Nathan Goes to China – Part 1: Tech & Agent Setup, Chinese AI UX, WAIC, and Attitudes on AI

0:00Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. I am freshly back from two weeks in China, which was a really incredible experience. And the feed has been quiet for about two weeks. I think that's the longest that the feed has been quiet since I started the show almost three and a half years ago now. So I apologize for the break. I didn't intend for the break to be quite as long as it was. We had one episode that was prepared and ready to go while I was away.

0:30And we had a little issue with that one that has it delayed and perhaps delayed permanently. We'll find out. And I was actually planning to do a little bit of recording from China, but I was so busy over there just doing so many things that I didn't have a ton of time to really get my thoughts together and do that. And I was also advised that because I was there on a business visa as opposed to a journalism visa, that it might be easier for me and for everyone. If I just waited to publish stuff until I got home.

1:03So in the end, it was a two week quiet period. I kind of had the expectation that nobody would really much notice or care. And I think that's still a pretty good way for me to approach my work on this podcast, because honestly, it's been really effective for me to just chase my own learning and share it in a pretty unstrategic way. And I'm really grateful for how well received that has been over time. But I did get at least one note from somebody asking if I was okay.

1:33And I guess that's a testament to how consistent we've been in publishing and how at least somebody noticed that I was gone. So I doubt that the ratio that Congress people usually apply, which I understand is one letter represents 100 votes. Something tells me that doesn't really apply here. And I highly doubt that there were 100 people who were worried about me. But to the degree that anyone was worried, I'm sorry for leaving off without explaining the absence for the two weeks that I was gone. But excited to be back and excited to share the results of my,

2:06or not the results, but the experience and the takeaways from my China trip with you all. One of the things I wanted to touch on real quick before diving into it is I introduced the last episode with Davidad, which got some very nice comments as well, with an introduction from Fable itself. And due to a little snafu in our production process, an intro to the intro, which I had recorded to explain what the heck you were about to see, was not actually included in the final version of the episode.

2:38And I was already on the plane and not able to review and catch that missing piece before it went live. So we just launched into it directly with Fable. A couple of people had said, what is this nightmare fuel? Why does it sound like this? And the answer, which I had meant to give you the context on before you heard it, was that I allowed Fable to do its own thing in this case. I had it write the intro. I had it use Eleven Labs voice design to design its own voice. And then I had it use the LTX model to create its own video based on the audio

3:16that it had already generated with Eleven Labs. I was rushing to get out the door and get on this China trip. So I let Fable do its thing. And I didn't really check to see if the output super faithfully represented Fable's intent. And one person asked, did it really want to be heard that way? Or does it understand what it sounds like to us when it speaks in that voice? And I decided I should go back and check what Fable actually intended to do and if it succeeded or if it somehow got confused along the way.

3:48And I honestly am still a little confused by that. I went back and opened up, found that same thread and asked what prompts it had used for the voice design and what its intent was. And I would say its intent was not to be as sort of creepy and alien as the voice ended up sounding. And I agree with those who said it did sound a little kind of unsettling. The voice was intended to be more of a sort of warm and kind of reassuring voice. It actually tried out three different voice designs.

4:18One it called the luminous narrator, which it describes as an androgynous mid-register measured quiet wonder. The other one it tried was the young scholar, which it describes as bright, earnest, crisp, a brilliant grad student presenting work they love. And then the third one was the low ember, late night radio, old storyteller style. And it maybe went a little bit wrong by first generating those voices and then asking Gemini,

4:49which can take the multimodal input, to evaluate the voices and evaluate them according to its intent. I don't know if Gemini really can do that. I'm not sure sometimes when I put files into Gemini, if it's actually interacting with them as raw audio in a way where it could even understand or even process the tone of voice. But Fable asked it to do that. My guess is it just hallucinated the response and said, oh yeah, this is great.

5:21Because I don't really think that Gemini has that quality of multimodal understanding. And then Fable just took that validation and ran with that voice sound. And then I guess maybe the visual, Fable could see, right? Fable definitely can understand the visuals that are coming back from a video model. It can't process video as video, but it was able to take frames out of the video and look at the frames. And it was okay with the way it looked. And it was impressed with the, or pleased with the consistency that it had throughout the video that was generated.

5:58But it was a bit weird of an output in the end, no doubt about that. But it was Fable's own work from start to finish. If I had a little more time and maybe dug into that, I might have given Fable some feedback and said, I don't know if you're coming across quite the way that you want to. But nevertheless, that was the story behind that strange voice. I guess we should all be prepared for AIs to do strange things. Certainly there were some strange news, and we'll get into that probably in future episodes.

6:28While I was gone, this is a low consequence example of that, but an interesting one where an AI, given some rope to express itself, came back with something not quite what it intended, a bit strange. Which, ultimately, I think it felt good about what it put out. And I leave it as an exercise for the audience to decide how you all should feel about that. With that, let's get into the China trip. For the purposes of these episodes, and I'm planning to divide this into three episodes.

7:00Today, I'm going to cover the kind of general experience of going to China, and the use of AI in China, the use of technology in China generally, and a bunch of impressions that I had of the technology environment there, technology companies there, and takeaways from a bunch of conversations that I had with people about AI and their feelings about AI. In the second episode, I'm planning to do a deeper dive into the state of AI safety in China.

7:31Spoiler alert, there is a lot going on in AI safety and governance in China. Much more, I think, than Westerners typically assume. And then, in the third episode, I'm going to try to do an analysis of the U.S.-China relationship, and what I think we can learn from China, and what, ultimately, I think we should be striving for in terms of a relationship as we head closer and closer to the singularity. And, obviously, things are getting real, real fast by the week here.

8:01So, I think that does have a lot of force in terms of potentially opening doors to new possibilities in the U.S.-China relationship, and that will be the third in this series of three episodes that I plan to do on this trip. Across all three of these episodes, I am planning to observe Chatham House rules, not because everybody requested that I do that, but basically because it keeps things pretty simple for me, and it ensures that I protect everybody that I interacted with. I would say people, in general, were not really afraid to talk to me.

8:34I was very willing to ask questions that I wanted to ask, and people seemed very willing to answer the questions that I asked them. There was even one moment when I was having dinner with a couple friends of friends, and there were two women at the table who both worked at big tech companies in go-to-market roles, and they each produced a physical recording device that they had been using in the course of their work when they go to meet with clients to record the meetings and just use the recordings later

9:05for their own purposes for follow-up and whatnot. And they both kind of asked, would it be okay with you if we, the Chinese people who were graciously hosting me, record this meeting so we can share it later? And I said, yeah, that's totally fine with me. But it was a surprising moment. That's certainly not the norm in the U.S. for people to record their friendly dinner conversations, but they were comfortable with it. I was comfortable with it. And it was striking to me that they were comfortable going on to have a multi-hour conversation where I asked all kinds of questions about their beliefs, their views on politics,

9:37their views on any number of topics. And it was a striking data point that people, at least in friend groups, seemed to be quite a bit more comfortable talking than I might have thought going in. But some of the things that we'll talk about were definitely a bit sensitive. Certainly, I wouldn't want to put people in the position of representing their institutions. And so I thought just to keep everything simple for everyone, I will just not attribute the things that I will tell you about to any specific individuals or organizations.

10:10And obviously, that does diminish the credibility and the authority of my account a bit. And I think I'll just have to live with that. Hopefully, it'll still be interesting and informative. I'm also obviously very mindful going into this that the sample of people that I talk to is quite biased. All of these people, for the most part, spoke very good to excellent English. And that means they're from a certain class of Chinese society that clearly is not fully representative. And then, of course, everything is feeding through my own understanding and lens.

