Hello and welcome. My name is Kyle and this is How You Level Up, a podcast that decodes
language to help you become your best self.
All right, should we get going? Who wants to, Kyle, do you want to like lead off and
host or how do you want to do it?
um i appreciate the offer i feel like whoever picked the book can sort of be the host at that
for that episode um or at least lead okay all right let me think about how i want to do this
um all right i can just just get started so breakneck was is a book by dan wang
And I first heard about Dan on the blog he writes.
I forget the blog name, but basically he puts out an annual letter and he's been doing that for, I think, the last five years or so.
And he's well known in the tech industry for these letters because they're really, really comprehensive about everything going on in the tech world in China.
And so he really made a name for himself with these annual letters.
And then he released this book.
I think he only released it maybe a few months ago, maybe three months ago or something.
And I just started seeing really good reviews by a lot of tech people.
Like if you look at some of the like the CEO of Stripe, Patrick Collison has a has a note here.
Tyler Cowen is like one of the best economists.
He has a note on the front cover.
And so I didn't really know like too much what to expect.
I had heard a little bit about it, the kind of dichotomy of the lawyerly society versus the engineering society.
And that was really like an interesting idea to me.
And that's one of the main reasons why I wanted to get into the book.
So I would say, you know, really surpassed my expectations.
It was extremely eye opening book when you when he really talks about and I thought he did such a good job of like.
weaving both U.S. and China into the same conversation.
And like he talked about China separately a lot,
but then he would sort of compare it and contrast it to his experiences in the U.S.
because he's lived in both countries.
And I just thought the, you know, the premise of the book is where, you know,
there's two superpowers now.
There's the U.S. and China, and we're both really great countries in certain ways, and we're both really bad countries in other ways.
And they just happen to be like the exact opposites, you know, like we're good for the reasons they're bad and they're good for the reasons we're bad.
And basically the premise of the book is China has mastered an engineering culture that where they've surrounded the top brass of Xi are all engineers.
And they've been able to engineer not only cities, but also culture and society.
right with with a flip of the of the switch they're able to control um massive uh huge parts of
of society um i guess i'm going on for a bit but uh that was like sort of my overview we can dive
deeper but i guess maybe doug you can get sort of like overall impressions of the book what you
thought yeah i was really pleasantly surprised by how good it was one the writing was very
accessible and then i thought for the first time i felt very connected to the chinese people i
always felt like their culture was very opaque and kind of hard to penetrate and the language is so
distant from you know latin and and like these germanic languages that we're kind of accustomed
to and the cult our culture feels so distant but i thought that he did a great job of really
showing that sort of quirkiness that is the american spirit that we consider to be the
american spirit is also kind of ingrained in the chinese spirit a little bit you know when he was
talking about like they're they're entrepreneurial they're like um kind of like they can be very
I don't know if crass is the right word, but sort of like gaudy or corny in a way.
I thought that was funny in the beginning of the book when he said that because I had never suspected that.
I think the similarities for me, it really opened my eyes to China.
But overall, I thought that dividing the book into, you know, and really detailing the lawyerly society versus the engineering society, it was a great way to, it was almost like to tell Americans or Chinese things that they're doing wrong without being confrontational to it.
It was just like a very observational approach.
So I never felt like, oh, hyper-criticized or anything like that, you know, from an American perspective.
And I thought it was, yeah, it was fascinating.
It was, I really enjoyed it.
Yeah.
Kyle, what about you?
Any overall impressions?
I completely agree with both of you in that the language was really accessible and it allowed me to lift the veil of, hey, we think we know what China is about.
We think we know how their culture works.
and in my mind, I've always thought of China as this place that can build, knows how to build,
and what they build might not always be great, but that doesn't mean that they're not learning
along the way. I think Breakneck did a great job of detailing exactly how far they've come
and how great they are at building, right? I didn't have all of the details of like what they
could build. I see snippets of it on social media. I see cities that are not filled. And
these are all part of what I now know of as political plans based on politicians being
rotated through different sectors of China so that they can prove their worth or prove their
ability in a different area. And by the way, I absolutely love that. To take a politician from
one area and be like, you did a good job over here. We like you go have at it in this other area
and see what you can do. That really forces the politician to adapt to problems that they may not
have dealt with in their own, wherever they were elected. Um, which is a, another point that we can
touch on. No one's elected. Right. Right. Appointed. Appointed. Appointed. Um, still the
idea of proving your your metal in in a different area i i liked that um of course all of this is
uh we we can dive into any points in in breakneck specifically um but i liked the idea of the
politicians i liked the idea of uh diving into the engineering side and and focusing on we want
people who are leaders to be engineers rather than people who know how to circumvent the law
and know where the loopholes are. Yeah. Yeah. Like not only do they appoint the people who've had
success in smaller regions, but to even get those jobs in smaller regions, they make sure that they
have accomplished or managed something, something like in the private industry.
So every, maybe not every, but most of the leaders of cities are former heads of big companies.
And so you never have a situation there where it's like, and this is a good and bad thing, right?
