TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #129: The Wonton Don

Episode Date: January 20, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Barstool Sports' Chief Foreign Correspondent, The Wonton Don AKA Donnie Does, to discuss: - Why Donnie decided to move to Shanghai - What life in China is like - Why he started creating content - Alipay + WeChat - Social Credit - Life of the Chinese middle class - much more Follow Donnie on Twitter Subscribe to his YouTube Channel Follow on Instagram Shoutout to our sponsor: Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. Subscribe to our YouTube channel: tftc.tv Contribute to the show: https://tftc.io/contribute/

Well, hey there, freaks. It's your boy Marty Bent here to introduce this week's episode of Tales from the Crypt. I reconnected with an old co-worker from Barstool Sports to sit down and talk about China, believe it or not. I sat down with the Wonton Don, a.k.a. Donnie Does, who is Barstool's chief foreign correspondent living in Shanghai, to get some information on China. China is a subject that I speak and write about a lot on the podcast and in the newsletter. And I thought it was time I actually got somebody in the studio who's lived in China and has an in-person perspective to share with you freaks. So for those of you freaks that don't know, Donnie is putting out some incredible comedic content, mainly based out of China. And he's actually traveling the world. He's got some content coming out of Zimbabwe, from Zimbabwe over the next couple of months.

So definitely check that out and then go check out his back catalog of content throughout the years. he does an incredible job of creating uh or not really creating empathy but you know just giving a view of what it's like to live in different parts of the world and again specifically china we had a great conversation i think you guys are going to like it uh it's pretty eye-opening tales from the crypt this episode of tales from the crypt excuse me more specifically is brought to you by the cash app as you freaks know cash app is the simplest way to send and save money and now it's the simplest way to try to grow your money introducing cash app investing unlike investing tools that only let you buy entire shares of a stonk cash app lets you instantly

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number one number two use the code stacking sats it's one word s-t-a-c-k-i-n-g-s-a-t-s you're going to get ten dollars and cash app will send ten dollars to our friends at owls lacrosse It's not that dirtbag owl, that scammer owl. Owl's the cross. Owl! Owl! Download Cash App from the App Store or Google Store Play today and enjoy this episode with the wonton don.

Okay. Okay. What is up, freaks? It's your boy Marty Ben here on a Wednesday night drinking pinot noir with the wonton don i like to introduce you freaks hey how are you i was waiting for that hey how are you oh yeah um for those of you freaks that don't know donnie is barstool's foreign correspondent um i hit him up one because i love your content you're one of my favorite content producers at barstool uh two because i'm infinitely curious to get your

perspective because you have a very unique perspective in my mind you put out unique content based on that perspective and uh this comes from the fact that you live in china in shanghai um and here on this podcast we talk a lot about um we have been talking a lot about china and hong kong in particular recently um pertaining to like digital privacy and stuff like that and surveillance in the digital age but before we get into all that i'm just curious to learn more about your story uh you did not take uh the typical paths you've taken a path that many have not you moved to China you're making content out there uh how the hell did you end up in Shanghai I had a friend from college who went abroad to Shanghai and he loved it so much that

he just like stayed in the country just chose like not to come back to college and he was the year below me so around the same time that he was deciding to just stay in China I was graduating from college and had no idea what I wanted to do didn't want to jump straight into a nine-to-five and he was like you should come out to China there's a lot of job opportunities you can travel like I'm doing this like party like he had just started this party um like this events organizing company um and he was like you can help out with that and so that was like all right i'll just move out to china for 10 months travel on the weekends and the holidays and then uh head back to the u.s and jump into more of like a full-time career uh but i just loved it out there

met a lot of good friends found some opportunities and ended up staying for like seven years how long you've been out there yeah i mean i'm i graduated college in 2010 and i've pretty much been in china since um although at one point i was like i was back in the u.s for maybe a year and a half but yeah i've been out there for a while was it uh was it something uh sort of out of the uh ordinary for you to do to get up and leave to china is that like um big traveler before this or is this like i've always loved to travel i hadn't done a ton of it but um I've never been like someone who's been super like cautious of traveling or afraid of traveling it's it's definitely something I've always wanted to do yeah no no I mean Shanghai

is like a big change so going from where did you go to college I went to Tufts okay yeah um so like yeah I lived up until moving to China I lived my whole life in Massachusetts um grew up in like a small town of mass then went to college in boston and um yeah so it was definitely a change of pace because once you start traveling you realize boston is comparatively a very small city yes very small city and for you freaks that don't know toughs very good d3 lexical yeah where like the whole city is pretty much just dead by 2 a.m but then you move out to shanghai where the city's just in china will go we'll go all night and like then like there i went through like one phase where i was going to the after hours places too so i remember there was one like

new year's morning where i left the club at 12 30 p.m the following day and it was like oh my god that and the sun just hit me like a sack of bricks what was the initial culture shock like when you first got out there um the culture shock was rough at first because so i was just teaching english my first year out there. And the company I was doing it for was like, Hey, you'll be working like downtown in the city and you'll have some other roommates who are also foreign teachers. And then they put me in this apartment by myself in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere in China. Um, when I couldn't even speak a word of English. Um, and this was my first year. I wasn't living in the same city as my friends. So like, I didn't even know a single person in the city. Uh, and that

was rough like I was I remember like I called my parents I was like yeah I'm probably gonna leave China like I like I was like yeah this is not gonna work but I met some friends from Liverpool actually uh okay on one of my first like weekends in the city and at that point I was living so far outside of the city that there wasn't even a like a subway line that so I would have to just wait until the buses started running again at six in the morning so I like I already knew i would have to be out all night and just ended up meeting these dudes from liverpool and one of them sort of took me under his wing and kind of showed me the ropes in china but and said that's what convinced you to stay yeah so yeah so once i kind of made all those friends i was like

i'm having fun and that was in guangzhou which is uh not too far from hong kong and then my second year like the main reason i'd moved out there was to live in uh shanghai and so then for my second here i moved up and was living with uh a friend from college and he already had a lot of friends up there so when i moved up to shanghai i kind of had like i was making friends right off the bat how easy is it for for expats to get jobs out there uh if if you're looking for a teaching job it's super easy um it's starting to get a like a little more tough because they had an incident where like someone on up like he was on the u.s's most wanted list top 10 most wanted and he was working as a teacher in shanghai like for 10 years because because it's the most absurd thing ever and

it turned out i look once i found out it turned out that i was actually in a group chat with this guy at one point and even like in the group chat i was like this dude is a psychopath what was he wanted for um i think he like murdered his wife after he had molested his daughter or something like that he was a cop in south carolina who had like touched like a young girl and then murdered his wife and then flew to mexico and then flew from mexico to shanghai and the only reason he got caught started working as a teacher in shanghai the only reason he got caught is one of his former uh one of his former students moved to the u.s and was just looking at america's most wanted like in her free time for fun i don't know like who actually does that but and then saw like

her former teacher damn fuck it was like oh that guy used to teach me thought he was that dude thought he was safe yeah i guess he had he had already remarried like he had remarried a chinese woman and he had a daughter who he named like after the wife that that he had killed oh that's fucked up it's super dark shit what happened to him i assume he's in jail now yeah um i don't know if was he extradited yeah i wonder if he's in jail in china or if china gave him back to the us yeah uh i have no idea i just know so there was a like a a big group chat on uh we chat that that i was in it was pretty much i think the name of the group was just like was just americans in china and i he went by the name the big dog in that group it was around the time of the election

and i just remember he would get like so heated up like we would just be talking about politics and he would get super heated up about trump i think he was he was a big he was a big trump guy but um even if we were just having a casual conversation like not trying to start a fight he would go on these like long insane rants social cues he might be a an axe murderer yeah and i remember being like asking someone else in the group like what's wrong with this like dude why does he get so worked up and he was like you know what you just have to meet him in person in person he's like he's a pretty chill guy he just gets like easily worked up but but don't worry he's actually like a very chill guy and then it turns out that he is not a chill guy he's on fucking

america's most wanted he's an axe murderer the big dog it's just an online persona you meet him in person he's nice yes they're like yeah i think he was big into uh big into uh mma as well okay yeah as uh a lot of men are these days yeah so what's it like but yeah so now they do background checks like for jobs and stuff and like teaching English is that's like the job you can get if you don't speak a word of Chinese but I do have friends that like work in all sorts of jobs just usually those if you're working in China it will help a lot if you can at least have like a basic if you can speak basic conversational Chinese yeah and that's the next thing I was gonna ask like you've learned a bit of Mandarin right like how how good's your Mandarin yeah my

