Dan Wang: How Dan Wang Became America’s Favorite China Expert

Transcript

Table of Contents

• 1:04 Why Dan writes Annual Letters

• 15:01 Dan’s way of writing

• 26:02 Why most travel writing stinks

• 30:44 How to travel through China

• 33:05 The regions of China, explained

• 44:47 Trade books vs. academic books

• 53:46 The problem with history books

• 01:01:42 Did Dan write his book with AI?

• 01:10:50 Dan’s least favorite part about China

• 1:15:42 A critique of American elites

• 1:33:08 Why Dan’s site got blocked in China

• 1:39:52 What China mocks about America

• 1:54:49 A simple way to improve your writing

David Perell:

Well Dan, I want to start off talking about your annual letters. There are two things that are really striking to me about them. The first is just the depth, but it’s a certain kind of depth. Your writing style honors the smarts of the reader, but not in a way where you’re using a bunch of big words. You’re really trying to investigate what’s happening in China, and it was unlike anything else I’d seen.

The other thing that was interesting is the way that you mix personal observations with these sort of deep, big insights. It made the style of the annual letters unlike anything else I’d seen, and I think that’s part of the reason why I was drawn to your writing.

Dan Wang:

I think the way that I thought about a lot of the annual letters was that I really just try to capture what was important about China in two respects.

There’s an element of China, which is the formal, official part of China, which exists through top leaders, Xi Jinping speeches, party documents, everything that the party state really wants the people to know. I think that part of rigid, officious, official China contrasts tremendously with the incredible informality of general society.

I really wanted to play up a bit of the friction of simply living in a country that is fun and messy and bizarre, just a really interesting and wonderful place to be. Along with the newscast, the official Party Theory magazine’s view of China, in which everything is immaculate for the leader’s pleasure. Everything exists for party leaders and Xi Jinping to examine these villages which are swept super clean for his personal pleasure, in which everyone around him is always sitting with him, straight backed and carefully listening. Then, as soon as he departs, shortly after he departs, people get back to their normal lives in these villages in which they are not thinking so much about the party pronouncements.

I really wanted to capture both aspects of that. The formal aspect of China, which is tremendously important, a vision of Beijing that is trying to attain some degree of sovereignty, power, everything that every national government wants. But they combine that with a deadly seriousness, along with the informal aspects of life, which is hardly serious, humorous, and all sorts of wonderfulness that is not captured by the newscast and the magazines.

David Perell:

The word that comes to mind from your letters is texture.

Texture. A lot of the writing that I read about China is big themes, these sort of giant tectonic plates of America versus China, the Euclides trap, stuff like that. What is surprising about the way that you write is that you’ll use like a soup that you had in Kunming or something like that as an entry point to talk about what’s going on there.

Dan Wang:

I think that the way that I think about China is that it is not only about the wishes of people in Beijing. China, to me, is just a country of a lot of different dimensions that butt up against each other, just as one would think of with the United States. I think these two countries are always going to be pretty directly comparable.

In the US, I think nobody would ever really try to understand the United States purely through the lens of what’s going on in Washington, D.C. And yet, I think that is what a lot of people do with China. I think if you wanted to write a little bit about the US, you would go beyond Washington, D.C. and go to, let’s say, Boston as well, where there are a lot of universities, to Los Angeles with the entertainment industry, to California and San Francisco with Silicon Valley, and Austin, Texas, which used to be your stomping grounds. All of these are important places to think about.

The way that I think about China is that far beyond Beijing, we also have Shanghai, a major business center of 25 million people, which used to have extraterritorial concessions for the British, the Americans, and the French. The French built these wonderful boulevards, leafy cafes, and excellent streets. You have the north, which I think is much more windswept and deserty. And Beijing itself is an especially Stalinist city. You have the Southwest, which is.

David Perell:

That’s where you’re from, right?

Dan Wang:

My family heritage is very mountainous. People love spicy food, pungent pickles. I think it is probably the most informal element of China, especially far away from the imperial gaze, which is in the Northeast.

I think you have to combine all of these different elements and not portray China as a series of cliches, as a series of great walls bumping up against grand canals and these sort of tectonic plate movements. That is one of these things that I really want to capture, that ordinary Chinese live lives. They’re much like ordinary Americans. It is often munDan Wange, frequently stressful, and often very aspirational. People manage to have fun and carve out spaces for themselves in which they really try to live their lives in the best way that they can.

[05:58] Deliberately Cultivating a Writing Style

David Perell:

What’s cool about your writing is there’s a real style there. There’s both the style. The word that comes to mind is a kind of gracefulness. It’s not surprising to me that you love music. I can see the influence of music in the rhythms and the flows and the patterning of your language.

But then also your style of analysis. That’s sort of a right brain and then the left brain analysis, the way that you go about doing it. It is very distinctive. How deliberate have you been about cultivating that?

Dan Wang:

I am very deliberate about my writing style. I wonder if I want to hear how you think about what my writing style is because the way that I think about my own is that maybe I’ll start by highlighting two of my favorite cultural artifacts.

