The Jordan Harbinger Show - 293: Zak Dychtwald | How Young China Will Change the World

Episode Date: December 24, 2019

Zak Dychtwald (@zakdychtwald) is the Founder of think tank and consultancy Young China Group and author of Young China: How the Restless Generation Will Change Their Country and the World. What We Discuss with Zak Dychtwald: At 417 million strong, China has more millennials than North America, the Middle East, and Europe combined. Chinese millennials and its younger generations are experiencing -- and influencing -- a society and culture changing at 10 times the speed of what Western millennials have experienced. What this breakneck rate of change means for the childhood of someone growing up in modern China and the effect it has on his or her resulting worldview. Whether we view it as a collaborator, competitor, or consumer, this "Young China" is the single most important rising actor on the world stage. How Zak became fluent in Mandarin -- considered by the CIA to be the hardest language to learn in the world -- at the highest level in two and a half years instead of the customary six. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/293 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with producer Jason DeFilippo. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most brilliant and interesting people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. We want to help you see the matrix when it comes to how these amazing people think and behave, and we want you to become a better thinker. If you're new to the show, we've got episodes with spies and CEOs, athletes and authors, thinkers and performers, as well as toolboxes for skills like negotiation, public speaking, and body language, persuasion, and more. So if you're smart and you like to learn and improve, then you'll be right at home here with us. I've done several shows about China in the past

few months, and it's something I've been interested in for the past several years. I think the writing is on the wall in terms of China becoming the largest economy in the world in short order. While we sometimes might fear China or not even understand China, or just decide not to Think about the complex issues that arise when it comes to China, well, that's just not how we roll here on the Jordan Harbinger show. Today, Zach Dykwald, author of Young China, How the Restless Generation will change their country and the world. Zach joins us today on the show. This conversation takes a bit of a different tack, as Zach's mission is to build bridges based on understanding between China and the world, focusing on people instead of governments and macro economies and associated news stories.

China has more millennials than North America, the Middle East, and Europe combined. So their economic and cultural power will only grow over the next few decades. And today we'll try to see China differently, taking a people-first approach to China. That's going to help us understand the rising power in an entirely different context and empower us to approach China as a collaborator or a business target. This episode includes a lot of stories from somebody who's lived in and sought to understand China for years, outside the typical academic and political context. If you want to know how I managed to grab all these amazing guests for the show,

well, it's because of my networking skills, and I'm teaching you those for free as well. Six-minute networking. It's a free course. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us, and you'll be in great company.

Here we go with Zach Dykewalt. I know that we see China in the news a lot every single day, But the problem is when we see China in the news, let's see, what's the first thing that comes to my mind when I think China in the news? Because I do read a lot of in-depth stuff. So I'm trying to come up with like what's in mainstream media. Organ stealing. That's a thing. Shinjiang concentration camps where the Uyghur Muslim population is going. Surveillance state facial recognition stuff. Spying on our cell phones and our routers with Huawei. I could go on. But the idea is we're not really getting a balanced view of China. And that's what I liked most about your book in Young China is that stuff's not ignored, but it's also not the point of the book.

Well, that stuff's really important. And I don't want to undervalue that. But that's also not everything. And if you just look at those headlines, the version you get of China is absolutely terrified. Yeah, it's like North Korea to point out. It's North Korea plus plus. You know, there's nothing that you would think and people do think I'm absolutely insane to not only spend time in China, but actually really like it. Really?

And it's sort of like if you were to look at the United States and only look at our headlines from afar. It looks like a dumpster fire. Right. Which, to be fair, like some of our institutions are. However, I also can walk down the street and. Well, here's the difference is you go home. Is at the end of every day, you know, you read those dumpster fire headlines and you go home, you get off Twitter, hopefully, and you hang out with your family and you're, and you see that not everything is burning, that not everything is as bad as it's described.

Or it is, but also simultaneously, you have this really normal, wonderful life. or wonderful in turn, but normal. And what we're missing when we look at China, and this isn't exclusive to China, but it's emphasized with China just because of the volume of China news we get. We're missing the really normal stuff. When we look at China,

we look at two versions of China. First is government, which is big and scary. Yeah. The second is economy, which is big and exciting and increasingly adversarial and scary. We very rarely look at the people. And then when we do, similar to what you described, you see sort of the extremes.

You have like the organ sealing prostitutes. You have dog meat eating festivals. You have the super rich kids in Ferraris or super poor who are being neglected in parts of Western China. And all of those are true, but they also neglect the ordinary. And what I try to focus on in my book is the ordinary, the average, focusing on just what's the makeup of the everyday life throughout different regions of China and particularly focusing, as the title would suggest, on this young generation who is worlds away, literally worlds away from the older generations in China. illustrate for us the difference between the generations in China because it you think your parents are different imagine your parents growing up in like the equivalent of Africa and now you live in New York City. Well, everyone in their mothers wants to know about millennials, right?

Right. Anyone who works in a marketing organization, anyone who has something to sell is so sick of hearing about American millennials. By the way, there's 80 million of us. There are 417 million millennials in China. So just think about the scale, think about the potential for impact. And this is sort of why there's More millennials in China than there are people in the United States. And Canada. And Canada. Although Canada, you're not adding a whole lot of number. It's not a lot, but it's another name.

It does sound. It sounds a little better. There's actually more young people in China than there are in North America, Europe, and the Middle East combined. Oh, wow. So the scale here is pretty incredible. Oh, by the way, when I say Africa, I mean like rural sub-Saharan Africa, I am aware that there are cities and people have mobile phones and cars in Africa. There are some places that are, I mean, I just came back from Egypt. And Egypt is actually another great example of a place that is only in the news when bad things are happening.

But getting to this idea of generational gaps. In the United States, we go on and on about millennials are so different than Gen Xers and, oh, don't even talk about boomers, worlds apart. Let's put that into context for a second. In 1969, my dad was deciding whether or not to go to Woodstock. You know about Woodstock? I've heard about it. Yeah, we're in Berkeley right now.

So you get the general vibe. A lot of those people who left ended up here. Woodstock was best known for three things, sex, drugs, rock and roll. My dad was interested in a couple of those. I'll leave that to the listener. But there's a lot you can know about my dad based on sort of the anthropological wrapping of just that one decision.

He probably had discretionary time, right? He had a little free time on his hands. He certainly had disposable income. He could buy a ticket. He probably had a friend with a car. He was rebelling against something, the war, or someone, his parents. You know, you can imagine him sort of long hair,

hippie guy, probably smoke some weed. Like, you get the general gist. That's the drugs part. In 1969, China was in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, deep poverty. Yeah. I have friends whose parents and grandparents described to me having to eat tree bark to survive.

Oh, that sounds like North Korea, like famine level, picking flowers and eating the seeds. Deep famine. Between 57 and 61, China's Great Leap Forward, around 40 million people died of starvation. That's crazy. And so, by the way, we think of this as ancient history, but these are China's boomers. Right.

So the rest of the world, and there's ways to quantify this, and I think, you know, you have a smart crowd, so we should talk numbers in a second. Yeah. But we have generation gaps and we obsess over them. China has generation golfs. Yeah. And the problem is a lot of the stereotypes, a lot of the preconceptions we have about China are based on old China.

Old China. Old China. So the last generation is China. And even the leadership in charge of China today in the government space or state-owned enterprises. But when you look at this young generation, not just the years separating them, but the quality of change. The rest of the world evolves at a certain pace. and then there's China speed. And again, that's sort of fun to quantify.

