What Dan Wang Saw on His Last Trip to China

16:36Dan Wang:We're going to have Joe Weisenthal-Lauwai texting them all the time about, you know, pick up this or that. And so I think that is less pleasant.

16:44Tracy Alloway:Sorry, just to jump. It does seem self-reinforcing, which is that if everyone is on their phone, everyone then becomes expected to text back within the minute, which means you can't opt out of always looking at your phone. Anyway, keep going. This is the other thing. So I know you're always on your phone. And so when I WhatsApp you and you don't immediately reply, I get insulted. Just DM me. Just Twitter DM me. Anyway, keep going. But yes, Tracy is, she's like, I know you're looking at your phone. Why haven't you responded? Yeah. He has a very limited bandwidth in which to reply.

17:12Dan Wang:I know. Go on. Just keep talking about Chinese Chinese. I can text Weisenthal like in 30 seconds. I know he ought to reply. So why isn't he replying within three minutes? But so, I mean, the good thing is that you can always reach your friends. And that's always good too. But myself, I think I'm much more of an American, whatever, European about this. I just silence all of my notifications. My friends can't really reach me. I think it's better that way. And I think I prefer it not to be reached whenever at anyone else's pleasure. But, you know, if you need to, like, call someone, you know, you know they're almost always going to pick up.

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20:04Tracy Alloway:Talk about influencers. Because this is like, when we were in Shenzhen, at one point, the guy who I was going around with was like, oh, there's a really nice new apartment. It's like all the influencers live there. Talk about like influencer culture there.

20:16Dan Wang:Yeah, well, this is also one of these things that make China increasingly highly unpleasant to me now. The extent to which everyone is just photographing themselves as kind of the main thing. So I usually go visit Shanghai and Yunnan, which are, I think, without a doubt, the two most beautiful parts of China. And the good thing about being in beautiful parts is that you have a wonderful city, you have this wonderful province. But what sort of distresses me is how many cafes in Shanghai are just places where young people, overwhelmingly women, park to take photos of themselves. Perhaps a group of seven might order one or two coffees to the disappointment of the cafe owners.

21:01Dan Wang:And then they park themselves there for like an hour or so taking photographs. And so many of these Shanghai city blocks have been almost re-architected to be photo spots, whether these are outdoors or whether these are restaurants. And so, you know, that's just a lot of photography. Have you noticed something like this? Oh, yeah.

21:21Tracy Alloway:I mean, I would say this is described as the West Village in large part. For sure. For sure. I still remember the very first time I went to Dominic Ansel in New York and everyone was taking photos of the food. And I was like, oh, like food is now performance art, basically. But OK, so is influencer culture that's standing in the way of Xi Jinping's drive to increase consumption? Is that what we're saying?

21:46Dan Wang:I think that must be a part of it, because at some point, you wonder the extent to which phone culture becomes a substitute for real spending on holiday. So as I just mentioned, you know, you have cafes, you may have cocktail bars in which a gaggle of people come over and then have buy two drinks, and then they spend the rest of their time photographing themselves. Maybe you can say that the constant photography is a boon for live streaming. And so that promotes some aspect of consumption. But I think overwhelmingly, people are substituting away real experiences to, let's say, have a super nice travel experience when they could just photograph themselves.

22:26Dan Wang:Because the other part of being in Yundan, which is in the southwest, this is the region where my family is from. You know, this is highly mountainous. It's essentially Tibet in the north. It's part of the Himalayas, literally, in the north. And then in the south is basically a giant rainforest. And in between, there are basically 25 of China's nearly 60 official ethnic groups. And so what these richer, again, overwhelmingly girls from Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen would do is that they go to Yunnan, dress in this ethnic garb, pretend that they're Tibetan for a day, take some snow-covered mountains as a backdrop.

23:07Dan Wang:There are parts of New York, Miami, LA that have been re-architected, but I think phone culture is much more extreme. But Joe, did you consider dressing up as a Tibetan?

23:16Tracy Alloway:No, but I know that if Tracy and I ever go to China together, I'm going to have to take a lot of photos. Tracy's going to make me do that absolutely for her Instagram. You're a good, you're a decent photographer. So, you know, it, it helps,

23:30Dan Wang:you know, I'm maybe part Tibetan myself. This is part of the family lore. When the Tibetans come up to me, they always say Tasha Dele. Um, and so, you know, maybe I, you know, just their hello, standard greeting. Um, and you know, maybe the three of us can do an awesome photo shoot. This is one time I would do a photo shoot.