Like it's good that they're able to appoint really smart people, but it's bad that the people don't, the actual citizens of China have no say.
right because some of them will there's just no democracy there it's not it's not like we have here
where everyone's elected um which sometimes results in in really good people being in power
but a lot of times it results in people who have no experience at all but they're just good at
campaigning right and they're just good at social media videos and good marketers right but they
actually haven't they don't have any managerial experience um are you talking about anyone specific
but no it happens a lot but um doug to your point um yeah like i i agree it was nice to
get a deeper and kyle you touched on this too but like just get a deeper understanding of what's
the hell is going on in China because, you know, we only hear, yeah, like snippets or like news
clips and propaganda. Really? Yeah. Yeah. It's very selective. And yeah, this book and it's not
it's not like we know that much about what's going on, but we definitely know more than we did before.
And it's it's interesting that most of what we hear as Americans are it's pretty negative about
China, I would say, like, for the most part about, like, how authoritarian it is and, you know,
whether it's like whatever. And it's and I had heard snippets of this, too, but it's really
interesting to go further on the fact that there's this tradeoff that's been happening in China where
the people, you know, there's no democracy and the people don't have a say. But at the same time,
the government is building things for them, for the people, right? And the government is producing
and making life better for them and driving a lot of people out of poverty and, you know,
driving a lot of manufacturing jobs and high speed trains so that everyone can get across the
country or especially so rural people can get into cities to work jobs and housing, you know,
housing development is insane in China where housing is so cheap. And so there's this interesting
trade-off where like, and it's not like they had a choice, the people didn't have a choice, but
the Chinese government is very authoritarian, is going to do what they want to do.
And in exchange for sort of like obedience from the people, the Chinese government promises to
deliver on those results. And yeah, it's, it's, it's, so, so there's a lot of, you know,
good things I would say that has been happening in China over the last 30 years, 30, 40 years.
Obviously, like we can touch on some of the, some of the horrible things, starting with
the, the one child policy, right. Which also was, was things we all, we've probably all heard about,
before but we didn't really know what actually happened so it was really interesting to learn
the specifics of that policy and how it came about with the with the scientists um like the army
scientist who instituted it for ma uh was it no it wasn't for mao it was it was the guy after mao
um yeah dung jiao ping because mao was actually very um pro-population growth
He believed that a higher population would result in just better military, more flourishing and more jobs and everything.
So or just better economy.
And and then under Deng Xiaoping, he promoted this military scientist who got into like cybernetics and, you know, went to some conference in Switzerland and learned about cybernetics.
and looked at some data that showed that population growth was going to be out of control
and that the country couldn't handle that kind of population growth.
And they made a very, very drastic decision to institute one-child policy
where every family in China can only have one kid.
And like, Doug, we talked about this the other night,
But that was the most brutal chapter of the book.
I mean, by far, it was the most brutal thing I've read in a long time.
The ways that they instituted this policy.
They did everything from like forced abortions to like kidnapping, kidnapping little babies
and sending them off to other countries like really really brutal stuff Do you want to talk about that Yeah I was gonna say um that was for sure i agree with you that was one of the most brutal i read a lot of
about the horrors of like world war ii and you know there's a book called the rape of nan king
that's i recommend everyone read but it's about what the japanese into the chinese and you know
from, I guess, a literary perspective, I thought that's when the book, I was very shocked at his
writing ability. But even more shocking was sort of, not sort of, was the methods that were employed
to, you know, see this policy through. And also, I thought what was crazy was the behavior of the
of the populace. I was wondering, and I think I asked you this, Scott, the other night, is if
they implemented something like that in America during the same period, let's say, let's even give
it, you know, like the grace of time. Do you think, I don't think people would have gone along with
that in the same way. Yeah, I mean, a point that he makes is it's probably unlikely that would
that would work in America because of our system, our legal system. It wouldn't have passed our
lawyerly society. There would just be so many legal battles and it would go to the Supreme Court
and it just would never get passed. And that's the kind of the key difference between China and the
US for both good and bad reasons. The fact that China can basically get anything done very quickly
is good in some ways for building trains and bridges, but horrible in other ways when they
have terrible ideas, when the data, you know, steers them the wrong way. And that happens,
like even with COVID that happened, right? The data steered them the wrong way and, or the data
that they had that they thought was correct steered them the wrong way. And so, I mean,
I guess we did have, you know, lockdowns and stuff in the U.S. and we did have forced vaccine
mandates, but that was, you know, only in certain states, right? Like, I don't think we'd ever have
kind of like a federal, you know, federal mandates like that. I hope not. I think it would
have too much legal issues. What do you think, Kyle? I think that some might argue
the idea of abortion being accessible on the federal level is an equivalent in America to
the one child policy in China. And I wouldn't draw that conclusion. Like if somebody brought
that up to me as an argument, I would argue against it. But I think that based on people's
beliefs in thinking that abortion is wrong, they might say it's very similar.
