a16z Podcast - Politics Over Pragmatism

Episode Date: June 2, 2016

"Anybody who is interested in China, who's developing things in China, who's doing business with China needs to be thinking about the instinct towards politics over pragmatism", argues New Yorker staff writer (and former Beijing resident) Evan Osnos. "It will affect your operations there. It's not the kind of thing where you can be, 'Well, look, we're not interested in politics.'" Osnos, who also wrote the award-winning book The Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, shares experiences and views on the tension between one of the oldest civilizations in the world and newer story of nation-building (is it, like the buildings being built, structurally sound?); an evolving demographic (where "kids you have no idea how good you have it" may no longer be a hedge against politics); and middle-class Chinese, not just outside or elite, complaints about pollution (especially since "environmentalism has often been the front edge of a deeper change in political consciousness"). And speaking of political consciousness and complaints, what of the Trump phenomenon? In this episode of the a16z Podcast -- continuing our recent tech/policy/innovation D.C. on-the-road trip -- Osnos, who is based in Washington, D.C., shares field observations from Charleston, South Carolina to West Virginia. And from Silicon Valley, where technologists might be able to do something about the largely public health, political, and economic problem of gun violence.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. And today, Michael and I are here in D.C. I feel like when you say D.C., I have to say our nation's capital. I wish we had stirring music. That voice you just heard is Evan Osnows, who is a staff writer at the New Yorker and a fellow at Brookings in the China Center. And previously, he was a foreign correspondent and has lived all over the world or you've reported from all over the world. Tell us about that. Yeah. I worked in the Middle East for a couple of years in Iraq. But really, Actually, China was always my focus. If you're a person who loves stories, who loves sort of the making of nations and how stories happen, how places sort of come to be what they are, China was really sort of

manna from heaven. Did you, you know, set up in Beijing? Were you in Shanghai? Yeah. Like, where did you go? I lived in Beijing. I lived in, and there's a bit of a sort of Red Sox Yankees thing about Beijing and Shanghai. I lived in Shanghai.

Oh, okay. You guys, I'm going to put like a little distance between. you move apart, please. But it is true that. I mean, does that sound consistent with what you're doing? Yeah. What about that period? I mean, I do think it's interesting that you framed it as, like, if you love stories,

you're watching this nation building happening. And China is one of the oldest countries in the world. So, like, what about that time sounds like the nation building part of it? There's this incredible tension in that fact, the fact that the country has been around and has been a mighty civilization for thousands of years and yet was, physically building itself in real time in the last generation. So to put it in practical terms, you know, China achieved in human development progress and in physical infrastructure development in the span of 10 years, what we did in 30 years or 50 years and a whole variety of measures,

whether you're talking about, you know, concrete usage, for instance, or how much, how many bridges they can build or how many airports they can build. And then the other piece of that tension, which I find equally compelling, is the thrill that you get from seeing that is not the whole story and can be deceptive if you just look at that. And that's why, meaning that when they build a building in a week, it's often not a great building. And you can adapt that metaphor, meaning it's structurally unsound, or it doesn't wear well, or it's not creative, or it's not architecturally significant, or any of those things. And that idea, that tension between what can be done and what can't be done in a country with the very particular political and economic chemistry

of China is the incredibly powerful story. And that's what kept me there for eight years. So you wrote a book, The Age of Ambition, which is about China's ambitions to be the center of innovation. I mean, could you tell us more about your book and the themes of that? Yeah, I was struck in moving to China about how much it felt to me like where the United States was at a point in our own development about 100 years ago, the Industrial Revolution, the Gilded Age. We were climbing out of this period of turmoil, the Civil War, and all of a sudden it was like the faucet had been turned on and all of these individual possibilities, people who had been, you know, the oddball in small towns all over the United States suddenly started making

their way to big cities and they were getting together. They were discovering capital. They were discovering other people with like-minded ideas and things were germinating. And that, is sort of what's been happening in China. And when I called it the age of ambition, it was because I was describing this phenomenon where it was truly that. It was like if you had enough gumption and creativity and sort of sheer audacity to get out of your village wherever you were, you could go to the big cities and try something out. It wasn't always going to succeed. And in fact, it might run you headlong into powerful institutions or it might make you into somebody who is a real pathbreaker. And that was, that's an astonishing thing to see. And it's not something that's

I'd seen living in other countries. This was very specific to China into this moment. I have to ask you about that because often when people talk about the immigrant ethic and people who've like moved to the U.S., for example, I always remind them that there's sort of a self-selection thing that happens where the type of gumption you have in order to do that and make that move. But in China, something unique is playing out as well, where there's also government policy to draw people out of the rural regions and into these huge urban centers down to the tiering of the cities. Like, you know, you're really pushing people into tier one next to tier two cities. Does that sort of change that self-selection notion of it?

