#121. Zak Dychtwald: Young China
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- What's up everybody? Welcome back to The Honest Drink. I'm Justin. If you've been enjoying the show, go ahead, rate, comment, and subscribe. All right, we got a really interesting guest for you guys today. We got an awesome show. How would we talk about it? - Oh, I was so excited. We have an expert on the Chinese youth culture of today. We talk about everything from Bailan. We talk about Tangping. We talk about nature, and we talk about the pressures of society and what that will bring to the future of this generation and how it affects the rest of the world.

Yeah, really from a macro and micro level, we talked about the youth culture here and all the

the pressures and expectations that they have of this new generation coming out of China, and really not only how it impacts this country, but how it impacts the world. So he is the author of Young China, the founder of the Young China Group. He leads a leading think tank here. He just gave a talk at Harvard University. He frequently writes for the Harvard Business Review. And now he's here after being away from China for three years. He's on Honest Rink.

We're basically saying we're the same as Harvard University. Okay, so without further ado, please give it up for Zach Dykwald. We'll see you next time.

Let me pour out some whiskey. But you were saying, I didn't want to break your train of thought. Start with the Jura. Yeah, start with the Jura. What are we working with here, guys? Some Jura 21 years. That one should be a good bottle. Yeah, this one's from Eric. I think he was...

He was trying to bait a little compliment, a little credit. No, I didn't even say it was for me. I just wanted to try it. I just got it for the show. Did you say that Eric got this for us? Eric. I like this guy. He feels like one of us already. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, cheers, Zach. Cheers, guys. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Great to meet you. Thanks for having me. Oh, that's good. Ooh. That's some good stuff, Eric. This one might not last the show with this. Oh, we finish bottles in one show. That's a nice flavor. Yeah.

Hey, so Zach, how you been, man? I've been great. It's a loaded question because it's been three wild and crazy years of trying to get back to China. And nine days ago, after much anxiety, after health crises, after a wedding, I got married in this space of time, finally landing.

This is going to sound super cheesy. Forgive this. This is not the whiskey talking we just started. It felt like coming home in a way that I didn't even fully expect. There's an expectation, I think, when you're gone for a long time, or there's a concern for me that, gosh, am I going to lose a step? Am I going to still feel like this is a place where I belong? Do I still feel like I've got the skill set to handle it? And it just felt so natural. It's felt so good. And

I think that there's broader implications here for like the business world and all that. It's so easy from outside of China to think about it from the big numbers, from the macro, from the news, from the headlines. And I know you guys talk about this a good amount. It's so much easier to be excited when you're here.

And being back here has injected me with that feeling of excitement. And I don't know that optimism is the right word, but this feeling of like, hey, let's get after it again, which is wonderful. Was it you? You posted something like from afar, if you're reading the media, the feeling is more fear when it comes to China. At least that's how it's portrayed. And then on the ground, the fear turns into more of an excitement thing.

Kind of what you're saying is, is that, is that what it's exactly what I wrote. And it's, it's as true as can be, particularly in the United States. And I, and I work with a good amount of businesses. I get to interface with a good amount of people who are actively thinking about China, thinking about the Chinese market. And, and,

In some ways, the biggest hit to their businesses is not regulatory. The regulatory matters a ton. It's not even US-China conflict. It's that their modality of learning about the Chinese marketplace is 6 a.m. phone calls with their China team, midnight phone calls with their China team, and then headlines. And the headlines are all bad. And they're not coming anymore.

And if you talk with any executive who comes through Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, I used to bring people to Chengdu and Chongqing, which was always really fun. And they leave buzzing, buzzing. You can feel it. But when you're just learning about the place from far away, and this was true pre-COVID, it's obviously been exacerbated the last 18 months.

It's hard to feel anything but fear and at best sort of consternation and timidity about the place. Yeah, actually, the fact that you have not been in China for the past, what, three years? Three years and change. Right? It's bananas. Out of China for three years.

listening to all the headlines and being over there when, well, we're over here talking about what we hear. He's like a fresh set of eyes. Yeah. I'm so curious. Cause like, you're going to be the first person that at least I think all of us, but at least definitely for me, uh, somebody who's been on the outside coming back and, and that perspective, I'm, I'm dying to hear what you think. It's a trip. There's a certain time machine element. There's a certain, um, you know, it's very difficult to see the forest from the tree sort of thing. And, um,

when we're in it every day, you know, I've interfaced far more with Americans and North Americans in general about their feelings towards China and also have been more mentally immersed in that information ecosystem, which when that's your primary source of information, it's hard not to feel jittery. It's hard not to feel fearful. And now that I'm back...

I can start to recontextualize all of those headlines amongst sort of the everyday. It's sort of like if you're looking at the United States, you know, especially during like the Trump era, and I used to talk about friends, talk about this with friends in China. If you look at from the United States from the outside, it looks like a dumpster fire. Like there aren't days where, you know, where a crazy salacious headline would come out and every, it was just like, oh my God, like shootings in New York, these obviously hate crimes. Like it looks like,

bad from far away. But when you're in the United States, you then close your laptop or you turn off your phone and then you have dinner with your family or you grab a drink with your friends. And that dumpster fire gets contextualized as like, okay, only happening sort of down the road and not really impacting daily life. The same is when you're looking at China from outside. If you're looking at headlines, and again, those headlines are typically pushed towards being more incendiary. It's how those businesses work. It's

It's impossible to contextualize that in the, in the fabric of everyday life, which of course is much different here. And so your guys' work, when you're thinking about interacting with the outside world, um, and certainly my work, and I think of myself sort of as a bridge person, um, is helping people to contextualize the good, bad, exciting, risky, uh,

At the right proportions, right? It's really about the proportionality of everything. Well, clue us in a little bit because I think alluding to kind of what Howie was saying is we've been living in a bubble here, right? And whenever you stay in any place for too long, it becomes kind of a bubble. And especially if you're only like reading the media headlines and stuff like that. And so a lot of, I think,

media that we consume makes us think like, oh, North Americans have like really think about China in this one way. What is, what is in your experience, the reality of how they actually think about China? Cause like, are we just exaggerating the, the fear and whatever the, the bias against China or are a lot of people on the ground, pretty objective and open-minded?

- No. - So how I feel is validated by your experience. - No, I would say it's valid. And I would say they're not wrong for it. Like, you know, if what you know, I think a lot about your mental diet and I used to think about this in terms of language learning. This was a big pillar of how I approached learning Chinese at a sort of adult age. I started when I was 22. In the same way that you are what you eat,

which people find intuitive, your brain is also what you feed it. And so if your information inputs are all fear-driven, all policy-driven, all government-driven, then, you know, bad in, bad out, on the output of that, you end up with a pretty dense base of information

And I say the US-China relationship and sounds political, but I mean, there are many people who, you know, the bridges that were the personal bridges have deteriorated over the years. There's fewer and fewer of them. And so basically what you're left with is big politics. People don't feel empathy for macro economies. Right.

it's those people bridges. And as business ties deteriorate, I really do think as business is being like the really critical bridge here because people are so well incentivized to make it work versus politics. It's like the only bipartisan issue is they don't like China. It's the only thing that gets both sides of the aisles excited to be together. And on the personal side, there's no travel. There's far less interaction. It's quite difficult to

build more of that to world build for people so that they have more than just those scary fear, like fear mongering true, but, but somewhat out of context headlines. Yeah. If you wanted to have like any single event or kind of thing that were to make a more negative impact on us, China relations, it would be like something that prevented people from traveling back and forth. Like if you could think of anything,

That would be like at the top of the list. And that's what happened. Well, just like we were saying earlier this morning, it's like you can't learn about people through media. It's like you actually have person to person interaction, which heals in a lot of ways.

Without a doubt. And by the way, I sort of disagree that you can't get to know people unless you meet them, because I actually think what you guys are doing and a lot of the work that I try to do is trying to make some version of that people first engagement without people having to leave their homes. Because the vast majority of Americans don't travel. Only 10% of the Chinese population has a passport.

I mean, outside of Shanghai, there's not that many foreigners. So there isn't like this ambassadorial work happening on the ground level. And a lot of these businesses, I keep thinking about these businesses, because I could bring up a really solid example in a second. Those bridges that they were trying to create are deteriorating. And so-

you know, the reason you'll always get an enthusiastic yes from me when you guys are like, Hey, do you want to do this? I'm like, absolutely. Because the work you guys are the ambassadors. I'm sure that's not what you signed up to be, but it, but it really is the work and it is possible. And so the more that you guys are doing this and, and, you know, cheers to you guys as cheesy as this sounds, but I genuinely think it has fundamental like world peace implications as well as like, it's nice to have a drink and chat. Well, talking about these bridges, Zach, like, um,

Can you give us a brief background of like, what is exactly the work you've been doing and why, what's your role in all this? Well, let me tell you where I'm at now. And then we could sort of build back. Um, first I'm 33. I wrote, get closer to him. I'm 33. I wrote a book called young China and I am quickly becoming not young, which is, um, I am coming to terms with that. Um,

But the book came out when I was about 28. So five years ago, five and change. And I first came to China when I was, I guess, 20 as an exchange student from Columbia. I'm from California. I'm really, this is a little bit asynchronous, so forgive me. And became totally absorbed with what China was, which is sort of silly, but I was a big science fiction fan. And when I was looking at the pamphlets at Columbia University for where you can study abroad,

I was looking at Europe and it kind of looked like a history book, right? Seriously, like the history of politics. I mean, like it's beautiful. And like most of my classmates were doing that. And you kind of get it. Like you take a great art history class, you take a philosophy class, you flirt with Europeans. Like sounds like a great time abroad. And then I saw the pamphlet for the University of Hong Kong. And it looked like the cover of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which would become the movie Blade Runner. Blade Runner.