One of the, what I was thinking about constantly is like, while reading the book, is that
there are so many edge cases that the lawyerly society has to account for because anybody
can sue in the United States and a suit is held up.
And when you try to build a product for edge cases, your product gets fucked. Like you have this thing that needs to account for every single scenario and it never can work as a fluid system when it does that. You need to account for the majority of cases. And then the edge cases can go find a different product or fall into the system that is generated for them and use it as it was intended to be used by the developers.
We account for edge cases in American society all the time. And that is the lawyerly society coming forward and like hampering our development, hampering our progress to do great things.
I would say, you know, as like to steel man the case against what I just said, we also have the example of Elon Musk, who can build really great things, has organizations that his end goal is to build a livable space on Mars.
With his companies, he can do that.
That doesn't exist inside of China because China, the moment anybody gains that much power, they cut them off at the knees.
They're not going to allow you to control that many organizations who have that many contracts with private companies, with military companies.
It's just not something they would allow. They would take over those organizations.
Right. Yeah, it would be too much power at the hands of a private citizen for China to handle.
because China's whole thing is government is like the way of life there.
Like everything is run and dictated by the government, right?
Government has all the power, all the say, and it's a massive government, right?
Like it's massive in terms of just their influence on society.
You know, they control every aspect of society there.
And so, yeah, like the examples of Jack Ma, you know, of when Jack Ma was getting too, you know, too much money and too much power and too much fame, they basically kneecapped him and made him basically, they didn't let his companies grow any further.
And I think he just left the country.
um but if i if i can something else that um when reading that chapter um it was serendipitous that
i came across a post on social media about um china's population i don't know if you guys saw
this i thought it was just crazy to be reading that chapter and then to see this post on social
media, which was about a Chinese dissident. So somebody who left the country and, you know,
analyzes China, having lived there. And when you look at the numbers of when the one child policy
was enacted, and the population at the time, and you try to account for how many children
does every couple need to have in order for them to go from the population that they were at
back then and the population that they're at right now. It's actually not possible.
Two things about this, which is China's population is comparable to India. India did not implement
a one-child policy, and India's population grew drastically. China had this, what they say,
is a very successful policy, and yet their population still grew rapidly. The numbers are
about, you had to have had per couple, four children in the decades that the one child
policy was enacted for them to have a one point whatever billion population today.
So do I think that having seen this post, not doing any research on my own, do I think
that there is a chance China's population is not 1.3, whatever it is?
Yeah.
Like maybe a really high chance.
And I would account that percentage of it being correct to the percentage of America's
GDP not being what it actually is because Palantir had an agreement with OpenAI and
OpenAI had an agreement with Microsoft and Microsoft then paid Palantir.
You're just moving billions of dollars between three companies who are paying each other.
And then you think to yourself, oh, GDP is now $300 billion if they all pay each other
$100 billion.
It's like, no, all you did was move money between hands.
Nothing actually happened.
Kyle, on the population thing, I mean, you might be right.
Actually, he mentions in this book, like, you can't really trust any of the numbers coming out of China.
But it's not that their population would collapse now.
It's just that their demographics, their growth rates, so they have an aging population, right?
So they still have a ton of people, but most of the people are all old, right?
And the younger generations aren't having enough babies to maintain population growth.
So once all of those old people die, which will be in the next 10, 20 years or whatever, they're going to start to really crater.
Right. So that that I think is the main point about population.
They're fine right now, but it's the projections, right?
Like the growth rate is, and it's the same in Japan and South Korea, right?
Like fine populations now, their economies are good, but it's that next generation out
where once the population hits a certain rate, the growth rate, and if it's below a certain
number which i think it's like one point something it's eventually the the country
will just collapse right they'll just not be enough people right um but still you may be right
i saw the same post i 100 agree they're fudging their numbers just thought it was i'm sorry guys
i'm not on camera but i just my phone's about to die i'm looking for um tile 100 these guys are
lying through their teeth no i'm kidding i'm kidding um i wanted to say the one thing i will
say just in case my phone dies and i can't locate a charger because i'm at the studio um i wanted to
say the one thing i was a little frustrated that i thought he didn't dive into enough
was you know the reports of china stealing ip and i i thought that that was a kind of a big
oversight on his part because in order to get where they they are well one if they're stealing
if they are stealing ip which a lot of american companies claim that they are and that they have
no legal recourse within china for ip theft if that's true that means that they're the quote
engineering society is sort of built on a fallacy which in order to in order to be to invent let's
say the net what's coming next if you're relying on stealing stuff it it seems like your society
can't make very large lateral movements let's say you know and and you could very if someone
tamps down on your ability to steal IP
or if we disconnect from China
or the world disconnects from China
and they lose access to the inventiveness
of the rest of the world
that people aren't being rewarded for
who are inventing this stuff in other countries
those products aren't making money for them
in China let's say
you might see a blow up of the quote unquote engineering state
you might just see the ugly aspects of it
really come to rise, which is like a, you know, kind of a boot on the neck scenario,
if I'm making any sense at all.
