Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, five mans Voloscian Caroen. I'm curious
Speaker 1: if you agree, but I kind of feel like in
Speaker 1: the abstract, this idea of a kind of tech grace
Speaker 1: or even a tech war between the US and China
Speaker 1: has been brewing for almost a decade, but this year
Speaker 1: it started to feel very real in terms of really
Speaker 1: the practical power that China wields over the US and
Speaker 1: its key industries. And he's a perfect moment for this
Speaker 1: conversation and this guest, given the news about China's export
Speaker 1: controls on rare earth metals.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it isn't until we started reporting on
Speaker 2: this show that I actually thought about how much China
Speaker 2: dominates what the future will look like. And I'm just
Speaker 2: not sure that the US is on a level playing field.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean has been this kind of rattat tat
Speaker 1: of one upmanship this year. There's been borderline frightening. Obviously,
Speaker 1: the US took the world by storm with its AI models,
Speaker 1: and then China released one that was purportedly far more
Speaker 1: efficient in deepsek R one. The US band export of
Speaker 1: advanced AI chips, so China started making its own, although
Speaker 1: they haven't caught up quite yet and now there's this
Speaker 1: reciprocal relationship between US tariffs and Chinese export controls on
Speaker 1: rare earth metals, Which is why my ears perked up
Speaker 1: when our guests today said this.
Speaker 3: I really feel like Chinese and Americans are the most
Speaker 3: alike people in the world. Both countries have a sense
Speaker 3: of hustle, They are pragmatic people. They have a sense
Speaker 3: of the technological sublime.
Speaker 1: That's Dan Wong, who's a research fellow at Stanford University's
Speaker 1: Hoover History Lab and the author of a new book, Breakneck,
Speaker 1: China's Quest to Engineer the Future.
Speaker 3: People in both countries believe they are great powers and
Speaker 3: smaller countries Canada or the UK have to listen to them.
Speaker 3: And they are also two of the greatest engines for
Speaker 3: technological change and economic change as well.
Speaker 2: You know, I never really think about China and the
Speaker 2: US as like uniquely similar in terms of culture, and
Speaker 2: I love this term the technological sublime, and I am
Speaker 2: curious to hear more of what he's talking about. Why
Speaker 2: is Dan the man here?
Speaker 1: Dan's the man because he wrote this excellent book, but
Speaker 1: also because he lived in China during kind of a
Speaker 1: crucial period between twenty seventeen and twenty twenty three, and
Speaker 1: he actually went there in part because it was during
Speaker 1: the time that the Communist Party had set this ambitious
Speaker 1: agenda to transition from being quote the world's factory I
Speaker 1: manufacturing consumer products to becoming the world's leader in advanced
Speaker 1: manufacturing so robots, batteries, aerospace, and Dan was there to
Speaker 1: kind of study this transition up close. Then came COVID,
Speaker 1: and Dan was actually in Shanghai during this zero COVID lockdown,
Speaker 1: so he got to see these kind of two faces
Speaker 1: of how China manages its economy is production and its population.
Speaker 1: And he also had a lot of time to think
Speaker 1: about the relationship between the US and China, what's similar
Speaker 1: and what's different. The framework he came up with is
Speaker 1: pretty intriguing. It's basically that one of the societies is
Speaker 1: an engineering society and the other is a loyally society.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm going to guess that China is the
Speaker 2: engineering force.
Speaker 1: Good guess, And per Dan's framework, this engineering versus loyally
Speaker 1: disposition massively impacts how the two countries relate to one another.
Speaker 1: Take the trade war, for example, China is showing strength
Speaker 1: by leveraging its resources, production, manufacturing chops, while the US
Speaker 1: is trying to maintain control through tariffs and laws.
Speaker 2: But Dan is essentially saying, the US and China are
Speaker 2: very similar in temperament and are tackling the same goal,
Speaker 2: which is to be the world's technology superpower, but the
Speaker 2: two are approaching it in very different ways.
