Lemonade Stand - A Very Chinese Time… | Ep.055 Lemonade Stand🍋

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

On this week's show... We launched a Patreon! - https://www.patreon.com/lemonadestand for bonus episodes, discord access, a book club, and many more ways to interact with the show! Episode: 55 Recorded on: 3/22/26 Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCurXaZAZPKtl8EgH1ymuZgg Follow us TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@thelemonadecast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thelemonadecast/ Twitter - https://x.com/LemonadeCast The C-suite Aiden - https://x.com/aidencalvin Atrioc - https://x.com/Atrioc DougDoug - https://x.com/DougDougFood Edited by Aedish - https://x.com/aedishedits Thumbnail by Cheyenne DeWolf - https://x.com/cheyedewolf Produced by Perry - https://x.com/perry_jh Segments 0:00 Intro 3:30 Chinese Vampire 5:00 Chinese EVs 10:00 Brainrot 14:00 Modernization 28:00 Train story 39:00 Infrastructure/High Speed Rail 47:30 Surveillance 50:00 Delivery Drivers 54:30 Chinese Capitalism 1:00:00 Censorship 1:05:00 Social Credit 1:12:30 Food Convention 1:19:00 Chinese Politics New takes on Business, Tech, and Politics. Squeezed fresh every Wednesday. #lemonadestand #dougdoug #atrioc #aiden Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Plans start at just $12 a month. Learn more at tellus.com slash online security. No one can prevent all cybercrime or identity theft. Conditions apply. Welcome aboard via rail. Please sit and enjoy. Please sit and sip. Play.

Post. Taste. View and enjoy. Via rail, love the way. Boys, we're in China. And this episode sponsored by Mita Wongzi, Rice Crackers. We are going to get into this later on. A lot of exciting stuff about these rice crackers.

A lot of rice cracker related news. Boys, don't tell Vox. They will. ask for a cut of that. And we'll give them part of this bag of rice crackers. To be clear, we don't have anything.

We just have a bunch of rice crackers. We got made in product. That's a smart deal. That's a smart deal. Yeah, Lillian might ask for a few. So, we're here and we figured it out.

We get China. Yeah, we'll say we have to get out before it collapses in 15 days, which is coming up quick, but we still have time to enjoy. Some people are split here. They said,

we asked that one delivery driver. He said 15. And then we asked that woman at the spa, she said 25. Right. So it's up in the year. There's a window here. What everyone agrees with YouTube that China will collapse within the next 30 days. I will say, when we were on the 300

kilometer hour train, I was shoddy craftsmanship. I was like, it's just Yeah. The water was hot. The water for you. That's what's going to take down this country is that every restaurant only gives you the scalding hot water. In the spicy food restaurants, I give you hot water. And then when you're eating spicy rabbit, it's like your tongue gets numb. All right, we've been here. What, this is day five, six. This is day five. We flew into Shanghai.

We spent two full days in Shanghai. We then spent a half day there and took an overnight sleeper train here to Chengdu, which you can see behind us is another one of the major cities. And in, uh, what, a day? Tomorrow we're going to Chongqing. We're going to be spending a couple days there. where they're going to go to Shenzhen. We're going to be ending the trip there. Hopefully getting to look at some factories. We have been talking to random people on the street. People we've set up interviews with.

We've been cruising and smooten. It's all been quite cool. And we're going to tell you all about it and what we've learned. Yeah, made a homie on the train too. We're going to go get dinner with him tonight. We're getting dinner with our random Chinese train homie who offered us tea and slept next to us. Yeah, yeah, he did sleep next to us. We had two sleeper cars.

There's four bunks in each. and we took that overnight from Shanghai to Chungdu. And he was our bunkmate. But three of us were in one. And then I think he was. Stefic and I were in another on the top bunk. And it was, it was loud.

I contributed. We heard the couple in your guys' room was just hacking. Yeah. So just going to town. They were snoring. I mean, to be fair, though, we were pretty far. We were a whole like two feet above them. So it's not like it was.

It lulled me to sleep. There's a lot we can talk about Yeah There's a lot of reasons We can take this Brandon what's an experience You've had so far The ink is notable

And then tell us about it Tell why it's interesting We have some kind of funny Travel stories that we can go into And there's also some stuff That I've been interested In seeing boots on their ground There's some great stuff I want to say

Some questionable stuff I want to say I think there's like There's a lot of interesting ways we can take this I think we can start with a couple of travel stories I mean we want to just get What do you think? Okay I think this really sells

I think I'll let Aiden sell it Because we're on the train station You're going to want to say it And I feel like I'm going to be midpoint on something else and you're going to take this and you're going to use it against me. It's so funny. So I'd rather get it out of the way. I was going to start with a story that doesn't have to do with you.

I thought this was, this is, I'm not representative of the country. But the strangest thing I've seen. Okay. Is we were in that candy store in Shanghai and somebody in the store walks by. He's a guy with, you know, presumably a Chinese guy with a ponytail and a white, a white jacket on and I look in his eyes he has blood red contacts in

so I feel like I'm making eye contact with like a vampire from Twilight No it was legitimately a Chinese vampire He literally had to put it And then and then as he walks by Like I see him I'm obviously looking at his eyes And then I look down after he gets past me

He has a Nazi iron cross arm brand It was on his arm And I No question about it the correct color scheme, like the red outline, square arm bed, with the white and the black red,

the black iron cross in the middle. I see, Aden, look at me shocked, then take out his phone, Google Iron Cross. Because I had to double check. I had to double check. I was like,

because I didn't want to, like, oh, maybe, maybe I'm just misjudging this. Yeah. Most insane thing I've seen so far. That was the only Chinese vampire Nazi have seen this trip. Outside of that.

I heard once we get to Shenzhen it, I'm taking over. Okay. I think like five things I want to talk about. One of them is EVs. We could just talk about that. I start with EVs and then talk about trains because I was looking a little bit of the history.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, let's start with EVs. This was, by the way, like I'm not a car person. And we mentioned this on the Patreon as well. One of the things that we spent half a day doing on day two was driving across towns. We could go look at the Xiaomi SUV 7 new car. Yep. So we went to, this is the equivalent of an America.

If you're visiting a new city, right? You're visiting, I don't know, Minneapolis or something. You'd be like, hey, I heard Chrysler has a new car. We should drive 40 minutes across town and spend three hours in a mall looking at a showroom car. That's going to be awesome. We have two days here out of a two-week trip to the market. Doug was not sold on the idea, but I think it ended up being rather fun. It's fucking awesome.

Like, it is awesome. Just the premise is absurd. Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this, you know, on my stream, and generally, you probably heard that China is making great strides in EVs. And boots on the ground, fact. It's a fact. Dude. A couple main things is that when you have an electric vehicle, you have a green license plate,

and if not you have a blue one. We are walking around two of these major cities, and it is green license plates pretty much as far as the I can see. We heard from our interpreter today that they have a sign entering the city that certain license plates, like if your number ends in one and six, you can't enter the city today. But if you have a green license plate that does not apply. So there's like restrictions that prevent ice, hashtag plug ice vehicles. We saw this in, yeah, this was in Chengdu today.

Yeah. And so like they've clearly put like heavy government pressure to get EVs mainly adopted. And because of that, there is intense competition. I've talked about it before, but seeing it firsthand as crazy, there is intense competition for the EV market in China because everybody is kind of pushing to buying one. So winning that market is huge. I would say particularly in Shanghai. Like maybe just anecdotally, slightly less in Shangdu.

But in Shanghai, it felt like 80% of the cars I'm looking at on the road, on EVs. And you mentioned this, but it's like all different brands. You're walking, you rarely see like three of the same brand. It's always like... And even weirdly, it's not a lot of BYD, which the story is that they're like the dominant number one. They've seen hardly any.

It sounds like they're mostly in international markets now not in China. There's so many. I think I saw more in Mexico City. I saw more BYDs in Mexico City than I saw in Chagai. Like, 100%. And I can say as a not car guy, they're so cool. Like they're beautiful. And the inside of every car we've got into is just like incredible.

There's screens everywhere and places that are unnecessary. Dude, I will say, I agree with Doug. We got into one, we were taking a D-D, which is like the Uber equivalent here. And it was a van. I forget what brand or model it was. But on the arm. of the passenger seats in the back, there were screens built into them

to like adjust all the chair settings. And I... A knob could have done that. I'm like, guys. It's an iPhone. It even has like, I think it's the same OS. It's like there's a little iPhone in the armrest

so that you can press back on the seat. Like, that's it. We can just, it's okay for some of them to be knobs and dial still. That's where, because anyway. Every taxi, gigantic screen dash with a screen hollow panel

in the front part of the, bottom part of the windshield. They're gonna have like panels above like the license plates on the back like just so you can have like cool things flashing on the back of your car. Wild. Yeah, no shortage of screens in the EV. So, so that's been an interesting thing is like just confirming that.

That it is, is it's as prevalent here as you would expect. If not more so. More so. Yeah. I think I came in with high expectations. And yeah. Their competition is truly fierce.

You know, every mall we go to the first floor, all EV showrooms all competing with each other. Tesla was in there, but it's just one of many. company that I invested in a while ago called Neo, which I thought would be the next big thing, is nowhere to be found tiniest little showroom I've seen one time.

This is their year, though. This is their year. Also, we haven't even been to Chongqing or Shenzhen. We'll see. Those were at Neo-dominated. I mean, they're supposed to be like the super luxury high-end one.

Wait, so what's surprise, is anything to surprise you about the car itself? Like seeing, because we, like, went into cars, both Uber and in the showroom.

I think the experience we had of seeing the brand new. It was kind of cool because they had, honestly, the streamers around, it was the interesting thing. There was some marketing thing that set up, or we don't know

if they'd set it up, but it seemed like it. There was just streamers live streaming and just screaming the car specs and going in circles as the car released. I can't really set the context.