23:47Tracy Alloway:This is now we're going to do a road trip and we're going to make this happen. I would actually do that trip. Um, Um, you describe this as mostly girls and this is also a phenomenon in the West, but why, like, what is the ultimate goal of taking all these photos and sticking them on social media? Is it, you know, dating? Is it building a professional brand? Is it just socializing with your online friends?

24:12Dan Wang:You know, Tracy, I don't look at these photos, so it's only speculation for me, but I think it has to be all the same phenomenon where, you know, women everywhere feel like they have to perform for the gram or in the case of China for the Xiaohongshu. And I think the added layer in China is just that it's kind of a cheap way to have fun and to establish that you've been there. And, you know, these are kind of beautiful things and you do spend a lot of effort on makeup. And so I think it is, it could be kind of fun, but so why not? So when I am sometimes upset by the photo culture, I remind myself, you know, these ladies aren't harming me.

24:49Dan Wang:So when I'm, No skin off my nose. They should have a great time.

24:53Tracy Alloway:They're not harming you. No skin off your nose. On the other hand, I don't really know much about how are your male relatives doing in China? And the only reason I ask is actually because I'm aware that in Korea, which is a totally separate country, people talk about the gender gap in politics here in the US, that the gender gap in politics in Korea specifically is extraordinarily large and that the, you know, the sort of, uh, for Chanification of politics in Korea seems like even far more advanced than it is in the West. There's no electoral politics in China. So we don't really get to read articles about how these feelings express themselves at the ballot the same way, but how do, uh, how would the, how would, uh, you know, the Dan Wong's, your cousins or friends, male friends, how are they feeling?

25:45Yeah.

25:46Dan Wang:Well, I think you guys have done this remarkable job of keeping this conversation on track, but I think we need to get this back on track and talk about my male pseudo-relative, Joe Weisenthal-Lauweiss, slight time in China. And I notice, Joe, for those watching on camera, you have a Chinese ethnic garb yourself. You have an anti-shirt wear on you. So we're going to ask you to talk a little bit more about your impressions, 24 hours though they may be. And I'm just going to offer one more proverb, a well-known ancient Chinese proverb here about visiting China. So everyone knows that you visit China for 24 hours, you feel like you can write a book.

26:31Dan Wang:Visit China for a week, you start having some doubts. You live six years in China and you realize you know nothing. So what's the book in you, Joe, that you're going to give to us?

26:45Tracy Alloway:I don't mean to brag. Yeah. But I actually do not have... I feel very viscerally that I only got the tiniest slice. And maybe just because I've been doing media for a while, I really do not feel like I could say anything useful about China from 24 hours.

27:00Dan Wang:Just tell us how you felt.

27:03Tracy Alloway:I mean, I had a great time. It's like all the cars are real. All the cars that we see on social media, they're all real. The food is all great. I spent a night in the Park Hyatt which was probably one of the top three or four hotels I've ever spent a night in and it was$250 which would be like the grimiest hotel off of Times Square but there was just 24 hours didn't you see some cool tech stuff as well? I went to the tech mall and I bought for$15 this eye massager I almost bought a suitcase that could double as a scooter for a grown adult person and ride around the airport but I was worried about like the batteries and like, I wish you'd gotten that.

27:43Tracy Alloway:I know Mike Sung would have loved it. Like if I told him, if I showed him a video, he'd be so upset that I didn't get that for him. But like, you know, all of this, like basically in the 24 hours, it was like all the social media stuff that like I'm inundated by. Like I was like, Oh, all of it is at least in this one city, incredibly advanced, an entire city as big as New York, where all the offices are about to feel like the new JP Morgan headquarters. Like it was extraordinary. What did you not? like about this experience? Walking around. No, I actually didn't. I found it to be a very pleasant 24 hours, including I went and bought some cigarettes for friends.

28:23Tracy Alloway:I don't know if it's smoke, but some friends do. And currently in New York, Chinese cigarettes are very highly sought after. Yeah, this is the thing for sure. What's the brand? Well, I got a Chun-Hua. I don't know. But I bought a bunch of other brands. I'll show you the box. I mean, they don't have the labels on them.

28:38Dan Wang:We're going to go out for a smoke after this.

28:39Tracy Alloway:Yeah, that's fine. But like when I went to the cigarette and liquor dealer, like you walk in and the first thing he just starts pouring tea for everyone and opening packs for you to try. I was like, this is great. This is a good life. Yeah. But you're the guest. So you got to tell us. Liquor and cigarettes are a good life.

