China Jails Overly Sad & Rich Influencers - Should We？
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Summary
Malcolm and Simone talk about China's crackdown on "sad people" on the internet, and why it's not as bad as you think it is. They also talk about the recent takedowns of "China's Kim Kardashian" and Hong Guanching.
Transcript
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Hello, Malcolm. I'm excited to be with you today because we are going to talk about China's
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crackdown. And it's not exactly what you would expect. It's a crackdown on sad people.
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Sad people go to jail. Directly to jail. Sad people. This is outrageous. Where are the armed
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men who come in to take the sad people away? Where are they? This kind of behavior is never
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tolerating. China. They put you in jail right away. No trial, no nothing. Right to jail. You're
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playing music too loud. Right to jail. Right away. It's also a crackdown on crazy rich Asians,
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which are my favorite. So yes, sad people, rich people. They're basically like,
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live the middle class. Like that is the aspiration we want on the internet. You will be moderate.
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But not just that, because we're also going to go on, you know, them disappearing gay people,
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them disappearing trans people, literally everything that they are shoving down the West
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right now. Like everything that they are filling TikTok with, their bots are hammering YouTube
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with more apparently. Oh yeah. Yeah. But this, this is, oh no, no. YouTube still very badly
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affected by Chinese bots. This is what everything that, you know, we keep saying, this is what
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they're hitting us with within their own country. It's controlled. Their own citizens can't even
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voluntarily produce this kind of content. And most people are familiar with this, with TikTok,
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how like in the United States, TikTok is just sort of this, this, this toilet vortex of debauchery
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and distraction. And in China, it's like educational content. Yeah. But the way that Laowai
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talked about this was, he said, it's, it's a form of informational asymmetric warfare, you know,
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within their own country, all of this stuff is banned. And I think the question that we're going to be
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coming to throughout this episode is, is this actually bad? Like the way that China is implementing
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this? Yeah. I know that we have like this idea around free speech maxing in the United States,
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but when other powers are actively and provably using these platforms to, so social discord was in our
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country, you know, do we need to address this or is there benefit in addressing it the way that China's
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addressing it? And what are the downsides to addressing it in the way that China's addressing
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it? So get started Simone. Yeah. So first off, what really got me and what I, where I first heard
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about this was the conspicuous consumption takedown where all of a sudden these really treasured,
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famous Chinese people, just like not known to Americans had their accounts taken down. So notable
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people were weighing Hong Guanching. Yes. I butchered that 2.3 million followers. Yeah. This guy was
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known for being China's Kim Kardashian. I'm sending you a picture of him looking fabulous in his
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outfits. I just, I love his look. I'm kind of devastated that he's been taken down because
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this means that I can't easily consume his content anymore. Those outfits look ridiculous. He looks like
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he's out of some crazy futuristic anime. He, his whole thing, aside from being China's Kim Kardashian
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was that he became really famous for his claims of never leaving home with less than 1.4 million worth
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of clothing and jewelry, as well as owning seven high value properties reportedly worth over 110 million
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US dollars. They were all located within this exclusive Beijing compound. He, he is, is really known for the
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lavish outfits. Great examples that I sent to you. Valuable jadeite jewelry, frequent visits to hot
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couture, jewelry dealers accompanied by his security team, which makes sense. Cause if you don't leave
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the house, it's like, you're famous for not leaving the house in that amount of money. Like you're screwed.
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You're, you're, you're, you're asking for it. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think what a lot of people don't
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realize is you build this up, building up fame like that, you know, 2.3 million followers. Like I'd be
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devastated if our followers just got wiped one day, right? Like this is something you worked for
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years building up. Well, and this is, he's someone who like literally, I mean, this, this wasn't how
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he got his wealth. His wealth was from a family business in coal mining, mining that was later
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invested into jadeite jewelry, which of course is why he has a lot of jadeite jewelry. And he's also
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launched his own luxury boutique, but he's been very explicit about like, no, I want to be famous.
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I want to be an influencer and China just pulled the rug away. There's other people,
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by the way, I don't know if you saw this one, they were sister Abalone. No, no. The one who
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got disappeared for giving money to poor people. I don't know this one. Yeah. So there was a guy
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who was sort of doing like what Mr. Beast was doing, but in China, um, where he would, you know,
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ask for people who had recently bought groceries, you know, how much did you spend on that? And then
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he'd pay them back for it and get sort of their life story. And he had built up, I think it was
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millions of followers. And he was taking, he was, he's redistributing wealth though. This is part of
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the, but Xi Jinping declared that there are no poor people in China. And he was very pro the state.
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And the thing that they finally disappeared him over, and I mean, disappeared, they didn't just
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take him off social media. You now can't search his name or anything like that. Right.
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He's likely in a detainment facility somewhere. He had somebody come on his channel during
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a live stream and ask him if he shot Xi Jinping with a dictator. And he immediately cut the
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video. He then went on a rant about how crazy this guy was. And the government should look
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him up and arrest him and he's trying to get the public. Exactly. Disappears the next day.
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I was going to say, do you think Xi is a criminal?
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This kind of person is in a serious way. I have to put him in a serious way.
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This didn't just happen to him. This happened to another guy who just
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disappeared. This other guy had like, I think half a million followers and he was bantering
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with some kid, you know, like an actual child, right? Like they were doing like video game banter.
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And at one point he's like, who do you think you are? And the kid's like, well, my dad will beat you up.
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And then the guy was like, who's your dad? And the kid said, Xi Jinping.
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And then the guy just like stops talking and like, it gets this like scared look at the camera.
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And the next day he disappears as well. His dad was obviously not Xi Jinping. He made a joke,
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but you can't make a joke about Xi Jinping and the kid was a kid and didn't realize that.