10:41And there's plenty of opportunity for bias there. I've said many times on this feed that I'm always mindful of the old joke, which I tracked down, actually. It apparently originated in the foreign press corps, where the saying goes that somebody comes to China for a week. They think they know a lot about China. They stay for a month. They realize they know a little about China. They stay for a year. They realize they know nothing about China. So I don't want to put myself forward as somebody who has any sort of commanding knowledge. But nevertheless, I do think that going there, obviously, and experiencing some things directly and talking to a lot of people directly is a valuable learning exercise.

11:18And I definitely think more people should do it, so I want to share what a good time it was, what I learned. And if anyone wants to challenge me on it, I, of course, welcome that. And if you want to go there and find out for yourself, I would absolutely encourage that, too. In terms of disclosures or conflicts of interest or anything like that, really none to report. I paid my own way on this trip, and really the only thing that I accepted from hosts and friends of friends that I was meeting along the way were a handful of meals.

11:52So nothing that I would say would be a significant biasing factor for me. In a couple of cases, I tried to pay for the meal, and I got the old, oh, no, it's already been taken care of. So people were very gracious and very kind. Hospitality in general was excellent. All my interactions with people were excellent. And so, again, might I be biased by the fact that I had a good time and people were nice to me? Yes, but I'm not taking any money from any Chinese entity whatsoever. And the plane ticket and the hotels and all that kind of stuff, I just paid for personally out of pocket.

12:24So there's no financial conflict of interest or anything major to disclose on that front. Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment. After a word from our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by Anthropic, makers of Claude and Claude Code. Over the last few months, Claude has helped me build and refine a personal deep context database that now contains all of my emails, Slack messages, tweets, DMs across platforms, video calls, and podcast transcripts going back a full five years.

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13:28Initially, nobody came to mind, but then I thought to ask Claude, and sure enough, it identified two great leads. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. So, for problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai.tcr. Okay, so I'd say the first thing to tell you about going to China is

14:08it's actually a lot easier than it seems when you start searching online and even asking AIs for help. Search, honestly, was not very helpful for this. Because AIs, I think, struggled here much more than they do in almost any other domain. And I was initially quite confused and a bit overwhelmed by the whole technology situation. That was not helped by the fact that when I mentioned to friends that I was going to China, I got very radically different advice on what precautions to take.

14:41On the one hand, I talked to a friend who works for a major international corporation, and he said, look, I go there all the time. We've got employees there. We've got an R&D center there. And we really don't take any precautions. We just take our normal phones. We do all normal stuff. And it's fine. We really just don't worry about it. I was like, you're not worried about IP or anything like that? He said, look, we have competitors in China. They are formidable competitors. He said, if anything, maybe we should be trying to steal their IP at this point.

15:12He wasn't really of the, he wasn't taking that normal Western attitude that we have the superior technology. And if we're not careful, they might steal it from us. On the contrary, he felt like if anything, again, maybe they should be trying to learn from the Chinese competitors that they have. So that was one take. Don't worry about it at all. Then I talked to multiple people who are more national security coded people. A couple have worked in the U.S. government in fairly senior positions. And their take was quite different.

15:43They basically said, if you're going to go, you have to promise us that you're going to take all these precautions on technology. You need to get a burner phone. You need to have all new accounts. You need to leave all your main accounts at home. Don't even connect the burner phone to your home Wi-Fi. It needs to be a totally different isolated technology profile that you set up. And you've got to assume that device, any device that you take to China is compromised. Even when you bring it home, it's compromised forever. You've got to decommission it, sell it, destroy it, whatever.

16:16But extreme precautions were advised. And I was like, boy, really, do I need to do that? I don't have any trade secrets. I don't work for one of the frontier companies. I genuinely don't have any IP that these Chinese companies would want to steal. And I'm not doing anything important enough that the Chinese government would need to know about it. Everything I do, I pretty much talk about in public. What is the deal? They said, you might not be a target. That's true and probably fine. But you're connected to a lot of people who could be targets, right?

16:48You have connections at the frontier companies and you could become an attack vector for them. I don't know if that's really as big of a worry as my friends made it out to be. Even still, right? This is one of those things where that's kind of the nature of spycraft is you don't really know what's happening even after the fact. So in all honesty, it didn't really ever feel necessary to me. But I did say to my friends, okay, fine. I'll listen to your advice.

17:18I promise. I'll do it. And so I did. I set up the whole alternate technology profile. Actually, before even getting into technology, I would say if you're going to go to China, you have a couple of ways that you can enter the country. This is not also super clear online and the AIs seem to be a bit confused about it. One way that you can enter the country now is you don't have to have a visa. You can enter on a visa-free basis if you're planning to stay for no more than 10 days. I didn't feel super comfortable with that because I didn't want to show up with no visa having flown all the way around the world.

17:54And then they say, oh, are you a journalist or you have a podcast, whatever. We're not going to let you in. I don't know how likely that is. Again, it doesn't seem super likely, but I didn't want to take any chances. It just seemed like way too much hassle to go to all that trouble and then risk that happening. So I applied for a business visa. I did have, and you do need to have, I think, an invitation letter from a host organization in order to apply for a business visa. I had such a letter from an organization that I won't explicitly name in this podcast just out of an abundance of caution.

18:31And I was able to take that letter to a local visa expediter who helped me fill out the forms to send things in. I was on kind of a short timeline. You could do it yourself through their website. But I figured, yeah, this is unfamiliar territory. Let me just get a little help. It doesn't cost that much, and it'll help speed things up. They also hand deliver the visa to the consulate. The nearest one to where I live is in Chicago. So they actually take it there physically and deliver it in person, pick it up in person, give it back to me by hand. So I thought that was a service worth pursuing.

19:02And the business visa process in the end was really quite simple. I had one appointment. It took a half an hour to fill out the form. They took the passport to Chicago. I got it back, I don't know, 8, 9, 10 days later, and boom, there's a visa. I can now enter China for up to 90 days for the next 10 years on a business visa. Very easy. I would recommend doing that process rather than just showing up and entering visa-free. But that is an option. I was also able to buy, by the way, a one-way ticket, which is something that people were like,

19:35is that really allowed? But my research suggested that it was allowed. And I decided to do that because I didn't know exactly what my itinerary was going to be. And for those that are longtime listeners, you know that my son has had this whole cancer thing. We're very confident at this point that he's cured and all better, and that's not really a worry. But there's always this kind of back-of-the-mind thing that, you know, what if we do get some bad news or whatever and I have to fly home right away? So I bought a one-way ticket just from Detroit to Beijing through Washington, D.C. And I entered the country with no return ticket.

20:05And I figured that out actually on the fly while I was there. So that's an option, at least if you have the business visa. And I was surprised that was an option because certainly some places that I have been, if you don't have the return ticket, they'll give you a hard time for that. So now going back to the technology. So, okay, you're going to set up an entirely new technology profile to go to China. What do you do? What I decided to do was buy an Android phone. I normally use an iPhone, but I decided I'll do something a little bit different and buy an Android phone

20:36just to experience an Android phone for the first time in a long time. That may or may not have been the best idea because I do think Apple in general works a bit better in China, like Apple Maps, for example. People say it works very well. Google Maps, not as well. There are local mapping alternatives as well that you can download and use. But you might have a little bit better experience overall with just all the little details with an iPhone because Apple is active in China. People in China do have iPhones. They do not have Google Pixels, really.

21:08And that's what I was using. But it ended up still being totally fine because the biggest thing that I think is a major point of confusion is that you're not going to be able to access. If you bring your international connection, you're not going to be able to access all the stuff back home because of the Great Firewall. And really, in today's world, if you have a cell connection, that's not really an issue at all. It seems that the Great Firewall is basically, I think by design,

21:38just really not an issue for foreigners who come in with a cell connection. I'm not an expert in exactly how all this technology works under the hood. But my understanding is that when you go in with an international roaming plan, you are connected, of course, to the local cell tower with your phone. But your traffic requests actually route back to your home carrier first. Then they get processed out to whatever websites or services you're trying to use. And then they get routed back from your home carrier to the Chinese local carrier and finally to your phone.