It's like if you're in a mall in America and there's like a car in one of the like mall, small mall booths. And then there's three people around it with a, with her phone just like Ford F150 and it's got a hundred horsepower

and it's great like that. It's like that. You do vehicles coming out tonight. you're going to see the prices. They are coming out tonight and you should go, look at these comments. happening right now and they're just like three of them around we looked online and they have

one viewer 20 viewers and i want to say like 14 viewers they're just there just streaming it's awesome and it's like there's no one else by the way it's like three streamers around a car just yelling and then us yeah this is a strange first impression i've had is the number of people that we've run into or seen that are seemingly live streaming on doyin which is like the chinese version of TikTok, and basically the same app. And the number of people who are just live streaming something out in public on that app, especially in Shanghai,

and presumably doing it to nobody. Like, with very, very, very few viewers. Dude, this really, this really cooked my noodle. We were out in the rain on a bridge, and I saw a guy live streaming with a not moving chat, telling the weather. He was like explaining the weather to his chat.

Like one person would pop in and ask a question, like, do you think it's a good time to go out? out and he's like, no, it's raining. It was crazy. I was like, why are you standing out in the rain to deliver this message? Yeah. Oh, I think it is a good misconception to clear up because people have this about whether or not Chinese TikTok is educational versus the American brainwreck one.

I want to get you 100% clear answer. It is as brain rotted as anything you've ever, it is just as much. There is no brain rot difference. The brain rot gap is not real. And everyone is using their phones. is about. That is a universal. Whatever you think about kids on their phones, adults in their phone in America, it's the same here. I'll say, and people are scrolling short form video. That is taken over the world.

There is no great firewall difference in short form video. I've seen some inspirational videos about pandas, like losing objects and getting them back. And they're all crafted by. Actually, it may be, here, I'll say, because we have a lot of good things about China. I'll say it may be a little bit more brain-rodded because of the true prevalence of AI video. It is every third video on Waybo. And again, I'm not as deep in social. I probably haven't missed Doyen stuff, but every third video is AI generated.

And when I was on the train, even they had, you know, state media on their AI videos. Like, it's just not a thing that they, it's not a bad, or not considered a bad thing. I think it's really odd to see the, for those who have browsed on something like YouTube shorts, and you've seen these AI animations where you watch like a tiny anthropomorphic cat get lost and get adopted by, new anthropomorphic cat parents as the background music goes, meow, meow, meow, meow. Like,

that style of weird AI animation is everywhere. Yeah. I see it. It's so prevalent on like screens, on trains. But imagine that, but it's an eagle and it's representing America. Yeah.

It's from Chinese state media and it's disgusting what's going on in Iraq. Dude, like there's some crazy stuff, bro. Can't wait until we get there. It's probably like six months. I mean, Trump does tweet AI video. You know, I'll just say, yeah, that's true. That's true.

But the White House has traded some fucking. and halo music over. But we have talked to a few people, and the AI skepticism that I think is so prevalent in the U.S. is just not here in the same way. There's a very strong public favor from the people we've asked and from what they think of what other people think, of AI being a good thing and something that will be positively integrated

into whatever the future is. Like, it will be something that helps, not hurts. And it's interesting. to see the disparity in the opinions between back home and here. Yeah, let me follow up on that. Because so we spoke with this person who works with Chinese universities and basically helps American students study abroad in China and does these like pairing programs at the universities,

asked us to keep the actual program and name anonymous. But had a really interesting conversation. He's lived here for 30 years. I've seen a ton of different stuff up close. He is American, but has been like deeply integrated in many different places. of China. And he speaks flowing Mandarin.

And he's, yeah, he's literally, he's lived here for a very long. You told a very funny story about how I've been here 30 years. Every time I speak Chinese, someone goes, wow, your Chinese is so nice. Yeah. I get that in L.A. With English. With English. So amongst many things that we've sort of like thematically seen over this trip,

one of the things I've been most impressed with that he said, and I feel like I'm seeing it more, is that China has the ability to pivot. it and they've shown how quickly they can pivot as a country over and over and over, over many decades. And he's seen that over the last 30 years. So he listed labor laws as this example where famously labor laws were extraordinarily bad in China. And then there was just this massive overhaul. And now there's actually a lot of workers' rights. And he said, like, in the university, like, it is hard to fire somebody. It is, it is, you know, you have to guarantee certain pay and all these different things that you don't associate with China because the stereotype

is, oh, horrible working conditions and blah, blah, blah. And basically said, this is one of many examples we've seen where as problems start to arise, the entire country can just turn on a dime and change something. So with AI specifically, he said everybody's used to change. Like the actual physical country has been changing for decades at this insane pace. Everybody's lives are getting better. And so they're used to change. They're embracing change. They feel like they keep seeing the positives in their life as as, I mean, literally now I would say in many respects. somebody's life in China seems more modernized and convenient than ours, right? Yeah, like by a wide margin in number of respects, I'd say.

Yeah, obviously not in all of them. And so that he said, yeah, with AI, he's like, people are just willing and excited. And they're like, yeah, this is part of change, this is new technology. And on top of that, because everybody uses these super apps, like we chat and Alipay that does everything. You do, you order food, you order cars, you do personal chatting, you use. That's also how you communicate with your job. Everything is through these apps.

So as they're introducing AI, it just goes right into the apps you already have. And so that was so interesting. Like we have this weird kind of like separation with the giant companies that everybody's building this resentment. The approval rating for AI right now is like, it's like near the Democrats. Like it's so low in America. And then here everybody's cool with it. Yeah. So I wanted to add two stories to this.

one that confirms it and one that sort of steel man's against it. So I did a little research. So the first thing about AI adoption being across all demographics and ages here is that if you guys have heard about OpenClaw in America or in the West, it's like, maybe you could explain it better than I am, but it's like it was created in Europe, actually. And it's a thing you can give access to your PC that allows AI to read all your root files and all your messages and all your emails. And you can use it to optimize your life and tell it to be like, hey, sort my emails,

organize my emails or it has control of your whole PC to do stuff. And it can just like, it's like a more access version of claw. Yeah, if you trust in AI to just do literally anything with your emails and your accounts and your computer, then hook it up. Well, great. This is a security flaw. But that's what I'm saying is so here, open claw has become a bit of a phenomenon. It's become like a real cultural trend.

There's many, many articles about how it's kind of, they're calling it a nation of raising lobsters because of the law. And so in some local provinces, People are getting paid to help set it up to like go out and help people who are older are going out and getting their laptops to add open claw to it. It's becoming pretty big. And there are messages from what you said. Like official Chinese government messages are saying, hey, do this to be sure for security because there's a lot of security flaws in it. But there's like this rate.

I think there's like a general race from people of all ages to be like, I want to make sure that I'm ahead or understand AI as a concept. And this is like a, this is an example of that. And then a little bit of a steel man against it, though, is I, you know, I did find articles from Chinese sources and comments that I got translated, which were like from white collar workers, similar to what's going on in America where people are, are worried about it. There is like a worry that is. I mean, I talked to, what, it's like two or three people now in China. Now, we've, I mean, thanks to our incredibly wonderful interpreter Steffick, we've been able to have like, I think, great conversations with people. We're not just like walking around

pointing at tourist stuff. So we've been trying to like really talk in depth of folks. I think the difference. But yes, obvious caveat to this entire episode. Yes. The difference that you kind of see themed across all of the conversations

we're having is there is a way stronger faith in the government here to tackle problems. Yeah. Like if something new comes up or a problem is on the way, I'm not super stressed about the problem because there is going to be a solution.

The confidence that it's going to be taken care of, we're going to adapt and overcome or find the best way to integrate that new thing into life here. And that, I feel like that theme exists through everything we've talked to or about with everyone. Like it's super...

People are extremely positive about China and feel so positively about the future of the country. And if you've seen for decades your country and lifestyle get better and you've seen the government, obviously with many missteps, generally keep hitting and it keeps going better, it's like, of course you're going to feel optimistic. And of course change is going to be like, well, we will adapt to the change. Like I'm just, I'm so impressed by that culture, given how much we don't want change in America because it will hurt the character of the neighborhood. I was thinking about the different people we've talked to and how they all mention, wow, the country or the place that I'm from has changed so much in the last 20 years. It's remarkable how much has changed. And I feel really confident and good about China's future. And also that I don't really feel pressed to leave or explore places outside of China.

Like that it's like not that they wouldn't travel outside of China like for fun, but it's not like, oh, I need to go see and experience other parts of the world. It's like I'll go see other parts of our amazing country. And I feel like that's come up, I think two different times that that that was interesting. Yeah. I don't want to be the guy that's only doing the other side. But I just want to say like, you know, there was some like the guy, the delivery driver we talked to where he mentioned he had to move from his area because there was no job. I think there's some similar things to what people are. feeling in like early graduates white collar jobs young people that are felt in a there's a very similar vibe of like it's very competitive right now there's not a ton of opportunity at level and people are trying to make that work I think in general like the things I'm seeing that I wish America would kind of learn for him is like the broad structural stuff which is like what tax money is spent on with regards to infrastructure and trains and everything like there's a clear advantage in that I did notice I think I, the thing I've been most struck by that I, I didn't think would be a thing here is the scale of everything.

It really does feel bigger. Everything does feel bigger. I've been calling it the Texas of the world in that everything feels bigger in China. It's, it's just trying. It's the China of the world. You don't have to. It doesn't, everything's bigger in Texas. I'm just thinking that's the thing.

And, you know, we were in the world. It's not, okay, hold on. It's not even a good analogy. In Texas, things are 1.5 times bigger. Here it is a hundred times bigger. Yeah. This is not the Chungdu skyline, by the way. This is a hundredth of it, right?