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And so, you know, you're, you're, you're the, the level of these people aren't just
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disappearing from the internet, but they're often actually disappearing and unsearchable after this
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happens. That is terrifying. But continue. Yeah. I'm, I, yeah, I was just, I was thinking
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in this case about just these, these conspicuous consumption.
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Were you thinking about the Apple guy? The guy who, you know, they're putting his face on
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Apple phones across stores around the world. No.
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Okay. Well, we'll get to that later because this is another instance.
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She's, she's, she's known for, she's actually an older woman. So she was really, I was like,
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oh, this is so cool. Like an influential, like fashionable old woman. She had over 2 million
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followers on, on Doyen. And, and she had this lavish Macau estate that had private gardens and
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courtyards and a golf course. And she wore lots of Jade jewelry and she would document her, her
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lifestyle eating really expensive food. Hence sister Avaloni. There's also Mr. Bo who was all
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about like the fancy clothes and he, a lot of dogs in his videos and he, you know, wear his dogs and
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fancy purses. And this is, it's so interesting to me because in the United States and probably
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other places like Western countries, this like almost fetishization of crazy rich Asians who just
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have insane conspicuous consumption is so high. And even some of the new most famous, just not because
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they're Asian, but just because they're rich influencers do happen to be Asian. Oh God,
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why am I blanking on her name? Becca Bloom. Okay. So there's, there's this new influencer. They're
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basically on this year in 2025 came on the scene in the United States. She's actually,
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she's a Silicon Valley background. Like she, she, her, I think her mansion is in Atherton,
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Malcolm. Oh wow. Yeah. So like Silicon Valley parents, like in tech and she herself is,
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I think working in finance, probably investing, but she suddenly became this beloved influencer
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specifically just for being wealthy. And like, she shows off her jewelry. She just got married. So
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she had this amazing, lavish marriage and she'll show off the insane, like desserts that she serves
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to her dog that are more than like what we would be able to afford for like a very, very special holiday
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meal for our entire family, extended family, that kind of thing. And, and she's here and it's just so crazy
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to me, this contrast of like this, this celebration of it in the United States and it often centering
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around Asian influencers and then them just being apparently quite trounced in China. But what's makes
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this so much more interesting is also, as you pointed out, the lying flat takedown. And then the
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New York Times recently covered this, which is basically a very new two month campaign. And it turns out that
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these campaigns are related. Did you know that the takedown of the depressing people and of the rich
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people it's part of, so both of them have been executed by the cyberspace administration of China,
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which I love that they have one of those that continue. Okay. So how are they connected?
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It's, it's just literally the internet police. So I think the American, one of it has to be the
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internet police for obvious reasons. And if you're too young to know that reference, then I'm sad for you.
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Yeah. Right. The, the, we'll, we'll backtrace them, but in China, they actually do like,
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no, that's the thing. They have the internet police and they will backtrace you. I love it so much.
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But yeah, so they're both part of this larger common prosperity initiative and it's a broad set
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of measures. It's, it's policy and it's like literal, like fiscal economic government,
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legislative policy and social initiatives that's measured at reducing inequality, improving social
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services and fostering balanced development across regions and population groups. So literally this is,
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it is about sort of forcing people into moderation and some middle ground. So you can't work too little,
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but you can't work too much. You can't be too rich, but you can't be too poor. And what we,
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what we're talking about here with the taking down the depressing social media influencers, but also
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the Kim Kardashian hyper-consumption social media influencers is the, the, so just the social
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elements. So they're, they're trying to promote what they call spiritual prosperity as well as material
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prosperity, where they're there. They have policies aimed at social stability and national morale and
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positive cultural values, which is why they're trying to fight like cynicism, but also the
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hyper-consumerism. And they believe that, that there are also additional like things that they're
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taking out is entertainment, celebrity culture. So I think that might help to explain why they're,
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they're Mr. Beast like person was taken out because they literally don't want like entertainment culture.
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That is another one of them. So they're trying to get rid of consumerism, pessimism,
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entertainment culture, and celebrity culture. And gay stuff.
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By the way. Yeah. So, so is Russia though. I mean, like everyone wants to get rid of gay stuff.
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I don't know why. Right. So in, in 2023, there were massive shutdowns of the Beijing LGBT center,
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the PLGA China, the university queer societies were abruptly deleted in 2021. And again in 2023,
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and then the CAC ordered the closure of WeChat profiles of Beijing, Lana Solana,
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lesbian networking, and Wudahona, Wudahung, youth LGBT plus group, and trans,
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trans story, transgender support networks, as well as others like the flying cat brotherhood.
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That sounds amazing. What, see, these are travesties. All these, all these amazing influencers
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But these are, what's funny is either the people who like on TikTok and everything like that think
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China is their friend. Like they're like, oh, China, what a great place to, to, to be gay,
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to be queer, to. Yeah, they're nationalistic. They're just, unfortunately, they're not welcome.
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Yeah. There was a movie, a queer themed movie filmed called Together, which was digitally edited
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to turn a same-sex couple into a heterosexual couple. And then they tried to like share the
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movie secretly online, unedited parts of it. And I think there was a rest over that. One student
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organizer, a trans activist, had her WeChat history scrubbed. And I actually have a list of,
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I think, erases here. Oh yeah. I mean, if you're talking about small things, because it's not just
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the stuff that you're talking about. It's also like criticizing celebrities can get you arrested.
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Yeah. Wudahung Shu in September, 2025 had an account with 50,000 followers and they were,
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they had all their, their posts erased for hyping a celebrity's makeup, e.g. Vegas star or drama post.
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Let's say, I think that's part of the celebrity culture crackdown though.
