YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Wang

lines on the record: 108
first: 2025-12-03
most recent: 2025-12-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'll take Fidelio when you have these excellent recordings like Krista Ludwig singing about at the very end it is the very end of Fidelio always moves me.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My final question, and then I'll stop hijacking your conversation. How have large language models changed the questions themselves that you ask on conversations with Tyler? Often, many of us love to choke about these hyperspecific questions that you ask people that, frankly, often could be better answered through AI, through GPT-5 than people themselves. How do you think about asking some of these questions after large language models are arguably better at providing some of these answers?”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something like immersion ventures, it is something that you started. Did you imagine that you would have built out a great network of folks to build out the marginal revolution extended universe of so many people that you have been able to support?”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's how Don't trust my To have no grand strategy, but to always be able to pivot like that. That is still a grand strategy in itself”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe sometime we should have a rebrand of this. But how do you decide how to pivot, how to be an early blogger, how to continue learning new things?”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something I have some perspectives and views on that I think is going to be fruitful for thinking about the future. Tyler, I want to ask you that you have had these really remarkable pivots throughout your life. You had your PhD in economics from Harvard. You studied under a great advisor, Thomas Shelling. You published in Top Economics Journals. You were an early economics blogger. You have been doing all sorts of new things related to marginal revolution university, emergent ventures. Now you are doing a lot of things on AI. You've started this extraordinarily successful podcast, which I've always felt should be, we should maybe rectify the names here rather than having this be called conversations with Tyler. Maybe we should call this interrogations by Tyler.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would really like to curl up on my couch and read a lot more novels, follow the Henry Oliver Hollis Robins Great Books program, just read a lot more authors. I have a lot of history books that I am very keen to read and follow along the Stephen Kotkin program for reading a lot of excellent histories. These are the two genres that I am most interested in thinking about. And I think I am thinking in terms of my professional life, having more extensive following along evaluation of the US-China competition. And I am trying to come to a net assessment of what is going on between the US and China, what is competition, coexistence, the contest really look like over the longer term. And I think that this is going to be something that we're all living through.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Standal has had some very passionate fans. John F. Kennedy read a lot of Standahl, Robert Alter before he translated the Torah, wrote a biography of Stendahl called A Lion for Love. And I think one other remarkable thing about Stendal is just that he inspires passion among those of us who appreciate the Italian ecstatic commitment to the art of song.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Performance of the Comte de Ri and ends in great tragedy. But along the way, there is some just these very voluptuous descriptions of love, and it is all the very funny to boot. What do you think of Stendah?”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is these voices encircling and entining, which I think is one of the most beautiful parts of opera ever. And this is something that I sometimes listen to on loop when I'm writing because there is just remarkable beauty. Stendal loved Rosini. Stendal mentioned Count Auri in my favorite book, my favorite novel, The Red and the Black. I reread the Red and the Black when I was living in Copenhagen this summer, wondering whether it would hold up. It was my fourth time rereading it. This was one of my mother's favorite novels as well. And she gave it to me to read. And I think that the Red and Black still holds up very well. It is a story of ambition, of an extraordinarily ambitious young man who has to choose between trying to join the army or trying to join the priesthood and then making these ridiculous errors in love and gets humiliated along the way.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very underrated, very underrated. It's very silly. But do you know what I'm talking about with the final trio, which lasts about 10 minutes at the very end? Do you know that? I would have to hear it.