Josherich's Blog

Kyle Chan on the Future of US-China Competition — #94

I know this is sort of like a hackneyed term now these days, but I really believe that the areas that China is really focused on are the building blocks for the next generation of technologies, emerging sectors that are going to be not only sort of like the economic growth engines, the job engines of the future, but sort of broader progress is going to be built on that.

You know, AI, robotics, you know, all the stuff that we’ve all heard about. But I want to bring attention to some of those things, too. It’s not just today. It’s like the trend going forward that people need to pay attention to.

Welcome to Manifold. My guest today is Kyle Chan. He is a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University. He is interested in many of the themes that we discuss on this show, in particular, U.S.-China technology competition, AI, globalization, multipolarity.

Kyle, welcome to the show.

Great to be here.

Yeah, it’s great to have you. So, as I was just saying before we started recording, I’ve read a lot of your stuff. Two things I’d like to go over in some depth are the opinion piece you had in the New York Times recently, and also something on your Substack about industrial maximalism.

Oh, yeah. You’re a theorist at Peking University named, I think his name is Lu Feng.

That’s right. Those are two things I’d like to get into further on in the podcast. But the way I like to start my podcast is to learn a little bit more about you as a person.

So, I know that you studied economics at the University of Chicago, and then you did your PhD at Princeton in sociology. Maybe tell us about the development of your intellectual interests since college to where you are today.

Yeah, so, one of the long-standing questions that drives my research that actually has gotten me motivated, like, for now, I guess, almost decades, is the question of development.

So, it’s funny because now I talk a lot about industrial policy in China, even in the U.S., Europe, I mean, a lot of countries, India. And so, it’s like a big topic now, you know, how can the state, or can the state even, do something to help move along industrial development?

But this older question, I think, is still like the biggest question. I mean, everyone says this about their field, right? But I think this is the biggest question out there:

• Why are some countries rich?
• Why are some countries poor?
• Why is it that if you were born in, I don’t know, some country in East Africa, or in South Asia, or in North America, your life is just so deeply shaped by just that place of birth and country of birth?

And, yeah, it’s a puzzling question because it transcends, you know, fields. Economics is where I began, and I found a lot of the tools there useful, especially a lot of the statistical tools, which are now kind of standards across the social sciences. That’s a good thing.

But I did find that the questions economists asked were getting narrower and narrower. So, you know, I’m always up for a good RCT to rigorously test a hypothesis. But I felt like a lot of the biggest variables were not even being considered, and some of those are the hardest to measure, quantify, to nail down.

And so I just wanted to make that shift over to sociology, which, you know, I like to think of it as the big tent discipline in terms of methodology and the types of questions you can ask.

And so, yeah, you can study development by interviewing government officials at an organization that deals with development. You can use corporate financial data. You can do sort of all these different things. You can mix it all together and just try to present the strongest case you can for whatever theory you’re arguing.

So that’s why I gradually found myself being drawn to sociology. And the questions still remain the same.

I mean, now the funny thing is, questions that I was asking about China, which I think is still also the biggest story in development. So if I think development’s the biggest question, China’s the biggest case. And it’s still, I still think to this day, still begging to be explained:

How did this country transform itself, basically in a generation, in a single lifetime, so dramatically, and have such huge consequences for the rest of the world that we’re sort of dealing with right now?

So, yeah, to me, those were such big things. And sociology, I started to kind of do field work. So I spent several years doing field work actually in both China and India. And the comparative thing was really helpful.

Because honestly, the first time I traveled to China as an adult, I went to Beijing. It was like 2005 or 2006 or something as an adult. And I was like, this place is kind of chaotic. It’s kind of like all over the place. I remember getting a bunch of hacked-together electronics on the cheap, things like that. And that was kind of like my association with China.

Then, I traveled to India. They have their own different issues, their own different strengths. It just opened the world to me. So that comparative lens has also been very important to me.

But yeah, that’s sort of like the longer arc, this question of, “how do countries become rich, basically?” How do they get all the things that come along with that? Better health care, better education, all the things that I think really matter still.

Your dissertation work was on development of railways and comparing India to China, is that correct?
That’s right.

Yeah, so that was really fun, in part because I got to take a lot of trains in both countries. My question was like, how did China build this high-speed rail system that is now larger than the rest of the world’s bullet train systems combined?

• In such a short period of time.
• In India, as late as the 90s, Indian railways was sort of on par in scale and technical sophistication with a lot of Chinese railways.

People I talk to who are in the international development world and have experience working in both countries tell me that it’s not the engineers. The engineers are extremely talented in India. In fact, in some ways, they had longer-standing access to English-based resources that sort of followed global industry standards. So that wasn’t the issue.

There was something else about why China could build this high-speed rail network and why India struggled to modernize its own very used, very useful, economically and socially important railway system. Yet, building a single high-speed rail line was a monumental undertaking. It would be for any country, frankly. So in some ways, the real outlier is China’s case—using India as a foil to understand that.

That whole project was trying to understand, at a meso level of analysis:

Because I think there’s a lot of people who look at what the top leaders are thinking in any country—whether prime minister, president, or what Xi Jinping is thinking. That’s fine. There are great people who can read the tea leaves on that.

And then there’s some who focus on the really nitty-gritty, like bureaucrat level or single company level. That can be very fascinating, too.

But I look at the meso-level organizational structures across the bureaucracy, looking at, at a time, how India and China were two of the last countries with ministries of railways.

• Looking at how those were organized
• Why, on the surface, they look the same
• But when you peek under the hood, the whole structure is completely different

China’s system, ironically, was less top-down. A lot of the responsibility was devolved or delegated down to project corporations. These were tiny teams relative to the size of the projects—multi-billion-dollar high-speed rail projects run by 100 or fewer people, ultimately.

What that did was concentrate a lot of power and responsibility into a core group that was living and breathing the project all the time. Not the very top, but still a focused core team.

In the Indian case, it was more of a typical matrix structure with cross-cutting lines of authority.

• Different functional divisions overlaid on regional structures
• Caused a lot of confusion as to who was in charge
• Who could make the final say

A lot of these projects are about trade-offs:

You need to make a decision.
You're either going to be on budget or go over budget,
but you can actually hit your schedules.

Somewhere along the line, someone has to make the call and be responsible when something goes wrong. So that’s the whole meso-level structure. That to me was so fascinating. So much happening at that level of analysis.

After years of what I assume included fieldwork, reading lots of papers, and studying other people’s work, have you reached a conclusion about why the Chinese felt differently than the Indian side?

