The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - China’s Surveillance State — with Josh Chin and Lisa Lin

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

Josh Chin and Lisa Lin, the authors of “Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control and journalists at the Wall Street Journal, join Scott to discuss the following:  How China operates as a surveillance state The role Silicon Valley has played in the development of state surveillance around the world what to consider when it comes to US-China bilateral relations. Scott opens with his thoughts on Apple becoming the leading smartphone provider in the US as well as its plans to move further into the digital ad space.  Algebra of happiness: tell someone you admire them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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cards, savings accounts, mortgage rates, and more. NerdWallet, finance smarter. NerdWallet Compare Incorporated. NMLS 1617539. Episode 193. Jurassic Park premiered in 1993. The X-Files debuted in 1993. People born in 1993, Pete Davidson and Ariana Grande. True story. The X-Files is going to have a reboot. It's about David Duchovny yelling at aliens to get off his lawn.

Do you think I'm spooky? Go, go, go! Welcome to the 193rd episode of The Prof G-Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Josh Chen and Lisa Lin, the authors of Surveillance State, of the Prop G-Pod. In today's episode, we speak with Josh Chin and Lisa Lin, the authors of Surveillance State, Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control. Josh is Deputy Bureau Chief

at the Wall Street Journal's China Bureau, and Lisa covers Asia tech news for the journal. We discuss with Josh and Lisa how China operates as a surveillance state, the role Silicon Valley has played in the development of state surveillance around the world, and what to consider

when it comes to U.S.-China bilateral relations. Okay, what's happening? So most importantly, let's talk about me. I'm back from vacation. I really leaned into my privilege and spent the summer in Aspen and Nantucket because that's how I roll. Well belts, pink pants, rich L.A. people. That's right.

That's right. Where am I going with this? I don't know. Anyways, we are back with our regular scheduled programming, but we're also at the Code Conference in LA where I'm interviewing several people, including Snap CEO, Evan Spiegel. So the obvious first question, moisturizer.

That guy is a tall drink of fucking lemonade. That guy is so good looking. I'm going to get his beauty tips and I will share them with all of you. I'll also likely ask him what on earth differentiates Snap from TikTok, and isn't TikTok doing to Snap, Meta, Pinterest, and everyone else what they did to traditional media? I think that essentially Dreamy Evan is getting kicked in the nuts over and over by the CCP, or as I like to

call them, TikTok. All right, moving on. Let's get right into the business news of the week. A lot is happening in Cupertino. Apple has officially captured more than half the smartphone market share in the U.S. Why is this so incredible? Apple has defied the laws of marketing gravity. Specifically, Apple is the first luxury brand to also be the market leader. Usually, it's the low-cost player, whether it's a Walmart, whether it's Toyota that offers a great product at a value pricing that is the share leader. Try and think of a company or a product that is the high-priced product, is the luxury product, is the aspirational product, but is also the market share leader. The iPhone is the most profitable product in the history of mankind. No product has ever generated these kind of margins, maybe with dollars because of its brand and technology and the way it signals to the world that if you have sex with me,

your kids are more likely to survive than if you have sex with someone who carries an Android phone. So what is this equivalent of? What if you had a car company with a price point of Ferrari, but the production volumes of Toyota? That's what we have with the iPhone. We have the high price product. It gets about, I think about 50 points of gross margin, which is unparalleled in technology. I was on the board of Gateway Computer, which I realize is literally the weakest flex in the world. And our margins, our gross margins, were, get this, between 6% and 9%,

meaning if we sold a computer for $500, we got to keep somewhere between $30 and $50, whereas Apple got to keep 26% or 28% on their MacBooks, meaning if they sold a $1,000 computer, they got to keep $280. So we had to sell seven computers for every one they sold to make the same amount of gross margin to apply it towards R&D or factories or distribution or whatever the hell it was we did. Actually, Gateway was an assembler.

It wasn't vertical. We would just get components and bring them together and put them in a box with a cowhide pattern and try and run funny commercials and sell these things at a decent price. But what did you have? When I went on the board, no joke, Gateway Computer was, I believe, the second biggest seller of computers. We sold more computers than Apple. And we used to talk about that. But here's the thing.