I'm a massive science fiction fan. And I had been hearing that, hey, like there's a version of the future that is unfolding in Asia. I had never been there. I had taken one semester of Mandarin at Columbia. I hated it. To this day, it's the worst grade I've ever gotten in my life. I have since been able to go back and teach a class as sort of the like, hey, if he can learn it, so can anyone sort of thing. And that allowed me to travel here. I ended up going to Shenzhen a lot with the robotics team and the energy I felt on the ground

Was unlike anything I felt really anywhere else in the world. And then the gap between the perceptions of the place, which is sort of what we were just talking about. The gap between the perceptions of the place and my experience with both young people as well as urbanized people, as well as people outside of the Shanghai bubble. Sorry. It was just the most interesting thing.

sociological, but also just life question I had ever encountered. And so I go back to New York where, you know, we're all poets and philosophers for three years in college, and then everyone becomes consultants and bankers. And I was in a consulting interview and more or less had a breakdown. I'm like, you know, I need to go back to China. It's the most interesting place I'd ever been. And I didn't have a job. I didn't know anybody. My goal was really just to try to get deep.

But the more I dove in and really tried to devise again, back to that mental diet, an ecosystem where sort of all the people around me were, were young Chinese people. Um, I was sort of avoiding the foreigner circles, which can be really sort of suck people in, um,

And so I ended up writing a book called young China. It came out in the United States early 2018, um, did pretty well, which was shocking. Um, I didn't have a platform. I'm not like a New York times person. Um, and I pretty much at the same time started an organization called the young China group.

It's a market insights and management consulting organization really focusing on a people-first approach to China. At first, that was primarily helping people understand the implications of the identity questions of this young generation on the ground for the economy and for politics. Increasingly over these last 18 months, it's become about fostering collaboration between these global organizations that are trying to make it work.

Um, but if you would have told me that I'd be doing this now, when I was 24 and pitching the book, I would have said, you're crazy. Cause I wanted to become a journalist or an academic. And then I talked with journalists and academics and very quickly was persuaded against joining those ranks. How, why? It was a very specific instance. I was speaking at the, um,

at the Foreign Correspondence Club in Hong Kong, which was a huge deal for me. I used to always pass the FCC in Hong Kong as a student there. It's like the Roman columns. It's a storied building, kind of like an old boys club. But there was something quite intellectually seductive about it and undeniable. I remember speaking with, before I was about to talk, with the head of the FCC at the time, and he had had a couple of drinks. And he basically looked me in the eye and said, Zach, like,

Don't go into journalism. There's no dignity in it anymore. And I'm not here to dump on journalists or academics. I think the work that they do is incredible. I think there's some wonderful journalists out there.

But basically, I started to build this vision of, okay, how do I marry the resources of sort of the private market and the business world to do the forward-looking work I'm actually interested in instead of running around on deadlines, trying to beg for institutions for money to do a research project or whatever it was? How could I get ahead of that?

And realizing though, that when the book came out, I wanted to be able to do that, to be able to push it, talk about it, explain it to people, sort of raise the flag a little bit with these ideas that I had been sort of slaving away over for years. I handed in the manuscript December of 20 or probably August of 2017. The day I handed in the manuscript, I went to the bathroom and formed a company, which costs $300 and takes a phone call.

That basically could research the questions I was doing for the book, but research them at a different scale with more resources. And so my goal is over the next three to five years to have the most amount of data, like data, data, not just I've had some conversations.

about what makes for good collaboration between the US and China, at least in the business scape. And then hopefully being able to magnify that for something larger. - Yeah, I think the whole data thing, I was recently watching a talk you did, I don't know, I think it was pretty recently at Harvard. - Yeah, that was like four weeks ago. - Four weeks ago, you were giving a talk at Harvard. Now you're in Shanghai, what a world. But I was really impressed by your talk and also your Ted talk, by the way, which was really good.

It was really great. Is that all related to your book, Yang China? So there is the book and that came out. But then what happens afterwards is there's a distillation that you do when you get asked to talk about the book again and again and again. And it helps me to see, okay, there are actually some distinct themes that are emerging here.

Instead of it being like a snapshot in time, which in some ways it is, it's also the setting of a trajectory. And so when people are talking to me about like Nezha and sort of involution and by land and, and, and lying flat and right. Exactly. It's like, if you've read young China and you're not from China and you're like, Oh, like the defining characteristic of the project of childhood in China is pressure.

Pressured to get ahead in the middle school market, the high school market, the college market, the grad school market, the job market, the marriage market, the real estate market. And then you meet these kids who are like busting their tail to work at Tencent or Pinduoduo and not being, and the money they're getting is not helping them realize those dreams and they're fed up.

Like lying flat to me is the perfect sort of silent protest against that culture of pressure that drives this young generation for so many years. So if you've read that and you have that foundation, it's not a surprise that this generation is reacting this way in the workforce. And so the data...

It helps to set a trajectory and it helps to remind people like, hey, this isn't my opinion. Like, I don't think this young generation is important because I've been here. When you look at the economic and political implications of this young generation, it's easy to argue. It's easy to argue that they are the most important generation in the world, maybe second to those of the United States.

And so when you start from there, it's not like, you know, I don't really like China or it makes me uncomfortable or like our political systems don't get along. Who cares? You need to understand this young generation, not just for business. Business is sort of the easiest thing to point to. But because when you put this economic and political clout hand in hand, what you get is cultural gravity.

And this is sort of a science fiction framing. But the idea is for really since World War II, you could argue, as countries have modernized, they've westernized. And because the economic center of the world was really westernized,

The way that they did business, the way that they dressed, who was advertised to, the way that travel was sold and rooms were designed for which customer, and the way that our political system works. It really revolved around us. And I say this as an American. When you think about the demographics, the economics, and the political implications of this young generation, it's the first Eastern power. You could argue really since like the 1500s, 1600s.

that has the potential to change the way that our world spins. What's more interesting than that? So what are the most pressing concerns or issues you think for this young generation of Chinese? Pressing concerns. Well, there's at this moment and then there's in life, right? At this moment, unemployment and opportunity. I mean, the biggest challenge for young people in a lot of ways is that you have 11 million graduates every year and you don't have a white collar job market that can absorb that level of talent.

And so you get employers who really have their pick of the litter and can treat their employees like crap and push them to the edge, which is why we have so much burnout culture in China. And that was one thing during a bull market. While all these companies were doing well, now there's layoffs. And so when I think about, okay, what does this generation need right now? Jobs, opportunity, the promise that the future is going to be better than the past, which...

In a lot of ways, the core of it has to be an economic one. You're seeing people react to that in really interesting ways. So instead of people being in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, or Beijing, you're starting to see people move to the Chengdus and the Changshas. Exactly. I remember in like a 2015 Qipa Shuo episode. Did you guys ever watch Qipa Shuo?

My favorite show in like the 2013, 14, 15 era, it got kind of worse, but I used to do debate team. And so like, yeah, it's awesome. It's like, you have like people debating really critical, really good, like excellent, especially early on, like the sociological questions they were attacking were awesome. And there was one topic that was kind of innocuous, but it was, would you rather live in a big city in a small apartment or in a small city with a big apartment? The core of which is a lifestyle question. Are you willing to sacrifice some economic upside and like, you know, the

pinning sort of attitude which

putting your life on the line for a job and for your future? Or would you like to have a higher quality of life? You're going to earn less. You're not going to be able to afford quite as many foreign brands, but you're going to be able to chill more and walk your dog. And you're seeing people negotiate those trade-offs now in what I think is a really healthy way. But the opportunity side of it at this particular moment in time to me is what is front and center. You know, it's really interesting. I mentioned this in the previous episode, but after the whole last year,

ordeal that we had to go through. A lot of employees were not fired, but rather they quit. And they quit for the purpose of going back to their 老家.

is because they feel it's not worth it. It's like, I'd rather just go home and just keep it a little more simple for now. And then I'll decide again after another year or two. And I heard that a lot. I mean, is that something that you came across? Oh, without a doubt. I mean, the amount of people we talk to and talk about multi-generations, like China's biggest issue in a lot of ways is the aging of the population, which yes, is an old age issue. It's also a massive youth issue.

the generation who's going to have to support the older generation and their emotional, as well as economic relationship and ability to do that. So in this case, like I talked to the parents who were like, Hey, my 28 year old kid is moving back. And, um, you know, one of the, one of the phenomena we came across a lot is this idea of an apartment slave, like a funnel, like someone who is basically working in a first tier city to pay off a third tier city mortgage comes up all the time. Um, and, um,

a bunch of those kids were just like, why? What am I like? What for, for what? Before when I was in Shenzhen or Shanghai, like I could come like get my fancy coffee or tea drink and like, I can maybe date a little bit and I'd see people in the office and I could see that this life was making my future better. When that window starts to close or when there's less brightness around that future, like,

That bargain, that sacrifice that so many young people are making becomes far more tenuous. Less attractive. Far less attractive. So what is your outlook then on the future here for the younger generation? Is it more pessimistic? Is it more optimistic? It sounds like it might be a little more pessimistic. It's been pessimistic. My question is, well, here's what we need. What we need is an inflection point. What we're hoping for is once the COVID-19

Our decision on the COVID mandate was essentially reversed pretty much overnight, which, you know, mixed reviews on that. But generally, it was the first time that we started to talk with people and hear optimism. It was like, yeah, we're about to go through a pretty shitty two or three months, probably, where everyone's, you know, little sheep running around kind of not feeling so hot.

But then after that, like maybe things can get back to normal. And so what I'm feeling now, and it's different because I obviously haven't been here, but in our work, when we're sort of putting our feelers out, it's clear that people are timidly optimistic. And that's how I feel. I feel like there's an opportunity to make good on the promise of the future.

there's an opportunity start to deliver on growth and opportunity again, saying the word opportunity a lot, it's clearly front of mind. And whether or not that people are gonna deliver on that and whether or not the market is going to rise to that to absorb some of that talent and energy is still a question mark. I'm much more optimistic than I was six months ago when there wasn't an end in sight. And so now what we're basically talking about is the speed, scale and breadth of the recovery, right?

Well, what, what, um, are there any evidence, is there any evidence to support this timid optimism? Like, are there, are there any metrics that we can go by or any data that really kind of support, like maybe confidence is growing, maybe there is going to be more and better opportunities across the board? For sure. So I used to do a lot of work with the, the travel industry, which, um,

in January of 2020 ceased to exist more or less. And what you're starting to see from China, just in terms of outbound interest, you see much more interest than you see product, which is to say that there's a lot of more people who are willing and want to travel than there are flights, or at least flights that are affordable, which is a good sign. You'd much rather have more interest than availability.