Like, every one of these cities is at a scale that makes ours looks like ants. Not, I remember seeing the skyline. Like, it was crazy as you're driving in between, one of the train, in between the cities, and you're in the less dense populators, and you're still seeing tall skyscars. You go to Los Angeles to Sacramento, and there's nothing there. And then you get from this medium-sized city to a medium-sized city. And here, there's condos like this everywhere, the whole time. Yeah, the whole distance.

I am baffled by the scale of it. like truly it's just like unbelievable in the sense that I cannot believe it as real. Yeah, we were in the Shanghai area, and I think this struck me too, is like the Shanghai metro area has a greater population than Germany. Like this one city, which is a one small part of the map of China, has 80 million people. And so I do, I sort of get a sense of, you know, I would say the thing, if I had to pick one thing that I still prefer is that like there's certain aspects of my job that I clearly couldn't do here. Like I could not make a video criticizing Xi Jinping 10 days a week.

I got you with trouble. I couldn't do it. But I do get, when I'm in Shanghai, I got the idea of like, when you have this many people, if you can get them all to row in even somewhat the same direction, the ability to move quick is crazy. And that is what I'm getting about China is like, if they have to like, I don't know, restrict a few things to make everybody row. You're just making progress at a scale that is so quick.

You're building so much, so fast. the amount of concrete they pour in like a year is more than America's poured in the last 20 it's just new energy coming online is like a lot of things that I'm just getting a sense of scale that is like, yeah,

now that they're moving in the same direction it's very hard to imagine. They've managed to create a system where that's possible. I think that was reiterated by the university director we were speaking to was they have managed

to do the imposterous In a country that's this big with this many people, they can get people to make, like, cohesively get behind goals or ideas. And that's, at home, at a country that is still large in population, right? A lot of those things seem so daunting because of how many people are in the US with so many different opinions, they're so polarized.

And then this place has literally four times as many people. Right. And they're able to do it somehow. Not even four times. Not just that, but like the density. You know, again, it's like Shanghai, Greater Area is 80 million people. That, you know, that's what, the entire West Coast and then some, you know, and it's all in like one area that's the... You know what stuck with me?

It's unbelievable how you can coordinate. And there's so many examples. You see it everywhere. The cities are incredibly clean, way cleaner than any American city I've been to. There's no trash on the streets at all. The streets are physically are clean. There's cleaners going by three times a day. There's flowers in the middle of.

the road. Like, it's quiet. It's beautiful. It's unbelievable, like, how well coordinated it seems to be, and I don't understand how it's done on this scale. Shanghai was, like, Tokyo clean. It was crazy. Yeah. Which is not the stereotype. Yeah. One thing that really, really stuck with me

on the scale stuff is our friend on the train, when he said, you guys have such a big country with so few people. I thought that was insane. Because from his perspective, it's totally true, right? The U.S. has the third largest population in the world.

I don't know where it stands on like population density, but like 330 million people is a lot of people for a country. But when you think about the scale here of like 1.4 billion, it's in a totally different realm. And I was really, really trying to reiterate to my girlfriend who have been texting, like, dude, the train stations that we, not only the train station in Shanghai that we left, from, but the train stations that we stopped at along the way and like saw from the platform. And then the one we got off at Chengdu, and the length of that train ride and how we, the buildings

never seemed to stop along the way. And the hall of the train station is like the biggest thing you've ever seen with like an almost like indescribable distance of trains and platforms at each one we started and stopped at. It all feels a little surreal. in how big it is. Like this, and it doesn't really exist like this anywhere else. Like there's other countries in the world that have really good infrastructure

and public transportation, but it doesn't exist at this scale, right? Like Switzerland's nailed it, but it's tiny. And it doesn't look like this. Tiny, by comparison, like, truly tiny. I think it gives me hope in a weird way. I think seeing it be done in this way with this many people

makes me, it's a model in a way that we can do it too. Like the size factor, whenever you make a point about like infrastructure or things in the US and people argue like we have too many people, our country's too big, things are too spread out or whatever. I think this demonstrates that like, dude, it's possible. These things can be built. Well, was it ever questionable that, was the question that it's possible? No, I think.

Will we? To me, that's always been the bigger one. I think people argue, a lot of times when you argue with people about public transportation in the U.S. or infrastructure in the U.S., they will tell you that a lot of the things you would want are not possible because of things like the amount of people we have. Or like politically it's impossible or logistically it's impossible. But people make it. Yeah, but it's just like, it's never been the road. The robot has always been political.

Yeah. It's always, like, we've never even gotten to the point where it's like, oh, we built it, but there's so many people. We can't, or we're hitting a mountain and it's not, you know, it's, we don't even start building. Yeah. I mean, I think if you looked at something like the high speed rail network here and thought about, uh, people would be like, oh, the country is just too big to build something like this. It's like we, so, and that is a justification for, from Los Angeles to Beggersfield. Yeah, but we went to the train, the train that we went on last night was basically the

equivalent of us going from L.A. to Dallas overnight. That's what we did. It was 14 hours? Yeah. Technically, we transferred because Brandon... Let's tell a story. Is there any... All right, so we decided to take a sleeper car. Now, this is kind of quaint, right? This thing is, is much slower, much older. It's only 200 kilometers an hour. Yuck! Which is like... For 120 miles an hour. For context. Our fastest train in America, bright line averages 69. 69 miles an hour. Dude,

it's only 69? Yeah, that's the average that we got. That's our newest and best one. Men weren't when to go faster than 69. Okay, 69 is where he top out at safe speed. Yeah. Gives you time to think. Gives you time to think and look around that scenery and enjoy life.

So we decided to take the slow one, the 200 kilometer an hour, uh, because that way we could do a sleeper car where we all get in beds and we could do it overnight. And it would be 14 hours instead of 10 if we'd done the faster one. And, uh, and then we get to, the station at 6.30. Okay, I'll just tell.

So yeah, we pulled up to the largest train station I've ever seen in my goddamn life. We go through the security. We have to show your passport. And I do show it. And then I get through and in between walking from one end to the other, we had the last train car. We were the very end of the thing. Somewhere in that gap, I lost my passport.

And so we're trying to board the train and everyone is through the security. And I am not. And I can't find it. And so I sprint full speed back through the largest train station I've ever been through my life. sweating through my shirt with our interpreter. I get to the front. I ask them for my passport.

They don't understand. The interpreter is not cut up to me yet, so it's just me. Nobody understands what I'm saying. I can't get my passport. I'm freaking out. She finally catches up. We talk to people. They say there's a lost and found,

but it's outside of the train station in a basement. And like if you leave, you can't get back in without your passport. So I'm freaking out. We do go out there. We go to the basement. They're like, and it's a run because the station is so big.

So to get outside of it all the way out, out around and then down. Sweating. Just sweating and running. And there's a lot of people there. And so we get there and they're like, anyway, they found it. Lawson and found has it in a different area. Someone returned it. Thank God.

But we already missed our train. So we get back to our spot. And, you know, I think we're cooked. I mean, I'm very happy that we found it because otherwise it's, you know, it's go find another path where we go to the embassy. So bad. It would have ruined the trim. So bad.

You need your passport for everything here, for everything. getting on a train, going into a hotel, fucking going to a spa, you need for everything. It would have been quite a disaster. Thankfully, they have it, so we get it.

And I think we're probably good. We're going to have to get a flight. We're going to have to do something else. They go, okay, you can get on the faster 300 kilometer an hour super train. Speed past your other train and catch up to your original tickets on the first ride, which is crazy and awesome that they suggested it. And so we go,

yeah, so we get on a later train. Oh, between between we should tell. I think I have told the story because this is fucking funny. I've been carrying around a basketball. You can talk about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing in a whole different podcast.

They'll have a separate Patreon. Hey, hey, think about this at home while you're listening to this. See you're in a trip with some of your best friends. And one of them, you have a small group. One of them goes to a store. He buys a basketball at the beginning of the trip and begins to carry around

and bounce said basketball everywhere you go for the rest of the trip. How would you feel about that? I would say, you guys were being so... Dude, you're a terrorist. If you were in Boston, you just live in Boston, and a Chinese guy's dribbling a basketball, you don't go, oh my God, this, this guy,

what a crazy tourist with his basketball. It's, nobody cared. We were in a thousand-year-old temple. Think about this. And you were bouncing a basketball. I was balling. First of all, let's be clear. I wasn't bouncing a basketball.

I had hand. like nobody's busy. Imagine, no, imagine if we went back to Boston and in Boston, there's no, there's no Asian people. And then the first Chinese guy

that's showed up in, that in like a couple weeks rolls up and he's dribbling the basketball. It's not about, it's like, we were not the first white guys in Shanghai.

No, that's not my point. It's not my point. It's not my point. It's that you, it's the groundwork for future white basketball players. It's the idea. You already, you obviously stand out already.

You represent something. It's like you're clearly a foreigner. So, and so you said, every Chinese person who talked about me has made conversation about basketball. Some guy talked to me about Kobe did it. Maybe it's fine. I think it's fucking fine.

Do you mean the way in the basketball court? Did you tell them? What's, what's Chinese, what's Chinese Google again? Baidu? Baidu. By do. I wonder what happens if you type in Kobe, Colorado.

I did not tell him to look at, up Kobe's history, but he did tell me he likes Kobe Bryant. Anyway, so here's where the basketball comes into play, other than them not happy with it. We are waiting for our second train. And by the way, I do feel like shake because I have half for it. We have people had to wait on me. And I just felt bad. So I walk away from the group into an open area and I'm just dribbling my basketball in the middle of the station. Open area. In the middle of the station. There are thousands of people around. Literally nobody else is caring or looking, but you guys are flattened up and freaking out. But I'll I'm drawing.

No one else is carrying except the fucking military official. And this is where it gets weird. Okay. So a guy strolls up in an outfit that even our interpreter has not seen this is not a normal station outfit. He is wearing like a military colonel's hat.