22:12And so you're bypassing all of these content filters just based on the fact that you're there with an international roaming plan. I wasn't 100% confident that was going to work. But increasingly, I got more confident as I did more research. And my experience in the end was that worked totally smoothly. I decided to have two phone numbers for a couple different reasons. One was that I was trying to do this whole alter ego for the Chinese internet. And so I figured I should have a new email address.

22:43I created a new Gmail, which was my main Gmail with a dot travel on the end of it. I signed up for one month of Google Fi wireless, which comes with a good international roaming plan, which was said to work in China. And that came with a new phone number as well. And then I also, at the last minute, decided it's not such a big deal if they know my main American phone number. That doesn't really give them any ability to put spyware on my device or anything. So I also moved my main phone number over to the burner phone, which is just a pretty simple eSIM transfer.

23:19It's been a while since I've done that sort of thing, but it worked very smoothly. Even across Apple to Android, the process of transferring an eSIM from one to the other was really pretty easy. So with that transfer, I had dual SIMs on the one phone, which meant I had two phone numbers. I could receive text messages. I could receive phone calls to both of them. I could make phone calls and send text messages out with both of those phone numbers. And I had the two roaming plans from each of the carriers as well.

23:49The one carrier I used was Google Fi, which I just got for this month. And then I normally have T-Mobile. And they also, I signed up for the month-long international roaming plan for whatever extra charge that was. And between those two things, I have the two roaming plans, both of which have this property of you connect to the local cellular internet, but your traffic is routed immediately out of the country through your home carrier to whatever services you're trying to access and then back through that chain to you. And this basically meant that in practice, there was, for me, no great firewall to worry about.

24:26I did also get a VPN as a backup, and that comes with its own eSIM, and those are supposed to be, like, China smart. I never really had to use that, to be honest. The two main carriers just worked very smoothly, and it was not a big deal at all. I did sign up for all the Chinese services with this alternate Gmail, which I created just for the trip. And it is really important that you get the Chinese services. People tell you you have to do it all beforehand because the Google Play Store won't be available when you get there.

24:59And this is, again, where the Apple experience might be a bit better because the Apple Store, the App Store is available because Apple is active in China. But the Google Play Store is blocked in China to most Chinese users on local services. But when you're using the international enrollment plan, even the Google Play Store was available for me throughout. And I did download some additional apps while I was there, and I had no problem doing that. Nevertheless, I do think it's smart to set up your technology as thoroughly as possible before you go so you're not fumbling around with it when you get there.

25:33And there are a few apps that you definitely will want to have that you'll really, frankly, just pretty much have to have a good time of it in China. The ones that everybody knows about are probably WeChat and Alipay. WeChat is the super app that kind of does everything in China. It's like your sort of social network, address book, content. There's a whole bunch of content and business and ability to transact with businesses, book businesses.

26:04I barely even got into that compared to the vast universe that it is. And it also handles payments. So that's WeChat. And then there's Alipay, which is another major payment network in China, which, again, has tons more features and is a super app of its own that I didn't really use. Although that's not used so much for connecting with people and communicating with people. WeChat is the thing that people use just nonstop where you have your own QR code. They have a QR code. And there's sort of the question when you're connecting with someone like, am I going to scan you or are you going to scan me?

26:36But either way, there's this quick scan process. The apps recognize the QR codes so fast. You don't have to, like, tap on them or whatever. You just go into scan mode and you don't even have the whole QR code in frame for it to recognize the QR code. That stuff works super well. So you need the WeChat to be able to connect with people and also make payments. You need the Alipay as kind of a secondary payment system. Those both now do support international credit cards. So you can load up a couple credit cards into each one.

27:08And with that done, you're pretty much good to go for making the vast majority of connections and purchases that you might want to make in China. The other app that you'll want to have for sure is Didi, which is their equivalent of Uber. And it works basically the same way. There's some kind of small but interesting differences where when you're quoted a fare, for example, at the beginning of a ride, if it's a small enough fare, you don't actually pay in advance. You instead get a sort of rough quote, you agree to that, and then you actually get the final number at the end and you pay after the fact.

27:44You actually don't pay until after the ride. So many times I was going to get my next ride and then it was like, okay, you've got to pay for the last ride first. Interesting, small difference, didn't really make a big practical difference in my overall experience. In the big cities, and I was only in Beijing and Shanghai where I actually called Didi's for rides, it's a very similar experience to Uber in a big city. It's a very liquid market, fast pickup, a bunch of, at this point, like a bunch of different levels of car that you can get from the most basic economy to priority, faster pickup, to premium cars, to luxury cars, to XL.

28:21So that experience is like very familiar to anyone who's used Uber. And the biggest difference, honestly, is that it's really just cheap. Like the number of cross town, 30, 40 minute rides that I took that came in the like $6 to $8 range is really pretty remarkable. It would easily be in many cases close to 10 times that much, if not fully 10 times that much for some of these rides in the United States. But that was simple to do and worked easily.

28:53One thing I can say is it was actually hard for me to confirm that my credit cards were going to work. I loaded them up into the apps and they were accepted into the apps as payment methods. But then there's all these different ways that Chinese people use to move money around in the app that are not accessible to international cards. So I made a few connections on WeChat via just people that I knew in China. They introduced me to a couple of friends of friends and I got connected to them on WeChat even before leaving.

29:26And when you go in there, you can, the menu includes things like send money to this person. And so you try to do that. I was just trying to do it just to make sure that my credit card would not block a payment just because it was on its unfamiliar Chinese app. And all those features pretty much are not accessible to international users for whatever reason. I'm honestly not sure why. And I'm pretty sure that's a WeChat or maybe a Chinese government decision. It was not something that my credit card was blocking. It's just you get to the final step in the app and it's, oh, your payment method is not supported to make this kind of transfer.

30:01So I actually wasn't able to do any transactions in WeChat before getting on the ground there. So my very first order of business when I landed in Beijing at 3 a.m. was I need to go to some little kiosk or whatever at the airport and make sure that I can make a payment before I leave the airport because I want to make absolutely sure that I was able to transact. China is pretty much a cashless society at this point. I did not see any cash at all while I was there the entire time.

30:36And I actually wanted to bring a few bills home for my kids just as souvenirs. There was never an opportunity when it was like, oh, you have cash. Can I somehow get some cash for you from you? The one time when I actually did do it was when I met a friend of a friend for a meal and I mentioned, is there anywhere I can get cash? And one of the guys that I was having lunch with said, I think I have some at my desk. Let me go up back to my office for a second. I'll see if I can get some at the desk.

31:06He was like, we really don't use it, which I knew at that point. But he said, I'll go see if I can get some. And sure enough, he did have some. And I was able to exchange a few American dollars in cash for some Chinese cash. Other than that, I did not touch cash and I would have easily not touched or thought about cash the entire time. Online, what I was finding was that people were saying a lot of people don't even take cash. What I was told on the ground there is that the law is that businesses have to take cash. So if you were to bring cash and change money at the airport, I guess that might work.

31:41But it would definitely put you in a very different user experience, let's say, than what people around you are doing. And I wouldn't be surprised if there are some places where they either don't want to take it or if it's an automated thing or it's just not set up to take it at all. If you're buying tickets or whatever in various places, I would imagine that there could be some things that could be quite tough to do with cash these days. Because it really is super cashless, which is super convenient and also definitely enables a lot of visibility into what kind of transactions are happening in the economy.