Mandarin's not great I can speak conversational like I probably speak at the level of like a 10 year old or even younger just because like right off the bat I made a lot of friends who speak like pretty proficient Chinese and then my jobs never required me to speak that much so I did like I hired a tutor out there for a bit but then when I started working for Barstool I really didn't have to speak that much and then shanghai just in general is probably the hardest place in china to learn because there's so many foreigners uh you know you're going out to foreign restaurants and bars and shit like that where like everybody there will be speaking english and then like with all of the apps out there my first year i always had to talk to the taxi

drivers in chinese and so it was important you at least could like say some words and then they came out with the uber of china and then they had they came out with in like an english version of that um so now it's like if i want to go somewhere around the city you just put in the address uh and a guy shows up and drives you there and you don't actually have to say a word of chinese yeah well that's one thing i really want to get into is like what what are so is that wechat uh alipay that you're ordering that from or that's an app called dd okay and they actually so there used to be there used to be uber in china and then dd bought out bought out uber okay um but wechat was huge so my wechat uh it wasn't around my first year in china maybe my second year in

china and then all of a sudden my friends was like yeah i use this like to talk to my family back home to talk to all my friends and i was just sending text messages and he was like no this you can just send a voice message um and i was like that's insane so i downloaded that and it really just it it changed it changed everything um just on like how you communicate with with people because you can translate like right um yeah and that was like a new feature that maybe came out three years ago um but we chat's nuts like now you there's not like a thing you can't do on it. Um, you know, and it changed. So I told you, I moved back to the U S at one point, this was maybe 2015, 2016. And when I came back, I was only gone for a year. When I came back

to China, it changed and you could pretty much pay for like, for, there wasn't a place in China where you couldn't use WeChat to pay for something. Um, and so, yeah, even if you're at a small like mom and pop like a convenience store or if you're at a giant shopping mall you can use wechat to pay for things you can use it to buy movie tickets um you can use it to it's it kind of combines a lot of the like it combines most of the apps we use in the u.s all into one app yeah and like can't you like pay bills from it yeah um train tickets all that train tickets what's the uh what's the ux flow of buying something like if you go to mom pop shop are you scanning qr code yeah it's all based off of qr codes okay and most of those places you can

also use alipay i haven't been using alipay um but most places will take either wechat or alipay so as an american in china do you have to set up like a chinese bank account how are you yeah i like i have an account that i don't really use but i think you do need at least um like a card to use wechat although they may have just changed it in the past six months that now you can link a us card to it um but it was crazy it even used to be i used to just be able to walk outside and wave a taxi and even in that year i was gone it's now only done through the app so you can't even like wave a taxi there anymore you almost like have to use the app well that's that's another crazy thing about how fast things happen in china like you see

crazy videos of uh like chinese construction crews putting up bridges over the course of like 24 hours and so what's what what what is it and because they work they work on two shifts they have like two 12-hour shifts when they're doing construction okay so it's like they have people working during the day for 12 hours and then they go off and there's a new crew working the rest of the night so it's just constantly being built and so that's like been the story in china like last few decades right is the emergence of the middle class the farmers moving to the cities and yeah um basically the chinese economy the china the chinese government stimulating that growth and incentivizing that and that's like one another thing that i'm very interested to get your

perspective on if you know anything about it like i've read books about it and stories about it like just like uh ghost towns that are that are built like replicas of other cities that have nobody living in them um yeah they're essentially just uh towns that were built to um put economic activity on the balance sheet yeah those exist for sure uh like in shanghai and beijing and it's not that bad because those places have been growing so fast that they'll make these new buildings and maybe no one will live in them for two or three years but then like as the city grows eventually people will move in but when i'm taking the train around the country you go through some areas and it's clear that like this whole like there's like yeah a whole just section of high

rises that were maybe built five ten years ago and still no one has moved in yeah nuts um i haven't like explored those but it's definitely happening and and people are worried because of the bubble you know if you just keep on building and building but what do you mean by that are like chinese people worried about that or i think i think the government is worried yeah yeah why do you say that um because so like i don't really know the economics behind it but they want to keep on building and building because it just like shows growth right but then if no one ever moves into these places they never make back like any of the money then i don't then like isn't that isn't that a bubble that will collapse at some point i don't know i mean it's essentially what

led to 2008 yeah yeah so i i have no idea no and it's i mean that's what my my theory is yes that's but i don't know like i don't i don't i've never been to china it's one thing like i've written about china story i've written about stories that have been written about china's financial system and i've heard stuff but i've never been on the ground myself and i've never talked to too many people who've lived there that long and that's and again like another thing that i really wanted to talk to you about is like you seem to completely immerse yourself in this culture and love the culture from at least what i can tell um yeah from your videos idea no i do love the culture i mean but also in shanghai like shanghai almost has its own culture in a way because it's a mix of

a bunch a bunch of different cultures because you go out for a night there and you can meet people from all over the world and then i know the foreigners that live up in beijing they might even be more ingrained so in chinese culture so like in shanghai when you're talking to a chinese person they might try to use some of their broken english but when you're up in beijing you're talking to a chinese person their attitude is like hey you're a foreigner in my country so you should be talking to me in chinese okay um but so but that's the thing i i enjoy about shanghai is that you can still have a very authentically chinese experience if you want it and then you know if you're in the mood for some uh incredible mexican food per se like you can find that as well

yeah you can go to like a club that will be filled of filled of colombians or something like that really yeah it's um but uh yeah but wechat it definitely like it transformed the country it was it was kind of like the first thing i saw that that china was doing that was ahead of the curve in the u.s because a lot of the things a lot of the apps you'll see in china are just like a blatant copy of an app that has taken off back in the U.S. So their version of Uber, it was just a copy of Uber. But with WeChat, like there were just so many things I could do on WeChat that like now I can do with apps in the U.S.

But like for a while, you couldn't even send voice messages like on U.S. apps. And it's even, you know how now on Twitter and everything, everybody loves to um post gifs yeah yeah like that was like huge in china a good like five years before it blew up here like on wechat the friends would always be posting gifs or sending them back and forth and i really didn't didn't catch on the u.s till three years later yeah no it's um that's the fascinating thing about it too and then yeah so do you see it as a double-edged you have like this thing uh you have everything in your hand at your fingertips but things like wechat in particular like aren't is isn't the government using that for like their social

credit system too like if you apparently so foreigners haven't really been like they're not on the social credit system so i haven't seen that and like i i am sure that the government if they wanted to they could read like like all of the messages i've sent on wechat so i have some friends that will be like very careful not to say certain words like recently with the hong kong protest i was in one group and they're like hey let's like please don't talk about that thing and they were like afraid to talk about it i've never been too scared and like um i've never been too worried about what i say because i was like oh the chinese government probably has like larger fish to fry than like me talking to my friend about like weed yeah on wechat so i don't know i've

never been too scared but uh i think for sure there probably have been people that have been like talking about the wrong thing on wechat and like they've been tracked down or they've been kicked off the app i don't know do you talk to to like uh your chinese friends who are on the app who are subjected to that like do they have a are they did they ever talk about the social credit system or anything like that um no because the social credit system right now it's just a series of pilot programs and like it's not fully in place around the country but the the goal is to have it fully in place soon so i haven't had my chinese friends like complaining about it yet is that scary though like being an expat there um no not really like some things are sort of scary

being out there um and i think maybe it's more motivated because of the trade war that like china's trying to crack down on foreigners more um like they'll do these raids which they've kind of slowed down but for a while they were doing these raids where they would roll into just random clubs and bars at like 2 a.m and just make all the foreigners pee in a cup and like test them for weed um and so i know people who have been kicked out of the country for that and i think that's just like that's their way of just trying to like you know i don't know like get more foreigners to leave the country yeah no that's why i wanted to talk to you this is like i'm i've heard like stories of people like yeah i don't go to china like you'll you'll go there you'll get sent to a

gulag and like you know i mean yeah like all my friends who have gotten in trouble the punishment has just been they've just been asked to leave the country and they're probably not allowed back for maybe five years yeah um and then i know like someone who was caught like with with uh cocaine on him and he was he was teaching at a kindergarten at the time and like was called into the visa office and there were and there were police there waiting for him and so they tested his p it tested positive for cocaine and i think they found a bag on him too but he was so he was only sent to jail for 13 days and then was like allowed to go back to his job and i'm like if you did that in the u.s i think the punishment would be like more severe if you were like teaching at

a kindergarten and like had cocaine on you even if you're just in a school zone of cocaine yeah if you're in like a school zone so i sometimes i'm like damn that does not seem like super harsh yeah but it's i think the main thing if you're caught like selling drugs then they could be like all right five to ten years even if it's just like a small amount then they can really crack the whip yeah you're you're enabling yeah and then i know some things if you ever get in a fight in china and it really doesn't matter if it's your fault or say if you just get like attacked and so you fight back and like hurt one of the chinese guys like the the judge is not going to side with you yeah and so that's what happened to a football player out there and yeah and he