Speaker 1: That's right, And we talked about actually how in this
Speaker 1: very heightened moment, the US is learning all the worst
Speaker 1: lessons from China's political system, but also about what the
Speaker 1: US should do, at least in an ideal world, in
Speaker 1: response to China's engineering dominance. But I wanted to start
Speaker 1: the conversation by having Dan define this paradigm China the
Speaker 1: engineering state and US the loyally society.
Speaker 3: In his own words, China's the country I call the
Speaker 3: engineering state because at various points in the recent past,
Speaker 3: the entirety of the senior leadership had degrees in engineering.
Speaker 3: And what do engineers like to do build? They build
Speaker 3: skyscrapers and highways and bridges, solar, colwyn, nuclear, you name it.
Speaker 3: They're building a lot of these things. They also treat
Speaker 3: the economy sometimes as an engineering exercise. And China's also
Speaker 3: made up of engineers of the soul in which they
Speaker 3: are also fundamentally social engineers. So I spent a lot
Speaker 3: of time in the book talking about the one child
Speaker 3: policy as well as zero COVID, which the number is
Speaker 3: right there in the name. There's no ambiguity about what
Speaker 3: these policies could possibly mean. They're very liberal minded about
Speaker 3: engineering the population. I contrast the engineering state with the
Speaker 3: United States, which I call the loyally society, because at
Speaker 3: various points the entirety of America's leadership were all lawyers.
Speaker 3: Most of the founding fathers were lawyers. For sixteen US presidents,
Speaker 3: from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln, thirteen of them were lawyers.
Speaker 3: Every single nominee to be president from the Democratic Party
Speaker 3: between nineteen eighty to twenty twenty four went to law school.
Speaker 3: The Republicans are pretty loyally as well, And the issue
Speaker 3: with lawyers is that they block everything good and bad,
Speaker 3: so you don't have stupid ideas like the one child policy.
Speaker 3: They also don't have functioning infrastructure almost anywhere in the US.
Speaker 1: To play Devil's advocate here, would it be fair to
Speaker 1: say that most empires on the rise are engineering cultures?
Speaker 1: And most empires, when they get to maturity, become loyally societies.
Speaker 3: There are certainly something to that. I acknowledge that though
Speaker 3: the US has always been loyally at various points, it
Speaker 3: was a proto engineering state. So I think between the
Speaker 3: middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the
Speaker 3: twentieth century, the US certainly built a lot. It built
Speaker 3: highway systems, Manhattan Project, the Apollo Missions, and these are
Speaker 3: all extraordinary achievements by American engineers. And then I think
Speaker 3: the characters changed in the nineteen sixties as people got
Speaker 3: very tired of Robert Moses ramming highways through dense neighborhoods
Speaker 3: in New York City, of the Department of Agriculture spraying
Speaker 3: DDT absolutely everywhere throughout the country, and of all sorts
Speaker 3: of projects that the engineering state in America was messing
Speaker 3: up on. And so people like Ralph Nader really took
Speaker 3: charge to tell law students that they needed to quote
Speaker 3: sue the bastards, and the bastards referred to the government.
Speaker 3: So this is where the lawyers turned into litigators as
Speaker 3: well as regulators.
Speaker 1: We'll come back to this idea of the tariffs and
Speaker 1: the export controls that successive US administrations have used as
Speaker 1: tools of leverage against China are very loyally. There's a
Speaker 1: quote of yours which is the United States has made
Speaker 1: the geopolitical mistake of bringing lawyers to a showdown with
Speaker 1: China on trade and technology. Why is a mistake?
Speaker 3: It comes down to a fundamentally different view of what
Speaker 3: are American strengths and what are Chinese strengths. So, on
Speaker 3: the one hand, China overproduces and the Americans over consume. Now,
Speaker 3: the Americans believe they are strong because they have the
Speaker 3: world's greatest market. They have the world's biggest market, and
Speaker 3: everybody needs to sell to Americans. I think that is
Speaker 3: true to some extent. If you control demand, that is
Speaker 3: pretty important. And I think that the Chinese are saying, well,
Speaker 3: you are a consumer, We are a production superpower. We
Speaker 3: make all your goods. When the Americans are unable to
Speaker 3: get essential goods, when during the early days of the pandemic,
Speaker 3: they couldn't make masks and cotton swabs, when the grocery
Speaker 3: stores ran out of particular barriers depending on which part
Speaker 3: of California or Mexico had COVID at the time, that
Speaker 3: made a lot of people quite upset. So I think
Speaker 3: the Chinese are accounting on the Americans not to have
Speaker 3: very strong pain tolerance to endure empty shelves.