The first is French novels, especially of the 19th century. My favorite writer, my favorite novelist, is Stendhal, whose big works are The Red and the Black as well as The Charterhouse of Parma. He was a French writer who was mostly active around the 1830s. I just reread The Red and the Black this summer, and it was probably my fourth time reading my favorite novel. I was wondering how well it would hold up and was glad that it held up really, really well. I think there is something extremely humorous about Stendhal; he is writing about, I think it is one of the best love stories ever told.

The love story of a French peasant boy who falls in love with two successive women, commits these extremely stupid mistakes, and triggers mistakes among the women as well. He is really good at skewering French society in the 1830s. So, I draw a lot of inspiration from that sort of humor and ravishing beauty and storylines of Stendhal in particular.

The other influence that I think a lot about is Italian comic opera, which is my favorite genre of music. This is known as opera buffa in Italian. These are the funnies; this is the funny opera. This is essentially the musical line that runs from Mozart, his three Italian operas, which are Don Giovanni, Cosi Fontute, and The Marriage of Figaro, that goes through Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, as well as Verdi, in which the Italians really prize cadence.

They prize pacing; they prize a sense of repetition. There are showers of ornament that drench the vocal line. I think they produce and they value a sense of ornament for its own sake. We’re sitting here in a beautiful French rococo space. David Perell, I think you are always able to pick the most wonderful spaces. Today, I decided to wear my Austrian jacket because the Austrians have so many tie-ins with the French. Marie Antoinette was an Austrian princess. I think there is something baroque and beautiful about just ornaments for its own sake.

That is something that the Italians do. I do like to have clean lines in my own writing but also informed by a few flourishes and cadences that really create a sense of pacing, in which, if you read it, I hope that readers feel like there is a sense of variation of sentence structure, sentence length, that really tries to propel the reader along in a thrust.

David Perell:

Even more than sentence pacing and structure, one of the things that I find is that there’s an experience of reading your writing, and it’s sort of like the experience of looking at a flower where you can see the flower from afar, and it gives you something.

But as you come closer and closer, there are actually new levels of beauty that are revealed. Because of that, your writing is one that I would say you don’t want to have it summarized for you. You actually want the experience of reading it.

We could talk here and we could say, “Oh, summarize Breakneck. Oh, there’s the engineer society versus the lawyer society.” Actually, I find that the more that I zoom into your writing, the better it gets.

Dan Wang:

If there’s one thing I hope that people can take away after this conversation, it is to go listen to Mozart’s Italian comic operas. I think those are, by my standards, the most beautiful works of creation.

If we can think a little bit about Mozart, these three Italian operas were all molded by an Italian librettist named Lorenzo da Ponte. Lorenzo da Ponte was a very curious figure, lived in a brothel, was excommunicated by the Catholic Church, eventually moved to Pennsylvania. And in the process of doing all of these, he was just this Italian adventurer.

He wrote these librettos with Mozart that are tremendously playful, that are extremely ironic, in which almost every beautiful piece of Mozart opera you would hear now, unfortunately, mostly selling accompanying commercials for selling pasta or something.

Every piece of beautiful love song that Mozart has written is almost always highly ironic. The person, usually the soprano singing it, does not intend the love for the person that she’s singing about. There’s beautiful levels of irony and structure in there.

That is also what I’m trying to achieve myself, where I think what is most important is to have a few gags, a few little jokes in there that does not have to be serious and po-faced, because China itself is already super serious. I think that official China is one of the least funny entities ever envisioned by anyone.

The leaders of the Communist Party are not only serious, they’re self-serious. They’re tremendously po-faced. And what I would love is for a slight element of Mozart to be carried in so that people have a little bit of a sense of irony and playfulness in everything that they do.

David Perell:

One of the things that I’m trying to square is when I think of ornament and all those little details, they always come out in the process of editing and revision, and that takes time. But it comes out in round five, round six, round seven.

But you’ve written these annual letters pretty quickly. My understanding is, do you have this giant list of notes? You look at the notes, you begin to compile a narrative. So how were you able to get those things so quickly?

Dan Wang:

My annual letters are written in a pretty simple and straightforward way. I have an annual deadline of January 1st in which I will have written the previous year’s notes. This deadline is something I had to blow past twice. But in general, I keep in mind that January 1st is when I have to write my annual letter.

The core essay part of it is something to do to reflect about what I saw that year, mostly around China. I try to present a lot of analytical insight combined with some element of narrative in the core part of that essay.

And then I write a little bit about the books that I read that year that are interesting to me, and maybe something else relating to perhaps food or opera or some of my other pleasures that I’ve undertaken.

The process of writing my annual letter is pretty straightforward. Usually, if you know that you have a product to ship on January 1st, essentially your whole year is governed by that deadline and that cadence.

There’s no mystery about what I’m going to be doing at the end of December. The process for thinking about all of this is that I have a vast notepad, which is just the Apple Notes app, in which I am just throwing little notes.