hurt one of like he got jumped at a club and then hurt one of the guys who jumped him hurt his eye and um they were like yeah it was self-defense but you were very aggressive and that he was in jail for three years yeah he recently got out right yeah that was part of your dragon wendell brown he played in that league but he was actually in jail the season i was that i was playing out there that's so fucked yeah and that's so yeah so like what are the things you have to be cognizant of if you're an expat and i want to be clear i'm not trying to draw like a certain picture of china i'm just like like and i'm not speaking to you yeah it's changed a lot my first couple years out there i honestly felt like at least for foreigners there like weren't rules out there

like it was very nonchalant i know people who would like smoke weed in cabs who would like walk down the street smoking weed even if there was a cop on the other side of the street because it was almost like the cops didn't really know what weed was because most chinese people didn't smoke it it wasn't like a problem amongst chinese people so i know people who just do like absurd things when i first moved out there and it was like oh there's no rules in china you can do whatever you want and then the past two three years they've started to like really crack down and it's now like more of a like a legit place in terms of rules where it's not just you can just go out and do whatever you want like they're actually enforcing all the rules like even with smoking

cigarettes like when i first moved there there was there really wasn't a place in china where you weren't allowed to smoke cigarettes you could smoke in all the clubs all the bars there'd be like a cop in an elevator smoking a cigarette like it was just absurd even if there was like a five-year-old kid in the elevator he would just be like smoking a cigarette but now it's like it's like new york where you can't smoke in clubs and bars and the smoking ban yeah so it's now it feels more of like a legit place now that they have rules when you first move out there it was like it was just a free-for-all do rules make it more legit i will just it feels like it's more because when you first move out there you're like oh it's a fantasy land and like they wouldn't there

just be like a handjob parlor on every corner and shit like that it's like what is this place but now they're like you know it feels i guess it just feels a little bit more like new york in the sense that there are rules i mean you're still allowed to drink on the streets there's no there's no open container law i wish we could do that here yeah that's one thing i loved about i love about europe traveling in europe yeah uh something funny about wechat as well there's actually there are some homeless people now that instead of holding a pot for change will be holding up a qr code so you can just like shoot them some people probably prefer that right like yeah like so is cash dying in china oh yeah yeah actually and like and cards have really never been big

out there so yeah now the majority of all like transactions are just done on wechat and that's the weird thing in new york you you go to so many places they're like oh we're card only oh we're cash only in china it's like that's never that's never really happened to me um because most people are just using wechat but i've never been to a place that will be like oh we don't like every place will still uh accept cash though but it's just not that common yeah that's uh this is um this is a bitcoin podcast and this is like where i step in i was like this is why this is why i'm so into bitcoin because i think like it's yeah it's scary right of like the the government runs the money and controls the apps that all the money runs on yeah um and so have you ever had

like an instance where you tried to make a payment or was blocked or anything like that um yeah for so there's like a limit to how much you can have on wechat like at some point like if you send back and forth over like 100k 100,000 um quai rmb then there's a limit to it eventually you have to actually like put some of it in your bank and then take it out from the bank but i didn't i didn't like have an active bank account so i was i was keeping all the cash just on my wechat and then eventually i just reached a limit and they were like oh you can't send any more payments um so then i had to go and like uh open up a new account so i could put the cash like into a bank and then take it out via wechat and pay that way man fuck man um yeah something

like that but it feels like have you noticed because like i haven't spent a ton of time in the u.s the past the past couple years but now are mobile payments pretty widespread uh i mean i see a lot i mean here in brooklyn yeah i see a lot of people using apple pay but we're still on the card technology most payments i see yeah i like cash i prefer cash where i can spend it yeah it is that trend is happening here too where um a lot of places are card only now which is a bit annoying okay we don't have like i wish we had qr code like because like being with bitcoin um using bitcoin wallets is very qr code centric as well and like i much prefer that ux but yeah and it's it's crazy because there's probably a lot of people in the u.s that just don't really know

what a qr code is but in china there's probably like probably most five-year-olds in the country like already know what a qr code is just because it's so common and they're they're all over the country well it's just a point you don't even click you just point yeah right and it's it's such a better ux yeah i think it is not common here in the u.s i think it should be more common but um right now no uh cash is still king that's the other thing like i think i'm so i'm a believer that we have to figure out how to build a system that can't be surveilled or controlled um by central authority before we make it all completely digital that's why yeah um i'm into bitcoin but um we're not i really don't feel like like uh chainsplaining bitcoin or like trying to

force that on you i'm interested like why did you decide to start making content in china like what I mean I've always liked making people laugh and I've always liked making videos I would do that with friends when I was real young just using my dad's camcorder but my friend from college who I moved out to China with he knew how to film and edit um and so we were like let's just start to and then once I saw how hilarious of a place China was and like how absurd it is and how like there was a lot of things that you know i feel like people in the u.s they're what they think china is like isn't necessarily true so i was like i can show people what china is actually like but in a very comedic way um yeah no yeah and i think you do an incredibly good job what was the first video

you were like uh in a paul pierce jersey going through a terminal or a baggage check uh yeah i Yeah, I was wearing a Larry Bird jersey for, like, my first year of vids. Because, like, a lot of people, as you were saying, they think of it as this authoritarian sort of, like, authoritarian dystopia. And I'm sure in some ways, like, it could seem like that, especially with the Internet. Like, you know, most of the Internet is blocked. I need a VPN to use most of the websites that I do use. So that's very weird. But then when you actually just like meet the people, you know, all the people are like

the vast majority that I've met have all been super friendly, you know, very down to earth. And, you know, it's been great, like being able to make friends out there. Yeah. I mean, you just met an internet legend, legend in Pongzai. Yeah. He's the man. Where was he from? He's from, he's from, he stayed in the, in his village.

Hebei, yeah. um and um yeah i think that's one of the more polluted polluted provinces something that's happened recently is they've been moving a lot of the factories away from the big cities in the east like beijing shanghai and uh and guangzhou and moving them into rural parts of china so now the pollution isn't nearly as bad in beijing as it used to be when i first moved there they would have horrible days where kids weren't even allowed to go to school um and so the air quality is a lot better in the first tier cities but if you go to a third tier city then that's where all the smog is now yeah no and that was uh yeah you had like advisories where you were advised to stay inside

yeah in uh in shanghai yeah um but no that's again like and i'm happy you said that like there's this view which i'm probably very guilty of having um just from having read the media i mean i do think the chinese government is doing some very evil stuff but that's the point i want to bring you in like the people of china seem to be very good people and like yeah pong zai is an incredible example of that like he he seemed like he you genuinely uh yeah touched him i mean not literally but figuratively he had him crying at one point singing uh karaoke to him and it's funny If you think about it, the people in China are probably even more farther removed from politics than we are because they've probably been trained, you know, that like, all right, we're just, you know, like we don't have a say in politics and there's not much we can do about it. And the reason why, you know, there's not mass protests or anything like that is because for the past 60 years, probably the, um, the quality of life has been slowly improving.

And so they like, kind of like, don't have something to complain about right now because most of the, like the people, my age in China, most of their parents, when they were young, they didn't even have enough food to eat. So now I don't think like there's anyone in China who's going hungry. Like, yeah, like there definitely are very poor people in China, but everybody in the country has enough food to eat. And as you were saying, the rising middle class. So it's like there's not mass protests or anything like that just because the quality of life has been slowly improving. And who knows if it will continue to improve. but like i think that's why people aren't upset enough to start you know revolting against the government right now yeah no if things have for most people especially in the big cities like

objectively gotten better yeah like they've that's the big story in china over the last six to seven decades yeah is the the immersion of the middle class and but and that's so that's this is a very economics heavy podcast and pretty much i i guess since 19 1987 or something i think or 1980 is when they first started to like open up to the west and that's when the country started to just like like rapidly improve yeah yeah it's like yeah the globalization started and that's actually the last uh the last uh episode i recorded with jeff vander or two episodes ago it was like anti-globalization but like it's um it's interesting to see how like uh china's changed so much so quickly like and like emerging into the global economy that quickly

yeah um and pulling all these people out of poverty too as well and again like so giving the perspective of somebody who sees only the chinese state like the authoritarian state like sending Uyghurs to concentration camps and stuff like that yeah um the Chinese people living there they're basically like hey my life's only got better my whole life like yeah a lot of people in the cities most people in the cities at least yeah or they think back to like their parents who were like complaining about the government and then like maybe their parents generation they were sent like to prison camps or something like that because I know when Mao was still around that happened to loads of people yeah so how much did you know about chinese history culture before you

