Factually! with Adam Conover - What Americans Don’t Get About China with Kaiser Kuo

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

Despite how much our media talks about China, most Americans don't really know all that much about it. What is China’s view of itself and its recent history? What is life like in the country for the average Chinese citizen? On the show this week Kaiser Kuo, host of the Sinica podcast, joins Adam to help answer these questions and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thanks for joining me on the show again as I talk to one of the most fascinating thinkers in the world and bring their insights to you in a way that hopefully I and you can understand. That is what we are going to do on this show and I am so excited to do it with you once again. I want to thank everyone who's supporting my Patreon. We are having a blast on there. We are releasing bonus podcast episodes.

We are doing our live book club. And I have just posted something very special. Full video of my 2019 live stand-up show, Mind Parasites Live. This was a show that I toured all across the country. It was about three different cultural parasites that want to control your mind. And it has a lot of personal history, a lot of stories that are really personally important to me. I'm really, really proud of the show. But I have never released it before until now.

If you sign up for my Patreon at patreon.com slash adamconover, you can have access to this full-hour stand-up show recorded at the Denver Comedy Works, one of the best comedy clubs in the country. Had a blast there. You can check it out at patreon.com slash Adam Conover. For just five bucks a month, you get access to bonus podcasts, live book club, and that standup video. So let's get to today's episode. Today, let's talk about China. You know, China, that giant populist country that hosted the Winter Olympics, invented gunpowder, and makes half of the stuff in your house? You know, as Americans, we have a somewhat fraught relationship with China. Our presidents can't figure out what the hell they think of this place. Obama pushed a pivot to Asia, while Trump demonized China and instituted tariffs.

And now, in the late stage of the pandemic, there are plans to revive American industry and reduce reliance on China. Every day, it's a new kick of the political football when it comes to US-China relations. But the strange thing is that despite how much we talk about China, we as Americans know very little about the place or the people who live there.

Now, a lot of that is because of our own ignorance, our own unwillingness to learn, and because of decades of weird, racist narratives about the place and the people. But, you know, even when we make a good faith effort, it is hard for us to really get into the perspective of an actual person living in China today. Think about this. You know, America's part of the West, right? And so our history is based on Western-ish shit. Think about what you learned in school, ancient Greece, the Roman empire, the dark ages, the Renaissance, the enlightenment and Dolly Parton, you know,

the whole big Western canon, right? This is our reference point for understanding the world. And the U S as a country has a specific historical narrative of its place within the world, that this is a country that went from colony to slave state to isolationist to World War II hero to industrial powerhouse and global hegemon. That history shapes our perspective, our sense of ourselves, and our perspective about the rest of the world. But here's what is hard for us to often appreciate. China has its own history, its own perspective, that people there are taught in school, a shared historical narrative, different from ours,

that we in America need to understand if we want to understand China. Like, okay, listen to this capsule history and just imagine living through it. During the 19th century, as America had its civil war and industrialization, China began what is known as the century of humiliation. Seriously, that's its name.

Foreign powers as varied as Britain, Russia, and Japan grabbed chunks of China, then forced the country to open its ports. Rebellions across the country killed millions. The dynastic system, which had lasted millennia, fell apart in 1911. And then there were decades of civil war between nationalists and communists

and atrocity at the hands of the Japanese. It was fucked. This century of humiliation ended with Mao's victory in 1949, but the fuckiness did not stop, okay? Mao's reforms led to the deaths of 30 to 45 million people from the late 50s to the early 60s, one of the greatest catastrophes in human history. Then there was the insanity 50s to the early 60s, one of the greatest catastrophes in human history. Then there was the insanity and violence of the Cultural Revolution, which lasted into the 70s and threw the country into further disarray and killed perhaps millions more. So Mao dies in 1976, and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution comes to a close, and the reform-minded Deng Xiaoping, who had been thrown out of leadership during the Cultural Revolution, comes in and sets the country on a new path. And that path is a new mix of state

control and market oriented reforms. And the results are that 800 million people in China have been lifted out of poverty since 1980. 800 million. That's a sizable chunk of the population of Earth. And a middle class with a standard of living not far from that of Western countries has sprung up in just a few short decades. So over the course of just a century and change, this is a country that has gone from colonialism to civil war to famine to the greatest economic success story in human history. to the greatest economic success story in human history. I mean, it's remarkable.

And imagine how your perspective would be different if you were born into this history and how you might think differently about relations between China and the United States. What I'm just trying to scratch the surface of here is how incredibly impoverished our understanding of China truly is. Because most of us, including myself, don't know the first thing about the people or the place. So you know what? Let's

start to fix that today. On the show today, we have someone who has made a career out of helping people understand China. He is so fascinating. I'm so excited to have him. His name is Kaiser Kuo, and he's the host of the Seneca podcast, an incredible commentator and expert on all things China. Please welcome Kaiser Kuo. Kaiser, thank you so much for being on the show. You're very welcome, Adam. Great to be here. So you host a podcast about China and Chinese affairs. I've been listening to it. It's fascinating. I think the thing that

we have such a distorted picture of China when, you know, as Americans, just like listening to American media. I'm curious from your point of view, there are probably multiple answers to this question, but what do you think Americans most often misunderstand about China in terms of a big picture? Well, I guess, I mean, if I had to pin it down to one thing, I think they fail to grasp how the rapidity of China's modernizations across the last 40 years or so has really shaped the way that Chinese people view the world and just the speed at which the compressed nature of that whole experience. I mean, that's, like I said, just the one thing.

I think maybe more interesting is, you know, why is our picture of China distorted? That's, you know, and it's not, it's not, I don't subscribe to this idea that there's some vast conspiracy to paint China in a negative light, that the mainstream media is out to, you know, to make China look bad. I don't think that's the case. I think that there's something much deeper and structural. It's just simply the way that foreign correspondence, the way that journalism is structured, especially here in the

United States. And I can go into that. Yeah. I mean, that's true so often in the media that people think, oh, the media wants you to think this or that. And that's usually not the case. It's just like the structure of how people do their jobs, how newspapers make money. And then also just the human factor of like, what is it to be an American writing for other Americans about a foreign place? You end up with certain blind spots, certain presuppositions that just like embed themselves in the work without being questioned, right? Absolutely. And even if you don't, even if you don't have those things, you're limited in the number of stories that you're going to be able to put in a US newspaper, into the LA Times or the New York Times or the Post. There's going to be,

five, six stories tops that are about China. I mean, if I took a copy of the New York Times on any given day and I read it cover to cover, I would see a lot of stories that would make me think the United States is on fire. I would expect that I'd open my window and smell tires burning and hear the sound of people rushing into the barricades, right? I mean, it sounds like the place is falling completely apart. And yeah, sure, there are parts of the Bay Area you could look at where it would look like that or parts of you know, you and me know from living here and from the rest of the damn paper that it's not like that actually, right? Yeah, there are, you know. So, if you only had those negative stories and you gave them to somebody in a foreign country that didn't know anything else about the United States, you'd form a very, very different picture, right?

