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God daddy, these people talk as much as you do!
Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning.
Hey everybody. So it's Razib I guess I'm recording this for Unsupervised Learning, I don't know where else we're gonna post this. So whatever.
We could co release.
Yeah, we can co release. We can do Manifold Unsupervised. We can do it. I'll send you - I'll send it to you. So, yeah, we're just starting, and we are actually IRL. I'm sitting approximately like six feet from Steve Hsu, a friend of mine, I've known him now for - we've known each other for a while now. I mean, IRL, 2005?
Early, 2000s yeah,
There are people listening to this who were in elementary school, maybe even in maybe even preschool. Who knows? You know, there's some precocious people out there. So we are aged men who have seenmany things
I'm sure this is the same for you. But one of the coolest things is, like, somebody comes up to you and they're like, you know, when I was in high school, I was this nerdly smart kid, but you know, I learned so much from reading your stuff online, and, wow, you're old.
Yeah? I mean, it's a little different for me and you now, because, like, you're married and I'm not, so that's all I'm gonna say. But yeah, it's great to be around and be a commentator for a while, and you've talked about a lot of different things. And I think one thing that's similar between us is we have a lot of different interests, even though we have, like some foci that are, like, repeated, I think. And what I want to talk to you about today, I mean, mostly, like, we could go on to other things, like, we have finite amount of time. Because when Steve and I just go and we just rap, it's just like, one thing to the other, right?
Oh for hours and hours -
Yeah, butI want to ask you about the People's Republic of China and its economy and its cultural influence and stuff like that. Because I'm not going to use whether you're a China bull or a China bear. Okay, I'm not gonna say that, but when I follow your Twitter feed, your social media and some of your commentary, I am impressed by China. And then there are other people. Let's say that you're, I don't know if you're quite the anti Peter Zeihan, because I think that's insulting you. But , I think those of you who know Zeihan's stuff, qnd he says weird things like, you know, indicative of a non quantitative mind, like the Han race is going to be extinct by the end of the 21st Century. I mean, that's just like the numbers, don't - I mean, I don't know. Like, are hundreds of millions of people at the least extinct? No, that's not an extinction level event, anyway. So, that sort of hyperbole does kind of annoy me. What I like about you, Steve, whether you agree or disagree, is like you bring the receipts, so to speak. You bring the facts. I guess the first thing that I want to ask is, we know that China has a demographic "problem", quote, unquote, in terms of its fertility is not even below replacement. It is now, you know, the one child policy is real in a way that it wasn't when the one child policy was real. And this is the East Asian fertility collapse, which has been happening in other East Asian nations, but also the worldwide fertility collapse that's been happening from everywhere,. From I don't know, South India, to South America, to the rural United States. And it's happening everywhere. So, you know, this is not a Chinese thing, but this idea that China has a massive demographic problem. I just went to a talk that you gave here. We're at the manifest conference in Berkeley, and you were talking about how people don't really understand that this is a thing for let's say the moderate term future instead of the near future. Can you talk about that? Just to make it clear to people out there.
Yeah. So the typical woman today in China only has about one kid, and so if you do very simple math, you might say, wait, if we wait long enough, they're only gonna have half as many people, right? So that's a kind of demographic extrapolation, but which assumes this current situation continues for the next 20 years or so. The kids that will enter the labor pool are already born, so there's no guessing about that. So we know the demographic situation that will prevail in China for the next 20-25, years, regarding the labor market, and it isn't a big problem. And one of the reasons is not a big problem is because they went in the last 20-30 years from only 5% of the say, 19 year olds, being able to go to college to now 50-60% are able to get tertiary education. So you don't just care about the total numbers in the labor pool. You care about their capabilities and their productivity. So most people who study this carefully, would say that the Chinese labor pool will become much more productive and capable over the next 20 years. But after that, if they don't solve this TFR1 problem, they are going to start having very, very small cohorts of people entering the workforce, and that could be a problem. But of course, like that kind of extrapolation gets into like, Where will AI be at that stage? Where will robotics be, etc.
Well, you know, we are old enough to be on the tail end of the worry about overpopulation and the Population Bomb which, you know, the reality is a lot of boomers still are worried about that because they don't mentally update. But those of us who are following demographics know that, because that's a joke. We have, like, below replacement fertility in much of the developing world, like even in Africa, it's converging to replacement. I'm just saying even in Africa, because people are always like, oh, or our, Nigerian future, but even that might not come about. So we have a much different situation demographically, in terms of the parameters of growth or lack of growth than we had a generation or so ago. So this is a general problem.
Yeah, I'll just add though, that most people who are thinking about the US / China competition, they're generally thinking about the next 10 or 20 years. It's very tough to extrapolate geopolitics further than that, and so they're - you know, I don't know if Zeihan is making some assertion about what's going to happen in next 10 or 20 years regarding demographics. I think he's just factually wrong. It's a longer term issue.
I mean, going back to, like, the year 2000 and around the turn of the century, there was a lot of stuff, you know, the Coming Collapse of China. It's like a meme. It's a joke now.
Gordon Chang,
Yeah, Gordon Chang. And so the issue that I have with that is, every year that it kept not coming to pass, I was like, okay, you know what? Maybe we don't understand some, you know, these people don't understand something deeply about what's going on here, because China keeps not collapsing, right? So the Coming Collapse of China is like, we're about, like, 20 years past due. It looks like, I don't think it probably will not collapse in like, the way that that was predicted then. There's things we don't understand. You were asking about college and tertiary education and like that does add productivity, I t does add skill. On the other hand, we also know that there's a signaling value of education. So can you talk about the quality of the Chinese educational system in terms of these college graduates, like, what skills do they have? Because we know in the United States a lot - I mean, we know because we live in the United States and we meet quote, unquote college graduates, and the median quality of the college graduate has gone way down because the human capital input has gone way down as it's expanded across the population. Tell us about China
So there are measurements of the level of education, the level of skills across different countries. So a very well known one is called PISA, which is kind of by the OECD. And there you actually find that the fraction of kids who are graduating from Chinese high schools that have what would be considered very advanced math skills in the United States is quite high. So if you're trying to source people who know enough linear algebra, multi variable calculus, probability and statistics and some coding in order to work in AI, they're actually in much better shape than we are. It's much more common for kids to graduate with that kind of knowledge than here. Now, anecdotally, if you talk to professors who maybe travel in China, talk to their colleagues, you know, I might have a long standing relationship with a physics professor at a Chinese University, and you know, no one data point, just that one guy's opinion, is determinative. But if you talk to enough people, you get a general impression of, like, how things are going. And I think the idea in China is that, in the past, they were so poor, lots of talented people were not able to go to college. Now they're at a point where, you know, maybe arguably, too many people are going to college, like here. But nevertheless, it means that if you are a very talented young person, you probably are going to get your shot. And so that means they're able to fully draw on their population to, you know, to produce AI researchers and physicists, yeah.