David Perell:

So what would those notes be?

[14:22] Transitioning to Investment Career

Dan Wang:

I might think about whatever happened, a big event that happened in any particular year. So let’s say in 2021, what I wrote most about was this crackdown that Xi Jinping initiated on China’s tech sector, in which he decapitated the online tutoring industry, hurt a lot of video game producers as well. That was definitely one of the big events of 2021, along with zero COVID.

As I was observing these sort of things, I would be thinking through, well, I don’t have to be very newsy. I’ll leave that for the Wall Street Journal to cover. But here are my thoughts, and I can continuously craft an evolution of my thinking about something like Zero COVID or the Technology Crackdown.

I keep dumping these notes into the Notes app on my iPhone. Every so often, if I am listening to Mozart or if I’m eating a dumpling, whatever it is, if a great sentence drifts into my mind, I will also put that in. And because I don’t have a product to deliver until the end of the year, I have the space to really try to refine a particular sentence.

In some cases, I believe for some pieces of writing, it is not at all an irrational thing to construct an entire essay around a single beautiful sentence. In fact, I recommend it. If we’re able to have one great sentence, I think it is absolutely valid to try to construct everything around that. Because I have the time and the space to do this, I try to refine everything as much as I can.

At the end of the year, it is always still going to be a hasty process because I had a day job in which I was writing notes for mostly financial clients, and it was only really the last 10 days of the year in which I would have the space to really try to write my letter. As much as one tries to refine all of this, the last 10 days of the year are going to be this hasty sprint in which I am taking this highly disorganized pile of notes, highly disorganized piles of sentences, really trying to distill a potential structure out of all of that, and then to just write all of it in a matter of haste. I think I accept that.

Though my letters could be good in parts, I feel like there’s so many imperfections still with my letters every single year that I wish it were better edited. I wish it weren’t so hasty. I wish I could cut and trim quite a lot more than they currently are, but I also accept that as a writer, one is never going to be satisfied.

I feel like I am perhaps 85% satisfied with my book. If I had something like another month, I would love to be able to refine the connections between the sentences, the connections between the paragraphs. I feel like I could do a much better job with that. But I also take solace in the fact that no writer is ever very satisfied. I’ve spent quite a bit of time chatting with some really good essayists, including people at the New Yorker, who would tell me that, no writer would ever get above 85%. So 85% is a good goal to achieve.

David Perell:

Actually achieve with two things. One, with the letters versus the book. It seems like there’s something about the letters that kind of breaks you. When you would talk about the letters, it was never like, wow, I had so much fun. It was always like, man, this was really hard, and I kind of got it over the finish line. This was my impression, whereas you seem to really enjoy writing the book, and I’m wondering what accounts for that difference.

Maybe we can start there, and then I want to hear about your method of observation. Travel writing is one of the most eye-rolling genres that there is. It’s filled with cliches. It doesn’t tend to be that intellectually engaging, but you seem to have figured out how to do something there.

[19:17] Beginning at Lehman Brothers

Dan Wang:

I think the letters were difficult, and the book was also difficult, but maybe I was just slightly more complainy in a way that I think is slightly unbecoming of someone who loves Mozart. And I think that when I think about Mozart, there is no musical question that he did not solve to perfection. He excelled at absolutely everything that he did, whether that was comic opera, whether these were masses, whether these were concertos.

Mozart, furthermore, made it all seem effortless. Perhaps, as a writer, I am a little bit closer to Beethoven, in which Beethoven obviously also made these incredible works. But you can detect a note of effort in most things that Beethoven wrote. Some parts of it often feels slightly labored.

You can tell that he had these titanic struggles as he wrote his string quartets as well as his symphonies. So I confess that I have made the letters to be slightly more difficult than they ended up being. A lot of it was because I, in the last final 10 days of the year, when most people are relaxing over Christmas or New Year’s or whichever holidays, they are really trying to not do very much.

I feel like that part of the letters that was challenging was that I was doing my hardest work when everybody else was in a state of perfect relaxation, but I definitely aspire to having a little bit of an air of perfect ease and grace that Mozart embodied.

The other part of the book process was that I had excellent editing support for actually writing my book.

David Perell:

You went to Uri, who runs the browser. Is that his name? That’s right, yeah. He seems to have steered you well with an agent and an editor.

Dan Wang:

That’s right. Uri is someone that I am very grateful for who runs the browser. Uri is himself a perfect reader and someone that I think has excellent literary judgment.

I was working with excellent editors to really help me to think about the conceptualization of the book, who really helped me think about things on the sentence level, on the paragraph level, on the chapter level. That definitely made it much easier to have. So I had an excellent editor at my publishing house, Norton, Caroline Adams, and she was really good at thinking through on a sentence-by-sentence level. How do we make sure that this flows very, very well?