And so, that's what's happening here is we're only seeing stories that are worth writing and those happen to be stories that they're about the bridges that didn't collapse right no no they're not they're about the bridges that collapsed right they're always about the planes that that didn't land not the ones that landed safely right yeah that's the analogy so it's always going to be about you you know, China as environmental hellscape or, you know, the committer of atrocities against minority populations or, you know, a place where, you know, these venal and awful officials are just sort of, you know, raping the innocent, you know, hard working Chinese people, right? Yeah.

And I mean, that's not to say that, like, those things are true to some extent or happening in certain places, but it's not the only story and it's not the dominant story for the average person in China. That's right. That's right. So, well, let's go back to what you first said in your answer, the enormous rapidity of the change in China over the last 40 years. Tell me more about that and what that means. Why is it so important?

So, you know, China, of course, emerged from the Cultural Revolution only with Mao's death in 1976. And then there was a couple of years of sort of transition. And then this reform-minded leader named Deng Xiaoping, you've probably heard of him. He was Times Man of the Year several times in 1979. I remember he died when I was in middle school. Yeah. And there were a lot of things of this. You should know about this guy. He's very important. He's dead now. Like, well, I didn't hear about him before. I was a baby. But, you know, okay, I understand he's important. What was important about him? So he really was the architect of China's entire transformation. He was a really pragmatic-minded person. He decided, enough of this rigidly ideological whatever. Let's open up to the rest of the world. Let's embrace elements of market reform. And let's, you know, let some people get rich first. Let's

develop the country. Let's put economics ahead of everything else. Now, he didn't open it up to political reforms, as some people were hoping that he would. But he did set China on the path of economic reform. And that began in 1979. So if you were somebody who had just graduated from junior high, say, in 1979, so you, no, somebody much older than you, somebody who's 60 today, right? 43 years ago, you were just finishing up junior high or high school. Nobody went to high school back then. It was junior high, basically. So you're working your first job.

The per capita GDP of China at that point was about $175. I mean, that's serious poverty, right? Yeah. Today, as that same person is now either retiring or considering retirement, the per capita GDP of China is over $10,000. Wow. So just, you can do the math it's a massive in terms of its percent it's you know what five six thousand percent uh increase in the gdp over that that period that's one person's lifetime so it's gone from you know these from really a country that was about 70 rural only 30 percent urban to a country that's about 60 urban now in that time, which it's gone from, you know, just hovels,

just wretched goddamn hovels to these gleaming forests of skyscrapers, right? And famine, right? There was immense famine in the middle part of the century that's like still within living memory. Yeah, absolutely. Still within living memory and, you know, and political chaos too within living memory. All of those things are behind it. So if you're that person in the last 40 odd years of your life have seen nothing but improvement

day to day, you're going to have a very different take on your government. The fundamental question that Americans have about China, it basically boils down to, this is a friend of mine said this once, I thought it was genius. It's like, why don't you hate your government as much as I think you should yeah and so you know that's kind of your answer right there it's well because and let me say we were brought up you know the the most i learned about china as a kid was like tiananmen square right um that was that was like the biggest unit in my global studies class in ninth grade and it's like, we're taught about those events and, you know, repression and those sorts of things. And so our bias as Americans is like, yeah,

why don't you, why aren't you mad at your government for doing all these horrible things we've heard about? And that makes a ton of sense, just given what we learn and our values, right? China flies in the face of so many of our core values as Americans. So yeah, I don't really hold it against Americans that they think this way. I mean, it's really, I think anyone who was only exposed to that would. But I think the answer to that, you know, why don't you hate your government as much as I think you should? A lot of it lies in this rapid growth and relative stability during this period. So what does this do? You know, 40 years, 40 odd years of this kind of sort of

constant improvement in life, it does a couple of things to you. First of all, it makes you kind of have a little more faith that the leadership is going to steer you wisely into an uncertain future. Secondly, it's going to change your attitude about technology. I mean, we live in a time right now where a lot of Americans outside of, you know, the weirdo libertarians of Silicon Valley, we're all kind of afraid of technology, right? I mean, we don't talk about progress without little scare quotes around it. We're, you know, we're constantly worried about, you know, how these big tech companies are riding roughshod over our privacy and abusing our data and all that. You know, look at our science fiction. It's all, you know, it's all dystopian, right?

It's all, I mean, I kind of, I like that little shorthand. I say that China is still in its Star Trek phase while we're kind of in our Black Mirror phase. And so, part of that is because, you know, for their whole lives, you talk to anyone under 50 or so, they basically only know in a time where the device that they have with them or their network abilities have improved in lockstep with their material lives. where suddenly people are single family home ownership and the GI Bill and, oh my gosh, I've got a pension and my grandfather was a laborer in the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. And now here I am with a Ford sedan

and a kid going to the state college. Is it sort of that kind of thing? You put your finger right on it. That's the mood, that kind of buoyant optimism that doesn't make you – it doesn't lend itself to, you know, really serious introspection or critical thinking. It just makes you, yeah, I'm going to enjoy this while it lasts. And, yeah, that's – not only has China gone through that, but it happened so quickly. It happened so fast. It's like, I mean, the analogy I use, you remember that movie, you were a kid, but that

Tom Hanks was in called Big. Oh, yeah. You remember that movie? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Playing on the piano. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dancing on the piano.

He's like, what, 10 or 11, and he goes to sleep after making a wish, and then he wakes up. Mm-hmm. So, that's the other thing that it explains. People often are wondering, why are Chinese so damn thin-skinned? Like, why does it always, you know, hurt the feelings of the Chinese people?