I mean, I think what you're getting at here is, what I always tell people is, a lot of life, a lot of the world, a lot of society, is a matching problem. And there are, there were, in the past, extremely talented people who just didn't have the opportunity. I think we understand why. I mean, Isaac Newton's father was probably at most semi literate. And we know enough of the quantitative genetics that Isaac Newton's father was probably a really bright guy, but he was never given literacy, and so he never realized his potential.
Yeah. I mean, this Ramanujan story, you know, guy, absolute mathematical genius. If he hadn't written a letter, you know, to I think it was Hardy in the UK, he would have just no one would ever have heard that name.
He would have stayed a clerk somewhere, yeah.
And so that is more similar to the situation that prevailed in China, say, 30 years ago, when they were poor. Now it's just not plausible. Sure, there are always kids who slide through the cracks, but most kids in China actually get a pretty good K-12 education, and they're pretty the ones who like math or like quantitative stuff science generally, are pretty well prepared for college, probably much better prepared than a lot of American kids.
Well, what do you say to people who have been complaining that in terms of comparison of PISA scores, the Chinese have been consistently skewing their results to say like areas like Shanghai and whereas like, if you go to Gansu, the PISA scores would not nearly be as good.
Yeah, very good question. So the regions in China that have participated in PISA is not the whole country. It's some sort of tier one cities and some provinces which are fairly large. I mean, I think the total integrated number, the sort of total catchment of population where the 15 year olds were tested for PISA in China is, I think, several 100 million people. So it's not actually a small population, but it could be disproportionate or unrepresentative of the total for China. Now, those regions that were tested scored extremely high on PISA. So they were higher even than the highly developed East Asian countries, right? So I think a more reasonable thing to adopt for, like, what if you had to do a nationwide, sort of average PISA performance in China is you could take a place like Macau? Okay? Now, most Westerners, they don't know what Macau is, okay. Macau is a former Portuguese colony across the bay from Hong Kong. It has no tradition of excellence in academics. It's basically a giant - it's like, kind of like Las Vegas. It's a big casino town. And so like Macau. If you just took the Macau performance on the PISA and you said, okay, the Chinese are going to be, like, kind of close to Macau. Macau is also probably pretty close to, like, Taiwan and some other countries. That's already enough for you to conclude that when you go out in tail and you say, Okay, kids who in the US would be top 1% in math ability or score on the Pisa. How many of those kids are there in China? There could be 5x or 3x the number of kids in China per capita who are who are at that level of ability. So someone who's good enough to do a good engineering degree in the United States, there might be five times as many kids per capita, or three times as many kids per capita in China at that level. Now you might say that's crazy, Steve, that's crazy talk. How could that be? Well, a while ago, I just happened to notice that my - I live in Michigan, and one year Michigan, they don't always do this, but I guess they've started doing this. They required every graduating senior to take the SAT. I think just because they punted it on -
Natural experiment,
Yeah, they punted on other educational assessments, and they decide, ah, let's just make them take the SAT. So we have a completely population representative set of scores for all the kids in Michigan. And actually, there are a few other states in the US that have done this. So you can just ask, like, well, Asian Americans, like, if you look at the top 1% white kid in Michigan - are Asian Americans, like, three to five times as many of them per capita scoring at that level? Well, yeah, actually, it's true, right? So there's no divergence between the estimates of what we think is going on in China and other sources of data about educational performance
Yeah. I think first, for some of the listeners that are more deep in the lore of this stuff, the implicit assumption here is like, Well, okay, well, the Eastern Chinese seaboard has like, all the cognitive performance. Whereas if you looked at the deep interior, oh, would go back down to say one like IQ 100. Basically, the East Asians on general intelligence they're about, like a third of a standard deviation higher than, like, say, Western Europeans. And the idea is, like, well, actually, that's like an artifact. And there's, there's really no evidence of this, partly, just because, you know, some of the diaspora communities are not very highly selected, and they do the exact same performance, right? So if you check over, maybe not overseas Chinese. Maybe like the Taishanese community in the United States. They are the ones that are responsible for the model minority, which was an idea that originally showed up in the late 1950s and early 1960s actually. And these are based on predominant Chinese, some Japanese, and they're the descendants of peasants, peasants and laborers. And they were still doing well, and they started to have greater college performance, you know? And so it's not just like selection. That's basically the idea people have.
So one hypothesis is that Asian Americans do well because they're highly selected, and the home population is not nearly as impressive. To be totally honest. I think this may apply to South Asians. So there's evidence that the South Asians in the US are not very representative and highly selected relative to the general population, but I don't think it's actually true of East Asian countries. So another way to test this is just to look at province by province test score data in China. And it is true that some of the eastern provinces score a little bit better than the other ones. But there's no feeling in China like someone says, like, Oh, you're from province X, you must be dumb. There's no stereotype like that in China. So like, if you ask Chinese people like, oh, are all the smart people living in Zhejiang, they would just be scratching their head, like, what are you smokingMan? Like, I never heard anyone say anything like that -
Maybe the greedy people,
Yeah, maybe the greedy people. They might say, oh, there are a lot of clever business people and scholars from Zhejiang, but they wouldn't say like there's a big gap between Zhejiang and all the other provinces. I mean,
I do know the North Chinese think that South Chinese, especially like Cantonese, are hot headed.