The guys over at China Beige Book, Leland Miller, who have very broad and sort of alternative data access. This is the first time I've heard him say anything optimistic like three days ago in like the last two years. And I do not think of Leland as being like a cheery, hey, the world is all sunshine and rainbow sort of guy. There is...

a sizable suggestion that parts of the economy are coming back first. And I think particularly, and this is my concern, is it's the wealthier parts. It's the people who are affected less. I think what the data isn't showing as well, and we sort of feel it, and it sounds like you're hearing it on the ground, Howie, which is that there's people who have sort of removed themselves from the economy, and that's not really showing up on the data tables. It's a hollowing of the middle.

It's that person who had a job, was working for somebody else. Or even by the way, I know a ton of people who raise capital who just like couldn't get a bridge loan and that's the end. You know, like one of my best friends in Chengdu,

their highly valued business is done. It's a tragedy. And so the people who worked for them and then businesses like them, it's not really showing up on the economic Richter scale. Now, these aren't the people who are moving the needle for the luxury houses. And so they don't care anyways. Because when people are talking about consumer China, they're really talking about the top quartile of the population, unless you're looking at Pinduoduo or Alibaba or to a lesser extent, Jingdong.

But when you're thinking about the health of the population, you're talking about the whole population. And even when you're thinking about the population that the government is reacting to, it's those bottom three quartiles as much, if not more than that top quartile. And so it's, it's the middle of China that I'm concerned about. Um, and I haven't seen anything convincing that's like, Hey, people are feeling safer now. Um,

It's still super early. Like these jobs take a while to come back. It takes a while for people to say bye to their parents and head back to the big city or to save enough to do that. And so we're basically looking for the speed of elasticity in people's, you know, the drop to pessimism, the elasticity towards optimism and willingness to go out. There's one thing I will say,

There's no place that changes faster on Earth than China, and there's great data for that. And an ecosystem of rapid change means you have a population who is far more adaptive and adoptive than any other population on Earth, and I believe that to my bones. I have a weird guess. I mean, I have no idea if you have the answer for this, but this is just my own...

the local Chinese community in terms of spending, I would think that they would probably spend less on domestic goods and more

and more on travel, for example, because that probably is more valuable as opposed to, oh, I'm going to start spending on clothes again. I'm going to start spending on, you know what I mean? I don't know if that's a reality or not. Totally a reality. Okay. This is quantifiable. It doesn't really get a lot of attention because it's not about war. It's not, you know, it's like, it's not stuff that makes headlines, but what you see is not all desire is created equally. And the desires that were denied people the last three years are

are very much rising to the surface. Now, like I said before, only 10 or so percent of the population in China has a passport. So it's not like everyone is buckling up and trying to go to Thailand. But there's no doubt in my mind that there is a massive travel wave outside of China that will happen, so outbound from China. The biggest question is when. I'm actually speaking at a global travel conference in Canada mid-May. And the bottom line is this, is there's a ton of interest.

One other problem is with travel is that for global suppliers, so like hotels, cruise ships, et cetera, they haven't rebounded fully. And so they have worse staff or less staff, which often means worse experience. And they're charging one and a half X. So it's a worse experience with more price. And particularly for Chinese travelers, um,

There's a higher expectation on service. You could say Asian travelers because service throughout Asia is so much better. Just as background for that, you know, we're talking about numbers around consumer clout.

In 2019, pre-COVID, China was the largest outbound traveler in the world. And it wasn't even really close. Not even close. Not even close. The crazier part is when you don't look at that as a static number, when you look at it over the last decade, the other top four spenders, France, Germany, UK, and the United States, had grown somewhere between 3% and 36% in their outbound spend, which is to say they'd essentially plateaued. China had grown by 535%.

In that same decade. So it's easier to double small numbers in truth and all fairness, but the number, you know, already larger than that of the United States. And again, only 10% of the population had a passport. That's crazy. 140 million people, 10% doing this crazy outbound travel surge when it's expected to double.

So when people talk to me like, oh, you know, what's the next China? When is India going to happen? And there's a lot of people saying the next China, China is the next China. I think there's a lot of validity to that. But we're still at the beginning of what's possible in the consumer space. And the cascading effects of that are we're still at the beginning of what's possible in China.

the political space and the sort of global influence space as well. This is all to say, there's a very long way of saying, yeah, there's a lot of people who want to travel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's why, because when you were saying the 10% of Chinese, only 10% of Chinese have a passport, it's

It's also a little misleading in a way because it makes you think, oh, probably not a lot of Chinese really traveling. When if you just look at the actual, just the numbers itself, it's massive. Bananas. It's, you know, 140 million would make them one of the largest countries in Europe. Did you ever feel, I mean, I felt this, obviously this is in our own Shanghai bubble, but-

After moving to China, the whole conversation of just traveling abroad or just travel in general is a common conversation. But back in the States, you don't talk about that that much unless you're traveling within domestically, right? It's like, yeah, I'm going to Florida or something like that, you know, or I'm going to LA. Or Cancun or something like that. But in general, like just traveling abroad to Thailand, to Europe, to Australia, to Maldives or, you know, whatever, it's like...

That's a big topic. Everyone's always talking about travel. Huge. And that's something that's just, I realized after moving here. Huge. I think, again, this hierarchy of desire thing, I think about it a lot. Americans, we like to travel, but we like to travel to Tulum when we're like feeling crazy. But no, Cabo or Canada or like- It's like the few- Italy again, which is awesome. And Italy is wonderful. And Cabo is great. But I mean, trying to get at the why for this is really interesting. But within China, there's so much interest in the outside world.

And part of that is, okay, there's a lot of people who've been insulated from that. Here in Shanghai, I used to sort of evaluate the foreignness of a city, which is how many foreigners there are in the city, by how many foreigners there were on a subway car. And I'd get to Shanghai and I'd be like, there's like 12 of us. And I'd be like, what's up, dude? Like there's...

I mean, it's a very, it's not uncommon to see foreigners. In Chengdu, where I was based for a lot of my time, it's pretty common in certain areas. But then like, you know, one city over in a place like Pengzhou, which is a million plus people city, none. And so as the availability of travel gets broader, there's this opportunity to leave and to see a different culture. Remember China's 90% Han Chinese. Like the diaspora is pretty,

sealed to a certain degree. And so there's like this really fresh pre-ironic, which is a way I saw it described in 2014 in an article on why Kobe was so popular in China, which is like, there's this genuine, sincere, untampered with non-jaded appreciation of like, the world is so big. I want to see it for myself, which was, those were the...

There was a teacher who resigned with those 10 characters and it blew up all over the internet, I think like 2017 or something. And like that attitude of just like, gosh, there's so much to explore. China has a very diverse, complicated, but also rich travel terrain. You know, you have Russia, which people aren't obviously going to now. Japan, Korea, the entirety of Southeast Asia, you know,

I mean, these are like phenomenal destinations and they're close. And at the end of the day, people go nearby unless it's one of those once every three years we're going to go see. Because US, you know, left and right, you're surrounded by water. Yeah. There's an upside to that. Defensively. Defensively. Like we have a very chill environment for a variety of reasons. You know, like I said, like China would have a very complex geopolitical environment.

without the United States. Yeah. Right? You have Russia, you have Mongolia, who there's historic beef with. There's Japan, who there's historic beef with. There's Korea, who there's historic beef with. There's Southeast Asia, who there's kind of historic beef with. There's,

India, who there's current beef with and some historic beef with. There's Pakistan, who there's historic beef with India as well as China. It's crazy when you think about it. It's so crazy. It's not a sweet situation to be placed without the United States. On top of the, you know, not to mention all the US military bases that's around. Totally. And so like when THAAD was coming out in South Korea, the missile defense system, it's like you get why China's paranoid.

The flip side of that from a travel point of view is there's a lot of great places to visit. Zach, I was curious. You told us sort of how you got started. And it sounds like your interest in curiosity and culture and that kind of journalistic or academic mindset is still sort of shaping your...

your direction, right? Like that's still driving it, but you're incorporating a business aspect so that you can be independent of this thing. Um, do you, have you sensed any shift? Like, you know, like one day, are we going to expect you to be some mega businessman or are you still using the business opportunity as the way to kind of fund your interest in learning? Um,

I don't ever expect I'll be a big, great business person. And a lot of that has to do with it's just not really where my skill set is. And I know you mentioned that there's a lot of young Chinese people who are listening to this thinking about their own future. Unique ability is basically this idea that you should be doing more of what you're great at and less of what you suck at.

Which in like the, you know, you should be good at everything. And like, you should really work on your weaknesses, which when you're like thinking about the Gaokao, like you need to boost all of your scores. The idea of unique ability is like, hey, like you're probably pretty clear on what you're great at. How do you do less of what you're bad at? And this is still a process, but if I do create a successful business, it will be because I've gotten out of the way of the business and just focused on what I'm great at and let people who can,

who monetize better and who love consulting and love building things. Like I'm in desperate need of a COO and I'm talking with a couple of people about that role just because like, you know, you can't, you can only change yourself so much. And so in a lot of those COO role things, like the best I can be, and I've really tried hard these last bunch of years, is still going to be average by most people's standards. But the other thing that I'm great at, like if you get out of my way, I feel like I could really rip. Yeah. Cal Newport wrote a really good book. So

So good they can't ignore you. And it's really about finding that unique and valuable skill and then surrounding yourself, you know, and complimenting yourself with people that can do the other work. It's also what I think our episode with Matt Beadle. Yeah, Matt Beadle is totally talking about the hidden superpowers. It's kind of exactly what he was talking about as well. Same idea. Like everyone, you know, supposedly, you know, kind of maybe everyone has a superpower, right?