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stendal is someone who loved voluptuous excess, like one of his heroes, Rosini. I think a lot about the wonderful musicality of Rosini, the Barber of Seville is a great place to start. Rossini also wrote these comic operas that sound a little bit strange today in terms of only their titles. The Italian girl in Algiers, or the Turk in Italy. But even these have just these, and these were early operas. I mean, he composed them, I think, in his early or mid-20s. But they are so much fun to listen to. The voice mixing really bursts when you have excellent singers. And then you have some really”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A Mozart symphonies to just simply copy out the scores and just write it all out. And I did this exercise also when I was early in my writing. I would just take a New Yorker article that I really liked and simply rewrite the entire thing. And when you engage in that sort of exercise, you really have a sense of what the composer was thinking when he was plotting out the harmonies. And when you do that with a really good piece of writing, whether that's a New Yorker article or a really good book, you start having a sense of the choices that the author was making in terms of syntax, in terms of sentence length, in terms of the word choices, and being in a position to make those sorts of choices, I think, is very valuable.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have always grown up loving to read. My grandfather bought so many books for me, first picture books that had text underneath, and then my mother also encouraged a reading habit. We had so many books growing up. And I think that if I were thinking about writing, first and foremost, I pay attention to cadences. I think about beat. I think about the musicality of the effect. And I think that it is just really, really valuable to just have a sense of how the word sound before it falls out of your pen. I have a sense of practice when I was a musician every so often. I would take some time when I was still a college student to just go to the music library, check out some scores from, I did this with a mahler symphony as well.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very good army cadet. I was awarded Recruit of the Year. I was the fastest person in my regiment to be promoted to Corporal. And I was in the marching band and I did excellent drill as well. And something I take away from some of the commanding officers who I grew close to, they would tell me that the ethic of the army was that whatever you imagine is the most difficult thing. You should simply reconceptualize it as the easiest thing. And then you just do it. And that's a turnout to have been a fairly robust lesson.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ottawa is not only the federal capital of Canada, but it is also the drug capital of Canada. And it is very easy to fall into a mischievous crowd when you're over there. And so I was playing hooky from school a little bit too much and running off and trying to do whatever I found fun. And I'm not going to school. I never had good grades growing up to this day. I will admit that I was academically challenged. I always just enjoyed taking a book to read in the park or something rather than sitting in class. And my main issue was that I played hooky a little bit too much, raised the ire of my parents. My parents threatened to give me to the army, and I laughed that off because no parents ever do that. But then my mom did it. So she gave me to the Royal Canadian Army cadets and they straightened me out. So I was very, I was very”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The tight answer is just a lot of discipline. I think that I was a bad kid growing up. I was absolutely not a good child, and I'll be the first to admit that.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I am much more keen for is to avoid these Wagnerian excesses in which every so often it really feels like the Communist Party is ready to march the entire country into Valhalla with them. And I would love it if the Chinese had a little bit of a better sense of the comic operas of Rosini or Mozart or Danizati who have smiling optimism, who have a sense of irony, who have a sense of humor. China's Politburo is totally pof-faced. There's no humor among them, but there is just so much wonderful irony, especially in Mozart, in which take a look at a lot of the love songs, almost none of them, are meant to be very sincere and meant to really declare love for the intended heart.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot about the Communist Party as a Leninist technocracy with Grant Opera characteristics. If you watch some of these proceedings from the party congresses held by the Communist Party, which take place every five years, it really feels like watching a Wagnerian opera by other means in which they are there. There's some less noise but much greater drama. The last party Congress was, of course, the party congress in which Xi Jinping more or less forcibly removed his predecessor, Hu Jintao, after Hu Jintao, tugged away at some papers. I still don't understand what exactly happened there. I wonder if we will ever have a good answer of what Hu Jintao was looking at and what he was objecting to and why Xi Jinping decided to humiliate an elder in that way.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cozy Fontute is never properly held up as being above Don Giovanni or the marriage of Figaro. The marriage of Figaro is definitely the most perfect opera. Maybe you can say that Don Giovanni is the greatest of them, but I would say that Cozy Fontute is the most underrated.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am. The clarinet is the instrument most close to the human voice. And so I was not a very technical player, but I feel like I achieved a degree of musicality that some of my teachers recognized. Now I will say that I haven't played the clarinet now for over 12 years now, mostly because growing up I had chronic bronchitis and One year my lungs collapsed and I couldn't play that year and I never really picked it back up. But rather than playing music, I've transitioned smoothly to spending a lot of time listening to opera. And when I'm listening to opera, I think it is not surprising that the sopranos voice, most approximates the musicality of a very fine clarinet player. And to me, I am indulging in all of my music interests. Interests by listening to especially Mozart, but also Roszini, Danizati, Bellini, and Verdi.