Speaker 1: When you look back at the last twenty thirty years,
Speaker 1: whether it's the automotive industry, calm manufacturing, or whether it's
Speaker 1: AI more recently with deep seek, what do you think
Speaker 1: about the argument that wasn't that the United States was
Speaker 1: too loyally, It's just that it was too bad at
Speaker 1: enforcing its rules well.
Speaker 3: To be clear, the Chinese don't lack for loss. I
Speaker 3: think China drowns and loss and regulations. The difference is
Speaker 3: that the Chinese have a very serious state that is
Speaker 3: very intent on making its will clear to the population.
Speaker 3: If you're just living normally in China. I think that
Speaker 3: there is a much greater degree of seriousness in China.
Speaker 3: I think that there's something that unites the Chinese as
Speaker 3: well as folks in Silicon Valley. Official China and Silicon
Speaker 3: Valley are both very very serious. They're not only serious,
Speaker 3: they're also self serious. You know, it's almost as dangerous
Speaker 3: writing a mean tweet about a prominent VC as it
Speaker 3: is done write a mean tweet about a member of
Speaker 3: the Central Committee.
Speaker 1: You know, it's funny you mentioned this because I was,
Speaker 1: you know, as you can tell, I'm English and our
Speaker 1: highest virtue educational system was rhetoric. And I was at
Speaker 1: a wedding with a number of my English friends this
Speaker 1: summer and they were saying, oh, you spent some more
Speaker 1: time in San Francisco and Solon Valley. You know, should
Speaker 1: we go and try and make our lives there. Guys,
Speaker 1: you're your charm. What's considered your charm in Britain will
Speaker 1: not take you very far because isn't not value as
Speaker 1: of humor and conversational dexterity that a Cherish I mean,
Speaker 1: it's I don't you think.
Speaker 3: That, because there's so much self seriousness here that are
Speaker 3: really charming plishmen, so do so many bright young things.
Speaker 1: That's what I hoping by side, I think you guys
Speaker 1: are mist guy that I think you're going to be
Speaker 1: able to do it.
Speaker 3: I've always liked saying that what Britain specializes in is
Speaker 3: the sounding clever industries, namely television, journalism, finance, and consulting.
Speaker 1: Now, of course, part of the mythology of Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: is that it's the innocense, the absence of government that
Speaker 1: allowed this extraordinary technological flourishing to happen, you know, from
Speaker 1: the nineties to today. And I'm sure if you spoke
Speaker 1: to Samiltman or Jenson Wong or others and said this
Speaker 1: is a fundamentally a nation of lawyers not engineers, and
Speaker 1: in China is the other way around, they would disagree
Speaker 1: with you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think they will probably push back, but I'll
Speaker 3: hold on to my case, mostly because I don't feel
Speaker 3: like Silicon Maalia is quite running the world just yet. Now,
Speaker 3: it got quite close to when Eli Musk promoted to
Speaker 3: be co president, but then Elion flamed out, so he
Speaker 3: goofed and he was pretty promptly fired with this public
Speaker 3: dispute between Trump and himself. Now, I feel like there
Speaker 3: could have been a moment in which Elon Musk was
Speaker 3: running the American government and DOGE could have represented some
Speaker 3: sort of a return to the engineering state. But that
Speaker 3: also flamed out really really quickly. And so I think
Speaker 3: that it is a tragedy that Eli Musk was so misguided,
Speaker 3: turned a lot of people against this idea of government reform,
Speaker 3: and rather than building up government capabilities, he was sharing
Speaker 3: down its capabilities. I think it is pretty clear that
Speaker 3: Trump is still running the show out of Washington, DC,
Speaker 3: that when he summons the tech CEOs to hail him
Speaker 3: at a dinner, then they will promise to invest hundreds
Speaker 3: of billions of dollars in the American economy in Trump's name.