went i didn't know a ton and i mean i now i know a lot more about the history but it's weird it's like almost living there i've been like very far removed from politics it's like i haven't been getting involved in u.s politics because i'm like well i'm living in china it doesn't affect me and then i i never get involved in chinese politics because i'm like i'm a foreigner here i don't really care like that's probably the best place to be yeah so i just like i feel like i've been very far removed from politics for like for like the past 10 years yeah um because they like i guess now it's starting to change a bit but definitely for my first five years it was like okay if you're a foreigner in china the government will let you just do what you want as long as you

aren't like involving a lot of chinese people as long as you aren't starting to get like chinese people wrapped up in something which i think why is why like the government i've done a lot of like risque vids but the government has never complained because most of my fans live in the u.s i don't have tons of chinese fans if i was like if all of a sudden i had like a rabid following of chinese fans then the government would be like all right who the fuck is this guy like we need to control him well so for you freaks that donnie has a series of videos at uh he's uh maybe the biggest shanghai sharks fan in the world oh yeah and those are my favorite you just i think that's where you get the most ridiculous as well yes and so i have a new sharks video that might come out in march

it was that with the baby yes where did you get that baby it wasn't a real baby it wasn't no it was a fake baby and i brought it because they this is the first season where they have banned booze at the games so i brought a baby as a way to sneak in beer so it was a fake fake kid filled with beer and then i had a beer in both of my tits so and so it was just like a way that i could sneak in three beers without getting caught what uh why they banned beer i have no idea there's that like as i was saying before china's starting to get more lame it's not the wild it's not the wild wild east anymore yeah man well that's like the the best part about your sharks videos is three beers and a fonta yeah yeah so i was finding ways to bring the booze in um because

you've been banned from that stadium before right the shark tank um yeah like at one point i was just like seen as like public enemy number one because i had danced on the court once um but then after that i put out a video about how like i was treated like shit there and they wouldn't like want me at any of the games and then the president called me like of the Shanghai Sharks and was like I'm so sorry for the way that you were treated like we're going to give you two free courtside seats all next season and that was insane so then I went from being public enemy number one to being just treated like a VIP and then I left for a year and I came back and now I'm just back to being like a normal fan but this might be this might be the last like the final

chapter of the shanghai sharks saga because this might be my last year full-time in china why do you say that um i don't know i just feel like i've lived there for a while i'm i'm ready for a change of pace i do like it's not a huge i haven't felt it super strongly but i know like like there is starting to become a little bit more of a hostile atmosphere like towards americans or at least like the government is looking for like ways that they can crack down on the amount of foreigners or on the amount of people from the u.s in china and it could be related to the trade war but yeah yeah the fucking trade war man it's um not yeah it's well that and like i think it might be more related to hong kong right because the the hong kong protesters waving the american

flags yeah the national anthem at one point yeah and i love hong kong it's like that was yeah and i don't even like fully understand like everything that is going on there because i know the protest there started off at first because of the of the extradition bill which was like if someone commits a crime in hong kong they can be forced to be it's extradited yeah they can be started before that though right because it was about the chinese government being able to they had or the chinese government had to okay the cabinet members of the hong kong yeah so those were protests that happened three years ago i was actually in hong kong during those the umbrella protests yeah the yellow umbrella that's nuts i was in hong kong

for those and they shut down the largest uh highway in hong kong what was that like and everybody was just camping on the highway so i was just like walked onto the highway and was just like hanging out with the protesters were you there for the protest or just no i didn't know i just happened to be there and it was funny those protests i think those protests are the are the reason why china banned uh instagram because you used to be able to use that in china and then they didn't want people seeing photos of the protests and so around the same time as those kicked off they banned that app yeah so what are your thoughts on so how what's the relationship uh as somebody who travels between shanghai and hong kong like how often do people go to hong kong

what's like the is it once you get to hong kong it's like i would yeah i used to have to go yeah it feels like a completely different country uh and you have to get your passport stamped um so for a while i was on a tourist visa i'm actually on a tourist visa now so every 60 days i have to leave the country and going to hong kong counts as leaving the country so i used to head to hong kong yeah once every two months yeah and it's it's it's crazy because it's like this little pub of like america not america like capitalism in yeah the east yeah it probably you could probably compare it more to like the uk i guess just yes yeah they were it was a british yeah yeah they have they have the uh red double-decker buses that they have in the uk all

the streets name like a lot of the streets are just called like very british names yeah things like that and there's loads of brits there's there's definitely a lot more british expats in hong kong than americans yeah that's one thing you do every year right is the uh rugby tournament is that in hong kong yeah yeah yeah so that's and that'll be nuts like i'm planning on going back but it'll be crazy if that's happening at the same time as the protest so it's hong kong sevens which is one of the craziest parties in hong kong if that's happening right next to all the protests that'll be nuts yeah they're still are they still protesting yeah i think so so i know this new round of protest was because of that uh because of the extradition bill but then they fully like

removed the bill and we're like okay we're not going to pass it and so you you would think the protest would then die down but then they just got even worse ramped up yeah and there's still going on there's always been like i thought they had a good thing like i thought they were like happy with the one country two systems policy it just seemed like all right hong kong is going to do their own thing china mainland china does their own thing and yeah they're both technically china but they operate completely differently and people seemed happy with that but i guess because china has been taking small steps to like fully incorporate it now hong kong these people are getting very upset it started with the press right like uh censoring yeah they're just like

very small things every time they do it people in hong kong are like because i think china's end goal is like 2047 they want hong kong to be fully part of china it's like a date they have yeah so like same currency same government and stuff and it's like i don't see like how that can happen yeah no i mean it got violent at a point like fire started bricks being thrown yeah malt a lot of malt of cocktails well and that's so that's like the the weird position we find ourselves in not only i mean uh especially the people in hong kong right now and others in china another even here in america and anybody else who's subjected to the swift financial system like the way the technology and the system is constructed right now like all this stuff

can be controlled um yeah and basically throttled by these governments and these banks in this financial system and so that's what i worry about that's why i started this podcast that's why i talk about bitcoin because i worry about honestly um the chinese surveillance state being exported to the rest of the world like we have a decision to make right now either work to make a sovereign uh non-state run central bank run currency like bitcoin which allows us to transact the way we want to or we just take the easy route and let the states and tech companies build these apps for us that yeah they are allowed to control oh for sure and but like the i think there's even like someone was telling me that a lot of people high up in the chinese government

like in the communist party they have a lot of their cash in hong kong and they're very worried like they don't want hong kong to fully become part of china because that's almost like hong kong is like a free a free place where they can keep their cash and it's not fully controlled by the government well that and then after you hit a certain point of wealth in china they like say hey right you're rich enough like we're just gonna send you into the pastures like you're not a lot of work anymore like jack ma's stepping down from alibaba isn't he uh yeah he is i don't know why is that do you think that's no that is because the government no chinese billionaires are like quietly told like all right you've made enough like you're done working oh okay yeah yeah i

believe it yeah um yeah i think you're required to retire at age uh 65 like i don't think you're allowed to keep working after that age yeah um but the craziest thing and the reason why chinese people are buying up all of the real estate in canada and north like and new york city and the u.s and just driving the prices so high is because in china when you buy a home it's actually only like a 70 year lease so when you buy that home that like you can't pass that on to your kids that just means that you have that house for the next 70 years and so they're like fuck i'm not going to invest my money into real estate in canada or north america where i will now like own that property forever yeah no and that's it's it's why rent's so expensive in this apartment

they were in right yeah it's good i've heard like in uh vancouver and shit vancouver is horrible absurd so vancouver san francisco new york london yeah um i don't want to ruin any other cities by mentioning them yeah but uh no it's and that's that's the other thing right so like you're forced because you can't store your value and the currency that you own because it's controlled by somebody to then go seek to store it in other vehicles other assets which real estate's one of the most popular yeah um and that's why i'm interested like so like what is the crypto scene like in big or what is the bitcoin scene like in china that people talk about at all because that would be like imagine being in china and not having to go buy real estate hong kong or

vancouver new york just being able to buy a little bitcoin keep 12 words hidden safely yeah i mean i think i think it's pretty big but i've only talked about it with my like my foreign friends there and i know i like i do have a couple foreign friends that are huge into crypto out in china but i don't really know what the chinese scene is like what have you heard about it like i did yeah i i just know the chinese scene that i know predominantly is dominated by mining i just know china's been the powerhouse for mining for oh yeah for quite some time um yeah there's definitely a huge mining community um china i believe controls close to 50 of the hash rate of bitcoin right now um that needs to change if bitcoin's going to be successful in the long run

but i gotta tip my hat to the chinese entrepreneurs or whoever's running mines out there like they're taking advantage of that hydroelectric energy yeah they'll set up shop like right next to one of those huge hydroelectric dams right well yeah and apparently it's because these ghost towns that they set up like nobody's moving well this is anecdotal like i don't have a direct evidence of this but what i'm hearing is like some of these ghost towns at least not all of them but some of them have been set up with a hydroelectric dam source for energy nobody's living there yeah um if you're not going to get that money from people expending that energy in the town they might as well mine bitcoin and true so a lot of this uh this hydroelectric energy that