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It's just they don't want celebrity. October, 2025, a post that ended up getting reposted 600 times,
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got a user removed because it was a quote unquote personal update, but the personal update involved
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financial hardship due to traffic fines. Oh dear. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's little things like this
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that are getting people removed. And I think it's, it's bigger things too though. And I'd love to read
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a little bit from the New York times article about the lying flat style. Okay. Go for it.
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Because this is one of the bigger trends that we've covered more on the podcast. And I've really
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lying flat is the movement where people protest through not working or engaging within the Chinese
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economy and just trying to earn what they need to, to survive. And I had come to view this as
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something that was like insurmountable, like that there would be no, this was the one way you could
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actually resist the Chinese government. And so I'm really interested to see how it plays out for the
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Chinese government to resist this. Cause like the whole point with lying flat is like, well, you can't
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stop me from this, you know? Yeah. But they can, you'd be forgot. Apparently. Yeah. And so let's,
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that's why I wanted to dig into this. I mean, they're basically saying you cannot get out of
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the rat race. The rat race is why you exist. Get back on that fricking treadmill. Chinese person,
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get back on the treadmill. The New York Times, it just released this. We're recording this on
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Friday. Maybe we'll run it Monday or Tuesday, but cheer up or else China cracks down on the haters
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and cynics. As China struggles with economic discontent, internet sensors are silencing those
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who voice doubts about work, marriage, or simply sigh too loudly online, which is to like,
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can you imagine this happening in America where like 90% of social, social media is either
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conspicuous hyper-consumption, like all the restock videos, all the like holiday decoration videos,
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all of the, you know, clothing, whatever. And then the, I hate the government. I hate my life. I hate,
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I'm depressed. I'm disabled videos. Like what would our social media even be? I,
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that's what I kind of wonder what's left anyway. China sensors are moving to stamp out more than
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just political dissent online. Now they're targeting the public mood itself, punishing bloggers and
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influencers whose weary posts are resonating widely in a country where optimism is fraying.
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The authorities have punished two bloggers who advocated for a life of less work and less pressure,
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an influencer who said that it made financial sense not to marry and have children,
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and a commentator known for bluntly observing that Western countries in terms of quality.
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She said it makes financial sense to not marry and have kids and they're getting rid of her.
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They're there. You know, I think this is what people imagine if we had total power in America,
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what social media would be like. Yeah. Oh, I don't know. I mean, I think like we tow the line
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so heavily on cultural sovereignty. We're more like, yeah, don't, don't get married and have kids.
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You're clearly not up for it. What do you see? Somebody is driving into our neighbor's yard
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without appearing to slow down. I mean, they're slowing down a little. What, what are they doing?
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Well, there, I saw a car in front of his yard, like right in front of their house earlier,
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and he was standing out that our neighbor was standing out in front of his phone. So I think
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there's somebody who they know. Intentional. Yeah. These supposed cynics and skeptics, two of whom had
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tens of millions of followers, have had their accounts suspended or banned in recent weeks as
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China's internet regulator conducts new cleanup of Chinese social media. The two-month campaign
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launched by the Cyberspace Administration of China, aka the internet police, as far as I'm concerned,
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in late September is aimed at purging content that incites excessively pessimistic sentiment
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and panic or promotes defeatist ideas such as hard work is useless, according to a notice from the
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agency. Which a lot of Chinese people, you can see our episode on this, believe.
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In reality, we all experience fatigue and anxiety as a result of work and life,
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but these real emotions deserve respect and should not be deliberately amplified for traffic.
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The internet is not a dumping ground for negativity, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said in an editorial
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about the campaign. I love that. They're like, stop whining, basically. Grow up. Around the world,
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officials debate how to keep social media from stoking outrage and polarization that could spill
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over into real-world violence or harm. The internet regulator in China has framed its campaign in
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similar terms, expressing concern about messages that stoke divisions based on gender or other group
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identities, live-streaming content that glorifies self-harm and violence.
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So basically, they'd outlaw the manosphere and feminist stuff, I would assume?
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Oh yeah, no, yeah. Oh God, yeah. But that's the other like 5%, right? So if 90% is whining and
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hyper-consumerism, then like 5% is manosphere, womanosphere, queerosphere, that's gone too.
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What is left? Well, I would sacrifice the manosphere if the feminist side of things also
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disappeared at the same time. I feel like, yeah, maybe the manosphere would sacrifice itself just to
00:19:04.680
get them to shut up. Yes. Yes. I just like, shut up with this gender nonsense.
00:19:10.360
Yeah, seriously. But China's crackdown carries a distinctly political undercurrent. It demonstrates
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the concern among its leadership about the spread of malaise as the country grapples with economic
00:19:19.960
uncertainty, a volatile rivalry with the United States, and growing disenchantment among young
00:19:23.880
people. In recent years, some young people have opted out of the rat race in favor of the minimal
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life of lying flat or given up on goals altogether and letting it rot, which apparently is another one of the
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phrases that's come out. The accounts of two bloggers known for promoting a minimal lying flat
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lifestyle were blocked from adding followers late last month. And that's an interesting,
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sophisticated way of doing it. Just like capping your upside.
00:19:46.760
Yeah, no more followers. I mean, I love that because you as a follower might not realize something
00:19:52.280
has happened. I mean, obviously the blogger knows something has happened and they've got to
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like re-decide how they're going to structure their lives because that's their income stream and
00:20:03.000
everything, right? But the followers themselves wouldn't immediately realize that they had been
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blocked or disappeared. And this is framed as obviously very dystopian, but the same thing
00:20:15.480
essentially happened on pre-Elon Musk Twitter. People were essentially shadow banned and they couldn't
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add more followers. Actually, you know, a lot of people right now are complaining. People who have
00:20:25.400
smaller follower counts like us are arguing on X that like basically with the algorithm, they have no
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choice. Like they have no choice or option, ability to grow. So as much as it's like, oh, China evil,
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China bad, kind of like this happens everywhere. And sometimes it's not even a political thing.