So maybe we could do that. Yeah, I would love to, because I think people go, oh, China's developing so fast. People think, like, oh, they got fiber and high speed rail before us. And it's like, yes, and also they didn't even have, you know, running water in most of the country until whatever, like while we were already watching cable TV.

If I were to say the one thing that makes this one generation in China unique from their international cohort. So from millennials around the world, it's the pace of change. When we say China speed, it's kind of like, okay, yeah, you know, Shaq is tall, China moves fast. Right. We get the general idea. But let me quantify that.

So I'm born in 1990. I'm born in Berkeley, actually, Altabase Hospital about 10 minutes away from here. And in my lifetime, I've watched our per capita GDP. So the basic unit for what a life gets you, it's not perfect, but it's good when you're comparing internationally. I've watched our per capita GDP increased 2.5 times in my lifetime. So the education my parents could afford for me, maybe two and a half times better. The cars that my neighbor could drive, maybe two and a half times faster, the length of

the vacations we could take two and a half times longer. You get the general gist. It's again, not perfect, but it's a general metric. My friends born in 1990 in China have watched their per capita GDP increased 27 times in their lifetime. That's crazy. So far. Developing country, you know, big economy, pretty easy, right? Well, what about India? In 1993, India's per capita GDP and China's was pretty much the same, around 400 bucks. In the space between 1990 and today, so again, this millennial lifetime, India has watched its per capita GDP increase Five times. Brazil, a BRICS nation, 3.2, Germany, a robust economy, 1.9. In fact, when you look at the top 60 performing economies today, every other country has watched a per capita GDP, the amount of change, the amount of growth that millennials have witnessed in their lifetime, that number is under 10, it's single digits. Sure. Only China is 27. Only China is even in the double digits. You know, we think about that as a macro number, but think about in terms of watching your parents' life change. Think about moving out of poverty, realizing that, okay, not all TV is.

are black and white, realizing that, okay, now it's normal to move from a bike, which used to be a luxury, the flying pigeon used to be the status of class and clout in China. And suddenly you've watched your streets filled with cars and then multiple cars and multi-car garages. You've watched your entire city change from a village to a town to a city in your lifetime. When I was in high school, we had a teacher who went to China, which was amazing, I mean, that was nuts. It was like the early 90s or something like that when he went. And he said that there were buildings and if someone had a TV, they would put it outdoors and everyone would go outside and watch it. Now you got cord cutters in China who are watching everything on their phone.

Exactly. It's difficult to describe to us because our ecosystem has changed at a certain pace. There's this great David Foster Wallace commencement speech, I believe, Kenyan, in which he tells the story of a couple of fish. There's an old fish and then there's two young fish. They're swimming in the water, as fish do. And the older fish is swimming bass and he says, hey, you know, hey, gentlemen, the water's fine today, isn't it? And the two fish are like, okay. dude, and swim past and swimming, swimming, and then one fish says to the other fish, wait a second, what's water? Yeah.

We get used to the ecosystem that we're surrounded in. In China, and this is one of the most fascinating things happening right now, this young generation just thinks that that's the pace the world moves. Right. They just think that's water because that's all they've known for most of them. There's only 9% of the Chinese population that has a passport. Two-thirds of those are millennials, by the way. So this young generation is far more exposed than any other generation in Chinese history.

With that being said, this young generation, in China is just learning that their water is actually unique, that not everywhere in the world changes at that pace. And what they've built and what they've witnessed, what they've watched their uncles, parents, grandparents, and join in their lifetime is actually internationally unique. Do you think that makes them better equipped to deal with change since it's going so quickly? Me growing up in a medium-sized city and moving to a big city, I had to adapt really fast to go, oh, people do things differently here. So I know that that's changed me and changed my business. I would imagine if the whole country is like that, and then you look at the speed of business, say, in the United States, and you go, oh, they're really slow. I'm going to be, you're thinking faster. You're moving faster. You don't have six months to do a committee approval process. You have to make a decision by tomorrow.

There is no question. So there's a saying from Deng Xiaoping, the sort of architect of China's modern economy. So China, reform and opening around 1980, moved from communist China to sort of capitalist, pragmatist, socialist, right, exactly. There we go. That's one of my vocab words. I was like, why do I need this? I there, just for now. Just for right now. This was it. And so Deng is known for a saying. It's Mojur Shetou Guo He.

It means crossing the river by feeling the stones. This was the guiding principle of China's economy in the 1990s, early 2000s. It's a beautiful way of saying, we don't really know what we're doing. Like we have a direction. We're on one bank and that's poverty. We're looking across this river of time to the other bank, which is prosperity. But we don't see a path. So we are entering the river.

We are leaning on. on a certain economic principle or an idea we're shifting our weight, seeing if it's steady, and then crossing the river that way, we're expecting to slip. We're expecting to fall. We're expecting to have to adapt. And so to keep with this water idea, you know, the rest of us kind of live in a lake. But China, because of its pace of change, it's a rushing river. If you do not adapt with it, you will get washed downstream. How did you originally get interested in China? I mean, aren't you like, I thought maybe you were just like a Jewish kid from Long Island, but instead you're a Jewish kid from Berkeley.

I was a big, big difference, but enough time. But in a way, also not. Yeah, there's like a loop between California and Long Island that's actually just an inch of part. So I did grow 18 years in California. I went to public school here, not so far from here. Ended up going to Columbia, which was a massive culture shock from going to New York and meeting all these prep school kids and east coasters, you know, with collared shirts. It was revolutionary. So I actually took Chinese one semester freshman year.

My dad made me. And to this day, when I give people tours or. Columbia, which I every now and then do when friends come and visit I'm in New York, I will point to the third story window. This is not a pleasant joke at any point really, but I would say, you know, I would look at that window and think about exiting from there every day of class. Because it was so miserable, hard. Miserable. And I didn't see the point. And I skipped for two months, by the way. And on the final, I crammed and I dialed down the center for the last five, which I've never done. It remains the

worst grade I've ever gotten my life. But thank you. Great inflation. I was able to pass. Right. And because of that one test, when I was making a lot of the test, when I was making the decision where to study abroad, I had a choice. So I'm a big science fiction fan. The answer to your question is science fiction first got me there. I was looking at these study abroad pamphlets. And one of them was French. I apparently spoke French at the time. Yeah. Not a word, but spoke it. It kind of looked like a history pamphlet. You know, go learn about the history of Western thought, Western philosophy, Western governance, what have you, Western art, drink some wine. There's a vision of it. Looked like the past. And then I looked at the University of Hong Kong, which because of that

one semester was a linguistic loophole, I could go. Columbia has a rule. Oh, because you quote unquote qualified for alumni as a rule that you have to be fluent where you go in the language where you're speaking because Hong Kong is sort of half and half and university of Hong Kong is taught in English it was a loophole they only allowed two people to go I was a lit major I had done very little to do with China and Hong Kong you know studying business and psych as minors but yeah psych and lit man you didn't want a job I I will say and this is the funny part of today is I've managed to use all of it yeah yeah odds were stacked against me yeah had to start your own business I mean, it's totally true. And because the pamphlet for Hong Kong, you know, it looked like

the cover of Blade Runner to me or the Androids dream of electric sheep. Like it looked like the future. And when you're just set it up like that, okay, I could either go to the past and drink wine, which of course sounds good on some days, or you could go see where everyone is describing the future is going out. Yeah, that's cool. Easy decision. I went, loved it and traveled pretty extensively throughout mainland China myself alone, a lot of it, because I was the only study abroad kid with a multi-entry visa. And this is where it got interesting. I really. I really. realized very quickly that the China that was being described to me in the news, in the media, and then even reverberating off of people who had spent the week in Shanghai, you know,

business people or, you know, they've done a tour of the wall, and then come back and they are China experts as, you know, you spend a week in China, you're a China expert. That's how it goes. Yeah, they can use chopsticks sort of. Right. Yeah. Yeah. They got the little rubber band on the top. Exactly. You can mingle a few words. And I don't mean that, you know, everyone should get, I'm a huge believer in travel, but. Yeah, of course. It just doesn't make you an expert because you went to go see the Berlin Wall, for example. The China that they were describing to me was very different than the China I was experiencing, even on a cursory level.