Apple made a shit ton more money than us because they didn't need to sell a lot of computers because they were getting four and a half times the revenue or margin dollars that we were getting for every one computer we sold. The FT noted that this is the iPhone's greatest share since launch in 2007. This comes right as Apple is about to unveil the iPhone 14, which is expected to operate with the A16 chip and get revamped camera and better face ID sensors. Now, a better way to think about this is that more than 50% of people in the US who use a smartphone are now on iOS.

I think this is a big moment. I think at one point it was 10 or 20% share. I mean, this has just been, it's difficult to talk about the kind of impact. I think the probably most important or the second most important product, maybe the third most important product, I think that commercial jets are maybe the most important product since World War II.

Is that true? I just pulled that out of my ass. I think it's pretty impressive that we can skirt along the surface of the atmosphere at 0.8 the speed of sound in something that you feel very safe in, or you should feel very safe in, or if you don't, or if you're like me, you're up there and sweating and scared and ordering drinks, it's because of irrational fear. Those are not rational fears. The more dangerous part is on your way to the airport. Anyway, I think that's an amazing product. I think vaccines are probably the most important product of the last 60 years.

With the other product, and that is polarizing social media. It convinces people to stick their heads up their asses and not take vaccines. Anyways, another talk show. What do we got here? Let's look at some stats on Apple. As of its last earnings report, the firm generated nearly $23 billion in operating cash flow.

That's, I mean, think about that. That's got, it's $100 billion a year in cash flow? You don't, see, it's, you can't even wrap your head around what to do with that number. The latest net sales, $83 billion for the quarter, meaning it's doing about a third of a trillion dollars a year. And the iPhone accounted for about $41 billion of that, followed by services at $19.6 billion. I guess that's Apple TV+.

That must be the App Store, Apple One. Wearables, home and accessories were at $8 billion billion and the Mac at 7.5 billion and the iPad at 7.2 billion. It's amazing that people still buy iPads. I see them in hotels everywhere. I try and get room service or I try and turn on the music or whatever it is I do in my hotel room. And by the way, you don't want me as a hotel guest. You do not want me as a hotel guest. I'm the guy that checks in and then I look at that little map, that fire map they have, and I try and figure out if I'm not in a good room. And if I'm not in a good room, I call them

and I pretend I'm more important than I am. And I asked to be moved to a better room. I'm that guy. I'm literally Ken, which is a male version of Karen. I'm like Karen, if Karen was like just an awful person. Anyway, mean Karen, Marin, I'm Marin. Anyways, it's no surprise here. Apple's a juggernaut and it's continuing its quest to conquer all of our attention.

Guess what else Apple's interested in? Guess what else? Query you this. The digital ad business. The Financial Times reported that Apple plans to double its digital advertising workforce. That's interesting given that Apple's privacy changes are often cited as the reason several tech firms,

including Meta and Snap, have declining ad revenues. So they've tried to position it as a feature of our hardware is we protect and revere your privacy, so we're going to make it more difficult for other people to track you. But, oh, wait, maybe it's Machiavellian.

Maybe it's like, not only that, just as we castrate our competition, we're maybe it's Machiavellian. Maybe it's like, not only that, just as we castrate our competition, we're going to get into the same business. Anyways, little Game of Thrones here, corporate warfare. It's estimated that Apple's ad business could reach $30 billion within four years. It currently sits at around $5 billion. For comparison, Google's current ad business is $56 billion. Amazon's ad business, this blows me away. This blows me away. We should take pause and think about this. Amazon's ad business is roughly $31 billion.

If you were to break up Amazon, and I've said this, I think AWS would be the most valuable company in the world by 2025, but its ad business would probably be a Fortune 50 company. That just blows my mind. Think about this. Amazon as a media company is bigger than Twitter, Snap, Pinterest. I mean, basically, they're bigger than everyone in the media business except for Meta and Google. That's how big Amazon's media business is. But Apple, Amazon, and Google's ad business aren't exactly apples to apples. We'll say that. Apple's ad