Yeah.
When I was in grad school, I TA'd a lot of Chinese students, and I would ask them where they were from. And one time I paired Cantonese girl with a girl whose family is from Beijing. And I was just like, Are you stressed out about her because she gets a little angry? And she's like, Yeah, because, you know, there's, she's Cantonese, youb know
So you, you probably know this. I'm sure you know this, and maybe your listeners know it as well. But there's a, there's a line above which it's predominantly wheat farming,
Yes.
And below that latitude, it's rice. And rice farming, I think, is somewhat more labor intensive and requires, requires a little more collectivization.
Yeah, coordination, yeah, communal coordination.
And so there have been experiments done where there are counties which are near that boundary, where climactically, they could plant rice or they could plant wheat, but And historically, have done one or the other, and they have found persistent personality differences. So it does seem possible that activity A rice farming shapes the heritable or adaptive personality type in a certain direction, and wheat the other way. So this north, south gradient could be, actually, there could be some genetic basis for this, don't cancel me. I mean,
I would never. I would never. No, you. The thing is, like, the dead cannot be killed. You've already been killed. Steve, so I'm unkillable. Yeah, you're unkillable now. You're a zombie. Yeah. I mean, it is interesting. So the wheat, basically, some of it. Peter Turchin was an author on one of these papers, if I'll probably put a link in the in the show notes. And basically, wheat people in wheat farming areas are more individualistic, whereas the really strict Chinese clan structure and the hyper patrilineal tendencies are actually more typical of southern Chinese, southeast Chinese in particular, which are the Chinese that most non Chinese know, because overseas Chinese are about 90% Cantonese and Fujianese. Like those two provinces for various historical reasons that actually go back like 1000 years, tend to get, tend to provide most migrants, is the word we use today, to the rest of the world. Going back to China, and in terms of its economic capacities, I guess the question that I have is like, you know, China number one? Is it number one economically already? I haven't kept track of all the GDP, PPP, all these calculations. And also, like, I'm gonna just put it out there, what is up with the Chinese government, like getting rid of statistics?
So I think the getting rid of statistics thing is, you know, occasionally some very embarrassing things, like, because of the housing bubble bust there, the youth unemployment rate was too high. And the government didn't want to really focus attention on that, so I think they basically suppressed those annual statistics that they otherwise would release. When you compare the size of two economies, there's a question of whether you want to use the exchange rate - So imagine you produce something which is worth 10 RMB, and you want to ask, like, well, but I want to compare this to the production of some other thing which is valued in dollars in the United States. And what conversion factor should you use? And so there's something called the sort of nominal or FX conversion rate, which is, you just look at the spot, kind of average spot price between dollar RMB, and then you use that to convert if you do that, then the Chinese economy is still smaller than the US economy. But a more sophisticated thing is you look at a similar basket of goods that say everybody needs. And of course, like, the way you choose this basket somewhat affects the answer, but you find some like, reasonable basket of goods that everybody needs. You say, like, well, how much of this could they buy in China, and how much of this could they buy in the United States? And that's called the Purchasing Power Parity conversion. If you use a Purchasing Power Parity conversion, the Chinese economy is maybe 30-35% larger than the US. On other measures, like,how much electricity they produce, or how much steel they produce, it could be like 2x or even more. So I think it depends on your purpose. Like, what do you what are you going to use this metric for? If the metric is for, like, who would win a prolonged military confrontation where you have to manufacture a lot of physical things, then the Chinese economy could easily be, like, 2x larger than the US, right? And so in the history books that we all read, like about World War Two, some clever historian looked back and said, like, man, the Japanese were crazy to take on the United States. And actually the Germans and Italians too, because you just looked at the productive capacity of the US, and it was clear that if the US got in the war and got serious about it, they were eventually just gonna swamp the Axis powers just from
Just grind it out. You grind it out,
Yeah - But, like, somehow people don't, like, don't realize, like, if you do that exact same kind of calculation, right now, it's pretty obviously China can grind us out.
Yeah. I mean, I will say that I - Okay, the way I will say it is, I think that, you know, for people of the STEM background in the United States, both of us have heterodox political views. I political views. I will say that I've been like, I don't know if livid is the right word. I've been pretty frustrated with the behavior of the Trump administration in terms of our international coalitions and alliances, because it just seems, by the numbers, we can't win a one on one, and so it seems extremely retarded to alienate all of the allies that we would need for the great encirclement, because that's what I was anticipating. Now, I'm just a simple geneticist. I don't understand geopolitics. So I'm like, do I not understand something? Is that's what's going on? Because this is the only way that it's going to have a kind of resolution to the Thucydides' Trap, have some of balance of powers, because I think all of us, and there's, there's more than me and you we have, like, a little bit of a studio audience, I think all of us don't want war. War is bad, but humans are stupid and we do get into wars. We do kind of back ourselves into wars. And so I don't really understand, like, what's going on with America's geopolitics. I do have friends in the Trump administration, and some of them, and I think you alluded to this in your earlier talk - Some of them naively just assert the claim that America is better and will win without any data to back it up. They just believe in the spiritual power, I believe, of the white race if I want to be entirely honest against the yellow horde. And so, I mean, that's the subtext. I think that that is there. And, you know, I'm just a little bit skeptical of it, I guess is what I would say.
So, I think I agree with you that if we were playing a game like Risk, but more realistic, okay, so imagine we're playing a realistic war game over the next 10-20 years of geopolitical conflict, the best strategy for the US would be to build alliances. Because otherwise the aggregate, quote, "power" of the US is actually not enough. And so, although I'm not a Biden supporter, I think the Biden guys understood this and tried to do it. The Trump guys are thrashing around a little bit. They're pissing off everybody. And so I, I guess the part that Trump guys did understand is they didn't want Russia to be on the other side. They wanted to bring Russia into our side. So they did try to do that, not successfully. So, but I don't feel that US foreign policy actually, right now is in a good state.