And a big part of that was, again, the difference between headline China, which is terrifying. Was that exciting, though? Because, like, I feel like if someone told 24 or 5-year-old me, hey, on the other side of there, there are organ-stealing prostitutes in chaos, I would be like, great, when does the next train leave? So that's actually exactly what happened. Okay. So I have a godfather in the Bay Area, and he started. did some business with a gentleman in Hong Kong named Henry, and I think I gave him a pseudonym in the book, and

forgive me for forgetting. Oops. Sorry, Henry. Sorry, Henry. You're fully outed. And I went to the University of Hong Kong. I spent like two weeks there, and you realized pretty quickly that Hong Kong sort of a middle zone, until 1997, Hong Kong was a British colony.

So a lot of the people who I was interacting with had grown up in sort of this East-West mix of a culture. And it wasn't out there enough for me. So I wrote my godfather note being like, hey, I'm going to Shenzhen, which is right across the border. And he wrote me a note back almost immediately. The note cautioned against three things. First, beware of pickpockets. Second, beware of buying fake goods because they will complicate your return back across the border. And third, beware of prostitutes. Because not only will they try to kill you, they'll also steal your organs along the way. Well, what do you care if you're already dead? Sincerely, Henry. It was like this beautiful loving note. By the way, this is a person who's written me a note to say, you know, Zach, I'm so happy to have you as a godson. I can't wait.

for you to meet my grandson. You know, like an overwhelmingly protective and loving person. Right. So when he's the sort of person who's like, hey, by the way, other side of the border, organ stealing prostitutes. Right. Naturally, I was on the next train over. Yeah. I mean, that, were you never a 25-old uncle Henry? I keep selling it. I was 20 at the time. So it was even like, you know, screw your mom. Like, yeah, see, check this out. And I went, and this is the hard part. And this is why I think a lot about sort of what the media is telling us, because those things matter. I went and I got off the train on the Shenzhen side of the border, the mainland China side of the border. For those of you haven't gone between Hong Kong and mainland China, for mainlanders and for Hong Kong residents, you don't need a visa per se, but you need a form that allows you to go. It's a border crossing. Yeah, it's a formal border crossing. And I get off and suddenly no one speaks English. Yeah. You don't realize that everyone in Hong Kong speaks English until no one in China speaks English. Right. And by the way, there's about a million people. I mean, it's this teeming mass, this roiling mass. And at the time, Hong Kong or actually mainland China had sort of bad dairy. And so people were bringing bottles of milk from Kowloon. Bad dairy? Bad dairy. There's a question.

about the quality of the dairy that young people were consuming in China. And so people would take Hong Kong milk. You're only allowed to bring two cartons. So you would take your two cartons and then people would flood you as soon as you cross the border because there were milk dealers who were buying the milk, the safe milk, and then redistributing throughout Shenzhen. And so there's this massive group of people who sort of store me because I have my milk and they say some stuff and I have no idea what they're saying. I'm trying to find my hostel and I realize that the hostel I book, like I can't even call them because my phone number, which worked in Hong Kong, didn't work in mainland China. And the problem is that every single

person I'm looking at, I think is an organ-stealing prostitute. Right. Sure. Because the only thing I know is that, and you realize that a lot of the way that people approach China were armed with the only things we know. And those increasingly are adversarial. They're sensationalist. And to a certain extent, they're true. But in the same way that I wouldn't want someone to judge Americans by the headlines, we can't judge Chinese people, Chinese citizens by the headlines, even more. More so because they don't choose their government. Right. I was at the Aspen Institute recently, and it's sort of like a fancy think tanky thing.

It's like a Davos type thing. Davos, but like in jeans, which is even more, by the way, unsettling because you don't know who's a billionaire. And when they're all wearing suits, you can kind of guess. But when everyone's in jeans, everyone looks very uncomfortable. Regardless, everyone's wearing, everyone's wearing those Obama dead gene. Right, exactly. Like, this is how I blend in.

This is how I human, basically. And so I was there. and you realize that there is this version of China that we sort of digest. And I got to tell them. I got to tell the group at Aspen Institute's like, look, my friends in China didn't choose their government. We did. You could blame us for our government if you wanted to. Like, I mean, not everyone did. Most people didn't actually. If you're going by the numbers, at least most recently. But like a lot of us did. It definitely says something about America that we have the government that we do. In China, they don't get a vote. And so we have this idea of the Chinese people that we have not cleave. from the Chinese government, which is fair if you're assessing Americans. It's not fair to impose that same system of judgment on China because they don't have a say. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Zach Dyke-Dwald. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show.

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It just means that you get all of the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player of choice so you don't miss a single thing. And now back to our show with Zach Dykedwald. I guess I didn't really even think about the fact that they don't vote. Do they have some kind of pseudo? There's an internal democratic process. So they say there's actually multiple parties within the Chinese government. They're deeply outnumbered by the Chinese Communist Party. And the voting has increasingly, especially as Xi Jinping has become a stronger force.

We have the habit of being like, all right, there's one guy, he's the hero and sort of heaping credit and blame on one person. Yeah. Sort of like the hero lens of looking at things. Western. And Xi Jinping has a team around him. He's not a sole actor. It's not like this renegade. There's a larger concept that's pushing C over there. And the voting internally has gotten definitely very one-sided. Yeah. Always kind of has been. He's the president for life, isn't he? He could be. And this is actually a great example of news gone a little bit wrong. So what happened was China basically had a vote to do away with term limits. Term limits meaning that

Xi Jinping or the get reelected indefinitely. But he has to get reelected indefinitely. So the news the next day was president for life. And pretty much the only thing that people know about this was not that they did away with term limits, but that Xi Jinping is going to be elected for, he's now president for life. So they're just assuming the results of this change, right? And there's some tactical regions that you could assume that he's not going to be president for life. And if you were to ask people within China, they immediately think of these reasons, which is that, okay, like Belt and Road initiative or One Belt One Road is really important. This is an international, massive infrastructure plan that currently involves around 68 countries in the Asia extended region. This is Xi Jinping's baby. It makes sense for

him at this fragile moment in Chinese diplomacy, as they're moving from a regional to an international and a global actor for Xi Jinping to continue to steward that an extra five years. Interesting. So what you're saying maybe is, or what I'm hearing anyway, is he wants to say, hey, all these countries where we're building highways and buildings and ports, I'm not going to then leave office in two years and then you're stuck with like a half-baked port in a road that doesn't have pavement. I'm going to be around for a while. He's not thinking, well, this is going to look pretty bad to all those people that want Democratic China. He wants stability and he wants permanence so that people have confidence in his plan. I'm saying it's possible. Okay. And so we're not doing

ourselves any favors when we just put out to the general public Xi Jinping president for life. Right. That's one of many options. And there is some strategic value at a moment where it looks like every four years, the United States, which is largely the biggest foreign actor, the biggest international actor on the world stage, where hegemonic power, where it looks like every four years, we might tear up a deal. Right. We've done that. You look towards the TPP. Everyone freaks out. The TPP in particular, if you're looking at the Asia region, like we have left a lot of our allies not knowing what kind of trade partner we're going to be, Japan, South Korea, strategic allies. And so at this time where it looks like, ooh, like what's going on in the U.S., China is attempting to, and I'm not saying that this is for sure what's

happening, but this is absolutely a strategic consideration. China's attempting to be the adult in the room, being like, hey, you know what, we're not building our relationships in aid that we might withdraw after four years or treaties that we might tear up after four years. We're building our relationships in steel and concrete, not to last four years, but to last generations. That's such a Chinese outlook, right? When I talk to Chinese people, all of which you talk to a hundred times more, they really look back at literally ancient history, like thousands of years old and like, oh, yeah, this is a thing that we used to do in ancient China. They're talking about it, like, it's a different country, but it's not really the same thing.

