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

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“Really excellent all sorts of morls. I have gone mushroom foraging extensively with my family when I'm visiting my aunts and uncles. And I have been poisoned only three times. The first time was when I had a spate of vomiting, second time was a fever, the third time was pretty bad. I hallucinated for about three days after taking some bad mushrooms. But it can be kind of dangerous in Ying Nan because people really love mushrooms there. Every year something like 20 people die from taking the mushrooms, mostly because the mushrooms are very smart. Sometimes the poisonous ones look just like the normal ones. And they're quite smart and adaptive. Tyler, what is your ranking? Beijing or Shanghai, Chengdu, or Chongqing.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That exists mostly in Vinan, and Vin Nan has a province full of mountains. So at its highest point of elevation, the northern Yinnan is essentially the Himalayas. Yinnan has one of the most sacred mountains in Tibetan Buddhism, Kawarkapo, or Medi Shishan in Mandarin. And it's south. It is essentially a giant rainforest feeling much like Thailand. And when you have these extraordinary climactic zones, you have a lot of salt deposits in central Yingnan, which is where Deng Xiaoping's wife came from. And so they salted a lot of excellent hams there. And you can find all sorts of mushrooms. If you go foraging through these excellent mountains, which are mostly in central Ghindan. There's excellent matsutake. There is”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone who has family origins in Yingnan, I would say that both Chandu and Chongqing are splendid. I would definitely defend the southwest against all comers. I'm from the southwest myself. We're the most mountainous aspect region of China. We have the best food between Sitrine, namely Chengdu Chongqing, as well as Yingnan, as well as Guizhou. We have a splendid natural beauty. It is the funniest region of China. And everyone there kind of looks like me. So I think everybody should go make a visit.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chongqing is the more cinematic city. I love how you can enter a building, go up 11 floors and exit again street level because it is built through these gorges as well as mountainsides and it feels like a city carved into cliffs. The front cover of my book is featuring Chongqing. It is this Raffles Tower built by a Singaporean company under construction and it is just this really gorgeous zone. Chundu I find a little bit sedate. It is certainly more pleasant in all sorts of ways. The food is more refined than the Chongqing food and I think that it has a slightly higher levels of food but you don't get the sort of tackling frenetic energy that is more typical of Chongqing. And Chengdu feels in a lot of ways to me to be a little bit too laid back. Now speaking as”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have a lot of the excellent senses of life because Hangzhou as well as Suzhou are very nearby where the poets dwelled and drank and ate marvelous food. It has the much better weather than Beijing, which is every so often hit by these sandstorms which drift over from the Gobi Desert. And I get really uncomfortable in Beijing because it is just this, you know, unmasked celebration of state power. And, you know, it gets somewhat uncomfortable walking around in Washington, D.C., which is the imperial city. And I am much more attracted to the pleasure center of China.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shang It was partially built by the French, full of leaf people of arts. It has all of these pleasures of life. We in Shanghai refer to ourselves as pears of the East, and we referred to Beijing as Western Pyongyang because it is this Stalinist no-find zone fully built out in concrete. Now, sometimes when I go to Paris, I tease the Parisians for living in the Shanghai of the West. But I think that it is just a really pleasant space. Shanghai is more intellectual than many folk give it credit for. Shanghai was where the Communist Party was first founded in 1921. Shanghai was thriving intellectual energy behind the gang of four in the Cultural Revolution. That was the great readout of Tianqing as well as the other Gang of Four. There's a lot of literary traditions in Shanghai.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No wealth, but nobody had much wealth then. We left right before the economic boom of China, one of several economic mistakes of my parents who were not sufficiently entrepreneurial. But I think that there's plenty of smart Chinese and very few people or elite of my age.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My family was not wealthy, but no family from that time was a wealthy. And so I think that, well, there was something called the communism in China, and there was also the anti-landlord struggles initiated by Mao, and there was the Great Leaf Forward, which plunged tens of millions into famine. And there was the cultural revolution, which destroyed a lot of the intellectual class. And my family is mostly made up of people of rural origins, but my grandmother was the daughter of my family lore, according to family law, the fourth-ranked private secretary to Chiang Kai-shek and Nanjing. And so there is a little bit of elite background in my own family through my grandmother. But I think, you know, I wonder how much of this is simply explained by communism and the fact that everybody in China was poor when my parents and I moved to Canada in the year 2000, we had hundreds of dollars in our pockets.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blocking their path to wealth, but they are able to repivot and are simply able to be pragmatic about doing all sorts of things. So I would say that education is certainly part of it. China has valued education for a very long time. And I would simply add the variable that they are very incentive sensitive and are able to pivot and do things that make sense to themselves.