Well, one thing that I used to say is, like, I feel like American cultural power is very strong and hegemonic, but it kind of is overhanging our economic and geopolitical power, and I think that's misleading us. Do you think that that's true?
Yeah, so actually, great. So yeah, it's a great point. And then, actually, I didn't address something earlier you said, which you said, like, you know this, this for people who closely follow the US, China competition. There's a term called copium. And a lot of people who I think are unrealistic about the actual situation, are just high on copium. And one form of this copium, which people generally won't express explicitly, although some like sort of actual explicit racialists, would express it openly is like, yeah, these Asian guys, they're not going to make the next big invention. So let me just make another big invention. We'll beat them or something. Or they can't fight wars. Or, you know, there's all kinds of crazy copium that makes some people irrationally confident that, oh, well, America always prevailed in the past. Why wouldn't we prevail in the future? Right? So it's that kind of thinking. It's very annoying, and some of it, there could be an actual racialist component, I think, to that way of thinking, not necessarily, but I think, I mean -
It's a range. I mean, some people are very explicit about it, but there's a lot of people, it's kind of there, but they don't really, could be subconscious. Yeah, they don't even, they don't even, like, think about it. It's just like these, like ant people, right? In their tiny cities,
And like, you know, how could they win?
Well, I mean, part of is we don't go there. Most Americans have not been to China, and if you see it with your own everyone I haven't gone, but everyone who's gone are just like, we don't understand right?
Now, the other thing I wanted to mention, which again, I'm sure you understand this, and many of your listeners, is that soft power is very malleable. So once you perceive that you know Country A is a rich advanced country. Oh, they made Deep Seek. They make these wild EVs that are better than Teslas. Suddenly you can pivot from like, Wait, they're just slave labor workers who sew T shirts for me. And why would I be interested in what's hot on Chinese soap operas or internet or KTV or, I mean, uh, singing, you know, suddenly you can flip. You can have a younger generation suddenly, like, really interested, like, what's hot in the Chinese internet? Or like, Oh, I'm really into these Chinese fashions or something. And most people have status quo bias, so they're just like, oh, I grew up in this world where everything cool had to come from Europe. And yes, there's some cool Japanese stuff, but everything else sucks. And they just assume that's like, the natural state of things and will just persist forever. But they don't realize, like, these things have flip flopped many times. And it wasn't that long ago when lots of things, stuff that came back from China to Europe, like tea and porcelain and all these other things, were actually super fashionable among the elites in Europe. And so, like -
There was a China craze in the early 18th century,
Absolutely. So these scenes can flip. And so, like, Yes, right now, for sure, America dominates in Soft power. But on the other hand, like, is Tiktok one of the dominant global platforms for young people? It probably is. Are those Chinese like, kind of influencing what people think and see via Tiktok? Yeah, they kind of are. So I could easily imagine the soft power situation changing drastically over the next 10 or 20 years.
Yeah. So one thing I would say here is, you know, when you talk about evolutionary process, there's biological processes that are constrained by, you know, Mendel's laws of segregation and whatever assortment. It's very, very constrained process compared to cultural evolutionary processes, which can exhibit much more protean, you know, the whole idea of punctuated equilibrium. Stephen Jay Gould promoted, there was a lot of issues with it. As actually, like, informative scientific theory, but as a descriptive theory, when it comes to culture, it's actually, like, pretty descriptive. So, for example, like this is, like, we're not old enough to remember this, but you know, 1965 was much closer to 1950 than it was to 1970. Like, there was a period between 1965 and 1970 in particular, probably like 67 and 69 like those two years. So a radical transformation of American culture that we, we're both Gen X, we don't remember it, but the boomers tell us. So some of the - most of the boomers are actually pretty young, but some of the older boomers were there and the Silent Generation were there, and they saw things went from like 1930s like, enforcement of morality on movies to, like, modern contemporary within, like, two years,
Deep Throat,
Yeah, yeah, that sort of stuff. Okay, you said it. But I mean, that sort of stuff, and, like, what some people have always said, some boomers have told me is like, we just expected that to happen every 10 years, and it didn't happen. And It didn't happen. At some point it's gonna happen again. We are gonna see another summer of 1968 etc, etc. Part of it, though, might be a little dampened because of demographic trends with the baby booms. You know, we don't remember how many young people were alive in the 60s. In 1970 the average age of the US was, I think, 27-28 Yeah, today we're 40, you know. And so that's gonna create some differences in terms of the dynamics. But, yeah, I mean, culture can change very fast. And I think we've seen this in even in the last like, it hasn't been as widespread across society, but little things like the emergence of trans and then it looks like it's coming, like decrease. These things are very volatile, and people can be very fickle. So I think, descriptively, candidly, I am actually underwhelmed by the influence of Chinese pop culture in the 2020s. I mean, compared to South Korea, you know, my daughter, my tween daughter, is big fan of K Pop South Korea is like, I mean, it's got like, 60 million people, but still, you know, but it's focused on that, and it's expanded that culture.
In terms of liberalization of markets and economic development. I mean, roughly speaking, the Asian Tigers like South Korea and Taiwan, they're kind of 20 years ahead of China. But of course, China's like, actually accelerating. They're kind of -
They have economies of scale and agglomeration that they never did,
Yeah. So they're actually accelerating a little bit faster than those guys did. But still, you would expect, like, yeah, the for China to catch up with South Korea in that kind of soft power production is probably going to take another 10 years.
Okay? I mean, 10 years, not that long though.
Yeah, but a lot it's going to change in 10 years. I mean, if you look at Chinese cultural production 10 years ago versus today, it's night and day.
How so?