Why are they, you know, getting so upset at Daryl Morey for, you know, saying something about Hong Kong or why are they so pissed off at Enos Cantor, or Enos Freedom, I'm sorry. Right, there was a joke in uh in the the monster hunter movie that like was explosive like a you know that sort of thing where it's like well hold on say yeah what's going on there yeah yeah so you know if you think about them as like having gone to bed as a 11 year old and then now they look like you know they're the body of an adult it looks like a fully developed, mature country.

But the hardware can improve overnight. The software doesn't. So yeah, I think it goes really far to explain a lot of how Chinese people sort of view the world. That's really fascinating. And that's one of my favorite things to do is to try to, you know, when I travel, I always have this desire to, okay, I came to this place as an American. I'm experiencing it as American. And then you're there long enough where you're like, wait like, people live in Hong Kong every day. What is it like to live here? And you sort of want to mentally get into the mindset of, of another person's way of life. That's like a very difficult thing to do, but you're helping me have it in this case, which is really, really cool.

Well, good. Cause I mean, that thing that you're talking about is called cognitive empathy and it's different from, you know, your, your usual, you know, run of the mill empathy. Like, you know, if I see you get kicked in the nuts, I'm going to bend over and grab my – because we all sort of – we experience that at a real visceral level. If you tell me that your grandma just died, I don't need to know anything about your relationship with your grandmother, whether she raised you or was just somebody you had a picture of. But I can still feel that sort of empathic sadness for you. But I can still feel that sort of empathic sadness for you. But if you're trying to imagine yourself into the head of somebody who grew up with a completely different diet of fairy tales and fables of heroes and villains, of a whole range of experiences that's completely different from yours, that's a hard thing to do.

You don't know what is there in their mental furniture, right? You don't know your way around that headspace. So it actually requires you to know something. So I call it informed empathy, right? Yeah. I read a, I read a book last year and maybe, you know, this book and maybe you, you think it sucks. I have no idea, but I read a book about China called superpower interrupted. Yeah.

Yeah. I read that. It was an attempt to, or at least as the introduction says to tell the version of Chinese history that a Chinese person might learn in school. Um, that like that, not, not, not from the United States perspective, but you know, here is the story that China tells itself. And I don't know how well it does that project. Cause I have, I'm not a Chinese historian or a historian of Chinese history, but, um but I really loved that project of like, ah, that's what we normally don't get in the United.

We have our version of the history, but what is the, what is the, you know, what's the George Washington? What is the pilgrims? What is the, you know, because that's the only way to, once you're able to do that, it's not just understanding what literally happened. It's understanding how other people see their history. So I interviewed the author. You can listen to him on my podcast. The author of Superpower Interrupted is this guy named Michael Shulman. He was in Beijing for a

very long time and he did a lot of his homework. I would say that he started off very well. He started off really trying to do exactly that, but I think he got a little derailed midway through the book and it stopped really being about, it really did it stopped being about uh the chinese perspective on things and uh it ended up sort of being now uh okay so how was this early perspective uh how did it warp them so that now we we see them as so perverse well we don't need to we don't, I enjoyed the book and there's, there's a lot of good in it. But like, okay, just returning though, to the, the mindset of the average person in China who's experienced all this prosperity and is like, wow, my life's great.

What about all the things that, you know, the stories that we tell in the United States about things that are not great? For instance, the, you know, the fact that, uh, China is a one party state, right. Um, and that is, you know, extremely politically repressive that one cannot start a new political party and try to get some votes. Um, is that a thing that people are frustrated by? And there's certainly some people who are very frustrated by it. You know, there's a huge range of thought, and those people are even more frustrated by the fact

that they can't even talk about their frustration at that because of the censorship apparatus. But then, like it or not, the preponderant majority of people would say, well, suck it up. This is the price you pay to enjoy this kind of political stability. You can have that or you can have and then, you know, exhibit B. You look over at the United States where, and especially in recent years, they can say this with increasing confidence, that country is utterly paralyzed by its political divisions. It's, you know, they are frittering away so much of their productive energy in arguing with one another about the direction that the country should take. And that is not a good use of their time and energy.

Look at all that money going into political campaigns. That should be building roads. That should be, you know, building better schools. That should be used for poverty alleviation. And, you know, so there's always that comparison. building better schools that should be used for poverty alleviation. And, you know, so there's always that comparison. And of course, the United States is not the only example of democracy in the world, but it's the example that, well, first of all, toots its own horn the loudest.

So that's kind of our fault. But also the one that China is always going to look to, you know, just like there are other cities in the world that Chicago could compare itself to, but it's always going to compare itself to New York, right? Yeah, it is. There is this paradox. Sometimes it seems of democracy because I can, I can understand that point of view because, you know, I lived for many years in New York City and I read about, you know, Robert Moses, the great city planner of New York City and how all the great bridges and highways and tunnels got built in New York City. And it was I was there at a time.

It still is that way in New York. You can't build big things there anymore. You know, they try to build a couple blocks of subway tunnel. It takes 30 years and billions of dollars and it gets stalled many times. And it's the sort of thing you start to go on like, man, back when they didn't care how many people got killed and how many people got relocated and, you know, who got rich off of it, it was really easy to build those bridges when you, when, you know, someone like Robert Moses could just at the stroke of a pen, do whatever they wanted and no one could stop them. And, you know, versus when there weren't environmental impact statements and people saying, hey, don't, don't knock my low-cost

apartment building down and, you know, going to city council meetings and that sort of thing. And so I understand that perspective, right? If you, hey, it's sure easier to produce things if you don't have as robust of a democracy, but yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, there's got to be some kind of happy medium between the two. I mean, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, there's got to be some kind of happy medium between the two. I mean, neither seems like an acceptable alternative.

