastructure as well as how sometimes that um, you know, is really intimidating to normal folks.
1:46:55
Um, but this post-production process um, involves a lot of this is after you're done with the works, >> after you're submitting with the manuscript, a lot of that could still take a lot of time.
1:47:04
And then there's a lot to do with book promotion.
1:47:06
Um, you know, there's a lot of I've gone on quite a few podcasts. >> Here we are. >> Here we are.
1:47:12
Thank you uh David for inviting me on this podcast and for really talking about sort of the process of bookw writing. I went on um live TV.
1:47:21
I was on Morning Joe and afterwards um my mother uh was not very satisfied with how I was on live TV and my mom had to call me up and said to say, "Son, you look terrible. What's going on?"
1:47:33
And I was thinking, "Oh no, mom.
1:47:35
What you're This is I did the best that I could." Not helpful, Mom. Not helpful, Mom.
1:47:39
Um, but she she knows wherever she speaks because she herself was a former TV news anchor. >> Oh, never mind. Okay. She has the credibility.
1:47:48
>> She has she has standing to say something like this even though it's still not helpful. Mom, come on, Mom. That was not great. >> Yeah.
1:47:55
>> Um, and I think um, you know, there's there's going to be more essays that I'll be doing.
1:47:59
There's going to be more writing that I'll be doing, but now we're living through this um, you know, book promotion process.
1:48:03
So, all of these things demand different skills.
1:48:05
And I think um you know a great author would be able to at least be adequate and at least really good at one out of these three steps. Tell me this. Why write a book?
1:48:15
And under what conditions should you write a book?
1:48:20
>> Um let me ask you this uh David.
1:48:20
Uh should more people be writing books and is that something that you're generally encouraging people to do? >> No.
1:48:31
More people should not be writing books.
1:48:33
But the people but then there are some people who need to be writing books and I think that we should strongly encourage those people dare I say shame them into writing those books.
1:48:43
There are books that need to be written.
1:48:45
There are people with deep domain expertise who have not written books and we should be just doing everything we can to make sure that they publish.
1:48:55
So I don't think that there should be more books but I do think that we need more books from the right people. Absolutely. >> Okay. I agree with that.
1:49:02
But I think that the way to actually try to encourage people, the people who actually need to be writing books is to encourage, give broad encouragement rather than particular encouragement because um you want to be creating an atmosphere, an environment uh in which um these people would actually feel very comfortable uh writing their books.
1:49:20
And so I want to air on more books being created rather than less. >> Yeah.
1:49:26
Um, I wrote a book um, in part because I felt like I needed to write a book after spending six years in China and after witnessing a lot of important things like the first trade war, seiz growing repression, um, zero COVID and I thought that I had a story to tell um, from all of this.
1:49:42
And I also feel like there's there may be something to do with a case of the um maybe books are falling in value but authors are gaining in value and that is in part because of AI.
1:49:56
that is in part because of AI. Um I think it is um really important to you know have some sort of a perspective and especially if fewer people are writing books um than to have cleared the uh filter to have risen above the threshold that means that you must be doing
1:50:13
something um very well indeed and I think maybe there is also an element of you know if you are an author and you have a great book before the super intelligence wakes up um you know you want to have a book out there before the super intelligence writes all of the books for for everyone. So, I think for
1:50:28
So, I think for all of those reasons, I still want to air more on the side of trying to encourage more book creation.
1:50:35
And this is why I think that um you know, I've been trying as best as I can to be helpful to my friends um around me to, you know, help them conceptualize their ideas and to really try to get these ideas out there. >> Yeah.
1:50:49
I the caveat here is I'm talking about non-fiction books here, which is what I know a lot better.
1:50:54
And I was just in Ghana with Tyler, Tyler Cowen, and we were talking about books and he's writing a book on mentorship now.
1:51:01
And he said, "Ah, it might be my last one."
1:51:03
And I said, "No, I think I think there's a book that you got to write."
1:51:08
And doing my public encouragement to Tyler Cowan here.
1:51:11
I think he's got to write a book about how to travel well.
1:51:12
And I say that because it speaks to the kinds of books that should be written, that can be written, and will continue to be very important in the age of AI.
1:51:21
lots of personal experience, ideas from that personal experience where the consensus is somewhat wrong and if you can have all of those things, you should absolutely write that book.
1:51:33
What I think is a much harder book to write now that I'm just tired of and these are the kinds of books that dare I say we should have less of is the insight porn Malcolm Gladwellesque start with the story get to the main point and just do that over and over and over again.
1:51:51
Not to take anything away from Gladwell.
1:51:53
I think that that style was was great in 2005 and he did a really good job with it.
1:52:00
But now it's just become so copied and belabored and formulaic.
1:52:03
And that's part of the reason why I enjoyed reading your book is it doesn't do those things.
1:52:06
And I think that what's nice about AI is it actually gives people not just the liberty, but they need to reject the conventional styles in order to stand out now because there's so much training data on convention that you need to find a way to go around it, you know. >> Yeah, I agree.
1:52:27
a lot of um and this comes back to this um point of about airport books in which a lot of it is just convention and most of it is not that interesting.
1:52:36
It's a lot of hustle porn out there that's not really good.
1:52:40
And I do wish I think you're I I endorse um Tyler if you're listening you should absolutely be writing a how to travel book.
1:52:46
>> Uh come on let's do it.
1:52:46
And uh I think the thing that the only thing that hardens me is that I've heard I've heard before Tyler say that um this is my last book.
1:52:55
So I've heard that before Tyler.
1:52:57
So, um, you know, I think I I definitely endorse he should keep going. >> Two more questions.
1:53:00
First one is tell me about what you pulled from the New Yorker style.