Yeah, so the theory I offer is the structure of the bureaucracies in the two countries. Yeah, that China sort of reformed its system from a system that looked more like India’s, more top-down, more centralized, to this one that was based around, yeah, on the one hand, these railway project companies, these sort of specialized state-owned enterprises that were formed to manage railway projects.

And actually, a lot of this was learned from the Japanese. There’s actually a whole history there of, like, you know, going back to the 70s and 80s, learning from Japanese project management techniques. I hope to actually do a project one day looking at that historically.

But being able to sort of, like, have these nodes, that’s sort of the argument that I make, this sort of nodal structure. There’s key nodes in the bureaucratic organizational structure where power and responsibility are concentrated. And that’s how you get things done.

Whereas for India, I argue that it’s more diffuse, that you have all these cross-cutting structures, that a lot of very mundane decisions are kicked up all the way to the top because nobody feels like they can take responsibility. And, you know, to be fair, there are many parts of the Chinese bureaucracy elsewhere that still have some of these same issues. So these are not, like, purely Chinese or purely Indian.

But focusing on the railway bureaucracies in particular gave me that sort of leverage to control for, you know, these are two countries with state-owned railway systems. And, you know, all these things are observable and controlled.

And then, but this is something that’s different. So, yeah, that was sort of the overarching takeaway from that.

I’m curious whether you’ve read any of Glenn Luke’s work. Are you familiar with Glenn?

• Yeah.
• Pretty big on it.
• Of course.
• Yeah.

But really in-depth studies of the financial viability of the Chinese rail system. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Well, just that some of it is not as clear to me. I actually find Glenn’s analysis very interesting. Yeah. Because, but overall, my take on the whole financial sustainability question is that I do think that a lot of sort of Western analysts are missing the forest for the trees when it comes to understanding this.

I mean, this is not a project investment that’s supposed to generate an IRR on the project itself. That’s not the main goal. The goal is to build something that will have broad economic spillovers across the entire country.

And, and, and that’s hard to measure. And there’s been very creative economists that have tried to use sort of spatial models, land value appreciation to try to capture some of that. And I look at their work a lot. I find it very useful.

But at the end of the day, yeah, it’s just, it’s a different approach you have to take rather than focusing strictly on, okay, is this single project going to return a profit? Or is the whole railway system going to return a profit?

You got to think about, like, this is a, this is an investment in the entire country, essentially.

And, and, and there you can still, you can solve waste for sure. That’s not to say that it all worked out. But to think about the whole system and its broader impact, I think is really crucial.

Now, after you finished your PhD, and you became a postdoctoral researcher, did you sort of consciously out that you would, you would be interested in?

• Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

So I started to realize that there’s a lot of overlap between infrastructure development and industrial policy, that both entail long term investments, and have massive coordination problems.

And there, in some cases, the state can step in and help in some way. And, and these are also two areas where China has just been very, very good at doing what it does.

So I see that some of the strengths, and some of the issues come up in both. That is, you know, sort of like erring on the side of investing too much, focusing on scale and speed, maybe going a bit overboard when it comes to replication or redundancies.

And an appetite for risk-taking is one way to characterize it, or waste is another way to characterize it. But, but both infrastructure and industrial policy, I saw that similar patterns, even similar institutions involved.

So, but of course, you know, a key difference is just that the industrial policy was across more sectors and involved this combination of, in many cases, private sector, private company, you know, sort of shaping, shaping markets, basically.

So I found that, that to be really interesting.

You know, this, this topic of industrial policy and whether it can work or not, you know, I’m much older than you. And so I’ve seen this play out over a really long period of time, you know, with, you know, the argument shifting, you know, quite a bit over multiple decades.

And I think right now, I think you’re well positioned because I think China is providing an example where it seems like industrial policy has worked out. And I think for the last few decades, people in the West have been, or at least an American, maybe American economists have, have been really conditioned to think that that’s just a recipe for failure, that governments can’t really execute properly and can’t get things done.

And so maybe the, the pendulum will start swinging back now.

Yeah, I think so.

I think China’s both an interesting example that has sort of galvanized other people’s interests and maybe caused, you know, us in the U.S. or elsewhere to question our assumptions about, you know, oh, the state intervention is always going to be, always going to backfire.

The other thing is China itself is a factor prompting a lot of countries to reconsider industrial policy. You know, you know, now we have rare earths, you know, all the news, but you can pick sort of many different industries where China is very strong or very dominant.

And there are questions about how to stay competitive in a world with China in it. And I think maybe our attitudes towards industrial policy might be different if there wasn’t a China-type player in the system, in the global system.

So if you write a paper or you’re formulating, you know, you’re working on something, your research, and you’re trying to come to a conclusion or reach a level in the argumentation where you think, okay, this will be convincing to a target set of other researchers.

Who are those people?

• Are they sociologists?
• Are they at the Kennedy School of Government?
• Are they economists?

Who do you, who do you think of as evaluating the arguments that you’re making in your papers?

Yeah, that’s a really interesting question, because I have a number of different audiences in mind.

Some are the people who also study Chinese industrial policy, and China’s political economy. Especially if I’m writing something more academic, then I would have them in mind, as well as other sort of think tank researchers as well, who focus on those areas.

But ideally, actually, I also have in mind, like a more general audience, like Americans broadly, or Americans who sort of care about what’s happening in the world or care about what’s happening, you know, even in their own backyards. Because I see a lot of domestic issues are tied up with U.S.-China relations, or what China’s doing, or what the U.S. is doing vis-a-vis China.

And yeah, that’s why what I try to do in many cases is try to use language that is not always so specialized for like China experts, or people who are sort of like spending their 24-7 in this area. So, yeah, and that’s, that’s part of like this New York Times piece.

I just realized that there’s actually a lot of knowledge and understanding that’s kind of locked away by scholars and researchers who have been kind of interested in this stuff for a long time, but just talking to each other. And every time I talk with them, I’m always reminded, like, there is just incredibly, incredibly deep expertise, people who have been doing fieldwork or traveling to China or studying China in some fashion for many, many years.

But there’s not, there’s a huge gap between what they know, and what folks in D.C. know, what folks in Silicon Valley know.

• It’s changing.
• It’s definitely changing, for sure.
• But just the broader sort of American business and investment community at large.

So, yeah, trying to kind of bridge that gap, I think is, I didn’t realize how big a gap there was.

I had been so long sort of like hanging out with my other China scholars that I just sort of took a lot of these for granted and realized like, oh, wow, you know, not only is there a lack of knowledge or maybe even sort of misunderstanding, but these have really big policy consequences.

If you have, you know, not a fully informed view or a misguided view of like how China works, that can lead to really, really bad policy decisions.