revenue mainly comes from display ads in the App Store and Apple News. So the ad business here is going to be very challenging, I think, for Apple because basically the ad business, you're in the business of violating people's privacy. And Apple has made that an incredible feature. They've tried to move to the subscription model where they've said, okay, there's ad-supported TV or there's HBO where you pay for better content. That's what they've tried to be. They've tried to be the HBO of the digital ecosystem and said, you're going to pay for everything. You're going to pay for apps. You're going to pay more for your phone, but we're not going to pelt you with ads that tell you you have opioid-induced constipation. I just saw a fucking, literally like watch broadcast news and it's a lesson in how much it sucks to get older. I just saw a new one, a pharmaceutical that cures or helps with, there's an affliction for bulging eyes. And I don't mean to mock these people or make light of this,

but you watch this and you're like, really, that's what I have to look forward to? Oh my God, my legs are restless again. Anyways, I think this is gonna be a challenge for them to how to thread this needle. It feels like everybody's moving to the middle or trying to be everything to everybody. When Netflix offers ads,

when Apple gets into the business of advertising, I just can't figure out if they're so horny for growth and they need, they just have to go everywhere and start eating everything, even if it kind of diminishes their core proposition. I don't know.

We'll see. The clash of the titans I can't wait for, I cannot wait for, is when Tim Cook pulls that recycled, dolphin-free meshed cloth off a piece of steel wrapped around four wheels, an electric motor called the Apple car. I'm getting on that list.

I'm absolutely going to get on that. By the way, I sold my Tesla. I moved to London and I sold my Tesla just because I love the way, I sold my Tesla. I moved to London and I sold my Tesla just because I love the car, but I'm kind of like figuring out, do I need to spend $120,000 on a car that is run by a guy that calls me names on Twitter? I don't think so. I don't think so. By the way, it declined quite a bit in value. I bought it for 110 or 120 grand And I sold it for 80 from, I think it was Carvana. They show up and they take your car and they give you a check. It's pretty cool.

Trying to think like, what else? Do you want a dog? How about a couple of kids? Anyways, and I sold my Range Rover, which I really hated giving up. It got about three miles to the gallon, total midlife crisis car, but a cool car um i just love the design anyways little british suv carbon into the climate terrorist action for the hound uh where was i going with this anyways the the clash of the titans i can't wait for that's coming that's coming is the clash between apple and tesla i think apple within six to 12 months of unveiling that car and the waiting list, that's going to be the most valuable waiting list ever assembled. You're going to see a quarter of a trillion dollars, let's call it $100 to $250 billion

leak from the most overvalued firm in the world right now, Tesla, to a firm that is overvalued, but not crazily overvalued, and that is Apple. Clash of the titans. Clash of the titans. Apple versus Tesla. We'll be right back for our conversation with Josh Chin and Lisa Lin. The Capital Ideas Podcast now features a series hosted by Capital Group CEO, Mike Gitlin. Through the words and experiences of investment professionals, you'll discover what differentiates their investment approach, what learnings have shifted their career trajectories, and how do they find their next great idea? Invest 30 minutes in an episode today.

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Support for this show comes from Constant Contact. You know what's not easy? Marketing. And when you're starting your small business, while you're so focused on the day-to-day, the personnel, and the finances,

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and create, promote, and manage your events with ease, all in one place. Get all the automation, integration, and reporting tools that get your marketing running seamlessly, all backed by Constant Contact's expert live customer support. Ready, set, grow. Go to constantcontact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to constantcontact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca. Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Josh Chen and Lisa Lin, the authors of Surveillance State, inside China's quest to launch a new era of social control. Okay, let's bust right into it. Josh, you know, for the past few decades, China's Communist Party has had a sort of

social contract in place where they deliver double-digit economic growth and Chinese people sort of acquiesce to their rule and sort of tacitly agree not to make trouble, right? And for a long time,

that worked, right? Everyone sort of had the prospect of getting rich. And as long as that was around, everyone, for the most part, fell in line. Well, now China's economic growth is slowing. In fact, last quarter, it was down almost to zero. It could be below zero this next quarter because of zero COVID controls. But even without COVID, its economy was sort of inevitably going to slow down. And in preparation for that, the Communist Party had to figure out what it was going to do instead. And the answer is the surveillance state, right?