1:53:06
I guess that you were really looking at the way that they constructed words and sentences. Talk to me about that.
1:53:12
Initially when I was um this is part of the reason I was a bad student um in in in college.
1:53:18
But what I really tried to do was to just understand um how great writing is.
1:53:25
And I did this by copying uh I by by porting over a method that I did from trying to understand music and composition.
1:53:34
I was um quite musical when I was um especially when I was uh 18.
1:53:39
What instruments do you play? >> I play clarinet.
1:53:42
So, I was uh I wanted to be a classically trained clinetist.
1:53:47
Um but I walk away from that path.
1:53:47
And something that I did was I went to um the music library of my uh school and I pulled some of these scores.
1:53:56
I remember pulling um a I think it was a Beethoven string quartet and a Mer symphony.
1:54:00
And I simply just copied um everything in the score.
1:54:05
And if you do an exercise like that, you really see how the um harmonies fit together.
1:54:10
harmonies fit together. where you really see um what instruments are doing what and you get to really understand um what is going on in the mind of a composer if you just simple simply copy the notes and by that you mean copy the sheet music
1:54:22
>> copy exactly the sheet music just take a blank piece of sheet music and just recreate every note on the P page and that I think that is something that really gets you into the mind of the composer and I decided to do that um by copying some of the New Yorker articles that I really liked. you know, you just
1:54:38
you know, you just take a New Yorker article in front of you and just retrace and just type out again sentence by sentence.
1:54:45
And you, you know, you don't have to do this for an entire article, but you could just do a few paragraphs.
1:54:50
And this was sort of the chic music training that I ported over that sounds a bit like a silly exercise and maybe The New Yorker is not the pinnacle of writing.
1:54:58
Maybe we should be looking through different authors instead.
1:55:01
But if you are able to do that sort of an exercise, you really get into the mind of a writer.
1:55:06
You start thinking about the trade-offs they make.
1:55:09
You start thinking about the choices that they make.
1:55:12
You start thinking at this point maybe I could have used a different adjective.
1:55:16
At this other point, maybe I my sentence should have flown in a different direction.
1:55:20
And then you really start um understanding their intentionality, their choices, and what exactly that they really tried to do.
1:55:30
And um once you start are able to start thinking about things in that format, I think that uh you're really going to be able to uh create intentionality within yourself such that writing does not feel like a totally strange and random process in which you have no idea what you're trying to do. >> Yeah. Comes back to texture.
1:55:46
I have the image in my head of wet clay.
1:55:49
You know, you're touching it, you're molding it, and you're taking a ceramic and you're almost making it wet again to see how at one point it actually had to be shaped in order to get to that end state. >> Yes. >> Yeah. Let's end here.
1:56:04
You wrote, I think in your first annual letter, about how most people expect their rate of learning to decelerate over time.
1:56:14
you graduate from college.
1:56:16
All right, I learned what I need to know and now I got to go implement that.
1:56:20
And you have a strong rejection of that actually.
1:56:22
What if it could compound and increase?
1:56:24
So I'm curious about that general idea and then what tactically you've done to learn faster and faster as as you've aged.
1:56:35
In economic models, you have some sort of a depreciation formula in which um value gets less over time.
1:56:41
If you owed, let's say, a piece of machine tool because of it wears out.
1:56:47
>> I just sold the car for $20,000 less than I bought it for, >> right?
1:56:51
That makes >> not particularly happy about it, but it's okay.
1:56:54
>> That makes sense for a lot of physical durable assets >> in four years.
1:56:58
>> In four years, but I think that we don't have to reason about it the same way.
1:57:03
Um, because I feel like maybe we should take the Silicon Valley model of network effects in which growth can accelerate um to some degree over time.
1:57:10
And you know, the more you know, the more you're capable of knowing.
1:57:14
And that is something that I think is um super important.
1:57:18
And this is also something that um Tyler taught me early on in life that you should try to know a lot of stuff.
1:57:25
And the more that you know, um the more that you read, the faster you are able to read and the more that you know, the better you are at learning things.
1:57:32
And so that's kind of just the strong proposition that I want to take in life to just try to learn as much as I can, try to keep growing, try to keep evolving.
1:57:41
And I really appreciate um you know someone like let's say Tyler um someone like I also think of a previous guest that you've had Ezra >> Klein >> in which um both Tyler and Ezra have been able to have very strong evolutions of themselves um their brands and doing new things.
1:58:01
>> Ezra was um an early blogger. >> Yeah.
1:58:04
>> He moved into the Washington Post.
1:58:04
He founded uh Box and now he's at the New York Times producing one of the uh most listened to and some one of the best podcasts out there.
1:58:16
Tyler was an economics professor. He wrote a textbook.
1:58:20
Uh he got really early on into blogging.
1:58:23
Um he is now also running not just being a classic um university professor.
1:58:30
I feel like, you know, that is kind of central to his uh identity uh teaching economics.
1:58:35
But around him have grown these great projects, >> emergent ventures, >> emergent ventures, conversations with Tyler, uh fast grants, um all sorts of these uh really wonderful things and all sorts of projects that is not even very well known about him that he continues to participate in.
1:58:51
You and I are both part of the Marshall Revolution extended universe.
1:58:56
Um, and I think that one of these really remarkable things is just how well Tyler has identified interesting people and try to be generous to them, try to be kind to them, try to platform them and try to spotlight them.
1:59:08
And that is um these are all things that I find remarkable and I really appreciate both um Ezra and Tyler for showing that they are able to grow and able to evolve and able to do new things.
1:59:22
And I think that David, you're also part of the pantheon of people who um have really tried a lot of different new things and you're really building up a lot of new things and I am uh really curious to see uh where you take this podcast and how you grow as a person next. Thank you.