Because China is really unique in that sense. Well, the immigration thing is an interesting one because, and we should talk about this when we're thinking about innovation possibilities in China. The fact is that it's not an immigrant destination. So how does that change what it becomes but what it has and this is, is that in its own odd way, it's so large that it almost is like an immigrant destination because if you're in Beijing or Shanghai, they're not coming from County Cork, they're coming from, you know, a county in Hunan province, but it's the equivalent dynamic to what was going on in the United States. So you still get the, in some ways, you know, the, you know, people are sort of splashing ashore in Shanghai coming from inland China. And so

there is some of that self-selection quality. But the tiering of the cities, which you mentioned, is such an important phenomenon. It is so important. I think people overlook it when they talk about China. Yeah, they really do. I think from far, it's hard to, it's hard to appreciate. If you're, if your, if your ambition, for lack of a better word, is to go from your little town to Shanghai in order to start a graphic design business, let's say. You can't necessarily do that because there are a lot of legal impediments that get in your way. So, for instance, if you have a kid, you can't get them into public school and get the same level of service that another student would have if they were a Shanghai resident. You can't necessarily get financing from a local bank. You can't get health care.

This set of restrictions, which is generally described as the Huko system, which is the household registration system is one of the biggest, I think everybody agrees, obstacles towards a more organic, innovative system that drives talent from around the country into places where they can make sure. So rather than if my goal was Shanghai, you might get shunted towards some other city. Exactly. Where they look, we need to fill it up with graphic designers there. That's right.

And literally that. And this gets to some of the conflicted instincts that China has because, and this is rooted in the nature of the country because Chairman Mao created this hookosis. to organize where people could go because the country was so big and everybody had to be fed that the thinking back in the 50s and 60s was if we don't keep a hand on the tiller, we'll lose control. And that idea, you should sort of went in doubt trying to understand what's going on in a Chinese decision-making process. If you revert to that idea, which is if we take our hands off the tiller, we lose control, that explains a whole lot of the decisions

that are made and good or bad. You know, I really want to hear your views then on how this is playing out with innovation Clusters. When you talk to Michael, when you brought up the example of like, oh, you can congregate all the graphic designers in one area, that makes me think of like government architected ones which have been shown to never be successful. Yet, there is also this competing theme where if you have like a high concentration of people in a particular area, you can get more unique innovations as a result, especially if you specialize and you create some sort of regulatory arbitrage around all these regions. How is that playing out in China? And what are your views on how that innovation is happening? I mean, you document a lot of that in your book. You see some successful examples and some unsuccessful examples. I at one point spent some time studying what was going on with green tech and looking at how China was using this extraordinary scale, for instance, to be able to, oftentimes it was not inventing things, but it was process innovation. They were able to say, okay, let's get a bunch of small manufacturers together.

They will learn from each other. There will be some advantages to that. They were doing wind turbine manufacturing, and they managed to figure out how to drive the price down by producing essentially faster and larger than anybody else could do. And that was an example of what China does very well. Look, this is a time in America where we have in some ways dismantled some of the infrastructure for science and technology development in ways in which the government can be helpful and all usual caveats apply.

But the moments when it can promote some sort of helpful head start, China was doing that. And China did that very deliberately around a few key. areas, for instance, nanotechnology, material science, wind and solar, and in some cases they were able to take steps forward. In other areas, you start to see that this sort of oversized role of government can be an obstacle. There's an expression that Chinese scientist friends of mine use, which is that the funding goes, this is a way to describe the fact that funding goes to politically connected organizations. They say that the pagoda closest to the lake receives all the moon light.

That's a great quote. Can you say that in Chinese too, by the way? I wish I could make it sound as good as it does. So the pagoda closest to the lake gets all the moonlight. So what does that translate into in sort of politics of funding? I want moonlight. Moonlight's a good thing. The idea is that there are some terrific universities in China and they're getting better all the time.

But they are ultimately still governed by a very strong political superstructure. And so the decisions about who gets fond. who gets research space and support are not always based entirely on the intrinsic measures of the quality of the research. And I will point out immediately, this is the case in a lot of places. I was about how it works in the U.S. too. It's not that different. Exactly.

There's a running joke right now about how you put the words, that security scientists only put the word cyber when they're trying to get money from the government for funding their research. Otherwise, they never would use that phrase. Yeah, I'm part of the group that says we should ban the word cyber. I think it's overused. I'm not going to go the opposite direction and say, let's just use it everywhere. On the new cyber podcast. The A6C's cyber podcast. Exactly. And in some ways, actually, your point is essential to this because they're actually a lot more like us in a lot of ways. It's not like you go across to China and all of a sudden, you know, just because somebody's able to make something really fast doesn't mean that it's going to be as good as it would be if it was done slowly and carefully over here. You talked about how China excels at this type of innovation, where in the case of green tech, there was process innovation.