is like, it's not like when we're talking about ancient Rome. They seem to have this wider or longer timeline where like 100, 200 years is like, for us, that's the whole history of the United States. We're thinking what was here before that? Nothing. Native Americans living in wigwams, damn it. You know, like, they're thinking that was not that long ago. It definitely feels that way to a certain extent. But on the other side of it, what I can say for sure is that they're not incentivized to at least think about it in two-year terms. Right. Or in three-year terms and then election year. There's actually a lot of discussion about this right now on sort of China Twitter and I'm not hugely involved there because it scares me. But I do follow it

to a certain extent. There's a lot of discussion, you know, is China playing three-dimensional chess while we're playing checkers? I don't think for sure. But undoubtedly, and again, this, I have this aspirin on my mind. It happened recently. I watched a lot of American politicians, politicians of note describe how they're realizing the incentive system of our system, getting reelected, career politicians, it incentivizes you to think about the short term. The incentives in China, short term definitely matters, but they're able to think about the longer term. And by the way, I'm talking a lot about the positive sides. There is a rash of negative aspects of the Chinese government. I'm not trying to say there's not. What I am trying to sort of put forward is that if we only cover

China in the most negative way, we are missing a lot of their strategic considerations that are important for us to consider, what is it, zhii, jibi, baijamb but that. Know thyself, know your enemy, and a hundred wars you will not lose. A hundred is metaphorical. We're not fighting hundred wars. I'm hoping we're never going to fight a hot war with China. But we're not giving ourselves the opportunity to know China, who I don't think has to be

an enemy, but especially if we're painting them as an adversary. We got to see it from their point of view. There's actually a lot of irrational concerns that Americans and Westerners in general have. I had this guy on the show a couple months ago named Kai Fu Lee, president of Google China, and he does a lot of investing and AI. Incredibly well-known, you know, a towering figure in the space. Oh, really? Okay, good.

I figured, but a lot of people. And it was only after he was on your podcast. Well, that makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah, we do build careers over. Right. I thank you, by the way, for having me. You're welcome.

You're welcome. Young China was in stores sold out completely by the time you're watching this, but you can try to get one. Sure. I thought, I'm going to have Kai Fu Leon. We're going to talk about AI and why China has an advantage in this area, and it's going to be interesting. I had a lot of people that were, of course, deeply interested in it. But I also had crazy people that were people that to me seemed crazy that were like,

I can't believe it. You didn't ask him about how China steals all of our intellectual property. First of all, it's like, I don't harass my guests when they come on the show. I challenge them, if necessary. But that, to me, seemed completely irrelevant. It also, it sort of chocks up all of China's advantages to, well, they're stealing from us. So dot, dot, dot. And it's like, wait a minute.

There may be plenty of that. But that is certainly not the reason that they're ahead of the game. And the more we sort of say, well, they're ahead of us because they do this negative stuff or this bad stuff or this illegal stuff, we're really just writing off our own disadvantage in a way where we're sort of outsourcing responsibility. We're throwing our hands in the air and saying, well, at least we don't. steal from other people. And it's like, cool, you can have this sort of victim mindset and say that that's why they're ahead, but it's not true. And it's going to disadvantage us to think that way

in the long run. Most people have never considered what it looks like from a seat in China. What does the issue of IP look like from there? What does the current American reaction on tariffs or activity from between American and China look like from China? There's a saying that got popular on the Chinese. I spent a lot of time on the Chinese internet for better or worse. And like I'm not trying to like I'm not like on political forums. I'm watching like trash TV on I spend a lot of time on like the Chinese equivalent of Quora which is you know a little bit higher minded but like hours and hours of really bad TV and we should talk about language learning later because that this is a important part of it. But there's a saying that got popular it's pi guu dreeding nao die but something exactly it means it means

it means your butt determines your brain oh that's funny where you sit in the world the people around you, the view from your seat in the world, the sort of podcast you're listening to, the chatter you're hearing growing up, that seat in the world that you occupy to a far greater degree than we'd even like to admit determines our worldview. And so the challenges, and this is what we often tell our kids when there's like conflict resolution, but the challenge that I see, particularly in America, also in China, is the willingness to take yourself out of that seat that you might not even realize you're in, that you might not even realize that you've, like, grown barnacles on because you've been there for so long. and put yourself in a seat in China and look at it from that perspective.

A lot of what I try to do and with young China and the work I'm doing with young China group and I do a good amount of talking about this stuff is not to make people in love with China and certainly not to make people in love with the Chinese government, which is usually what people hear. They're like, this guy is not bashing the Chinese government. He must love the Chinese government, in which case I hate him and I'm not going to listen to anything and then it's just to consider what the world looks like from a seat in China. Think about, okay, what does it look like? when the American president seems to be using China as a bit of a scapego. What does it look like when the Chinese government seems to be sort of balking on some of these trade considerations? What does it

look like when we consider the other actors in the region? When you take out the United States, China has some of the hottest, most confrontational borders in the entire world. We often forget that. We think, okay, there's United States and China. Think about having Russia to your north. Yeah. Think about in your backyard. You have North Korea. Yeah, no thanks. No thanks. And then Japan, obviously Taiwan and Taiwan is in a gray space. India and Pakistan who both have historical conflicts with China and currently have a conflict with one another. And have nuclear weapons.

It's tough place to be. But we don't think about that. We think about United States and China. We think about what are our interests. We would be doing ourselves a massive service just and this isn't exclusive to China. This is almost like preschool level like now, now, have you seen this issue from Chad's point of view? Right. But we don't do it.