So that’s also what I’ve, what I’ve been concerned about lately.

Yeah.

Which I’ve talked to various guests about at length is the AI and chip competition, but maybe we’ll get there later in the podcast.

I definitely feel your pain because I feel like I’m an issue where the people that consume my content might be academic economists or think tank people or actually, you know, business people that compete with Chinese companies or actually operate in China.

So there’s such a broad range of understanding, you know, ranging from people who think they, you know, they actually have a, you know, a social score, social credit program to, you know, people who actually run factories themselves and live in China.

You know, so such a broad gamut.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nice piece.

Maybe we can talk about that a little bit.

So sure.

Opinion piece.

And I, now it’s got an interesting title and often the title is by the editor, not by the author.

So I’m going to ask you about that. The title of the piece, it’s a guest essay in the New York Times opinion section. And the title is “In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant.” Now, pretty strong title. Tell me where that title came from. I can tell you it did not come from me. And, yeah, I have to be careful what I say about that title, but let’s just say I was pretty shocked when I saw that. And I saw it on the day that the piece came out.

Did you get this because of the title? It’s funny. I got like a tsunami of emails and messages and responses to that piece. I mean, I was really surprised because I thought, again, this is sort of like me coming from China research world. I was like, this is probably not surprising to a lot of people, both what I’m saying about China and what I’m saying about the U.S. I mean, I’m not saying anything so new.

When I talked to my fellow China experts and China scholars, they’re like, “Oh yeah.” Yeah. I mean, that kind of put together a lot of stuff that we’ve been studying, but yeah, I was blown away by the reception. And yeah, I could tell the difference between people who just got stuck on the headline versus people who read the piece. And then even people who read the piece, I’m still like, that’s not my best work. My real work is something else. Like read my other writing or read my other research. Because this is sort of just an overview. You know, I get into more like what I consider to be more real analysis elsewhere. Right. But yeah, that has been quite a journey.

Now, since that article came out, are you now officially a CCP shill? Yeah, it’s so funny. I got called all sorts of things and, you know, I think both of us are pretty active on Twitter and/or X, and you develop thick skin. Even then after that piece, I still got some new ones.

• CCP shill on the one hand
• Some people who really didn’t like my use of the word China as a threat
• I get a lot of flack from both sides

I got to say, so it’s fine. You can get it from both sides. Even if you say they’re a competitor, people might ask, and I think with reason, “Why do you have to think of them as a competitor? Why couldn’t we be cooperative?” So you’re going to get criticized from both sides usually. Yeah. It’s just part of the game.

So I felt that piece was totally reality based. In other words, you mentioned a lot of things in the piece which I think for people who are really following the U.S.-China, shall we say, competition, these are key indicators:

- Where is the EV industry?  
- Where is renewable energy?  
- Where is shipbuilding?  

I think for people who are serious and follow the numbers, nothing you said in the piece was particularly controversial or even necessarily new to people who are deep experts in the field. But I think the average New York Times reader, probably in aggregate, it was a shocking article. For the people who actually read it all the way through and thought about it, I would tell over 50%, maybe 80% of the people who read it were a little bit shocked by the end.

But what do you think? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so. And I did mean for it to be a little shocking. I kind of want to cut through the noise a bit and connect the dots for people because, yeah, I think, and I was talking to the editor about this that I worked with. Like, there are a lot of stories about BYD, or you get a story about Chinese EVs, or a story about DeepSeek. So you have the whole DeepSeek moment.

People are focused on that particular company sometimes. If they’re more sophisticated, they might see the industry as changing and China moving up the ladder in that particular industry. But I just hadn’t heard that many people in mainstream media talking about all of these different sectors, all these different scientific fields as well, sort of backing. And that’s a big story as well that I know you’ve actually written about.

So there are these bigger trends happening behind each of these individual sectors. And so, yeah, like, you know, I’m sure some of the people who you speak with and probably who listen to this podcast, they might be deep in the weeds on biotech in China and be like, “Wow, there’s some big changes happening here. Some of the oncology treatments are really taking off. The pace of clinical trials is really incredible.” But they might not have a view into the shipbuilding world, or it might be very light. And so to kind of put it all together and just be like, look, this is not just a single sector or a single industry or a single company. It’s not just DeepSeek or BYD or any of these ones that make the headlines. It’s a much, much broader pattern. And that’s why we need to wake up.

Like, you know, we can’t just be like,

“Well, you know, we’ll concede that one. Solar panels, sure. You know, you can make cheap solar panels, whatever.”

But like a lot of these, and especially the point about the industries of the future. I know this is sort of like a hackneyed term now these days. But I really believe that the areas that China is really focused on are the building blocks for the next generation of technologies, emerging sectors that are going to be not only sort of like the economic growth engines, the job engines of the future, but sort of broader progress is going to be built on that.

You know, AI, robotics, all this stuff that we’ve all heard about. But I want to bring attention to some of those things, too. It’s not just today. It’s like the trend going forward that people need to pay attention to.

Yeah. You know, I think a moderately competent government, you don’t have to be super-duper competent, your government officials. But if you’re moderately competent and you listen to area experts, it’s not that hard to formulate a kind of China 2025 plan where you might compare a few different areas and say:

• Which of these should we put more weight on?
• Which deserve more resources behind?

Because they will, as you say, be the building blocks for the future. It’s not that hard, I think, for them to pick the right ones.

What’s unique about China, and this is something I think both you and I have written about, is, you know, there are a few factors which affect verticals. So the surprising thing is, as you said, you have all these different verticals where if you were able to go into the weeds in each of them and determine where is U.S. versus China competitiveness in this particular vertical of, like, humanoid robotics or self-driving cars or cancer treatment, whatever it is, you would see them advancing across almost all of them simultaneously very fast.

And the factors that underlie that are:

1. Human capital – They have just, you know, an extremely large population.
2. Engineers – They sort of have their act together at the government level. Like I just said, the government can maybe not pick individual winners, but they do know what areas to pump resources into.
3. They know enough to get out of the way and let actual market forces determine which companies actually win in the space.

So if the competition is somewhat fair and different regions, different cities have their own individual companies, car manufacturers, for instance, that have to actually compete in the entire domestic market globally, then quality will rise at the top.

And so if you have those three factors, then you can advance simultaneously in each of these verticals all at once. But I think still most Americans don’t realize that those factors are in place and, indeed, that they are advancing in each of those at the same time.

I think that even that basic idea, which you conveyed well in the piece, is pretty new to most people in America.