And instead of the habit of just focusing on your weaknesses and like exactly what you said is, even if you spend all day and night trying to work on what you suck at, realistically, you'll probably only have modest returns. Maybe get to average, right? Maybe. But if you can focus on what you're really good at innately,

There's like exponential growth with that. And that's like such a vehicle to take you to much further places than to just bang your head against the wall trying to be average at something. It's so, it's such like, it seems like common sense. Common sense, yeah. It's so difficult to do. But we forget it all the time. We forget it all the time. Because we're so like wrapped up in our own weaknesses and shortcomings, right? Because like that's what we think gets pointed out like it's most glaring to other people when maybe that's really not the case. Well, and I,

And I think there's nuances to this as well, right? When you think about your superpower, it's not like some lower level skill, right? It's usually kind of an integration of different skills and to identify that. But there are basic things like reading and writing and communicating and all that stuff that you're constantly growing. And we do have a lot of limiting beliefs. Without a doubt. And I would say that it's hard to turn the corner

I spoke at Harvard like four weeks ago to the Fairbank Center. They paid for my expenses, but it wasn't like a paid speech. It was like something I've dreamt about doing. I am a kid.

for whom the name brand Harvard still means something. My parents took the poster. Well, no, I took the poster from the event, brought it home to my parents and they were like, shucks. Like it's a moment. Like it's hard to- As good as a diploma. Like honestly, it's like, it's, you know, when my parents are upset about me being in China, I'm like, you know. But even while I was there at Harvard, the place with the best endowment in the world and the most, you know, it's where all academics are trying to be.

I was there for three days. I saw, by the way, some of the most incredible speakers in those three days. Like the amount of people that they can attract is just wild. What was the theme of the conference? So this wasn't a conference. It was an event organized around me in this particular instance, but they do this all the time. It wasn't like once a year. I've spoken, you know, I did that for UCLA and that was really cool, but Harvard just brings people in all the time.

Like they have the resources and they also have the name. Like Harvard can send you a text and be like, yo, what are you up to later? You're going to be like, I am free. Yeah. And so I, I, I go and, but even in that period of time, I was talking with a lot of the academics there and they were, can I bitching? Can I say, they were whinging about like, Hey, I have trouble getting funding for things. And Ooh, like the PhD students there were like, Oh, like I hope I can get a job. And like,

Stuff that you know about academia everywhere, but you kind of think that people at Harvard are like, you know, I've made it. They haven't. And the amount of people who are going on the academic track are like fighting and clawing for space, for oxygen, for a spot somewhere. And so there's immense competition for few places. And truthfully, again, thinking about my own decisions here,

I just didn't want to compete in that. Like I was like, for what? Like, what are we competing for? What's the best scenario? I felt this way, by the way, in China as well. When I was looking around at like the jobs that I could get before I decided to write the book. And I was looking at all of the people and kind of looking for like someone to look up to, looking for a model that I could copy and be like, oh, that's the best version of that. I'm going to shoot for that. I looked around and didn't see anyone that I wanted to be.

And again, it's not the best business. I don't have the best business in a lot of ways, but it's sustainable. So getting back to your point before earlier, Eric, like if you have a dream, you can, you could fuel it on like spit and sweat and like go get a matitude for a while, but then you need to make it sustainable. And sustainable could be, God, when I was in Chengdu,

My first couple of years in China, I made $10,000 a year, which my friends back in the United States were like, but I was like one of the better off of my friends in the hostel in China. I was like, I'm doing just fine. And then when I, when I first got the book deal, I made $25,000. I thought they were going to give that to me all at once. And so I'm like, I am the richest person I know.

And so like hot pot was on me for like a month. Like I was like, cause people had also taken such good care of me. Like when you're in like that kind of like hosteler on the road, backpacker community, like the amount of like Chinese friends I had who had like looked after me, who had my back when I like didn't have enough, you know, it was just, so I became that guy for a little bit. So if like the nut you have to crack is like, and this is all by the way, why I feel like I can be a little bolder in business is like, I know that I could be fine in Chengdu on $30,000 a year. Um,

I just know it. Like in the back of my head, I'm like, I was happy then too. And I have a wife now and there's a different threshold. And like, you know, she has her like aunts and uncles who are like, hey, like an apartment is what we expect. I'm like, okay. So there's different pressures now, but-

making your dream sustainable and deciding what sustainable is should be a base. And then once you get to that base and you typically have to be reactive to what the market is asking for to get to that base, once you get to that base, you can then be intentional. Like, what do I actually want to build? And is there a market for this? And will people start to like pay me to keep living my dream? Because otherwise you have to get a job and there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, I'm married now. And so that like,

$20,000 dream in Chengdu is like, okay, like maybe, maybe like 40 would be like, you know, my backup plan is different now. Wait till you have kids. Yeah. Well, so there's this crazy thing, you know, I sort of joked about this before, but I'm not young anymore. I'm I, this is like my last year or two, according to Pew youth ends at 35. And, um, we're actually, so one of the other things that I'm doing, I'm trying to fund a 20 country study right now on youth.

So comparing cohort to cohort, US and China, which I do a fair amount of my work, but India, Nigeria, Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam. Well, what about the youth are you trying to study? So there's a variety of different

things that we're approaching in this. And trying to do a global study, by the way, is extraordinarily difficult. With scale, you sacrifice nuance to a certain extent, but it's a mix between quantitative and qualitative. Qualitative first, subject matter expert interviews in all of these countries. And then this massive quantitative approach, we're working with a global partner on this. And we're asking a variety of questions, getting at the pillars of youth in each of these places. Identity.

priorities, family, wealth, trust. And one question, by the way, is just like, when does youth start and stop? In the United States and in China to a certain degree, I mean, this whole like pushback on Xiongnu, on leftover women concept, and like, I don't want to buy an apartment now, or like, it's this renegotiation of life stages.

And so when youth starts and stops in Nigeria versus the United States versus China versus India is a fundamental question towards what your priorities are at whatever life stage. People often conflate the idea of generations and life stage. Life stage changes as you grow older. Generations never change. You're always part of the same generation as you age.

And so as I, you know, the weird thing is I started to get to be asked to speak kind of all over the world. In 2019, I was on five different continents. I was doing about 20 a year. And everywhere I went, people would ask me, how do young people in China compare to

X compared to young people in Egypt, compared to young people in South Africa, compared to young people in Saudi, compared to young people in the UK. And a lot of the time it was like, I don't know. Like, I don't know. I'm not like, this isn't what I'm, I am not an expert on UK youth, but we created a framework. And I wrote an HBR article about this, Harvard Business View. I still do write a little bit, but I was like, hey, as interesting as this is to do theoretically, I want to do it with data. And so this is a great example of how like

There's a business around this and like there's certainly consulting implications and we're getting sponsors for it. I'm not footing the bill. It's over a million dollars to do something like this. It's not like, hey, I'll just like- It's not a smaller deal. No, it's not a smaller deal at all, but it could be immensely valuable to companies who have global vision. And God damn, is there a more interesting thing to try to peel into? Well, when will this study be done? The goal would be to do the data collection in January of 2024. Okay.

I mean, I'm sure you're pretty burnt out about talking about young China, but there was one thing that I got from your talk that I want to hear from you again that really stood out to me and I found was really profound and was really about the mindset of the Chinese youth. And you were using data to articulate...

just the amount of change that has actually happened and put it into perspective by comparing it to the United States and other countries in terms of per capita GDP and all these things. And you were tying it and negotiating it with like the psychology that a person or a generation of people go through when they experience such drastic change, which is unprecedented before China.

Can you kind of go through that whole spiel again? Because I would love to hear it from you and just get more out of it. So I mentioned before that there are two phases to writing a book. There's writing it, then there's distilling it. And this question of what makes Young China different than anywhere is something that nagged at me. And I tried to answer it in creative ways and with stories, but...

it just felt anecdotal. It was like, oh, they use phones. Our kids use phones too. And like, they like punk music now. Like our kids, you know, it's, the buzzwords are actually really similar from generation to generation. And like, it looks like it's getting more similar and it definitely is. But, but it was an unsatisfying conclusion to me.

And this idea of the pace of change, everyone knows China speed, right? And if you guys do any editing here, you should throw up that like picture of the Bund in 1990 versus 2015. And it was basically like China in like the 1500s versus, I mean, like 18, 1900s versus like this futuristic Jetson city. And so we think about China speed, we typically think about buildings, right?

Right? There's that phenomenal statistic. We talk about the hardware. Yeah. Like between 2011 and 2014, China poured more concrete than the United States did in the 20th century. That's phenomenal, but that's not about people. And so I created something called the Lived Change Index, which is what you're referencing, Justin. Yeah. Which was trying to contextualize the amount of change people have lived through in their lifetime. And so I was born in 1990 in Northern California.

From 1990 to, I think it's 2022, the amount that my per capita GDP in my country, which is sort of the best metric we have for measuring the quality of life. It's not perfect because it doesn't capture wealth inequality, but when you're comparing global cohorts, it's pretty good. The amount of the per capita GDP in the United States has increased over that 32 year period is 2.5X. So imagine that in really concrete terms.

The trips we could take as a family, two and a half times longer. The education my family could afford for me, maybe two and a half times better over a lifetime. The hedges on my neighbor's yard, two and a half times higher. Like even like comically, think about it in real terms, two and a half times better in a lifetime. My friends born in China in the post-90s generation, so 1990, in their lifetime, they've watched their per capita GDP increase 33 times. That's crazy. Two and a half X, 33 X.

Maybe it's just a developing country thing, right? What about India? The other demographic giant of the world. There's that. It's the only place on earth with more young people than China. The two of course stand apart from the rest of the world by like miles and miles. Um, in their lifetime, 1990 to say young Indians have, have lived through six X per capita GDP. Um, Brazil, I think it's 2.9, uh, you know, a bricks nation, uh, Germany, uh, 1.9. Um,

If you look at the top 40 economies today and you look at this lived change index, the amount of change they've lived through in the last 30, 32 years, every country is under 10X. All single digits. All single digits. And so there's only one outlier, which is China.

And so when people ask me, hey, what's the one thing? Everyone does this. Like, hey, you wrote, you've devoted years of your life to researching this. You wrote a book about it. You've probably discarded hundreds of pages in research. What's like the one thing though, if you have two minutes? And the psychology of China speed is my answer.