Yeah, one point about that is, I thought the same thing, but slightly different. So he mentioned
that it happens, right? He didn't deny the fact that China has stolen a lot of
intellectual property patents and just trade secrets, whatever, from the U.S. He didn't deny
that. What he did do was he downplayed it significantly. He said he claims, yeah, he
claimed that it just wasn't a big deal because like we hear that as Americans, we hear it in the
news and whatever, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, China. For many years, we heard that,
Right. Less so lately, less so in the last few years. But for a while, there'd be an article of, you know, China steals Boeing's, you know, plans for the new plane, whatever.
He yeah, he downplayed it. He said that we hear it in the news and we think that and we have politicians who, you know, talk about it a lot and try and maybe like fear monger a little bit of like China stealing all our stuff.
and maybe they are stealing our little stuff,
but he kind of suggested and had the theory
that it may have helped them,
but it's not like there were so many other factors
that had them, you know,
that made China become a world power.
I think if I could add to what you're saying,
he really harped on the idea of
because China has so much manufacturing power,
like they became the manufacturing hub of the world when we offshored all of our manufacturing
and so their process knowledge grew exponentially and so when you have a whole bunch of factories
that are all in the same area he was like look you're gonna have a manager who's getting drinks
with another manager from a plant that's across the street and they might scout him out and like
hire him and take him and he has all of this process uh process knowledge that he then just
unloads at the new factory.
And I think that a really good point I don think it discounts the stolen IP Yeah Just wanted to add that in Yeah yeah No it a good point I think he downplayed it
I'm not sure if he's right or wrong.
I don't think any of us can say how much of a difference stolen Chinese IP has made for their economy.
I think it's really, really difficult for us to know that.
But yeah, I agree, Doug.
I think that when he wrote that, I was like, really?
Like, you really don't think it made that big of a difference?
Like, it's years of work, years of like toil and sweat of somebody, you know, that they that they.
Yeah, I felt that I did feel like he downplayed it.
But to your point, Kyle, and one of the things that was really interesting is he says America was once like that.
Like we had, you know, manufacturing, we've had these plants and we had experts in those different processes.
And, you know, there is there is the case to like you look around at our infrastructure.
It's obviously deteriorating.
You look around at certain aspects of our society.
You know, for example, like working in real estate, I am astounded every time I walk through New York that it exists.
Like I can't believe with all the zoning laws, with all the, you know, the cost to build now that this place even exists, but our society built it at one point.
So that was, you know, kind of taking what I learned out of the book and applying it to our life.
We definitely did have that ability at some point.
We did.
Yeah, absolutely.
In the 19, starting probably like in the 1920s, like New York when we built the Empire State.
No, it was a year.
It was 13 months.
13 months or something like that.
But by the way, to build that building today would take you like nine years.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, it would.
And yeah, it was just, it was a building culture then.
And there wasn't that law early society yet where everything was getting bogged down.
there wasn't a political party that, you know,
got in the way of everything that you want to do, right.
Whether it's, um, you know, for, for reasons like,
like unions or, um, environmental regulations, um,
all these things contribute to, to our decaying infrastructure.
And like the best example is the high speed rail in California that has been
like the biggest, um, failed project, I think probably of all time.
it's like a hundred billion dollar over budget they've barely built anything by the way for like
15 i'm sorry to interrupt you but i i think it's we should clarify that that project is not only a
stain on america it's a stain on human history like as far as failed projects and ideas go
it should be known that that is so disgraceful that you should be up there with like
you know throwing bodies over the wall with bubonic plague or something like that is
an equal act of destruction yeah and you know what's interesting
and you know what's interesting about it too is no one's been held accountable
right no one's been held accountable for no one's lost their job um and as we've read in this book
like and i'm not suggesting this is a good way of doing it but like the people who fuck up in
china with their infrastructure they you don't see them again like they go they they get demoted
whatever they they you know they go to jail in some case some i think in some cases they might
be killed which i'm not suggesting that but the point is it's like you know you're held accountable
um if if you if you make mistakes and sometimes maybe to a too like like too high of a degree
Because like there was that example of the guy who just built a ton of stuff in some city and it ended up just being he went overboard.
He built too much and he still held accountable, even though like he was just trying to impress, you know, the higher ups.
But he was he just like, I guess, was was too extravagant.
One interesting thing to learn about the Chinese government, which I didn't know before, is they're not really...
I mean, they are communists, but the name of their party is the Communist Party.
But they're not really about redistributing wealth, which is one of the main tenets of communism, right?
Like there's a passage here. Rather than redistribute resources from the rich to the poor, the state builds infrastructure.
Lenin used the term commanding heights of the economy to refer to the strategic sectors like power generation and transportation.
In Guizhou, the commanding heights may well be seen from its tall bridges.
So they're not taking money from the end.
Taxes are very low, too, right, in China, which is super interesting.
Like, I didn't really know that.
I would have thought taxes, especially for like the wealthy, would be very high.
It's a communist society.
But it's really not like their name communists.