I was also working with a writing coach, Hugo Lindgren, who was thinking really well about my chapters as I was developing them. Hugo was really helpful to me because every time a writer finishes a chapter and submits it to anyone else to read, the writer’s ego is more fragile than a flower. What Hugo was constantly telling me every time I sent a chapter to him was, “Dan Wang, you’re the greatest fucking writer, and this is the greatest fucking chapter.”

David Perell:

That’s your hype man.

[23:03] Working with Emerging Markets

Dan Wang:

You need that sort of motivation in order to keep going, and having a writing coach, as well as an editor, in place really did make the book much easier than it was for the book writing.

David Perell:

It seems like you would just procrastinate during the day, and then at night you’d have a, “Oh my goodness, I need to write,” and then you would stammer to the keyboard and get your writing done. Is that right?

Dan Wang:

Yeah, I think that is the normal part of my process. There are a million different writing processes, and most writers would always tell you there is no right or wrong answer.

Some people get up super early in the morning at 4:00 AM, like Jimmy Soni, and have their own very well-protected writing time. Then there are some people, like Gustave Flaubert, the French novelist, who drank probably 50 cups of coffee a day. He would also be writing at 4:00 AM because he was staying up all night and sleeping through the day as he was trying to have this sort of writing process.

So here we have the great horseshoe convergence between Jimmy Soni as well as Gustave Flaubert. Some people write really early, and some people, like me, procrastinate throughout the day and then actually get to writing at night. It seems like among writers, there is no invalid approach; all approaches are valid. You just need to put sentences on a page.

David Perell:

One thing that’s funny is I would have bet my life that you were a nighttime writer, and I’ll tell you why. Your writing has the space and the rhythm of your drinking whiskey with your friends, and time is not an object.

Dan Wang:

And.

David Perell:

What you get there is not like a license to ramble. That’s the wrong interpretation of this. But there is a license for depth and long conversation.

This is total conjecture, but I think a morning writer tends to be more polished, more to the point—”I need to get my work done”—and yours kind of has a “sit back in the Eames chair and let’s let our thoughts flow” kind of writing.

Dan Wang:

Yeah, let our thoughts flow while drinking whiskey and being highly panicked about not having done any work throughout the day. Another writer to throw into the mix is Christopher Hitchens, who drank a lot of whiskey and smoked a lot of cigars.

I have not actually read a lot of Hitch, but the legend around him was that he would be drinking all night, and then as he got back into his home, staggering back nearly blind drunk, he would compose a perfect essay, and it would be in totally publishable condition the very next day when he sent it off. So maybe that is a little bit more of my process.

I tried to be slightly more sane as I wrote my book. For me, the book-writing process actually turned out to be fairly straightforward, and I did not quite shift into being a morning person, but perhaps I did successfully shift to being more of an afternoon person, at least. Every day I repeated my mantra to be a Qualcomm-collected Canadian, and I managed to achieve my deadline so long as one repeats this and actually believes in this and has a modicum, a forkful, of discipline in order to get all of this done.

David Perell:

Let’s go back to the observation question. Why is travel writing notoriously terrible, and what are you doing differently, or how are you intentionally observing the world?

Dan Wang:

You’re right that a lot of travel writing just isn’t very good. I wonder if it’s not insightful, because it’s usually not insightful, and it is often very self-indulgent.

I personally believe that travel is just one of the very best ways to experience the world, and that would not be surprising to you, especially because you and I share a mentor in Tyler Cowen, who is one of the world’s top travelers. He’s super analytical in thinking through absolutely everything that he sees. Contra Agnes Callard, whose work I tremendously admire, writing that travel is not great means for understanding the world, as she did in the New Yorker in an essay, I quite profoundly disagree with. But I think there is something to the idea that most travel writing is not terribly worth reading.

I feel like there is an element in which a lot of travel writers are enjoying a degree of revelation that they see throughout the world, but are unable to quite convey that to the reader. You may have an ecstatic experience traveling through something like Peru or Vietnam, but it becomes really, really difficult to actually convey your own personal ecstatic experience onto the page for the reader.

I feel like there is something there also that is true for a lot of anthropologists. Anthropologists can very much be great writers. I’m thinking about someone like Clifford Geertz, who has this legendary work on Balinese cockfighting, which is very, very well displayed and written. In general, I think a lot of anthropologists are still unable to really capture the essence of the human experience that they themselves have been able to observe.

The way that I tried to do this was to not write about my travel experiences as such. What I really tried to do was to combine that and marry that with some degree of analytical insight. These are the sort of tectonic plate movements that you mentioned earlier, in which I understand China as not only the formal elements of me going into the countryside, chatting with people, cycling around, getting to know them over a bowl of noodles. I think that I am always trying to elevate that with: What does this all mean for Beijing’s desires over its own people as well as the world abroad? What might Xi Jinping make out of all of this? How do we combine the conceptual with the analytical, with the observational, with the pedestrian?

