Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Dan Wang
[00:00:00] S0: I remember this idea from The Hundred Year Marathon—the book about the very long-term planning of China to be resurgent and then dominant—that maybe it’s quite deliberate, that there is some line that operated below which no one notices the compounding that’s happening in China. And with no spikiness above the line to their progress—just smooth and steady—all of a sudden we’re going to wake up in 2050 and be like, “Oh my God, what happened? How did this happen?” And it’s been happening forever, for a hundred years. So what do you think of that—that it’s just been deliberately quiet and below the radar? And that’s a big reason Americans haven’t noticed. They don’t go to China, they don’t visit, they don’t see it, they don’t go around Shenzhen, they don’t go anywhere. So it’s just completely invisible to them, and they’re used to the status quo here. [00:00:00] S1: Well, it sounds like a problem with Americans. [00:00:00] S0: It sure does. [00:00:00] S1: Rather than with the Chinese. I mean, they are really happy to broadcast all of their achievements. Their amazing trains—they love to highlight them. They’re constantly inviting Americans to come check out these glimmering cities. China’s infrastructure gleams, and you only have to go over there to take a look at it. And there are plenty of people ringing the alarm, but it does feel a little bit like the boy who cried wolf. So I think this is not just the sense of crisis with China. There’s also the sense of crisis in California and New York, where even people here just shrug after such obscene cost overruns.
· Dan Wang, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: Rather than with the Chinese. I mean, they are really happy to broadcast all of their achievements. Their amazing trains—they love to highlight them. They’re constantly inviting Americans to come check out these glimmering cities. China’s infrastructure gleams, and you only have to go over there to take a look at it. And there are plenty of people ringing the alarm, but it does feel a little bit like the boy who cried wolf. So I think this is not just the sense of crisis with China. There’s also the sense of crisis in California and New York, where even people here just shrug after such obscene cost overruns. [00:00:00] S0: What are the highest similarities between the two peoples—between Americans and Chinese? Obviously you talked about some of the differences, but what’s most similar between the two countries?
· Dan Wang
[00:00:00] S1: A lot. What I really enjoy is that I start my book, in my very first paragraph, by saying that Chinese and Americans are more alike than any other people. And I think this is something that people who have spent any time in China always tell me—they’re always congratulating me and saying, “Yeah, that’s exactly right. Chinese and Americans are so alike.” So how are they alike? Well, they’re the two great founts of entrepreneurial dynamism in the world. It is Shenzhen and Silicon Valley that are inventing the future—and not so much Europe and Japan any longer. There’s a hustle, an energy, a hastiness, a sense of taking shortcuts. A lot of that manifests in some things that don’t work very well but just need a lot of hustle and dynamism that you see among these people. Both countries have a sense of the technological sublime. There are these grand projects—like the Golden Gate Bridge, Manhattan, or Apollo—that the Americans have, and the Chinese also share. Both countries are filled with elites and masses that really believe themselves to be important great powers in the world. And if other countries don’t get in line—whether that’s the Philippines or South Korea on that side of the Pacific, or the Canadians or the Danish with Greenland—then they also need to be muscled around a little bit. So I see far more similarities than differences between these two peoples.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Dan Wang
[00:00:00] S0: What would be something that you would have put in the book if the book was designed to be a bit more out there—speculative, unhinged? What was on the cutting room floor that you would talk about with your friends over beers more than you’d put in a New York Times bestselling book? [00:00:00] S1: Well, Patrick, is this book not unhinged enough for you? I thought there were plenty of people who believe that. [00:00:00] S0: I thought, what’s the Spinal Tap version?
· Dan Wang
[00:00:00] S1: I’ve gone off the deep end here. But if we had to turn it up to 11, then I think I would talk a little bit more about all of the ways that China believes in the future. So I think that’s another similarity between the U.S. and China—they’re often very future-oriented. They have a sense of optimism, much more so than the Europeans, who have a sense of optimism only about the past. Both countries see themselves as pursuing some sort of destiny, and they’re driving really hard toward it. Something that I’m quite interested in is the path of Chinese futurism. There are a lot of ways in which the Chinese are much more pro-technology than Americans are. China hasn’t experienced this broad tech clash that has come across big tech companies in the U.S. There is no sense that tech is partisan—because nothing in China is allowed to be partisan. There’s no sense of a tech right. And just if we take a look at technology by technology, whether that is something like e-commerce, the rate of e-commerce purchases in China is, I believe, last I checked, something like twice as high as in the U.S. They have much more of a sense that artificial intelligence could be a friend and something that they don't worry about taking away all of their energy. They also spend a lot more time on their phones, and this is not positive. This is one of the things that most bugs me about Chinese society today. Last, when I went to Shanghai at the end of 2024, you could just see people being on their phones all the time. You could be with a lot of friends at a restaurant, and people could be just on their phones the entire time. You could be in a business meeting, and people are on their phones. On the one hand, that speaks to some sort of social dysfunction among social interactions. On the other hand, that also speaks to the fact that they are not very concerned about what smartphones may be doing to their life and their brain. I would also want to try to write a little bit about how the Communist Party sees itself as modernizing the country, and how it feels about various technologies that include, let's say, space missions—going to the moon, then Mars, and moons of Saturn as well. And then how they view themselves to be much more of an industrial civilization relative to the Americans, whom they often denounce as, in their terms, a fictitious economy or a bubble economy.
· Dan Wang, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Not in a financial bubble sense, but in the sense of a bubble that pops very easily. I think there are various strands of Chinese science fiction that could also be really worth exploring too. [00:00:00] S0: What feels like the very bleeding-edge frontier? If I were to take a month and travel around China—and maybe you could pick the four cities I would go visit—to learn the most and really see the bleeding-edge frontier of everything you just described, what does that feel like today that people might not fully appreciate? [00:00:00] S1: Shanghai is my favorite city in China—maybe my favorite city in the world. [00:00:00] S0: Why?