I'm not sure is that valid anymore because it's low taxes.
It's not redistributing wealth.
It's just taking money from taxes and building things, right, and building infrastructure.
And I thought that was interesting.
Let me add to that because it stood out to me too, which is, this is an excerpt from the book.
Xi has forcefully pushed back on the idea that China needs more generous welfare.
In a major speech in 2021, he said, even when we have reached a higher level of development, we should not go overboard with social transfers, for we must avoid letting people get lazy from their sense of entitlement to welfare.
Worrying that welfare could make the population lazy is one of those instances where a Communist Party leader sounds like Ronald Reagan.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's interesting.
you can't put a label on the Chinese government, right?
They have aspects of the right,
they have aspects of the left,
of communism, socialism,
but also of like free markets and capitalism.
So it's like, it's weird in that sense.
You know, in America,
we like label everything left or right
or, you know, or centrist.
It's kind of tough to do that in China.
They just have these different policies
that aren't really grounded in anything.
I think it's just what the leaders think is the best route.
It's really interesting.
I saw an interview with this guy.
I can't remember his name.
I want to say it's Werner something.
I think he's Austrian.
It's Werner Herzog.
Herzog? Werner Herzog?
Do you ever see that?
Speaking of Werner Herzog, do you ever see the Arctic documentary
where he films the nihilistic penguins?
That is the funniest thing ever.
I haven't seen it.
He like films a penguin separating from the herd and it like just go walks towards him.
He goes towards the mountain away from.
Anyway, it's neither here nor there.
But I saw this interview.
He's an economist.
And he was saying that the Chinese, the way that they built their economy and that they actually became, quote unquote, more capitalistic is they decentralized.
So they were hyper centralized.
I think they had one central bank under Mao.
And, you know, most of the people were in like mired in poverty and it was horrible.
But they went to the Japanese, which was like a very humbling thing to do because the Japanese tortured them in World War II.
And they asked the Japanese for the secret to finance because the Japanese were so successful financially.
I think during the 80s or whatever.
I can't remember what year this was.
And the Japanese asked them, how many banks do you have?
And the Chinese said, we have one. And the Japanese basically were like, no, you need to localize banks and open as many as you possibly can. So imagine in the banking system, there's, let's say, let's say it's 20 people in the central bank of China making decisions how to distribute money, you know, how to invest the money.
The Japanese were like, rather than that, open up local banks and the banks will make those decisions locally.
And you'll have more, not wealth redistribution, but you'll have more distribution of wealth because the bankers are deciding who to invest in.
And if you actually look at our current system, we're currently centralizing banks more and more.
Like after 2008, more banks – how many banks closed? I forget the number of them of local banks that closed and those assets got bought up by J.P. Morgan and these sorts of banks.
So we're going reverse direction, which, you know, I think that to your point about political systems, communism, things being kind of in between and far removed from what we think of as communism or fascism or this.
I think a lot of it has to do with the monetary system and the underlying principles that are applied to the marketplace.
Like if the Chinese have a communist government, but they have people at a local level that are making decisions, you know, they're still quote unquote communists, but they're operating in maybe a more free market way than we're currently operating, you know, with banks becoming more centralized.
And, you know, I feel like that's almost like sacrilegious to say living in the U.S., but, you know, maybe we're looking in the wrong place for where the danger really lies.
I personally believe communism is dangerous. That's me. But maybe the danger really relies in how money is distributed throughout an economy via decision makers rather than, you know, if you have 20 people making decisions for a billion people, it's impossible.
But if you have hundreds of thousands or a million people making those decisions inside of banks, you have potential for success, maybe.
So, yeah, but this book, excellent, really opened my mind to different perspectives and ways to view something that I think we've been propagandized to view one way.
And I think that Kyle's point was excellent when he said it's propaganda.
It is propaganda the way that we see them.
And, yeah, I thought it was really eye-opening, man.
I'm so happy you picked it, Scotty.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was a good one.
Anything else, Kyle, that you want to talk about?
Yeah, just let me add some thoughts.
because I looked it up the moment that you said it, Doug.
There were over 500 banks that closed
after the 2008 financial disaster in the US.
And there are also near 4,000 commercial banks
currently open in the United States.
So there's still a lot of banks that exist,
but how much centralization of the banking system
will we allow for before we say,
okay, here's this bank that is taking too much,
controlling too much, and what are we going to do about it?
I think another part of this, too.
Yeah, you're like shuffling.
It sounds like you're shuffling a deck of cards.
You're about to...
This guy's playing mahjong with a Chinese ant
that he picked up in the park.
Because it wasn't.
Sorry.
so how much will we allow people and this by the way is a very like slippery slope of a question
where how much will we allow one entity one organization to begin to control more
and dictate the path that americans take because that question leads to well let's do something
about it and let's get the lawyers in there and let's take down that big organization because
they're not allowed to exist because they have too much power and we should be afraid of them.
And that's what diminishes our ability to progress. And yet that's also what China does.