If you go to China and you're like, you just some regular restaurant, not some super fancy restaurant, and you look at the menu, like, who did the graphic design of this menu? Because it's beautiful. Or, like, just the decor in the restaurant, or, you know, everything. The way they design their cars, even. So, there's been tremendous advancement in just all these sort of esthetic, cultural things in China, you know, over the last 10 years, and it's just accelerating. Noah was asking me about this because he -
Noah Smith,
Yeah, Noah Smith, who was on the panel that we were just, we just did out here at manifest. He was asking me because he wrote a piece on his substack about how, you know, the way that they do the urban planning in China is at these huge apartment blocks, and then, you know, they have good metro systems, but the scale is kind of in little bit inhuman. I don't particularly like it. And he didn't like it, and he was asking me, he's like, are is there cool architecture that not, not like museums and fancy buildings, but is there cool architecture that people live in in China? And I said, Here, just look at this channel, and it's like a YouTube like channel. I mean that the YouTube equivalent in China, but a lot of the videos people have put on YouTube now - And you can see, like, people who made money in China, you know, the way they remodeled their houses and apartments is, like, very cool, like, very high esthetic taste, all that. But you wouldn't know that as a Westerner. Even if you went as a tourist, you wouldn't know that as a Westerner, because you wouldn't necessarily go into somebody's home and see, like, all the stuff they've done. So all that is all that is changing pretty rapidly.
They gotta have Yo MTV, cribs, China,
Yeah, exactly. But this happened briefly, as you know, because of the Tiktok ban, people got on RedNote, and people started seeing, like, Wait, that. Your apartment. Like, that's your, wow, that's a wild looking rice cooker you got there. Or, ythat's really wild looking, like, somebody was saying, like, I saw this weird robot cleaning the window in the background of, like, we can't buy that here, there's this. You know, like this, these guys lived in, like, some skyscrapers. They had a huge glass wall overlooking the city, there's lik, a little robot going up and down, cleaning it, yeah? Like, well, we don't have that. How come you guys have that, right? So, so stuff like that, I think it's just easy to not understand what the actual situation is there, unless you you really spend a lot of time there.
Well, guess one question I would have in terms of China and the rest of the world is integration communication is, you know, one thing that I did not anticipate was how insular it seems like the Chinese internet is. And I think that's linguistic, right,
Yeah.
And do you think that that's going to kind of cause a permanent barrier?
No,because AI,
Oh, that's fair.
See, all bets are off. Like, if you think about it, we're very close to the universal translator in Star Trek. So earbud, I talk, I'm speaking Hindi - You're hearing it come out in Spanish, right? So we're very close to that. And when RedNote got all these Tiktok refugees coming in, their tech team right away deployed an English, Chinese translator in the comments. So in the very beginning, people were having to cut and paste, like, what? Like, oh, I posted this video on red note. I joined red note, and all these Chinese people are commenting on this thing I posted, but now I have to cut and paste the comments into Google Translate or something to figure out what they're saying. But the Red Note engineers, like, within a day or two, they implemented Auto Translate, and then it was like, almost being, you know, like, like, having comments on an all English social media site, because, you know, translation not perfect but you could clearly tell what people were saying.
I mean, this is the kind of thing where we take - So, you know, Peter Thiel, about like, 15 years ago, had this thing, There's no innovation. We don't have flying cars, although people are working on flying cars now. But some of the things that we take for granted today would be so incredible five years ago. Or, Waymo, which I What's the Chinese version of Waymo?
DiDi Well, oh, sorry, Waymo - So DiDi is Uber. In terms of robot taxis there are multiple Chinese companies that have robot taxis.
And are they? Like, how common are they?
I would say it's similar to the situation with Waymo maybe slightly behind, because now Waymo is expanding
And Waymo has been around since the late 2000s
But like in many Chinese cities, there'll be a zone where Robo taxis are okay, yeah, like one of the hedge fund guys that I interviewed who he lives in Shenzhen, Taylor Ogan. I've interviewed him on my podcast. He takes a robo taxi to work every day. He lives in Shenzhen,
Yeah, okay. I mean, if you get in a Waymo, because Waymo is in Austin, there's Waymo all over SF. They're like crawling with them. They're actually more popular than Lyft now. They surpassed them in December. So it's not talked about it. It's something that's so natural that people adapt to it so quickly, it doesn't make a big wave. And so I think that there's some of these technologies that we're encountering right now globally, and they're percolating into our lives, and we take them for granted, and we don't talk about them, and it's like we're going through a massive transformation, right?
Yeah, so our friend Tyler and his sponsor, Patrick Collison, they're very interested in something called progress studies. They actually sponsored, I think, conferences on this. And the question is, why have we not had faster progress? Why are we stagnant and stuff like this? And I always used to argue with those guys about this, because I used to say, like, Are you sure we're stagnant? Because, like, yes, our cars are not much faster than they were 50 years ago, and the planes are not much - That's physics, right? It's, there's some basic physical constraint, right? But on the other hand, like, we can now nano engineer features on microchips, you know, that are a million times smaller. And, like, does that count as progress? And now I think, I hope I'm getting Tyler. I think he's kind of thrown in the towel because he's so excited about AI that he's like, Yeah, I guess you're right, because all this, like, nano technology finally culminated in this huge brain that I talk to every day. And so like, now, are you sure you want to say that we're stuck and there's no progress? Because clearly, like, no, there has been progress. Like, maybe you weren't measuring it.
Let me - This is, like, unrelated to the China thing. I will tell you something that I do with AI that, like, I couldn't do very quickly or very easily, yeah. So, you know, I'll write a post about Indo-Europeans, yeah. And then what I will do is, like, I'll open up because I pay for, like, Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, and one of the others, whatever, grok, I guess technically, I pay for it through Twitter premium. And what I'll do is I'll be like, give me the Lord's Prayer in Sanskrit, old Persian, um, Albanian, and transliterate it so that I so it's in like, Roman. And then, like, I'll use that as my example. Now I could, like, pay someone to do that. It would be expensive, and it'll take a long time. I do that in literally, like, three minutes now, you know. And these are, like, the things that I don't know how that's going to be an economic you know?