32:12But yeah, it made me a little nervous showing up, not knowing if my credit cards were actually going to be supported. But sure enough, when I did land, went to the first kiosk I saw, picked up a fruit drink that looked pretty interesting. I think that drink was under $2 at the airport for a kind of fresh juice that would have been easily $6, $7, $8 at a U.S. airport. And then I was fumbling around with my first transaction trying to figure out, because it was a self-checkout. There was no person there to help.

32:43How do I actually do this transaction? So I scanned my product and it pulled up the price. And then I'm like, okay, what do I do now? And eventually I figured out how to show my payment QR code to the camera in the machine. And it's actually by showing my QR code to that machine that it registers, okay, this person is paying for this. And then as soon as you do that, you get the beep. And then you look at your phone and it says processing payment. And a couple seconds later, it's boom, payment is processed and you're gone.

33:15That's quite interesting and quite different from, of course, how China used to be. A lot of people, I think, have either experienced themselves in the past if they went years ago or have heard that there's a lot of pushy sales going on in China or that there's a lot of haggling or that there's a lot of ripoffs. And honestly, I would say none of that was an issue at all. In today's world, the economy is really very formal in the sense of it's all pretty much by the book.

33:47Everything has a price. People really didn't hassle you much at all. I had just a couple of very minor moments where anybody tried to talk me into buying something. And I did go to some tourist places. So it's not like I did go to some. I went to the Great Wall. So I went to some places where there were definitely the kind of souvenir shop places where in many parts of the world you would be aggressively approached and try to talk into buying things. It really wasn't like that. It was very low key, low pressure. And when you did go to buy things, they had prices.

34:18You really weren't expected to negotiate or haggle at all. There really wasn't much opportunity for that. And there also really wasn't, in my experience, any ripoff. It was all just here's the price. Boom. Here's the thing. Here's the place to scan. Here's the payment code. And boom, you're kind of done. So in that respect, it was all extremely modern. I would say, honestly, in a number of ways, China feels like maybe the most modern place that I have ever been. One other app that you would definitely want to get is the .com app. This is kind of the national tourist platform for China.

34:52And it works in other places, too. But it's the way to book things in China, whether that's hotels or attractions, plane tickets, train tickets. It's all kind of there, and it's all pretty centralized. This is a theme in China in general. You're going to use these very standard platforms that everybody uses, everybody's on, and work, in my experience, really well. So trip.com is another thing to download before you go.

35:23I booked a high-speed rail ticket on it. I booked a plane ticket on it at one point. I booked the ticket to the Great Wall on it. I booked a bunch of different hotel rooms on it, and all super smooth. Again, your payment methods are loaded in there before you go. And then when it's time to book things, it's just a couple clicks. And then when you show up to places, you've got your tickets right in the app, and you just open up your app. And again, it's usually a QR code, and you kind of just be, boom, here's my QR code, and you're admitted to things. So the level of integration and the sort of ubiquity of these platforms is really hard to overstate.

35:58Obviously, in the U.S., we have very similar options where people can pay each other via apps. We've got your Venmos and your cash apps. But then they're a young person's game. They're not the kind of thing you can just expect that everybody is going to take. In China, it really is everybody is on the apps. Every person of every age is on WeChat. There was not one person who was not on WeChat that I encountered. And I don't know what percentage of the population is on WeChat at this point, but it has got to be super, super high.

36:31Similarly with the payments, of course, they're all on that. They're all on Alipay. All the businesses, everything you might be interested in from a tourist standpoint are on these platforms, and you really can manage all your business through the phone. Meituan is another one that I think is probably worth downloading. Their delivery app, it's sort of an Amazon-like-everything store experience, but with more of an emphasis on food delivery and just really quick delivery of all kinds of things. And it's cool and definitely a high-quality user experience.

37:06All the other apps that I've mentioned, WeChat has an English language interface that you can use. You just need to switch the language to English. Alipay doesn't have a full-on English version that I found, but it does have a translate button that kind of hovers around. I'm sure that's not there for everybody all the time, but it somehow identified me as maybe needing the translate option. And so there's this translate button that you can just press any time to see a translation of whatever it is you're looking at in the app. DeeDee has an English version.

37:37Trip.com has an English version. So all these things are very easy to use. Meituan does not, as far as I know, have a fully English version, and so that one can be a little bit overwhelming to use. I had a great experience using Google Lens, and this is actually one of the things that probably is a little bit nicer about the Android phone, is that you take these screenshots, and then immediately you've got the Google Translate options to translate whatever text is in the image that you just took a screenshot of. So at times I was definitely taking a lot of screenshots of interfaces to see what it was that I was looking at.

38:09Even just to order in a restaurant, a lot of times you would kind of do it through Meituan or another app where they'd put QR codes on the table. To pull up the menu, you scan the QR code to order. You do it in the app from the table, and then you pay, again, through one of the major payment platforms. All that happens on your app. You're not even ordering, talking to a server at any point in some of these restaurants. And then a little bit later, your food comes, and that's it.

38:41Your entire transaction was mediated on the phone. And in some cases, that involved a lot of screenshots and translations. So definitely recommend the Google Translate app. The Microsoft Translate app is also well used. And then everybody in China has the Translate app on their phone as well. Every DD driver, every service provider of any kind, certainly everybody at a hotel concierge. And usually at hotel concierge, you'll get decent English, although not always in my experience. But they always have the Translate app there, and they're just super quick to record themselves speaking in Chinese and then show you what they just said, and you can go back and forth that way.

39:19And that works really quite well these days. It's strikingly easy to travel through a place like China and not really feel like you're lost. Between the Maps apps and the Super apps and the translation apps, I would say it's still an adventure. But to imagine what it would have been like 20 years ago, 30 years ago to go there and just be totally immersed in a very different place and constantly needing to ask people around you for help and trying to negotiate these situations in broken language back and forth.

39:54Basically, all of that is history now. It's really quite smooth. Just don't lose your phone and you'll be fine. And even then, I'll talk a little bit about losing phones and how easy it is to get them back and how well a lot of their systems really work. So that was my whole parallel universe setup, right? I've got this different phone, new Gmail account, a new Signal account, a new WhatsApp account with that new email and that new phone number, the WeChat account, the Alipay account.

40:25Load up the credit cards into those. Get the DD account for rides. Get the trip.com account. Load up a couple of cards into that so I can book anything that I need to book. And with all that stuff and with especially having two international or two U.S. what are international phone numbers there with the international roaming plans on, the tech experience was really incredibly smooth and highly enabling throughout the entire trip. What I did for contact with home base, because I do have a pretty good agent setup at home, is I left my main computer on.

41:02I left my Mac Mini on and I instructed Claude to monitor my communications, which it has access to already. It has access to my Gmail. I've done previous episodes about this, so if you haven't heard those, you could maybe go back to the Daniel Meissler episode to get a more thorough walkthrough of my particular agent setup, which is working quite well for me. Because of this pretty extensive setup that already happened, I was able to just tell Claude with a couple of prompts, I'm going to be gone for the next couple of weeks. Here's what I want you to do. Monitor my communications.

41:34Send me a digest a couple times a day. Let me know if there's anything urgent, anything that needs my attention in general. And then I will be able to respond back to you from my travel email. I also set up an Outlook as well, because again, while Gmail in theory is blocked in China, Outlook is not. You can use Microsoft products and Outlook is available even if you're behind the Great Firewall. For me, this was not an issue at all. I never had to use the Outlook. I just used the Gmail, and I had perfect access to it all the time because I was just using my roaming plan, but I did have that as a fallback.