You really have to try to combine all of these things. The trouble with too much travel writing is that people are really only thinking about what is in front of them. They’re thinking a little bit too much about what they have just heard about from other people. I think this is the problem with a lot of reporterly books, which is that they’re talking to an expert about a particular topic—maybe that is the Dan Wangish pension reform system. It is really good to interview that expert and convey that expert’s opinions. But perhaps you should also read the literature on Dan Wangish pension reform, interview several experts, look at the data as well. A lot of travel writers aren’t very good at doing all of that. They’re really good at conveying the thoughts of that particular expert. What we should really try to do is to zoom in and out throughout a piece to convey the data, the official, the unofficial, as well as the observational.

David Perell:

It is funny because I agree with you that travel is one of the best methods for learning I’ve ever discovered.

Dan Wang:

And.

David Perell:

I’m curious to hear your method of travel insofar as your time on the road leads into writing. What is the Dan Wang Wang method?

[29:30] Living and Working in China

Dan Wang:

The way that I try to do this in China is that I really firmly believe that there is not a single boring place in China.

I was living in Hong Kong first, and then Beijing, and then Shanghai. These are China’s three of its biggest economic zones. One could travel within Shanghai and find some great urban neighborhoods. One can travel just outside Shanghai and get into farmland. There are some mountains around Shanghai, full of tea mountains, full of beautiful little villages.

One could really travel much further outside of Shanghai and get into the hinterlands and the provinces. There are just so many interesting places in China to go. I think about China’s northwest in the province of Ningxia, which has a completely Mediterranean climate. To my surprise, this is very deep inland. It has a climate very much like California’s. They grow a lot of grapes for wine production there. This is where you have a lot of Muslims who eat a lot of lamb, and they are living in kind of Californian sunshine.

David Perell:

This is the northwest of China.

Dan Wang:

This is part of the northwest of China.

You could go to other cities in northeast China, which has beautiful landscapes, but this is absolutely China’s rust belt. There is a lot of industrial decline. This used to be the site of China’s biggest state-owned enterprise sectors. They’re really close to Russia, and they have some of the lower standards of living in China now, but they have their own distinctive culture, their own distinctive food, and they are really fun and friendly people living in a beautiful landscape.

I think a lot about the southeast of China, which is more typical of the culture of Guangdong. The center of the southeast is the city of Guangzhou, which is not very far from Hong Kong. People eat a lot of seafood and have a very deep mercantile sense. It is one of China’s richest areas, and people there are supposed to be just really good at making a lot of money.

The Southwest, where my family is from, we are mostly tea drinkers. There’s a sense where people don’t really like to hustle, and I think that is mostly true. If you take a look at the city, Kunming, where my parents are from, there is just not that much industry. It’s mostly agriculture. It is an economic backwater. It remains backwatered today, since my parents departed from China in the year 2000.

Then there are these really mountainous places like Tibet, where the Himalayas are just out of this world, as beautiful and maybe even more beautiful than the Rockies or the Alps. There are just so many regions of China that are tremendously interesting. My method for trying to understand and explore more of China was to simply go to these places by bus, by plane, by train, by hook or by crook. I just book a hotel and simply walk around and see things and organize my day by the three or four eateries that I really want to try out. That is my tactic for visiting these places.

David Perell:

Yeah, how do you find good food?

Dan Wang:

It’s just to eat a lot. Often in these places, you don’t need to find good food, because these places have extremely good food. In the corner noodle shop, almost any normal place that has people eating in them is going to be pretty good, because this has been a cuisine refined by thousands of years.

Essentially, the task is to eat a ton, because that is the central pleasure of life, I think, especially if you’re in China. Walk as much as you can so that you can get to the next eatery still reasonably hungry and eat a lot more. As you’re walking in between the eateries, the restaurants, the noodle shops, you’re just going to be bombarded with insights.

[36:23] China’s Unique Characteristics

David Perell:

Is it as crazy as I see in the TikTok videos these days?

Dan Wang:

It is far crazier than that, really.

Dan Wang:

It’s totally viral because you have these cliffs. You are able to enter a building on ground level, go up nine flights of stairs, and then exit ground level again. That’s so crazy.

These TikToks, I mean, the especially viral moment of a subway going through the middle of a big apartment building, I think that is real. I’ve seen it. It’s totally amazing to see.

As you’re eating the noodles in Chongqing, which are my favorite, with minced pork as well as a side of chickpeas. It’s so spicy, it varies for auditory capacity.

And then you see all of these super dramatic buildings set among cliffs as well as two rivers, the Jialing River as well as the Yangtze River. I think it is inevitable that you’ll be bombarded by insight all the time, and this is how I populate my notes of, man, this is so weird. How are they doing this? This is what people are saying and they’re thinking, and that is just how I build up a lot of the material that I have for an annual letter.

David Perell:

Well, I think one of your foundational ideas, messages, whatever you want to call it, is that the world is very textured. Reality has a surprising amount of detail.

We’re seeing it here in terms of how you do your analysis of China. We see it in your repeated reminder of the importance of process knowledge in terms of what allows a culture to thrive.