So they're now using a combination of mass data collection, cutting-edge AI, and they're melding that with their system of government to create a sort of new, more nimble form of authoritarianism that is both very good at ferreting out dissent, but it is also very good at smoothing out the lives of those Chinese people who are well-behaved and who sort of buy into the system. Lisa, is it a change in mentality or is it just that the tools are better and they can be more effective at it or more insidious at it? Yeah, so you're right there. The Chinese government has all along wanted to try and

use data to keep citizens in line. What's really changed in the last 10 years or so is the arrival of the current Chinese president, Xi Jinping, who has a lot of belief in the idea that you could mine data or collect enough data and be able to govern with the insight you get from that data. And of course, technological breakthroughs, as you mentioned, also played a role. Somewhere in just before 2010, we saw a big technological advancement in deep learning. It's a field of AI

that basically powers a ton of the AI surveillance that goes on in China. Just before 2010, researchers essentially found out that you could use high-powered chips like GPUs basically to accelerate deep learning and just help train the algorithm better. And that's actually really commercialized a lot of the AI applications that you see in China right now, such as facial recognition use in public order or image recognition used by traffic police to pinpoint a license plate of a hit-and-run car. And how does... My sense is in the movies, we see someone who's a dissident,

they're saying things and they're uncovered, and we have this image of police showing up and taking them off to jail. But my sense is it's more nuanced and insidious than that. How does this surveillance state actually play out? Liza, I'll come back to you and then ask for Josh's comments. The way I would characterize the Chinese surveillance state right now is it really runs the entire spectrum. You're seeing the worst potential uses of state surveillance in the northwestern part of China, in the Xinjiang

region, which is home to millions of ethnic minorities, predominantly the Uyghur. And on the other side, you're also seeing Chinese police using the same sort of tools that you're seeing in Xinjiang to, for example, ferret out potential criminals. Or, for example, if there was a blacklist that the public security bureau of a local region had, they could feed it into this AI system, the AI system of both surveillance cameras and a backend system that helped to crunch that data. They could feed that list of faces into the system and you could use that system to find anyone on that list. And typically, China has got so advanced on that front that it only takes a couple of seconds sometimes to hunt down someone in a small vicinity.

That said, though, I think for outside of Xinjiang, for the most part, China is still all seeing in a very retrospective way. And what I mean is that if you had done something wrong in China and the Chinese police have a photo of you or a profile shot, they could run it through the system and find where you've been, where you've shot, who you hang out with. But for most parts of China, outside of Xinjiang, it's not predictive policing the way you describe it. Not yet, at least. Josh?

Yeah, so I think one of the things we discovered about the way that the surveillance state functions that was surprising, at least to us, is that it actually doesn't always function, right? Is that it doesn't always work as well as it is portrayed as working. And that's because, you know, the surveillance state is as much as a propaganda project as a technological project, right? And the idea is that it needs to be just credible enough that people internalize it. So they do have facial recognition. They do have systems. They can track down dissidents, and they do, and they make a big deal out of that. But in a lot of instances, the technology does kind of fall short or the data isn't quite there, but it doesn't matter because they've done enough to persuade people, most people in China, that the government can. So there's a chilling fact. Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. And talk about the surveillance state outside of the state. And that is, I've always, just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean I'm wrong. But when I've said anti-Putin things, I find I get a lot of comments, a lot of replies in my Twitter feed saying, it's always the same thing. Scott, love your work, but you have it wrong here. Or when I have said that I think there is corporate espionage, state-sponsored corporate espionage, espionage out of China, and I've said, we do it,

why wouldn't they do it? I get a lot of replies from accounts with pictures of dogs who are fake accounts. And I would imagine it's the CCP. That's what I would be doing. I think it's a lot less expensive than kinetic power. Describe if you can, or try and provide some color on the surveillance state of the CCP outside of China., it's a very difficult thing to know. I mean, that's an area that we're actually just sort of starting to get into. So it's hard to say exactly

how that operates. But we do know that they, in the last few years in particular, they have been paying a lot of attention to Twitter. You know, China's leader, Xi Jinping, has been telling people in state media in the US

that they need to tell China's story well. And a big part of that is happening on Twitter and on social media. And they have been tracking people who comment on China. And there's evidence that they are doing it in an automated way and that they then have their own armies of commenters who then sort of flood the zone. They do what's called hashtag flooding. So they figure out which hashtags are connected to which sort of critical stories about China, and then they just overwhelm it with comments. So basically, you just blow the hashtag up, it's essentially useless. So that's a new frontier. I think they're just sort of starting to explore that, but it's definitely an area they're interested in.