Yeah. And on one of our recent A6 and Z podcast, we had Clay Shirky and Connie Chan, our partner in China, talk about what's happening with Xiaomi and how that represents something broader. And that's just the different type of problem set, but the same type of thinking. Right. I am personally on a mission, and Connie and I talk about this all the time, that people not dismiss that as not really true innovation. I agree. I want to hear your thoughts on that. I agree. Yeah, I think we will be caught flat-footed if we underappreciate what China is able to accomplish. Because you can actually change the nature of a product by changing the way that it's produced, by making it available to a larger number of people, by sort of making it a part of daily life rather than something esoteric. So I totally think of it as innovation. I do sort of make the classic distinction between total greenfield invention. I think it's a little bit more elusive in China than it is in other places. And that's for interesting reasons, I suppose. What do you think some of those reasons are. This is not an original thought, but I do think that the education system, and if I had Chinese friends sitting on either side of me, they would agree with this, which is that

the education system, as it's constituted today, is not encouraging kids to be disruptive and wildly innovative. It just is not. And this is one of the reasons why a lot of Chinese families are now trying to find alternative forms of education for their kids. So you've got this huge boom in like Montessori education, things that are in any way outside of a conventional system. Or literally, well, you send your kid outside of China for education. Exactly. This is one of the reasons I think where you find that you've got now kids coming earlier and earlier, not just for middle school or high school,

but even for primary school if they can get into the U.S. One of my findings from when I used to do research and education, though, and it was part of the world's largest cross-cultural international comparison of education among three dominant places. And later on, they expanded to include other countries. I don't think they did China during my time in that project. But one of the most interesting findings is how we think of the U.S. education system is a lot more supporting that type of disruption. And in fact, when you look at these videos of classrooms, and they're all over the United States, it's actually much more homogenous than we realize A and B, they are not as pushing original thinking as you would think.

And this is in elementary schools. And in contrast, we expected something very different from Japan at the time. And it was incredibly disruptive in terms of getting people. to really think outside the box, work with limited constraints, like, you know, figure out different ways of problem solving. It was just eye-opening. Yeah, I learned one of the valuable tools in trying to analyze China is I more or less put on the shelf the idea of comparative analysis with the United States because it just doesn't really help me all that much. It's not useful. It's not useful. Let's try as much as possible to just understand it on its own terms and get

as intricate as we can in our detailed understanding of the place. You know, the book is called The Age of ambition. Certainly China's a very dynamic place, shall we say. Are we going into a different phase? And how would you describe that? Yeah, that's a good important point, because something is changing at the moment in China. Something is, and I don't say that with great pleasure. I did a long profile in the New Yorker last year of the president of China, Xi Jinping. And he came into office at the end of 2012. And he's turned out to be a much more important figure because in simplest terms, he's taken what was this consensus model of governance, which was you had this group of guys who were almost studiously bland and nonspecific. They wanted them to be that way.

They were looking for the opposite of Chairman Mao. And instead, now we have, once again, a very dominant single personality. And as that can be a good thing or that can be not a good thing. And in some ways, it has set back the process of bringing China into the world, the process that China itself initiated. So in practical terms, if you're sitting in Beijing or Shanghai right now, you're not able to get on a half a dozen information sources, news sources, data sources that you could have three years ago. And from my perspective, how many countries in the world today do you go to where the internet connectivity is worse than it was three years ago?

So if that instinct that worries me, because what that suggests is politics over pragmatism and pragmatism has helped China so much over the last 40 years that I want that to be in the foreground as much as possible. I think that most Chinese entrepreneurs want that to be in the foreground. They're like, let's put this politics stuff aside. It slows us down. So that's a change over the course of the last two years that I think anybody who's interested in China who's developing things in China, who's doing business with China, needs to be

thinking about because it will affect your operations there. It's not the kind of thing that you can be like, well, look, we're not interested in politics because politics, as we know here, impact you every day. I think every company is finding that as they enter China. And as my colleague Connie often tells me, there's many ways to have a China strategy where you're not necessarily untrained China because you have to go through like joint ventures to actually do that or where you're just even selling products in China or there's partnering with Chinese companies. You know, recently in the news, there's been a lot of discussion around the capital outflows. Like, how do you think that's playing out with what we're talking about here in this age of ambition? How do we reconcile those?