28:58Dan Wang:No, after this, we're going to, you know, drink some Baijiu. We're going to have a Hua Zi, which is kind of how you refer to a cigarette there. And then, so I don't love Shenzhen. I really feel like Shenzhen is America's answer to San Jose. You know, we kind of talk about Shenzhen as the Silicon Valley of China. And I think, yeah, you know, it's kind of the San Jose. It's kind of these big, kind of big midtown buildings. It's a lot of office parks. I mean, the nice thing about it is it's really green. But the parts of the city is really centered between the east and the west. And to get between them, you have to get on this big highway.

29:34Tracy Alloway:Oh, yeah. It's on that highway.

29:36Dan Wang:Urban design is not great. And so this is why I think Shanghai is still much, much better. And I think that when people are in China, I think the central contradiction, as the Marxists like to call it now, is that what I feel on this trip is that people have a bit of a serene discontent with their lives. On we, sort of. Sorry? Ennui, kind of? Maybe everyone does, but I think it is a little bit more extreme in China. So on the one hand, the products are really, really amazing. So you have these amazing suitcase rollers that you can sit and roll around. No, it's all real. Paul Blart, Mall Cop, Joe Weisenthal, Laowai Airport roller guy.

30:23Dan Wang:and you know when i was uh in shanghai this time i was really struck by the amazing food culture there i mean just in terms of you know the coffees now all have these infusions that make them look almost like caffeinated cocktails without the alcohol so you know why not have your coffee being infused with some sort of honeydew melon and roast water yeah all these amazing things and they taste really good and i'm thinking oh why am i getting a standard americano when it can have something like this. The croissants are really, really amazing. I love baked goods. And so the Shanghainese croissants are approaching Parisian, maybe Copenhagen levels of quality, Tokyo levels of quality.

31:04Dan Wang:I spend a lot of time talking about how China builds a ton of electrical power, solar, wind, nuclear, et cetera. And then I learned how much it costs to charge your electric vehicle to the full range of about 600 kilometers, it's about like$12 to have essentially a full tank of gas. And that's kind of totally amazing. And so people are able to have a really good life. They have access to cheap noodles. Cities are amazing. And yet, and yet, take a look at how people are, especially young people. Youth unemployment, according to The official data is north of 15%, trending close to 20%. The main source of wealth for most people is parked in property, something like three-quarters of the wealth is in property.

31:53Dan Wang:Property has fallen by 25 % to 30 % across all these big cities. This is the first time in Shanghai where friends have told us that there are sort of these homeless people wandering through the outskirts of Shanghai because all of these migrant workers may have nowhere to go. Based on all this macro data, migrants are kind of returning to the countryside because they can't find great jobs. The college educated young people, mostly men, are doing delivery drivers because they can't find great jobs. Everyone's kind of, all these young people are sort of living with their parents, which is kind of a fine lifestyle.

32:32Dan Wang:And for me, the most amazing fact about China now is that Shanghai is such an amazing city and no one wants to have kids. No one wants to have kids. So the national TFR rate in China, and this is the official data, is 1.0. And Shanghai is 0.6, which is on par with Taipei and Seoul. And there are aspects, the richest parts of Shanghai, the official TFR is like 0.4. And so how can this function when in a couple of years, in something like I think 20 years, half the population will be north of 65? How can the city function when half the people expect to be retired? And how can the country function when there's no young people?

33:14Dan Wang:And this is something that I used to be a little bit more sanguine about the demographic cliff. This is where, are we going to see a completely different China in 15 years? Because I'm much less sanguine about that.

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36:24Tracy Alloway:Seeing these global stats and being at a place where it's like, OK, it's not so expensive and transport is very easy with children, etc. And yet still, you know, fertility is collapsing like that. Unfortunately, it definitely makes me more skeptical of a lot of the claims that like, oh, if only we had like free child care in the U.S. or whatever, that that would like make people more inclined to have families and stuff like that. Like it doesn't seem like these physical material affordances actually do much on that front. Well, I was going to ask, Dan, what's your theory for declining birth rates in China?

37:04Because you hear all these different things about, you know, like the work culture is too intense. The educational culture is too intense. Life in general is too intense. What do you think? Yeah.

37:15Dan Wang:Yes. And I mean, the first thing to say is that China is not an outlier in East Asia.