Speaker 3: And so that doesn't seem like the people who are
Speaker 3: running Masters of the Universe to me. Rather, they seem
Speaker 3: like obsequious courtiers. Now. I acknowledge that Donald Trump is
Speaker 3: learning from China, but I think it's unfortunate that he's
Speaker 3: learning some of the worst things from China. And I
Speaker 3: think the great shame here is that in America it
Speaker 3: feels like we're getting authoritarianism without the good stuff functioning
Speaker 3: logistics and public order, the buildout of mass transit, and
Speaker 3: the buildout of clean energy. Rather, what we're getting is
Speaker 3: kind of the construction of guilded ballrooms as well as
Speaker 3: detention centers, rather than the creation of more public works
Speaker 3: as well as a healthy manufacturing base. I think that's
Speaker 3: a tragedy.
Speaker 1: Would it be fair to say that the thrust of
Speaker 1: your argument is that, on the balance of things, an
Speaker 1: engineering society is preferable to a loyally society.
Speaker 3: No, I don't think so. I would say that the
Speaker 3: US and China both have virtues to teach each other.
Speaker 3: My great hope is for the Americans to become twenty
Speaker 3: percent more engineering. Because the US needs to build many
Speaker 3: more homes for people, to build much better mass transit,
Speaker 3: and needs to achieve the clean technology revolution, and it
Speaker 3: needs to revitalize its manufacturing base. It doesn't have to
Speaker 3: be like China in all respects. I think that China
Speaker 3: is a good operating model for abundance. It's not a
Speaker 3: great operating model for abundance. So I think that the
Speaker 3: US should be twenty percent more engineering at the same
Speaker 3: time I think that China should be fifty percent more Loyally,
Speaker 3: what I really wish is for the Communist Party to
Speaker 3: actually respect individual freedoms, to not strangle so hard the
Speaker 3: creative impulses of Chinese and fundamentally, what I really wish
Speaker 3: is for the Communist Party to just leave people alone
Speaker 3: for a little while and let them get on with
Speaker 3: their lives and just not feel like they're under the
Speaker 3: thumbs of the engineering state all the time, such that
Speaker 3: these engineers want to be engineers of the soul.
Speaker 1: After the break, what China thinks of Donald Trump, stay
Speaker 1: with us. Coming to the book, why did you write it?
Speaker 1: And well, the key inputs and I know one of
Speaker 1: the key inputs was living in China between I think
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen and twenty twenty three, when you do it
Speaker 1: and what came out of it.
Speaker 3: I felt I was living through a pretty momentous time
Speaker 3: over that period, Donald Trump's first trade war, something that
Speaker 3: morphed into a tech war I was living through sees
Speaker 3: greater repression than the centerpiece was being in China throughout
Speaker 3: all three years of zero COVID. There's something about living
Speaker 3: in China which feels a little bit apocalyptic. You really
Speaker 3: get the sense during zero COVID when you have all
Speaker 3: of these videos from zero COVID times of people fleeing
Speaker 3: office buildings or something because there was rumors of a
Speaker 3: potential case inside the building, and once that happens, the
Speaker 3: police will seal off the entire building, trapping everyone inside.
Speaker 3: Imagine sleeping on the office floor with all of your
Speaker 3: colleagues without being able to shower because they need to
Speaker 3: test everyone in that office. And even for me, there
Speaker 3: was a slight apocalyptic sense of the Great Firewall block
Speaker 3: my website in twenty twenty two, which is when I
Speaker 3: had to go see the Canadian Console General to ask
Speaker 3: whether they needed me to leave in a hurry. And
Speaker 3: that is something quite surprising to happen. Generally they block
Speaker 3: big platforms like Wikipedia or Twitter or The New York Times,
Speaker 3: not little RinkyDink websites like mine. And so to be
Speaker 3: quite clear, I moved to back to the US in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty three because I craved some of the pluralism
Speaker 3: of the United States.