Yeah, I think you characterize it really well. Yeah, I think, again, I have to kind of step back and see China through the eyes of someone who doesn’t follow China all the time. And that’s actually hard for me to do.

So, like, I think some of the ideas of how Chinese industrial policy works that are out there are:

• Either it’s a very top-down system, like Beijing leaders or Xi Jinping himself says something and everyone executes.
• Or you just kind of flood the zone with subsidies.

And, again, if it were that simple, at a certain point, you’re going to run out, right? Like, if you’re not going to build competitive industries, if these companies don’t upgrade technologically and become not just domestically competitive but globally competitive to a certain extent, then you can’t just subsidize it. You’re going to run out.

So, like, at a certain point, it’s about, as you said, kind of

“shaping the market, shaping the ecosystem, like providing, you know…”

I kind of think about, I know you’re a physicist and I love the physics analogies, but I often reach for the biological ones more when it comes to industrial policy.

It’s, like, you can’t just turn the knob all the way to 11 and expect that to work. You want to kind of like add the ingredients that you think will help. You know, if there’s some key component or key aspect that’s missing, maybe the government can backfill or contribute in that area. And then especially looking at problems in the supply chain and trying to fill those in. So, that can be very useful.

But overall, it’s this mix. You’re right. It’s not just top down. It’s also not just flood the zone. It’s sort of trying to cultivate this ecosystem. And AI is a classic example of that, where DeepSeek itself is not a state-owned enterprise by any means. It’s quite the opposite, right?

But I would argue that, even though it’s not a direct product of industrial policy in the traditional sense, the people who are the incredible researchers doing cutting-edge research at DeepSeek came through the Chinese university system, which had investment research grants, a lot of which was targeted in AI. So, that all sort of benefited that broader industrial ecosystem.

Yeah, one of the points I made in the wake of Mark Zuckerberg hiring with exorbitant salaries and comp packages, all of these top AI features from companies like OpenAI and elsewhere, is a big chunk of those people were actually educated in China, at least at the undergraduate level.

If you’re in my position, a professor in a quantitative subject, you see that in China, because there’s so much emphasis on math, solid grounding in math, even the software developers, people who are coders, generally have much better math chops than the coders in the United States. To do AI research, there’s a certain core set of things you need to understand:

• Multivariable calculus
• Linear algebra
• Statistics
• Probability

It’s very likely that a Chinese CS major actually has pretty good mastery of those things. And so, they could, if they wanted to, do AI research.

Whereas in the U.S., maybe only a quarter of CS grads are strong enough in those areas that they can pick up and read a paper from Archive on AI, actually understand large language models, matrix notation, and tensor notation.

So, even a really basic commitment to STEM education matters itself in the pool from which companies, for example, are able to draw from. That would be the same if you were doing computational methods in genomics or biotech.

A lot more people in China can sit down and actually read papers in those areas and apply what they read, whereas in the U.S., it’s much less common for a biologist to have that math background.

That’s really interesting to have that kind of scientific foundation.

You know, it’s funny here in Princeton, I like to pop into random seminars and fields that are not my own. I’ve been to more than one CS seminar or talk where the entire auditorium is almost all Chinese, the speaker is Chinese, and I’m like, “you literally could just have this whole talk in Chinese,” right?

Oh, absolutely. In theory, yes. But it’s just an assessment of the strength and depth of the talent pool. You can see it even here at the graduate level in Princeton. It’s very obvious.

When I saw that Damian Ma and Macropolo have tracked AI talent and over 40%, almost 50%, comes from China — and with Meta’s superintelligence team seeing how many came from China — I was shocked. On the one hand, I was like:

“Wow, I mean, these guys, their lives are like you can imagine their parents might have come from a generation that was dirt poor and now they’re getting hundred-million-dollar pay packages.”

What a change. But overall, it was surprising but not that surprising. If you look at NeurIPS co-authors on a huge chunk of papers, many are Chinese or of Chinese origin researchers.

So, it’s just that kind of depth that again hasn’t been emphasized enough in understanding where the next DeepSeek or innovations are coming from, at this deeper level.

Yeah. In the sociology world, are people hostile if you break out human capital as a separate factor for productivity or development? I mean, certainly, certainly you couldn’t link it. I mean, you couldn’t link it to anything like genetics, but just even saying that this system produces more 22 year olds that can do linear algebra per capita than this other system.

I’m like, is that an okay thing to do in sociology or do people get mad at you over that?

Oh, I think education, human capital, the pipeline, I don’t think those are controversial things. In fact, I think there are demographers who specialize in sort of those questions.

Yeah.

Because, for example, like there’s a guy called Garrett Jones, I don’t know if you know him, he’s at George Mason, he’s an economist and he’s done studies linking — like he tries to estimate the sort of average IQ of a whole country, which, you know, is equivalent to just saying how well they do on PISA scores or TIMSS scores or something like this.

And then he relates that to their economic growth rates and things like that. And, of course, he doesn’t mention DNA or genetics or anything like that. It’s just country by country. There’s an education system, it produces these outcomes. And maybe that is an important input factor into productivity growth or whatever.

But even that, like, I think he’s found it somewhat controversial; he’s gotten some pushback that, like, what shouldn’t be looking too closely at these things. I don’t know, apparently, maybe you have not felt that.

Yeah, I don’t know.

And also, the funny thing is, like, in the business world, you talk about talent all the time. I mean, that’s like the word that you use. So, yeah, maybe that encompasses maybe a broader set of performance metrics or something like that. But whatever it is, like, there’s a sense out there that this matters a lot. And if China has a lot of it, that also matters a lot.

Yeah, I think people still even today, underrate how big the gap is, because in almost every metric, if you look at in terms of human capital, if you look at China, it tends to dwarf the US and it tends to be more like China is roughly equivalent to rest of world combined.

And, you know, I think still people can’t really quite absorb that fact, even though it’s in the numbers.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, also, I think people don’t realize that, like, factories, you know, like, again, like a battery plant, you take kind of like a mid-level manager, the level of technical capabilities you need to have, and then you multiply that by across an entire factory, and then times all the factories in that industry, and then times all the industries.

I mean, you really need, you know, I was talking to someone about industrial robots, industrial automation, and just deploying them. So it’s not, you can’t just sort of like install them and let them run. You need people who have the technical skills to be able to do that, to understand some of the mechanics, how to operate them, how to repair them, how to deploy them properly. And you need a lot of those people.

I mean, the scale of what’s happening in China in terms of manufacturing, in terms of the number of new factories being open, or factories where, you know, these automation systems have to be serviced or managed.

Yeah.

You just think about the number of people who are needed, who are at that level. And that’s, that’s something that I think a lot of people don’t realize.