So here's the problem. I don't want to get too wonky, but like, this is the thing I argue with real economists about all the time, is, like, their GDP measure - Let's imagine I invent a vaccine that cures disease X, but it, it's so cheap to make that I fucking sell it for 50 cents. Okay? Because I can make it at scale in huge vats. Yeah, it's like, well, you didn't really impact our GDP very much Steve, in fact, our GDP went down because all these doctors who provided expensive services to all these sick people, they don't have a job, they don't have to do that work now, and the guy just takes the vaccine, right? So like, I guess you hurt our GDP. And so similarly, like, if suddenly everyone on the planet decides the best use of my time is to scroll on my smartphone and talk to my AI, which I only pay $20 a month to do. It's not registered in GDP figures so much, but I did qualitatively change your fucking life, and you are showing your revealed preference by spending all your time playing with the gadget I gave you. Now, maybe I gave it to you cheaply, and so therefore the economists don't measure it as a GDP increase, but I did actually increase, like, maybe I didn't increase human flourishing, because maybe it's ultimately bad for you to have this toy. But I can tell what the apes like. ape like toy, yeah.
I mean, I always say, like, there are some people are like, Oh, where's our future? Like the future is here. You just, you take it for granted. Like, you don't know that you have a super computer in your pocket, bro, right?
Exactly, right? And so, and you spend all your time with that supercomputer,
Yeah, you love it.
And eventually it's super AI, and you're gonna spend all your time with it,
She's gonna be whispering to you,
Yes.
Well, okay, so going back to China, like, you know, we're kind of towards the tail end of the podcast, I want to ask you, like, not necessarily spicier questions, but just like candidly East Asian countries, they're obviously very different from each other. They got some beefs. We all know that. On the other hand, East Asian people also have similar cultures and kind of societies and maybe even personalities in some ways. Now the standard American western model would be like, Oh, well, it's because of Confucianism and Confucius and all this stuff. And, you know, that's ignoring the fact that, for example, in Japan, it was much less impacted by Confucianism than, say, Korea. But like, well, what's the difference compared, you know I'm saying? So, I mean, there's obviously, like, you know, you know, 1000s of years of separation and all these things. And I forget the guy's name, but there's, like, a young Asian American scholar who's publishing stuff about East Asian personalities. And I think a lot of the conflicts, not conflicts, but a lot of the misunderstandings peoples can have are just the way they behave and what they think what is normal. So for example, East Asians traditionally are, you know, they're not braggy people. South Asians are quite braggy. Like, anyone who works in tech in Silicon Valley, okay? Like they have observed this difference, yeah. And actually, like, I think candidly, like white Americans in particular are more comfortable with the South Asian way, because they are also a little bit like that. You know?
It's that Yamnaya thing.
I don't know what it is, but, like, you could say it, but, but it's a thing. Like, everyone notices it, like they know. Everyone knows, yeah, but in terms of, like, these sorts of differences, like, I mean, how deep do you really think they are? I mean, do you think that's?
So taking it first just as descriptive,yes. Among Asians, East Asians, there's a different attitude toward how outspoken one should be what's appropriate, and that even, I believe it even extends to Asian, East Asian Americans who grew up here.
To some extent, that's what I've seen.
Yeah. So it's a little bit persistent. I'm not ready to say, like, how much of it is heritable and how much of it is environmental, because Confucianism is actually a factor in this. Even if you weren't raised as a Confucian, it still kind of permeates the values of your parents. So, taking the standard thing, which seems to always be true, is like partially heritable, partially environmentally caused. This whole thing we talked about with the rice farming and the wheat farming, I don't recall whether they looked at people who, I think they did trace their heritage to one of those regions versus -
and they flipped,
Well, I think there's some evidence that that difference is it's not just okay. There was this difference in the community activity through agriculture, the type of agriculture, but I think there's some evidence that that is heritable. In other words, that difference in way of practicing agriculture actually got encoded in the genes somewhat, which, again, canceled me, but it's not my paper, it's somebody else's work. But it's plausible to me that this is the case, right? So, so there is that, I mean, personality traits are pretty heritable, yeah, on a purely technical level, for all the behavior geneticists out there, when you have. An imperfect instrument for measuring the phenotype. Okay, when I measure height, I do get your height within, like, a centimeter or an inch. Yeah. When I measure your personality, those big five measurements are very noisy. And so when you estimate the heritability, you have to correct for the noisiness of the measurement. And so if you correct for that, you find actually these personality traits are not just weakly heritable, they're actually highly heritable. And any parent who had a little kid knows this, because the kids come out very different from day one. And like, I don't think that's because of the environment in the womb. I think it's actually some heritable manifestation of personality and and so, yeah, I think obviously that could be something that is affected by drift or natural selection, and so different separated populations could have different distributions when it comes to personality traits.
I mean, I think about this sometimes, because I work in - I mean, you also do, we have private sector lives in business and corporate culture is a whole thing. And like, not to get into too many details, I try to keep that sort of stuff separate from whatever my podcasting persona. You know, if you have like, different branches, in like different locations, to some extent, you have to, just like, be open to accepting that they're gonna have somewhat different cultures based on where they are, based on who's in that office. And this is, like, frankly, a conversation that we've had to have where like, we're not going to have, like, a uniform corporate culture, because the people that live here are different than the people that live there. And there might be, like, here's a concrete example, not a real one for me - But if you're in the deep south and you have an office there, you probably don't want to schedule too many meetings on a Sunday, yeah, because people there, a lot of them go to church, you know. And it's just, it's not, like, imposed, but that's just their custom. Whereas, like, if you're on the West Coast, if you're an SF, it's not a big deal. You'll probably be like, people will be annoyed because they have to interrupt their hiking or something, you know. And so when I'm also thinking going back to like, the issues with, like, the bamboo ceiling, which just so you guys, know, like, there's this thing. Descriptively, East Asians tend to be like less common in management in the United States than compared to the technical level. I mean, I think the most plausible explanation isn't explicit discrimination, but it's this behavioral tendency
Comfort level within a particular corporate culture
because we all know like people who go high up in management the United States, and they are the most narcissistic, self promoting people. You know, whatever, whether they are literally sociopathic or not, you know exactly the type of person that's going to succeed in upper management United States. And that is not the stereotypical East Asia.