It's one thing to look at buildings. It's another thing to think about the implications of living through all that change. Growing up in a poor country, $300 per capita GDP in 1990, give or take, and living through what's probably the most incredible Cinderella story in modern economics. It just is. This isn't a political statement. But watching your village turn into a town, turn into a city.

watching your uncle be proud to wheel a bicycle home and now having a two-car garage, maybe, or at least aiming in that direction, seeing McDonald's being like this massive breakthrough and remembering the first time you had mashed potatoes at KFC back in like 1993 when they first opened and they give you diarrhea because you weren't used to dairy if you're from the South, to suddenly every major luxury house has a crack China team and wants to know you.

living through that change and what it does to your worldview. Yeah. Your sense of self. Your expectation. Your expectations, your attitudes towards government, towards money. Well, what does it do to your worldview and expectations? Defines it. And so if you look at travel, if you look at government, if you look at the job market, like from, the implications are cascading, but the answer is that it defines it. And so

you really have to break it out. In terms of expectations towards growth, you expect to grow at a rate that's different than anywhere else in the world. Or unsustainable though, right? Totally. And even when I talk about, the subtitle is the restless generation, right? They're not the optimistic generation. Everyone always tries to sort of corner me like, oh, you're the optimistic China youth guy. I'm like,

No, I'm not. And like a lot of like the LinkedIn folks will reach out to me and be like, so optimistic about the future. I'm like, that's nope. That's not what I talk about. Um, I'm, there are elements of optimism undoubtedly, and certainly massive opportunity, but the restless generation feels that the best growth is probably behind them. And, and the era of like, of gold rush in China is done. And the competition to get ahead is so fierce. Yeah.

that giving up for millions of people is an option and then competing at a higher level for another bunch of millions is also an option. But it's not just like unfettered optimism. In 1990, the average premarital sex rates were like 17%. It was sort of equated with sin at the time, even though China doesn't have religion in quite the same way. It was faux pas.

Now it's 90% people are having sex before marriage. So it's not just tech, it's social values. People used to, you know, China used to be 70% rural. And I think it was 1990. Now that's inverted as well. Like top to bottom, you know, it's easier to look at the marketplace and be like, hey, these numbers, you've seen a real change. But like social values have changed at the same exact speed. So if you went like, if you went back to 1990, right? And I think that's a really good reference point.

like no one would have been able to imagine like what's happened in the last 30 something years has just been you know to use a overly used word is unprecedented but like really like i mean it's pretty crazy right

So let's move like another 30 years into the future, right? And you mentioned a couple of things, like now expectations are sky high, like we're not gonna increase another 33 times, right? And then everyone's mood and sentiment is completely based on that expectation because they had nothing before and then increased 33 times, right? So now it's like, if it doesn't go up X number of times, people are gonna like, you know,

not do certain things at the same time because of the china speed you've said that like people here are more adaptable than anywhere else in the world so that's an advantage right that's like a muscle memory that a lot of people do have here you know sort of already so if you combine everything together like what's your prediction in like the next 30 years like what's actually going to happen like i'm really curious you love science fiction you know let's write your next novel

This is going to sound silly in light of the amount of things that I've said I'm doing recently. I have a book idea, China 2035, the 10 questions that will define China's next decade.

The important part here is that people are so myopic when they look at China. They're so short-sighted that we haven't, A, we don't know what's really important. People don't know what the right questions to ask are. This was a big learning from traveling around and getting to talk about this. The questions, Q&A is my favorite part. The questions people ask me, they're like, didn't really know what to ask. So they would just ask about government because that's what's in the news all the time. And so helping to create a framework to help people think about the next 10 years for China is

And then this is the important part. What does success mean for the country? I'll give you an example. The GDP could double and the per capita GDP would be around 22, 23, $24,000. So poor by not poor, but like lower middle-class people,

Compared to the United States, Japan, like the GDP giants, per capita GDP giants of the world, people who have large output, the people are relatively rich. It's falling into the middle income trap, right? Growing old before you become rich, which is likely in China, truthfully. However-

If the GDP doubles, it would be far and away the largest producer in the world. And the economic and political implications of that would be that China would be the number one undisputed hegemonic world power. And so what we haven't done a good job of is define success in a way that is off the impulse to parallel that of the United States and the dominant sort of hegemonic world center right now.

What does success mean for China different than what it has meant for the US over the last 70 years? And in that definition, my hope and my expectation is that there's space in between what the US identifies as what will make it successful versus what is identified for China as what will make it successful.

Because the most interesting conversation I've had in the last five years is with Obama's nuclear guy, kind of by accident, longer story. But basically he was talking about like, and this is something that's become more popular over the last few years, but what global leadership looks like for China is different than what global leadership has meant for the United States. Different how? Yeah.

Well, it's a bit of a question mark. This is sort of what we're trying to figure out. But historically, China is an expansionary. That's, by the way, different now because it used to be that China could be self-sufficient. That's done now. One of my favorite articles written by The Economist was called The Empire of the Pig.

It was about when China started importing pork because China's caloric intake has doubled since 1970. Not a surprise. But they have 20% of the world's population and 10% of the world's arable land, which, you know, when you do the math, makes it difficult. And so they have to import food from around the world. That's a dependency.

And so there need to be expansionary. And if you look at the Belt and Road, like all of the language around this is not like, hey, we're doing this to like bring the Chinese system to your country. And like, we think ours is better. We're not proselytizing. They're like, hey, we are building this explicitly to help ourselves.

There's no mincing of words if you look at the Chinese transcripts of like, why are we doing this? We're doing this so that we can secure dependencies and diversify our basket of dependencies around the world. And we want to make it really good for you so you're incentivized to keep part of it. And that sounds like Europe. I mean, like 500 years ago, right? Like they went out there. They weren't like trying to like

They did kill a lot of people. They were colonizing all over. The religious acts. Once you bring religion into it. But they were trying to find stuff, get stuff. Totally. You look at your spice rack right now and 1,500 in Europe, you'd be the coolest guy in the world. You would have won. You would have been it. You would have been like, hey, I'm trying to go to that house. Exactly. You are the wealthiest man in the world. To go back to this, you went to...

Colombia and I imagine like a lot of people you know who went to go to Colombia like come from wealthy families and all that stuff right but you got to a point where you could live on like 10 20k a year and you were happy right and um so it's all like sort of relative and so like like every single person that lives here like has you know this this particular psychology about money that then collectively becomes a national psyche and so like

In 10 years, if the GDP does double, right? Like you're part of a winning team, et cetera, et cetera. Like your expectations and what hope that brings you has to be defined very uniquely. Happiness is the fulfillment of expectations. And so the most important life skill or country management skill becomes defining expectations for yourself and for the people.

And what I love so much that I see right now on the ground in China is a willingness. And it's not like a willingness, like a nice to have, it's a need to have. It's a pushback on the expectations that would limit young people's happiness. The feeling that I have to be putting my, you know, the attitude of

There's tons of people for whom that is still the reality, which is great. People are like, oh, like, you know, lying flat. Like, are people like done working hard in China? I'm like, some people are, but there's more than enough to populate the sort of the working ranks and the entrepreneurial ranks of the country when people feel confident enough to do that again. But there's this redefinition of what a good life means, right?

The older generation in China, and I talk about this in some of my talks, is sort of 吃苦的一代, right? The whole eat bitter idea. Eat bitter means delayed gratification. I am working hard now for a better life later. And it's not I'm working hard now for a better life in six months, five years, 10 years, 20 years. For the next generation, I'm busting my tail so that my kids could have a better life. The thing is, the next generation has sort of arrived and they want their better life now.

And so there's like, 活在当下, there's like live in the moment sentiment in Chengdu at CCYD, the place where I live for a lot. It's closed now, unfortunately. We would say, you know, over 烤鱼, 今朝有酒,今朝醉. It means today we have booze. So today we'll get drunk. We'll enjoy what we have now.

And that's an approach towards life that creates space for, hey, maybe I don't need to have an apartment. Maybe I can just rent. Or maybe I don't need to be in Shenzhen. Maybe I can go to Chengdu or Changsha or wherever. And maybe like a good life means something different than what my parents think, which is just sort of money at all costs and progress at all costs.

Like people, there's a point that I sometimes make, which is that China does not have generation gaps like we have in the US. They have generation gulfs because of that pace of change, the distance between generations. I mean, people's grandparents, if they have living grandparents, have survived a famine that took lives of tens of millions of people. They remember hunger, which is in part why like the whole Shanghai lockdowns triggered something different in the older generations in particular, but there's also intergenerational memory of that. Well, and-

It's totally understandable because my parents are like that, right? I mean, a lot of people, it's not just people in China. It's like the people that are from this part of the world and then they go somewhere else. It's the trauma.

It's completely defined by the trauma of growing up in that environment and the fear. And like the fear is like driving everything. It's like people who grew up in the great depression. If you look at like, you know, how like investment behavior, like Morgan Housel wrote a great book a few years ago, the psychology of money. And he's like, no one's crazy. Right. But like,

People of the Great Depression generation, they would never put their money in the stock market, whereas people that were born after that invested all their money and all they've seen is this trajectory. And so the trajectory, the expectations, those are trajectory and expectations are sort of very, very related. But the trauma of where you came from completely- Your lived experience. Yeah, your lived experience. And that's all you know.

Like our parents' generation, or at least mine, and probably, you know, some of you, was defined by that, right? And then they've worked their whole life, right? But we don't have that necessarily that same type of fear. Well, I also think there's a connection because talking about like past traumas and like a lot of historical events also create stereotypes, right? And there was one thing you also said was like the whole thing about China's speed is that stereotypes get outdated really quickly, right?

And we don't always think about or contextualize that because at least growing up from the States, right, we see time moving at a certain pace. We see development moving at a certain pace and we think, okay, well, that's just the way things are and probably other countries are either as fast or maybe slower, right?

But we don't contextualize it in terms of China's speed, in terms of how fast things have changed. Therefore, as things change, all the old stereotypes or old preconceptions that were true at one point are completely untrue now. This is a really important thing about the last three years.