I mean, yeah, I don't think that it's just a straight tradeoff. There's a part of the curve where you get the best of both worlds. And, you know, we should all be striving for that. Oh, absolutely. I just mean, I understand the argument that one can make if you're in the position of saying, hey, this is paralyzing. Look at these folks are paralyzed. we are paralyzed in many ways um our our american democracy has become dysfunctional in many ways um but i mean okay let's talk about the you know the the long

list of human rights abuses in china um the the suppression and forced assimilation of the uighur population and all of that. That's the big one. Yeah. How does, yeah, that's the big one that's currently happening right now. I mean, tell me about that and how that looks in China politically. Yeah. So, you know, the origins of this really, I think that whatever label you want to put on it, whether you call it a genocide, a cultural genocide, crimes against humanity, a mass atrocity, I'm not too particular about what label, but I think nobody who understands what's happening, even if you look at it only from what the Chinese government has admitted to, thinks that this is exactly a humanitarian policy. It's pretty brutal. It's horrible. I call it out anytime that I can. But

here's what's really frustrating, is that even good friends of mine in China who are in the Chinese scheme of things sort of liberal, I mean, who would ordinarily care about the oppression of minority peoples, they look at what's happening there right now. In a different circumstance, they might say something about it. But right now, they see this as just the cynical weaponization of this human rights problem by the United States to try to keep China down. They think that the United States has blown it so out of proportion and basically used it in an entirely deeply cynical way because it's not like Mike Pompeo was exactly fighting for the rights of Muslim Americans, right? So when he's the one who starts raising these issues, it looks rankly hypocritical. And so, yeah, that's really unfortunate because the truth of it is there are severe human rights

abuses that have been going on for quite some time. Now, there's a lot of complicated backstory, none of which exonerates what China has done. but I think you do need to understand this was an outgrowth of the global war on terror. This was this idea that the United States wanted to enroll China in this so-called global war on terror, and they gave them a very explicit green light to go ahead with the demonization of this group of a separatist group that was actually quite small, as far as we can tell, and didn't have its fingerprints on many actual terrorist events. There was always sort of low level stuff happening, but this is called the East Turkestan

Islamic Movement. And sort of as a condition for the United States to get Chinese help, the U.S. had to sort of put the name of that organization on a list of terrorist groups. And so China sort of felt vindicated in this. It went ahead. And, you know, things – you have to understand, this is an enormous, enormous part of China. It's a string of oases, towns, basically, that ring a gigantic desert, one of the biggest deserts in the world. And it was inhabited by a Turkic Muslim people called the Uyghurs, primarily, who do not speak Chinese and practice a kind of mild form of Sunni Islam, for the most part. So. So China had basically decided we are no longer going to use the sort of Soviet model of allowing total autonomy to this different ethnic group. Instead, we're going to use what used to be the American model, the melting pot.

We're going to assimilate them. We're going to sort of wean them off their language. And, you know, the way that the Han Chinese will tell it is, this is for your own good. If you don't speak Mandarin Chinese, you're not going to be productive members of this society. You won't be able to get good work. You're going to always be, you know,

relegated to putting on your costume and singing and dancing for the tourists. You're going to be – and so they went after them for all sorts of expressions of religious extremism supposedly like growing your beard too long or going to the mosque too often. And they used really sophisticated surveillance technologies in AI to kind of, it's like minority report, you know, to identify people even before they'd actually committed any kind of a crime who were in need of intervention. And intervention- Yeah, they just like blanketed these towns in like cameras and surveillance, right? Yeah. And biometric data and all this other stuff as well. It's, you know, I mean,

I think that there are a lot of people who talk about China writ large as Orwellian. I would quibble with a lot of that in most of China, but in Xinjiang, I wouldn't quibble at all. It's very much a surveillance state, a panopticon. Yeah, so they rounded them up

based on this AI algorithm, put them in camps up to a million people, they say, for reeducation. Now, are there instances of rape or torture? There are many claims, but it does not seem to be systematic or on large scale. I think that anytime you have like a kind of power dynamic like that and a racial hierarchy and coercion and imprisonment of female populations, you're going to see some of that. And that's a horrible thing. But this is not mass killings, right? It's almost more grotesque in some ways.

Like when they have invited journalists to see some of these camps, in one really harrowing thing, they brought these journalists by these classrooms and they had these Uyghur men in a classroom all singing in English, if you're happy and you know it, clap your hands. I mean, it was just, I mean. It's out of a movie. Yeah, I couldn't have dreamt that up.

It would have been like too preposterous to put in a movie. But so this is not mass killings, but this is a mass attempt to assimilate or destroy a culture through separating people from their culture, re-educating them, et cetera? I would say, yeah, I would definitely say that's what it is. Now, that's awful. I have to agree with you, though, that I have heard a lot of people complain about this disingenuously in the US. Folks who have never expressed and would never express any concern over forced assimilation policies that happen in the U.S., you know, folks who have never expressed and would never express any concern over, you know, forced assimilation policies that happen in the United States to our indigenous populations here, right?

Children being separated from their parents, reeducated, languages being destroyed, populations being forced to move from, you know, one part of the country where they initially lived to completely different areas like that, you know, like overt genocide in the United States. You know, there are politicians and political actors here who say, oh, that's all bullshit. The Native Americans are very lucky and happy that we came, you know, fuck you. All that's great. What is China doing to the Uyghurs? That's awful.

And that's obviously hypocritical, but it also leaves me a little bit uncertain of how to treat it. Cause I'm like, well, all right, I'm not angrier about Mike Pompeo's hypocrisy than I am about the human rights abuse. I don't want to get drawn into some kind of argument where it's like you're being hypocritical. But I also, I understand the, you know, when someone says, oh, this argument is being used hypocritically. Yeah, some people are being hypocrites. Yeah. So it's a really difficult thing to do. I mean, to tweeze apart, you know, when is it just, when are you using whataboutism to try to shut down a conversation? Or when are you actually, you know, making the case that you don't have moral standing for that criticism?

You know, the American response typically is, yes, but we can talk about that openly, and we can make redress and we have learned the lesson. And are you really saying that two wrongs make a right here? And of course, that's not what, well, there are, I think, bad faith people who do engage in whataboutism, who do try to sort of erase or whitewash what China has done just by pointing out similar horrible things that the United States or Canada or Australia has done. I hope that I'm certainly, I don't regard myself

as being one of them. I certainly don't think that it exonerates China in anyoded. And I certainly think that in the Chinese eye, it weakens our ability to lecture with real moral force. Yeah. I mean, even if we say, hey, we talk about it openly, we have atoned through mass discussion of our genocide. Well, there's currently bills being passed across the country to try to prevent that history from being taught in our schools. Exactly. Yeah. So like literally teachers are getting fired for bringing up the basic facts of America's history towards, you know, our enslaved, formerly enslaved African-American populations

against indigenous populations. Like it's it's not always possible to discuss openly. People are literally fired for discussing it from state institutions. So, you know, it is, yeah, it's harder for us to make the argument than we would want, but that doesn't mean that the practice of forced cultural assimilation in that region of China is any better. No, it's okay. It doesn't change it one bit. So this is an age-old problem when it comes to us wanting to do good in the world and seeing other people suffering.