And it's a little bit our media's fault for and our, you know, I don't want to like rant against main tree media because that's like a triggering word for me at this point I freak out every time someone says it. But we're click motivated. And so if there's something that's relatively tame that like China, there's something kind of okay going on in China, people aren't going to click it. Yeah. The incentives aren't there for that story to be rewritten in a different version unless it's like hot war coming with China, trade tariffs blowing off. Right. You can even bet on it, by the way. This is a totally valid thesis for an investment fund. If someone out there is like trying to make it, we're in Silicon Valley. So this is a good place to talk about. Just perception. When Xi Jinping came to the United States for his first visit, he first, he first

went to Washington. And I was thinking about at the time, I'm 25 at the time. I don't have a ton of money at all. I'm like, all right, I got a few pennies in my pocket. I'm going to see what I can do with him. So Xi Jinping's coming in the United States. I know that that means that he's going to be in the press more. 95% of the press written about China is negative. The press opinion impacts markets because perceptions impact market. I'm like, all right, when Xi Jinping comes, there's going to be so much negative press about China that any Chinese company is going to be negatively impacted. Their stock price is going to be negatively impacted because we can't cleave the idea of a Chinese government from a Chinese company. So I'm like, all right, Alibaba is going to go to its natural

low as possible because of all the negative press. Load up on shares. Sure enough, it goes down to, I think, like, 57, 58. You know, I bought it 60 and now it's tripled in price. And of course, it's fluctuated since then. But like, you could bet on how negative pretty much every spin and every description of China's going to be. Yeah, that's a good point. You really can. And I think that this does us a disservice when we look at that because there was a pro tip that I gave a long time ago, what was it? I saw a news report and it was so wrong. It was about something I knew a lot about and I can't remember what the topic was at the time. But I remember looking at it and it was so wrong. And then I looked at another news report about something else a few months later and it was so

wrong and I went, wait a minute, since I'm an expert in these two areas and these news reports are so wrong and they're obvious how wrong they are because I'm an expert. That probably means that everything I see in the news reports is equally wrong. I just don't know enough about that subject to point out how wrong it is. So then I started realizing, oh, yeah, Yeah, pretty much everything you see here is going to be really simplified, is going to be really overstated or understated, or is going to only focus on the negative. So you have to bear that in mind when you're looking at something like news about China, you have to read it like you're looking at news about anything that you're an expert in and go, nope, that's for sure not the case. That's the rabbit hole here. I want to switch focus a little bit to the pressure that some Chinese people are age and younger are in.

because if you're developing at 10x, 27x, whatever normal speed, your generation gap is such that a lot of the focus is on you as the maybe one or two offspring. Now that they don't have the one child policy anymore, for those of you that don't know, there was a whole lot of time where you could, you were only allowed by the government to have one kid. But now, I guess you can have two. But still, that's a lot of pressure for, okay, your grandma, grandpa, your mom's grandma, grandpa, and your mom and dad both and everyone else, all the IE's uncle. We're all looking at you,

so don't screw this up. The pressure is enormous. And let me tell you a quick story. I moved to China on my own when I was 22. I just graduated college. I didn't really know what I was going to do. I had a backpack, the address of a hostel,

and the number of a language program. I didn't know anybody. I didn't have a job set up. I went there, quit the language program pretty quick. You realize that the worst place to learn language in a city is the place where all the other foreigners are. Oh, good point.

And we can get into that. Yeah. So one of the jobs I had basically was like working. I taught SAT. I taught ACT. I taught golf at one point, which is funny because I don't know how to play golf. I watched videos on how to do that. I got fired after about two weeks when that came out. So kind of scrapping it. One of the jobs I had towards the end of that first year, I was in Sujo just outside of Shanghai. And the job was that sort of an upscale English tech, fun weekend training school. So I was the teacher in a class with six five-year-olds. And it was me, one foreigner, and three TAs, two or three T-A's, two or three T-A's. TAs depending on the class. My preconception, I didn't dealt a lot with little kids before. I'm like, oh, damn it. These are South Huang Di. These are China's little emperors. The term little emperor first came up in around 1986. I didn't know this at the time. But the idea is basically that, like, you have these kids, single children who are just spoiled rotten. It's called the 421 problem. You have four grandparents, two parents and one child. Oh, yeah. So you have all these grandparents,

these two parents who are putting all their love, attention, money, food, obesity. is become an issue. They're all funneling it down to this one kid. And, you know, if you have a room full of little emperors, you are very clearly the court jester. I had a turtle puppet in one hand. I'm thinking, great, this is what my college is. Right. Yeah, yeah. So we start class. And the thing about five-year-olds is that they're adorable. Yeah. There's one kid in particular, Jenguo, which is this really old school name that means like build the country. It would have been a totally normal class, or not for the fact that for those six kids at the back of the class, there was a glass partition. And leaning up against that glass partition were 12 parents and 24 grandparents.

They're watching you teach. Every single twist of a microscope, every single punch of a keyboard. They were leaning against the glass, breathing onto it, watching their kid. The whole time? The whole time. That is so awkward. Class finishes. And I mean, think about it for those kids. Think about the amount of attention. Class finishes. I walk out. I talk to some of the teachers. I'm like, this is a chance to show off my Chinese and like, and also try to, you know, keep my job. And all of a sudden, I hear Jiang Guo start to cry outside of the corner of the room. I look over and three of his grandparents are sort of like arguing amongst themselves. His dad is looking extraordinarily confused. I knew it was his dad because he was dressed the exact same way.

And sure enough, his mother and his grandmother were leaning over Jiang Guil, wailing. And they were holding a notebook with words on them. I walk up and I realize those words on those pages were microscope, keyboard, robot. These are the English words that we had learned that day. I asked, you know, what's going on? I didn't assign any homework. Yeah. And his mom looks at me and says,

Zheng Guo will have to take the Gao Kao, the college entrance exam, in 13 years. We are trying to give him the edge. D. Yikes. So we think about these little emperors, and this is the consumer story, right? Like, everyone's lighting up about, wow, Chinese millennials, buying stuff. We love it. You know, even if you have 10% of them, that's 40 million people.

Everyone's just trying to, how do we get so much money? And the reason that they have money to buy things is because of that upside down pyramid that I was described. Four grandparents, two parents, one child, it acts as a funnel for resources, love, et cetera. It also acts as a funnel for pressure. Yeah. For expectations. Oh, man. I'm getting like anxiety just thinking about not knowing the word microscope, which also I don't know in any of the five languages that I speak other than English.

And this kid is five. And you compare the level of pressure on these young people in China. this generation in China versus millennials in the United States, pretty incomparable. Pretty incomparable. And by the way, that level of pressure is starting to produce some cracks. They're in charge of creating China's modern identity. On one side, you have tradition. What it's always meant to be Chinese, you know, education focus, a family focus. On the other side, you have the pressures of modernity. Get a great education. Urbanization. It used to be kids, you know, when you're 18, you wouldn't have to get educated. You just start a farm next to your parents. And so getting married

at 18 made sense, but now people feel like if they don't have a great college degree, a great higher education, you know, masters, PhD, then they're not fit for the job market. And this young generation, the post-90s generation, really. So born out 1990 and after, they get to decide what it means to be Chinese in the modern world today. So no pressure. No pressure. Yeah, just figure it out. Figure out your national identity. Figure it out. Please your parents, please your grandparents. And, you know, remember, live life for yourself. And have some fun. Yeah, and have some fun. This is the hard part, Right. So the older generation was best known for their ability to eat bitter, to do difficult things for long periods of time

at the prospect of delayed gratification. This young generation does not want to eat bitter. And frankly, they don't have to. When you think about why the older generation was working hard, it's so that this younger generation can have a better life. They want to hoa da-dang-hya, to live in the moment. There's a toast in Cheng. I lived in Chengdu for three years. It's my favorite place in China. So imagine it's me and a bunch of friends. We're eating Kau Yu, which is barbecued fish. It's this amazing Chongqing day.

So you have like sort of crispy skin fish. It's super spicy. It's sort of steeped in this oil. Oh, is that the numbing hot? The Chongqing. Exactly. So Chongqing, you have a lot of like just normal spices. And then Chengdu brings the, it's called Huadiao.