37:22Tracy Alloway:There's not an outlier anywhere. It's ahead of the curve. But there's not a place in the world, including Africa, including Central and South America, et cetera, where we don't see fertility rates basically falling off a cliff.

37:36Dan Wang:Yeah. But I mean, I think there may even be a qualitative difference between TFR of what is the US now, 1.6, 1.7, and 1.0. And so the exponential math here really starts doing their punishing math. So in East Asia, Japan is actually now kind of something like 1.2, 1.3. And they're further down the demographic curve, but they have a higher TFR at the moment, and they're much more open to immigrants. And so should we be more optimistic about Japan or China? Japan is more open to immigrants and has higher TFR, so maybe that's bad.

38:20Tracy Alloway:Can I just, on a statistical methodology question, does the national Japanese TFR include the immigrant population, which presumably, which might have a higher TFR than the ethnically Japanese population?

38:34Dan Wang:Surely, but I suspect that the immigrants are not that big a part of the population really to affect that. And I think the East Asian problem, if I had to boil this down to one thing, and obviously life is complex, but the one thing has to be the educational culture where people feel like if their kid can't get into the right university, then their life is over. and therefore they need to get into the right kindergarten to get into the right university. And if they can't live in this particular section of Shanghai or Shenzhen, then they might as well not have a kid at all. And I think it's also worth acknowledging all of these other pressures that families pile on the kids that your life is so oriented towards education.

39:16Dan Wang:And then after education, it's so oriented towards getting a great job in finance or tech. And then once you've checked off that box, the parents are telling you women face only one question in China. When are you going to marry to the unmarried? When are you going to have kids to those without kids? And just all of these social pressures that keep reproducing themselves. I think it's like a wonder that anyone has children.

39:44Tracy Alloway:This actually gets to something that I wanted to – that I regret not talking about. And it's the last time we had you on the podcast, which was last year. And we were talking about your book, Breakneck. And around the same time that I read your book, I also read Eva Doe's book about Huawei and like the culture they had there. And one thing that she really emphasizes in that book and other like about this extraordinary company is like this sort of, yes, of course, they have like plenty of brilliant engineers, et cetera. But they also have like this culture that probably is a sort of silhouette of CCP culture, maybe is a way to put it, and how like the company's founder instilled a certain like willingness to die within the company's cadres.

40:33Tracy Alloway:And they would therefore win the contract to build 5G in Iraq or win the contract to build 5G in Afghanistan because they would not leave the country while everyone else would. And there are these certain – like that strikes me as like a cultural change or a difference in corporate culture that is not simply about, say, the engineers versus lawyer brain that you discuss in your book. And so when you talk about some of these like intense cultural forces about getting into the right school, et cetera, when you read about this sort of like imbuing of the Huawei ideology within the company, et cetera, is there something else going on that drives these companies to the technological frontier to success beyond just, you know, the sort of engineering mindset that you discussed?

41:20Tracy Alloway:They're an ideological component.

41:22Dan Wang:Yeah, well, Eva Doe's book is great on Huawei. I blurbed it. I think everyone should read it. And to read these descriptions of the wolf culture, I think, is the term on Huawei. They rush towards Afghanistan. And so I think that there is definitely an element here that is very real. And I would say that this is more kind of a developing country's hustle mindset. Because who else had this culture? New York City of 100 years ago. Joe, you still live in the Lower East Side? Yeah, I still do. I hear there's a lot of people there. Where there's a lot of people, Lower East Side, 100 years ago, when there were like 15 people living in a single room.

42:02Dan Wang:And the US definitely had this. And so the US people would rush forward. And so this is where I think this is kind of just capitalism. And my view is that if you want to appreciate capitalism, red in tooth and claw, you go to Shanghai, you go to Shenzhen, you go to Beijing, you go to all of these places where people just really work their asses off because they believe that there is something worth pursuing for. And the US used to have this. And I think that China very, very deliberately picked up as much as it could from the United States. The cities are kind of built more like the US cities, much more of a car culture.

42:44Dan Wang:My A phone charger plugs into the U.S. and China more easily than it plugs into anywhere in Europe. So, you know, they copied the U.S. a lot. And they copied everything from the U.S. aside from the political system. And so they've decided that they've got to hustle. And so maybe, you know, you're a New York hustler, Joe. And, you know, this is what attracts you about China today.