00:20:42.040
Wait, so why are they saying this on X? Are they just saying like the way the algorithm works?
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They're just saying like basically with current algorithm updates, small fries have no chance of
00:20:50.280
growing. Hmm. Yeah. Interesting. So, I mean, just to say, I'm just trying to add some perspective.
00:20:56.440
Anyway, Beijing is concerned that such pessimism doesn't just discourage citizens from
00:21:00.680
being productive members of society could run into criticism of the ruling communist party.
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The root cause is deteriorating economic and social perspectives for many Chinese,
00:21:09.400
which has led to what a country would be in a natural social response. The expression of anxiety
00:21:14.520
and misgiving said David Bandersky, the director of the China Media Project, a research group.
00:21:19.480
Such sentiment, the leadership worries might be infectious. Mr. Bandersky said,
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local governments and social media platforms have jumped into action to carry out the regulators orders.
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In the city of Zhengdu in central China, officials said two social media account
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users were investigated for portraying the city in an unflattering light.
00:21:38.040
And I just imagine you were today, like imagine if like for the San Francisco poo maps or something.
00:21:52.680
You're not being such a downer about how terrible LA is.
00:21:55.560
No, and before we go further, I mean, for me, this is why I do not think it's a good idea,
00:22:00.040
even if broadly it's a, it's a good thing to try to monitor social media because you're like, well,
00:22:06.840
on the whole, it's probably doing more good than harm by removing these unrealistic lifestyles,
00:22:13.080
by removing a lot of the downer nihilist posts, a lot of them.
00:22:17.080
Well, yeah, because we've seen people whose lives have been ruined by Doomer influencers.
00:22:21.800
Right. But I mean, I think that at the end of the day, what's going to happen is China is going to
00:22:29.560
suffer from this because they are not building up the same memetic and social immunity to this
00:22:38.040
And I think also that a degree of criticism is necessary. I mean, the article also points to
00:22:42.920
an internet regulator in Xi'an, another place in China where they're, they're taking down people
00:22:48.600
for spreading false information about housing prices and real estate regulations. But are they
00:22:53.720
really spreading false information? Like sometimes it's probably accurate information. Yeah.
00:22:58.520
You can't say the economy's bad. You know, that's what happens when you begin to give governments
00:23:05.880
And the way that they're using it at the local level for like inter-community fights
00:23:09.880
is a really big thing. And they're even using this against like hardline nationalists.
00:23:15.240
That's that's, and that's what really gets me is so there to go back to this, this common
00:23:20.920
prosperity initiative, key policies and areas of, of the actual, like the more legislative economic
00:23:27.160
things is education reform. So they're cracking down on for-profit private tutoring services.
00:23:32.360
They're trying to focus more on income distribution through tax policy and social insurance.
00:23:37.080
They're trying to fix housing policy by making housing more accessible to low and middle income.
00:23:43.400
How a families they're trying to improve healthcare. They're trying to revitalize rural areas. They're,
00:23:48.120
they're trying to fix labor and tech regulations to address exploitative labor conditions.
00:23:54.520
They're, they're doing environmental things. So I'm just like, there are a lot of really good
00:23:57.400
things that are happening, but then what's happening is like, for example, on Weibo,
00:24:03.480
more than 1,200 accounts were, were suspended for spreading rumors about the economy and government
00:24:08.600
welfare programs. But as you pointed out, like with the CCP, there are a lot of adverse incentives
00:24:14.040
that would prevent information about corruption from making it to the higher echelons of the CCP.
00:24:20.200
And I kind of see social media as a way to circumvent that. Like if people can surface
00:24:25.480
fraud that is taking place with social welfare programs, for example, or with housing policy,
00:24:30.440
then they can address it and actually execute on this broad and actually like good sounding common
00:24:37.560
prosperity initiative. But if instead these cities have this mandate and, and right apparently to take
00:24:44.440
down these, this false information, then they won't even be able to execute on the common prosperity
00:24:50.520
initiative. So I feel like in some ways it's like to, to your point, right? It's well-intentioned,
00:24:56.040
but it's not going to work the way that they want it to. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's, it's kind of scary.
00:25:02.680
Well, no, but I think that the, the, so one, it ends up being used, and this is one of the problems
00:25:09.320
in these big China bureaucratic things. You know, I have friends and I guess I should talk about the
00:25:14.440
fate of China more broadly as a result of this, where they, you know, listeners have reached out
00:25:21.320
and they've been like, have you changed your position on China? Like, do you think it has a shot now?
00:25:25.160
Like, you know, they're like, I know you see China as this giant bureaucracy, but is not the U S full
00:25:31.480
of a lot of bureaucracies that are breaking down and incompetent. And my, you know, through, through
00:25:39.000
its authoritarian nature, China might be able to fix something about where the world is heading or
00:25:44.120
what's going to happen. And unfortunately the broad answer is extremely unlikely unless AI somehow acts
00:25:52.360
as a solution for them. So I'll explain to you why it's unlikely. If you studied the history of China,
00:25:57.400
which I'm very interested in as a subject, I spent a lot of time studying China really only gained its
00:26:04.200
current economic dynamism because it began to loosen state control because it began to allow for private,
00:26:13.160
not really ownership, but 99 year leases that nobody really believed that they were going to get rid of.