And Lisa, what role does Silicon Valley or American tech firms play unwittingly or wittingly in this apparatus? So, you know, years of research, we found that U.S. technology actually was there right from the beginning. And I would probably point your audience to a pretty groundbreaking report that a surveillance researcher, Greg Walton, did in 2001. He basically profiled and chronicled the companies that were at one of China's very first public security exhibitions. And the customers there were local police. And the companies there were all Western names. Some people might not recognize because they've gone out of business, but most of them still exist. People like Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Nortel Networks from Canada, Siemens from Germany, all these companies were there and willing to sell to Chinese police. Ultimately, Sun Microsystems did sell its equipment to Chinese police.

It helped China create its first national fingerprint database. So fast forward two decades on, we're seeing the same sort of involvement and possibly at an even deeper level, just because the surveillance state's demand has gotten so much bigger. When you look at commercial partnerships, when you look at financial investments into Chinese surveillance companies, when you look at supply chain relationships, you always find US tech companies involved. So Josh and I, when we were researching this book,

we poured through a ton of government contracts, government contracts calling for the building of Xinjiang-style or Hangzhou-style type surveillance states. And in these contracts, you would always see a huge demand for hard drives. And typically these hard drives

came from Seagate and Western Digital. And the same thing for processing power. You know, a lot of these AI applications relied on chips from NVIDIA, chips from Intel. And I'll probably just close with the financial connections. You can look at a company like SenseTime, which is China's largest AI surveillance company. It's the most valuable one and one of the pioneers in the industry.

All its early investors, pre-IPO investors included Fidelity Capital, Silverlake Capital, Qualcomm. We'll be right back. I just don't get it. Just wish someone could do the research on it. Can we figure this out? Hey, y'all. I'm John Blenhill, and I'm hosting a new podcast at Vox called Explain It To Me. Here's how it works. You call our hotline with questions you can't quite answer on your own. We'll investigate and call you back to tell you what we found. We'll bring you the answers you need every Wednesday starting September 18th.

So follow Explain It To Me, presented by Klaviyo. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be. The average U.S. company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS.

Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. So, Josh, I'm at this conference called Code today in LA, and they're interviewing Tim Cook. And when I think about privacy or surveillance, I think that the ultimate tool would be either a social media platform or a handheld device. And the most valuable company in the world is domained in the U.S., but it has more employees in China than in the U.S. It just seems it's impossible not to really think about this or get to any sort of depth of this conversation without thinking about Apple. Can either of you provide any texture or observations around the relationship between Apple and the Chinese government and obviously the sensitivities there around economic value and shareholder value? Because over here, Apple has positioned itself as the privacy product.

That is a key component of their marketing positioning is we're the ones that will not turn over an iPhone to the FBI, even when we have the iPhone of a terrorist who's just killed 27 people. They have kind of doubled down on privacy. And yet China, you know, as goes China, as goes kind of the iPhone. Any thoughts on Apple and China? I'll start with you, Josh. Right. I mean, I can comment on the sort of political side of it. And then, you know, Lisa has been following it on the business side a lot. But Apple is a really fascinating company in China. I mean, they are one of the most popular phone makers and device makers in China. And they also produce, they source the production of a lot of their devices in China. They're invested in the country in a way that very few other American tech companies are. You know, they do have, they're required by Chinese law to store Chinese customer data inside China. And they do that on servers that are controlled by a state-run company.

And so, you know, Apple says that they, you know, that they have, that that data is encrypted. They're not handing it over willy-nilly to the government, but it's still nevertheless stored on servers that they don't ultimately control. And so if you are an Apple user, a Chinese Apple user, your level of privacy protection is much, much lower than an Apple user anywhere else in the world. That said, you know, Apple's products are still popular amongst dissidents because they

are still, an iPhone is difficult to crack. It still has some of the best, probably the best security in a consumer device. And so in Xinjiang, you know, the police there have these handheld scanning devices and they'll sort of wave people down on the sidewalk and just randomly plug smartphones into these scanning devices. And a lot of those devices actually just don't work with Apple. So if you're a Uyghur and you have the money and you want to protect your data, you'll still go for an iPhone. Lisa? Sure, I'll talk about it from the supply chain perspective. Apple walks a very fine line in China between not wanting to anger the Chinese government