Like he looks like he's part of the CTP military. And he's also tall. He's like six, five. An extremely stern face. Like a naturally resting stern face. He walks up to me like confidently and points at turns out not a basketball, but it looks.

Looks like he's pointing right at my basketball. And then he points over to the area. And then he turns into the crowd, like over, far from me, but in the stage. And he points at Aiden. And Aidan's face is the funniest face I've ever seen. Aiden goes a pure look of horror, number one. And I don't know this guy. I've never met him.

I did not do that. I did not do that. He was trying to sell me out and throw me under the bus, bro. You think about this. Think about this. Your white friend in the middle of this. train station in the middle of China is bouncing a basketball and the scariest looking man you've ever seen walks up to him motions and then and then from across the room locks eyes with me

points at me and then points away like come with me and I in that moment I am thinking oh Brandon's basketball has just sent me to prison you and by the way I'm also I'm also kind of freak it up because this guy's fit, I swear to God, this guy's face is not, I smile at him like, hey, what's up? Stern. Like, does not smile back. Did you mention Kobe? Did you mention Lakers? Kobe Ryan? He does, I saw. I was so mad. I was maybe the most mad I've ever been to.

And I look over it, Aden, and I'm trying to tell him to get our interpreter, but he is like trying to run away from me and pretend he never heard me. No, you, okay, this is why it was such a disaster is because Stefic wasn't around. Yeah. Stefic, Perry, and Doug are often a different part of the terminal. So we each individually came back. and then we're motioned by this guy from across the entire train station.

And he, I'm like, I'm like, Stephic, and I don't know, then I'm getting pulled over by this guy, and he,

he, you know, he pulls me away from everyone else to a passport reader, and he, like, points at it. And again, I think, and it's like,

next to a gate leading off into nowhere. I think I'm being pulled away. It does feel like that. And then I realize what's going on, which is just that he's trying to help us get on our train, and he's just doing a nice thing.

He just has to be used to, he just wants us to, in advance, scan our passport, It's going to be a little slower for us and we just get it done. It was great. Yeah, it was actually very nice of him.

So we get scanned and one by, but you know, every single person in our group has to individually be kind of freaked out because they keep coming in. Because it's one at a time. And then at least two of us are looking concerned

near this tall military guy. Also, this is not a normal thing because I also looked at the faces of... Bouncing a basketball in the middle of a train terminal is not a normal thing. Regular Chinese people around. No, they were not worried

about the basketball. They did think something was going on. Like, they also looked a little bit like what the hell's happening. So anyway, we did get on our speedy train. We caught up, which I think is just cool. I think it's just incredibly cool. It's like a moment in a movie.

It's like we missed our train. So we just got on the faster one and caught up to it. We caught up to it. We caught up to a 200-hour train. No, with the 300 call-hundred hour train. Got there 30 minutes before. We had time to kill. That's why you were bouncing the basketball.

It's like we were bored waiting for the slow-ass train to catch up. If only their trains were slower, I wouldn't be bouncing the basketball. Local news is in decline across Canada, and this is bad news for all of us. With less local news, noise, rumors, and misinformation fill the void, and it gets harder to separate truth from fiction. That's why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada, reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us,

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Nice travels. One thing about the trains, and I've noticed a lot of the buildings and infrastructure here in general, is we're on this incredible 300-kilometer train catching up to that one, right? And on that train, the inside of it is honestly not super nice.

And I don't mean this as a big critique. I think there's a theme across what I'm seeing of the projects or buildings or infrastructure here where they don't like I'm not on the nicest subway you've ever seen or the nicest high speed rail you've ever seen or the best bus you've ever seen but they exist and they work and they serve their purpose and I feel like that is that is a theme of the the buildings in infrastructure specifically that's I've had that that thought many times in fact even you guys said shanghai was incredibly I thought Shanghai was a very clean city compared to Los Angeles for example but I thought Tokyo is

significantly cleaner. But what I got from Shanghai is that like it has, everything is just functional and works. That's what I did. I did not get the sense of like it was insane. It was like off the charts on any one metric. It was just that they've got all the stuff you need for a functional modern city that serves a lot of people.

And here in Chengdu, I feel the same way. I just think they, they, I don't know, that is the impressive part is they've gotten all the roadblocks out of the way to like get the majority of people. moving and doing things and things are relatively very clean.

Consumer electronics or consumer stuff. That's where you're like when you, you know, we went to the Huawei store and saw their trifold phone. You bought your Huawei earbud things. We're seeing these cars that are just like mind blowing. So it's consumer tech. It is just like consumer tech.

Robotics. Farter than we have. There's definitely cutting edge on that. The difference I would describe is if you've been to a city like or I don't know, like Amsterdam or. Utrecht or like I don't know

like Zurich or something I feel like the things are like nicer nicer there and in Chengdu it's like there's still huge intersections there's still a lot of like traffic it's not like you're watching this perfectly designed like Dutch city you saw

on some YouTube video but it it gets everything just gets the job done it's so sick yeah I I would say that. I thought I've been impressed with it. There's the, yeah, the ability to get the job done for a lot of people. You guys want to hear some fun train stats?

Yeah, fuck yeah. So, you know, we talk all about this high-speed rail stuff. So I was looking into how exactly did it grow to this point, right? So there's like some key. So we talked to this guy on the train again, who slept in your guys' car. And then in the morning, Steving and I were sitting out in, like, the hallway. And he just struck up a conversation. We talked about a bunch of stuff.

So he, the highway system is like clearly a point of national pride, right? And he's talking about how he takes it every week for work that tons of people do. And you take it all the time for trips. Like you just do a day trip because one hour on a high speed rail. And it's the equivalent. You can go to Los Angeles to San Diego in 40 minutes in 300 kilometers. You go L.A. to San Francisco in two hours. New York City to Miami and 6.5.

Right? Like the amount of area that you can visit in like an hour is just like massively expanded. And I was like, oh, in California, we're 18 years into our train. we haven't built any yet. He said, ah, that demonstrates incompetence. I think is the word he said,

yeah. He was just like laughing at us. Like, oh, you're very incompetent. Okay, so quick history of the Chinese rail. Basically none that was really, you know, coherent or usable or connected

through the end of World War II, just because civil war, like colonial powers are doing stuff, all these different problems. There were some, but not a ton. So then Mao comes in, they do a giant build out.

And they actually get up to 33,000 miles of railway, by 1978, which is huge. That's a lot, and I'll give some exact numbers later. But then in the kind of like modern reform era, they keep adding until 1997. They get the 44,000 miles. And then basically from 1997 to 2007,

they start doing these nationwide campaigns to speed up all the rail. So they're like going to the existing railway infrastructure and upgrading it. They do speed up campaigns. And so they start getting the trains to go like 100 to 120 miles an hour on their upgraded track. This is like by 2007, right? This is 20 years ago. And then over the past 20 years, right as the Great Recession hits, they do massive, massive subsidies and start pouring tons of money into national infrastructure. So then it just skyrocket. So in 2007, they're like 48,000 miles and they have 400 miles of dedicated high speed rail. Three years later, they have an additional 9,000 miles of track with 5,000 miles of high speed rail. By 2017, it's 81,000 miles, 17,000 of which are high speed rail. And now, 2023.

like a late concrete number, over 100,000 miles of track with 28,000 miles of high speed rail track, which is more than the entire rest of the world combined. So just to give you sense, the last like 40, 50 years, they went from 33,000 miles of OK infrastructure track that's slow

to now 100,000 with 28 of high speed rail. US by comparison, we actually have a shitload of railway. I didn't know that. 250,000 miles in 1916. That's just because it was like all over. over the place. And it's actually gone down. Pioneers and rail back when rail was early. Yeah. And then hundreds. Basically from 1916 onwards, it's just been plummeting. And so now,

2023 by comparison, again, China has 100,000 miles of 28,000 of which are high speed rail. We have 137 miles of track, but zero high speed rail. And that's basically all freight. That's not like really passenger line. We have Amtrak, kind of, which is in America, that's the line you used if you want to get somewhere as a passenger. But even then, they're renting the freight line. So it's a bunch of private companies running freight track rather than, you know, what's happening here where the, you know, the Chinese governor is managing the whole thing. Numbers by comparison, Japan has 15,000 miles of conventional track, 1,800 miles of Xin Kansan. So if you're just like, Japan is so famous for the Xin Khan, the high speed rail. And it's 1.8,000 miles of high speed rail.

China has more than 15 times the amount of high speed rail. And that's, you know, that's have been happening over the last 40 years that they've just outbuilt. France has 18,000 miles total with 1,700 miles of high speed rail. Spain is doing pretty solid. They have 9,600 miles and 1,800 of which is high speed rail. So they're like these periods in Chinese history, and it's particularly from 1997 to 2007, they started expanding infrastructure. And then since great recession, they're like, we are massively investing in this.

they've just gone absolutely fucking crazy. So history is nuts. And now it's like a flywheel, right? Like if you have this much of your economy and system that is able to build this with that level of expertise, like it just keeps speeding up, right? Like it gets cheaper. And of course, very notable thing. You don't have to do land acquisition battles. The government, you don't have to deal with local governments.

You don't have to do budget flights and fights in legislation. You know, you don't have environmental law review stuff. You can just build. You just chopped through it. Which is the obvious caveat to all of this, which is that there is not like stakeholders around the country who get to like really talk about it. But I think the barriers are different.

Any one of those things individually, you could argue as a good idea. We did it in America. But when you add them all up, you end up what we have, which is so much red tape has choked our ability to build things on grand projects.

Yeah. So clearly there's a problem. I will say, you know, I don't know the specifics on like, my understanding is you do get paid a market rate if you have land that is in the way of a project here in China, they just pay you.

But you have to take the payout. Yeah. There is no option. You get paid out. And so, like, you know, you can make the argument that somebody lost their grandfather's farm or whatever. But, like, this is what they do to build gigantic projects. They get done on time and they're good at it.