43:06Tracy Alloway:In an earlier stage of my life, maybe I was. Now I'm sort of just like I'm fine too. Since you mentioned the wolf thing, what's the nationalist temperature like at the moment in China?

43:21Dan Wang:I think it is fairly steady. And I think that my sense of part of what ails the Chinese economy right now is that Xi Jinping has his wish come true. And I think that top leader Xi Jinping's main goal is to militarize and harden the country for great power competition with the United States. And I have a chapter in my book called Fortress China. And I think this is much more of a fortress mentality in which everything has to be about pursuing the semiconductors and pursuing the batteries and making sure that social pressures are not blowing off a lid. And I think that it seems to me like the top levels of the Communist Party is pretty comfortable with where things are in spite of the collapse in property, in spite of youth unemployment being almost 20%, because they're having their wishes come true on the chips and the batteries and on all of these high technology pursuits.

44:30Dan Wang:and you know when president trump visited beijing you know the the white house social media was you know almost treated trump as a supplicant you know there was these photos yeah yeah which she was pointing the way and donald trump is kind of nodding along and so you know there's all of these things where this is much more about great power versus great power and in great power the little people don't really matter all that much and so this is much more about the elite you know So 10%, 1%, 0.1 % of the engineers still being able to achieve everything that they want to achieve. And all of these resources are funneled towards them and power is made really cheaply to them.

45:10Dan Wang:And so, you know, they want to pursue it. So one thing we've talked about before is the lack of cultural exports from China. Labubu's notwithstanding.

45:22Tracy Alloway:I thought this was going to be the one. I thought this was going to be the one. And that lasted about five minutes. Yeah. What do you think is needed to sort of unlock a cultural explosion in China? Because like the impulse must be there, right? Yeah.

45:39Dan Wang:How about some marijuana? And I don't think that this is something that... I didn't expect you to say that, but go on. Marijuana and the dropping of censorship. How about that? And I don't think that is going to be real anytime soon. So I was pretty deliberate on my trip to Shanghai this time. I went to go see a lot of stand-up comedy in Shanghai, which is something that's really booming. And so they have kind of more of these online specials now in which comics are doing shows. And then offline is actually a real phenomenon as well. And I went to shows, one of which was English speaking. I didn't choose that, but it just happened to be there that day.

46:19Dan Wang:And it was kind of these American expats who were English teachers, mostly, who were giving this show. And for the most part, the audiences were amazing. They love to play along. They give amazing joke answers back. I think the Chinese audience is really, really fun. Comics were not as funny as I hoped. I mean, I don't see that much comedy in New York. And so it's not really good comparison. But the Chinese comic that I saw was essentially telling a series of skits. And it's not stand-up as I understand it. He was essentially telling these elaborate jokes, which he constructed, which didn't really happen to him.

46:59Dan Wang:And so it wasn't all that funny to me, but I think it would be great if there were more Chinese jokes out there. But the fact of Shanghai comedy was that something like three years ago, one of this really big comic in China, made a pun off of one of these core military slogans. And what happened? What happened to him? Well, all of these comic clubs in Shanghai were shut for, I think, something like four months. And they all closed down in Shanghai. And across these festivals, across all of these public performances, the comics have to submit their scripts to the sensors before they can do their routine.

47:39Dan Wang:And so how can that possibly be not excellent for creativity?

47:42Tracy Alloway:You know, this actually gets me to one more question. In addition, the other book that I read last year, the other China book that I read last year was the book about Xi's dad. Terrigian. Yeah, which is great. And I guess he's like your Hoover Institute colleague. And one, like my reading of that book, which I thought was very interesting, and it speaks directly to this, is that one way to think about the sort of post Mao era is how do you keep a hard line while not tipping into true cultural revolution territory? And this fear, like, because what you describe where it's like, and, you know, there was a story in the Wall Street Journal recently about Xi Jinping cracking down on people who are into mysticism and so forth.

48:25Tracy Alloway:And, and like, but it's easy to see how these things spill over, right? Because if you're my boss and you tell me to stop with the mysticism, then I'm going to bully the 10 people who are like a little bit mystical in my arena. And then they'll, you know, and everyone replicates the bullying. And then suddenly you're back in cultural revolution territory. Like that seems how the way these things propagate to me. And I'm sort of curious, like when we look at the fortress China that you talk about, do you think it's inured from a future cultural revolution at some point in the future by the way these things propagate?