Some of the hyperventilating, I think, about capital outflows is a little bit overstated because some of this actually is. the process of what China was trying to do anyway, which is to become a little bit of a more normal economy. That being said, people are moving money out. They're moving money out because they're uncertain about what the future holds. This anti-corruption campaign, which has been a big story for the last couple of years, is going to be around. It's not going anywhere. And what that means is that people, even people who feel like, look, I've done nothing wrong. I'm not worried about being caught with my hand in the, in the till. It's that they don't really know if they can count on the courts to defend them in the case where, you know, to give them a fair hearing if something happened.

So people with a lot to lose are saying, look, I'm going to hedge and I'm going to put my assets in places like California and New York real estate and elsewhere. So that's a real phenomenon. It's not the sign of the barrel going over the falls, the way it's sometimes described. Well, the flip side of that capital is all the tremendous amount of money going into funding the new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs. Let's talk about that. I mean, that's huge and hugely important to the world of technology as well. It's exciting. You know, so I went to this conference last summer where there were 12 Chinese entrepreneurs in the room, each with their own

companies. Outside of a small group of friends, in the U.S., I really don't think that most people, even in the technology community, had ever heard of a lot of these companies. Granted, these are small companies, but they're already starting to get traction among Chinese users. And there are all of these scenarios that really don't make that much sense for Americans that make a ton of sense for Chinese users. The greatest example of this is WeChat. I mean, WeChat should occupy like three hours of our discussion. It occupies three months of my time. WeChat's obviously this very powerful communications platform. But I think the thing that people sometimes don't appreciate unless they're in Beijing or Shanghai is that it's actually a whole ecosystem in which you can live. And in fact,

this is the part that I find really interesting is that if I pay with cash, it's now a little bit of a negative social stigma. And that, again, is like one of these examples. where we can try to anticipate what's going to work in one place or another, but in the end, you just have to be so alert to the cues. And the cues are not necessarily preordained. Well, tell us more about those other entrepreneurs you met. I mean, what was like, what was unique about them? What were the things they were working on? The reality was that in some cases, these are still somewhat derivative of successful American products. That's a dynamic we've seen for a long time. But in other cases, they'd begun to tweak things in some important

ways. I highlight one example in my book. There's a woman that I met when I moved to China whose name was Gong Haiyan. She had been very successful. She'd gotten a PhD. She had grown up in a little village in the middle of nowhere at the foot of a mountain and had made her way to the city. She got into her late 20s and her parents said, okay, now it's time for you to move home and get married. And this is the way that we have always done it. We will introduce you to somebody in the village. You'll be very happy. And traditionally in Chinese marriages, there really is a much room for individual choice on the part of the participants. And in this case, she said, that's not going to work for me because the people that you know

are nothing like the people that I know. And so, and she started a company, essentially the Chinese equivalent of Match.com. And it was very early. In fact, it was so early that people didn't even have enough connectivity. They were mailing in their photos. Just a great example of how innovation can be so different. And she was sort of straddling these two eras. And so anyway, a company becomes the largest dating site in China.

It's called Shurji Jia Yuan, which means beautiful destiny, which I find wonderful because, in fact, what she's doing is actually an affront to destiny. She's saying destiny is obsolete. Like, you can shape what it is you want to be. And one of the things that's interesting about the way the Chinese users use a dating site is that after all these years in which they had very little choice, they tend to be highly, highly specific about what they're looking for. And so they'll say, I'm looking for somebody who's had between two and four ex-boyfriends. Capricorns need not apply, somebody who's willing to be home to cook dinner four times a week. In some ways, it's an overcorrection from the inability to be able to tailor your life, that now if you can tailor it, you are going to really to.

Or sometimes it's just making what was previously tacit explicit in a way that can be codified by machines. Totally true. Before it would have been done through a matchmaker or like informal conversation among a family. Yeah, and that's one of the reasons. Actually, as an analyst, as somebody who looks at the place, it's wonderful when an instrument like that becomes available because I can begin to look and see the choices that people make. there's actually data. But so then, long story short, Gong Haiyan's company did well.

She went public. It was the leader in that field. And then over the course of just like 18 months or two years, the whole way that people were using the internet and China changed, mobile became so dominant. And all of a sudden, other players moved in. And she drifted into the background. And that evolution, it just happened faster even than we would see in the U.S. So you can go from being, you know, a non-existent company to being the leader to being gone

in the course of a couple of years. Purely because of mobile. Purely because of mobile. And also because people figured out, in this case, somebody else came along and they merged elements. They took a piece of Tinder. They took a piece of this. And they put it into a new product with Chinese,

as they say, Chinese characteristics. And it worked. So what does that tell you? Like, what are some of the takeaways that come from that? I think the most important thing is, even though we often tell ourselves, yes, we have to understand the local market. We underappreciate how hard that is

and how much it can be almost impossible to do it from far away. So, you know, there's this tension, right, about how much do you localize versus stay true to what you are? And what you find over and over again in the cases that I've looked at is that the people who know the most, in the most subtle terms about what Chinese consumer habits are, about what it is that they're looking for, they really do succeed.