And so it's tradeoffs that people should think about more in America as like maybe we need some of that or at least to cut back on some of the regulations we put in place on those areas because everybody, anybody can stop everything. Everybody can lawsuit to stop it. And so, yeah, it's interesting. What else? What else? What else have we different direction?

I think the surveillance is interesting. Oh, yeah. Like, how visible it is. And we, apparently the most obvious it is is in Beijing. And like, we won't even, I mean, we won't even see that. So just being in Shanghai and then even in Chengdu, if you've ever been in a Las Vegas casino, it is honestly very reminiscent of that. There are cameras everywhere, especially inside buildings.

But there's a ton outside as well. And aside from the fact that it exists, I think the reactions from people about it. One woman that Steffick talked to noted that like, oh, it's so, like, it's literally called Skynet, literally, is so good. It keeps everybody so safe. There's all this accountability for like traffic infractions, theft. A lot of the person at the university we're speaking with noted this fall in a lot of major crime in China. attributes a lot of it to this enforcement mechanism. I mean, your fucking American passport

was on the ground somewhere in a train station that was just returned to information. Yeah. I mean, I think someone just handed it in. Yeah. I think that reaction of people have a confidence in the way that it benefits life here is in juxtaposition of the American view of it being so intrusive and painful. Yeah, I'll say it. My thoughts on it are

a little dystopian that's called Skynet and you see cameras everywhere you go. 100%, I will say the area where it clearly is just a net good, and we should probably adopt at least this area, is cameras regarding traffic. So they have cameras on every intersection everywhere. And the idea is if you are speeding, if you cross the line and whatever, you get a small ticket every time.

And so the way he was talking about it was like, if they have a rule, people will, they have to do it. It's funny because I actually want to, to push back against this. Okay. In the traffic here is insane. Not necessarily in the quantity, but in the way that traffic flows. People don't, I don't really feel like crosswalks are a great right-of-way here for pedestrians.

People just drive ahead and like don't really look at you. In Chengdu, there's been like a ton of honking. It's interesting to me because all of these things seem to be acknowledged by people we talk to. They recognize that, you know, I wouldn't necessarily step out in front of a car with confidence on a crosswalk like you would in many parts of the U.S. But apparently it is such a substantial upgrade and difference from what it used to be, and that is because of the camera infrastructure. So it's funny to be like, oh, it's so good here.

When to me, honestly, it's one of the worst parts about being here. The only thing I've built it for is scooters. For scooters, I think. Yeah, the cars are great. But that's part of it. That's part of it. The cars and the scooters are absolutely problematic. They're in different lanes, and the scooters literally just ignore the area they should be in.

The scooters will drive on pedestrian lanes on sidewalks. They will cut across. They have to have areas that have like literally barriers and walls to stop scooters from being and say no scooter zone. Because outside is that to go everywhere. Even Stavik was telling me there's a path along the river that's designed for runners. You know, it's made for runners. It's a big lane. And now the runners have to like literally almost avoid or go to one side of it because

scooters just use it because there is so much pressure. We spoke to a scooter driver. You know, they get paid on delivery. and time is very, very important. And if you have a shortcut, there's any way you can make it. That's what they're going to do. They're going to optimize their time.

And so, yeah, I think. It feels like you're playing Frogger when you cross the road. It's awesome. The scooters are truly insane. And what's weird is, though, even they, I mean, I guess the cameras aren't hitting them or not. I don't know how it's work. But, you know, the guy we talked to,

he did get a fine up for speeding. And he was like, yeah, it's 50 you on, which is, again, seven or eight trips. So it's like a significant fine. But he still has to do it, I think. the pressure of that job. So yeah, I think the scooters are very interesting. I think that's actually one of the things that struck me the most that I hadn't heard

about too much or knew about but didn't recognize how prevalent it is. There is multiple scooters almost everywhere you look at all times in the city. They're always traveling. Every shop you go to has a uniform delivery driver often picking something up, going out, walking around. It's everywhere at all times. The ubiquity of these app delivery services is kind of at a scale. that I haven't seen.

It's kind of crazy. Yeah, the delivery driver stuff, okay, we were talking about this kind of, uh, consistent like flow and class of delivery drivers that kind of underpins everything in the city. Like as you walk into a building, it doesn't matter what type of building it is.

There's always delivery drivers walking in, out of it, parking, going. There's, they exist in like all facets of life. They're so present in a way that they aren't in the U.S. probably because everybody's in cars. and I think it is more popular here, 100%, partly because of how cheap it is.

So you ordered three meals, one of the nights that we were in Shanghai, for 12 US dollars? 12 US dollars total, including delivery. These were three full meals, you know, chicken and rice and vegetables, delivered to our hotel by a guy, and all of it adds up to 12 total.

It was an absurd number. Now, we've sort of investigated a bit, and I think part of it is that there is a brutal competition going on. between the three major delivery companies. And so they are cutting margin to the bone. And that is why we're getting just a truly impossible deal. But it's like the point is like if you lived here,

it's and you make, you know, anyone white collar job, I guess. It would be almost absurd to not do delivery because of how insane they've cut the margin to. You can literally get delivery from a million places. Every place has it. And you can get it at absurdly cheap prices. It's like if movie pass was for everything. It's fast.

The scooter drivers can get through traffic a lot faster, right? As cars are backed up in the major cities, they just go right through. Like, pedestrians are just suggestions. Like, it's super fast. And then, you know, if you're in a hotel, they just deliver it in a robot. They don't even have to, like, it's the whole chain. It's just ridiculously convenient. If you order to a hotel, the delivery driver will go take it to the hotel counter,

the concierge, drop it off. They will then put it in a robot that drives into the elevator. It uses Bluetooth to go to your floor and knocks on your door and you open it up and the robot hands you the food. This is all for insanely insanely cheap. It's pretty surreal. Yeah, it's wild. I will say, here's a debate I want to have. Nothing that I've seen on this trip has dissuaded me from my opinion that China is a not only capitalist country, but almost a hyper-capitalist country that is kind of just beating America at its own game.

And I wonder if you have things that disagree with that. I've seen, I'm reading a little book called capitalism right now. and there is no, I mean, people are working jobs for private companies getting paid in money that they're using to buy their own things. There's not, there is literally nothing about it other than the government takes taxes and spends on math. You are a sitcom character. You are a sitcom character. You buy your basketball. You dribble it in the middle of the trade station.

You lose your passport. You're reading a book that I think is the two X the size of the Bible of the Bible that is literally says capitalism and giant letters on the front of it and brought it to China. Whether it be intentional or not. No, it's not intentional. Yeah. But yeah, I just, you know, that is, that is what I'm seeing, that, like, the privately owned tech companies are out competing. The tax dollars are spent on just better things.

Like, they're just being smarter with their tax dollars. Like, I don't think it's like a fundamental economic system difference. I think it is literally an intelligence of how you are allocating your tax dollars. That is the, yeah, I mean, the infrastructure that, like we talked about, it's not like the craziest thing ever, but it works. and it's well done. I think there's a lot of focus on city services. Well, you guys went and had a different conversation.

I just ran for a long time down the Shanghai River. As I went farther and farther down, it became less developed and whatnot. But there's still, like, all these public service workers, cleaning random walkways, clearing this area of bamboo. Like, you know, it's just this endless, just wide system-wide, you know, I don't know, organization of people at this mass scale. And there's that.

And then there's insane. capitalism on top of it at a level that is like way beyond ours. Not beyond ours, but like is wild a lot of the time. Yeah, I don't feel like it's necessarily changed my opinion or understanding. I think going into this, from everything we've read and talked about China before, it's like the state is very heavy-handed in picking like the winners and losers of overall industries. Like, we're going to allocate assets to benefit public infrastructure or to benefit specific types of companies so that things flow in a certain direction. But if you're a part, it's like the free, the free market or the capitalism part of it is within the industries

that they want to see like proliferate and succeed. And I feel like that's what I'm witnessing. Yeah. I said they're not picking winners. They are picking. I think they're not picking winners and losers within the industries. They're doing everything they can to emphasize start successful companies within these spaces and industries and then compete with each other. For example, I think the perfect example is the EVs thing where it's like they're creating laws that emphasize EVs. Yeah. You know, the license plates that creates a market for it. And they're saying whoever figures that out can get rich. I mean, I think that and then there's just brutal competition for people to try and get the market share in that.

in the EVs area because they've created this mess Yeah. My like week in China synopsis of it is like... I'll tell you, no weed in China.

That was not what I was gonna bring up. That was where Aiden was getting. I was gonna bring up no weed. I was been desperate for weeds since we got here. What have I been smoking? You've been eating betel nut. I do much of a cowardly.

I'll answer the question you're really asking. I would let the CCP run Los Angeles. I think it'd be better. You specifically said you would let Trump end his turn. now and give it to Xi Jinping for three years at the same time as he's running China. You'd say you'd do it as a side job.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that I would disagree. What's an extra, what's an extra 300 million people? At that point, it's a rounding error. It's a rounding error, bro. We could move them into Shanghai. Have you seen how many buildings there are?

There's a lot of buildings, man. We don't have enough in Los Angeles. That way everybody would keep the character of Los Angeles. I think what in the country, the government wields the power to make sure, that corporate interests can overwhelm anything, which it's like if anything, like, falls out of line in terms of competition,

they have the power to be like this, like, there's a bunch of billionaires in China. China has plenty of billionaires. The second most billionaires in the world. There's a gigantic wealth gap in China, but anybody who like falls out of line or isn't acting in the country's like best interests, they can kind of come in and hammer that thing down and change it.

And I feel like in the U.S., it's not the same. Like in the U.S., corporate money is so tied into politics that the government's ability to effectively influence business in a direction for the country's best interests is not there in the same way. And I'm not saying that doesn't come with, like, tradeoffs here or something.