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Than be aggrieved about the obstacle. They will think about okay, well, how do I navigate around this obstacle? Some of the Chinese I know have not even been all that upset with President Trump's jerking around the visa statuses around H-1B. They simply understand, oh, the rules have changed and now I need to pivot. And so this is also something that I think speaks to some of these Chinese attitudes where Xi Jinping and the rest of the Communist Party is able to generate a lot of economic growth simply because it has been pretty easy to be a Chinese official in the last 20 years, mostly before Xi's era, in which the bureaucratic incentives were simply to maximize GDP growth and minimize the mass incidence, which is the Chinese euphemism for protests. And so you got a lot of GDP growth because that was what the bureaucratic incentives were. And even right now, there are plenty of people who realize that C is”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe. I will say that. Chinese to me seem extremely responsive to incentives. You put an incentive in front of them and they will maximize everything out of it. So Chinese to me are a super pragmatic people. It's funny. I was working with the healthcare system. My wife and I were navigating some of the healthcare system at the University of Michigan. And by the time that we spoke to a nurse with a obviously Chinese accent, you know, we could tell that she was Chinese. And then it was clear that she was kind of the truth teller among all of the nurses in the system that was able to help us navigate, oh, this process is good, that other process is not so good. Maybe you should consider doing things with this doctor. And so I feel like, you know, what I enjoy about a lot of Chinese is that they're totally pragmatic, that if you throw up an obstacle in their way, they will simply, you know,”
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 that is likely. So I think that the case for Chinese expansionism is more limited. I don't think that they will be extremely expansionist. And then the question for the experts is, to what extent should the U.S. defend a country like Singapore and Malaysia from Chinese influence rather than American influence?”
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'm mostly with you. Now, my rabbi at the Hoover History Lab is Stephen Kotkin. And Kotkin would say that the appetite grows with the eating. And so what if they first seize Taiwan and then Singapore has to kowtow and so goes Malaysia and then they decide to seize Japan because they can because Japan can't.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How about Malaysia? If the leaders of Malaysia and Vietnam regularly have to go to Beijing to kowtow for the emperor's pleasure, how much of a threat do you think that is to American imperial power?”
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 think that American troops will ever occupy Shandome province. What would they do with that? So then there's a more limited case of, okay, if China is fully dominant in East Asia and it can regularly”
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 this is something that specialists can debate and the extent to which China is expansionist. Now, I think I agree mostly with you that China is not extremely expansionist. No PLA troops would ever take the state of Oregon. Why would they take Oregon? What would they do with it?”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At declining capital productivity and declining TFP growth writ large when it is the successful industries that really matter.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just likely, they're on track to do that They are on track to, you know, right now they have about a third of global manufacturing capacity. And they may continue gaining share, in part because they're deindustrializing everyone else, deindustrializing Germany in particular, as well as Japan and South Korea. The U.S. has mostly already deindustrialized itself. So it's not in the firing line. But at some point, there will be a second China shock coming for America's manufacturing industries. They're going to make all the drones. They're going to make much of the electronics. They're going to make much of the munitions. And in that scenario, what would it mean for most of the products that we physically use and touch to be mostly Chinese? And even if that's not true for the United States, that could be substantially true for Latin America, Africa, and even wealthier places like Japan, as well as Europe. And they seem to be on track even to be in that scenario. And so I don't find it too meaningful for the West to take a look.”
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 think that is very valid to think about. And I think if I were having a China discussion, The West Coast, there would be among the venture capitalist class much more of a focus on thinking, well, how might China succeed? Because they, like me, are taking a look at the superstars and looking at the highly functional parts of the American economy as well as the Chinese economy. And what I am always asking is, well, what if they succeed on being the global center for automotives in the world?”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that China's economy is mostly pretty dysfunctional, and what we are seeing is that the state-owned enterprises morass is overtaking the highly functional private companies. But let me observe a East Coast flavor of thinking about China as well as a West Coast flavor of thinking about China. I split my time essentially between the coasts. And yesterday I presented to the editorial board of a major newspaper here on the East Coast. And I think that a lot of the flavors of the questions were of the sort that why doesn't China end up quite like Japan or the Soviet Union? Aren't there all of these reasons for China to fail, whether because of financial crises or the imploding property sector or the long-term demographics? You can go on and on about all of these problems with China.”