So you’ve probably seen these videos of EV factories where they’re turning out a car, like roughly every minute. And there are these robot arms that are simultaneously welding and moving a plate into place and doing, and if you just think of the spatial reasoning required to install — like even if the robots all came from Germany, which is not true anymore. Actually, mostly they’re built in China, the robots, but yet the robots, like placing them and solving these problems, so that all the arm work properly in the car is placed in a certain position.

Like all of that is actually very, very, to use the verboten term, very G loaded. Like a lot of people just can’t.

Yeah.

Like if I said, “this is your job, figure out where to place these robots so all of these arms can operate simultaneously without screwing each other up and they can get into the part of the car where they need to get into,” and, you know, “we need to put it in this corner of the factory on this conveyor belt.” A lot of people just can’t solve that problem.

It’s actually a pretty difficult problem to solve.

And the way you solve it affects the overall efficiency of your factory, like:

• How many square meters of factory do you need to actually do what you want to do?

Right.

So all these things just require a ton of human capability.

Totally.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Maybe we can move your Times piece to, um, it wasn’t just you, I guess there were multiple authors, right? On that. And so we maybe should give credit to your coauthors, but I was interested in the philosophy of this gentleman, Lu Feng, who’s at, I think, Peking University. Maybe just tell us a little bit about the article and this individual.

Yeah. So Lu Feng, he is a very prominent, I don’t know how to categorize him now, a political economist, economist. He has done a lot of work on industrial development in China in particular, in particular, this piece.

So it was Thomas at Sinification who actually asked me, he found the piece, so he should get credit. He asked me to write an introduction to it, given that it was related to what I work on. And this piece talked about what I called industrial maximalism.

That is all the arguments that you hear, like from the West, the critiques, the criticisms about:

• overcapacity
• how China should shift to away from sort of more industrial development
• towards consumption or less production

And all these things that his piece was saying almost the exact opposite. He was saying China should double down on manufacturing, on industrial capacity.

He even had a whole part where, like, even steel, he argued, was not at a state of overcapacity. I thought that was so bold. So, if anything, I just found the piece almost like a very erudite troll of a lot of the Western critiques, but I also found it to be really fascinating, point by point.

I wish that maybe I could find a way to get out the whole version in English because it’s just very, very long. It’s this very long interview where he’s talking about what he thinks are the sources of strength for China’s industrial development, why he thinks the U.S. can’t do that, why other countries have struggled.

He has a lot of actually very interesting cases where he looks at specific companies. Some of these semiconductor companies today in China had their roots going back even to the pre-reform years. So I find all this historical stuff very interesting as well. But overall, this argument that:

China needs more of this, that actually this is the direction that China should be focused on.

I just find it so fascinating. And yeah, he has a few little jabs too at, you know, JD Vance with the peasants comment and things like that. So, I think he had fun with this Q and A in addition to making a serious argument.

Right, so the original document, it was a Q and A, where is it published? Like, what’s the Chinese audience that it’s actually aimed at?

Oh yeah. So I think this was guancha, which I don’t know how to characterize. So it is a state-affiliated media. It is a very prominent platform for a lot of researchers who write pieces there.

I wouldn’t call it quite the New York Times of China, but it has that kind of intellectual sort of exchange. It would be other economists, academics, but also policy people, business people.

Yeah, I think broadly speaking.

A piece that I read in translation was already pretty long and you’re saying that the whole thing is actually even longer.

Yeah, that’s right. He goes into history lessons and it is very interesting again. He really pulls out a lot of case examples and dives into them.

But one of the biggest takeaways was just thinking about industrial capacity is not just something about building physical factories, but as sort of this, and this relates to my work, the organizational capacity that a society has to be able to do this.

Tying back to what we’re talking about with talent, tying back to having at least a decently operating government that can implement some of these things.

So that’s where I found it very useful that he was trying to cut through some of the previous ideas like:

• “Oh, a lot of stuff just got outsourced to China.”

If it were so easy, why isn’t every other country doing that?

Things aren’t just outsourced to China, like China created a system to make it attractive for other companies to set up their operations there.

They did a lot of industrial policy to not only do that, but to make sure that the learnings from those companies got transferred over in some way and absorbed.

And again, all these terms — even the word tech transfer — unfortunately, it is not about handing someone a piece of knowledge, right? It is, I like the term actually sort of like absorption capacity, you know, in a way more because, and this comes back to sort of China’s scientific foundations that you, it’s one thing other countries have tried to lure foreign companies to build plants in their jurisdictions and train their workers. And then it’s sort of just ends there.

And the question is why has China been able to get that technology and understand, and sort of technical knowledge and have it diffuse throughout society more broadly, and then create homegrown competitors that can not only catch up, but then actually, you know, move beyond, beyond that.

So, so that, that’s sort of, to me, the most interesting question. So I like Lu Feng’s sort of readjustment of how to see some of these issues.

Yeah, I think people in China are aware of this unique aspect that, that, you know, the foreign company Apple comes in, there is knowledge absorption, but the Chinese are able to both contribute to Apple’s innovation in, in trying to localize the process, but then also potentially go beyond it and create competitors.

And, episode of Manifold, I interviewed the author of the book, Apple in China, which is a really, really exhaustive look at the operations of Apple in China.

And then how that gave rise to domestic smartphone manufacturers and how the, actually today we discuss this at length, like most of the, the leading innovation is actually happening in China when it comes to smartphones.

And in a way Apple is actually kind of a laggard now in terms of, you know, the, you know, the feet.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, so that’s a very, yeah. Similar with Tesla.

Yeah.

And if you want a very specific, in depth, Scott, that episode of Manifold, I think is very good that I forgot the author’s name, but he, he’s extremely good.

Patrick McGee. Yeah. He was really great. I actually interviewed him too for a different podcast.

He spent a huge amount of time writing this book. So let’s maybe steel man, both sides of this.

So, so from the Western side where this term overcapacity comes from, the idea is something like:

• “Wow, these autistic Chinese guys just keep building more factories and they just keep wanting to make, wanting to make more stuff.”
• And they don’t have good profit margins or just driving.
• It’s a race to the bottom.
• It’s making so much of this stuff and flooding the world with cheap, you know, maybe high quality.

Now we grudgingly admit it’s high quality, but cheap stuff. And they should just calm down and relax like people in Europe or California and take more time off and do other stuff.

And, it’s just a mistake for them to be so frantic, focused on industrial production, technology, the stuff. And you could say like, if someone said that to the fan, what would his response?

Yeah. I mean, I think his response would be that this is something that is helping consumers in the rest of the world.