But I think that is the difference, is like, when you see billionaires in China held accountable by the government in a way that I don't think is really possible in the U.S., I think that's part of the reason that like the competition exists in China in the way that it does. Yeah. I mean, there isn't democracy here. That is the obvious clear counterpoint to all this.

You know, it's like I think what I've been surprised by on a broad, high level is like, holy shit, this is really well done in so many people's lives are clearly improved. And you can hear it in the way we talk to people and the pride they have for the country. They explicitly say how much better their life is, how convenient it is here. And it's like, in that context, yeah, of course, you're going to feel more receptive to that. And it's also weird to be like, if anybody here doesn't like that, they cannot voice that online. We spoke with not only our interpreter, but also the folks who work at university, saying how podcast here will talk about current events, but you don't talk about politicians by name. You just sort of like, yeah, like Mr. Jen.

Like, you kind of allude to it. because if you ever start on the nose talking about the political side, then you just get removed. And it's less like dramatic. Yeah, because I think that was a good thing to clear up. Yeah, it's not, you're not getting removed as in you're getting tossed in a prison or anything.

Yeah, it's much less dramatic. You can just get deleted. Your content will get deleted. If you have a post that is critical that gets viral, it's deleted. Yeah. This was, I think this whole dynamic was really interesting. This was in our conversation with the director

from the university. And he explained how he listens to a lot of podcasts. And there's free versions of podcasts and subscribe to versions of podcasts, much like we use Patreon for this show. And in the subscribe versions, people have a comfort with speaking a little more freely about political issues

that they don't in the public versions of the show. And it's not that that's not accessible or policeable, because at the end of the day, if you keep poking the bear in the subscriberable version, it's still, you're still gonna be held accountable somehow. But there is a freedom of speaking in those subscribe to podcasts, which- I mean, it's like us.

We don't tell you what we really think about Trump until you get our Patreon. We've kept it low key, but when you get to the Patreon, we tell you what we really think. I talk about how hot P. Heggseth is on there. And I'm not scared. It's a total one.

It's a total way. It is a Tucker Carlson, buy, I guess. We just asked straight up. It was like, what's your thoughts or understanding of people being, you know, thrown in jail or facing consequences for speaking out against the government in China?

Like, explain to us how that actually works. And because the government has such an influence or control over social media platforms, which he also added is not direct control. He basically said that the rules of the government are so broad and that there's a lot of incentive for the platforms themselves to police themselves.

And be really specific in their terms of service and the way you can use these sites and the things you can talk about. And the companies do a lot of the legwork of enforcing more broad rules. that the government has put in place. And then if you do overstep the line, like say I go fucking crazy across my social media platforms

and I'm really critical of the government and they decide to pull the plug. And the thing is, I lose my access and my influence across all of these platforms at once. So in the US, it's like if I get banned on YouTube, I might be able to communicate an update to my fans through my big Twitter or Instagram following. And people can get an update of like what site to jump to.

I can carry on my, influence somehow. But in China, once you use your influence on one of these sites, you've lost it on everything. And your ability to rebuild your following isn't really existent. It's like you just pay the price. You're not going to jail, but you've lost all of your influence. Yeah, I would say, yeah, the way you describe companies and the way I see it happen with local governments, it's really more that the high level federal government is pretty broad on setting large macro goals and being kind of vague. They're not doing a lot of things you hear about happening in China. A lot of things that are done on the enforcement level or people choosing to self-censor

are done either on the individual level, on the company level, or on the local government. Like all that stuff is them trying to adapt to these larger goals. Yes, but like we read a book and the university person mentioned that like more and more party representatives have to be in every company. Like that is increasing over the past like decade. For sure. Yeah. There is more of a sense. I mean, you, I mean, for context, you literally have to with a company of any size have multiple like CCP members who are party members who are there to make sure the interests of the party are represented at your company and they're at a high level in your company. That is way different than the government's like, I'll do whatever you want. Am I crazy? That feels like extremely

heavy handed this. I think you're totally right. I mean, it'd be similar to what's happening with Intel right now in America. But yeah, I'd say like, are we installing like party met, like Trump party is barren working at intel? The geopolitical goals of America, which is to build certain things within the American board, which whether, why they're propping them up and forcing them to do. Like that's, I guess that's true. He did, he mentioned how before it was like his office was kind of like separate. And, you know, it was, you know, again, not to cross the line, but don't go too far.

But now it's like you're literally in like different administration groups are being like, you're in the same building and the same room in the university now. the CCP party member is there in the same room. There's just like more, and it goes up and down, he said, depending on the political ties. But even the party members, the party members are probably someone from the local government, right?

Not like, yeah, I think. I think, okay, here's an example I can think of that kind of supports what you're saying. It's actually the social credit system that gets talked about a lot. Oh yeah, we should clear this idea. So we've joked and talked about this on this trip a little bit, but basically the way that started is broad requests

from the, I guess you call the federal government government, the central government, came in and the social credit system, as it was floated around in the U.S., was an example of more local government trying to take these like broad stroke goals or rules from the central government and employing a policy in one specific place, was it a specific city, right? And then trying this sort of like social credit-s system out where like officials would like know good deeds or bad deeds and like try to build something out of that. But it didn't actually work and it never expanded out of that one place.

And that expanded into this news story of the social credit system as we know it in the US. But that from, I mean, admittedly stuff I've just like read and watched, this is an example of how the central government in China works is they'll roll out some new goals or things that they want to change in broad terms and then let. local government officials approach tackling that problem as they wish. I mean, I'll give a specific because it goes back to the open-cloth thing. So the big Chinese five-year plan meeting just happened very recently. And one of the things they walked away from saying is that one of our big goals for the next five years is to be a world leader in AI.

AI is a big goal of the Communist Party for China. And so all the local governments are given that goal and said, you know, figure it out. Help your area of the country be a leader. And so a lot of local government money is going towards funding things that have to do with boosting AI productivity or whatever in the area, which is why many companies or areas

are using this open cloth thing because they can get local government funding to be a leader in that. That's how it trickles down from like broad idea to local government money to actual action. And so, you know, they did that with EVs and that is why EV factories popped up

in all different parts of China and there is huge competition because they said that it's a goal. It's a broad goal. Local government figure out, local governments give subsidies to EVs, or create the, you know, the license plate law. And like, license plate law starts in a city and it works. And so everyone goes, oh, that's a good idea. Yeah, that's how it. It was stressed to us that like these local places that try something

become testing grounds for laws that can be applied at scale across like the whole country. I think one of the downsides to that, too, is you often hear these stories of how much debt China has actually taken on. And it's also a result of this system from my understanding is like, Local government officials take on debt in order to build large infrastructure projects that the public still benefits from, right? But the debt is accumulating in China in a different way where local officials are choosing to spend this money and the debt accumulates at a local level, which is like tracked differently. So the amount of debt that China has is actually much, much larger than the central government shares

because a lot of the debt is held by like specific areas of the country or like by these local positions or parties. Yeah, they have local debt and we have national debt. I will say like, you know, at the end of the day, it does seem like they got more for their debt. Yeah. And there's arguments you can make, and I'm sure you've heard of them about overcapacity overbuilding.

I will say that the, you know, having been around here a few days now, not really anything deep, but we talked to the guy who's dad worked in construction. You know, the ever grand thing is there is a reality to do that in that construction on some buildings we've seen passed by has frozen and stopped, and there is so much capacity. So if the population is shrinking, there's just so much housing. So housing prices are shrinking. And because the stock market is not a place most Chinese have put their savings, savings, you know, people's retirement savings that are in housing is slowly going down because the price is going down.

I think they're unwinding the bubble in a pretty smart way from what I've heard and seen in that, like, they had a real estate bubble, they knew they had to fix it. and they are like slowly deflating it to where it's not causing chaos. But it is happening. There's clearly, and the people we talk to that aren't in the areas that are thriving, which are EVs, robotics, areas are crushing,

are saying there's fewer jobs. We were seeing that there's like a job slowed out outside of the areas that are crushing. Well, the one young kid, the delivery driver, he was from a different part of the country. He was from Hunan. And he said the reason he left is he literally cannot find work back home. And even if he could, he said that job would pay a lot less than like delivery driver in Shanghai. He was like, yeah, be my five friends just move to Shanghai to look for work.

So that was, you know, it was interesting. To be fair, you know, there is the scale of the buildings and infrastructure is so massive. But I have yet to take binoculars and see if there's people living in these things. You know what I mean? It could all be like, let's let's be clear. What I can definitely confirm having seen 0.5% of China is that there's a, Fuck load of buildings. Just a fuck. Like just like it's new York city

Times a hundred. Whatever I think it's not just Oh it's a little bit it's no it's like bigger than anything you can possibly imagine and then And then maybe there's people in it. It could be Like this I think you don't do there's People in the city. I don't know I'm saying have you proven it? Have you done real investigative journalism or you just

We go unit by unit you heard let's go Knock on doors unit by unit. With my basketball and we're going to ask about Kobe Bryant. I acted by my Alex Jones voice. Do people even live in these buildings. We live, we're saying in this for $100 a night. This is a two-bedroom fucking apartment in a condo building. Okay, this is obscenely nice. And that points to nobody lives in this building. All right. Let me just say. No, it does point this. No, I think it points to a lot of

supply. There's a crazy amount of supply. No, actually, dude, again, this very anecdotal. I'm curious to see more of this. But it does feel like there's such a focus on building and it seems excessive at this like spa thing we went to yesterday. It was like one of the nicest spa things I've seen and it just keeps going. It's like, oh, there's an outdoor area. The outdoor area has a movie area and it has a movie area and it has soccer. Over here, here's the gaming. Here's the PC cafe. Here's the PC cafe. Here's the like fighting stick. Here's five different steam rooms. Here's the rock room. It just keeps going and going. And then this buffet that we went to was like incredible. We just, it was like, oh, if you're here, you get a buffet at 5 p.m. or whatever it was. And there were

not nearly enough people for all the food there. I don't know if you guys noticed that. Where I felt this was the malls. When we went downstairs and there's three people waiting by the door while we wait for our Uber, there's like five people down there. In America, that would be one person maybe. Yeah. And the whole, this whole complex had maybe 30 customers.