Speaker 1: Talk about shin Zen. This is a city, as far
Speaker 1: as I understand, went from basically producing cheapies for Japanese
Speaker 1: consumer electronics in the nineties to being was the leading
Speaker 1: auto producing cities and technology cities in the world in
Speaker 1: this space of just thirty years. I mean, how did
Speaker 1: that happen? And what would be necessary to happen here
Speaker 1: to emulate a story like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Hinjin really started to develop throughout the nineteen eighties
Speaker 3: when Doncaping designated it a special Economic zone, and Hinjin
Speaker 3: really grew by leaps and bounds. This was the sharp
Speaker 3: tip of the spear into China's foray in becoming a
Speaker 3: much more capitalist in Chhinjin has been an interesting success
Speaker 3: in all sorts of ways. Shinjin is most famously the
Speaker 3: city that started making the first iPhones. So Tim Cook
Speaker 3: and Steve Jobs before two thousand and eight decided to
Speaker 3: situate most iPhone production in the city of Shinjin. And
Speaker 3: I think it is no wonder that Hinjin is now
Speaker 3: the global hardware capital of the world because once you
Speaker 3: start training a lot of workers, hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 3: workers producing the most sophisticated electronics in the world, what
Speaker 3: that has produced is a giant workforce able to deploy
Speaker 3: their talents into many other fields as well. So imagine
Speaker 3: that you are someone working on assembly line making iPhones
Speaker 3: this year, you're making iPhones next year, maybe you're making
Speaker 3: a Huawei phone. You're after that a Dji drone the
Speaker 3: year after that electric vehicle battery. There's just this gianted
Speaker 3: supple workforce that investors as well as academics and factory
Speaker 3: managers are rubbing shoulders with. And I think it is
Speaker 3: no surprise that it has been an innovative leader in
Speaker 3: producing all sorts of great electronics goods.
Speaker 1: Do you think the US and Silicon Valley over values
Speaker 1: innovative platform technology like AI coming back to this idea
Speaker 1: of engineered versus lawyers and whether people in Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: would agree with you. I mean it seems like people
Speaker 1: here might say, well, it's great to be able to
Speaker 1: put the technology to use, but that the real value
Speaker 1: is in laying down the tracks to the future.
Speaker 3: Yeah. First of all, I wonder what the term innovation
Speaker 3: really is. So I think the Silicon Valley model of
Speaker 3: innovation is that you take Steve Jobs, put him in
Speaker 3: a garage, put some LSD into the garage, and what
Speaker 3: comes out is an Apple computer. And I think that
Speaker 3: is a strange model of innovation. I mean, it is
Speaker 3: a valid Silicon Valley model of innovation. But I think
Speaker 3: with the Americans, really value is kind of this moment
Speaker 3: of invention, and what I challenge Americans to acknowledge is
Speaker 3: that maybe there's greater glory in the production and actually
Speaker 3: owning various industries. So I think a lot about the
Speaker 3: solar photote Excel. This is something solar PV was invented
Speaker 3: by Bell Labs in the year in nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 3: and so that could go straight into the history books
Speaker 3: as an American invention for all time. But does that
Speaker 3: really matter when China now owns ninety percent of the
Speaker 3: solar industry, everything from the police and processing to the
Speaker 3: final module assembly. I think that there's much greater glory
Speaker 3: in owning a product rather than inventing it.
Speaker 1: How do you view attempts under President Trump of technology
Speaker 1: companies to onshore manufacturing and the skating up of technologies
Speaker 1: not simply the creation of the idea.