It's a type of numbing spice. It's Sichuan peppercorn. Yeah. So it's like explosions in your mind. It's the best. I think it's, that's some stuff like there's some white people shit that we eat here in the States, obviously. When I came here, that was when I was like, wait a minute.

You can eat all these things I've never even heard of before. Like numbing spicy. I didn't know that was a real thing. And it's not just so hot you can't fill your mouth. It's just like a different, there's something going on there. It's a different flavor entirely. Yeah. And so we're sitting there having, we're drinking some beers and there's a toast.

It's Jinjao yo chintzai. It means today we have booze, so today we'll drink. We'll enjoy what we have now. That's revolutionary. That's so antithetical to what it used to be in China. To a certain extent, obviously people try to have fun. But like, you know, this generation gets to decide what is fun. What is leisure?

Like I said before, two-thirds of all people who have passports in China are under the age of 37. They're millennials. They're seeing the world. And so it's not just pressure, you know, the way that this pressure articulates often is consumption. This is, they're deeply interconnected. They want to see stuff. They want to spend. They want to eat incredible food.

They want to see the world. And by the way, those are also dreams that are inherited from their parents. Sure. Who could not. Who could not do that. Right. Their cheers was bury some of this drink under the mattress in case we need a I mean, like, yeah, yes, yes.

Oh, dark. Yeah, I know, right? It's a joke, but it's also kind of not. It's, you know, we make light of the past because it makes it easier to swallow. That's right. People here know that it's hard to get into college. But the idea that you would have to prepare for 13 straight years in order to have a fighting chance is alien. Right.

It's like, yeah, you take some AP classes in high school. You've got to do some extracurricular activities. If you're a celebrity, you bribe someone to put you on the crew team. Right, water polo team. Right, yeah, the water polo team. But like in China, it's a completely different animal. And I remember hearing things and reading in your book, things like if you don't do well on this exam, like you're basically, the fates have spoken. It's like if you don't do well in your SAT, you retake it.

If you don't do well on these exams here, your life is over as far as your parents are concerned. You can do stuff, I'm sure. That's it's just, you're just a failure in many people's eyes. In China, the only thing that matters when you apply to college is your score. This, by the way, is part of why entrepreneurialism is becoming so hot right now in China, because if you're trying to go the traditional route, passing a test, getting into either state-owned enterprise or a firm that's like, wow, you went to this school or that school, the odds are just brutally difficult. And not everyone's a good test taker. Yeah, I feel that. You know, it might not be good at test, but that doesn't mean you're bad at business. That doesn't mean you're bad at coding. And that intensity that people bring to test taking, they bring to starting your business. We make a joke about being like ramen sufficient here. or whatever it is, like, you have enough money where you guys can eat in the United States. You have enough money where you can eat ramen.

If you're eating ramen in China, you're balling. You're doing well. Oh, man. Some Japanese noodles. You're living life well. The second issue is average wage in China is still really low. We think, okay, there's like some parity between China and the United States. The average income in Chengdu when I was living there.

They do it by the month. It was about $600, $700 per month. Imagine trying to buy an iPhone. Oh, yeah. Take it around $607 per month. Good point. It's like 10% of your salary for the whole year. And so the way to get off of that,

wage track is to create a business, is to start something different, is to sell something internationally with people who could afford a little bit more. It's an exciting moment right now in China because of this really substantial entrepreneurial surge. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Zach Dykewald. We'll be right back after this. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us on the air. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard so you can check out those. amazing sponsors, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget the worksheet for today's episode. That link is in the show notes at Jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. If you're listening to

us in the Overcast Player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really appreciate it. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Zach Dykedwald. Let's get into the language stuff, though, man. We could talk for hours, but I want to get into the language stuff because the CIA ranks Mandarin as, I think, the hardest language to learn in the world? Is that correct? Among the hardest language. It's the top tier in turn. Yeah, that's an important point.

It's like Hindi, I think, is one of them. So Arabic, I believe Hindi is one of them. I'm not totally positive. I know Arabic. And I haven't checked this recently because I haven't had to flex as much recently. Yeah. But it's, you know, this is something you used to say to impress your parents friends. Right.

Arabic, Japanese, I believe South Korean. And then Chinese, I would argue that Chinese is certainly more difficult than South Korean. Sorry, my friends in South Korea. You mean, just Korean in general. Oh, excuse me, Korean. I apologize. They do have Korean. It is true.

It is true. No, I apologize. Anyways, it's hard. And the reason it's hard is because there's no alphabet, and this is where Korean is different. Right. So if I have the English alphabet has 26 letters, and if you know the alphabet, you could read any word off the page. Even if you don't know what it means. Right, exactly.

I mean, and the letters have no meaning. D doesn't mean anything, but you put it with A and another D and it spells out dad. You're like, oh, okay, that's dad. Our alphabet is used to describe our oral language in that way. Chinese has tens of thousands of unique characters. And if you don't recognize one character, you can't read it off. Oh, I know. It's the worst.

It's a really difficult part. And that's just the written side. The spoken side, it's a tonal language. And people like, oh, you know, English is a tonal language? Like, is it maybe? And not the same. Not really. In Chinese.

In fact, I thought of an example earlier when you were talking. You said the new generation doesn't want to ch'he kuhul, which is like eat bitter or suffer. but if you say ch'a kuh, it's parking space or garage. Right, exactly. And trust me, you might have heard the difference there. When you're learning every word in Chinese, it's going to take you a long-ass time to hear the difference. And then also to remember that ch'gou is suffer and ch'koo is parking space or garage. Like, you have to know how to say that.

And when you hear it, you have to go, oh, parking space. Yes, some of its context, some of it's going to trip you up forever. And this is if we're speaking really slow, right? like ch'i-koo versus ch'cuh, sure, maybe you can figure it out. Yeah. But if someone's yelling at you to stop eating bitter and find your stupid parking space, like, you're like, ooh, right. It freaks you out.

And then you got to remember when you want to say it yourself. Right, exactly. You've got to hit. You know, I used to complain because I'm like, look, I'm getting the phonemes right. I'm not getting the tones right. You guys know what I'm saying. But now when people speak trash Chinese, that's typically non-tonal, once you train your ear enough and we can get into how to do that.

But just to give you a basic example, this is the famous example. Ma Ma Ma means mother. Ma means hemp. Ma means horse. Ma means scold. You don't want to confuse horse and mother. Ha, ha, ha. This is like the classic Chinese joke. There's some naughtier ones. I don't know if we can get into this. Yeah, if you want to. Yeah. Just young China. We're trying to be cool and pretty edge of time. So a funny story of mine. I have a friend who does not speak very good Chinese is a foreign friend and we were in Harbin, which is as far north as you can go in China. We were there during winter. It was negative 30 degrees. Sort of like you spit on the sidewalk. It cracks. Yeah. Very exciting. It's one of the coldest.

cities in China slash, isn't it one of the coldest cities in the world? It's one of the coldest habitable places in the world. Yeah, that's what, okay, that's what I thought. So we were there for this ice festival. I heard it's incredible. It's incredible. They build this entire city and these massive sculptures like multi-story high just of ice and they sort of pipe these colored lights into them. It really is incredible. I'm a Californian. My friend was Costa Rican. The only people who are dumb enough to go to Harbin in the middle of winter are, you know, us. Right. But regardless, like negative 40. That's just a number to me. That's an abstract. Yeah. I have no concept of what that means. By the way, the first thing to happen is your nose hairs freeze.