and trying to continue to do business with China. And the reason why I say this is because it's got very strong supply chain links to China. China is by far the best place in the world to produce smartphones. And you can tell because Apple produces most of its smartphones through Foxconn in places like Zhengzhou in China. And any sort of gadget or component, any tiny obscure gadget that you're looking for for your phone, you can definitely find in China. And that's the reason why it's been very difficult for Apple to actually move its supply chain relationship away from the country,

despite all that pressure from the U.S. government and from advocates to try and diversify its supply chain. And, you know, the second thing I probably would point out is Apple has a huge consumer base in China, even though, and this has continued, even though Chinese smartphone brands have fast become some of the best-selling brands in the planet. Brands like Oppo, Vivo, Huawei at a certain point in time as well. And Apple was able to do this because it's got the cachet. And people are still willing to pay for Apple products. If you still remember, Apple introduced a gold iPhone in China years ago. I mean, that was predominantly for the Chinese market.

It knew its position. So I want to put forward a thesis and have one or both of you respond to it. China has a vested interest in America declining in geopolitical power. They're a competitor, if not an adversary. They have now the ultimate propaganda tool in a company, the most ascendant tech company, in my view, in history. And if I were the CCP, I would find a way to elegantly put my thumb on the scale vis-a-vis algorithms to dial up slowly but surely content that was anti-American from Americans and create a generation. I mean, as far as I can tell, China's superpower is their long-term thinking. They

played a long game. So why not slowly but surely have an emerging generation of youth feel worse and worse about capitalism in America? I think TikTok is an existential threat to the well-being of the United States. Josh, I'll start with you. Do you want to respond to that? You know, it's interesting looking back to the debate about TikTok during the Trump administration, right, when Trump wanted to ban it. And, you know, I think a lot of the arguments against banning it was that it's just dance videos, right? What does it matter?

And I think you're right in that we've all sort of come to appreciate just how influential and powerful this platform is. TikTok itself, of course, says that it's not, you know, that it sort of operates separately from ByteDance. It doesn't, you know, it's not taking orders from the Communist Party. Ultimately, it's impossible to know how that relationship is going to work. But ByteDance, the TikTok parent, it's impossible to know how that relationship is going to work but ByteDance to the TikTok parent is it's a Chinese company all Chinese companies have communist party cells that wield increasing power and I do think that that's something you do you have to take into account. Lisa? We put it this way all Chinese companies have to play by China's rules. And China has very vaguely worded national security, internet, and content laws.

That means, and I'm talking about data at this point, that also means that when the Chinese government, for national security reasons, asks ByteDance or TikTok to turn over user data, TikTok cannot say no. Realistically, TikTok cannot say no. There are no checks and balances in the legal system. And on the content front, I would agree with you as well, because in the past, we've definitely seen TikTok employees tweak or downplay content that hasn't been favorable to the Chinese government. And just given that TikTok has a ton of engineers and a ton of employees still based in Beijing and Shanghai, there is a very strong risk

that the Chinese government could go to a Chinese employee, a Chinese national, and ask this person to tweak the algorithm to downplay or to promote certain sorts of content, it would be very difficult for this person to refuse. Yeah, and I've always thought the person committing espionage doesn't think they're doing anything. It's okay, you're a Chinese now. I mean, I think they'd be stupid not to do this. We promote our interests overseas using whatever media vehicles we have influence over. It strikes me that they have stronger influence than we do because of lack of what everyone called privacy laws. What can the U.S. do?

And I'll put forward another thought. I think it's difficult for us to wave our finger at the Chinese when we have insurrections, when we have this income inequality. This strikes me, we've lost a lot of moral authority other than forcing a spin of TikTok to wave our finger at the surveillance state of China when we have people storming our capital. So let me start there.