And, and that live change index, when I bring it to headquarters in other places, or when people read it, there's a couple of things that they realize, like from the United States, again, you, you can sort of, if you've not been to Helsinki in five years, you look at the pace of change and like, okay, it's kind of changed at the same pace as where I'm from. I can kind of guess if I know if I have a couple of clues, like in which direction it's developed. Um,

And for most places around the world, that's the case. But when they look at that, they're like, oh gosh, like the speed at which these stereotypes, these trends, these expectations get outmoded in China is so much faster that we are ill-equipped to understand it. I just can't help but think back to around 2010. I remember having a deep conversation with a friend who was visiting and

And we're talking about how the hardware of the country is getting upgraded like super quickly, right? Buildings going up, roads getting fixed, all that stuff, right? But the software, meaning society, the people are still, you know, running OS 9, you know, whatever, right? And it's like, oh, until the software catches up to the hardware, you're not going to really reap the benefits of all this stuff.

you know, mass transformation. Now, you look at it now, I mean, 10 years, 13 years later, you see the software upgrade. Like, we're living through this era and time where you see people, like, society's changing behavior drastically.

By the way, Howie has been going down an AI rabbit hole for weeks now. I welcome it. I'm ready for it. Yeah. I'm not going to put my foot there. But I'm just saying, it's just like from waiting in line or even the way taxis are driving.

We literally live through that change of behavior. Now, go back to like America, like living in America. Do you see behavioral change like that like happen? No, because life is static, right? It's not growing exponentially like we've been saying in China. So it's just so obvious when you're living here and you – at least when you reflect –

It becomes so obvious and incredible, that energy that you're talking about. It's like, I think what we're trying to do on this show is to take the labels off and say, it doesn't matter if it's China, like let's change the names, China, US, like let's jumble up all the names. Would we still come to the same conclusions if all the names were different? And I think the India comparison is really rich here because India is the world's largest democracy. Now the-

efficacy of the democracy. There's a lot of question marks there. And all of the best India experts I know from India raise their eyebrows when India is described as a pure democracy. But that's an asterisk. There's this inclination around the world to look at India with a level of optimism that is only counterbalanced by the inclination to look at China with a level of pessimism.

And I always think whenever I talk with, when I get invited to speak, there's often India folks as well. The India and China are sort of grouped together. There's this optimism around India being the next China, despite them having, you know, one fifth of the purchasing power and, and a lot of that infrastructure stuff. Because in 1993, India's per capita GDP was higher than that of, than that of China's 1993. And since then China has developed exponentially or again, country A has developed exponentially and country B has not.

Still incredible, by the way, but linearly. And there's this sort of home team lens that we take to India because they're a democracy. They speak our language. There's a lot of Indian executives in Silicon Valley and especially, and like that's gotten a lot of attention deservedly.

And then, but there's this impulse in China to have a negative tint on it. I think of it as like a Rocky IV sort of, like it's like a communist hangover. Totally. We must win over communism. Good guys, bad guys. It's a McCarthy hangover. It's a knee-jerk reaction. And it's not to say that everything's good and everything's bad in one place, but this ability to take off the label-

And to see a place without bias, at least when you're thinking about part of it, when you start to think about the politics of it, that's obviously that, you know, that deserves labels to a certain extent, but everything else, I think... It'll help. It'll help tremendously, right? I mean, we're still in two very different systems with different values, and I think we can't get around that. You know, and like, you know, whatever India is... I mean, we're taking... And the other piece about labels...

beyond just the biases that they're just like, they're radical oversimplifications, right? Calling something a democracy or calling it capitalistic or whatever, whatever you want to name it, calling Justin, Justin or Eric, Eric, like it doesn't mean anything. Eric with an A is pretty specific. But naming something. Yes. I love that. Zach with a one K. Naming something is,

And describing it are two completely different exercises. Communism is a great example of this. And like the idea that everything that's labeled communist, looks, smells, acts, behaves similar to the way that, you know, when the US was fighting communism and like that was it, communism, is ridiculous. And particularly when people are thinking about China, and obviously we're at a moment where the government's more foregrounded, communist as a label was more...

than clarifying in many ways. - Yeah, and how you evaluate effectiveness, right? I mean, in one way we're trying to put a lens on, we're trying to predict the future and it's not based on the label. Because you have a democracy, whatever the label is, doesn't translate to are you gonna be successful? It's the actual factors inside.

I mean, in the soundbite kind of world that we live in, we just want to then just take labels and like a mathematical equation, right? A plus B equals C. And it's just not an effect. Well, we want intellectual shortcuts. We want intellectual shortcuts. Because we want to spend the brainpower that you think about. We want to literally have a mathematical equation that says, okay, you know, C plus... Yeah.

communism plus blah, blah, blah equals this. And that's just, it's not like effective. No. And I'd go a step further and think it's like the Marvelification or the Disneyification or this idea that something can be good full stop or bad full stop. And I brought up

Rocky IV, but like any Stallone movie really, which is where you have good guys and bad guys and the bad guys have heavy accents and are communists and like without fail. And I think we underappreciate how

you know, the Hollywoodification as we're thinking of other- - Well, that's their propaganda. - Yeah, and it's effective. And like, I think as Americans, one of the things I always worry about is there's this thing that happens in the end of all those movies, which is that we win. We win kind of no matter what. And like, it's 'cause we're spunky and like, and overcome the odds and like, ooh, we run up those stairs and like, won't give up. - Well, it would defeat the purpose of the film if the Americans didn't win at the end. - It wouldn't sell very well.

But that's also not how life works. And so my concern, again, one of those weird things that happens when you get to talk and plug into a group for an hour around the world is you can tell, I can tell which places have

a stronger embedded belief that like democracy, heavy on the label, will win no matter what. It's dogma. It's totally dogma. Well, it's religion really at this point. There's a certain amount of like this religion of freedom. And by the way, there's nothing wrong with that. I think there's a lot of great things about it.

Let this not be the soundbite. There's a million great things about freedom. Religion sucks. I'm with religion. I'm with freedom. Actually, one of the points I wanted to make earlier was how like it's interesting how Buddhism is being reintroduced in China as like this method for dealing with consumption and like not really, you know, and redefining happiness for what has been a very consumer-driven, goal-oriented society for the last 20 years. On the, I always ask people, which freedoms are the most important?

And there's some clear answers to that. Like, cause there's this thing in like American political debates. It's like where a politician makes a really good point and the other politician says like, well, yeah, have you considered freedom though? And the guy's like, oh, it's a great, oh, I hadn't considered, like it ends debates no matter what. It's a nuclear bomb. It really is. It's like, hey, that's a great perspective that you put out, but it's not a freedom oriented perspective. There's freedoms that matter and are critical to quality of life and people being happy. And there's freedoms that matter less.

And particularly like voting, for instance, is a great example. Half of Americans don't do it. And you could argue that they have the freedom not to do it. And that's the wonderful bit. But there aren't like a lot of young people in China looking in that being like, oh, yeah, that would really make me happy. I wish I had that. Yeah. Like that. That's the thing that would make this life better. Yeah.

No, but there are certain freedoms that are massively important. And so the point being that there isn't one system that unconditionally gives those. There isn't one system that unconditionally denies those and recognizing outside of the labels, hey, what's the crux of a happy life?

What's the crux of good governance? Where are the areas that people are willing to compromise? Where are they not? How is that changing over time from generation to generation? And then evaluating systems based on that versus, hey, and 300 years ago, we wrote down these ideas and they're kind of being maintained or not. Through all the interactions you've had, Zach, what are most Chinese youth thinking?

saying is a successful life or a happy life or a free life? How do they define that? Excellent question. Freedom was a word I encountered all of the time. I actually think this might be how I started the Harvard talk.

The focus of the Harvard talk or like the headline was what do Chinese youth want, which is like as a white Californian not from China, it's like that's a lot to try to – I mean – Yeah, take it from me. Take it from me. I know. But the thing that comes up in the research and these conversations and like –

The word freedom comes up all the time. Or are they saying 自由? 自由. Independence. I've seen it like tattooed on people's arm. I've seen it. There's one person who I'll always remember who had it written on their ceiling. And so it was the first thing they saw every morning. It was the last thing they saw every night. Freedom. And it's really around the country. It's not unique to Shanghai or like around the country, but different than Western expectations where freedom is so politicized that

The freedom that Westerners often expect, and I say Westerners sort of writ large, is freedom from an oppressive and restrictive government. That's the expectation consistently. The freedom that I hear people want much more consistently, and this isn't to say everyone, and there's certain people who want different things, but-

What I hear most consistently is freedom from an impressive and restrictive set of expectations. Yes. We talked about that competition. Yes. We talked about the expectations around owning an apartment. We talked around- Societal freedom. What defines success? And what's interesting about China that's different than other places is because so much of the culture is quite social and community oriented and relatively mono-ethnic.

The definitions of success and the comparative element around it means that there's this feeling amongst young people that there's a narrow path that they can trod, which will make their parents proud of them and make their community proud. AKA a narrow definition of success. Exactly. Exactly.

Even at this Harvard thing, so one of the cool things we did at the talk was I'm like, all right, I want to have a panel of students there. I don't want this just to be me. I'm not a professor. And so we had five or six young Chinese students who were studying abroad at Harvard, sort of like at the top of the mountain, by the way. There's nothing that can make a parent prouder than their kid being at Harvard. You talk about social capital back home, it's like, oh, your kid's at like...

You know, Beida, that's cool. You've heard of Harvard. Like you've, you've heard of Harvard. Just a little school called Harvard. Yeah. And I don't want to undermine, like, like, like Tsinghua and Beida have done so much better in the last decade. So I don't want to undermine that at all. But these were kids who were like talking about, you know, the first question I asked them was first, how do your parents define success or what, what's their dream for you? And second, what, how does that compare to what your dream is for yourself? And, and,

One of the things that came up after the conversation on stage was that at Harvard, there's all these students who have their own sort of WeChat circle or WeChat group. And then there's the parents who also had like parents of Harvard WeChat group. And they talk about getting meals together when they come visit and they talk about, okay, like which flights are the best to fly from Beijing. But what they also do every May-ish is they talk about the very specific job offers that their children get.