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To hang out in the parks. I don't think it produces many great marriages because I think young people are not very interested in having their parents set up their spouses for them.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very effective for the parents who feel like they're doing something for the kid. I am not sure that they have actually produced a lot of excellent marriages. I think that one thing that China clearly does so much better than the rest of the world, especially America, is that it is great to be an old person if you are in China. You go out to the park. There will be many people doing some sort of ballroom dancing. They'll be practicing Tai Chi. They will be dancing haphazardly to music from America that they cannot understand. They're doing all sorts of calisthenics and there's a lot of community. You can be playing Chinese chess. You could be playing Mai Chang. And people will just come to talk to you. My elderly grandfather spoke to anyone in the yard, mostly because he was deaf and he was just able to kind of yell at them. And marriage markets are something like calisthenics. It's just something that old people do.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recognizably Beijing character, who is competent, funny, full of humanity, also has to obey orders when his superiors tell him what to do.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is the most Chinese of the three it integrates discussions of the past much more effectively than the second volume. The third volume to me felt mostly like rubbish. The second volume is so much more forward-looking. I do enjoy the second volume quite a lot. I think the second volume is totally excellent for being a really great science fiction novel. There's themes and discussions of strategic deception, very Chinese sort of a theme to pick up. And the strategic deception is everywhere in the first volume as well. The prominent scientist who doesn't even tell anyone that she alerted extraterrestrials to conquer humanity. And it integrates the cultural revolution much more effectively. And it is also a rollicking good police trauma as well. The top cop, the detective in the first volume is just such a”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would say that Chinese music is not a special case in which Chinese films have gotten steadily worse over the last 10 years of Xi Jinping's rule. You have the top art house movie director Tia Zhang Koen being openly frustrated about the censorship regime, that there is this clear preference in China for ballots, which are a holdover from basically the communist days plus the canto pop that was imported from Hong Kong. They haven't really been able to move on. That Chinese visual arts has gotten also weaker steadily over the last 10 years of Xi Xin's rule. And so I would say generally Chinese culture has gotten weaker and weaker. And it's no surprise to me that the old Singh wrote most of the three-body problem before Xi Jinping came into office. And so a lot of things are getting worse. It's not just the music.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't listen to any American contemporary music. I would ask you why is American contemporary music so weak relative to Mozart?”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of these Chinese series are too long, but I watched a couple of episodes of an anti-corruption trauma called In the Name of the People. And in the very first episode, you have three men spending about half the episode arguing about jurisdiction. What could be more jurisdictional and what could be more bureaucratic than jurisdiction, right?”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mountains may depart. But let me throw in one title also from Zhang Yimo. Believe the English name is Tioji Goes to Court. And this is, I believe, mid-80s, Chang Yimi-Mo, in which you have a Gongli who is fabulous as always, walking through the Chinese countryside in northwestern city, probably around Xi'an. And what you see are sort of these street scenes of Deng Xiaoping's China trust that it is starting to bustle. It is a movie about bureaucracy and it is a movie about courts. And I think the Chinese are really wonderful at portraying bureaucracy. There are a lot of these genres of bureaucracy porn in terms of some of their novels, which could be fun reading for some people, especially if you work inside the US federal government. You can see some parallels. The best Chinese TV series in recent years, not that it's very good.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I don't like a lot of the magical realism stuff, and I think that you do generally between the Spanish authors as well as the Japanese authors. But why is Moyen not speaking to you”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. And I will also say that part of the reason that I'm so into some of these tribes is that the ethnic groups in China is that within my family a lore, again, I don't know how accurate this is, but there's speculation that through one of my grandmothers who come from whose origins are cheerfully unknown, that we have Tibetan heritage through her or Wa heritage through her. And so again, in that sense, although I would officially be categorized as a member of the Hein majority in China, there could be that there's some Tibetan norwa in me.