So in the case of Tibet or in the case of Xinjiang, I really wonder whether we could do more by doing less. And there are, I know that sounds awful. And we want to be able to express ourselves in a way that's consonant with our values. But when we, I feel like we need to reach out. The only thing that can actually change the situation is if we were able to win over significant populations of the majority. 92% of Chinese identify as Han, right? That's a lot. And that's the dominant ethnic group in China by a huge, huge amount.

And they're even a majority in Xinjiang right now, a small majority in that autonomous region. I think back to the civil rights movement in the United States. And if it were all about, you know, blame whitey, and if it didn't open itself up to people who wanted to get on buses and come down from Northern universities to take part in marches alongside, you know, to show what we now call allyship, I don't think it would have gotten as far as it did. If the rhetoric around it coming out of Dr. King or other leaders of the

Black Civil Rights Movement was, you know, more along lines of Malcolm X than it was Martin Luther King, I think there might not have been the kind of, I mean, as righteous as that would have been, I'm afraid it probably wouldn't have been as effective. So I think Americans need to ask themselves, I mean, there's this line from one of Obama's speeches that I absolutely love. He said, and it was at Oslo, I mean, everyone says he got that Nobel Peace Prize way too early, and he did. And he knew that himself.

But he gave a great speech. And in one line of it, he said, well, I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation. I'm afraid that a lot of Americans are really kind of wallowing in the satisfying purity of indignation rather than actually wanting to change the situation on the ground. They're doing it to make themselves feel good about being on the right side. And it's great that they're on the right side. I don't want them, obviously, to be on the right side. But if it stops with that sort of self-soothing, then what good is it? Yeah.

But then how engaging in that more complex, deeper way is so difficult and fraught when What good is it? know what I mean? Very easy political statement for me to make. I felt very indignant when I did it, you know, great. But yeah, if I were to want to engage with the deeper project of, you know, political reform in China and help change the hearts and minds of all the folks whose hearts and minds need to be changed, well, God, I don't know the first thing about how I do that right here. Hong Kong is another great example. I mean, it's a really, really complicated situation. You're a comic, right? You understand there's this principle of punching up versus punching down, right? As a comic, if you want to go after Silicon Valley billionaires, if you want to go after powerful politicians, that's great.

Nobody's going to stop you. You can say whatever you want. But if you started picking on people who are like you know non-neurotypical or or people from you know oppressed minorities you'd look like an asshole you would be an asshole right yeah so the problem in hong kong kind of boils down to that is that mainlanders feel like they're punching up and hong kong people feel like they're punching up wow it makes sense for hong kong people think that they're punching up. Wow. Now, it makes sense for Hong Kong people to think that they're punching up. After all, they're fighting this gigantic, you know, this enormous, very, very powerful state. So that's obvious. But why would mainlanders think that they're punching up?

And this is the part that most people are not aware of. They're not aware of the dynamic. Hong Kong was always way wealthier, you know, all the way up well after handover even in 97. Yeah. Way, way wealthier, all the way up well after handover even in 97, way wealthier. And they treated mainlanders who visited like they were their poor country cousins and not in a charitable way at all. I mean, they were contemptuous of them and it had only gotten worse as the mainlanders suddenly had more money. So it got to the point, I mean, I used to go there often. I lived in Beijing for 20 years and I'd go down to Hong Kong all the time. And I'd play this little game where I speak really fluent, you know, Beijing accented Mandarin. And I'd go and I'd

check into my hotel and I'd speak Mandarin to them. And because, you know, it's a Chinese dialect that anyone in service knows. And they treat me, you know, really brusquely with, you know, borderline contempt. And then I pull out the American passport and slap it down there and switch into, you know, code switch immediately into accent-free English. And suddenly they get all fucking obsequious. Wow.

And so it's a thing. Any mainlander who's visited Hong Kong can tell you that that's a thing. You're treated as a social inferior. And this is not, and so, you know, they were using dehumanizing language. They were calling mainlanders locusts. That's not cool.

So now that does, does that mean that China should be able to then gun them down? No, it didn't. They didn't gun them down, but you know, to, to deny them, promised political liberalizations. No, i don't think so and i think that it's it's but it's it's really complicated we only see part of it i mean if we see it in black and white we're we're really missing it yeah oh my god this this shit is so complex and i have so many more questions for you but we have to take a really quick break we'll be right

back with more Kaiser Quo. Okay, we're back with Kaiser Quo. You mentioned Taiwan. I'd love to talk about Taiwan a little bit because the more the situation, the political situation between China and Taiwan, the more fascinated I get and the more complex it seems. Because it's, I don't know, there's similarities to, you know, Hong Kong and Taiwan being put next to each other. But it's also like the history is completely different. Could you like just tell me, like, first of all, let me just say, the fact that, and correct me if I'm wrong, both China and Taiwan, or both Beijing and the government of Taiwan

claim to be the government of both areas, right? Of both, like, they are competing governments that both claim territory over the entire ball of wax, even though they do not have it. Correct? Well, almost correct. I mean, so Taiwan, so when, when Taiwan was still ruled by the Kuomintang party up until 1996, that was true. But in the time since the democratic progressive party, which is, was an opposition party and it actually began winning elections and is in power right now, they never foreground this claim to the entire ball of wax, as it were. They, without coming out and saying it absolutely directly, they lean way more in the direction of independence for Taiwan. So, it's different. So, that would have been true previously, but it really functionally

no longer is. Taiwan's not, it's really complicated, but I think it's super complicated for Americans in particular when you look at it, because it's like, if you don't look at Taiwan and recognize that it has functioned independently for over 70 years and has developed over the last 40 years, a vibrant democratic culture with a successful democratic politics, and as a ton that's just super admirable from the American perspective, you don't have a heart. But if you look at the Taiwan situation and you think that, therefore, we should just throw ourselves behind this idea

that we can ignore the diplomatic claims, the diplomatic agreements that we entered into that were the foundation of our relationship with the People's Republic, you know, beginning with the Shanghai Communique way back in 72. You don't have a head. I mean, it's kind of a classic battle of the heart and the head. And it makes for a terrible conundrum. I think that,

you know, anyone who spent time in both places in, in China and Taiwan knows that while I get, once again, there are so, there's so much similarity and so much difference at the same time. Yeah. It's,