For a long time, the standard description that a CTO,
I'm notmaking any comment on all the South Asians.
I'm going to give you a comment. I'm going to give you something juicy on that a sec. But for a long time, the standard description that a startup, CTO, typically, an engineer would give about the CEO is, oh, we really we, you know, we have a great CEO. You know, he's a warm sociopath, yeah? You know, he has to have those sociopathic skills but he has to be able to exude warmth when he, you know. In terms of, like a grand unified theory ? This is a particular nichey question, but I know a lot of your listeners are probably interested in it. So why are there so many successful South Asian Americans in high management and not so many
Also in politics
Yeah, and politics as well. But you know, my interpretation of the patterns of migration are that if you're in India and you are among the elite, whether it's cognitive elite or socio economic elite, you're actually trying to get out, right? You're trying to come to the United States. You're kind of trying to come to come to the UK. And so that's a highly selected population that is the creme de la creme of Indian society. So they've suffered from a very big brain drain. In China, because they basically grew from a poor, shitty, backward, communist country to one of the top economies in the world over the last 30 years, there were many, many more opportunities for ambitious people who are East Asian, or, say, Chinese, to work in China than to come to the United States.
Get big in Alibaba.
Yeah. So first of all, the pools are different that are being drawn from. If you ask, like, who's gonna become CEO of us tech company, the pools are quite different because a lot more of the Chinese talent stayed at home, or if even went from Taiwan to China to work, that's very common. So that explains part of the effect of why there are more South Asian CEOs, for example. But the other one is, I think, due to, like, some intrinsic personality differences or comfort levels of expressing yourself in a certain way. And I think in the US system, the South Asian style works better than the East Asian style. Now, if you go to China and you go to a meeting, and some guy's like, talking the whole time, and maybe he's like, claiming, like, to have done something when his team hasn't actually finished it, that's like, the death sentence for you there. They're like this, you know, Tsong is not serious, because he's just talking all the time, and there's no substance. You know, everybody else is under promise over deliver. And like, That guy's dead. So it's a different system, and you you're gonna be you gotta have different personality types that advance in one system versus in the other system.
Yeah. Okay, so to loop it back as we close out, I want to ask, obviously, I think one of the things that you like believe, and like have talked about, and like we've alluded to this and talked about it, is Americans are a little bit like ostriches with their heads in the sand about the China issue. You know, we are sleeping. You know, do you think, do you think we will wake up? Or do you think we're going to have to be woken up?
I think that in government, people are taking the whole thing very seriously. Maybe to an extreme, because I think the one of the few things that there's bipartisan agreement on is anti China action, right? And so, like, we actually may go too hard against China. This is kind of my interpretation of what's happened recently. We go too hard. We ban the NVIDIA chips and all this other we ban semiconductor manufacturing equipment to go there, and we end up helping them, and we didn't actually stop their advancement. So that actually, I think, turns out to be not a best strategy. But in any case, I think people in government who have the job of like thinking about competition with China. They may not be perfectly calibrated, but they're serious about the problem. The average American, I'm not, I'm not sure how the average American thinks about all this stuff. And I think there's quite a big diversity, like someone who, you know, has traveled somewhere in the world, like even to Mexico and gotten to a BYD car. It's like thinking like, Wait, this is better than my car at home, and I could buy it in Mexico for $17,000 or something, what the f is going on? Whereas then you could have some like Maga guy who's like - Them Communist Chinese. We got to stop them at the border, you know. So there's just, I think, incredible diversity in what people think.
Wait, how often do you go to China anymore?
So with the exception, I'll say it this way, with the exception of the COVID years, when you couldn't really go, I would probably go at least once or twice a year.
I mean, you just said something like Communist Chinese and all that. I think Dikotter, like Frank Dikotter, wrote a bunch of great books on China. He said one of his arguments is that Americans and Westerners in particular, but Americans in particular, underestimate how communist the Chinese leadership still is, and think that it's all fake. Yeah. What do you think about that?
Well, it's a time dependent question. So the the sort of Shanghai clique that ran China in the around, say, the 2010 era, they were very open. They were actually very open to the Western ideas and all this other stuff. And Xi's group is diff very different, right? So she actually did Institute calm and prosperity. So one thing that, like people here are totally ignorant of, is, during the rapid development of China, lots of villages in remote areas were left behind. And, and they were just not developed very much. Like the road didn't go all the way to the village and, you know, and all the young people went to the city to work in a factory or something. So there was a lot of poverty or immiseration in the countryside. And Xi actually put a lot of resources into fixing that. So, like, you go to some remote town in China, you could even be in Tibet, okay, at extreme altitude, you know, like, wow, I have fucking amazing 5g coverage here. Like, super fast. Faster than you can have in downtown San Francisco. Like, somebody paid to put, like, a Huawei tower here. And they have, you know, so they built, they built a lot of infrastructure for, you know, the bottom 20% of the population. And now, is that communism or socialism? I guess it is because we wouldn't really do it in America. So in that sense, Xi really is a communist, right? But they understand they need to use market forces to for to develop the country. So once they choose a direction, like, we are going to electrify the economy, we're going to have electric vehicles, but then you have, like, 100 companies competing to build the best car and they drive the profit margins down to zero. So they have relentless, relentless capitalism going on there.
Well, I mean, but do they still? I mean, I'm just asking your impression, because, you know, sure you haven't asked them directly. Do you think they still believe that there's going to be a Marxist utopia?