is supposed to be used for towns that people are living in that nobody's living in it's being used for bitcoin mining instead yeah it's it's pretty scary i guess like i don't know it's scary like as you were saying before the amount of control the government has like with the surveillance state like have you been hearing about their facial recognition oh yeah dude you can't jaywalk without getting a ticket yeah um and i didn't know so like my face is is in their database and i found that out because i was at a shanghai sharks game and they got upset because i was filming myself trying to sneak in beers like i first i wanted to film a scene where i blatantly get caught walking in with beers so i taped just like six tall boys to my chest and i

walked to the metal detector and it's like beep beep and then i pull up my shirt i'm like oops I'm sorry and they like noticed that my friend was filming and so they call us into this back room and they actually like call the cops and the cops like they just wanted to make sure that we were in China legally so they take out this machine it looks sort of like a phone and just like take a photo of our faces and then my like real name pops up my visa number pops up like the date i came into china pops up uh the last time i've left the country pops up and so like all of that um and my passport like and my passport number and they just they can pull up all of the info just by one quick scan of my face it's fucking frightening man yeah and we're all

face fucked so this is this is a topic i talk about a lot like we're all face fucked so do you think the u.s also has a database of just like all of our faces that's a fact it's been proven wikileaks has proven it like yeah i don't know if they've directly proven that they have our face data but they definitely have a lot of our data and i think in the last couple weeks it's come out that apple has a backdoor where they're just feeding all of our data oh because they they have all of our faces for sure yeah i mean you just have a passive camera staring at you at times like and um i know there's a kfc in china where you can actually just pay with your face it just scans your face it sees which wechat account it's linked to and takes the money

they're about to start piloting that piloting that in new york city with the fucking subway dude facial recognition paying for the subway oh wow i mean it would be convenient but it's also kind of scary yeah it's minority report right yeah yeah well that's like the weird thing again that's like the big topic of this podcast like what are we doing we're moving into the digital age the information age we have a decision to make like we right now we allocate a lot of our data to all these huge companies yeah facebook amazon uh instagram is facebook whatsapp is facebook telegram uh and all this data stored in the cloud and there's a good chance freaks that we fucked up the internet the first time around like architecting it this way

where we allocate the storage of our data to third parties. And that's what's like, so that's why I want to talk to you. Like, do you, and it seems like you're, you're okay with it, but like a little worried that like the, the, the tech surveillance state could potentially hinder freedom and your ability to do, or not your ability, but just individuals ability. to to live life the way they want to in the future yeah for sure i definitely knew a few friends who would actually like buy weed using wechat and shit like that and then they're like

yeah i don't think i should do that anymore um yeah self-censoring yeah you find yourself self-censoring a lot um in china i like i haven't been just because i haven't gotten in trouble yet and now that i think this might be my last year in china be like if i get in trouble now and they're like you have to leave the country it's not the end of the world um but no i mean for like the local chinese people there they probably have to self-censor all the time um and that's the thing that's why i don't make uh chinese content or i don't make content for a chinese audience because i have tried that a few times and you'll film a video and they'll be like um okay but we can't use that part and that part and that part um yeah like even i knew a kid he like he wrote a chinese

parody song and he was invited to perform it on a chinese tv show but he just had like a line about the traffic in beijing being very bad or about like the air quality not being great and they're like you need to take out that line see that's the problem with china is like they can't make fun of themselves and they can't like at least that's something you can do in the u.s you can talk shit about the government you can be like this is a fucking joke this is horrible in china you're just not allowed to do that and that's why that thing like when um that uh the owner where was the manager of the houston rockets he just posted something about hong kong and it's like they're so insecure about it that they just like lost their shit how did you feel about like lebron

and adam silver and all those guys that was like absurd i mean i could see why they were in a tough place because they make so much money from china but i think it's just china's just i feel like just recently probably because of the hong kong thing they've become like so insecure where they can't let someone just like talk a little shit about them or then they feel like they need to pump their chest out and be like no you're not going to say that about china or we'll screw you over um and they so they made a big show of it and they're like we're gonna ban the nba from china but now it's all like slowly coming back like tencent is their biggest video uh streaming website and they at first they were like yeah we're banning all um all games and then

slowly they have like brought it back like after they were able to appear super hardline now they're slowly bringing back the nba games yeah it's interesting like how uh although i i did hear that now on that app and maybe in china in general they don't call the houston rockets by name they call them the red team the red team yeah so now i think in china like every announcer in the country isn't allowed to call them the houston rockets they just go and the red team has the ball that's that's ironic right because yeah yeah right yeah and he's he's the biggest yeah he's the he's the commissioner of the cba right now well yeah what is he is he the owner of the ducks or no he was the owner of the owner of the sharks yeah he used to be at all the games and i got to shake his hand

a couple times um but now he's the commissioner of the whole league as he should be and he moved up to beijing yeah it seems like a good position for him yeah um how massive is he in real life he's huge yeah he's probably one of the more famous people in china you would think he's probably someone that like most people in the country know who he is yeah well let's well speaking of the nba it's crazy how big like i'm from philly so like seeing the success that ai has in china like oh yeah in his after his career i thought that was huge and you see stefan marbury out there yeah they have like statues of him out there right yeah they built because he started playing for the beijing ducks i think he won them like three cba titles back to back to back

um so that was huge and now he's still a coach out there yeah but fuck the ducks fuck the ducks yeah yeah jimmer for debt was huge out there for a bit uh jeremy lynn's out there now right yeah and i mean he's gonna be he could be even huger the marbury just because he comes from an asian background really um yeah i could see i mean if they were willing to embrace marbury that much who was like he showed up with like the worst rep of all time being like he's a fucking weirdo psycho back in the u.s was he like 32 um well no i just know like right before he moved out to china he was like putting out these youtube vids where he was eating vaseline and was acting like a fucking weirdo and like everybody in the u.s were like okay he is fucking he has flopped off the

dock like he is just he is out to lunch but then he just got fully embraced in china and then you have jeremy lin who's just this like super wholesome guy um harvard grad yeah harvard grad and everybody in china loves harvard and he's asian although he's taiwanese and it's like i don't think they really harp on that but um yeah so i think like if he actually wins some titles like he could be treated like a god out in china yeah yeah what that run with the knicks why why was he starting and who went down um oh i don't know but yeah was it steve but like like lynn sanity was nuts and like that's why when he realized he would no longer play in the nba he had that he had that press conference where he was crying and he was like i've hit

rock bottom and it's like dude you have a harvard degree millions and millions of dollars you're like an asian american hero or you're just like a hero amongst amongst asian people around the world and you won an nba championship with with the raptors so you have a ring it's like you have not hit rock bottom you have a lot of shit to fall back on and um yeah now i'm sure he's one of like the highest paid players out in china germany land i would seriously consider trading places with you yeah it's been pretty fun yeah it's up to this point um now it's uh now it's and that's the other thing too like so again getting back to the topic like the people versus state like you see and again through your videos like i you just see like the average chinese person seems like

your average american who just wants to enjoy life get by have fun with their friends drink yeah yeah for sure there's like a lot of a lot of chinese guys i feel like they're so like caught up and like okay i need to get a job i need to get a car i need to find a wife i need to find i need to buy a house how much does the one child policy play into that yeah and so and because their parents put a lot of pressure on them because they don't really even have social security i don't think and so a lot of times you're like you're expected to take care of your parents when they stop working and so they i don't find i don't find a problem with that yeah i guess but so when you only have one child they just put all this pressure to be like it's

very important that you are very successful so you can take care of us and so a lot of like chinese i don't have like as many chinese friends my age as you would think because they really don't socialize that much they're what do you mean they're very serious like when they're young they just have loads of tutors so on the weekends they're going to their like math tutor their english tutor their piano tutor and then the goal is to get into a really good high school and then a really good college and then right after college they have to just focus on their job and then their main goal is to find a wife and then you know once they find the wife and then they're very they're freaking out because in china like chinese men think they'll have zero chance

of finding a wife unless they have a car and an apartment so like a job a car and an apartment so then their first priorities are job car apartment and then wife and then so you're delaying family formation you're and then they have their kid and then their main priority is their kid so they just don't have a lot of time to just like chill and have fun yeah yeah no and and with the one child policy like you have this weird yeah uh imbalance right where you have like something like 40 million yeah men more single men than women and and that's why they recently removed the one shot yes like the last couple years right yeah yeah and that's that's a crazy thing like just a bunch of horny single dudes running around like yeah with literally not enough women in the country to