My kid got $180,000 offer from McKinsey. My kid is going to do a PhD thing. My kid is, I mean, it's like, it's comparative jockeying at such a high and direct level. I mean, you guys have lived in China a long time. People would be like, hey, what's your name? Where are you from? How much do you make? How much to make? People are very open with that. And so there's these young kids who like, they define success for them in a way that has more to do with social impact, fulfilling my dreams. But they're also dealing with the sense of pressure

That is not just from their parents. It feels like hermetically sealed within their culture. That is very success-driven and with a very narrow definition of success, which is financial and institutional. And what you're kind of pointing out there on this topic of expectations is that there are probably quite a large number of Chinese youth

that have their expectations either directly or indirectly defined by their parents. - Eric, your mom needs to be here actually for this conversation. - And think about expectations, right? Expectations are super duper important because

you know, there's that side of building pressure, but the positive side of no one ever had any expectations. Like we'd still be like in caves. Right. And so it pushes us to, you know, to be better. But when I was a kid, I mean, as early as I could possibly remember, my mom,

said exactly what you just said. It's like, you know, so-and-so's kid just got accepted to Harvard. I'm like, dude, I'm like in elementary school. - Yeah, beer ends at a high, right? - And then it was like, oh, and then- - It's always a comparison. - And there was this ladder that you were saying, 'cause like this incredible crucible of pressure, right, to get into the best kindergarten so you can get into the best grade school. And it's like step by step by step, like when does it ever end? You know, then you get a job, then you gotta have kids. And it's just like, yeah, okay, I'm gonna get the best grave. You know, it's crazy.

I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of like how success is being redefined. My father-in-law got me this. So I have an interesting relationship with my parents-in-law, my new parents. And it's basically their daughter who had studied abroad in the US and lived in the US for like seven, eight years. She hadn't seen them for seven years before we just came back. Wow. Seven years. Mm-hmm.

So at first they were going to like really grill me. They're like, who's this white dude who like speaks Chinese? Is he a spy? And like it wasn't their dream. And like Fei Fei, my wife, has always done things a little bit differently. She like definitely hasn't made things. She has not followed their narrow definition of success, but they've also been really encouraging of her. She had a major medical crisis before.

during COVID. It wasn't COVID related, but it was compounded by medical availability. We were in Mexico. We were there because I couldn't get back to China and she couldn't stay in the US. We weren't married at the time. And so she was in a medical coma for 21 days. - What? - Oh. - Like which on the 22nd day is where your brain starts to get, like it was life or death.

I can talk about it now without breaking down because she's here and she, you know, I had- Is she like recovered? Fully recovered. She's got some nasty scars for it, but she's a total fighter and trooper. Let's cheers for that first. Yeah, honestly, to health, y'all, especially after the last bunch of years, like I cannot tell you how much it has shifted my perspective. And so she's wonderful and amazing. And we like, you know, we had Shengjian Bao before coming here. So she's chilling. Her parents-

Like their whole rigmarole that they were going to put me through to be like, how much does he love my daughter? Done. Gone. I mean, we were talking twice a day. They're quite Buddhist, which is sort of where I was, you know, these are, you know, the idea of like Kai Guang, like when you have something like this in Kai Guang, it's like. Well, for listeners, you're wearing a bracelet of beads, right? And so, and these are from Hainan. They're very special. And so for something to be, go through the process of Kai Guang, it means like opening the light, essentially. You'll have Buddhist monks wearing,

Like blessing. Blessing it essentially. And so when I arrived, they gave me this. And like, if it weren't for her mother's belief in Buddhism, I mean, can you imagine your daughter, your only daughter is sick and almost dying in a hospital in Mexico with some...

Jewish American dude who's like responsible for getting the doc. Like, you know, we, I was through the trap. I mean, I've been talking a lot about virtuoso today, but through the travel community, I was able to get surgeons to travel two hours, both ways to like better than what we were able to get there. And if it weren't for that, and if it weren't for their belief, then they,

I mean, they themselves might not have survived it. And I mean that without any exaggeration. Yeah. Wait, so you were getting surgeons to travel back and forth between the states? From Tijuana. And Tijuana is not exactly where you think you would want to get your surgeons from. So we were in a place called Ensenada. We were there because Fei Fei was trying to get her visa to the United States again. She got denied. And then weeks later, she...

we have this medical thing that seemed really innocuous. It's 60% fatal. It's called descending necrotizing mediastinitis. There's no Wikipedia page for it, which is why it's often so fatal is because it goes seriously underdiagnosed. Basically an infection that in this case, it spread from her tooth all over her body metastasized in a way that's similar to cancer, but it's not, it's not the same. And, and Sonata does not have people who have encountered this before. And, and,

Without getting too into it, because it's still very difficult for me to talk about, but we were able to get surgeons who had trained in the United States to come from Tijuana. And she had eight surgeries over the course of these 21 days. This is all to say that the role of spirituality in China, I feel like there's space for it now in a way that's different. I've seen it in my personal life, but-

The reintroduction of faith and the recognition that what makes a life good is different than just that narrow definition of success, I feel like is being renegotiated right now. COVID has reintroduced it. But I even remember in 2019 being on the train from Beijing to Shanghai and Da Dao had postered everywhere a course on how to be happy without money.

And like that, I mean, with that level of sponsorship, like with that level of plastering everywhere, I assumed it had some government backing. And it's this massively important question that people are asking and answering.

Because the success of China today is really a credit to some people getting rich first, like what Deng was talking about in 93. And what that means though, is that some people have won the race and some people have lost it or are losing it or have fallen short or will never be winners. And when that's hundreds of millions of people figuring out how to define expectations in a way where you can go home at night and be like, you know, I am happy or this is what I want.

Or this is, I'm not a failure. And what we know, like if you've made any money, you know that it doesn't like, you don't wake up and like, you know, you're not, you're not, it doesn't, it doesn't equate to happiness. Problems don't go away. What you have right now is a country as growth slows, who is redefining success and diversifying it. It's the space to define success for yourself.

It's the space to not be pressured by, what is it? It's the chorus of aunts and aunties who are asking you when you're going to get married, how much do you make? Where's your apartment? When are you going to get married? How much do you make? Where's your apartment? It's to be able to separate from that and be like, you know what? This is what success means for me. There's a group of people who agree. It's not everyone.

But happiness is possible without just busting my ass at Tencent for an apartment in a second or third tier city and maybe a lack of clarity about what a good life means after that. Because this is kind of one of the weird things about youth and these milestones, middle school, high school, college, real estate market, marriage market, those kind of are done at 30. Yeah.

Like if you look at the milestones for a life in China, ideally they happen before 30 and that's being renegotiated right now because that's ridiculous. But like 35 is like the ideal timeline. And so between 35 and now the average life expectancy is 76, give or take, which by the way is incredible. In 1950, the average life expectancy was around 40. But so like between 35 and 76, like-

you don't have any milestones left besides have kids and then pressure them to get into a good middle school. Yeah, grandkids. Yeah, grandkids. Like seriously. And so- On to the next generation. Like kind of. So the good thing that I see now, and it's painful, it's restless.

you know, identity, the older generation was moving out of subsistence, right? Maslow's hierarchy of needs, they're moving from food, water, shelter, the basics up to, okay, we have some stability. This younger generation, for the most part, there are still very poor areas of China, but for the most part are not on that bottom level. They're now the who am I generation. What does it all mean generation? And if you guys remember when you were like 13, 14, 15, and of course now we're all self-identifying through our thirties and beyond, figuring out who you are is hard, right?

It's this tension between expectations and reality and who you want to be. And that identity generation, that identity definition is what we see being negotiated in real time today in China, which is exciting. It's anxiety producing. And again, this is like, hey, why am I so excited to come back? Aside from just like, I love the food. It's great to be here. I miss speaking Chinese. I love my in-laws and my wife. And this is a life that I'm excited about.

It's the most exciting intellectual question I think in the world. If you're like an anthropologist or a sociologist and you think about a place with implications, like this is the thing. There's a lot of places with really interesting phenomena unfolding. There's very few that will change the way the world, like the answer to these identity questions in China.

In a way, it's like to borrow you like kind of a term we use more probably in the Western or US world. It's like they're like, I'm happy to just get out of the biggest fucking rat race in the history of mankind. Totally. Like fuck it. Totally. And so like, again, this is all like what is a life for? What does this young generation want? You're seeing that renegotiation happen back home for sure.

And it's also a big driver of study abroad and why it still has value despite the marketplace on it. It's value in the marketplace definitively going down as more people do it. And I think we continue to see it. I think there's some trials and errors. I think there's a whole line of products that obviously like glamping in China, you

Wouldn't have been a thing if it weren't like people's drive for experience over quality. Because otherwise everyone would just be in the Four Seasons or saving up like for once every three years they could go and take pictures at the Bulgarian beach. You're only going to glamp if you've already been to like the Four Seasons. Because then you're like, is there something...

even more crazy right but then i actually i don't know about that no i mean like like because that notion of luxury right but then i went actually glamping and i you know i really enjoyed it but i'm like i prefer the four seasons it's fucking cold the towels are fluffy no it's uh it's i mean look there's a lot of eggs benedict to die for there's a lot to unpack here but i um

I think at the core of it, and what I think about a lot, are these tectonic plates, right? You have old China on one side, traditional sort of Neo-Confucianism, what it's kind of always meant to be Chinese, which is like hotly debated, but like family, success, ambition. And these are very much the metrics by which the older generation judges the younger generation. It's not exclusive to China, but again, the size, scale, and again, there's a certain hermetically sealed element to it that drives up the pressure.

That's on one side. And then you have this young China concept, which is the new realities of modernity, urbanization, the costs that come along with that, the new definitions of success. For women, this idea that, hey, yeah, like it would be cool to...

get married when I'm 20, but I'm also now expected to get educated until I'm 25. So how does that line up? You have these tectonic plates sort of grinding at one another, old, new, tradition, modernity. This young generation for better or worse, and it's not exclusive to them, it's gonna keep unfolding, is more or less responsible to decide how those tectonic plates fit together. And being ground down between those two isn't always super fun, but it's also important.