it's just mind boggling. Yeah. I mean, it's, it is very hard for Americans to understand. Like the thing that really struck me, this was within the last year, this is how weird things are. John Cena gave an interview about a new movie that he had coming out. And he just says casually in the interview,

oh yeah, Taiwan's gonna be the first country where they get the movie. That's the first country the movie's gonna be released. And then he was inundated by folks from China saying, Taiwan is not a country. How dare you say Taiwan is a country? And he made an apology in Mandarin, I believe, where he said- He did. He speaks good Mandarin, yeah. He speaks good Mandarin. He says, I'm very, very sorry for saying that Taiwan is a country. Now, I think most Americans would just reflexively say, yeah, Taiwan's a country. Because that is their, I don't know, you look at a map. say, yeah, Taiwan's a country. Like, cause they, that is there. I don't know. You look at a,

you look at a map, you know, we don't recognize it as a country. The United States government does not recognize Taiwan as a country. Yeah. I'm aware of this with my head, but I am, but it is a point upon which I think a lot of Americans are confused. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, no. I, that's, that's exactly right. I mean, and the expect, I think we need to look at the mainland perspective on this and why it is in its own way so fucked up. I'll get in huge trouble with my wife if she ever hears me talking like this. But listen, I mean, look, the PRC, the People's Republic of China has never had jurisdiction over Taiwan. It was part of pre-PRC China. It was part of the Republic of China and it was part of the Qing dynasty that preceded that. But it was never under the control of the People's Republic of China. So when people say reunification with the People's Republic,

that's just simply incorrect. What people in the PRC don't seem to grasp is this. Japan took Taiwan in 1895, the spoils of a war between China and Japan that was fought in 1894 and 1895, and ruled it as a colony for the next 50 years, basically people of Chinese descent on Taiwan missed out on all the formative events of modern Chinese nationalism. They were not so, you know, as the brilliant scholar Shelley Rigger has talked about before, there was a psychological distance between them. They don't feel as Chinese. And why should they? Like I said, they don't feel the impulse of Chinese nationalism. And that's something that, you know, when I've tried to sit down with my Chinese friends and explain and tell them this, sometimes you get an aha moment. Sometimes there's a breakthrough and they realize, you know, you're right. Why would I saddle them with that

expectation when, you know, of course they didn't. They missed out on, and I can roll off a litany of 40 things, you know, major events that were like crucial moments in the birth of Chinese nationalism that they were completely separate from. Yeah. Cause they were in a different, they were ruled by a different group of people. They were not, it's the same true of Hong Kong, by the way, I always wonder. So it's, it's different though. It's different because, you know, it's contiguous, right? I mean, Taiwan is separated, you know, by a pretty wide strait. Hong Kong, you know, we think of it as Hong Kong Island, but, you know, the geography of Hong Kong is such that the mainland parts of Hong Kong are much bigger and more populous. So Hong Kong was continuous. It had a constant in and out flow of people,

especially of people who were crucial in the formation of Chinese nationalism because that's where they sought shelter when they were being persecuted by the Qing dynasty, right? That's where they sought shelter if they were nationalists being persecuted by warlords or if they were communists being persecuted by nationalists. So there was more contiguity and more sort of participation in that. During the Cultural Revolution, so many mainlanders fled into Hong Kong. It was a very different situation. You didn't have that admixture in Taiwan. But Taiwan was just always more separate. And so what the culture and the history of the place is not tied up in that recent, extremely eventful last like half century of mainland Chinese history. Yeah.

And yet it also is in a strange way. the ruling strata for a while there, the people who were, you know, the elites who dominated everything from higher education to banking to, you know, industry to politics were mainlanders. They, you know, they came over, they were the 49ers, we call them. My parents were among them. My grandfather was, you know, very senior in the nationalist organization. He was a scholar, but, you know, he was very, very senior in the nationalist organization. He was a scholar, but he was very, very senior there. And yeah, so both my parents grew up in Taiwan, but were born in the mainland. So that's,

it complicates things even further. But they're no longer at all the ruling majority or minority. the ruling, you know, majority or minority. Yeah. It's, you know, because we can't freeze things in time in 1972. Yeah. How do, so how do people in, you know, mainland China, like, how do they think about Taiwan? You said that they don't understand that, oh, they missed out on, on all these moments of Chinese nationalism, but what is the sort of default? The default is like total brutal irredentism. Taiwan should belong to China. Taiwan is, it only exists independently because the United States interfered in our civil war that we were going to win. And the only reason is because they interposed before we were able to mobilize to finish off this little rump state that had escaped to Taiwan. It's only because

the United States interposed forces and threatened to nuke us that Taiwan even exists. So that's what they would say. And so we're here to finish off what history intended all along. And what is preventing, and this is such 101 stuff, but I've always been fascinated by it. So I'm really happy to be able to talk to you. What is preventing that final resolution, right? Because you look at it and go, all right, this is a pretty tenuous situation. The United States does not recognize Taiwan as a country, but presumably if I travel to Taiwan, I'm going to have a different stamp on my passport than if I was going to travel to Beijing or Hong Kong. Right. So that in itself is just a weird situation geopolitically.

Very unique. And you would you would think would not be tenable over a long period of time, except it's lasted for decades. And you have, you know, vast majority of people in the People's Republic saying, hey, this is a little rump state that we should absorb any day now. So what is what is keeping us in us in this sort of odd stasis? What's kept it here is this fantastically well-crafted policy from the United States called strategic ambiguity. It's like they have basically, we co-created conditions for the indefinite continuation of this weird status quo, which to me is the only workable thing right now. So strategic ambiguity means a couple of things. It means, well,

mainly that if China were to move on Taiwan, we won't tell you whether we would or would not come to the military aid of Taiwan. Now, the mainland, of course, assumes that we would. And we should never allow them to think otherwise. But the – so I've talked to, you know, dozens of people who party to this, the creation of this. You know, this is – I talk to diplomats and people all the time for the podcast. And what I understand is that the unofficial American policy has always been, if a Chinese invasion comes without a prior declaration of

independence from Taiwan, the US will absolutely intercede. But if Taiwan fucks us and decides to declare independence first, which throws you know, throws everything into turmoil. And then China invades, we won't lift a finger to help. Wow. And that is because what it violates our previous agreement with the people's Republic or? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for one is that, you know, because we notionally subscribe to the one China policy. I always almost say one child policy, but the one China policy. China policy. I always almost say one child policy, but the one China policy. Wow.