And I hate to say, because I'm not prepared to say that foreign companies will never be able to compete with Chinese companies. But it's hard because Chinese players are really good at this. They know what they're doing. And as much as you can figure out a productive relationship to work with them, I think you sort of, you know, stack the deck in your favor. What about Chinese companies leaving China and trying to do business elsewhere? Right. Because part of this age of ambition is the global ambitions that China now has, or maybe has always had, and is finally able to realize them. Absolutely. This is a little bit unfashionable to say, but I'm actually a little bit skeptical about the possibility for a company like

Alibaba, for instance, to come in and change things in the United States. There may be places where they can do it, but I think at the moment what you've seen is pretty smart on their part, which is, for instance, investing in American companies that they think already you're going to do well. I think they stand a better chance by going into other developing countries. That's one of the main points that we've talked about in our pieces on China and innovation is that in many ways they're better suited because of the scale, the users, the model, even if it's not a democracy to adapt to a place like Brazil or, you know, India or other places than U.S. companies even.

Though I do think one of the things that's surprising, I saw this in Burma, which is that reputation matters in the following way. So I was in Burma writing about this, I think for many of us, surprising turn in Burma's history, which for years and years it was one of the most repressive places on earth. And then it began to climb out into a more open society. It's still early days, but it's happening. Something's happening. So I'm spending. a lot of time in Burma, writing a piece for the New Yorker, and I was talking to people about what they use in technology terms. Everybody, for instance, is on Facebook. And which is interesting, they weren't on a Chinese product. They weren't on some other alternative. So Facebook was king.

Then when I started talking to entrepreneurs about where they, for instance, what they were using for cloud services, I was asking, well, are you using a Chinese product? And as one Chinese entrepreneur, as one Burmese entrepreneur said to me, would you put your data in a Chinese cloud? You know, he's making a choice, not based on price or proximity, because China has a huge influence in Burma. That reputation matters. And so that's a hard thing. Once you damage your reputation, then it's very hard to recover it as well, I think. They've become such a juggernaut in so many ways that it's kind of interesting that people will still consider some of these aspects, which brings me to a question from your observations on the ground. How long do you think, you know, mainstream Chinese people

will take the existing political structure and not question that in return for these other economic growth and gains that they're getting? It's the million dollar question. It's the thing that's kept me studying China for 20 years. And I've thought about it a lot. I mean, my answer is that people's expectations are steadily rising, and they're rising by design. I mean, the government has created a system in which you should expect that your life will

be better a year or two from now. And that's a tough thing to fulfill. Well, and if those expectations aren't met, that's when, you know, we always hear about cracks in the Chinese economy. And when those two things happen, you know, disappointment, plus if there are really cracks, then maybe some changes afoot. I think that it will take time for the following reason. Like, there are a lot of people in China today who still remember just how bad things were, how recently. I mean, we forget that during the cultural revolution and during the famine that pursued it, it was within our lifetimes. And so there are parents and grandparents

parents out there who say, kids, you have no idea how good you have it. And that's a huge hedge against rapid swings politically. But as that sort of demographic evolution continues, you get fewer people who are satisfied with less. Because that one that expires, for lack of a better phrase, it's a new memory. There's no institutional memory, so to speak. Exactly. And the government is constantly saying to people, look how good things are today compared to the past. But that's not how people evaluate their own experience as it's lived in real time. People say, look how my life is compared to where I went when I traveled in Europe last summer, I liked the air there. I mean, in the book, I described this experience of going on a, I signed up for a bus tour

of Europe with Chinese tourists. And we went to five countries in 10 days. And by the way, I can report to you that you can go to all Chinese restaurants in Europe. Oh, my parents did this. I totally baffled by this. They took like some bus trip and they had an Indian chef every day. And I was like, what is the point of this? I was like, I have to admit by the end, I was longing a little. I was like looking at pizza through the glass in the window. But what was so cool about that was that there's a lot of things they didn't admire. They were like, the streets are filthy. If this happened in Shanghai, it would not be tolerated. But then there were other things where they were really amazed. And most of all, it was the air. It was the quality of the

clean air. These are middle class Chinese people who now have sort of like come to expect something better for themselves and for their kids. So the biggest change over the last five years in some ways among that gets to where is the political system going is that five or ten years ago it was the foreigners who were complaining about the air quality in Beijing and Shanghai and other big cities and today it's the Chinese who are complaining about it and environmentalism has often been the front edge of a deeper change in political consciousness because it is a reflection of how you regard the sanctity of your own body you know I don't know if you read this but I never read Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook posts but the one