They redirect their energies towards things that they think are beneficial. They can make very
rapid left-right turns at 90 degrees, whereas it takes us five years to make a left turn because
we've got to go through every circuit court and all the way up to the Supreme Court just to make
a decision on whether or not we should do a thing. Yep, yep, exactly. We move just way slower
as a society as a government And again it hard because there really good things about that too right Yes Like nothing can change that drastically with a new president or a new you know whatever with a new government
but it also really comes back to bite us in the ass
when it comes to innovation and technology
and infrastructure, housing,
new laws to be more modern about AI and whatever.
It's hard to keep up with a slow, lawyerly society
in a fast-paced world.
And it's a huge challenge for us, I think.
Just real quick about the COVID section. I thought that was really interesting. Also, just getting the insight into what happened during COVID years in China.
like you know they they did really well at first I mean it's crazy like it started in China which
is crazy they contained it when it started and then they did incredibly well once they contained
it after starting and they controlled society right they had lockdowns way more intense than
And then our lockdowns here, you had an app where you had to show your app everywhere to get in places, which we also had here.
But they had to, you know, a bigger, more of an extreme.
And then I think everything changed with that Shanghai lockdown.
All right. Because the Shanghai, and I didn't realize this fully, but Shanghai is their one city that's pretty Western.
You know, there's a lot of there's a lot of Americans there.
It's very, as he talked about in the book, there's a lot of streets that look like you're in Paris. And once, you know, Beijing, as he says, which is the government, focused their time, their effort on lockdowns in Shanghai, that's when the people there were like, holy shit.
You know, this is a this is something that is really scary because there were there were food crisis. Right. There was a food crisis. They couldn't get the amount of food that they wanted because everything was was locked down. They couldn't leave their apartments for weeks on end. They had to get tested, you know, every day, I think.
Um, and, um, that, that was, that was interesting to, to read about.
Um, and I think, I think that was a big shift, right.
In, in, in the way that people who wouldn't normally care about what the government is
doing, where it really affected you.
Right.
And you're really like, this is, you know, this is not good for, for my life or my health,
whatever.
Um, do you guys have any thoughts on that?
want to go ahead kyle you go ahead yes yeah yeah i think that they're the lockdowns that they had
i didn't start seeing it until covid but because of the extreme lockdowns that china had it was
a one two-step into what are called 10-minute cities where you're not allowed to travel outside
of a certain area unless you have certain credentials or approvals. And I don't know
enough about the 10-minute cities in China, but when they started to try and implement those in
the UK, there were a bunch of vigilantes that started to destroy the hardware that would stop
someone from leaving a 10-minute city. So I think it's very interesting that when it comes to China,
they make these 90 degree left-right turns on policy, they can implement a 10-minute city,
no problem. The moment that you start to apply that to a more Western country, you have people
go, I'm not going to stand for this and I'm going to do something about it. And that something about
it is destruction of the property that the citizens believe inhibits their ability to be free.
It's crazy because going back to the one child policy, that's how I felt. If someone tried to
implement that here like hey you're not allowed to have uh well you can only have one child and
you know even if you saw somebody like getting rid of a little girl or something people would
lose their minds in this country people literally become hyper violent and start fighting each other
like it would get crazy you know it's not like you just oh yeah sterilize me i'm up next you know
So it's like, I don't know.
But yeah, the COVID chapter.
How about, you know what was crazy about the COVID chapter?
Was that like hippie town up in, what was the province?
Yeah, it was in the mountains.
It was like outside of the cities, which confirms.
I've suspected for a long time that in like horrible countries that you,
like not everything is horrible
everywhere.
Like for example in Russia
even in communist Russia
I'm sure the cities were absolutely
god awful like
terrible you're getting mugged you're getting
beat up by KGB
whatever but I feel like in the countryside
people were kind of chilling.
You know and I'm sure the same
is true in Venezuela
like I remember
this guy I used to work with
he said he went to cuba in the 90s and he was in the city and they told him like do not go outside
at night in in havana and so he went outside and he said literally all the lights were off in the
entire city like they shut the power grid off he said it was horrifying it was really scary he's
like but i made it back to the hotel and then i got he's like i wandered out of the city the next
day and i got lost and i like was really lost and these people he's like there was no food in the
city either i was eating like terrible terrible food he said these people found him and he was
like he speaks spanish so he was telling them like oh i'm so hungry i'm on vacation here and
they were like really you're on vacation like you want to eat with us and he said they walked to the
beach and they had a feast like literally like lobsters and and fruit and he's like it was like
like a paradise out you know in this communist country so i thought it was kind of cool to see
in China, you have these sort of
outside of the
big cities, you have these mountainous areas
and these people are like, you know,
they're like people here that live in the
forest. They're another type of creature,
you know?