No. I think there's like, from Xi's perspective, or the top party leadership, they may be like, trying to reinforce that, because the annoying meeting that you have to go to about Marxist thought is like, that's been reinvigorated under Xi, that that was kind of like decaying away under the old guard, old gang. But how many Chinese actually believe that stuff? I think it's not very many. I think the comment I made out there, which you might remember, is that a lot of the stuff that Americans are uncomfortable with about China is not it's not originating in Marxist thought. Or communism. It's originating in just plain nationalism, like, just like we're a great country now, we're not going to be pushed around, if we want to put a man on the moon, we're going to put a man on the moon, you know, Oh, you didn't let us participate in your International Space Station. Hey, we built our own space station. See, ours is actually better than yours. So that's just nationalism that has actually nothing to do with communism.
Okay, Okay, last question, then I think it's a good you set me up here. Would you bet right now, we're recording in the middle of 2025, would you bet right now that the Chinese will send someone to Mars first? Or do you think that we, quote, unquote, "we" will send someone to Mars first? Who would you bet?
It's a tough call, primarily because you got Elon, who's so focused on it
He wants to go back home. Yeah,
It's a tough call because I think they're spending an R and D, and their talent pool to do space stuff is actually exceeding ours, but because, on that one point thing, because Elon is so into it, it's tough to call, I think it's like a 50/50, thing. But like, in terms of, like, Moon Base, they're probably going to beat us to moon base, for sure. So,
Okay, so it's a Faustian game, like, it's on Elon's shoulders.
Hey, man, a lot of people think, like - again, this is, like the sort of tech cult thinking is like, oh, without Elon, where would we be? Like, government can't do anything in the United States. Without Elon, where would we be?
Well, I mean, what do you think about that?
I think that's overstated. Okay, yeah, even though I'm a fan of Elon accomplishments, but I think it's overstated.
Okay, yeah. re you happy to be American, though?
Oh of course. I mean, you know, it's so funny, because on X I will always get - if I point something out, like, hey, you know what? BYD is shipping a hybrid vehicle that has like, 2000 kilometer range, and it's too people like, what are you a CCP shill? Like, are they paying you to, like? And so, like, the current climate is that if you actually just make some factual statement about what's happening in China, you're going to be under attack.
Yes, that's bad. That's a bad comment.
So, for the record, I'm a patriotic American. I actually hope for the best for my you know, the people that I grew up with in Iowa, I had an incredible childhood in Iowa with wonderful people all white, pretty much,
You're sounding like Charles Murray.
Well, Charles Murray from Mason City. I forgot where he's from, but Davenport? Anyway. So yeah, we're Iowans, so like, that's the heart of America, man. And yeah, so I will always pull for those people. And you know, I feel that the average American has really not gotten a fair shake. That's why I voted for Donald Trump. So, yeah, no. So of course, I want America to do well, okay, but, but we have to do it the smart way. Yeah, yeah.
I think you know where we agree and, like, you know, like, we're here at the Manifest conference, yeah. I think one thing that you know, because, like, there's a wide range of political, well, not so much racial, but maybe sexual diversity. I don't know, the various types of diversity, you know, but, um, but, you know,
We have neuro diversity.
Yeah, we have neuro diversity. We have a lot of, we have a lot of viewpoint diversity. You know, what's the Decker guys here? Yeah, but you have to start with the facts. Yep, you have to start with the facts. And not close your eyes and hope. I'm not, like, I'm not, like, denigrating, like, religious people here, but it's like, you know, there's too much faith based thinking in the world. And like, what I like about talking to you is, like, you bring the facts. You're trying to understand the world as it is. We may have agreements about where we want to go, But setting that aside, we need to actually understand the facts. And I think that's why, you know, I hope that people get that out of this conversation. And, you know, I haven't been to China yet, partly because, like, COVID happened. I mean, there were, I was going to go to Asia right before COVID. And probably my life would be very different in some ways. If COVID didn't happen, it happened. That's a fact. That's a fact. I can't change that. We're on this trajectory, right? And so I'm talking to you because you've been there. You have, like, lived experience, whatever you want to say. And so, I hope that people take that from this conversation in terms of we're just trying to, like, understand the world as it is, and this is not no comment on what our values are, which might be totally different
Yeah, I think those things should, should be separated. And I think you heard me say during the manifest talk that I personally don't try to invest a lot, I don't invest a lot of time in trying to change someone else's value system or feels, because I think it's a waste of energy. It's very tough to move people Yeah, I'm happy if I can just introduce some new fact nto their thinking. Like, can you just update on this list?
You will never convince them. They will convince themselves,
Right. So, like, if I'm just like, go look this up and try to update on that fact, that's like, pretty much the best
I may do. You know, one thing is like, you know, like Nancy Pelosi, I don't agree with her politics. Great politician. When I say that people like, oh, you're a lib and I'm just like, No, she like,
This is hilarious. Yes, I totally agree with you.
What is she has done as a politician,
She's capable, right. Whether you like what she -
She is the 21st Century's in the US. Yes, she is arguably, currently the most impactful. Obamacare passed because of her. Not Obama because she was like, No, we're gonna pass this. He wanted a punt, right?
You know, the other analogy I often use is like you're watching a chess game, okay? And like, if you really understand chess, you might have a view as White is ahead, White has a dominant position, or, you know, whatever. If you allow your personal feelings for the guy playing White versus the guy playing Black to distort your analysis of who's ahead or what's the next bad move. You're a fucking idiot, right? Like, what? Who would accept that? Like, I really hate Bobby Fisher, and so obviously he's gonna lose his chess games. Like, fucking look at the pieces on the board and evaluate, right? But in our political, geopolitical discourse, we allow people to, like, not actually analyze the facts and the real situation, they just default to the feels.
Yeah, let's, let's take a bet, Peter Zeihan that there will be Chinese people in 2100 you're just BSing becauseyou know no one's gonna call you out. And let's keep it real. There's no skin in this game, you know. So just like, try to imagine that there is skin in the game. That's all we can do. So, I mean, I guess, like a close out here with a Unsupervised Learning Manifold. I was great talking to you, Steve. I will see you around at the conference.
Always a pleasure Razib. We're gonna party hard the next couple days. Is that right?
I don't want people to get the wrong idea about me.