Yeah, it's really strange. But really, the only people in the world who aren't sure whether the United States would invade, would intercede in the event of an unprovoked Chinese attack is the United States. Everyone else assumes that we would intercede. And thankfully for that. So it's just kind of a classic like foreign policy stalemate where it's like if anybody – things won't change unless someone makes a first move. But if someone makes a first move, it will not be in their – it's not in Taiwan's interest to declare independence even though they sort of like spiritually consider themselves independent in a way. It's not in China's interest to invade because they're worried about triggering something from the U.S. It's not in the U.S.'s interest to change anything about the facts on the ground because, hey, then nothing bad – nothing fucked up will happen. We won't have to send any troops anywhere.

But let's – I think we need to be fair to Taiwan here. Nobody in Taiwan got a say in this, right? Yeah. And that is – it's a it's a horrible truth and it's not fair it's absolutely not fair and of course taiwan should ideally have not just a say but you know ideally the only say it's just that that's not the world we live in that is absolutely not the world we live in uh we live in a world where, you know, we need to balance the interests of all the parties that are involved in this. And, you know, I've spent a lot of time trying to puzzle through this thing, you know, looking at the disposition of different forces and all these, you know, reading all these military reports. And the only thing I can come up with is we just got to keep kicking the can down the road until any old fucker who cares so much about this that they would throw blood and treasure into it is dead.

And then say, okay, now all the old fuckers are dead. Let's have a conversation. Ideally, let's get together around table. Let's talk for real now. And let's, let's like leave the ideology at the door and then like you know figure out the future because it has been a phenomenally wonderful uh cross-pollination over the i mean look if it were not for all these taiwan entrepreneurs going to china china would not be manufacturing the

world's cell phones right now. Foxconn is a Taiwanese company. Most of these OEM and ODM manufacturers in the mainland are run by, started by Taiwanese people. There's a book by that same author I just referenced called The Tiger Leading the Dragon. And that's a perfect metaphor for it. Taiwan, one of the five tigers, one of the four tigers, was the one that really, you know, started the Chinese economic miracle in a lot of ways. And then likewise, if it weren't for Chinese manufacturing capabilities, where would Taiwan be today? It would be, you know, kind of a backwater. It doesn't have a growing population. It doesn't have, I mean, a cost structure that would make it an attractive place to manufacture. It would be, yeah. So it's been, when it's good, it's great.

Man, there, oh, God damn it. There's so much to talk about. That is also fascinating. I really, really appreciate it. I want to bring us in. I want to bring us in for a landing here. All right. all so fascinating. I really appreciate it. I want to bring us in for a landing here. All right. One question I just want to make sure I ask you, coming back to your initial point about what has changed in, especially mainland China, in the last 50 years, the economic miracle or the incredible growth in standard of living and all that. I read a theory a couple years ago, and I can't remember where,

it was on someone's blog post somewhere. But it was that, like the main mistake that Americans make is thinking that freedom, which we value very highly, we're taught about in school. It's like our highest national word, right? It's what we pray to.

It's what we write on our buildings. Is that we think that that's a value that is extremely highly prized in china and whatever blog post i read was asserting that stability was a much more important value that like china had been through such upheaval you know uh colonization civil wars uh you know the cultural revolution all of this over so many decades that it was just important for folks to like, okay, nothing is blowing up right now. No one's dying of a famine. Everybody's, you know, doing okay. And that that was the most, that that was like a much deeper national value.

And I wondered if you agreed with that. I do agree with that. I think that's, it might've been my blog post that you read. I mean, I've said the same thing, but seriously, you know, it's not an original thought, but I think the person who said it best was a friend of mine named Jeremiah Jenny, who said when the Chinese, when Americans create their movie villains, when we create our bad guy, it's we, every single time we recreate Nazi stormtroopers, it's always like, you know, jackbooted thugs. It's always like an excess of political authoritarianism. That's always, you know, the villain, right? Mm. But when Chinese create their nightmare scenarios, their bad dreams, it's always about chaos. It's

always about an absence of rule. It's the cultural revolution. It's the warlord period. It's all these periods of, you know, that Akira Kurosawa movie, Ran, right? The character that they use is the Chinese character, Luan, which means chaos. That is the great fear, is chaos. And of course it is. I mean, that's the lived experience. I mean, as you said at the very top of the show,

this is in the living memory of a lot of people, you know, who are, again, alive today. They remember the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, and they don't want it. So, yeah, I think that that's essentially correct. Now, does that mean – I do not believe that that is true genetically. It's like for all time, Chinese people will always believe that. No, it's completely conditional on what the experience has been, what they've lived through

and what they've been taught and all that stuff. There's nothing genetic about it. It's not hardwired into them. But right now, Chinese people, and this is going to change because when all anyone can remember is stability, I think it will not be chaos that they fear as much. Do you think that, so we have this like long, one of our deepest narratives in America that we apply to other countries all the time is that, okay, even despite all that, people do crave liberty at the end of the day, you know?

And that's, you know, that's deep in our narrative of Hong Kong, for instance, right, that, okay, this is a place that became, you know, liberalized and democratic, and that, you know, even if the state imposes all of that order, that one day, you know, people will start crying for their rights, right? Is that, like, in your view, entirely false?

Or is that something that like could could hold to some degree that like, hey, once once things are stable in China for another 50 years, right, maybe maybe people start going like, hey, what if we get a second party going on or something? Yeah, no, I maybe it's because I grew up in the States and I was born here and drank that same Kool-Aid. But I firmly believe that that, you know, when conditions – it's not that Maslow's hierarchy of needs kind of thing, right? I mean, once everyone's got their basics all taken care of, of course, I mean, it's sort of – maybe that is something that is hardwired into us. Is that, of course, we desire more sort of space for individual expression.

That's just sort of part of what the species is. It's a matter of prioritization. And I don't think I've ever met a Chinese person who would disagree with that. You know, they want, it's just like, of course they want to get to that. It's just how we get there. Right now, freedom and democracy aren't looking so great in the short term, again, because America is always what they're looking at. And we've kind of pooched it here. We've really not done so well.

We're not a particularly good role model. And I think many of us know that. And I found it extremely difficult to preach the gospel of American freedom and democracy to any of my Chinese friends. I mean, it's, I mean, I, I often think about if you're the leader of any country or if you're any country and you're a partner of the United States or you're looking at the United States and then, you know, a Donald Trump gets elected and, you know, a bunch of, a bunch of folks storm the Capitol building, you're like, holy shit, this system, I thought these guys were resilient. I thought that, you know, America, hey, they got two parties, but things will, you know, they got stability.