that he posted from when he was running in Tiananmen Square, the comments were freaking fascinating. They ranged. I mean, they were very political. They were very health-wise. They were very personal. I mean, it was a range of true life and human experience all around the world, but captured in such an interesting way around this topic of air pollution. It's, in some ways, it's a really good portal through which to understand the Chinese political consciousness because it's become a status symbol to be aware of the importance of your own health and your own air quality. Because look, if you're a coal miner and you have no choice but to do what you're doing and you're out in the middle of nowhere, that's a different kind of self-consciousness

than what you have if you are somebody in the city. I mean, quite literally, I know people who are the sons and daughters of coal miners who now go around Beijing and Shanghai wearing masks on their faces against the air pollution. And I found that fascinating. They're saying I want a better, I want a barrier for myself. I want a better life for myself. Yeah, there's a guy I wrote about in the book whose father was a coal miner out, worked underground for 30 years in China. And I once got up, yeah, I was so excited to interview him about his experience because being a coal miner in China is brutally dangerous and difficult. And I got to know the family for a while.

And I said, you know, can I come talk to you about this experience? And we sit down and I said, so what was it like? You know, I got my tape recorder out. I was ready to go. And he's like, well, it was very difficult. I made 60 UN per week. And that was it. And that's all he had to say.

And it was like he couldn't quite bring himself to access the true deprivation of that experience. Whereas his son was hyper aware of what he deserved as an individual and what he deserved as a person. This is a phenomenon that happens around the world. It's a really interesting thing. And some people like Clay and Connie have argued that this is one of the areas where China will be a leader in innovation, like to your point, the generative greenfield type of innovation where because the experience is so unique of the air quality and pollution, that they'll be, you know, already building new filters and HVAC systems and all kinds of things that are unprecedented around the world. And that'll actually signal what people will need all over the world as

more and more places become hyper-urbanized. Yeah, I do think that the specific challenges of being Chinese in 2016 make you very creative. They make you very, I mean, I love all the little sort of life hacks that people do in terms of getting through the day. I mean, some of this is very practical, like, how do you figure out who to bribe at the hospital to get first in line for the radiology department? If you can harness that energy in other ways, it leads you to good places. So, yeah, I tend to think that the environment is one area where people are going to make big change. You and I were joking earlier about cyber, a cyber in front of everything. But cyber threat is a real topic, especially when people think about that in the context of China. What are some of your

thoughts on that topic? I think some of this comes from how China regards itself. in the global balance of competition that, and oftentimes people who haven't been in China for very long don't appreciate the degree to which China regards itself as a weak player in an asymmetrical conflict with powerful players around the world. So they try to truly, I mean, on an individual level and on a national level, looks at the United States and says, you know, we are like bandits trying to take down a huge locomotive. And there's something virtuous in that. I mean, one of the terms in Chinese for counterfeiter is Shan.

which is a mountain stronghold. It's like the, you know, it's like the little village where the bandits are holed up fighting kind of gloriously against the powerful foe. And that idea, and all the layers of that gives you an idea of how they regard themselves in this global competition for progress and edge and ideas. They said, look, we missed the first industrial revolution. This is our chance to make up that. Something is changing now. From my perspective, I noticed a few years ago that one of the clearest signs that China was beginning to take IP more seriously and regarded differently was when a company like Huawei, for instance, was hiring a lot of lawyers because that meant they were suing other people to defend their own

IP, get as many patents as you can. But that didn't, it was kind of like a, it was sort of like a distraction, actually, from doing genuine innovation. To go back to the cyber thing, I think there is a recognition now that China is not the country it was even five. years ago. It's more powerful. It has a larger role in the world. It can't be in effect a kind of pirate ship, you know, marauding across the cyber seas. It has to now be a more responsible player. And something's changing, but I have to say it's going to change slowly. There are a lot of institutions in China. There are a lot of different law enforcement and intelligence agencies and semi-government institutions, all of which are involved in the cyber effort. And it's not like turning

off a faucet overnight. And the incentives have not, the incentives are not going to change immediately. It's great that you use a faucet analogy because I think of it as like another form of water where it's like a river rushing forward and trying to put a dam or barrier on generations of cultural tendency is a very difficult thing. You'd either reroute it, redirect it, turn it into some, you know, wind power, but you can't just like stop or it and expect it to go anywhere. Except that China is a place where you can. Like if they really, you know, that's one of the a few places in the world where you just, you could. That's a very good point.

I mean, it is a country where you can get rid of plastic bags, like, in a week, and you can actually make big headway on stuff like smoking. I think the hard part when it comes to cyber is that you have a genuine debate at the highest levels about whether or not we should pull back, you know, because like we might need it in a pinch. This is where it gets actually to the question of like, what's the nature of the political leadership at the moment? And does any one person or any one body have the power to be able to turn that faucet?