And this is a product of China’s investment and trying to develop like this very sophisticated manufacturing platform, right? This whole system of industrial clusters of, you know, technological upgrading that makes it, yeah, uniquely capable of producing relatively affordable, high quality products. Yeah.

Things. I wrote a whole thread on this and on X, cause I really did enjoy the, you know, your art, your translation of the article.

There is that throughout most of the 20th century, there were, or at least during the history of the People’s Republic, there were American sanctions, Western sanctions on China. So they could not get Western technology until that opening period under Deng.

And so I can’t blame them for wanting to, like, you know, surmount those technological hurdles as fast as possible because previously they were denied the ability to do so.

So if they’re a little bit overly indexed or overly focused on technology catch-up, you know, they, they have things like the Opium War to look back on. Right. So, so I think they still feel like they’re playing catch up, even if they’ve now caught up, they still feel like they’re playing catch up.

People tend to, you know, pendulums tend to overswing. Right. So, so they feel like they still want to over index on this stuff and they’re going to keep pushing.

And there’s a little bit of paranoia, which for them is justified. Like, like, you know, they remember during the Korean War, the U.S. just flatly threatened to use nuclear weapons against them. Right. Like we forgot that. Most of the targets can’t remember that once.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that never happened. Did it?

And then you look it up and you realize, yeah, in fact it did. And they never forgot that, right. That there was a period where they were at technological embargo. The thing pisses them off so much, but they were under technological embargo. At the same time, MacArthur was urging the U.S. to just drop nuclear weapons on Manchuria, nuclear bombs on Manchuria.

So they were, and that is definitely going to color their strategy, right? They’re going to be more risk-averse. Absolutely about ever falling behind in any one critical area because they used to be behind and it caught them—they paid dearly for that.

So I think, just put yourself in the psychology of the other side, even if you don’t disagree, even if you don’t agree with it, even if you just say:

“Oh, you know, that anti-China cold war hysteria, that was an aberration. We’ll never see that again. Americans are so diverse and nice. Now that could never happen again.”

You still have to allow for the fact that the other side doesn’t believe you. Like, they experienced all this stuff. That’s the potential victim of it. They’re not going to give up on that right away. They might give up on it in 10 or 20 years.

• In 10 or 20 years, Chinese kids might be lazy, lying around all day.
• But it won’t happen for a while. Right now they’re still very focused on working hard to get ahead.

And in fact, if anything, I think going back to that Lufeng piece, he sees it as sort of a natural kind of progression of de-industrializing—that this is just kind of what happens over time for a society. Unless someone steps in and tries to alter, especially the financial system, to allocate resources in such a way that incentivizes that industrial capacity to remain.

But, yeah, the broader point about self-reliance and this paranoia—being in a world that is very insecure where someone can cut you off—later on it was the Soviets that were the big threat, and then most recently, all of these fears…

Imagine you have been afraid of something your entire life and people keep telling you:

“Don’t worry about it. It’s okay.”

And then it turns out your fear was well-founded—you are afraid of a burglar entering your house, and people said it wouldn’t happen. Then a burglar actually enters your house, and you say:

“Confirmed, all of my safe room investments were worth it. In fact, I’m going to double down now.”

That’s actually what’s happening now with the export controls, with the Huawei sanctions, and with all these related issues.

I joke that there’s a sort of rule of three:

• When a Chinese company gets mentioned three times in international media,
• Within three years, it will be entity listed.

There’s a sense that at any moment, they could be cut off. Xiaomi’s Leijun has a whole story about how he thought Xiaomi was going to get cut off, which was partly the reason why they pivoted to EVs.

This sort of fear, both at the policymaker level and at the company level, has only gone further into overdrive with the actual sanctions that validated all these concerns.

So yeah, this feeling of

“Could we be cut off? What do we do? How do we prepare now?”

is really important for people who are not feeling that kind of sense of insecurity all the time to understand.

I think it will be a while. The timescale is probably decades before they feel comfortable enough to take their foot off the gas pedal. They’re going to have their foot on the gas pedal for easily another decade.

If you’ve seen me post on X, these growth graphs illustrate this well:

- U.S. electricity production is kind of flat
- Chinese electricity production is rapidly growing
- During the period when America was dominant hegemon, the Chinese curve was way down
- Eventually, the curves cross and China's production shoots up while America's stagnates
- Leading to an era where China is up and America is down

When the curve crosses, the American side reacts with alarm, but because the growth rate (first derivative) is so large, this keeps accelerating.

Eventually, you end up in an era where:

Chinese metrics are up here, and American metrics are down here, with a little skull in between.

I don’t see that leveling off for most of these KPIs for another decade or so. Yeah, yeah. And they’re making a big bet. I mean, they’re betting that more investment in these scientific fields, more investment in these industries, is the long run, right thing to do. Yeah. And so it’ll be very interesting. I mean, we will watch the experiment unfold before our eyes.

Like, we will see, you know, these are huge, huge bets. In many ways, I think the US should be doing something similar. Like, it doesn’t have to be the same way, exactly. But there are certain industries that, yeah, I think we realize now, it would be, it would be a shame to kind of sit back and hope that it all works out. And not have, you know, not have tried to do something in the process.

You know, I recently tweeted, there was an article in MIT Technology Review, and they interviewed this economist, David Autor, who, I think he may have coined the term China shock. And now they’re talking about China shock 2.0, where instead of shock on legacy industries, like making cheap furniture, or dolls, or t-shirts, and of course, that did affect American employment.

Now it’s 2.0, where it’s the advanced industries, where they’re threatening to take away the advanced industries from us.

I wasn’t expecting that tweet, that post on X to get a lot of attention, but it did, because I think people didn’t realize this was happening. And when they read David Autor saying it, they suddenly thought, okay, this has credibility. Like, this guy’s been saying this for five years, but we just ignored him. But this guy, David Autor, said it very explicitly.

And so now, now we’re actually… He’s the China shock guy.

“China shock guy.”

But I think obvious prescription, I think Professor Autor would agree with me, is that the main thing is:

• America has to actually strengthen itself and compete in those industries
• It wants to reach a level of excellence where it can retain control or leadership in those industries
• You can’t do that without all the usual things, like industrial policy, R&D investment, and production of human capital here at home, or at least stealing it from abroad or however we get it.

So, I mean, I think all these things are pretty clear.

Yeah. Definitely.

I mean, this is going back to, like, part of what got me so interested in these topics in the first place. I mean, how to understand them, like, in a broader sort of system level view, rather than seeing, like, this particular company that’s maybe not profitable or this particular industry where the economics just don’t seem to work out.