48:56Dan Wang:Yeah. I mean, this is quite a chain of dominoes you've constructed, uh joe you know first you take away everyone's tarot cards and then the cultural revolution

49:04Tracy Alloway:erupts a little bit later everyone you know you take away my tarot cards then i'm like gonna prove that i'm even harsher on the people i know who like uh you know look at astrology website perhaps

49:15Dan Wang:perhaps now i think that you know i think that one and i'm spending um more time in silicon valley and you know the opening line of my letter this year was that one thing that silicon valley shares with the Communist Party is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed completely humorless. You know, the Central Committee is not a bunch of yucks. And I think it is our misfortune, our global misfortune, that we are ruled right now by Silicon Valley on the one hand and the Communist Party on the other. And these are completely humorless people that are determining, that are kind of reshaping a lot of what we buy and what we think.

49:51Dan Wang:And that is kind of nuts to me. And I think this is also why, you know, how great are Silicon Valley's cultural exports? I don't know. I don't think it's great products, just like the Chinese. And there are some great products. I think there's going to be, you know, Chinese marketing has not really kept up. You know, we don't really have amazing associations with Chinese brands as such. But I think that will change because the quality is going to improve. But I think if you're looking for any sort of a bottom-up culture, it is still remarkable how stunted Chinese cultural exports are relative to, let's say, the Koreans with all of this K-pop, Squid Game, all of that.

50:30Dan Wang:You have Americans who are much more eager to study the Korean language at college now. I think that is actually outpacing people studying Chinese in college now. So China might do much better, but I would say by any measure, it is an underperformer relative to its population and its economic growth. All right, Dan Wong, thank you so much for coming back on Odd Lots and giving us the vibes, the vibes in China.

50:53Tracy Alloway:A true China ham. Thank you so much, Dan. That was fantastic.

50:56Dan Wang:Yeah, let's have some photo shoots in China. We'll get on some yaks. We'll look like Tibetans. And then we'll have a great time. While drinking lychee-flavored coffee, right?

51:07Tracy Alloway:And smoking cigarettes. The three of us are going to do a road trip one day. Absolutely. We're going to make this happen. I can't wait. Thank you so much. That was great.

51:27Always fun to catch up with Dan, Joe.

51:30Tracy Alloway:I love talking to Dan. And there was a different one. You know, we didn't talk too much like what is the secret recipe of like batteries and building giant projects. Yeah. I like to talk about influencer culture. And then that last anecdote about standup comedy was really interesting as well. Yeah. Yeah. So stand-up comedy, obviously very different in China versus the US, although maybe the US is heading in that trajectory in some ways. But what stood out to me in that conversation is actually like there are a lot of similarities, I think, between like some of the cultural or not cultural, social ennui that we have, we seem to have in the US and the what did Dan call it?

52:11Silent discontent or quiet discontent in China.

52:14Tracy Alloway:You know, I just – sorry, before going on to that, I don't – I happen to follow a – I think she's Kyrgyzstani stand-up comic on Instagram. And it's really funny because she, like, makes these jokes about, like, other – like, distinct ethnic pockets within Kyrgyz – you know, it's like so-and-so men do this and stuff like that. Anyway, I like seeing, like, these patterns, like, replicated all around the world. But I do think this is very interesting that there are certainly like, let's say the collapse of fertility. They say that's a pathology in some way or something like that. These are global phenomenons.

52:51Tracy Alloway:Maybe the East Asian countries are just sort of like the most further along down this trajectory for one reason or another. The phone stuff, the influence. And then also, you know, and I remember when we did that episode earlier this year about like the Chinese internet and like people, oh, there's like this more nationalist flavor. That's the same here. I know. So it does, I think to your point. It feels like it's convergence. Yeah, there's sort of a global cultural convergence that everyone is sort of, I guess what I would say is even in very different economic conditions, there is this sort of cultural convergence happening.

53:30Tracy Alloway:And you say it's like, OK, the Chinese economy is clearly done so well from a standpoint of lifting people out of poverty and material abundance. So it's so well over the last 10, 20, 30 years, obviously better than any other country in the world. And the fact that it's still roughly replicating the same moods, et cetera, as anywhere else, I just think is a very like, as Claude would say, a point to sit with for a moment. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Wazenthal.

54:07Tracy Alloway:You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our guest, Dan Wong. He's at Dan W. Wong. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Lots or the daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash oddlots. And if you enjoy Oddlots, if you want us to do a road trip through Yunnan with Dan Wong, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform.

54:40And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

55:02Thank you.

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