Because you're right. When they do, they have powerful. Yeah. It's a great point. Okay, well, let's wrap up and talk about some U.S. writing that you've done in particular. U.S. politics is never a cheerful subject right now. Well, we're in D.C., so I feel like it's appropriate to bring it up because it's coming up a lot already on this podcast. But let's talk about one of your most recent articles. And you talked about the Trump phenomenon. Yeah, the Trump. That was a loud side. Just in case I didn't translate into the audio. I wanted to verbalize that for the listeners. In the transcript, it should say Audible side. Yeah, I mean, I think like all of us, it's hard to go, at least I should say people in Washington, D.C., it's hard to go more than 20 minutes without all conversations leading back to Trump. It's like a new rule of the internet.

It really is. It's like, what is it? We should give it Evans law. I love that idea. I don't want to be associated with this in the long term. You know, frankly, I think all those people who coined those laws, that's exactly what they all thought. Like, they have a whole body of work. Yeah.

And suddenly they're associated with, like, Beck. Actals law or blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so let's talk about Evans law that all conversations lead to Trump. Well, Evans law, I suppose, when it comes to Trump is that Trump is the tiny outgrowth of a vast sociological phenomenon that's been going on and will go on over the course of the next 30 years. If you're a working class white male out in a lot of the United States right now, you feel as if you are falling away from the country and falling away from the general progress. And I think for a certain number of, and, you know, the reality is like the Republican Party really didn't do very many favors for its constituents over the last generation. It fed them a lot

of false promises about what it was going to do. And meanwhile, wages were stagnating. People were not being retrained. They weren't figuring out ways to catch up with this new evolving economy. And they turned on their television and they said, this is an outrage. And it's not my fault. it's somebody's fault. And then Donald Trump comes along and he is a comic cartoon version of success. A caricature. A caricature of what a quote unquote successful New York entrepreneur is. And let's just stipulate the obvious, which is that none of those things are true about him being a success. In any event, he became the vessel. And obviously he had a preexisting celebrity because of his television show. And it was the perfect storm of, I'm afraid, angry grievances.

that have just coalesced into a moment. But, you know, like a lot of things, he radically overestimates his own contribution to his own success politically. What role do you think the media played in this? People have been very tortured about their, all these confessionals are being written everywhere. That's true.

I also, I do think that we were guilty of some kind of malpractice for treating Trump as a joke for months. When if you actually left Washington or New York and you went out and talked to the people who were lining up to see him, you discovered there is a big sociological story. that we should be telling it. We should not be treating this guy as a joke. When did that moment happen

for you? And how did you observe it? Last summer, I was working on a story about the resurgence of white supremacy, white supremacist thinking in the United States online. This started because of the shooting in Charleston where the guy named Dylan Roof went in and killed nine people in a church. And it was this moment where I was trying to understand where did he get his ideas. And I was spending time with people in these white supremacist organizations of one kind or another. And then something strange happened, which was in the middle of the summer, they all started talking about Trump. And they were saying to me, we are so excited that somebody has finally entered American politics that is speaking for us. And I sort of like my head spun around about it. And then I realized that they really

felt that this guy was animating a set of ideas that had not been allowed on the main stage of American politics in generations. So when I started to notice that, I said, okay, Even if the broad base of Trump's support are not, obviously, white supremacists, his language and his vocabulary and the ideas that he's that he's giving voice to are bringing to life a gene, like a gene in the DNA of American politics that has really been, that has been lying fallow for a long time. And that established mainstream media has not really let in in a significant way. and then this way it's almost self-revealing because it's not curated. It's an interesting point. I mean, like, in a way, you know, in polite company, we don't talk about some really hideous ideas.

Exactly. But it doesn't mean those hideous ideas cease to exist. Like, I'll give an example. I mean, I've been out in, I was in West Virginia last year writing a piece about a chemical leak, how this terrible chemical accident happened. And I had conversations with people that they would say things that were racist about the president of the United States. And you know how when you have that conversation with somebody on a bus and you're just like,

yikes. And you just kind of file it away, but you don't really think about it. You get off the bus, exactly. And as somebody who analyzes politics for a living, I should have been better. I think one of the best books over the last few years that anticipated the Trump phenomenon was a book called The Unwinding by George Packer, who's a colleague at the New Yorker, and won the National Book Award. He got to this idea that there were these subcultures in America that were sort of pulling apart from each other, and were spinning off into their own orbits. And some of them were very high performing. He talked about Silicon Valley. And some of them were very low performing. They were falling away from the great kind of on rush of American

progress. And it's that falling away portion that ended up becoming the base of Trump's support. Yeah. And of course, the way the internet plays out with all of this. I mean, I think the biggest shock people have is all the trolls on Twitter. But in fact, that may be the norm, sadly, and the distortion of it is more possible than ever. I do think Trump is sort of, you know, the troll in chief. And when he started this, we realized that's what he's doing, you know, the provocation, the the violation of norms, the sense that there is no decorum. However, that's what he's always done. It was the response on the platform and the, you know, echo that he got then afterwards.