Speaker 3: I think it's not going great if we just take
Speaker 3: a look at manufacturing employment. Since Liberation Day in April,
Speaker 3: US has lost something like forty thousand manufacturing jobs, and
Speaker 3: actually the data has stopped, so we don't know how
Speaker 3: the manufacturing employment sector has been doing. I think that
Speaker 3: it is counter productive to become a great scientific and
Speaker 3: technological superpower by cutting a lot of funding to the
Speaker 3: National Science Foundation. I don't see a scenario in which
Speaker 3: we get better science by spending less on science. I
Speaker 3: think it is a big mistake to frighten away a
Speaker 3: lot of European researchers as well as supporting a lot
Speaker 3: of the American workforce. Imagine if you are an engineer
Speaker 3: today in South Korea and Taiwan, in France, wherever else,
Speaker 3: and your boss is telling you you've gotten an assignment
Speaker 3: to go build factories in the US. Maybe they say no,
Speaker 3: thank you, because they've seen these images of South Korean
Speaker 3: engineers who are trying to build a battery facility in
Speaker 3: the state of Georgia being deported away in chains, and
Speaker 3: that does not feel like a very good prospect. And
Speaker 3: then this way, the Chinese were much more sophisticated. They
Speaker 3: really welcomed Walmart and Apple and Tesla to build in China.
Speaker 3: They welcomed the managerial expertise from the West because they
Speaker 3: recognized that they were so behind. And I would really
Speaker 3: love it if the Americans were able to have the
Speaker 3: same attitude.
Speaker 1: I've read about the reaction in Korea after the deportation
Speaker 1: of the Hundai factory workers being seen as a kind
Speaker 1: of watershed moment in terms of the relationship between South
Speaker 1: Korea and the United States, in terms of how much
Speaker 1: trust they could put in an ally that treated their
Speaker 1: citizens like that. What is the perception of the current
Speaker 1: US policies that you just outline in China.
Speaker 3: Well, really hard to figure out how they think about
Speaker 3: Donald Trump. But for the most part, rampant hostility I
Speaker 3: think is kind of a default mode that the Chinese
Speaker 3: would greet Trump. Now, there is some sense in which
Speaker 3: I think a lot of Chinese still kind of like
Speaker 3: Donald Trump. He doesn't seem like the Great Satan to them,
Speaker 3: mostly because during the First Trade War there was a
Speaker 3: little bit of a sense that Donald Trump likes Chinese. Essentially,
Speaker 3: he is very Chinese in terms of his business practices.
Speaker 3: You know, it is very strange that Donald Trump keeps
Speaker 3: praising Sees King. I dug up an interview he gave
Speaker 3: to The Wall Street Journal last year in which Trump
Speaker 3: said he was and I quote nearly verbatim, brilliant, so smart,
Speaker 3: everything nearly perfect. And so you know, there is a
Speaker 3: sense in which he wants to be friends with See.
Speaker 3: But I think that friendship would not be reciprocated by See,
Speaker 3: who finds this guy too obnoxious to deal with. But
Speaker 3: that maybe these two countries can co exist very well,
Speaker 3: because right now Donald Trump is the most pro China
Speaker 3: member of the White House. So let's see how this
Speaker 3: shakes up.
Speaker 1: There were two kind of narratives that people in the
Speaker 1: West reassured themselves with when it came to China's rise
Speaker 1: and potential supremacy. The first was that the state control
Speaker 1: over the economy in China would inevitably strangle innovation, and
Speaker 1: that would ultimately lead to economic collapse. On the one hand,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, the attempts of the state to be,
Speaker 1: as you put it, engineers of the soul or control
Speaker 1: the private individual, whether through the one child policy or
Speaker 1: zero COVID policies, would inevitably, because of the evidence of history,
Speaker 1: result in seismic revolutionary change. What is the status of
Speaker 1: those myths today.
Speaker 3: I think the first thing to do is to recognize
Speaker 3: that it is a myth that there is this American
Speaker 3: narrative that China's poised on a knife edge, that the
Speaker 3: Communist Party's entire basis for legitimacy depends on delivering economic growth,
Speaker 3: and I think that is not the case. I think
Speaker 3: that the Communist Party certainly values economic growth, but its
Speaker 3: sources of legitimacy are more robust than that part. Because
Speaker 3: there's been excellent momentum from the engineering state. Because if
Speaker 3: you're a resident of Shanghai, what you've gotten over the
Speaker 3: last decade are more and more subway stations throughout the city,
Speaker 3: better in better parks, better air quality, as well as
Speaker 3: well as around networks that allow you to go throughout
Speaker 3: the country. The engineering state has managed to build quite
Speaker 3: a lot of political resilience by delivering people a sense
Speaker 3: of physical dynamism, and so I think that has given
Speaker 3: people some degree of optimism. Whereas if you're living in
Speaker 3: San Francisco or a bunch of other mostly blue cities
Speaker 3: and your physical environment does not change almost at all,
Speaker 3: the only way can imagine that your life could be
Speaker 3: a little bit better, as if there's another coffee shop
Speaker 3: around the corner, I think you really don't have a
Speaker 3: sense that the future will be different from the past.