And the government
has less
authority in those places,
right? They're not able to
instill
so much control in the mountainous
regions so they kind of those people kind of just it was like when uh in covid the guy at seti he
went there during covid to get away from like the lockdown craziness or like being have you know the
government stomping on your head and i did the same thing i flew to mexico i was in the mountains
i was hiding out there like i related to him he's a this is a great canadian man yeah i wrote this so
yeah yeah i think uh one other um you know i guess i guess last last thing for me maybe to
talk about is like the i i thought the end of the book was really interesting with um like where he
talked about okay kind of what we talked about earlier where we used to have this mentality that
we can we can build things and we can and i thought it was really interesting that he brought
up robert moses um in new york the new york city guy um yeah it was what like was that like the 40s
or 50s or something um where or maybe maybe 60s um where he did have this mentality of like
I'm going to build as much as possible, as much infrastructure as possible, and you're not going
to get in my way. And if you do, I'll, I'll beat you or whatever. Like I'll, I'll take you down.
And there wasn't like a super strong lawyerly society at that point. And he was able to
accomplish a lot. Now, I think he also might've went a little bit overboard. I mean, I've heard
people call him like super racist for, you know, for like building in poor areas or I'm not, I never
read the biography, but, but yeah, like the end of the book, it talks about him and it talks,
it talks about like, we need to have that mentality again as, as Americans, you know,
especially in positions of power of like, I'm going to build this and like, there's nothing
you can do to stop it. And like, we're able to make tradeoffs here, like there's going to be,
you know, maybe it is not great for the environment to build a huge new building,
but it's worth it for housing prices to go down, right? Housing prices, in my view,
and like we just saw this with the recent mayor election with Momdani winning is like,
housing prices, I think is the key issue of our time, especially for younger people.
Right. Where it's really, really hard to buy a house right now, especially in cities and especially like New York and San Francisco.
And Kyle, even where you live, I'm sure that's really hard.
And yeah, like he talks about how there's tradeoffs you can make.
But like we have to get in this mentality of building and engineering and not being so bureaucratic.
And, and to me, like that was all well and good, but like, I didn't leave, I didn't like finish the book being like super optimistic at all.
Cause in my head, I'm just like, it couldn't happen.
How would that happen?
Right.
Like how would we all of a sudden?
Yeah.
It couldn't happen.
You literally, society would literally have to collapse.
and then like the uh like let's say a city would literally have to collapse and then you'd have to
rebuild like rehire the entire you'd have to have some you know visionary that goes in there and and
cuts like every position except for three and just i i i don't think like for example the the best i
think scott we were talking about this the other night 40 or 44 of all the buildings in the city
new york city right now are illegal according to the zoning laws you know you couldn't build them
but they're because they're not far enough from the sidewalk or they're whatever whatever it is
it's like it's so ingrained the the zoning law book is like this it's it's um yeah i'm not sure
you can do it unless you collapse and because the government can't afford to pay workers they
literally get dissolved and then you start again like i i literally don't see any other way because
i don't know even the way that people are our voters are making decisions based on the information
you know information available to them or what they're being propagandized to believe is like
anti-solutions it's making it worse you know it's like let's put more people let's centralize things
more and give more power to these people who are just trying to collect a paycheck and are like
scrolling twitter for 90 of the days and then last minute deciding what type of lighting poles
you're going to use on your property that are going to cost you like three million dollars
Literally, I just went through that exact scenario.
What government agency that you use publicly for citizens works efficiently?
And if you can name 10, that's success.
If you can name five, that would be great.
But there isn't five.
Yeah, exactly.
Can you name one?
And giving more power to the government, which is inefficient already, makes more inefficiencies.
Yep.
But people don't realize that.
People don't, you know, like, why did Mamdani win, right?
Because 12% of the population voted for him.
There was a 20-some, between 20 and 30, voter age population turnout for that election.
What do you mean 12% voted for him?
The amount of people that voted for Mamdani that allowed him to win the mayor seat, it was 12% of the voting age population of New York City.
That's not enough.
Like, we need to have a blockchain technology on voting that everyone has on their phone that you can vote from work.
It has to be easy.
Yeah, this is kind of a different topic.
but Peter Thiel wrote a really good piece recently.
No, I agree with Kyle.
I was thinking about it.
Go ahead.
I'm sorry.
Well, he wrote that –
Of course he does.
He's a psycho.
That guy's a psycho.
Which is very –
what's his reason for it he thinks higher voter turnout um is is means that there's more chance
that like like the the the stakes are higher essentially so we had very high voter turnout
um relative to other elections in new york and that's a bad sign according to him because
because that means that like there was something important on the line if you know if we lived in a
society where it's like it shouldn't it shouldn't matter that much right like because he's a
libertarian too so like his belief is like the government shouldn't like it shouldn't be that
consequential because the government shouldn't have that much authority and power anyways
i i agree with that sentiment i don't agree that we should have low turnout because we should have
the highest possible turnout. That would be a true democracy. But what about lower and lower?
But there's a whole class of people who are classified as low information voters, right?
Do you want, do you really want those people voting where they don't, they don't know,
like anything about either, either candidate, right? Is that, is that better than the current
really, really good question. I think if we look at Mamdani and knowing that he won with about 12%
And they're all what I believe.