You see that some of these are links in this chain or are nodes in this broader network. And if you break that critical node, you’re going to have huge spillover effects onto all the other dependent industries and upstream and downstream linkages. You know, these are all interconnected.

And so, yeah, like, to me, in some ways, the puzzling thing is not what China does, but what the U.S. does or doesn’t do when it comes to these things, where it seems so glaringly obvious that, you know, here is a coordination problem that is sitting right before our eyes.

And we’re all, like, kind of nodding our heads, being like,

“Yeah, boy, that would be bad if, you know, we got cut off from this critical part of the supply chain.”

And then it happens. And we’re like, oh, that was bad. But we still don’t really step in.

And, yeah, the question is, you know, can we kind of overcome some of our very strong priors about what, you know, policy can do? And to be fair, I share a strong sort of skepticism of state intervention. There are many cases where it does do a lot more harm than good.

So, you know, this is not just a wholesale,

“Oh, yeah, we should take out, you know, nationalize everything.”

But to think carefully about where the government could step in and at least support private industry in a way that wasn’t just totally up to the markets and up to, you know, global prices, which can be volatile or unpredictable.

But, yeah, that is something that I hope people think about more.

I mean, to take a specific example, like the Biden Chips Act, I was not very optimistic about what it would accomplish or that it would be conducted efficiently. But directionally, I was not against it. I was not against direction.

Yeah, yeah.

I would say, hey, chips is an area we cannot lose. We have to support some domestic activity in this area. But, of course, the devil’s in the details, like, can they actually execute properly? Right, right. And make it work.

I think for people who are really actually…

So if you’ve done cutting-edge, frontier level research in an academic lab and you’ve built a company, so you’ve seen both the application in a marketplace and also the…

Where do the original ideas come from? If you see those two things together, like, then you can understand, like, this ecosystem that’s required for NERCA to compete. But if you’ve only done one or the other, you could be wrong.

The university guy doesn’t necessarily understand, like, most of the stuff people do at the university isn’t that valuable and can’t be commercialized. And the applied guy probably might not realize, like, oh, this thing that I’m, oh, I can now think of 100 different uses of this thing. That came 20 years ago that at the time it was considered a crazy idea and only DARPA or NSF would fund it. Nobody else would fund it.

And it’s important to have both of those connections. And not a lot of people actually have seen both of those different parts of the ecosystem.

Yeah. If those people are out there, they should get to work because we need that kind of, like, that intersection of experiencing and capabilities.

Right now we’re doing everything wrong. You know, we’re making it harder for foreign students to come here and pursue their educations here. We’re cutting funding to large chunks of science.

Yeah, it’s all going to be, I mean, of course, maybe it’s just going to be a transient hiccup that just lasts for a few years. But it could have really negative long-term consequences for U.S. competitiveness as well.

Yeah, yeah. And that’s the thing that I was, I don’t know if I pointed it out in that piece, but the thing is the, like, breakthrough treatments, medical treatments that are going to come out, you know, in 20, 30 years, those are being researched, you know, to your point.

Those are being researched today. There are labs who are testing, you know, new sort of areas of research and exploring that now who are getting their funding cut off. And there are a lot of sort of these forking paths that are just never going to happen because, you know, at this stage they got sort of nipped in the bud.

But, you know, it is very hard. Like, if even some engineers who are more, like, they’ve only worked in industry, they’ve only worked very close to, like, the market and the customer shipping a product, even they have a hard time understanding, like, what are you physics guys doing with the superconduct? What’s the point of that, you know, besides, like, there are people in Silicon Valley who think all these academics are useless and, oh, if you just give some smart, agentic engineer the problem, they can solve it.

And they just lack a historical understanding of, like, the innovations that they currently work with. Where were those innovations 20 years ago, right? So, yeah, it’s very easy to get this thing.

Yeah, actually, Huawei’s Ren Zhengfei, Huawei’s founder, he actually recently had a piece talking about this. It almost sounded like he was trying to convince people in China, too, of the value of sort of foundational science of, you know, even like the way he characterized it.

He was like,

“Yeah, some of them are kind of weird characters. And we have to sort of, like, embrace them in our society because they are so valuable. And they might be kind of, like, a bit odd and they might have, like, slightly odd ideas. But actually, those are the seeds that, you know, are so later on that become basically the next, you know, Huawei or NVIDIA or, you know, whatever it may be.”

So, yeah, I think I read, at least in translation, some of that. And, yeah, I mean, he was, you know, Huawei itself actually hires a lot of people who are doing sort of very mathematical or theoretical work and a little bit surprising. And I think he was urging other companies to do the same.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

But in the future, for you, Kyle, the sort of U.S.-China competition or, you know, the biggest story of the last 100 years, which is probably China’s development, or last 70 years at least, is where you intend to focus most of your energy going forward?

Yeah, yeah. And to continue to focus on, yeah, development in Chinese technology and science and industrial policy. So those are the main areas.

So, yeah, like, I like to kind of, like, position myself as someone, I’m not going to be, like, a leading chip expert. There are people who are deep in the weeds on specific photo resists and can tell you, you know, why, you know, this versus that. That’s not what I’m trying to do.

But I’m trying to see, again, you know, maybe the New York Times piece is actually useful as a characterization, where I’m trying to connect the dots here and see, like, what are the broader systemic factors that are contributing to this? And how is that shaping, yeah, not just the U.S.-China relationship, but sort of the China-global relationship?

And, yeah, I actually look at a lot of stuff, too, about China’s interactions with, you know, global South countries or China and Europe, which I think is like, you know, maybe Americans don’t care as much, but Europeans really care. And there are a lot of people who care about, you know, the rest of the world. So those are all things that are, I think, very dynamic, and there’s a lot of things happening. So those are areas I’m following very closely.

Let me throw out a couple speculative things. So there’s one meme that’s around on the Internet that, like, China already won. And so if I were to steelman that, I would say something like, well, you look at any of these verticals, and, you know, if they’re not past, if they haven’t surpassed us, they’re coming close. And their first derivative is clearly much higher than ours. And this is happening across, you know, the 20 most important areas. And we’re in Iraq together. And actually, the rigor of our education system is actually going slightly down as opposed to up. So how could we possibly win out?

Now, the one scenario which I think if you go around Silicon Valley and talk about this, some people will just say, like, they’ll just deny that what I just said was true. So that’s just a different, I think, perception of reality. But for the people who accept that that’s, in terms of the metrics, that is actually a fair characterization of what’s going on.