00:26:17.560
We know nobody believed they would get rid of it because the houses aren't priced differently based
00:26:21.080
on how long into the lease they are. Um, which implies that there is a broad social understanding
00:26:26.360
that they would be renewed. But the point here being is China, you know, basically makes private
00:26:32.360
land ownership legal and in regions, China makes private companies legal China, you know, loosens a lot
00:26:38.680
of stuff. And this brings in outside investment. And this creates a degree of dynamism that led China to
00:26:44.200
become a world power while other quote unquote communist countries, whether it be, you know,
00:26:49.880
North Korea or, you know, the Soviet union never really were able to be. Now, if you look at the
00:26:57.000
direction that China is going right now, especially if you look at the hypotheses that people have around
00:27:03.000
how China could fix its current scenario, the hypotheses are all, well, what China needs to do to fix things
00:27:13.480
is it needs to reconsolidate and it needs to exercise its centralized authority. But the problem is, is the
00:27:21.880
more China moves in that direction, the less it will have the only reason it has economic relevance on a global
00:27:28.520
stage at all. And this is why we are seeing that economic relevance contract. Not only that,
00:27:35.000
but it doesn't even really have a role in sort of the global supply chain going forward.
00:27:39.480
Well, isn't it trying? It tried to create that role and it tried to create alternate networks
00:27:44.120
through the Belt and Road Initiative. Why do you discount that?
00:27:48.120
Well, so the Belt and Road Initiative is not what people think it is, at least in terms of a function.
00:27:53.880
The Belt and Road Initiative has become a way for Chinese elites to smuggle money out of the country.
00:27:59.720
It's not actually building up goodwill in the regions where it's operating.
00:28:04.840
And they they're doing things like, oh, we'll get this region in a debt trap and then we'll get this
00:28:09.480
port and then we'll get access to X. And it's like, yeah, you can have contracts for all that until
00:28:14.600
the next revolution. And you just, quote unquote, owned a port in Africa and you don't have that port
00:28:19.720
anymore or not not meaningfully. Right. And so a lot of this stuff is very much like things that
00:28:25.560
the U.S. tried in the past and learned why you don't do it. Like the Belt and Road Initiative is
00:28:31.480
very similar to the U.S. period of sort of like U.S. colonialism, I guess you'd call it when the U.S.
00:28:36.520
decided to go out and be sort of the world police. China is like, yes, but we're doing it nefarious
00:28:41.480
style. That will certainly work. And it's like, no, it won't. It won't work. So you haven't seen,
00:28:47.960
if you look at the results of the Belt and Road Initiative, a lot of actual meaningful goodwill
00:28:53.800
out of like outside of super poor like African countries, that's goodwill doesn't actually
00:28:59.080
matter except like in terms of U.N. votes. If you look at where China needs goodwill, where does it
00:29:03.560
need goodwill? Right. Like for where it could actually earn it. OK, it's probably not going to win over
00:29:09.240
Japan. Right. But it could win over Vietnam and the Philippines. And oh, all these countries hate China
00:29:16.440
now more than they ever have. Like that was that was the wins it could have had was the Belt and Road
00:29:22.760
that it didn't get. So for that reason, I see one, China has basically a worse relationship with
00:29:30.120
every one of the players that were up for grabs, I'd say five or six years ago. Now they're no longer
00:29:36.200
really up for grabs to the huge, huge problem for China is and they're no longer up for grabs. No,
00:29:43.160
they went from being up for grabs to not up for grabs during the period of Belt and Road investment.
00:29:49.320
OK, if Belt and Road was working at all, that wouldn't have happened. Right. It doesn't matter
00:29:55.560
if poor, irrelevant country that's about to have another revolution in Africa is your friend.
00:30:00.200
You needed to get Vietnam and the Philippines on your side and you effing failed. And keep in mind,
00:30:06.680
China, Vietnam kicked your butt in a war not that long ago. OK, they kicked our butt too, but they're not
00:30:15.480
our neighbors. All right. You actually need them to like you. Next problem. Their relationship with India
00:30:23.960
has gotten worse. Other major neighbor like every one of their neighbors effing hates them now. Like
00:30:29.800
Russia is this close to like war with China. And the only reason we're not seeing more conflict
00:30:36.520
there is because Russia is dependent on them because of the Ukraine sanctions. But China has overplayed
00:30:41.720
its hand with them. They tried to do like a one currency thing and ended up screwing over Russia.
00:30:46.680
You don't need to get the specifics of it. It's just that China not doing great there. And then you've
00:30:52.280
got the problem of how big the bureaucracy is. So if you look at like the United States,
00:30:57.800
inefficiency of the American bureaucracy, whether it's like the Navy or whether it's anything else that
00:31:03.160
we have, China is that times a thousand. All right. And you can say they're putting
00:31:09.480
X mini billion into their new AI infrastructure. And it's like that infrastructure is going to be
00:31:15.960
China's equivalent of managed by like our army, but like a hundred times less efficient.
00:31:24.520
And we are getting that with Microsoft and Oracle and Google and Facebook all competing against each
00:31:29.880
other, which means that what we're going to produce is going to be astronomically more efficient
00:31:34.280
in the AI space, right? Like in investment dollars, why would you go into China with AI stuff when you
00:31:40.040
can just go through the rest of you and even worry about it being taken from you?
00:31:45.160
I mean, what I'm curious about though, is sort of what you think about the likely efficacy or not
00:31:51.480
of this larger social media effort. And I mean, one, I just want to point out like China's not alone in
00:31:57.400
doing this. We've already covered how Russia has banned in both mainstream media and on social media,
00:32:03.080
not only gay stuff like gay, lesbian, bi, whatever, but also anything antinatalist, anything that, that,
00:32:08.840
that promotes not having kids like Vietnam also has a lot of censorship and it also floods social media
00:32:16.200
with positive pro state messaging in Turkey, Iran, and Egypt. There are shutdowns there. There are arrests.