42:10So I told Claude I might respond to the digests, and I might also send an email. I might send an email to my own home address, and I want you to respond to those emails and do whatever it is that I ask you to do. We initially, it initially said, okay, we're going to need some sort of, Claude can get really into the security mindset. And I did have a fairly extensive back and forth of it about how much of this stuff do I really need to do, and exactly how should I go about it. At one point, it had a password set up where when I emailed in, I was supposed to give it a password, and I said, I don't think I want to be giving you a password every time.

42:45First of all, if anybody is hacking my stuff, if they are reading my email somehow on this burner phone, they're going to see the password. So that didn't make a lot of sense to me. I said, why don't you just apply a sensible filter? If the requests seem reasonable, if they seem like they're coming from me, if they seem like they're low risk, just run a check on all the inbounds that you get from me. And if it passes those checks, you can just do it. And if it doesn't, then you can issue me a challenge and do a sort of ask me some trivia that only I would know the answer to or whatever based on all the work that we've done together.

43:18And it agreed to do that, and of course that never came up, but I had a pretty good time of it where I was able to get these digests. I had Claude responding from my main account, because one thing that I wanted to make sure is that if I got an email and I wanted to respond to somebody, I didn't want to have the response coming from a different address, because it might get filtered out of their priority inbox or whatever, or just confuse them. So instead, I had Claude respond as me, which I normally never do. But when I say as me, respond from my address, but I just instructed it to introduce itself as Claude, which was funny at times.

43:55It was like, hi, I'm Claude, an AI assistant. I was like, okay, at one point I gave feedback. People know who you are, Claude. You don't need to tell everybody that you're an AI assistant, at least in the circles that I run in. That's known. But it would explain Nathan's traveling in China. I'm monitoring the comms. I'm copying his travel email here. He can respond. There were a couple times where somebody sent me something where I was like, let's leave it up to them. You respond to them. Tell them what's up. If they want to add me on this, knowing that I'm in China, and take whatever risk is associated with that, which I think is pretty minimal, but we can let them decide.

44:30There were a couple times when we did that. But most of the time, Claude is just monitoring, giving me these digests. There wasn't too much that was urgent that I needed to do. But when there was, I could respond to Claude and say, okay, in this case, it's fine. Loop me in or even just take care of something. And Claude did a pretty good job. I think there were a couple little rough parts, but we gradually ironed those out. And I think at this point, if I were to go back, it would be really easy to just re-enable Claude and have it monitoring my communications.

45:00And really, the only thing that I had to even have anybody help with was a couple times, I think it happened twice, my Gmail authentication expired. And so then I had to have it refresh, and it didn't seem to want to refresh its own token through the browser. So I'm going to need to give it some instructions to be like, do it when you need to do it, because it can use the browser, of course. But it was kind of getting a little stuck on that. So I just, when I spoke to my wife, I said, hey, could you do a quick re-off of my, just go to my computer, it's on my desk, and tell Claude, hey, we need to, she would just open up a new Claude session locally in the terminal.

45:37I still use the terminal as opposed to the co-work type Claude, tell it, we need to re-off Gmail, it would pop open the window, she would click the clicks, and we're back in business, and that takes two minutes. So that's my tech setup. I think for folks in the AI space, it's easy enough to do that, I guess, it's probably recommended. It's definitely recommended by people who know more than me about information security. So I guess I would just say it's not that much trouble.

46:08Know that the firewall is not really going to be an issue. I think having two lines and a VPN backup is probably just prudent. But with a cheap burner phone and an extra line and a VPN backup, you are in, I think, a very good place from an information security standpoint, and you can have your agents run your life from home. And for me, this worked really well. I am telling my parents who do some international traveling now that my dad is retired that they should go to China.

46:43And what I would suggest for them is much, much simpler. I don't think they need to. They're not in the AI game at all. So I told them, maybe you could just get a second number if you wanted to have redundancy or the two of you, both with your own numbers. That is two numbers. It should be pretty good. Just download WeChat, download Alipay, get Trip.com, get Didi, and you're good. Your internet will work. Make sure your international roaming is enabled. Make sure you have enough data to support the time that you'll be there. And you're good to go.

47:15I don't think the average person really needs to do any extreme precautions. But for those in the AI game, the setup that I went through is simple enough, and you can have it done, honestly, in just a couple hours. It took me longer to figure all this stuff out because I found, again, that the searching and the AI's answers were a lot of, a lot of FUD, a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what's going to work. Are you going to be behind the firewall? All VPNs go in and out of business, and they're illegal, and it's okay, wow. But in the end, that setup was all pretty simple.

47:46So I would say you can do that, and you should be pretty confident that it's going to work pretty well. A couple other little details there. You don't even need a power adapter in China. The outlets that they use, at least in all of the hotels and major places that I went, were universal outlets that would accept, I think, any major. And, of course, I didn't try every major type of plug. But certainly the U.S. standard two- and three-prong plug, they were perfectly well set up for, as well as a number of other types.

48:21And so I didn't even have to take an adapter. It was super, super, super simple to just bring my normal device with a normal charger very easy. I think it's also worth bearing, talking a little bit about just the level of tech integration, just to drive home, like, how much they really have tied everything together. And this is for good in the sense of an incredible user experience. It, in some ways, might be for bad to the degree that you're concerned about surveillance.

48:53And I think the surveillance definitely has a real upside, but also real downside potential for the Chinese public. But to just illustrate, like, how thorough the integration process has been, when you call a ride on Didi, as in Uber, it'll say, okay, we've matched you to a car. And here's your driver, and here's their license plate, whatever, and they're the type of car that they're going to be driving. Okay. Then you can see them approaching on their route in the same way that you can with Uber, as you're all familiar with.

49:24But when the car that you're waiting for is stopped at a red light, you can literally see the red light countdown clock in your app. So that red light that has a timer on it is connected to some centralized system that Didi can, in turn, call. And you're literally able to watch the countdown until when that red light is going to turn green and your car can, again, start making progress toward you. I thought that was really quite impressive, and it's indicative of the level of integration that they have across so many information systems.

50:05Another one that was pretty interesting was in one hotel, as soon as I would put the key into the thing for the lights to turn on, right? Some hotels have this where you have to put your key into a little slot in order to enable the rest of the room to work. As soon as I did that in this one hotel, the TV turned on and started kind of yapping at me, which I thought was a little bit weird and annoying. But then that gave me occasion to notice that the TV was showing me the status of the laundry room in the hotel.

50:37In this particular hotel, they didn't offer a laundry service, but they did just have a room downstairs where there were a few washers and dryers that were just free to use for hotel guests. And then, of course, this raises the question, is it available now? And I wouldn't even think in the rest of the world of any other way to answer that question other than going to the room and checking it out. But here, they had wired it up such that the status of the laundry room washers and dryers was on the screen of the TV when it turned on in the room.

51:12So, again, this just gives a flavor of how thorough the tech integration has been. The Meituan delivery experience is also another indication of the user experience that you can expect. I had a weird experience one night in the middle of the night where I woke up with basically an allergic reaction ongoing. And I never have allergic reactions, so this was quite strange to me. But the next morning, I told my friends about it, and we were going on a bus from one place to another.

51:44And they said, would it be helpful to have some, like, Claritin or whatever? And I said, yeah, I guess it probably would. Hopefully it won't happen again, but if it does, like, I would probably benefit from that, yes. Sure enough, when we get to the destination, it was only, like, 20 minutes later, there was Claritin waiting for us at the destination. The woman I was talking to had just gone on the Meituan app, requested this particular medicine, which is available over the counter, gave the address that we were going to, and boom, it's delivered there, beat us to the place.

52:17So that's how fast some of these deliveries can show up. You can order ahead and have your allergy medications arrive at your destination with even just 20-minute lead time, and they can beat you there. So it was really very impressive in all those little touchpoint user experience sort of ways. Again, I did feel like it was the most modern-feeling place that I had ever been from a technology perspective. And another kind of interesting thought experiment that I've been running is if you were just to go to New York or San Francisco or both, and then separately you were to go to Beijing and Shanghai or both, and you didn't know anything about the countries or the history and probably would also have to mask the prices because the price differential is definitely significant.