I think that that’s sort of a call to writers to, if you’re writing about the world, how do you zoom in and just look deeper and experience things at a less abstract level and a more concrete one?

Dan Wang:

I think it’s not only the concrete. There also has to be a level of ambition for writers to also be abstract and conceptual and analytical. There is an element of zooming in as well as zooming out.

I think that a lot of what I tried to do with my letters was in every single year that I was living in China. There is a sense that the common line about a lot of newspaper articles, a lot of reporters, is that they’re writing the first draft of history, and then it is up to the historians to complete the final draft and debate their final drafts with each other.

I wasn’t a Daily News reporter. I wasn’t doing things for Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal. I was writing one essay a year for the public. I was writing draft 1.5 of my conceptualizations of the year.

I’ve definitely gotten a lot of things wrong. I’ve definitely been embarrassed three times a day before breakfast about some of the things that I’ve not quite gotten right, but I think that I did my best to gesture at what are the big questions about China that year, and also to try my best at providing as well as I could an answer to some of these big questions.

I’m thinking about one of my lengthiest letters, the 2021 letter, in which I try to address what is the difference between living in Shanghai, Beijing, as well as in Hong Kong. The big questions that year were what was going on with the tech crackdown that Xi Jinping had initiated, how was zero Covid in China going to resolve, and what did common prosperity mean? Was the Communist Party very serious that they were going to go back into socialism?

That was what a lot of people had been interested in about China that year. That was what a lot of my financial clients, my clients who were working in endowments and pensions and hedge funds, have been asking me with.

I knew what the big questions about China were, and I really tried my best, totally imperfectly, with full of mistakes, to also offer answers to those questions because I think that writers should try to get into what is the most important subject that is animating them. Maybe that is some element of biotechnology, maybe that is some element of civic reform in New York or San Francisco.

You have to figure out what you’re super passionate about, or you have to figure out what are some of the biggest questions right now. Maybe for me, one of the biggest questions then, as well as at the present moment, and I think for the next decade, will be how will the US and China get along with each other, if at all. Maybe some of the biggest questions right now in San Francisco, where we’re recording, is what is going on with AI.

Let’s get to the heart of what is animating you, what is animating the world, and not just try to outline what the important, pertinent, tractable questions are. Let’s also try to have an answer around these really big questions.

David Perell:

What strikes me with that is it’s not just David Perell White talks about the conversational nature of reality, where all of life is basically, what do you want from the world, and what does the world want from you? If all you do is say, this is what I want from the world, you’re kind of delusional and you’re not going to be able to get things done.

But then on the converse, if all you do is say, what does the world want from me, then there’s not a sense of intrinsic joy in that. True flourishing comes from the meeting of both of those things. What do I want from the world? What does the world want from me?

That’s what I’m hearing in your writing, where you’re saying, what are the big questions that are being asked? I’m going to choose a big enough topic, but then also I’m going to do it my own way. You have explored China in a distinctive way, and you’re writing about food and music, and you just don’t shy away from saying no. This is what I’m really excited and passionate about. This is my lens on reality, and I’m going to write in that way.

Dan Wang:

I can’t write any other way because I am who I am.

[41:15] Understanding Modern China

David Perell:

I think that you’ve really leaned into it over the years.

Dan Wang:

Maybe my great gift was that I was not very well academically trained in college. I was a philosophy major, and mostly I had pretty bad grades.

I spent most of my time in the basement of the library where I went to school at the University of Rochester. I could just go and pick out a lot of novels, and I could just spend long weekends reading them. That was probably my happiest possible experience in university.

I think that it’s not unique to that particular university library because a lot of university libraries have these stacks. These are just places where there’s all of these books, and you can just grab one after the other, and what an intellectual feast that you get to enjoy.

I spent too much time in the library reading the books that I wanted to read rather than reading the texts assigned to me, and that was why I had bad grades. I never even considered going into grad school because I had already suffered academically as a college student, so how in the world was I going to make it in a much tougher academic environment?

The way that I try to do this was not to write so much academically, not to write so much for a specialist audience. It is to be a little bit more autodidactic, to really try to treasure good writing as I understand it, as inspired by Mozart, Rossini, as well as Stendahl, and to try to capture these big questions and ultimately to be synthetic, syncretic.

I want to combine the big with the small, the formal with the informal, the rational with the irrational, really trying to find what is the right sweet spot for all of these. Not to be captured by a genre, not to be captured by a method, but to do it in your personal, distinctive way, because how else can you do it?

David Perell:

You’re talking about captured by genre. Talk to me about the difference between trade books and academic books.

Dan Wang:

I wrote a trade book. My publisher is W.W. Norton in the US and Penguin in the UK. These are books that are meant to be read by a broader audience. These are typically the sorts of books that you find in a Barnes and Noble in your town.

Before I do anything to a book these days, I take a look at whether it is written for the general audience in a trade press or if it is written for mostly a specialist scholarly audience as published by an academic press like Yale University Press, Stanford University Press, or Oxford University Press. There are no hard rules about whether trade books or academic books are good or bad. There are some really terrible academic books, and there’s some really awful trade books as well. As a writer now who has written for a trade audience, I’m much more discerning about what are the pitfalls involved with both trade books and academic books.