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 say lethamed horses, I would say, you know, the Japanese eat horses, and I think that would be a little bit better.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I don't know. I feel like what you're telling us all, the running thread of this conversation, Tyler, is that I'm saying that people need to get around and you're saying, let them eat cars. And I think that.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I think it is a very well established fact that TFP growth in China has been falling. And, you know, we don't have to get into how valid TFP measures are. But I agree with it, and I think that one can sort of see it in society. Now, my view of China is that 50% of China's economy is pretty dysfunctional, but 5% is going splendidly well. When I became a technology analyst working for Andrew Batson as well as Arthur Kroeber at GovCaltra Economics, my remit was to take a look at the top 5% of China's economy. And that is the area that I've always spent most of my time thinking about that goes from strength to strength. I would say that 50% of America's economy is also pretty dysfunctional. 50% of every economy is pretty dysfunctional. In America, I would just call that healthcare as well as the subways. I'm sorry to tease you, Tyler, but I know you.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dissolved like the historical predecessor is going to be a pretty important fact of not liberalizing and not democratizing.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Extensively studied the experience of Japan. And third and most importantly, China has studied the example of the Soviet Union. They think that Deng Xiaoping famously called Gorbachev an idiot. And Gorbachev, until he realized what he was doing, it became too late for him to really rescue the Communist Party. And so they really want to avoid the fate of Gorbachev. Now, if Gorbachev didn't exist, maybe they would have Gorbachev to themselves, but they have this example of knowing what not to do. Every day in Beijing, I feel like the Politburo and the rest of the Central Committee and Xi Jingping in particular feel like it is a life and death struggle to avoid the fate of political dissolution. They are really, really thinking in terms of apocalypse, much as Silicon Valley does today, to avoid being dissolved. And I think having that very intense Londonist focus on not being”
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 first point out that China is ruled by the Communist Party, that is a studied extensively the Soviet Union. In my view, China has studied three institutions in depth. The first institution is the Catholic Church. How do you organize doctrine claim to be thousands of years old and have a figurehead that everyone is expected to worship? And China is not simply the Communist Party. And the Communist Party is not simply the Catholic Church with a major figurehead. It is inflected with something like the Sicilian mafia, which enforces its Omerta throughout the entire organization. The second organization that China has pretty extensively studied is Japan and how to avoid the economic malaise that plagued it after the 1980s. Doesn't mean that it can avoid these problems, but it has”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the person who took power after him, Trendu Wan, was much, much more repressive than Park Chungi. And he shot students in the streets before he was deposed. And I'm not seeing a common story in the East Asian democratization story”
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 put on any hat you want to put on me, Tyler, but I would not put on the hat of a political scientist. Thank you. Call me a historian, call me a lawyer, call me a classical liberal instead. So I wonder the extent to which democratization in East Asia was highly contingent. Japan was the first democracy that was democratized by force through MacArthur's constitutional changes after it was occupied and after it had two nukes dropped upon its cities. How did Taiwan democratize Well Chiang Kai-shek first had to pass away and then his son Cheng Cheng Kua took over and that was also a fairly gradual process maybe that was probably the best case scenario of Taiwan democratizing how did South Korea democratize well Park Chung He was shot by his own CIH”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Shanghai lockdown was constitutional. It was announced by press release through the Health Commission, not through National Emergency by the city government. It's not amazing that the health authorities can simply announce by press release the most ambitious lockdown ever attempted by humanity. This is where I think lawyers could have a difference. I think that China will never be as nimby as the US. They're never going to get their dogs in a yard. I totally concede that. And I think for the most part, it is good that they practice some form of physical dynamism, which is unavailable to Americans in the 2020s. And so I think that on the margin, again, communian economist, if you must, Tyler, but on the margin, there should be a few more lawyerly instincts in China. What do you think?”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is because the court has captured the entirety of the intelligentsia through the administration of the exams. And if you wanted to get very far in Chinese society, you had to do very well on these imperial exams and no one gets far in court by advocating for constraints on imperial power. And so I am interested in having any sort of liberal checks and balances call me a classical liberal if you must, Tyler, but let's have some constraints on government power. And so I think that China would definitely be better if there were some ability of people in the countryside, rural folk, who were able to resist these posses of thugs reaching into a woman's most intimate parts to force them to have an abortion. I think that it would have been better if the Chinese were able to resist parts of zero COVID because a spokesperson of the National People's Congress once wondered whether”
