Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· 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?
· Dan Wang
[00:00:00] S1: It feels a lot like New York. Both have been port cities with an industrial past that has significantly moved away from them. Shanghai has a ton of Art Deco buildings because the time of its great boom in the 1920s and 1930s was also a time when Art Deco really boomed. There's a river that runs through both cities, and there's a sense of hustle and ambition that one can see. It is really comfortable. It's a little bit like New York if the French managed significant parts of it and put in a lot of beautiful plane trees as well as cafés. I think it's perhaps not the bleeding edge of technology as such, but I think Shanghai represents a bleeding edge of some element of consumption. You can just order food really easily in Shanghai. Most of the Uber-like Didi taxis that you would get into—almost all of them—are electric. There are parts of the city that are superbly well managed in terms of traffic flows. You can always tell how much time a red light is going to be on, and you can see this in the apps. There are all sorts of ways in which the city is very well managed. It has a subway system that doesn't screech with that metallic noise like in New York City. As a place for consumption, Shanghai is really wonderful. I would then hop on the high-speed rail from Shanghai to go to the city of Hefei in the province of Anhui, which is pretty close by. Hefei is probably, let's say, two hours away by train from Shanghai. Historically, Hefei has been significantly poorer—it is much more mountainous. But now Hefei is the center of China's electric vehicle industry, and several big EV makers are headquartered there or have operations there. As a city, it has been growing pretty consistently. There are a lot of Chinese first-tier cities that have not been growing quite as fast anymore, but there are plenty of these second-tier cities that are growing really well. And then I think it is always worthwhile going to Shenzhen, which is in the south, pretty close to Hong Kong. I find Shenzhen probably the most boring city in China. It's a lot of big office parks; a lot of it is meant for driving. The city layout has several big hubs connected by highways that are pretty distant from each other. Not that much interesting culture going on. People are there to hustle and to work.
· Dan Wang, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
But it is the headquarters of companies like Huawei, Tencent, and DJI—many of China's most innovative companies. You can find a lot of really interesting electronics there. And you asked for four cities, so I guess the fourth one that I'll offer is Chongqing, which is also in the southwest. Chongqing, I've learned, is really big among TikTok influencers. You can see a lot of these very futuristic structures carved essentially into cliffs. There are shimmering lights and this really well-known subway station that goes through the bottom of an apartment building on one side and then out the other. That creates really wonderful imagery. It's in the southwest, which is where my family is from. I like Southwesterners—they have, I think, the best sense of humor in China. People there tend to just sit over tea and chat. They have great food; it's often very spicy, and it is also really dramatic. So what else could you want—great food, great people? [00:00:00] S0: Of all these places or in a different city, if you were to send an envoy of U.S. technology entrepreneurs somewhere—where, when they emerged from this trip, they would be the most inspired to come back and do things differently than they were planning to—where would you send them?