Let me try to beat up on my own publisher just slightly. I think the level of derision that one could have around trade books is that all of them are written by celebrities for a really general audience. This is Salt Bae, trying to capitalize on his one moment of fame to really try to have a book out of it. All of these books are ghostwritten and tremendously unserious and not really meant to be read by anyone. The derogatory term here is an airport book. This is what the academics and the scholars would dismiss as a bad trade book.

I don’t want to let the academics off the hook here, because academic publishing also produces all sorts of pretty terrible books, books that are published by the press. There are about a thousand of these copies ever published, and probably not more than a few hundred are ever actually properly sold before they’re given to the libraries. I think a lot about what are the structural incentives for authors in both of these categories.

The convention among trade books is that you want to have a bigger audience and make a lot of money on the book through your advance or royalties. You’re maybe not writing for the most sophisticated people. That is a really unfair characterization among a lot of trade books.

There is also an unfair characterization one could make among a lot of academic books, which is that part of the reason that professors produce these academic books is that it is a requirement to achieve tenure. You have to have written at least one book. It doesn’t really matter whether this book is any good, if no one but your mother bought this book, or what exactly you say. As a requirement for tenure, especially in the humanities, you need to have written at least one book. This is why a lot of these books are really boring. They have no real life to them. A lot of it is just obsessed with defending one’s discipline, with defending one’s positions, not really trying to figure out what are the big questions out there, and really trying to answer some of these big questions. These are the conventional pitfalls of both types of books.

Again, there is no hard rule with these books. What is important is to find the books that really transcend their own genres. There are certainly these incredible academic books, just as there are these amazing trade books. There are plenty of scholars writing excellent trade books.

I think of Stephen Kotkin, whom I work with, who is writing a biography of Stalin. He’s already written two volumes and is now working on his third, in which he, as a professor at Princeton University for the last 30 years and now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, could very easily have written a super niche scholarly specialist study of Stalin. Instead, he went with Penguin Press, which is the biggest press in the business, to really try to shed his scholarly light to a much broader audience. There are a lot of academic books that really distill an academic’s life’s work, written in an analytical, narrative driven way that is not obsessed with the smallest questions, trying to defend one’s positions against one’s immediate peers. These are obviously also some of the treasures of book writing as well. There are definite pitfalls with every sort of writing. What we should really try to do is to find the authors that manage to transcend the own problems of their own industry.

David Perell:

Right. You mentioned that as you were writing Breakneck, you became a better reader. One of the things that was striking, and it relates to what you’re saying, is that when you’re working in a genre, there’s a sense of, “I’m supposed to do this, and I’m supposed to do that.”

It seems like what you became aware of was a kind of X-ray vision to know when a writer was writing about something that they were actually passionate about, versus when they were writing about something out of a sense of obligation or something like that.

Dan Wang:

I think becoming a writer and writing a serious, sustained work is a great way to train yourself to be a much better reader. Having this insight of what is the difference in the production culture of academic books as well as trade books only really became super obvious to me as I understood the industries as well as the incentive systems.

The other part of writing a book is that I think in every book, you have to have to some degree a potted history of something that may not be tremendously important to you. I think for anyone who writes about modern China, they cannot but at least gesture a little bit towards some of the most important aspects of modern Chinese history. Let’s call it the Cultural Revolution under Mao or reform and opening under Deng Xiaoping, in which some of the conventions of these have been rehearsed a million and one times. It is not necessarily terribly important to get into, but you still have to set the context for the stage.

I suspect that one of the reasons that our friend and mentor Tyler Cowen is able to read so fast is that he does have exactly this X-ray vision to know, “Okay, well, here is the potted history. We don’t need to get into that. Let’s just try to find the key analytical phrase within each of these sentences.” He’s able to zoom into these really, really quickly and get to know what is the most important part of every page.

Developing that sort of vision of knowing when the author didn’t really want to get into this but was made to by his editor, knowing what are sort of the conventions of academic press and trade press, and trying to really try to figure out what is actually animating the writer, what is his favorite aspect. I think that is something that writing a book would actually really teach you.

David Perell:

As you’ve spent time with Stephen Kotkin and interviewed him, what would be your fundamental gripe with history books, and then what would the antidote to that be?

Dan Wang:

That’s a great question. I think the fundamental gripe with a lot of history books, more of the past, not in the conventional scholarly genre today, is that historians have been accused of writing a lot of just so stories.

Oh, of course, Napoleon was fated to be defeated because he had made exactly the series of mistakes which he in fact made. Of course, Hitler lost World War II because of these series of mistakes. History has tended to become this series of just so stories that perfectly elucidate why history shook up in the way that it did.