And I think that's really what we're at right now. And what's so important about the post COVID moment is that it is the first challenge and it's the first real inflection point. You don't have a blank slate, but you have this moment where it's like, okay, we get to rebuild a little bit. What are we building? What does consumption look like in a way, you know, now that I've been knocking the teeth once for months,

years maybe. What is the ideal version of that? How do I feel about ambition versus security in a way that's different than I did three years ago? Yeah, it's going to be really interesting because...

Even going back to where you brought up of, I mean, first there was Tang Ping, right? And then it was Bailan, right? And so what's next? Major escalation. Right, what's next? Exactly. I'm just going to chill and like, you know, lie flat for a little bit. And then it's like, well, I'm actually going to rock. I'm going to rock. It's over. Well, this brings me to my question, right? Because like maybe we can kind of like tie it off with this is like,

Back to more of a macro lens and going back to what you were talking about earlier, incorporating everything that you've been talking about with this younger generation and the pressures they go through, which by the way, isn't necessarily unique just to that generation because the idea of like, what is a happy life? Like we're asking ourselves that too, like personally. And by the way, the older generation who's like retiring or not,

who never had leisure? Like, what does it mean? What does fun mean to the... Like, I talk a lot about young China, but in a lot of ways...

An equally interesting topic is old China, a generation who has lived through the most extreme poverty and is now living in this like, hey, bring out your phone and get a $7 tea world. I mean, the whole going back to the whole like 33X thing, right? This generation that's lived through this unprecedented change and speed of change and quantity of change and lifestyle and expectations and pressure.

And going through all these things, like to me, intuitively, it sounds like, damn, okay, that kind of sucks almost to feel like the greatest amount of change and opportunity is behind you. And that you already passed, like you've already peaked basically, right? You passed your prime. Yeah. And the golden age is behind you. But on the other hand-

Are there positives to take away from that experience as well? Are there things that you think maybe this generation may come out stronger because of that or maybe can leverage off of? In some ways, the defining question of every generation around the world is,

Which is a grand thing to say at the beginning of a sentence. But it's true is, and we're going to try to ask this in this study is, do you think you'll live a better life than your parents? Which is different than, do you think if you have more opportunity than your parents? Because if you were to ask that question to Americans, do you think you'll live a better life than your parents? There's a lot of question marks right now in the States. In a lot of ways, we're in identity crisis there.

I think if you were to ask that question in China, there's no doubt materially. By the way, it's a very easy bar to pass in a lot of ways. You talk with the older generation. And they, again, 1990, when they had their children, it was a much different China. And so the ability to live a better life, there's a relatively low threshold in China still. And so I think the answer to that is yes in China. The question is, do you have more opportunity than your parents? It becomes more complex.

And so again, what I think we're basically seeing now, and I don't mean to bring up the government verbiage around this, but I actually think there's some truth to this. You're talking about qualitative versus quantitative growth and qualitative versus quantitative changes and qualitative versus quantitative definitions of happiness and qualitative versus quantitative definitions of a good life that are now being negotiated. Right.

And in some ways, I think that's a very healthy pressure valve from first-tier life is better, first-tier jobs are better. Everything else is worse. First-tier work in finance or work at Tencent is better. Everything else is worse. Those are very linear definitions of success. And suddenly, I think what you're seeing is as opportunities are decreasing, not being eliminated, but

being less just like the sky is the limit. It's much more what's right for me. How can I create opportunity that makes sense for me? Different than just what's a societally objective, flat definition of what would be the best outcome. And so for some people, it's depressing, for sure. And for some people, there's suddenly the space to go be a skateboarder in Chengdu and run a coffee shop

That's like pays the bills, but isn't making them rich. That's like, hey, my parents were not trying to figure out how to use a surfskate and cruising to Hainan once every year to chill in Houhai with the other Chengdu and Shandong folks, which for some reason are all the people in Houhai, which is a place in Hainan. So those are the types of, again, lifestyle questions, right?

Is it growth questions? Are they going to be able to change their lives quantitatively as much as their parents did in their lifetime? Definitively no, unless they're like the one in a billion who creates the next Pinduoduo and whatever. But do they have lifestyle considerations that their parents could never have dreamed of? And then more societal space to make those? Definitively yes.

And the irony of it is like every generation is made possible by the previous one, and it's also a response to the previous one. You know, this is something I've been wanting to ask you is that, you know, you can come to certain summaries and conclusions looking from the outside and looking at the objective facts, I guess. But I think like there is also an innate fallacy in terms of

surveys when you ask people directly about themselves because I think all of us as humans we have a tendency to dramatize like what we're going through ourselves right and and everything we go through is so much worse or intense or better that main character energy exactly we are the main character in our own movies and

And so I think maybe if you ask a lot of the youth generation now directly, they might say, yeah, I feel like I don't have as many opportunities or I'm not as free or I'm not as happy as the previous generation. I mean, how do you – which might be true. I'm not saying it's not. But like how do you balance that?

that perspective bias that's innate in like, I think all humans versus maybe like the objective facts and figures, I guess. So this is like a classic psychology question. I remember learning about this like freshman year and thinking about it because I now do a fair amount of survey work and both within organizations and for general population. And there's the classic thing is like, I think the example in the psych textbooks are, what car would you like for yourself? Or like, what car would you buy?

And so there's some like real action associated with it. It's not just like, you know, close your eyes and fantasize. It's like, what kind of car person are you? What would you buy? And people often say like Mustang, like I'm a Mustang sort of guy. Like that's, and I'll buy that. That's just the sort of person I am. And this is from like the seventies and eighties. So this was pre-social media. And so,

What people were realizing though, is like they would say Mustang and then people would design the Mustang, but people were still, that person would then go out and buy a Nissan, which is a little different. Or like a Volvo, which is like, I'm a family man, I'm safety. It does not scream the same things that a Mustang does. And so the shift in questions is not what would you buy? It was what would your neighbor buy?

What we were able to do back then is that if your neighbor was your neighbor, they were probably the same exact socioeconomic strata as you. Particularly in the US with the way that property markets work and the spread of suburbs worked. It's likely that the home value and the job and like, it was easy to be like, hey, whatever Joe would buy is probably what I would buy. It's like, it was a much more accurate telling of even that person's behavior versus what they themselves would report.

And so when we ask people questions, it's often asking about their peers rather than about themselves. Because when people are thinking about themselves, there's like this vortex of emotion that's associated with it. And the meification of everything, like if people have their... They're pointing a camera at their face a lot, you are...

inevitably putting yourself at the middle of a story in a way that just wasn't the case 30 years ago becomes even more important when you're trying to predict human behavior to be like, Hey, what's like, what's a you who's not you because you are this incredible individual who's, who's the only one of you, you know, and none of us are except for Eric with an A. Like we all, we're all pretty much like I've, one of the funny parts about being in China is,

Um, again, and like seeing young foreign, like I was 22 when I first moved here. I was 20 when I first came. Y'all look exactly like we did. Like, yeah, the style is different. And like Gen Z, like baggy pants versus tight pants. Like what an incredible difference. But I mean like that level of assuredness that they're walking around campus with, or,

or temerity because they're nervous or like whatever it is, it's like, it's so similar to the way that I probably felt. And like the outcomes that we're going to have are all different, but like there's far more similarities. No human behavior that exists now hasn't already existed like 10,000 years ago. For sure. And you're just plugging in different inputs and expressions and hardware. But like, but Eric might be the first Eric with an A, who knows? Well, you know, my guess is like, and like, you know,

in ancient Iran or something. There was some like, I mean, like you never know, like the Peloponnesian, like there's a Peloponnesian king somewhere who like, he was like, you know, yeah. The way that I would spell this. E is so passe. E is so passe and people are going to feel this way. No, I have no idea. But like, but like, I mean like spell like even the Rome, I mean, look,

I first landed in Suzhou. Suzhou used to be spelled S-O-O-C-H-O-W, Suchao. - Oh yeah. - The old romanization of things, which is a ridiculous way to spell it if you know Suzhou is how it's pronounced. But like Suchao University is how it was and like Sichuan food. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - It's Sichuan, man.

And so I go back and they're like, "Oh, do you like Szechuan film?" I'm like, "I live there and it's not Szechuan." - Or like Nanking or something. - Yeah, I mean, there's the old romanization for things. And so like there's these things do, I'm basically trying to create a way in which I'm not being an asshole for saying Eric might have been spelled a certain way in the television work. But like it's these things, the romanization of everything changes. - I mean, it's like Bombay, right? I mean, like we're just, when you're not like native to that culture,

like and i understand this coming from the other side is that it's just you don't have the sensitivity to it right whereas like if you're from that culture it could be even offensive to you like i would just say okay bombay right now it's mumbai totally but i'm sorry about the eric joke don't never apologize i'll never apologize no it's great it's great it's great but um look zach um

Honestly, I say this a lot, but I really mean it. This was, I truly enjoy talking to you. I mean, honestly, thank you guys for what you do. And look, to one of the first of many conversations, hopefully. Definitely. Cheers. Hey, Zach, drink that first.

Where can people find you if they want to connect with you? I don't tweet that much. Good for you. And I'm like afraid of Twitter to a certain extent. There's a longer story behind that. But I'm oddly active on LinkedIn, which is – I'm still digesting what it means for my sense of self to be active on LinkedIn. But I'm there. So shoot me a message. I always love to hear from people. And especially if you're here, we are currently deciding –

Whether or not we want to settle down in Chengdu, where I've spent a lot of time. We've nixed Beijing, by the way. Beijing's off. Sorry, Beijing. Yeah.

Shenzhen or Shanghai. Shanghai is probably the last time I listen. I can get in with you guys about this next time. But if you got, if there's any of your listeners who are like, Hey, like this is where you should be based. Shoot me a note. I'd love to chop it up with you so I could get your perspective. Great. Just on anything, like whatever, whatever triggers you or makes you happy. Shoot me a note. Great. Awesome. Thank you, Zach, for your time. It was wonderful talking to you. I'm Justin. I'm Howie.

I'm going to read Young China. And you already know my name. You're Eric with an A. You already know my name. I come from the Peloponnesian Wars. All right. Be good. Be well. Peace.