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 name all of these popes and ask you to distinguish their characteristics. So I agree that it is definitely the case that religion has been an essential part of the West and it has not been an essential part of China, that China did not have an independent religious authority that can claim transcendent authority to interpret the affairs of the world. And the emperors did not allow any of these religious orders really to take root and claim higher authority than their own imperial power, that there was no landed bloodline aristocracy in China that was really able to resist the edicts of the emperor. And part of why I think that China has lacked a liberal tradition, which I understand as having constraints on the court imposed by either the church, other religious authorities, the aristocrats or merchants.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tyler, you can't bring up the string of popes without assessing some of them and giving us some of the merits and demerits of some of them. Were there any really distinguished popes among these lawyers?”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More engineering so that we can have all of this mass transit to fix all of the broken manufacturing that the US has. And I would love for China to be 50% more lawyerly because the Communist Party does not respect individual rights. It strangles the creative impulses of young Chinese who are so funny they can meme with the best American youths. They have amazing TikToks and doughings as well. And I would like for the Communist Party to just leave people alone for a change. And so definitely China should be more lawyerly, but let's have America be slightly more engineering too.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Without even getting nationalized by the Trump administration. Pretty good job, guys. But the West Coast in America is the only region in the world that has produced several companies worth over trillions of dollars. And that is a really remarkable achievement. If you are a member of the rich in America, you can pretty easily transmute your wealth into some degree of political influence, especially as we can see now in the Second Trump administration. In China, it is really dangerous. If you become rich in Europe, it's hard even to get rich. But what I'm always pushing American elites is to consider that, yeah, if you are a wealthy person in Manhattan, you get to live in these skinny high rises that overlook Central Park. If you're in California, you have a giant home in Atherton, and that feels really good. But I want the subways to be less loud. I want mass transit to work better. Fine, let's improve the suburbs. And I think that what I would love is for the U.S. to be 20%.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love the lawyers myself, Tyler. So I think that the lawyers are great in all sorts of ways. But as I talked about with bioprosperity for the 0.01%, I think the fundamental problem with the US is that the US is great in a lot of ways, but it is especially great to be rich here. So we're recording on Halloween in 2025. Yesterday, NVIDIA became a $5 trillion company. That is amazing. That's pretty remarkable.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I understand some of these more as the bureaucratic incentives. So, I think that if you take the perspective of a civil engineer or a mechanical engineer, a lot of the social processes in China make a lot more sense in which they are, again, have so much desire to control the population that there is a term from Stalin being an engineer of the soul that Xi Jinping repeated in 2019. I think there is a social element of engineering. And as I write about the one-child policy, I think that this is pretty distinctive in East Asia, that no one else, that there were birth planning policies, certainly in Japan, as well as Korea and Taiwan, but no one went so hard against the countryside as China did. That if we take a look at zero COVID also, that obviously East Asia had a pretty extensive pandemic control policies, but again, the China went quite a lot harder at some of these.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“PPE grads. I think that we can understand the engineering variable mostly because of how much more China has done relative to Japan and South Korea and Taiwan.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, Japan, a lot of lawyers in the top leadership and even What exactly was the leadership of Hong Kong? Well, a bunch of British civil servants.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pandemic in which people were unable to leave their Shanghai apartment compounds for anything other than getting their noses and mouths swapped. I write a little bit about how if you take the rail outside of major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, you hit farmland really, really quickly. And that is in part because the Communist Party assesses governors as well as mayors on their degree of food self-sufficiency. So cities like Shanghai and Beijing have to produce a lot of their own crops, both grains as well as vegetables as fruits, as well as fruits as well as livestock within a certain radius so that in case there's ever a major devastating war, they don't have to rely on strawberries from Mexico or strawberries from Cambodia or Thailand. And so there's a lot of farmland allocated outside of major cities. And so I think that will prevent suburban sprawl. And you can't control people if they all have a yard as well as a dog, right? So I think the”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How about never? I'm not expecting that China will have American style suburbs anytime soon, in part because of the social engineering projects that are pretty extensive in China. So I think there is a sense in which Chinese cities are not especially dense. So Indian cities are much, much more dense. I think Chinese cities do not, the streets are not necessarily terribly full of people all the time. They just sprawl for quite extensively. But they sprawl in ways that I think the edges of the city still look somewhat like the center of the city, which there's too many high rises. There's probably fewer parks. There's probably fewer restaurants, but almost nobody has a yard and a dog in their home. And that's in part because the Communist Party has organized most people to live in apartment compounds in which it is much more easy to control them. And we saw this really extensively in the”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prosperity for not just the 1%, but let's call it the top half. But within the top 0.1% and 0.01% of people who have amazing concierge doctors, who have all sorts of amazing health care that is customized for themselves, but then for the bottom half, it doesn't look very impressive at all. And especially in the early days, the pandemic, where the US underperformed by a lot of different bureaucratic measures, why don't we have bioprosperity for all rather than just for the 0.001%?”