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Community. It has excellent gemineschaft, and there are many people brewing coffee there. And I'm trying to maintain the local biculture very, very well. And it is a lot of where cosmopolitan Chinese as well as some foreigners like to spend a lot of their time. And so Dali itself will not reveal to you if you are simply passing through, but if you had a few months to live there, that is the corner of China that I would live in. It's also where my parents met in the 1980s when they were sent down as college graduates to go teach local Bai people. It was a tremendous adventure for them. So that's a personally interesting place for me. And then I would go to the extreme north past Changla, which is mostly touristed out city. It has some important monasteries, but Shangriila was so fully embraced commercial tourism that it renamed itself about, I think, like 20 years ago to be this mythical land essentially to capture a bunch.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you drive a fifth further north, you can stop by in Kuiming, but I think that is probably the least interesting city in Yinnan. It's the administrative center. They've torn down a lot of their interesting historic buildings. You can drive a little bit through central Yingnan, which has some of the best mushrooms, but I would go further north immediately. Twin cities of Dali and Lijiang have been treasured for a long time. Li Qiang now, I think, is fully broken. Now it has really traumatic snow mountains. It has these snowy close to Himalayan-like peaks. But as a town, it has totally hollowed out through commercial culture. Dali is a city that I love. This is where my wife and I spent three months Winchanai was locked down. It is a city that reveals itself to those who properly live there. Its mountains are not quite so dramatic. It has a wonderfully big lake, but it has excellent”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grilled fish, a lot of quite spicy beef, as well as other meats. And what I like to do is to just have a really big lunch. And then for dinner, I will buy a variety of tropical fruits, whether that's mango, durian, a lot of other things as well. And then you can drive.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you have 10 days, I would say that can cover quite a lot of Yin Nan from the south to the north or vice versa. So you can go to Sichuan Bana in the south, which is my favorite corner of Vin Nan, which has a lot of remarkable ethnic diversity. You have certain ethnic groups that essentially dwell within one mountain, and they have a lot of their own customs and rights and practices, as well as some of their own language and a lot of their own cuisines. It is where the Mekong River flows. Essentially, it is the first major city that flows along the Mekong, which takes the melt water from the Tibetan Himalayans that flow down. And it is tropical rainforest. You can get excellent mango, durian, all sorts of tropical fruits. It is my favorite region of China to eat. You will have some”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guess, yeah, maybe the United States is, maybe this is a difference between the US and China. The United States is much more governed by its zomia-like residence or much more rural and who have a little bit more contempt for elite culture. And that is different from Japan, Europe, as well as China.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I am critical of major aspects of the United States because I'm an outsider in the US as well. Now, one of the things I struggle with Scott, I was at Yale University, but I regret that I never had a chance to chat with Scott before he passed away. But something that I've wanted to ask him is something that I try to grapple with myself. You can accuse me of enjoying elite cultural products like the opera and Mozart as well as great books like Buddham Brooks. And I am sure that Scott is an extremely intellectual person and he is not some sort of illiterate farmer walking bare feet among the mountains of Myanmar. And he was a professor at Yale University, which is also a quite elite place. And so something that I grapple with, and I wonder how he grapples with, is how do you embrace some aspect of elite culture while also prizing running away from the state? And I don't have a good answer here. Can you supply one for me, please?”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it is also where two of the most intellectual parts of the places where a lot of the highest paid people choose to gather, San Francisco streets are full of syringes and the transportation really does not work so well. And I am critical of major aspects of China because I am an outsider within China.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is fair to be more intellectual because one knock against zomia, given that so many cultures have only an oral culture, they didn't really write things down, it is hard to be more intellectual. I feel like I am also an outsider in the United States by virtue of having grown up in Ottawa, where for many of us Canadians, we thought that the United States is kind of the luminous center of the world. And then coming over to living in New York City as well as San Francisco, the two cities that I know the best, again, let's not get into these screechingly loud subways. Let's not get into JFK.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am a regional thinker, and I submit that my region of Yinnan is slightly different and slightly more mountainous and more interesting than New Jersey. Wouldn't you agree?”