We took a 31 hour train ride, and as soon as we get off the train, everyone local is wearing loafers. I'm like this easy. And the first thing that happened to me is I completely panic. You start coughing. You start coughing. I feel my nose hairs freeze over. And my first impulse, my friend had to stop me from running back on the train. Yeah, yeah. I blacked. I, you know, you're like white out. I had no idea that that's what I was doing. So yeah, that's what's like going back to Michigan. You walk out of DTW airport. You start coughing because you go, oh, I forgot. You got a breathe slower. Exactly. And so my friend goes in, he wants to buy a face mask. It keeps your face warm and it also blocks off pollution. Yeah. And he's asking for what he should be saying is kojiao. Face cover. Kou is mouth and jaw is cover. And he's like motioning to his mouth. He's like, you know, koujiao, unfortunately what he was saying was co-jiao, which means oral exchange. Oh, yeah. Oral exchange. And that's the PG version of it. But like this guy behind the counter was like freaking out. Because it's not like he, you know,

immediately, oh, he means face cover. Right. Because it's not intuitive if you, like, he's like, this is my language in your butcher. You know, if someone says oral sex versus face cover, you're not going to be like, oh, when you say oral sex, you really mean face cover. So this is what this guy's hearing and just absolutely freaked out. Tones matter. And getting it right matters.

And you don't want to walk into a convenience store thinking you're asking for a face mask and really be asking for a sexual favor. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I started learning Mandarin because it was hard. I was like, well, I'm learning Korean. and then if it's gonna be this similar amount of effort, I'm just gonna start learning Mandarin.

And it's tough. But of course, if you can learn languages, you can learn anything, it's great for going to a country. If you're gonna be there for a year or even six months, you should try to learn the language of the place where you're going. Obviously, if you're gonna be there for any amount of time, learn some of the words, but it's worth getting conversational.

If you're gonna be there six months to a year, it's worth getting fluent if you're gonna be anywhere longer than six months or a year. I know that you had a pretty steep learning curve. Like you really went at it with a vengeance. I was very intense. And the reason is, I didn't know that I was going to stay in China

for four, five, six, seven, however long. It's been seven years now since I moved there, nine years since I first went. I didn't think that this was going to happen. But when I first went, for me, it felt like language was the first difficult thing I was ever taking on on my own. And so it had enormous personal meaning for me.

And so figuring out how to do it, you know, I said earlier that I spoke French at the time. I didn't speak a word of French. I took two years of French, didn't learn anything. I'm not a language letter. Or that's what I was saying. told. And so I did an enormous amount of research into the fastest ways to go about language acquisition,

not language learning, as we talk about, but language acquisition. The idea being that you could just acquire it over time if you do the right things. And that was really empowering for me. So there's a couple things that you could do that will allow you to learn language faster than all of your friends and faster than what everyone says that is possible. One of your strategies that I thought was really good was you didn't do what a lot of people do. You didn't go to Shanghai and Beijing and go, I live in China. You're like I need to go to a, what was it second or third tier city? Second or third. So I was in Sujo at the time.

And Sujo has, it's become a suburb of Shanghai even after I realized that I left. The hardest part of being in China now, I'm like, oh, you're like, you go into China, you learn by immersion is that most people don't immerse themselves in China. Right, right. In Shanghai, most of the people, and I'm not knocking this, by the way, I've been an expert before, it's fun. I did it when I was studying abroad. It's a good time.

But most people only have foreign friends. And the Chinese friends they do have all speak perfect English. And so even if you. you're spending 30 minutes a day or three hours a day in your Chinese class, if at the end of the day you're going to hang out with your expat friends, I have never met anyone who has learned Chinese that way, ever. I met some people who get pretty good and can order beers and like and have like some stilted conversation. But, you know, my definition of fluency is if my friend, and by the way, I have to have a Chinese friend for this, even to be possible, but ideally a lot of them, I'm thinking of a friend Yidza, who ran a hostel on the fourth ring road or just outside of the third ring road. His name is leaf. Her name is Leif. Oh, okay. Xiao Yedza, a little leaf. By the way, Yadza is also weed for anyone trying to pick up in China. Don't.

Yeah. Not worth it. Yeah, yeah, don't. But regardless, she had a breakup. And so she called me crying and describing me like the emotional pain. Can you comfort somebody when they're breaking up with you in their lane? Could you at first, are they calling you? Second, can you comfort them?

And third, can you be empathetic? On the next day, if things kicked off in North Korea, could I have a conversation about nuclear deterrence? Yeah, that's tough. This is what I had in my head. I'm like, right, if I can get there, which is a bit lofty. That is lofty. But it was like, you know,

this is where I want to be because these are the things that matter. Like the politics matters, but also the personal relationships really matter. So the first thing that you want to do is avoid expat communities if you can. Yeah, don't go to the Irish pub with your British friends every day.

Do it every now and then, but like if you make a life of that, you just won't learn the language. So the overarching theme, and this is from a guy named Katsumoto who runs a language blog called AJAT, all Japanese all the time. He's a bit of a nut.

He writes like a nut. But the language principles he described is pretty much what everyone describes, he's just more intense about it. So his big overriding quote is that you don't learn a language, you get used to it. And the way I interpreted that and the way I used that was I thought about shifting my mental diet into Chinese. So if we are what we eat, we know intuitively that if we eat good food will become a fitter person. If we eat bad food, it kind of, we start to look that way a little bit, our brain composition, and this isn't obviously particularly scientific, but in terms of the

way that we think, we are what we eat. So my mental diet means the conversations I had is obvious. The podcast I listened to. Sorry, Jordan, you might lose a couple listeners because of this. I apologize. The movies I watch, the TV I watched, the friends I surrounded myself, the roommates I had, the very bad, awkward dates I went on, all should be in Chinese, top to bottom. A lot of people say, well, I don't understand the TV. Good. You want to feel like you need it. The amount of subconscious churn, especially at the beginning that's necessary to make your brain kick it into gear and be like, I need to figure this out. Otherwise, I'm not going to be able to live in this world that I'm inhabiting right now. This is how kids learn it. You know, this is how kids learn it. Their parents are talking,

the TV is on, people are, and they're just trying to decode the world around them. So if your entire world is in a code that you don't understand, your brain is going to do a lot of the work for you to decode that and allow you to understand that language far faster than what most people do, which is, you know, at 8.30 in the morning, you go to your language immersion class. You're there for five hours. Next to you as a Korean student. Behind you as an Irish student. To the left of you as a South African student, you're hearing them speak crap Chinese all day. At three o'clock, you get out of class and you go get beers with them. And you start speaking English again. The highest concentration of bad Chinese speakers in a Chinese city is in a Chinese language class. Yeah, good point. And yet

that's our first stop when we want to learn the language. You need a foundation. And so this is where class matters. I think of it as a filing system, a mental filing system. You have to understand the basic grammatical rules. You have to kind of understand the way a sentence works in order for you to start to label and sort the information that you'll be acquiring over the next couple years of language acquisition. So either take one of these classes for two months or do one-on-one classes. Take that same money, have fewer hours, but take some one-on-one classes. That's what I do. I take Skype lessons. People have heard this. I'm happy to refer anyone. My teachers are 24-7. They're in China. I'm the only one in the class. I think it rounds out to

about $17 bucks an hour, super flexible, obviously. And they go, what do you want to learn? And I go, here's what I'm going to be doing. I don't want to learn how to write, because I don't even write things by hand in English. If I can read, I can type in pinion and the character will pop up and I can read it so I can push that one.