No, but in the malls, did you feel that? We were in some of the nicest, largest malls I've been in my life. Spotless malls, floor to ceiling filled with all full stores. The traffic on a weekend was. like, yeah, this was a weekend yesterday. Was,

it was like nothing, it's just crazy. I think it just wasn't full. I think it felt normal. So I think it's a, yeah, Barry's making a face of you. I,

I think that it's, I've seen balls that are dead that have more people per, for, you know, I thought it was, it wasn't, I was saying it's dead.

You're probably getting an image from what I'm saying that it's dead. I'm just saying the size versus the, you're never touching another person. There's plenty of room. It's like relative. Yeah. We're in multiple malls.

We're like, they're not that far from each other. Until we went to the food trade show, at which point it was to the busiest. All right. So leading into that, so we're on the train. Many strange experiences are stemming off of man we slept next to on the train.

So one of the things he said that he, you know, travels back and forth. He works for a food company and there's a trade show in Chongdu that's happening that day. And he's like, if you guys go in there and say you work for a foreign food company, you'll be treated like VIPs. Turns out we don't have to say that we have a foreign company.

We explicitly said we are not a company, but the fact that we are just like foreigners was very exciting. And so we went into this place and it was like a convention like in any other country that is way too, way too full. Shoulder to shoulder. And I got shoveled a bag of these, the best rice crackers I've ever seen. I kind of dragged the whole group because a woman came up and was very excited to talk and how powerful a company was. Yes. And she said, we do 40 crates of rice crackers a month and I speak. I have friends in America and Americans. I like you because you're outgoing personality and we're friends

now and I want you to meet the boss. The big boss of the rice cracker company is here today and I was like wow that's impressive guys. We got to go and she gave me all these things and we're now friends on WeChat and I am promising right now okay because I don't want to disappoint her that I'm going to calculate how much money I

personally take home from a weekly Patreon episode and I'm telling Susanna on WeChat this is my budget send me this many rice crackers to our studio in Los Angeles. We're going to get so much. We're going to get so much. I don't know if I've been going to,

we're going to get so much, and it's not because the amount of money he makes from that episode is that much. I want to stress that. It's probably like a thousand or something, because this would be after we're buying bulk prices. You're buying wholesale cost. Exactly.

That's what I'm saying. Even if it's like a few hundred dollars, it's going to be an obscene amount of rice crackers. And I think it's going to be more than a few hundred dollars. So I've committed, we haven't done the calculations. I'm fully committing to this. I'm going to make it happen. And all I'm saying is that she pointed out, again, we were very clear. We're not a food distribution company, but she kept saying it so many times. And I was like, oh, but we make videos. We make YouTube videos. She's like, oh, okay, but you could start selling food. Like, she, she kept talking to open up the office. Food entrepreneurs. Okay, we have our little studio space and I can run a ricecracker business out of there. And they're very good. They're honestly very good. Think out Mito Wongzy for the lovely rice crafters. You might be having to thought if you're listening to this. She kept saying powerful.

and maybe it's just like a mistranslation. Like maybe she doesn't mean, like, why would she stress that word so much? Maybe she just doesn't know that much English. Like, it's fine. No, when Steffick interviewed her for us, she kept using the word powerful in Chinese. She just kept talking about how powerful

the rice crackers a month. She told me that three times, which does not sound that impressive. I was saying, you know what I was thinking? It's like, we're in this multi-floor building, right? And the first floor is the most packed one for obvious reasons. She kept saying powerful, she took us to the fourth floor. We were the top floor.

And it's like, oh, I meant that's the worst floor to be on. This is the hardest one to get to. Oh, but that's where the boss is, dude, up the top. No, that's completely wrong. That's a ridiculous thing to say, and that's insulting to the big boss. My fault. Of the, uh,

I went to a Mandarin orange booth. And we found out that it was like 13% of the world's Mandarin oranges go to this company. They're like the largest exporter of fruit in the world. One of the, it was crazy. It was fascinating to be in this, like, So the idea is all these food companies trying to pitch to a potential retailer of like what their food is. That was the context. And then we are just randomly in there walking around.

If we were like buyers for Walmart, we would have been treated like God. I mean, we were already given. Right. We were treated as kings. And it would be kind of ascend to some sort of divinity that people would like be unable to look directly at us. Yes. Everyone handing you juice every three feet. Yeah.

It was really, that was a really cool experience that happened kind of randomly by happens then. There's more to life. than finding the perfect car. But finding the perfect car can help you get the most out of life. Like the SUV that handles everything from drop off to off road, and the car that hulls groceries and hockey teams, or the van that's gone from just practical to practically family. Whatever you want, wherever you're going,

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I, again, starting from training. Man. When we talked to Train Man, he mentioned a quote to me, which is he kind of randomly was like, oh, he heard where Americans. It's like, oh, it seems like, I forget. The first thing was, I believe going into Iran was a mistake. They're much more powerful. They're much more powerful than Trump realized. And I like felt a little embarrassed by this because I'm like, oh, man, going around the world, everybody think we're like a bunch of war hungry crazy lunatics. And he was then followed up and said, like, but I think most Americans don't really like, Trump or they think he's crazy. And I was like, yeah, I don't, and I think most people don't. I think probably 75% of people think he's crazy or that this is a bad idea. And he laughed and he said, I think it's 90%. So his view is like an average Chinese citizen who has not left China, but is very proud of the country as I learned over the course of this conversation is, is Trump's like this crazy guy and 90% of people hate him, but he's just, he's doing his wacky thing. And then mentioned a couple other kind of analysis of the rest of the world that felt a little bit uninformed.

I don't want to say uninformed. Very China-pilled, maybe is the way to- Yeah, it was very-China-pilled. I think there was nothing more. It was interesting because I feel like he was, the way he talked about global and political issues, I feel like he was informed in the sense that I knew what his American counterpart looked like in the U.S. Someone who's relatively like tapped into news and events and does pay attention to stuff. nightly news.

Yeah, yeah. Like that vibe. And it can have like a nuanced conversation about it, but clearly has like a very focused perspective from the media he watches, which is kind of, you know, which is everybody. Like it was, it was interesting to meet. Yeah. One of the things where I was like, that seems a little off is he's like the Ukraine,

I forget the exact wording and it correct me if I'm wrong. But it was like, the Ukraine and Russia war, it's not really a war. It's just about selling oil. And I was like, it's a war. I don't know. It's a war. And then another one was, if we just got rid of nuclear weapons, then there would be peace. Then it would war would be over.

And I was like, I also don't know. There was actually famously a lot of war before nuclear weapons. Yeah, there's a good argument that that would be the opposite. Right. And I, at this point, this is seven in the morning off of a sleeper car sleep. I feel like shit. And we're translating through stuff. And I'm not going to be like, well, actually, I think that some of the.

Let's get into this. Yeah. And so, but I did think this is interesting. And then the line that super stuck out to me was he said, no country on earth loves peace more than China. And I was like, that is so fascinating because that's not really the American version, right? The American version is China's being aggressive and blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I like thought about it. So I looked into it. All right. Let me give you guys some numbers. So I basically started to research this question of is China more peaceful than any other like great empire or power historically?

And let's say past like 500ish years to like narrow it down, right? Who do you think is the most? Who has invaded the most foreign countries? What can I say? It's the Brits. It's the British, dude. You're proud. You love those Brits, don't you? All right, so.

Leaderboard. People don't do it like them, dude. Scoreboard. Right up there. So there's a book called from a British person, all the countries we've ever invaded and a few we never got around to. Of the 193 countries that are recognized by the UN, at some point, British has invaded 170.

There are only 22 countries on earth that they have not been invaded at some point. That is goat static. God, it is truly impressive. French Empire, they had 80, and these are all, you know, kind of estimates depending on how you define war, right? And define country, because like a lot of the countries they invaded have changed since. Yeah. Yes, but that's just in terms of, but yes, so some caveats here, but general idea of like

French Empire 80 times they've gone into other countries and invaded. U.S. were at only 68, more peaceful than the French. Unfortunately, we're not very old. So we have a little more dense. We're getting it done quicker. If you're at home, don't do the math. It's like Cooper flag, dude. USA still in our Cooper flag.

We're getting generational talent. We're putting up big numbers in 19. Dude, but we're probably, you know, Trump's got to tear our ACL and we're going to bomb out. All right. All right. And then by the same, you know, kind of definition of this war stuff, China would be at 12, like just, you know, massively small.

And so if you are a Chinese citizen, is this, is it a sincere question, is this China as in post-war II CCP takes over as that version of China? The past 500 years. Okay, you're talking about 500 years of China. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not going to ancient times where like, I'm not even including like Mongol, you know,

times here because then that even skews it because then it's like the Mongols are. Okay, 500. I'm not an expert. I'm not an expert. And I think these numbers are. Don't get wrong. These numbers are a little damning if you think about them. I would like to say, though, that China famously in a historical context kept to themselves,

and there was a lot of wars in China between Chinese people. Yes. So I think... So I thought it was interesting if you kind of look at the type of aggression that China is criticized for in the West. What it almost always is, let's say in the last 70 years, is it's China saying this is our historical border and we're going to enforce it. in a way that other people are like, we don't think that's your historical border.