That was surprising. I think that's true. But I also think that he was surprised by his own success. It was almost like a joke. And he's like, wait a minute. They're taking it serious. I've sort of gone back and forward. This, you know, lends a person to conspiracy thinking, I'm like, what if he really is a Bill Clinton

conspiracy, you know? But the clearest sign that he didn't know how successful or he didn't know that there was this group of people out there, this reservoir, people available to be animated, was that he hired actors to flesh out the crowd at his announcement speech. He really did, meaning he didn't think that people were actually even going to come to his announcement. And now he's filling stadiums. And he had no idea that that was out there. Right.

Well, okay, so one final question. Then, you know, you mentioned Charleston and the Dillon case. You're working on a story right now about gun violence. I mean, I know it's early reporting, but given that we're a technical. technology podcast. What are some of your thoughts on some of the technologies with guns? Well, one of the really intriguing prospects is that we can use a technology solution for what is this public health and sociological crisis of gun violence in America. And the president said a few months ago, why is it that we're able to rely on a thumbprint

to open our iPhones, but we're not able to do that with a handgun or a shotgun? And it's an intriguing prospect. It's a new, I mean, it's not a new thing. It's been around for a wild, the hope of doing this, in the end, you're still asking investors to put money behind a firearm. And if you're choosing between putting money behind a firearm or something else, it's easy to choose the something else. I think smart guns will probably end up being a part of our future in the United States. And that'll prevent a kid, for instance, from picking up their parents, you know, even if that parent has a legitimate use for it, let's say it's a cop, you know, keep that kid from picking up that gun and hurting themselves or somebody else. But the, the

solution to the gun problem is going to be a combination of public health, political, economic, strangely enough, I think a lot of the reasons why people buy guns are not because of guns. They buy them because of some of the phenomena we've been talking about. So basically, I guess our takeaway is that for all that we talk and think about technology, you just cannot ignore the social, economic, political context. And I don't think anyone really does. But you're right. I mean, in some ways, it's like so much of what else we've encountered over the last 10 years

in which we've had technology transformed pieces of our lives. It can be the change agent, and it can introduce an entire new market that didn't exist. And then that can drive other parts of the market out. I'm working on this idea of what are guns in America going to look like in 10 or 20 years, as a cultural phenomenon, as a physical product, and as a piece of technology. I think what's so jarring about it is that's the exact same mindset people bring to a lot of other interesting questions. like what does a future car look like,

what does a future TV look like, what does a future of school look like? It's somehow jarring hearing that applied to guns, but I think it's an important and relevant question given the political realities and the increase in shootings that have happened alone in the last five years. It's heartbreaking.

Yeah, I think we're all aware of it in a way we weren't even a few years ago. At least something has to change at this point. Look, I will tell you right now that I live in Berkeley, California, so you can imagine smart guns sound like clean cold. Right. And I think it's going to be.

going to, we'll see how that debate goes on and whether there is such a thing. There's a debate among gun control advocates who say, look, in the end, I just don't want to be driving funding towards the development of firearms at all, you know, and say that's why I don't think this is a good idea. There are others who say this might chip away at the problem. Yeah, no. And there's legitimate, you know, debate on both sides, I'm sure. An example that would, you know, that the smart gun proponents would give is, why shouldn't we have police officers with smart guns? Because there are a not insignificant number of cases every year where a suspect is able to take a gun from a police officer and then hurt them

with what if we had a gun that was that was responsive to a fingerprint or to a ring or a wristband and only people in that department could operate it and so it's not just that one cop but also his partner and also everybody else and everybody else in that department could use it like touch recognition yeah I mean this stuff's available so what's it going to take to actually make it happen and it's not going to be it's a horrible analogy it's not the silver bullet but it's like Like, you know, something, it's a piece. And you'd be amazed at how little innovation has actually gone on. It's like, you know, technologists have taken an interest in education because it's this

broader sociological problem that we confront. And in some ways, this is now technologists are taking an interest in this other problem, which is gun violence. There is, you know, in so many ways, there's so much exciting energy that can come out of the technology community. As somebody who lives in Washington, D.C., you know, I've been here for three years. I'm, I wouldn't, I don't know how long we'll be here. But it's exciting when you see that energy applied to the problems that Washington tries and often unsuccessfully tries to solve.

Evan, I look forward to reading your story. Thanks. Thank you for joining the A6 and C podcast. My pleasure.