00:32:22.200
There are legal actions against influencers who spread messages that they don't think are helpful for the
00:32:26.520
state. India, Brazil, and others have platform bans. So they'll just have legal takedown demands over
00:32:32.200
any sort of like harmful social content. And even EU countries, they have regulation over what they call
00:32:38.840
unfair market practices and also misinformation, which of course could be real information that they
00:32:44.360
just don't like. And some various authoritarian or even semi-authoritarian. Right. And, and, and my
00:32:52.200
thought on this is the exact thought I, I, I mentioned before, I think this will be very effective
00:32:57.880
for a country like China in the short run. I think it's going to be very damaging to them in the long
00:33:02.920
run. And the EU, like, so basically in all these countries, you, you, you think like this is a short-term
00:33:10.360
fix. It's going to cause long-term damage. Yes. As I have said, memes and cultures spread like viruses.
00:33:17.400
Um, right. You'll have a movement like the feminist movement, or you'll have a movement like, you know,
00:33:22.760
the trans phenomenon or something like that. Sometimes like, do, do I think that trans is
00:33:28.200
ever really going to spread within China? No, I think that that's going to be handled in the West
00:33:32.120
before it had the time to really permeate China. But when I'm thinking of other phenomenon, and by the
00:33:38.520
way, we could do a whole other episode on this, but like, it's, it's very interesting to see the
00:33:41.640
people that are still clinging to like trans normalization when like even blue sky is like,
00:33:45.240
no, we're not banning like transphobes anymore. Like we don't like even blue sky is like,
00:33:51.000
yeah, you guys can screech at us that they're killing you, but we don't care anymore. Like
00:33:54.920
you guys clearly just abused your power. Um, so, but the problem is, is that the people who fall for
00:34:02.280
this stuff, like Western nihilism and stuff like that, they are taken out of the cultural pool and
00:34:06.920
they're taken out of the gene pool of the next generation. And then like, let's, let's just let this
00:34:11.800
happen naturally. But I mean, I think even the nihilists who are suppressed in China,
00:34:16.680
they're still, they, there will still be people who lie flat. Yeah, there will still be, but I'm,
00:34:21.880
I'm sort of viewing this the same way I view COVID, right? Like with COVID, we now know that the masks
00:34:27.080
did nothing. They lowered short-term spread, but overall, because through lowering short-term spread,
00:34:33.800
they increased the number of non-immune people who are around. The death rates over time in these
00:34:39.240
regions were broadly the same. This we've seen in studies of European death rates and in regions
00:34:44.360
that were very strictly controlled around masks and regions that were not. And also in comparison
00:34:49.000
between states that were strictly controlled and the states that were not strictly controlled
00:34:53.160
within the United States. There just aren't actually in the United States, the states that were
00:34:56.680
less strictly controlled had lower overall death rates, but you could say that they're more rural.
00:35:01.400
And I'm like, okay, great. Yeah. Like that makes sense. But the larger point here being
00:35:05.080
is that it didn't seem to work. And I think that what we're looking here are masks, but for your
00:35:11.000
brain and your eyes and your ears. And this is why I'm so against, you know, in that episode that, you
00:35:16.360
know, we ran today, right. Where I was like, you cannot beat this by restricting the social media your
00:35:23.080
children have access to. You need to immunize them to these types of ideas. And that can only be done
00:35:29.960
through information. It can, it would be better for Chinese officials to, as, as they do, right.
00:35:37.320
They know how to flood the zone with content and comments to just shame the celebrity worship,
00:35:43.800
the doomerism, the consumerism. That's what you would do if you were the CCP is just make it
00:35:49.800
embarrassing rather than censoring. Make it embarrassing, produce state content about how
00:35:54.760
it's embarrassing, making fun of them. You know, I feel like you also need to give something more
00:35:59.160
though. And I guess what I couldn't find from the research I did on this is, okay, what is China
00:36:04.920
replacing this with? Because, okay, I can't be like minimalist and stoic. I also can't be hyper
00:36:12.200
consumerist and like extra vitalistic. I have to be like, what, nothing? Like, I can't be gay. I can't be
00:36:20.440
a celebrity fan. Like, what can I be? I guess I don't know.
00:36:24.360
You can be a beige mom. That's what they want is beige moms. They want to actually that the
00:36:31.160
stereotype of beige moms is hyper consumeristic. So I know, but what they mean is, is middle. They,
00:36:36.680
what they want, and this is important. It's not consumerism that they're against. It's
00:36:41.880
wealthy consumerism. They want everyone in the middle-class rat race.
00:36:46.760
That's what they're trying to do is build blinders to anything other than the middle-class rat race.
00:36:52.600
Well, they're also trying to build policy mechanisms, economic, educational, et cetera,
00:36:57.480
that also make that possible. They're trying to redistribute income to create a thick middle-class.
00:37:02.360
I mean, I like the idea. Yeah. I mean, it's always interesting to watch China because they have the
00:37:06.920
ability to do things in a more fast and blunt way.
00:37:09.640
And they always F it up. That's the problem. I mean, like you said, big lumbering
00:37:15.560
bureaucracy doesn't help. Every time they do something right,
00:37:19.400
and this is what I was talking about when I'm talking about putting these sorts of restrictions
00:37:22.440
in, the restrictions get put in and then one district is using them in a battle against
00:37:27.160
another district because you're trying to move up the communist hierarchy and that's how that works.