to me and i think it's a lot of the single guys are like just living in the countryside where they're like yeah well it's something that's uh it's not for the same reason but in japan it's something that happens too where you have the uh there's like a hermit culture on this too yeah i've been hearing about that where people don't want to fuck in japan for some reason yeah that's very weird right yeah they feel like it's too much responsibility i don't have like a real relationship so they just they're just will be playing computer games or they'll go out to these clubs and just like watch these female singers who they look up to and they'll just kind of like fanboy over yeah and they'll be like that's my girlfriend and i'll go see her concert once a

month and they'll have like mini hologram girlfriends and yeah it's pretty crazy i was just i was just in japan and i absolutely love that country it's the best food i've ever had in my life everything's so cool but there is that kind of like sad um you know that sad part of the culture that you don't really see that much but you just know is happening yeah it's it's fast i mean i'm again i am fascinated by the the interaction of economies in the world like economics backgrounds like i uh graduated high school in 2008 and like just uh going into college during that time like really had me hyper focused on what's going on in the world and one thing that is important to follow that i found is birth rate and um if you just look at

like birth rates of the world japan is one where it's like falling like if you're a country that's supposed to be growing and your population is growing your birth rate should be 2.1 yeah births per couple japan's at like 1.5 right now which is like absurd and if like back in the 80s they were one of the most successful countries in the world right yeah they were mating like uh yeah furbies yeah yeah and that's like and now they've been taken over by china sort of um or at least like now china is the big dog in asia yeah what's going on in the uh is it the south china sea uh oh yeah there were some islands yeah i don't really know at one point there were protests against japan over those islands and it puts the u.s in a weird place

because we have like vowed to protect japan but we're much more closely tied to china economic yeah yeah yeah we're tied economically to both pretty intently but like yeah china makes a lot of our shit yeah most a lot of i don't want to say most of our shit i can't say that i'm certain so like with the trade war i know the exchange rate has changed a bit now i get paid in usd so it hasn't really affected me as much but my friends who are paid in chinese r&b i think it changed from like it was one us dollar to six r&b now it's one us dollar to like 7.2 and so a lot of them their their salaries are now worth a lot less in usd than they were before yeah the purchasing power of their paychecks less so yeah can you help me understand the r&b versus guan

better like what's offshore is one it's the same thing it's the same thing yeah it's just they you can call it a yuan rent rem and b or a quai and it all means the same thing and but isn't there like a an offshore isn't one offshore one onshore oh i had no idea about that i've always just heard that you can use them both yeah for whenever yeah no i was uh um always because yeah so they're like the currency markets you have like your offshore yuan and then like the renminbi yeah i didn't i i had no idea about that yeah um but that's another thing like so you've traveled the world you were just in zimbabwe you've been to south korea for the olympics like how does this stuff vary from country to country from what you've seen and is there is anybody doing it better or worse

um well i was telling you before the podcast started that in zimbabwe they use mobile payments too yeah even if it's not on a smartphone if it's just on a keypad phone and you just put in a code so if you're at the supermarket you put in the code for the supermarket and it it takes it out of your account and puts it into their account and that's what most people use now because i guess just cash in zimbabwe is just historically so unreliable that they feel like doing mobile payments like makes a lot more sense yeah no that was what we were talking about before we hit record too like za was oh it was called it was called econet econet econet is how all the mobile payments are done there and so how do you get on the econet like did you um have to go through

yeah i could i will so i handed za's mom just us dollars and she was able to convert it into cash on my econet account and that you just created when you landed in yeah so i just had to get a i had to get a sim card and then and then you put that money onto your sim card yeah so for those you freaks who don't know uh i had za we're talking about za who's another barstool employee from zimbabwe he was on the podcast first 30 episodes we talked about how we talked about zimbabwe's hyperinflationary um uh their bout of hyperinflation and what how the country reacted and i told us about how he paid for high school with with uh with cattle and gasoline what was the experience like in zimbabwe you were there like three months ago right yeah yeah uh yeah we

like za didn't want us to like delve too much into the politics because he was like if we if we're putting out vids that i don't know because there were like a lot of protests that were happening in the capital city when we were there and it was like if we're putting out a video about that then the government might like visit his family and be like why did you let these journalists like into the country to report on what's going on because they're the government is pretty corrupt and they definitely don't want kind of news leaking into the outside world uh so yeah we didn't we didn't really focus on politics that much i know people aren't very happy with the government right now like zaz family is very well off there and most days they wouldn't have

electricity from 9 a.m to 9 p.m yeah that's what i found fascinating but you said and it's like i don't and i think it's because the government like is corrupt like they have like the country has enough resources and money to provide everyone with electricity but there's just like people at the top that are taking all the money yeah no it's it's fucked man yeah it's uh and it's with zimbabwe in particular like they had the hyperinflation where like the zim dollar just got inflated into into shit and then um and then they just had to invent a completely new currency so i think now it's not even like zimbabwe and dollars they had to like it's tied i would imagine it's tied to the dollar to some extent yeah so i think you can use usd like in zimbabwe i think

for a while when their currency completely collapsed then people were only using usd yeah i mean that's that's the the go-to like yeah that's the reserve currency of the world right now they use usd in cambodia too actually yeah i mean what so i um i'm very partial towards latin america i go to costa rica and same thing you can use colones or or usd yeah i'm definitely trying to go to latin america and south america next but uh yeah at some point let's talk about that or anywhere in particular um well i've been to belize and guatemala once but this was back when i was in high school and i just loved it down there but i haven't gone further south than that so i would like to make it like you know into peru and colombia bolivia at some point yeah

now i used to work for a company uh before barcelona company i worked for uh was based out of quito ecuador and cartagena colombia i've always wanted to go to cartagena cartagena seems like a dope fuck yeah i know people who have been going to colombia for bachelor parties now because there's like it's cheap as there's reasonably priced flights down there and you'd probably actually spend a lot less at a bachelor party in colombia than you would in las vegas 100 oh yeah 100 yeah i have and you would have more fun i personally didn't love las vegas i lost i've never been i have no desire to go yeah it's just like a giant shopping mall it's it's not great um someone was saying when i said i was going on this podcast

even they were like like being a world traveler like yourself you really need to get into cryptocurrency so like why would you say it's so important to world traveling because you can walk around the world naked across borders with money in your mind nobody can do anything about it but then but then how do you spend the money when you're in the country like it depends where you are you have to find people who are willing to accept it or okay uh atms that are willing to exchange it yeah that's a that's a big thing so colombia borders venezuela i've had um a couple few venezuelans on the podcast to discuss their hyperinflationary and despotic situation and so the way they're using bitcoin as world travelers crossing borders so

the use case that i think this i saw the tweet the person that you're talking about was was alluding to is the fact that you can move money across borders without uh having some money changer or government take a fee out of it which is huge for a lot of people um so the example uh my venezuelan friend was describing on the venezuela colombia border is so obviously venezuela's got shit currency hyperinflation uh the bolivar is not worth anything uh it is possible for venezuelans to attain bitcoin um most people will use the u.s dollar as a sort of current sort of value though because it's stable yeah bitcoin's price is obviously volatile but if they have to cross borders they'll exchange their temporarily exchange their dollars

for bitcoin and the way they'll do that is they'll write down the private key which is either 12 to 24 words or a string of letters and numbers um which basically uh gives them and them alone access to uh the public keys associated with that which is basically the bitcoin addresses where you accept your bitcoin yep so they'll take the us dollars buy bitcoin with it send us this address put the words on a piece of paper which you can hide in your ass crack yeah across the border you go across the border you find a bitcoin atm you put your 12 words in you get your money you take your cash out okay and you're not able to be frisked at the border you're not you're not having gold confiscated at the border yep you're not um so that's one aspect yeah no because i know

if you live in china you're only allowed to like take out 10 000 like you can't take out like more than 10 000 us dollars like um so i have some friends that you've been working in china for the past 10 years and just you have all this money in chinese r&b it's like i have some they're they're worried about how they're going to be able to get it all back to the u.s it could take them years yeah yeah or they have to just like hide it in a suitcase but then you're only allowed to exchange i think like at a chinese bank you can only exchange like five hundred dollars of like you can bring in chinese r&b and only exchange enough for five hundred dollars per day yeah and i only do that up to ten thousand u.s dollars did i have fucking limits on the amount

money i can move on venmo and cash app yeah that is uh that is what bitcoin bitcoin provides a alternative network in which like i could send as much money anybody could send as much money as they wanted to yeah nobody is there to be like hey we need to check your id before you send this so seeing i get paid in u.s dollars right now when i need cash in china there are there are a lot of like people uh from the u.s working in china who want as much usd as possible so i'm like i'll send you a two thousand dollar memo and then you send me the equivalent in rmb via wechat and that's a way that we can avoid having to like you know pay a high exchange rate or anything like that no that's perfect yeah that works well yeah um but obviously i'm not like always going to be