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In higher elevations rather than planting grains like rice or wheat. And they have stronger oral cultures so that they have greater ethnic malleability. And I think reading through all of that made me appreciate my status as voice and outsider, first as someone from southwest China, which is an economic backwater even today, hiding out from the state, hiding away from the imperial gaze from Beijing, as well as the excessive commercialism of Shanghai. I am much more skeptical of Beijing's power than I think someone who would just celebrate the grandeur.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, very good. It is an extensively centralized view that he likes to criticize, and it's kind of a systematic view of human society. And I think that by far, by far, James C. Scott's very best work is the art of not being governed, in which he did extensive field work in Yunnan, as well as the broader zone of Southwest China and Southeast Asia, which is heavily mountainous, an area that is larger than Western Europe. Zomia is an academic term he borrowed from French academic Pierre Clastre. And it is kind of this major zone where people decided to hide out from the state, whether this was the Burmese state, the Tibetan state, and overwhelmingly the Han Chinese state. These people practiced escape agriculture, planting cassava, which is underground, or potatoes, as well as maize, which can grow.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am a major Scothead, and I think that James C. Scott helped clarify my own views of Beijing in particular. So I think that James C. Scott's most popular work, Seeing Like a State, is also unfortunately his, I would say, weakest work. It takes”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I prefer perfection a little bit more than you do. I think this is why I prefer Mozart to Beethoven, that there is no musical question that Mozart did not solve to perfection and that Budenbrooks is a more linear novel than the magic mountain. Budenbrooks is a remarkably Confucian novel because it is so much focused on family virtues and punishing the unvirtuous. And I think that Anna Karenina is just a much stronger love story than the story of Natasha Rostoff.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it is the part of the country that is most facing Southeast Asia. There's now a high-speed rail connecting the capital city of Kuiming to the capital city of Yentian, which you can go through a lot of different regions there. And I think that there is also some pretty decent visual art culture in Yunnan, in part because during the Second World War, major parts of the nationalist government retreated to Chongqing and there was a big satellite in Kumming as well in which they try to bring a lot more elite culture into the Southwest. Between the natural beauty, food, visual arts, am I missing anything here?”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you cannot get it elsewhere. You like fresh food between the mushrooms, which are not easily shippable even to Shanghai or Beijing. You want some of that. You like a lot of ethnic diversity, and Yinnan has about half of China's official 52 ethnic groups in the country, which you have Tibetans, again, in the north and all sorts of Moswa people. There's the Dai, there's the Tinhua, all sorts of people in the south. You are interested in thinking about geopolitics. And Yingnan is important for that because Yunnan will control a lot of the major waterways. There's three major rivers that have their headwaters in Yunnan. The Yangtze flows from there. And so does the Mekong, which will flow south through Vietnam. And Yinnan is a great place to dwell on geopolitics.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a good sense of why I like it. But I mean, if we're in 98.5% agreement, then I don't know if my views are going to be very different from yours. So let me throw out a few ideas. First, you like natural beauty, and that is something that Yingnan has in abundance between all of these different mountains and lakes. I think that you like excellent food, and Yinnan has extraordinary diversity of food within its very province.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“98.5% agreement. I'll take that, Tyler. It's you and me against the rest of the world, but then we'll save our best disagreements for each other.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tyler, what does it say about us that you and I have generally a lot of similar interests in terms of, let's call it books, music, all sorts of things. But when it comes to particular categories of things, we oppose each other diametrically. Like I much prefer Anna Karenina to war and peace. I prefer Budenbrooks to Magic Mountain. And here again, you oppose me. What's the deal?”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree that Beijingers are much more fun to talk to. The Shanghainese can be, I think that the funniest part of the funniest two parts of China are first the Southwest, which is Sichuan Guizhou as well as Yingn, and second Beijing. Beijingers are so much more funny. And I think that the Southwest is funny. Beijing is funny. Shanghai is not funny. The Shanghainese can't crack good jokes. I don't really understand what's with that. And so if we can somehow just bring all of these Beijingers and throw them into Shanghai and then perish the Shanghai knees up to the north, I would feel quite fine with that.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source