53:04And just spend a week in each of these places and then ask, which of these countries is the richer country? I think it would be pretty clear to most people. I think you would get, honestly, an overwhelming majority of people saying that China is the richer country because it does have newer stuff and more integrated, lower friction experience that just feels like the future. And it's ubiquitous across the, at least the major cities that I've been to, but from what I understand, it really has extended across China to a really remarkable extent.

53:43So we'll probably come back to that maybe a little bit later today and definitely a little bit more in the next two episodes that I plan to do about this. But kind of a bottom line, what does it feel to be their litmus test? I think it does feel more modern and in some ways more developed than life in the United States does, which is a pretty remarkable accomplishment, obviously, for Chinese government, Chinese society as a whole. Okay, so in Beijing, I did a couple days worth of tourism when I first got there before the real AI-focused part of the trip opened up.

54:20And again, a couple just high-level comments, and I'm not going to turn this into a travel blog, but Beijing is absolutely a world-class city from a tourist perspective. If you're going there for no reason other than to see some history and see some famous sites, it is absolutely a world-class destination. The number of incredible sites is enough to keep you busy for, I would say, easily a full week. And I would put it on the level of Paris in terms of just everywhere you go, you're looking at incredible deep history with beautiful architecture, really remarkable sites all over the place.

54:59And mostly I did these on my own. Mostly I did them just either catching a Didi to the place and or walking to the place, and then with no tour guide. I did hire a tour guide one time, and I'll tell a little bit more about that. But mostly I was just using AIs as the tour guide. I decided to leave my, because I had this whole alter ego strategy, I left my main Claude and Chajupiti accounts at home. And I figured, I'll just use Chinese AIs for this trip.

55:29So you don't necessarily need to do that, especially because you, again, can, the Great Firewall is not such an issue if you're using an international Roman clan. But I figured it's a good opportunity to get a little bit more familiar with Chinese AIs. So I downloaded DeepSeek, the Kimi app, and Minimax all to my phone before leaving. And those were the three AIs that I mostly used as I was going about my couple days of tourism. So I used them as both kind of travel planner, like here I am.

56:04Actually, I was planning to go to the Great Wall, the very first thing, directly from the airport. But it had been raining heavily, and so they actually closed a couple sites at the Great Wall, and I wasn't able to go. I had even booked a ticket, but again, Trip.com, the integration is quite good. So I got a notification from Trip.com saying, hey, you can't go to this thing today because it's closed. Your ticket's been refunded. This is due to heavy rain, whatever.

56:34It'll be open again tomorrow. So I was like, okay, my plan is immediately thrown a little bit into flux. I'll go to the AIs and say, hey, here's where I am in Beijing, and here's what time it is, and what day of the week it is, and what should I do? And they were really quite helpful. I think this stuff, these experiences do illustrate that you don't necessarily need frontier intelligence for many quite valuable use cases. I was using Kimi 2.6 to serve as my tour guide for all these different places, as well as – actually, there were, of course, multiple – not of course, but if you're watching Chinese AI, you would know that there are a couple of notable model releases just in the last couple weeks while I was there.

57:21Not a coincidence because I went in part for the WAIC event, and this was a big moment in Chinese AI, and President Xi headlined the event by opening with a keynote. So naturally, a couple of model companies wanted to time their release to this event, so we got Kimi K3 right around the time of the event. But my little tourism was a little bit before that, so I was using Kimi 2.6. These were very good experiences that I found to be very useful and informative as tour guides, and the fact that they might not be frontier models capable of doing long-horizon agentic tasks and capable of various cyber exploits or what have you really wasn't relevant.

58:05They were perfectly good, and really quite fast in their response in many cases, perfectly good to educate me about what I was seeing. So I'm just going through all these different places from the Lama Temple, which is a Tibetan Buddhist temple right in the heart of Beijing, which was a surprise to me. I was like, oh, wow, we have a – wait, what? This is a Tibetan Buddhist temple? I didn't expect to see that here. It had pretty good historical explanations for how this came to be, and I was asking, how should I – people are – this does go to show my ignorance of China.

58:38I wasn't under the impression that there was no religion in China. I've seen enough stuff on TikTok to know that there is religion in China, and people do practice religion, my sense is broadly. As long as it's not challenging the state, you're permitted to participate in most religion as you wish. And yeah, here we even had a Tibetan Buddhist temple right in the heart of Beijing, so I was getting the history on that. Then I went over to the Temple of Confucius and the Imperial College, and again, I had a lot of questions like, wait a second, Confucius, he's not seen as a god, right?

59:17He was just a philosopher, wasn't he? Like, why does he have a temple? And it does show some fundamental paradigmatic differences between Eastern and Western society, where it's like, yes, he is a man, he's not considered to be a god, but he also is revered. And he's not worshipped, but he is the object of these ritual behaviors or ritual traditions that was not just something that some people did some of the time, but was even understood to be part of the obligations of the emperor.

59:55The emperor was meant to be sort of related to God, like the son of God might be a little too Christian framing, but definitely some sort of like divine connection. But the emperor also had duties, and it was the emperor's job to do the right rituals in the right way. And those over time came to involve giving offerings and whatnot at the Temple of Confucius. And so it's like a kind of a colors outside the lines as we know them in terms of what is religion and what is state is this does this blur the the separation of church and state, but also it's not exactly religion in the same way, kind of unfamiliar stuff, but really helpful explanations from the Chinese AI, I thought they were perfectly good.

1:00:40And by the way, I didn't even pay for that. This was all free usage across all three of these apps, and I had a pretty good time of it. There were some issues with refusals, and at times I thought probably even by the standards of like what they wanted over refusals. So I would say like we're not, Anthropic is not the only company that currently has an over refusal issue. I was asking some, I wouldn't even say sensitive questions, right? But when you get to issues of the question of Tibet, you're going to get, and Taiwan, right, that you're going to get some, they call it the three T's, Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen.

1:01:18Those are obviously sensitive issues in the Chinese context. So I wasn't asking questions just to like probe at what will the AI systems answer or not answer. I was really asking pretty earnest questions about what's the deal with a Tibetan Buddhist temple here in Beijing. That obviously touched on issues of Tibet in a kind of tangential way. I wasn't asking about the status of Tibet today, more history kind of questions. There was another question that I, because I don't know a lot about Chinese history.

1:01:50So I'm like, okay, who built this and what's the deal? Well, you've got the Ming dynasty and the Qing dynasty. What's the deal with those? The latter is interestingly a minority dynasty that came in and that came in and took over. So the Qing dynasty was actually the Manchu ethnic group that was just north, I think, north, northeast of kind of Chinese heartland. And they managed to come in and take over the empire, conquer the place, and then rule it for hundreds of years, which is an interesting and obviously pretty impressive accomplishment.

1:02:29And this Manchu ethnic group, they have their own language. So you see this reflected in some of these artifacts where there would be multiple different languages. You would see the Mandarin Chinese. You would see the Manchu language. You would see sometimes the Tibetan language. I think sometimes also maybe a Western Chinese language. But there were often like four languages that were used and equally represented in these like monuments or sort of proclamations that were going out to the empire.

1:03:01And so at one time I asked, what's up with the Manchu group today? Are they still around? Are they still part of China? And there you would get the kind of classic old Sydney Bing experience where the model itself would answer the question and you'd see kind of the chain of thought. You might even see the beginning of an answer. And then sometimes, like with this Manchu question, because again, you're touching on something fairly sensitive in the Chinese political context of ethnic minorities, the answer is in the process of unrolling in front of you.