Like I saved myself, you know, 50% of time learning that kind of thing. And you end up with all of these different techniques. I use SRS, which is, I think, called a spaced repetition system. So this is what you're skipping ahead, Jordan. Yeah. But that's a really good point about the Skype thing because you don't have to be in the room anymore.

No. And it's inexpensive. And you're also funding the people who don't have the opportunity to study abroad themselves or to go abroad themselves. So that to me is like a perfect example of, okay, these are people who are interested

in the outside world who don't get to travel there. They're looking for some money. And they're professional, by the way. Yeah, they're real teachers. They're really good teacher. It's a massive system. Like the amount of young people who go to college

for teaching foreigners Chinese is massive. So they're qualified. And it can become a really beautiful interaction in friendship. So number one is, build a filing cabinet. Filing cabinet is your basic organization system that you're going to be putting these Chinese words into, Chinese words and Chinese phrases. Second part is hours in the pool. And this is sort of what I said before. I'm writing this down as I go because I have not codified this as well as I'd like to, but hours in the pool. We study Chinese or we study anything for 30 minutes at a time,

we put our pencil down, we wipe our forehead, we feel good about ourselves. Again, you don't learn a language, you get used to it. So you have to think about how do I get more hours in the pool. The best way to do it. In fact, if I recommend one thing to any aspiring language learning, particularly Chinese, is to watch hours and hours and hours and hours of TV. Which is good permission slip. Usually you're not supposed to be watching TV. And what Katz talks about from all Japanese all the time is take whatever your hobby is and do it in that source language, whether it's Manjo, whether it's video games, whatever, TV is so good because it's the closest you can get to immersion.

Isn't it? It's not manga? I don't know, man. I'm exposing myself. Yeah, I don't know what it is. I think it is manga. I'm sorry. I actually, if you get it. Mangea. I thought that was like eating and Italian. Well, I'm clearly not as worldly as I'm letting out of you.

I've been stuck in Asia for a while. Although I should definitely know manga then. I like the idea of doing a hobby in that language. So hours in the pool is number two. What's the third? The third one. There's got to be a third. The third one is SRS.

Oh, the space. And this is where it gets a little bit structured. So an SRS system is how you can learn anything. Space repetition system. Everyone knows that it's important to do flashcards when you're learning a language. But what happens when you have more than 100? Yeah, you just, you see one every month. You're right, exactly. It's like, it's on this stack on your desk and you don't have a system for showing you the right information at the right time. So an SRS system is a system on your phone or

your computer where you input the cards that you basically build the cards the exact same way. And it does the thinking for you in terms of when you need it. I have this scritter for Chinese. There's also Anki, which will link to ANKI. Anki is open source. So you can like, if I was taking any test in the world from a drive, test to a cooking test to some technical test, I would use Anki and an SRS system to learn it. It's so much more. It shows you either the picture or the symbol or the word. You say it in your head or out loud.

If you know it, you give it a plus or whatever. If you don't know it, you give it a minus. And it shows you the ones that you've said you don't know more often than the ones you've said you do. Exactly. Which is just logical. But if you try to do that manually, it's a humongous freaking pain. Enormous.

So this does all the thinking for you. This does all the scheduling for you. So basically, you have to make a rule to yourself. that every day I'm doing 20 minutes of flashcards or 15 minutes of flashcards or 30 minutes of flashcards and you sit down and your SR system does the thinking for you in terms of which flashcards you need to see you just sit there and do it and I've been doing it almost every day I've had lapses but almost every day for seven years now and the goal is 10,000 flashcards by the way one of the major tenets of flashcard building sentences don't input individual words it's smart it's super

important and the reason is you know Americans we don't learn grammar we internalize it because we read enough and you see enough sentences you see enough examples where you kind of, it's called you gone. It's called language feel. That language feel you develop through sentences. So you're reading a book or you're watching TV and someone says a sentence that you like that you might want for later. Yeah, I store it in my head. You put it in your SRS. It comes up later. And for like, I now know what funny book I was reading or what show I was watching for the last seven years based on which sentences I put into my SRS system. I've got about 5,000 now. Yeah. I'm not stopping until I get to 10. There were points in my German learning, for example, where I would say an entire

sentence or entire paragraph that was just individual sentences that I'd memorized. And people were like, wow, you're so good at this. And I'm like, actually, I just memorized four sentences. But after a while, then you can obviously create your own. You just follow the structure that's in these other sentences. And it sounds like a native person would have put that sentence together. Exactly. But if you're just memorizing words, you're just trying to plug them in. And it's kind of like you're trying to fit the Lego on the Duplo and it's not working. Super stiff. And so all of this is really trying to, you know, from the filing cabinet, which is just your basic structure. to the hours in the pool, which is just getting a feeling for the way the language works,

to the SRS system, which is just prodding your brain, reminding your brain, and it's the most efficient way to feed your brain new information and then retain it. If you combine those three and you create a daily practice, and you create these habits that allow you to, they're faster and better than thinking you have to be in a classroom or you have to be at your desk 30 minutes a day in order for it to work. This has been awesome. We are way over time, so I want to make sure that we wrap it.

But if you go to our YouTube channel, I'm going to ask Zach what the weirdest thing he did in China, if we can even narrow it down to one or two of those things, and some resources for people who want to go to China, but maybe have no idea where to begin. Maybe you're in your 20s and you go, what am I want to do with my life? And my suggestion is go to China if you don't have any other ideas. And we're going to get into how you can actually make that happen. That's Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. Zach, thanks, thanks, man, for coming in.

Thanks so much for having me. This is super fun. Big thank you to Zach. The book title is Young China. how the restless generation will change their country and the world. Interesting show. A lot of, man, there was so much we couldn't even get to. Gay dating culture in China, which is a fascinating subchapter. I never thought I would be interested in.

And the kids are just under so much pressure. A friend of mine, his wife, teaches young Chinese kids English via Skype, just like I learned Chinese via Skype. And they don't want to miss a minute of lessons. So if they have to go to the bathroom, they pee in bottles. And my friend's wife is always just so amazed about this. And she finally asked, like, why don't you just let him go to the bathroom? And they say, no way, we paid for this.

He's got to take the whole lesson. I mean, the pressure is enormous. I would not want to be a Chinese millennial in this market, this economy, these little princes. Just absolutely crazy amount of pressure. But it's going to take the country far, but at what cost. Link to the book will be in the show notes. There's also worksheets for each episode. So you can review what you've learned here from Zach Dijkwald.

That's at Jordan Harbinger.com in the show notes. We also have transcripts for each episode, and those can be found in the show notes as well. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits. That's over at our six-minute networking course, which is free that's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Don't do it later. Dig the well before you get thirsty. You've got to start now. Procrastination leads to stagnation when it comes to your personal and your business relationships.

And the drills take a few minutes a day, hence the name. I wish I knew this stuff 20 years ago. It's not fluff. It's crucial. and you do it before you do everything else, not after you're done and quote unquote, ready to network now. You can find that all for free

at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us. You'll be in smart company. In fact, why not reach out to Zach and tell him you enjoyed this episode of the show? Show guests love hearing from you

and you never know what might shake out of that. Speaking of building relationships, you can always reach out and follow me on social. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. This show is created in association with podcast one. This episode was produced by Jen Harbinger, Jason DeFilippo, and Jace Sanderson. Show Notes and Worksheets by Robert Fogarty, music by Evan Viola, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Our advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own.

And yeah, I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. So do your research before implementing anything you hear on the show. And remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. That should be in every episode. So please share the show with those you love and even those you don't. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast.

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