able to do that but it just that's working out well for me now yeah until we chat's like hey we notice you've done this three or four times yeah what are you doing yeah with bitcoin and the bitcoin network's never gonna be like oh what are you doing this yeah and that's so that's again the difference between bitcoin and so i think china is this chinese the chinese state the surveillance state particularly is the on one end of a very polarized spectrum and the most extreme end you can be it is minority report brought to the modern age yeah um and every digital system surveilled and run by government is slowly drifting towards that and that's just inevitable by the way the technology that we use today works yeah uh

we literally have to re uh imagine the way data is stored and how you how you control your data um and bitcoin is my opinion one of the first if not the first or the best uh first uh product that allows you to do that in a in an earnest way in a way that actually uh uh impedes the state's ability to to control you yeah we're getting philosophical here we're and cosmic we are i mean i might have to buy my first bitcoin after this podcast hey um and bitcoin are you selling something no no i'm not i'm not i don't i don't i don't i don't uh i practice what i preach yeah i huddle i did have a couple friends back in 2015 and they started mining ethereum um out of one of my friend's mom's house and um yeah i think that was kind of right

before the boom so they were probably both able to make like a quick 150 000 boss yeah just a quick stack stack and a half yeah but no no it's a um no that like the the um i think insane gains of all coins i think it's possible that they come back and that stuff still happens but uh bitcoin cryptocurrencies i don't think they're going anywhere like um it just makes sense this stuff has actually been predicted yeah there was a book written in the 90s called the sovereign individual in 1997 on page 25 it predicted bitcoin and say in the future there'll be a cryptocurrency named bitcoin it said in the future after uh many uh instances of state central banks debasing their currencies there will eventually come along a currency that's run on the internet that's

completely separate of a central bank run on algorithms and cryptography yeah run by individuals like so this is something that's actually been being worked on for decades yeah because that would be better than the alternative like say if the u.s dollar loses prominence and like the chinese the chinese r&b becomes king or something like that like you don't want that yeah that's a lot worse than it's just like there's a new big dog in town who controls the world where if it's bitcoin it's not just one country that's controlling the world no it's a bunch of individuals yeah and um so that's actually a big theory out there so the world right now the reason the dollar why do you think the dollar is the reserve currency of the world um it's the most

stable or it like that's true did it rise to prominence after world war ii or after world well most mostly yeah after world war ii mostly after um nixon took us off the gold standard but the main reason is because if you want to buy oil in the world you have to first convert your currency into us dollars to buy oil it's called the petrodollar that's what the petrodollar is like yeah okay petrodollar system dictates that if you want to buy oil at least in the middle east from an opec uh provider you have to first convert your currency into us dollars uh and then buy the oil so that provides like a uh a long-term demand for the dollar that sort of drives and dictates its reserve status so on top of that we had the biggest military burden one of the strongest

economies so that yeah certainly helps but uh we're also fucking up our money i would argue too yeah by uh printing too much of it which is a problem that many societies have had and that's what we started to do during the recession did we right after yeah yeah so the federal reserve which is our central bank yeah it came to be in 1913 yeah so between 1913 and 2008 95 years uh the balance sheet of the fed which represents the amount of money they printed expanded from zero to 800 billion dollars so over the course of 95 years they printed essentially they printed or created 800 billion dollars by the u.s dollars over the course of 95 years after 2008 after Lehman Brothers collapsed yeah the response to that it took the balance

sheet from 800 billion to 4.3 trillion dollars over the course of six years so it took 95 years ago from zero to 800 billion to six years ago from 800 billion to four to six x yeah yeah that's insane so then it basically poured a bunch of money into the system it's another reason why So that's a compounding factor to the Chinese nationals driving capital into the U.S. real estate market. On top of that, the banks that were getting money from QE were also driving it into the real estate market because that's where the best returns were on top of the stock market and stuff like that. So you have this like vicious cycle. And the question is, can we keep up the economic production needed to pay back the debt that we've accrued by expanding the balance sheet?

Because that's what printing money actually means, is that you're actually creating debt that needs to be paid back in the future. Yeah. And that was my drunk Bitcoin rant, or anti-Fed rant. Yeah? No, I mean, you can't create cash out of thin air. Like, it has to come back at some point. It has to come back to haunt you at some point, or, you know, it needs to...

Yeah, you need to... That's the thing that worries me. I don't think people know what money is that well that's the thing you don't when you're young you don't actually think about it at all and even with me like I'm 32 probably only in the past three years it's finally dawned on me it's like what does this piece of paper actually mean like and because yeah you can't tie it to something concrete like uh like gold like gold anymore so you it's like what does it mean like when I take out my credit card and swipe it like what is it what is it tied to why am i receiving technically what it's good there was a uh south

park episode that like that kind of summed it up very well they're like no because we all just believe in this like as like like see like as long as we all believe in this bullshit it's going to work but the moment someone stops believing in it and realizes that it's not real then like it could all collapse well that's yeah and that's that's the biggest bullshit lie out there right now is that money is a shared illusion yeah yes this money right now i'm sorry blowing up here this money that were like the u.s dollar or use the zimbabwe dollar like as an example like that was bad money because it'd be printed out of thin air like there was nothing again to tie it to like it does not represent your time or your effort well at all it can just be debased and again

going back to it like what that money being printed represents is future production in the economy which some would argue uh may not be attainable or and if you wanted to grow the economy at such a pace you may destroy the world in the process by consuming so much yeah well that's the scary thing is that yeah like all capitalistic economies are built on growth but i feel like we're starting to reach the end of the line because we only have like finite resources on earth so it's like at some point you can't tie everything to growth just because we don't like you can't have growth for growth's sake yeah you and you like the world just can't actually handle us just growing constantly for the next a thousand years you got to find something that's

more sustainable but i don't know how you do that because that's kind of like how we're all trained it's just grow grow grow work work work like it's it's never a company's goal to just exist you know and be like hey we have 10 employees we're all like fairly well paid and and we're set we're not going to try to grow at all we're just going to coast that's like never a company's goal yeah and again i that's why i harp on bitcoin and focus on educating people about bitcoin because i believe that growth for growth sake mindset is curbed a bit with bitcoin like you can't expand your economy by printing money in a bitcoin world like okay it's simply not possible you would have to bargain with people to have them agree to pay

into the the ideas that you want to uh fund okay and stuff like that all right yeah so it's it's Bitcoin is a bit of a reversion to a monetary system that existed for thousands of years. So that quote that has been propagated by Yuval, Harari, and Sapiens, which is, it's an okay book, but the quote on money being a shared illusion is totally wrong. Money is a tool, and that tool has certain properties, and those properties, if that money has those properties, it will be a better money when it's able to compete on the open market. And those properties are, it's scarce, it's easily divisible, it's easy to send, it's relatively cheap to send, and Bitcoin checks all those boxes. That's what gold was before we were taking off the gold standard. yeah gold was a lot more clunky and that was my bitcoin indoctrination of donnie have you ever considered having john mcafee on the podcast well he's on the list here to talk he's on the list

he hit you up to meet up it was i have not had a lot of like celebs just randomly reach out and then one day out of the blue he fucking sends me a dm on twitter and he was like i love your stuff man i was like what the is that is this the john mcafee because i think i had like seen the documentary on netflix and i obviously knew when he was on the run in columbia and shit like that and yeah it was the john mcafee and he just randomly liked my vids and it was funny because someone maybe like three months later had sent a photo of john mcafee and was like you're gonna look like this guy in 30 years i was like oh i hope not um but he usually wears like cheap like fake oakley shades as well and that's usually what i'm wearing in all my vids so i think they

were just drawn the comparison there um but then he like invited me down to cuba and i was like i i talked to his wife and i was like this is gonna be so much fun janice or what yeah janice yeah yeah and i was gonna hang out on his yacht and just like film a video about i was so pumped and then uh before i could he got like banished from cuba and like was in jail in the dominican republic and then like ran off to europe somewhere i have no idea where he is now yeah so yeah i sent janice an email be like so is this still gonna happen like oh we're currently on the run uh so i think i think the meeting is gonna have to be postponed we're gonna have to rain check that john was supposed to eat his dick last week jesus he was gonna he was supposed to chop it off and

cook it no in 2017 like in december when we were uh running towards 20 000 he tweeted out uh bitcoin will be uh one million dollars by december 31st 2019 if not i will eat my dick oh my god and uh he for a while for a while there he spoke like he was gonna hold to it but uh do you think all of his wealth is in crypto right now because i know he sold like he was like finally i don't i like i no longer own a house because he was like at one point i had five houses and all this shit and he was like i just found like the more you have the more the more responsibility and just like and time you don't have so it seems like he got rid of most of his worldly belongings i don't know if he just put it all into crypto more money more problems i don't know i mean it would be