00:37:31.720
Right? You end up turning the guns that you built against each other, right? But it's worse
00:37:38.680
than that because you look at something like China's bullet train system, like that was genuinely
00:37:43.080
working. It was great. It was amazing. And you can watch the videos on YouTube about how it's
00:37:47.320
going bankrupt and very dangerous to the country now because it's great. And then they decided,
00:37:53.960
well, then let's just like double, triple down on this. And they built a bunch of routes to areas
00:37:58.920
that nobody uses. And now the whole thing doesn't work anymore. And economically speaking,
00:38:05.160
and we had this problem in the United States. I don't know if you, if you know about them,
00:38:08.360
but we actually had it was the way the airlines work because we initially tried to mandate the
00:38:13.240
way airlines worked. It's a, it's a confusing history. I'm not going to get into it, but basically,
00:38:17.400
uh, we then released the mandates and we moved to what's called a hub and spoke model.
00:38:22.760
Um, and the cost of flying in the United States went down like 15 X or something.
00:38:26.280
Yeah. Cause we let market forces essentially determine it, but that's the problem was these
00:38:32.600
centralized systems. And we are at a pivotal turning point in human history with AI and China
00:38:38.280
can't get around this just by building bigger data centers. And you can be like, oh no, of course they
00:38:44.760
could look at all the money they have. The problem is, is that that money is on a 20 X or 30 X dilution
00:38:51.400
spree. Right. Because of the bureaucracy. And then in the United States, everybody knows AI is
00:38:56.600
a future. And so every rich person wants to be involved in whatever AI thing is going to work.
00:39:01.000
And so they're pouring money and pouring money. And people are like, how is Amazon spending like,
00:39:06.120
like, I don't know, like five times the amount of money on building out their AI platform than
00:39:10.600
they spent on like AWS in the last X many years. That's like their primary earning platform.
00:39:16.520
Um, and it's like, because everybody knows it's a future. So every dollar in the world that from
00:39:21.160
like the ultra wealthy is just pouring into it, like an infinite money spree.
00:39:26.360
Right. And except to China, because nobody wants to be involved in a state controlled
00:39:33.960
No, all I can say then is I I'm glad that we still in America have Becca Bloom. I think
00:39:39.080
they're making a second crazy rich Asians, thank God. And we're just going to have to persist in this
00:39:44.440
fantasy that China never cracked down on them. And that at least we have our American crazy rich Asians,
00:39:50.200
because I love they do rich best. I feel like no one does rich better. Like rich Russians just
00:39:56.120
still have houses that are super ugly on the outside and then like crazy on the inside. No,
00:39:59.880
I want everything crazy. No rich Russians. They have a lot of like castles and stuff that they
00:40:03.960
build in the forest in their in their like the war. Yeah, but the stereotype is super ugly outside,
00:40:09.400
super lavish inside. There's the I was looking at, oh my god, I hate Middle Eastern wealth.
00:40:15.400
It is so ugly. Their sense of style. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Asian wealth is amazing.
00:40:19.800
And European wealth. I mean, like old money is just like, you know, crumbling everything. It's
00:40:24.200
not everything falling apart because they don't have it anymore. And American new money isn't that
00:40:28.440
fun. So no, it has to be. I disagree. I think American like Connecticut wealth can be pretty nice.
00:40:35.720
Oh, waspy old money. Yeah. We were just talking though offline about how that's like pretty much over
00:40:41.400
that there are influencers who try to keep that aesthetic alive. Some of which I love to follow
00:40:46.920
on Instagram, but they're just doing it to hawk their Halloween sweaters and socks. And it's,
00:40:51.640
it's all a fantasy. Like it's not real. No one actually goes yachting anymore. No one actually
00:40:56.440
wears, you know, the yacht industry is falling apart. I was watching a YouTube video on that recently.
00:41:01.960
Not, not just yacht, but sailing more broadly. Like, but you know, I, I love our aesthetic,
00:41:07.160
the old stone house aesthetic, you know, the, yeah, maybe technical. Yeah. But that's not,
00:41:11.400
you know, it's not an aspirational hyper consumeristic thing. So it's not consumerist
00:41:17.400
enough, but yeah, the, the, the, the closing point I was going to make is I really think
00:41:21.960
China is just setting itself up for failure. And the point I was making earlier, which is so
00:41:26.600
important for people to rock is if the way that you think, like if your hypothesis is,
00:41:32.680
well, China can manage things in a centralized top-down fashion and that's how they're going
00:41:37.000
to get around X problem. What you need to understand is every single dollar that China
00:41:44.120
has right now, every great, like, like their entire civilizational rise in these last 30 years
00:41:50.120
was because of deregulation. If you think the way they are going to get around one of their current
00:41:55.720
problems by tightening up recentralization, what you are saying is they are going to go back to the
00:42:01.640
economic relevance that they had 20, 30 years ago, because that economic relevance didn't come from
00:42:08.520
like the Chinese people or something like that. They're not that different from the Vietnamese or
00:42:13.720
the, you know, the, the Thai or any of the other surrounding populations. It came from the fact that
00:42:20.040
the government decentralized the economy and, and, and China before this was truly economically irrelevant.
00:42:27.560
And if you think that they're going to be able to like, this is the thing where people think that
00:42:32.520
like Saudi Arabia is going to make this like Neom city and it's going to be economically relevant.
00:42:39.160
That's what China is doing with AI right now. They're making,
00:42:41.720
No, you think, okay. So you think China's AI is China's Neom?
00:42:45.480
Yeah. It's not like really supposed to work. It's supposed to look like it could work because
00:42:52.600
that's how you move up in the CCP. And it's not that it's impossible that China could do something
00:42:57.960
right. The problem is, is that Xi is the guy who's in charge right now. And Xi is completely incompetent.
00:43:06.200
How old is he? Let's see. And unfortunately he has a fear of anyone replacing him. He's 72.