The usual place where the Silicon Valley people can still pin their hopes is the following:

• Fast takeoff in AGI led by Americans.
• And that’s the one thing that saves our asses, right?
• Yeah.
• It’s literally what people – so, again, we could meet people who just don’t believe me that, you know, the skull curve predominates, right?
• Like, they would argue, “Oh, they’re not really ahead in rocketry or they’re not really ahead in this or, you know, they’re not really close to us in jet engines.”
• You know, they could argue stuff like that.

So that’s a different category of person. But for the people who accept these numbers, and I think the numbers actually are, as I present them, correct, usually, if they’re technologists, the thing that they’re going to retreat to is,

“We’re going to win the AGI battle, and that’s what’s going to keep us.”

That’s what’s going to – that’ll be like the Trump card.

“Therefore, like, please nationalize my company and write me a check for $10 billion.”

So – right.

But what are your thoughts on this?

Yeah.

Well, so one thing that’s very interesting that I follow is the debate in China about the 0 to 1 versus 1 to 100 sort of innovation scale-up thing. And it’s still an ongoing debate. I mean, I think, you know, I think people still debate, like, what was DeepSeq? Was it a 0 to 1 innovation or was it another fast-following thing? And, you know, you can go back to, like, mRNA vaccines or sort of other areas where I think there is still a sense of, like, yeah, I don’t know, like, could China have done this? What counts as an innovation?

There are other people who argue that, like, drone technology or, like, LiDAR systems today are, you know, essentially a Chinese invention now because, yes, like, parts of that have been out there for a while. But to really become a real thing in the world is something that China did, basically. So that’s all over the map.

And I guess one thing I will say on the U.S. side is there are possibly – I mean, maybe this applies equally well to the Chinese side. But I would just have a big dose of humility for, like, I don’t know what the next sort of ChatGPT might be. Because to me, ChatGPT was itself, like, so huge.

And I guess, you know, if I had been following a little more closely, I would have known that, like, okay, you know, GPT 3.5 was already out. And that’s actually not – it was actually not even the, you know, the hottest model. But still, you know, there’s just – I feel like we’re just living in a time of very large, frequent paradigm shifts in technology.

You know, and then you can zero in on specific industries. You can look at, like, batteries.

I mean, it was just yesterday, I felt like, when NMC batteries were seen as the standard. And then you have the shift to LFP and then maybe solid state or maybe sodium will be next. Like, who knows?

I now feel like we’re in this state where it’s not, like, a single race or it’s not, like, a one-and-done, you know, type deal.

So, yeah, I will be curious. Like, this is sort of hedging, sort of, like, punting on the question. But I actually think it’s just sort of exciting. I mean, I hope that both countries continue to push the scientific and technological frontiers for humanity’s sake in terms of, like, coming up with better medical treatments, coming up with sort of, like, better things to help with our material lives. I think, you know, what’s not to love about that?

You know, I like this optimistic perspective. It’s so seldom articulated.

China Talk host, Jordan, is it Schneider?
Jordan Schneider, yep.

So, I was talking to him a year or two ago about this stuff. And at the time, I just said,

“Look, isn’t this great?” Like, all these technologists in China, they’re selling you their stuff at rock-bottom prices. They’re making stuff efficiently. They’re selling it to you. And they’re actually starting to make real fundamental breakthroughs, like new battery technologies or new AI models. So what’s not to love?

It’s just a huge number of scientists and technologies and factories all in one corner of the planet, but they’re sharing, they’re selling everything to the rest of the world at rock-bottom prices. What’s not to love? Like, that’s just a great optimistic future.

And he just couldn’t believe I was saying that. He was like, “Yeah, but aren’t you worried about what happens if they become the hegemon and stuff like that?” And I’m like, no, I’m not really that worried about it. But the optimistic future we should aim for is one where the U.S. and China can coexist and mutually benefit each other, right?

It sounds like a cliche, like win-win is a cliche. But, you know, I still think it’s possible.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just think from a pure sort of science standpoint, it would be so sad to have so much scientific capability bifurcated and isolated from each other.

When, in fact, that’s really, like, I don’t know what the term is, but you want that kind of multiplier effect, where each group alone can do a lot, but you want all of it to be intermingling and fusing.

Like, hot war, I don’t think the science and technology ecosystems can fully decouple between the two countries, because you still have flow of human capital back and forth. And now, with AI and people publishing papers, the information spread, the knowledge spread so fast, faster than it ever has before.

Yeah, yeah. So I don’t think, if we have a hot war, who knows, maybe the whole planet will be destroyed. But in general, we will benefit from any investment, whether it’s made in China or the United States, in fundamental research. The whole world actually does eventually benefit from that.

Yeah, I would point to GitHub as, like, just spend time on GitHub. Just see who’s contributing, who you can see—like all the different names, different people around the world. I mean, it’s just amazing.

People who have never met each other, people who may never meet each other, and building complex software that is usable, that is actually used by companies as the foundations for some of their commercial services. You know, I just think that’s so incredible.

Maybe, yes, there could be dark clouds on the horizon in terms of some of these issues flaring up. But in some ways, again, I just think we’re also so interconnected.

I think you’re right that some of these kinds of knowledge flows, cutting them off would mean quite a severe, I don’t know, state of repression for yourself, essentially. Much less for the other guy.

Your example of GitHub is really one of the best because that even goes beyond the U.S.-China thing. Because if you look on GitHub, the barrier to entry to write code to develop software is so low, and the cost of hardware is so low now that you see lots of really strong developers coming from:

• Eastern Europe
• Turkey
• Iran
• Central Asia

It’s like everybody in the world is able to contribute.

GitHub is probably a very unique place in which everybody in the world can contribute. Unlike in, say, molecular biology or physics, you need to have access to a very high-quality home institution to be able to participate at the frontier.

On GitHub, almost everybody can contribute. Some poor kid in India who just has a shitty internet connection and maybe is even coding —

Yeah, because they’re coding on their phone or some $100 laptop, they can contribute on GitHub. So that’s probably the best example, actually.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that’s an area where I just, if you see that world, like, I feel like a lot of people who are not in the software coding world don’t know about things like that. And if you do know about things, you realize, like, wow, there can be incredible collaboration worldwide.

And, talking about democratizing the process, that is really pretty mind-blowing what you can contribute. You don’t even know who might be able to solve some bug or some puzzle that you’ve been unable to crack. And it could be someone from anywhere at any level of education, almost.

That’s a nice, optimistic place. Maybe we can end our conversation.

So, Kyle, thanks a lot for being on the podcast, and I wish you all the best.
Thank you. It was my pleasure.
Thank you. Thank you.