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, perhaps, but I am also thinking a little bit about the longer term, where I'm not a specialist on biotech. This is when I was living in China, I was studying things like semiconductors, clean tech, industrial robotics, and many other things. And I avoided learning too much about biotech. But there are plenty of people now who are extremely optimistic about China's development in biotech. They are doing a lot more manufacturing of a lot of different parts of biotech processes. And I am quite, you know, I think it is quite plausible that China Biotech will run other aspects of the China story in which they start from relatively simple projects like manufacturing and get much better at R&D. You're absolutely right that China avoided the better vaccines for political reasons. But again, this is where I'm thinking a little bit about what is strange about the US to me is that what we have is bioproduction.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, here's where I want to be a little bit more of a financialized Law Street person to say shouldn't we look a little bit at the ratios and what did we get out of so much spending? The US spends so much on so many things and gets so little that we have the Second Avenue Subway costing something like eight times per mile than Madrid and Paris.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I am struck by the early pandemic experience in which every scientific health organization measured the US to be one of the And my colleague at the Hoover Institution, Phil Zellico, who was part of the COVID official study committee on thinking about how America responded well to the pandemic, what my colleague Phil Zellico would say is that the U.S. underperformed Europe by many, many measures, many poor countries. The U.S. underperformed. And so, you know, this is where I am thinking again about are we too optimistic here about the US healthcare sector”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't know. Should we be spending 35% of GDP on healthcare? Double our share? In 30 years, yes. That sounds like quite a lot.”
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 a lot, right? That's a lot. That feels too high to me. I feel like we should be ringing better efficiencies out here. Now, I think a lot.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Donald Trump is very intent on upsetting a lot of key allies. Now, maybe they won't be so upset that they don't follow American edicts, but at least I would have a little bit of hesitation about the strength of American alliances in the wake of Trump. So if I were a central planner, I would say, are we building enough power? Are we making sure that there's enough water here? Are we making sure that we're managing the potential political backlash among a lot of NIMBY residents, including in Virginia, who are getting the bulk of data centers, who may not necessarily like a lot of the information out there about water use and electrical use. And I'm not sure if Silicon Valley is managing public opinion very well. There's a lot of what people call misinformation out there about how much water these data centers use. And so I think that I would like to invest in a much broader basket of technologies, not just data centers, that there has to be much more of everything else. Why don't we throw in better subways and light rail in there 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
“Yes. Yes. Okay. Well, maybe it's not the final technology, but it seems to be, as you say, the most important technology that is going to be pretty defining. And I agree that it has been actually extremely impressive that the US has built a lot of data centers, a lot of trillions of dollars invested. If I were a central planner here, I would ask, well, what do data centers need? Well, they need a lot of electrical power. And the U.S. is not invested enough in electrical power. This year alone, China will build about 300 gigawatts of solar, and the US is on track to build 30 gigawatts of solar. Right now, there's 33 nuclear power stations under construction in China. There's zero under construction in the US. Now, you're going to tell me that we're going to fix this with a smaller nuclear power. We're going to fix this with geothermal. Maybe we'll fix this with gas.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, I agree that the US has been doing amazingly well in terms of data construction buildout in particular. I think we can debate the premise of whether AI is going to be the sharp tip of the spear to be almost essentially the final technology in which we don't need much more technology after this one.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of their self described humiliations as not possessing technology when the European imperialists as well as the Japanese fascists made incursions into China because they did have technology. And so I think they are going to continue investing in all of these different things. I think there's just so much competition among the industrial companies in China, as well as so much bureaucratic incentive among the state-owned enterprises and the civil engineers who are always planning a next big subway station, a next big high-speed rail link that they will continue to invest in all of these things. And this is where I think the engineering mindset is a little bit more part of the process.”
2025-12-03 · Conversations with Tyler · Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source