00:43:13.240
And so he's basically cleared anyone out of high levels of government who's competent and could
00:43:17.800
replace him. And apparently there's like one guy who might be able to, but like China really needs
00:43:22.840
to get rid of Xi soon. If it wants to have any chance of getting out of the disaster that it's
00:43:27.320
heading into right now. And I just don't see that happening. So yeah, well, but, but Belt and Road is
00:43:34.440
not a success. Belt and Road, when people hear Belt and Road, they should think the opposite of a
00:43:38.520
success, like an actual in the moment disaster of huge amounts of money flowing out of China
00:43:44.520
for people who are just pocketing it and trying to escape before the ship sinks.
00:43:48.840
So we never get to visit China again. I hope you don't regret that. I at least got to travel a lot
00:43:55.480
there. So that was nice. And I'm looking forward to hearing all the comments from our China experts
00:44:01.800
who were going to vehemently disagree with us because they think China's just going to kill
00:44:09.720
Like seriously, the delusion of that belief, like I can't even, I literally can't even.
00:44:17.240
It's like the people who think the urban monoculture is going to somehow work out.
00:44:20.120
I'm like, but look at the statistics. Look at the statistics. Look at the statistics.
00:44:23.960
Rufus is cracking his knuckles. Tim is stretching his hands out and getting ready for that.
00:44:28.600
I can't be like, we see you. We see you. Yeah. Love you guys. And I love you, Malcolm. And I love
00:44:37.400
Yeah. Oh yeah. Tex came home. Look at this. He's alive. Just came home a few hours ago.
00:44:43.560
They did another x-ray. He's no longer got holes in his lungs. So, you know, we got a healthy kid
00:44:48.360
for now. I mean, SIDS can happen high probability in the first, you know, few weeks and months.
00:44:53.480
Don't say that. So like, let's just get through this before we truly celebrate.
00:44:58.360
Yeah. He's not going to be more than like 15 inches away from me for the next like six months,
00:45:02.040
basically. Yeah. Putting an oxygen. Yeah. We got it. We got a foot oxygen cuff. I don't care
00:45:07.080
about the false alarms it's going to give me and freak me out. I am just, I don't care. Okay. You
00:45:11.000
know what? I don't need to sleep for the next. I have kids now, Simone. Five.
00:45:15.320
That's pretty great. Love you. Hey, we're actual pronatalists now. That's like a number of kids.
00:45:20.920
It's like, no, that's we've, we've reached Catherine Pakalik qualifications. Cause she,
00:45:25.800
for Hannah's children only interviewed college educated women who had more than like five or
00:45:30.840
more children. So I didn't qualify as a mother, you know, before that. Now I do. I'm a Pakalik
00:45:37.240
mother and that's saying a lot. She had eight of her own and then raised 16 total. So we'll get there.
00:45:45.480
What a woman, what a woman, Malcolm. What do you think we can beat eight?
00:45:51.560
I hope I would love to at least do eight. I mean, seven's obviously our bare minimum.
00:45:56.680
I want to beat at least Kevin Dolan and he's at six.
00:46:00.600
Didn't he just make it to seven? Oh, he did. Dang. Well,
00:46:06.440
who can we beat? Have we beat Matt Walsh yet? At least let's see.
00:46:09.640
I thought he had five. So maybe we're neck and neck with Matt Walsh.
00:46:13.560
All these people like got married. Oh, well, but they had two sets of twins. That's kind of
00:46:22.520
cheating. Still really, you go, you really go through it when you have twins. That's,
00:46:28.040
I mean, talk about NICU time. I have, I have one donated kid. So I'm at six, at least genetically
00:46:34.200
speaking. Yeah. But I want, I want to raise, I want to raise a minimum of seven. All right.
00:46:46.200
Hopefully eight, 12. I love you too. All right. All right. So what do people think of today's
00:46:53.240
episode? Even though it did terribly for whatever reason, this was a 747 video on like the,
00:46:58.840
I was surprised by that. Who doesn't want to learn about a satanic Minecraft cult? Maybe our
00:47:08.200
audience is just not interested in, I can actually have to look to see if the issue was watch time
00:47:14.520
or it was click through rate. The watch time was high, but the click through rate was a little low.
00:47:18.680
Okay. Give me a second. So what did people have to say about it?
00:47:22.200
They liked it. A lot of people were sort of like, this is my approach to social media,
00:47:25.880
which I think was, was good to hear. Yeah. The, I think you saw the comment on original sin,
00:47:31.320
which I thought was interesting. Oh yeah. Yeah. I like that one. I gave it like this idea that like,
00:47:35.320
you know, actually not all people are good as it happens. And that's so true because I was kind of
00:47:42.120
raised to believe that all people, I mean, my parents were like, yeah, there are a few people
00:47:46.680
out there who aren't good, but I don't know. I was kind of just given the impression societally that
00:47:51.560
you can just trust people and everyone's good and it's going to be fine. And that led to problems.
00:47:56.440
But it wasn't for you. Yes. Yes. Well, I think that's a really toxic thing to teach young people.
00:48:01.320
You know, I think viewing society adversarially is quite useful in terms of navigating it
00:48:06.840
successfully. Yeah, absolutely. I will. I'll kick us off though. I think it was a great episode.
00:48:14.120
I think maybe it'll do well on the long tail. We'll see. We'll see. But yeah. Oh, well,
00:48:21.240
next week will be a better week and hopefully this, this will, this will do it. All right. Well,
00:48:26.520
I'll let you get started on this one. Okay. And I pulled up some data too,
00:48:30.440
that I can also go over. Yeah. All right. Torsten, are you lost? Come on,
00:48:36.120
let's keep looking. Titan to Octavian. Go in the exit. Go in the exit. Find the exit,
00:48:48.120
that I will meet over there. Okay. Go for there. Do you think maybe you need to go under there?