smart for him it is true in some sense like the more the more you have like everybody dreams of being rich and famous with like all of this all these cars and boats and houses but that has to be like a pain in the ass i can't fucking manage all that shit right just the upkeep alone yeah like i've always dreamed of having a boat but i also have heard it's like definitely the biggest money drain you can have what the uh you have two good days with your boat yeah the first day you get it yeah yeah i mean i then i i would still like to have one it doesn't have to be a crazy yacht it could just be like a small no i agree you're talking to somebody who's 20 footer i just love being on the ocean so i feel like it would be worth it but who knows we'll see would you uh

rip that in mass or yeah yeah probably up in mass i grew up on the coast up there so i've always just like that's the greatest thing about my job now is that i used to just be in china for most of the summers and it's fucking hot out there and the beaches near shanghai are not great and there were some like pool parties every once in a while but the summers were pretty brutal just so humid and i just i'm used to just like being near the coast in the summer so now that i work for a company based in the u.s like i worked from new york all of last summer and i would go up to massachusetts a lot on the weekends and stuff what like it still puzzles me like what did what did a boy from mass like how do you end up in shanghai and like did you ever think you would like you

know what did you think you're going to do it after college i didn't i don't know like yeah because in college i never took chinese classes and shit i could i didn't know i would be there i was like i actually took a lot of biology classes and then started doing some like environmental science classes just because i always did well in those classes so i was like all right i'll just take those but um yeah it was tough no i mean like senior year was tough for me because it was like i couldn't see myself doing like a set career like at the time so i really had like no idea what i would be doing after college um and you know like i liked making videos even back then but i never saw it as something i could be doing as a career so yeah what's it like it was tough

so i was like all right i'll just fuck off to china for 10 months and figure it out there and then and then come back and find like a real career but yeah dude i feel like but it did like Like, I was just, like, doing, like, because I probably was living in China for maybe four or five years before I started working for Barstool. So there was a time I just worked a bunch of, like, random jobs out there. You worked some white face jobs. I was at the point where I was, like, I've been working so many random jobs out here. But I think, like, I'm probably going to have to move back to the U.S. and just find, like, a more of a real job at some point. because like there were some people i would see in china who had clearly like there were foreigners

who had been there for the past like 15 years and that like after a certain point they just start to lose their mind and i was like fuck i don't want to i don't want to end up like what do you mean by losing one of those guys well there were just some like sort of creepy older guys that have been there for so long and they're just you know like at the bar with a prostitute and they're like running from their ex-wife or their family that like lives back in the UK or the US or Australia and they I don't know they're just fucking like hammered most of the time and I was like fuck I don't want to end up like one of those guys like I saw like I'll probably just have to move back to the US at some point yeah I mean I'm happy you found the path you had because honestly

like i fucking love your content again because you bring like a humanizing aspect to the lands i've never been to yeah it's very i've contemplated i went back and forth before uh you showed up tonight of comparing it to the but i want to compare like berdain like in that way like you're you meet people you eat you drink with them and yeah and i try to just i try to treat people the same way i would treat them if i was back in the u.s like you don't treat them like a museum exhibit it where you're like oh my god and here is this Chinese family look at how they live it's just you treat them like another human being because at the end of the day like humans are pretty similar wherever you go obviously they're gonna look different and like the food they eat is gonna

be very different where they live is gonna be unique but at the end of the day they're still like just human beings so if you just treat them how you would treat a human being back where you're from um you know then you end up even learning more about them than if you're just like oh this is like yeah this is an authentic foreign family you know no yeah i mean like again going back to the pong's eye videos like like you could tell like you were i felt like you were having a genuine experience where you were excited that you were experiencing uh the world through pong's eyes eyes and he was showing you his experience and then it was reciprocated where he was genuinely excited to to share that experience with you and yeah like hey we are we we are normal people like

you this is what i do like yeah no and he's done a great job like he's got like the peasant he's gotten pretty popular on twitter he has more followers than me after only being on like the app for a few months but he's always said the same thing he's like i'm not doing this for show i'm just doing this because this is what i like to do this is my daily life and i'm really good at drinking so like these are the videos i like to make and like i'm just glad that people like like me sharing them with them what what is it pong's eyes drinking prowess like in real life i mean he's absurdly fast um but but but he even said that like a chinese a chinese government official reached out to him at one point was like i don't think you should keep

on posting these vids online well that's one thing in the social credit story like you get so that's your credits for being drunk it's scary to think like yeah like eventually when that system's in place if those vids will actually hurt his social credit system could you and then and then you could say like if they had that in the u.s like if my videos would be hurting my social credits fucking it's coming dude like yeah it's i mean i'm not saying it's coming but like if you don't pay attention you don't fight for it like they could come here yeah like could you imagine like pong is like again like he seems like a great ass fucking dude like yes i'd love to bring him to the u.s at some point um yeah that's the scary thing about china because like

it won't affect me at all but it would be it would be sad if it affected him and they were just like you need to stop um but yeah i it's funny like what i when i first started to make the vids it was almost i was trying to do like a parody of a travel show um so it's just like because it's like a travel host who doesn't really know a thing about where he is i was like if you just took a dude from the middle of boston and plopped him down into the middle of china he didn't have a fucking clue what was going on that was the story behind it at first which i'm sure most people can tell is fake by now when i said i blacked out at logan airport and just woke up in china then i've had a couple people like dude that's fucking fake because you you need a visa to go to china

you can't just wake up there it's like yeah no shit no shit but um yeah so it was almost like a parody it was like a travel show host that just knows like nothing about where he is you know he's just like just like hammered and and acting like he's still at home uh but then i found like hey that's actually like actually a pretty decent way to make people if you're just you know being yourself because most people are gonna then feel more comfortable being themselves as well yeah so what's like the greatest thing you've learned like traveling the world and meeting all these yeah i guess it's just that we're not that different you know um at the end of the day it's like uh we enjoy a lot of the same things um and so yeah i know there are people that are like

afraid of travel but um i don't know i've never seen like i i don't think there's that much to be afraid of um because like even if you can't speak the same language like you can still convey what you're trying to get across because like as humans we all feel the same emotions and shit like that i mean it would be weird being in one of the countries that now supposedly like hates the u.s it's like i haven't done that even in china when we have like a trade war i've never like been the subject of a lot of like anti-americanism i've heard it happens more up in beijing but i've never been like you know targeted out being like fuck americans fuck americans like that would be that would be very intense but uh it's never like the people i've met it's never really happened

no like that's like that's the thing it's the thing that's uh frustrating about all this about like the trade war and all that it's like content like yours really drives that home is that hey we're all most of the people the middle class the lower class around the world no matter what government you're subjected to the same mass low orders and needs like the hierarchy and needs like We just want shelter, family, food, good times. And that's been going on forever. If you go back to World War I, none of the soldiers really knew why they were fighting. It was just the governments.

The governments had a bone to pick with one of the other governments. And they had all these alliances and shit. they're like oh I need I need to back up this country because we signed we signed an alliance but it's like now it's like oh Americans and Chinese or Americans and Middle Easterns like appearance wise they look very different and then in World War I it's just like French and Germans who like looked the exact same just murdering each other by the millions yeah and but maybe maybe we ended on a good note here yeah but that isn't don't you think modern times like a war like that would not be yeah possible because people can get on social media and be like oh yeah most

of us are are the same yeah it is weird to see it's like i don't people world war three was trending and recently but yeah i don't it's weird like can you ever see there being like another world war i've said this many times like i think syria 2012 when john kerry was trying to bomb syria after the quote-unquote like chemical attacks i i legit remember like the uh the conversation around social media getting to a point where i was like don't do this don't do this and i honestly think the social media backlash is the reason we didn't bomb syria in 2012 and yeah um going forward i think that it will uh serve the same curbing uh the use case as it did back then yeah yeah for yeah no i agree i think like there's always going

to be some proxy wars but i don't know if i can see there being like a world war no again it's not worth it we've come too far no right yeah it's uh we've come too far yeah we're too interconnected at this point like why fuck it up at this point donnie thank you for what you do man and thanks for having me on the podcast dude i appreciate it i just i'll let you know if uh by next fall if i move back to new york yeah i just blew up 100 minutes of your life i appreciate it man my pleasure man uh do you have a parting note for any of the freaks where can we find you um it's the wanton don on youtube on twitter it's donny does world on instagram it's also the wanton don and um yeah we got my zimbabwe videos dropping first tuesday after the super

bowl yeah we're gonna see uh donnie in a river with some hippopotamus yes hippopotami hippopotami i was not super close everybody thought i was gonna die you'll see i think i was safe enough all right tune in to check out or to find out peace and love freaks