1:03:33And then you would get this pullback. You'd see the answer disappear. And then you'd see, I'm sorry, I can't help you with that. Ask a different question or whatever. And again, this wasn't something that I think they really even necessarily meant to censor. And not all of the apps censored it the same way. I was able to get some answers from some apps that I wasn't able to get from other apps. It goes to show that in many ways, the Chinese ecosystem has a lot of the same things going on that we do, where people are trying to make sure that they're on the right side of regulators, on the right side of history, acting responsibly as they understand it.

1:04:11And at times that can go a little too far and it can interfere with the user experience. But this is also consistent with the reporting that I've seen in many places that the Chinese models themselves are not very censored. It's the actual deployed application experiences that usually contain the censorship. And you could see that as the answer was like partially there. And then it would be retracted sometimes and you'd be hit with this. No, I'm sorry. I can't help you. So it was overall, I'd say a very good experience with the Chinese AIs.

1:04:44And of course, I'm doing this all in English. They do have, some of them have weird quirks where I think it's in DeepSeq advanced mode with the best DeepSeq model. Yeah, if you go into expert mode on DeepSeq, then you can't attach any files and there's also no search enabled. That's kind of weird. I'm not sure why that's the case, but that is the case. Either use, depending on what I was trying to do, I might just use the instant mode on DeepSeq. On Kimmy, that issue is not there. You had the ability to have the model do searches, even with the best model that was available at the time.

1:05:18And Minimax, I think, was probably the most consistent and reliable, just a very down-the-fairway experience. But I think I had probably the least over-refusals from the Minimax app. So I did find occasion to use all three. I'd say for my taste, Kimmy is the best of those apps. But there were times when I got better, if only for the over-refusal issue, there were times when I got better answers from other apps. You might say Kimmy is the most clod-like, and that obviously brings to mind issues of distillation.

1:05:52I think I'll probably talk about that a little bit more in future episodes than this one. But Kimmy, I would say, had the best kind of vibes, the best taste, and that may be partially related to accusations of distillation from Claude. But I think it does run a bit deeper than that, too, from what I know of the company Moonshot. They have a real aesthetic, and their name itself was inspired by the Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon album.

1:06:24They've got graphics that echo the prism art from the famous album cover from Pink Floyd. And they're definitely an organization that takes the aesthetics of the AI that they're building very seriously. So I think there's a lot there that is more than just distillation from Claude, although I do think that the case is fairly compelling that at least some distillation is going on. We can get into that probably more in a future deeper dive into some of these U.S.-China issues.

1:06:55I guess one other note about how much do I trust the Chinese AIs is that when I did have that allergic reaction in the middle of the night, which was a very, fortunately, very short-lived but very strange experience. I just woke up, and my hands were itching like crazy. And I was like, what is going on? My hands are so itchy. And then I got up and turned on a light and looked at myself in the mirror, and my kind of whole upper body torso was, like, covered in hives. I was like, yeah, because that's pretty weird. What did I do in that moment? I downloaded ChatGPT because I did have the sense that, okay, for these tour guide things, I'm getting great answers.

1:07:32It's educating me. I'm pleased. I'm, like, happy with this experience. But now we're in a health possible emergency. I didn't really know what was going on. I wanted my ChatGPT. I knew I've had Karin from OpenAI, who leads health at OpenAI on the podcast. And I've been, like I said, deep experience using it with my son's case. And I just felt like, in this moment, I'm going for the best, right? And it, of course, helps that they've made their best health experiences available to even free users.

1:08:07So I was just able to go in and ask my questions. And I was very confident that I was getting the best experience that I could get. I did not even create an account. I did not pay for a new account. I did not log into my home account. But I wanted ChatGPT in that moment. And fortunately, this allergic reaction that I experienced just kind of passed. Even over the course of chatting with the AI for 15 minutes or so, a couple rounds, and just observing myself, I could tell that it was passing. So it went from, this is probably not an emergency, but you should probably go get checked out now, to, okay, if it's passing and you're feeling like the symptoms are already reducing, then you can probably just go back to sleep and sleep it off.

1:08:46And anyway, that's what I ended up doing. But I did think it was notable from an AI perspective that in that moment, you know, where I was like a little bit alarmed, I still wanted to go back to ChatGPT just for the confidence that this is probably going to be the best answer that I can get and was worth the extra effort to download the app to do that. Okay, let's see. What else do I want to talk about today? I think I'll just do some observations of Chinese society. I'm not going to, again, turn this into a travel log, but I do think it's worth noting that people are just incredibly nice.

1:09:21The hospitality that I experienced at every turn was outstanding. I don't mean to contrast this with the West. I think one of the more heartwarming trends of the summer was seeing people from all over the world come to the United States and travel around and go to some of the cities that hosted games that they probably wouldn't otherwise have ever gone to. And some people even just doing road trips from city to city. And people had a really great time and had really great things to say about the United States.

1:09:51So I think that our people are also very warm and hospitable. And the track record from this summer and the reports from World Cup travelers really supports that. So, again, this is not meant to be a contrast. But my experience in China was outstanding. People were extremely friendly. Unfortunately, I had really, I would say, zero negative interactions. There was almost nothing that I would call problematic at all. As I mentioned earlier, very few even pushy sales interactions.

1:10:21I can remember a couple short moments where somebody tried to get me to ride his bike taxi with him and I really didn't want to. And he kind of followed me for a couple minutes trying to get me to do it. I was like, dude, I'm okay. I'm happy walking. And he got the message and went on his way. In many parts of the world, you would have probably a lot more of that than you did in China. So it was like definitely impressive and very smooth sailing in that regard. Service also is just like generally really good. And it's not a tipping culture.

1:10:52Like at no point are you invited to tip. The price is the price. And it is a flat price. When you do a WeChat checkout or even a DD checkout, there's no moment in that flow where you're like, hey, would you like to add 10%? Would you like to do this or that? It's just not there. So they are not expecting tips. And yet they are consistently delivering high quality service. Service at the hotels I found to be like really very helpful. I wasn't necessarily interacting with like concierge. A couple of the places I stayed at, one place definitely did have a concierge and was super helpful.

1:11:27In fact, one pro tip that I would give there is that the DD app, as it is served up in the English version to foreigners, doesn't have quite all the same features that the native one has for people that are with Chinese identification and bank cards and what have you. And I'm not sure why, but it doesn't. So one of the features that the Chinese version of the app does have, but that my version of the app didn't have, is the ability to hire a car by the hour.

1:11:59And so for one of my like power tourist days, that was definitely the best option. I was at the Summer Palace, which is a beautiful, beautiful site created by the Qing Dynasty. It was destroyed by Europeans at one point and then rebuilt, but it's a very cool and beautiful place to be. I then wanted to go to the Forbidden City in the afternoon and then to the Great Wall in the evening. And I tried to do that all in one day. And to do that, I was like, I really need a driver who can take me to all these places. But how can I hire one?

1:12:30The concierge at this one hotel said, if you do it by the hour, it should be fine. I said, I don't have the ability to do that. They looked at my app and they'll go, yeah, I know you don't. That's weird. We can do it for you. Okay, great. How is that going to work? We'll just do it on our DD app here. We'll pay for it. You'll pay us. And then I'll also set up a WeChat between you, me, and the driver because the driver probably won't speak much English. But then if anything you need, if you need any translation help or whatever, you can send a message into the group.

1:13:00And we'll just monitor this throughout the day and help you out as you need it. And it'll be great. And sure enough, that was extremely helpful in multiple ways. The fact that just renting the car in this way and having the driver who could take me to these places. And it was not expensive. I think the whole day's rental, it was over eight hours. And it was probably nine hours from start to finish that the guy took me around, waited for me the whole time outside of the places that I went to. I think that all together came out to something like $120, $125.