Speaker 3: And so that is also something I'm really trying to
Speaker 3: encourage that people have a sense of physical dynamism and
Speaker 3: develop greater optimism too.
Speaker 1: These is only a very interesting earlier in our conversation
Speaker 1: about the United States learning the worst lessons from China.
Speaker 1: Right now, how do you when you look at these
Speaker 1: two countries next to each other, how do you look
Speaker 1: at what those wrong lessons the United States is learning
Speaker 1: are and what the consequences will be if it continues
Speaker 1: to focus on those learnings and perhaps lose its ownership
Speaker 1: of the American dream mythology.
Speaker 3: I think it is still pretty clear that most of
Speaker 3: the world's most successful people are still really eager to
Speaker 3: work and establish their lives in the United States. There
Speaker 3: is just so much more economic opportunity, much better compensation,
Speaker 3: much higher levels of energy and dynamism in the US
Speaker 3: relative to let's say Europe or Canada, and I think
Speaker 3: that is still clear and obvious. At the same time,
Speaker 3: I think the United States is doing its very best
Speaker 3: to erode a lot of its attractiveness to a lot
Speaker 3: of global migrants. And my view is that the United
Speaker 3: States is a superpower in many dimensions and that China
Speaker 3: will not overcome the US and all of its dimensions.
Speaker 3: The US is also a financial superpower, it is also
Speaker 3: a cultural superpower. It is also a diplomatic superpower. And
Speaker 3: China will not overcome these sort of things because, for example,
Speaker 3: it can't be a financial superpower because it imposes really
Speaker 3: stiff capital controls on the financial system. But there is
Speaker 3: one area in which China can be a very big
Speaker 3: threat to the US, which is in advanced manufacturing. So
Speaker 3: China produces so many things, and I think it is
Speaker 3: on track to continue to the industrial the US as
Speaker 3: well as Europe. Right now, America's APEX manufacturers companies like
Speaker 3: Intel and Boeing and Detroit automakers in Tesla. They haven't
Speaker 3: been doing very well for a long time. And that's
Speaker 3: not mostly because of China. That's mostly because of their
Speaker 3: own missteps. So I think that China will not do
Speaker 3: very well rid large but if it wins even narrowly
Speaker 3: on this narrow victory of advanced manufacturing could be pretty
Speaker 3: devastating to the West.
Speaker 1: Dan final question in a sentence, whatsh the United States do.
Speaker 3: Build more and have a little bit more seriousness about
Speaker 3: recognizing its own problems, not demonizing the Chinese, and recognize
Speaker 3: what are the Chinese successes that it's able to learn from,
Speaker 3: because the Chinese have done very well and much better
Speaker 3: in learning from the Americans rather than the other way around.
Speaker 3: And I believe that was one sentence with just one
Speaker 3: semi colon.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, appreciate you taking the time.
Speaker 3: Thank you very much.
Speaker 4: As for tech stuff, I'm Kara Price and I'm Oz Valoshian.
Speaker 2: This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis, Melissa Slaughter, and
Speaker 2: Tyler Hill. Was executive produced by me Oz Valoshian, Julia Nutter,
Speaker 2: and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Norvell for iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2: Jack Insley mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our
Speaker 2: theme song.
Speaker 1: Join us on Friday for the Weekend tech when Karen
Speaker 1: and I will run through the tech headlines you may
Speaker 1: have missed.
Speaker 2: Great review and reach out to us at tech Stuff
Speaker 2: podcast at gmail dot com.