What can a citizen, if a citizen says, okay, I'm concerned about just generally the wellbeing of people in other countries. I'm concerned about just generally the well-being of people in other countries. I'm concerned about our geopolitical position. What should we be advocating for as citizens and voters here for the America to do in terms of action? Right. I mean, I think if you're an American and you're concerned about how this is all playing out. You know, the biggest thing that democracies need to do is figure out how democracy interacts with these technologies, right? I mean, we just, democracies, they're schizophrenic on this front, right? So if you, so China has a very clear position, which is that

governments should be able to use these technologies in whatever way they want, for whatever purpose they want, because it's, that's just the right of governments, right? And Russia aligns with them on that, right? And so if you're, you know, any other country around the world, especially if you're a developing country and you're kind of trying to choose between, you know, China and Russia on the one hand and Western democracies on the other, well, China has a very clear vision about the future and democracies don't. And this is one thing that, you know, I think everyone needs to think about more, right? I mean, in Europe, they have a bit of a vision, right? They regulate data in a very strong way. They now have a draft rule that's in the works that would ban all real-time biometric surveillance, period, in the EU.

And so they've taken a position. The U.S. is much more schizophrenic, right? We have NYPD has a gigantic smart policing platform. It's basically a legacy of 9-11 that is connected to thousands of advanced AI sensors, and they use predictive policing and facial recognition. In California, on the other hand, you have a pretty robust debate. San Francisco implemented in 2019 some really strong restrictions around the police use of this kind of technology, although they're now sort of

rolling it back as the mayor of London Breed there is trying to crack down on crime. The LA Police Commission recently passed some new rules around how police use this technology, but privacy advocates there, some people say that actually it's just a fig leaf. They're actually enabling, they're making it really easy for police to get permission to use these technologies and they're calling for bans. So I think one of the main things people in democracies need to do is figure out what is the approach to these technologies that conforms with democratic values? And I don't think that's an easy question to answer. To add on to that, I think what's really needed is, you know, just as a citizen to work to strengthen democratic institutions like a vibrant civic society or a healthy journalism scene.

Fundamentally, just be a democracy. Show to the Chinese citizens the benefits of a democracy. Every time America or some country in the West does something to shoot itself in the foot, the Chinese propaganda department plays this up. And it's all over Chinese social media. Any fumble by a U.S. politician will be plastered all over state media and all over social media platforms in China as well. Being a functional democracy helps Chinese people realize that what they have doesn't compare to what's out there.

Josh Chin is deputy bureau chief in China for The Wall Street Journal, and Lisa Lin is a China correspondent for The Wall Street Journal based in Singapore. Their new book, Surveillance State, Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control, is quick exercise. And I'm not just saying do as I say, not as I do. I am trying to do this almost every day. I'm trading a program trying to do it every other day. We'd had Dr. Emily Onhald on the pod,

and she had this wonderful idea of an emotional push-up, things you can do, kind of hacks to keep an emotional shape. I'm a big fan of fitness. It's my antidepressant working out, and I like this idea of emotional push-ups. And here's my idea for emotional push-up. I'm going to do it, and I hope you're going to do it. Text somebody today and tell them you admire them. Tell them why you admire them, or maybe you don't even do. I admire you, or I admire your strength around this type of issue. I admire your professionalism. I admire what a good friend you are. I admire how you're always able to handle situations with grace. I think it makes that person feel so good,

and you can literally feel that goodwill, and it makes you feel more confident, and it makes you feel like your time here amongst the many things you're accomplishing, that you're in a position to demonstrate concern and care and generosity for other people. Trust me on this one. Trust me on this one. Your emotional push-up for today, text somebody and tell them that you admire them. Our producers are Caroline Chagrin, Claire Miller, and Drew Burrows. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe.

Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you next week. by the way did you see that video of mark zuckerberg wrestling the guy that's serious like steven seagal and putin fake judo vibes and i gotta be honest turn me on a little bit hey it's scott galloway and on our podcast pivot we are bringing you a special series about the basics of artificial intelligence. We're answering all your questions. What should you into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, I'm Esther Perel, psychotherapist and host of the podcast, Where Should We Begin?, which delves into the multiple layers of relationships, mostly romantic. But in this special series, I focus on our relationships with our colleagues, business partners, and managers. Listen in as I talk to co-workers facing their own challenges with one another and get the real work done. Tune into Housework, a special series from Where Should We Begin, sponsored by Klaviyo.