They're all more educated.
I think the people who voted for Mamdani are higher education.
And wealthier, yeah.
And maybe wealthier, but they definitely have a lot of school.
They've been exposed to a lot of what is the possibility of socialism?
What is the possibility of communism?
And I don't think more education means that you have the ability to make a smarter decision.
And I think more information, right, this is where it correlates to more information does not make it better, make you better as a voter.
That's true. I agree with that. I don't I don't think I think. Yeah, I think I think Kyle, the real problem is they started slapping degrees like they opened up degrees to the marketplace.
and basically a bunch of like people who should have been you know moving rocks in like northern Alberta even though those guys are probably geniuses Yeah
They thought that they were, you know, they should be,
they basically gave these people the belief
that they should be re-engineering entire societies.
Like, you're so smart, you need to re-engineer everything.
And you're like...
there's there's a couple of things that we could do if if i could snap my fingers we could fix a
lot of the u.s government but not all of it will ever be it will ever be accepted and a lot of it
is guys if i'm more if i may before i have to jump off but i just want to give you guys a quick
story so one night i was trying to have lucid dreams and uh it's going to relate to what you're
saying um i was i was trying to have lucid dreams and finally i achieved a lucid dream so
i go to sleep i have a dream that my brother and sister are behind me and they're really little
like they're little kids and somebody's breaking into a building that i'm in and i have a knife in
my hand and i feel like the guy's gonna kill us and i became so scared that i woke up in my dream
and force push this guy through the door.
I was aware.
I realized, oh my God, I'm dreaming.
I'm like, what am I going to do?
I go outside and I'm like,
I'm going to build the perfect brownstone apartment.
Beautiful.
I'm going to make it as beautiful as I possibly can.
I'm doing this consciously.
I start lifting up from the ground,
raising a brownstone and boom,
This perfect brownstone pops out of the ground.
And then I get a weird feeling.
And I lean over and I look behind the brownstone.
And I leveled the entire city.
And I destroyed everything.
I literally must have killed millions.
Millions in my dream.
And sometimes I think if you think that you can snap your fingers and make everything right,
You like I going to do this one little good thing You might crumble You might crush everyone Yeah Mm Yeah Well then I share one which is a thing that talked about in the public sphere a little bit more now
which is if politicians want to pass a regulation, a law, a bill, single item, it covers one topic, pass that one topic, then move on to the next.
Don't throw 300 topics into a bill.
Okay.
You snapped your fingers.
You got away with that one.
Yeah.
Yeah, they do.
They jam everything into a bill knowing that most people, like, it's to hide what they're doing, right?
Because then the bill will be 100 pages or even 1,000 pages and no one's going to actually read all that crap.
And and they can just kind of sneak in, you know, the things that they want for their, you know, whatever, for their donors or whatever, whatever stuff they're doing. Right. Because if they were really, you know, being upfront about what they wanted to accomplish, yeah, they would just they would just be a simple bill.
and all that, you know, it's kind of back to the lawyerly society, right?
They have these lawyers draft up extremely complex bills and agreements and contracts
and that kind of obfuscates, you know, what's actually going on.
That's, you know, lobbyists too.
That's another big one.
That's just people trying to shove in whatever they got paid to shove in.
But guys, I really have to run.
I have to get out.
I have to clean up the studio and then get out of here.
But before you head out, we're reading the Technological Republic text.
I got it. I ordered it. Do you want to read it?
Correct.
Okay.
Yeah, I ordered it.
Is that what we're reading?
Yeah.
I started it just to warn you guys.
Like it has like some similar themes as this book.
It's definitely not as approachable as this book.
Alex Karp is very philosophical and very educated and he kind of like Peter Thiel where he has more he has more of like he in tech but he also like kind of a philosopher So he has sort of complex some complex ideas
But I don't think that's a bad thing.
I just I think it's a little bit harder to read than than breakneck.
But and it has some of the same themes of America sort of like decline, being in like very stagnant and like a little bit of a decline.
and how we can fix that
and how Palantir is addressing these problems.
So I'm only like 10 or 20 pages in,
but it's very good so far.
Palantir to the rescue.
It should have never sold.
Yeah, yeah.
Can we please,
because we skipped over the fiction book,
can we please after this?
I don't want the responsibility to picking
after I picked the American establishment.
I'm not reading
I am not reading any of Doug's books
or sorry
I shouldn't say that I'm vetting Doug's books
very highly
I know what I took out of that book
you guys might have taken nothing
but that was a life changing book
did you?
I took something I did a whole episode on it
geez coach that was a tough one
that was a tough one
it was so hard
it was so tough
so after this book then
I'll pick the next one.
Do it.
I'm going to pick a fiction book.
All right, guys.
Scotty, I'll text you.
I really got to run.
What kind of fiction?
I'm going to be –
Okay.
This guy is going to walk in with, I don't know, Christina Aguilar or something, and I'm going to get yelled at.
Jesus.
All right.
See you guys.
Bye.
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