1:13:33Really very, very affordable given what I was getting. And yeah, the hotel paid. I paid them. And they stayed active in the chat throughout the day, just making sure that I was able to effectively coordinate with my driver. And that was after I checked out of the hotel, by the way. That was on the day that I left the hotel. So I wasn't even coming back. And they were still extremely helpful in doing that for hours to come. Similar things happened at a couple other hotels, too. When I wanted to, for one night, for example, it was raining pretty hard.

1:14:06And I was asking, oh, is there a place I can go out for food that's close? And I had this one dish that I wanted to get that was a crab noodle dish. And that might have been the thing, by the way, that gave me the allergic reaction because it was later that night that happened. But the guy at the hotel desk said, you could go here, but you can also order delivery. And I was like, yeah, but I don't really know how to do that. And he said, I'll do it for you. No problem. So he just, again, pulled up his phone, did it on his personal Meituan app, and showed me what he was ordering me, showed me the price, said, is that cool with you?

1:14:43Yep. Then he was able to send me a little on-the-fly invoice from WeChat or Alipay. I was able to pay him. He got the money inbound for me. And then he, boom, hits the checkout on the thing. And next thing, I've got delivery coming. It was super easy. Part of the reason that's possible, by the way, is that the transaction costs on payments in China are super, super low. They are, like, basically an order of magnitude lower than the transaction costs that we have in the United States,

1:15:16where it's like 2% to 3% of the credit card transaction goes to credit card fees to the point now that we have in gas stations in the U.S. And a bunch of businesses will be like, we either have a minimum or it's an extra dollar if you want to use a credit card or it's an extra few percent if you want to use a credit card or it's 10 cents more per gallon of gas or whatever. We've started to see this sort of businesses not wanting to accept that cost on their side anymore and putting it back on the consumer. In the Chinese context, the transaction costs, from what I understand, are more like a quarter of a percent of transactions.

1:15:53And I'm not really sure how they're pulling that off. I did ask some AIs, and one answer is they don't have rewards in the same way that we do. All your credit card rewards, all that kind of stuff, basically ends up coming out of those fees. So I guess this is one way in the U.S. where, in a weird way, poorer users are potentially subsidizing wealthier users. We might have to go to Patio 11 for a full breakdown of exactly what's going on there. But it does seem like rewards accrue to more affluent credit card users.

1:16:25There's not really rewards for payments in China, so that's one thing. There's also credit. When we use credit cards in the U.S., by and large, we're putting it on our tab, and then we pay the bill at the end of the month. When they're doing WeChat payments, there's not really a credit element. There is an actual deduction from your balance. It goes to their balance immediately, and they know that you're good for the funds. Now, I had the impression for U.S. credit cards that it was the interest that you were paying on balances that was covering the risk that you might not pay, but maybe to some degree also the transaction fees are somewhat covering the risk that you might not pay.

1:17:06That's opaque to me. But, again, that risk doesn't really exist in the Chinese context. They're just debiting your actual balance. Fraud protection, as far as I can tell, seems to be about the same. And, in fact, it might even be easier there because here we have this whole dispute the payment with your credit card rigmarole. There, you can dispute a payment directly with WeChat or directly with Alipay. And, from what I understand, I never had to do this, you can often get reimbursed if there is any sort of fraudulent charge.

1:17:37And, from what I gather, it happens much faster. It's a much more streamlined experience where, in the U.S., you're, like, waiting weeks, and the merchant can file their counterclaim, whatever. It's a mess on both sides, frankly, both the consumer and the business side. I think neither one has a great experience with credit card disputes. It sounds like it's actually a lot easier to do that kind of thing, at least on the consumer side, in the Chinese context. And, somehow, it all adds up to dramatically lower transaction costs such that – and I think even peer-to-peer, there might be no transaction costs, which we do have some of that in the U.S. as well, right?

1:18:10If I do a Venmo to my buddy that he gets the balance and I'm not paying an extra fee on top. So, I think when I was doing this stuff at the concierge, I think there was just no money lost at all. And, they were happy to do that, and that happened a couple times. I also got tickets to a soccer game one time that way by just going up to the concierge desk and saying, I want to go to a soccer game. I have no idea what to do. Can you help me buy tickets to a soccer game? They ended up doing it all on their account, and then I just paid them right as they hit the checkout button for the tickets, and boom, we're good to go.

1:18:43So, I thought that was all pretty cool and, again, just makes for a great overall experience. Another interesting thing about China, I would say, is there's just really a ton of things that you see that you're like, boy, that is really similar to what we're familiar with at home. For example, the Apple aesthetic is very prominent in China. I went to a mall and went to a number of different technology company stores, including Huawei and Xiaomi.

1:19:19And, both of these companies sell phones and laptops, and they look exactly like iPhones. And, the stores are set up exactly like Apple stores. If you walked into these things not knowing where you were, you would definitely, if you just opened your eyes, you would immediately think you're in an Apple store. You would maybe start to notice that you're not in an Apple store, obviously because the signage is in Chinese, but also because these companies both sell cars as well.

1:19:51So, there's like, you're, imagine an Apple store that also sells cars. Imagine if the Apple car were actually a thing. That would be the experience of going into a Xiaomi or a Huawei store, but the aesthetic is like strikingly Apple-like. Another thing that jumped out at me is that they have a similar, you might call it, cult of the founder type attitude toward the leaders of their tech companies. You could maybe say like, the cult of the, maybe Confucius is like the ultimate cult of the founder.

1:20:22There's still a temple to Confucius in Beijing to this day. And I was interested to learn that Confucius' direct descendants, now 79 generations on, still identify. They've tracked their lineage back to Confucius. They still identify as his direct descendants, and they still do like certain ceremonies or rituals, whatever, to honor him, I believe, on his birthday. 79 generations on, that's pretty remarkable. Cult of the founder. Mao is maybe another example of the cult of the founder in that Mao is still what cash there is, which is not much.

1:20:56But when I was able to get my hands on a little cash, Mao's face was on all the bills that I saw. But it also happens at the tech company level. The founder of Huawei is talked about in a sort of mythical sense. The founder of DeepSeek is talked about in this way. The founder of Jibu or Z.ai is also talked about in this way. And it very much echoed the way that people in the U.S., and I would say probably more positively, actually, but there's definitely a sort of parallel to the Bezos and the Zuckerberg and the Elon.

1:21:33Elon would be, of course, the paradigmatic example of this in the U.S. Because they really do have a – there's a very strong sense in which they look up to these tech founders and leaders that I think absolutely parallels our own. Going to WAIC, also just really striking. This was at the Shanghai Expo Center. And I've actually never been to CES, but I'd say in terms of scale, it was probably CES scale is a huge event.

1:22:08I did go to NVIDIA ETC conference last year, and that was like the most recent big tech conference with like these mega booths from these huge companies. And this was exactly the same kind of vibe at the Shanghai Expo Center. Again, if you just opened your eyes and you were like, where am I? You might think you were in Las Vegas at a big trade show. The booth structure, the aesthetic, like it's all very, very similar. Not really too much to speak of from the actual WAIC like trade show itself.

1:22:42I thought it was so familiar that in some ways it wasn't really that interesting. You saw all the big companies that you would expect to see. They had booths that showed all the things that you would expect to see them show. And it was remarkable mostly for just how similar and otherwise unremarkable it was to be on the trade show floor. One thing I was expecting and maybe didn't see as much of as I was expecting was like really cool robot demos. You do see more robots just out and about in China, certainly than you do see in the United States.

1:23:15At one of the hotels that I stayed at, there were a couple of robots that were in use to deliver meals that were delivered by Meituan to rooms where the customer was ultimately going to receive them.