Famously, Tibet in 1950, that they went and invaded and basically took Tibet, right? But like, that was them saying Tibet has historically been part of the greater Chinese empire and influence. And of course, there's a whole lot of discussion around that. But if you believe, if you are in like, well, that is our historical border, then that feels less of a war and more of we are restoring, we are restoring this after World War II, after the century of humiliation. Korean War was like sort of justifiably defensive. Many asterisks there obviously, but that's like the U.S. is like sweeping up through Korea. There's skirmishes with India.

There's skirmishes with Vietnam. A couple of these are like harder to defend. There's the South China Sea stuff of, you know, saying here's the nine dash line and now the 10 dash line that's including whatever else. But if you are sort of like, look, this is us reclaiming historical boundaries over a long period of time, I could completely understand why that would feel like this isn't really aggression. Whereas to many other people around the world, they would go, well, actually, we believe this country is this area and therefore. And so I thought that was pretty interesting of it.

Depending on how you view this, certainly, I think without question, China does not have nearly the same history in modern time of go to another country and just fucking get in there. And like, we do this quite a lot. And like, if we always had a good reason. It's just, you just think about how many times we've done this year. This year. This year how many times we've done this fucking we're putting up generational generational numbers so fascinating

to me that in the West are like oh trying to so aggressive and then you know to a person here it's like we we have stuck to our fucking selves we're reclaiming the you know the ancient history that we've had for thousands of years and that's it and you go around

bombing and stealing from whatever country you want of course you would feel like this yeah yeah I mean it definitely makes sense. Yeah. I want to, as a result of this trip, I want to like really dive into some more Chinese history because this is obviously the, you know, I don't know, mainstream news version of it. Sure.

Yeah. I just think it's fascinating, the way you might view geopolitics. And this guy was very respectful about it. He was just like, one of the lines was like, I think it's very silly how America keeps going deeply in debt and spending money on wars. You should do it like us and spend it on infrastructure for your country. And I was like, yeah, that fucking makes sense. Yeah, that's a good idea.

Yeah, I mean, you know, speaking of it. Is that like correct? Like, yeah, roughly the is all through through our interpreter, obviously. Iran war. I wanted to bring up, you know, as I've spent a ton of time on Chinese social media and Weibo and just brain rotting and scrolling it. Yeah. I want to give you credit, right?

Yeah. I, I, you have done more journalism like with the people than any of us because you all the time are scrolling on Chinese social media. Yes, sir. And hitting translate. I'm not even kidding. You have really gotten in there. No, I'm reading what they're thinking.

And it actually is just a great way of seeing like, what is trending right now and what are people talking about? And I, it is in a way that would not be the case scrolling Instagram or anything. A third of content it feels like is about the Iran war. Like it's really, it is talked about a lot. There is a lot of stuff about it. And oh, oh, bad, of course.

Didn't like it? Of course bad. But, and, uh, most of the comments. Again, I'm just, I'm clicking random comments and just translate it. I'll go down the whole thing. It's a lot of just kind of making fun of how badly this is going. Of how like this about Trump is kind of like, you know, for example, I saw again, but it's always put out in a almost cartoonish way.

Like they'll have an AI video of like a cartoon Trump like tripping into a well or something. Like it's kind of what, but then all the comments will be like, yeah, this is a really stupid idea. And, you know, recently Trump. made a, this is like, as we're recording recently, he's like, hey, if the next 48 hours, if you don't allow free passage of tankers with this rate of Hormuz, I'm going to start blowing up electricity grids in Iran, which, first of all, insane thing to do. I think we're the second most peaceful nation.

Great Britain would have done it to. And, and, but the thing was that Iran's response was like, go ahead. We're not going to, you know, we're not going to change, which then puts us on a clock. We are coming up near the end of this 48 hours. And it's seeming likely that Trump won't actually do it, which then becomes a kind of embarrassing thing. And all the comments are kind of just pointing out that it's like they know he's not going to do it. Like, nothing's going to happen. Like it's a real loss of credibility that I'm seeing on the ground, like a regular person's level.

If Trump doesn't take care of this, his reputation will be damaged. But you know what's funny is I think that's genuinely happening. Obviously it's happening in America. but from what my understanding is that there's some people in China that thought Trump was a better leader in his first term. I thought he was kind of like someone you could respect or, you know, they had a less of understanding. But he is proving to be more of a, I don't know, the word paper tiger or whatever, but like just it's not, there's an emptiness to his threats and his luster that is more revealed to regular people in this, from what I'm saying on social media. I'm reading a lot of comments. Yeah.

The rest of the world is like has their shit together and Trump's walk in a, around in the middle of them bouncing a basketball. Yeah, sort of like that, but in a much different way because that would be dropping his passports. That would be very cool, actually. I, the, I, the, when the guy said, I think, he like laughed. He was like, I think 90% of Americans think Trump is crazy. I was like, do you not think we, do you think we didn't vote for him?

Do you think he's a dick to? Because that's great for me, right? I'll be like, oh, yeah. Yeah, it's 90. Couldn't, couldn't do anything. And all, we all waited at him, but, you know, he got in there. grabbed the golden idol and power was restored to his body. That would be one way to do it.

I think we have, you know, there will be a lot more to talk about on the Patreon episodes than the other. We're going to do one more episode in China while we're here. I got one more little thing, which is, this is sincere. Okay. So two days ago when we were driving to the train station to come to Changdu, this is the middle of Shanghai, greater population of 80 million people is a bafflingly large city.

through an area that, you know, you can see back here behind us, right? Tons of giant buildings all over the place. And we're in the nicest car I've ever been in. My arms are resting on top of an iPhone for no reason, which is what will allow me to move the chair back if I want. I'm playing Flappy Bird. You're playing Flappy Bird. And I notice all three of us did, Perry and Stepwick, that it is, we pull up to a stoplight and it is dead silent. It is dead silent and it's noticeable because we can hear birds chirping next to us. It sounded as though we were in like in a park somewhere like way out in the forest. I, and it was like beautiful.

This is going to sound stupid and sentimental, but it was genuinely like beautiful to me because it made me feel like maybe the development of humanity with our infrastructure and technology, maybe it isn't just towards an increasingly destructive version of the world. Maybe it isn't just destroying nature and making everything worse and louder. like it felt serene in that moment. It is dead quiet in, not as much Chong do, but like in a lot of the cities

because the cars are electric, honking seems to largely been reduced. Even the amount of honk you guys are talking about, this is a hundred times less than New York City, right? And I just, it just sounds weird, but it was, it was like I'm in the middle of a mega-dense city

in a country that you're always told is like the biggest contributor to, you know, pollution and all these things. And those are true, right? But in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the fucking world, It is dead silent. You're hearing birds chirp all around you

and it just felt serene. And I was like, maybe the future as we keep building and expanding doesn't have to be awful and loud and dirty. Yeah, I thought a funny point on this story is when through one of the intersections we were in in Shanghai, there was a board.

And it said if you're, it was cars over 80 decibel infractions and then it listed the license plates of people who had broken the rule. Public shade. The cars. Public shire. shame you if your car was too loud.

Buy your license plate. So you'd have to see like Joe's license plate number and be like, what? Is that fucking Brandon's plate? Dude. Brennan's hot and fit was over 80 dB. Dude, I knew it. What a fucking scumbag.

And then we were joking about how if that existed in the U.S., it would become like a leaderboard. It would everybody. And then there was this giant poster of any foreigners carrying basketballs and they're just shaming them. Yeah. Yeah.

They're building those across all the. But I think that's a really beautiful sentiment, actually. I hadn't thought about that, but I definitely, this has made me feel very positive about the future. It's not like we're walking through these spaces that are perfect cities or the most beautiful cities I've ever been, but just so good in so many of these ways that are difficult to experience at home

and at a scale that I just didn't really think was possible until I got here and saw it for myself, even though I've read so many things about China. And I don't know, I'm really looking forward to the rest of the trip. Yeah, me too. I will say it definitely motivates me at home. We're talking about the difficulty and scale of this task,

but truly it makes me think how with a few changes, these things are not that impossible. They're not that crazy. If only someone is willing to do what must be done. I just, I think, I think it makes me like, we need to get going at home. Like it makes me be like, we need to want to get Trump out. I want to move forward on some basic shit and put some money to our building. Right. And we all know what you're saying. We all know.

Nobody should do it. No, nobody should do it. Nobody should do it. Something needs to be done. You shouldn't even think about it. No, I'm not. I'm not even saying that at all, by the way. I can read it. I wasn't saying. What were you saying? I wasn't even implying that. I was just saying, No, don't worry.

I'm picking up what you're putting down. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening. Through our show here in China, we will have Patreon bonus episodes. If we want to hear more of our walk-in talks as we walk around some of these cities, we've been recording a lot of B-roll,

a lot of extra stuff, some of our interviews. And, yeah, there's just more bonus comments on to Patreon. We're going to have another main episode here from China later on in our trip after we've seen some of these super high-tech cities like Chong Ching and Shenzhen.

So, yeah, appreciate. They do get into the Patreon supporters who gave us the opportunity to do this trip. Yeah. Hitting 10,000 patrons is what gave us the opportunity to do this. Thank you so much. And it really has been an eye-opening and a very cool trip. And it's just nice with the amount that we read and talk about China. I think the U.S.-China relationship is the grand story of the 2020s and the foreseeable future.

And what's the deterioration or the rebuilding of that, whatever happens. And it's cool to have some boots in the ground experience of just seeing, you know, a picture's worth a thousand words. And I think walking through a city tells you a lot more than a lot of articles. We're getting in here and we're reading Chinese Twitter. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

We're on the ground scrolling, what is it, Baidu, Weibo. Waybo. We're doing it. No one else will. No one else is doing it. And we're going to tell you all the memes. Probably Brandon will literally compile memes. Oh, literally.

And share them with you. I have some memes I'm going to share that are truly, I mean, I showed in one that is like. Dude, they're psycho. They're psychotic. Some of them. Anyway. Guys, thanks for watching. Thanks, everybody.