They have, you know, economic prosperity. They don't have political violence. And then you're like, you know, if you're like an Angela Merkel or somebody like that, you're like, holy shit, look, look what can happen. Like, all right. And now we got that, you know, now things are, maybe things will quiet down a little bit, but in the back of your mind, you're like, well, hold on a second. They did that once, it could happen again, right?

Oh, I mean, it's looking extremely likely to happen in 2024. I mean, do you really think we're going to hold a Senate? Do you really think we're going to even hold a majority in the House? I don't think so. I mean, it's looking really, really grim right now. And, you know, I don't mean to end this on a bummer note, but here's the thing that I fear most is that Chinese elites, not just in government, but people all over China, will have come to the kind of final conclusion that irrespective of what party holds Congress, irrespective of who sits in the White House and what party they belong to. The real goal for the United States when it comes to China is to thwart China's rise, to keep China on its knees, to prevent it from developing as a peer, and to maintain our unipolar hegemony forever. That's what more and more Chinese people

have come to believe about the United States. And if they finally decide that that is true, what are the consequences of that? If all their policy afterward is built on that assumption, if that is a rock solid assumption, we're all kind of fucked. Yeah, I mean, it's a recipe for Cold War. is built on that assumption. If that is a rock solid assumption, we're all kind of fucked. Yeah. I mean,

it's a recipe for, for cold war. It's a recipe for, for like a lot, it's a recipe for, for having a lot more trouble getting iPhones and everything else that our society is built on. Like it's,

it's a bad scene. Yeah. Terrible, terrible scene. Yeah. Well, okay. Let's,

let's end on this note. We've talked so much about how our view as Americans of China Is so shallow and narrow And based on, you know, again Learning two or three facts in school And having two or three narratives repeated endlessly in the press Without any deeper investigation And that is certainly contributing to this dynamic that you're talking about Where people are either nothing but frightened or aggressive towards China.

How do you suggest folks at home break themselves of that spell and like, try to, you know, actually get what you are describing, cognitive empathy, do that very difficult trick of actually understanding what China is actually like from the perspective of the people who are there. You know, you're going to hate me for saying this, but subscribe to my fucking podcast. Yeah. I'm giving you an invitation for a plug, man. Do it.

Yeah, yeah, no. So the podcast is part of an independent media organization called SupChina. You might not love the name. I don't love the name of this. Sup as in like, right, what's up? SupChina. You might not love the name. I don't love the name of this. Sup as in like, right, what's up? SupChina. Yeah, what's up, China?

But it's great. It's a great organization. The guy who's – so it's sort of a two-headed thing. I run all our audio stuff. We have a network of podcasts that include this one. We have a weekly news roundup that we do. We have a – the flagship show is called Seneca. It's an hour, hour and a half, sometimes long,

deep dive with really, really important scholars or diplomats, journalists, sometimes practitioners, people who know what they're talking about. And the website itself, they have a daily newsletter and a free weekly newsletter. The daily newsletter is paid, but it's really worth it. It's just a curated roundup of all the important news coming out of China within our own editorial spin, for sure. But I think you'll like our editorial spin. It's what you've been hearing today. In other words, there is no apology for

China going on there. It's not saying, oh, China is just misunderstood. It's all just a PR problem. No, we are very forthright. We cover China with neither fear nor favor. We talk about China's human rights violations. We talk about its foreign policy where it rubs up against ours. But we try to bring that angle of cognitive empathy into everything. Chinese perspectives on things sitting alongside American and other perspectives. So yeah, I think you'll dig what we do. We have a lot of really good columnists writing on everything from history to feminism, LGBTQ stuff. It's a good site. And it's rich.

Lots and lots and lots of content that we put out every day. And a whole bunch of podcasts. We've got one that a lot of listeners might be interested in. It's called China Sports Insider. We've got a two every week right now because of the Olympics. And this is a veteran sports writer. And the other podcast has been doing 45-minute long show twice a week right now, all on the Olympics with really great interviews. Lots of other shows in the network as well. One that I think is fantastic is called

the China in Africa podcast, which is all about China's involvement in the developing world, in the global South. So it's not just Africa. There's also some stuff on Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa, but check that out. We also do a podcast called China Stories, which is great if you like, you know, it's kind of like autumn, you know, that app. If you like to listen to podcasts, and presumably you do, you're listening to a fucking podcast, listen to this. It's China stories. It's English language stories on China from about seven different

major English language outlets that are specializing in writing on China. The Wire China, Protocol China, Us Up China, Week in China out of Hong Kong. And they're just read by people who actually speak Chinese so they don't butcher the pronunciation of the names.

So check that out. It's great. we put out like 10 10 of those a week amazing i love what you do so much because it's like it's so hard to find media that is really focused on just understanding what the hell is going on in all of its facets right because the first thing you have to know, like you say, it's very easy to have outrage and say, well, you know, this, whatever, yell about a human rights violation, but you need to understand why is it happening?

What do the people, you know, in the country think about it? Like, what are, you know, what is going on mentally? What is going on politically? And it's so difficult to do to think your way into it. And the fact that you're dedicated to that project is, is enormously helpful. I'm such a fan of what you do and I'm thrilled you came on the show to talk about it. You'll have to come back on again so we can talk about the other 50 things that are on my question list that we didn't even get to.

Like, like the, you know, what has changed? I shouldn't even get started. My God. We'll we'll do it again in the future anytime man anytime thanks so much thanks so much adam yeah well thank you to kaiser quo once again for coming on the show his podcast once again is called cynica i hope you check it out. Thank you so much for listening. And I specifically want to thank our $15 a month Patreon supporters, Allison Leparato, Alan Liska, Antonio LB, Charles Anderson, Chris Stale, Drill Bill, M, Goddess Morgana, Hillary Wolkin, Kelly Casey, Calis Frini, Mark Long, Michael Warnicke, Michelle Glittermum, Paul Mauck,

Robin Madison, and Spencer Campbell. I want to thank our producers, Sam Roudman and Chelsea Jacobson, Ryan Connor, our engineer, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC

that I'm recording this very episode for you on. You can find me online at Adam Conover or adamconover.net, and we'll see you next week. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time on Factually. That was a HateGum podcast.