I think there has been a reaction against a lot of that among historians, because the best historians imagine counterfactuals. They have a very strong sense of history might be contingent sometimes. The world really was thrown probably off course by a series of unfortunate and bizarre and coincidental events. The murder of Franz Ferdinand in World War I that triggered World War I really was in part driven by his own driver taking a wrong turn and having him be exactly at the foot and steering him exactly towards the assassin who never expected to be able to murder Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Sometimes you do have these strange coincidences in history that didn’t have to shake out in exactly that way. I think a good historian would be able to synthesize a lot of these archival documents, imagine the counterfactuals, and really try to be very, very analytical. That is the sort of history work that I love to read.

David Perell:

I was watching an interview with David Perell McCullough one time, and he was talking about his book on the Brooklyn Bridge. He said that now you look at the Brooklyn Bridge and think it’s just a bridge from Brooklyn to New York. But at the time, people didn’t know if it was possible to build a bridge like that.

You have to remember that on every single page the future had not been written yet. We don’t know what’s going to be true one year from now, one month from now. We don’t even know what’s going to happen tomorrow. I think my sense is that a lot of historians almost think that the future was contingent or something like that.

Dan Wang:

I think that there is an issue, which is that every event feels impossible before it takes place, and then right after it takes place, it feels obvious and necessary for something like this to have happened. So that’s something that we might think of with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

At the time, nobody expected that the Soviet Union would implode as it did spectacularly throughout the years 1989 to 1990. We have to really try to imagine that nobody expected this. Afterwards, everybody sort of just assumes that this communist system full of political sclerosis with a broken economy, of course, was going to fall apart.

We have to really try to navigate between these traps, to really try to think about how people at the time were conceptualizing these sorts of things and to understand the contingent elements because it didn’t have to shake out in the way that it did.

David Perell:

One of the most encouraging things about your work is, and tell me if this is too big of a stretch, but in many ways, you built a name for yourself through six or seven annual letters. So you had one writing product a year that you gave a lot of time and attention to, that you were very deliberate about, and then you published that, and that’s how you built a name. There’s something very encouraging about that.

Dan Wang:

I hope so.

David Perell

Yeah. A lot of people think, oh, you got to write all the time. You got to publish every single week. But you’re saying, hey, I wrote for 10 days a year. I spent all year basically prepping for that, and then I poured my heart and soul into it from December 20 to the time I said, happy New Year.

Dan Wang:

I’d encourage more writers, especially young writers, to try to do this. I am a big fan of Substack. I think that Substack is an excellent product and has really enabled a lot of writers to make their lives and make a career out of writing itself. There are plenty of people in San Francisco who are self-supporting and able to live there by writing on Substack.

My gripe with Substack, like every other technology, is that it’s really encouraging people to write at a more frequent cadence and pace. The tragedy of modern technologies is that it’s trying to make posts and thoughts as short and frequent as possible. The apotheosis of this is Twitter. The Substack model is trying to encourage people to write a piece a week or a piece a month.

I was trying to bring down the average. I was trying to write one piece a year. I can’t keep up with most writers who are coming up with a post every other day. What I would really like to do is to read most people’s thoughts every quarter, perhaps every month. Every week is a bit of a stretch, but what I really want to do is to read a writer’s most considered thoughts, the reflections, the well-crafted sentences, looking past the immediate headlines in order to deliver a product at the end of every year.

I was doing that in conjunction with my day job, which involved a more frequent pace of writing for financial clients and people working in hedge funds who wanted my quick takes. That was for my work audience. My public product was much better considered and more personal. I’m pretty sure that my hedge fund clients wouldn’t give a fig about whatever I was eating at the noodle shop in Kunming.

I would also really love it if people were able to slow down a little bit and be more deliberate. It doesn’t mean that you can’t do your day job or write every so often for magazines as I was doing in the year that I wrote my 2021 letter. I’d also published in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and The New York Times. That is the right pacing for a lot more people, and I hope many more people will write their own annual letters.

David Perell:

I think there’s something really encouraging about that.

Talk to me about AI. It seems to be something that you’re using all the time, and yet you were like, I’m not going to use it for the book. So what were you thinking about there?

Dan Wang:

AI is something I’ve only really started to use after the book was done. That’s in part because I think GPT-3 was kind of this big breakthrough from ChatGPT that really allowed me to see how things could be really good.

For the most part, when I started playing around with ChatGPT, I guess it was GPT-3, I was disappointed conventionally. A lot of people had been saying that there were too many hallucinations, everything was flat, and it wasn’t really connected to the Internet, so it didn’t really seem like it could be all that helpful to me.

Now I think if I were writing another book, which to be clear, I hope I do not have to do for another couple of years, I think I would be much more in conversation with the AI to try to find some pieces of research.

I also conceptualized AI as being a helpful tool that I should use after the book, mostly because I think that there’s something important about delivering one last big project before letting this super tool into my life.

I think a lot about Tyler’s remark in which he said that the Internet sort of dropped into his lap about halfway through his life. He had already gotten his PhD. He had already taught at UC Irvine and George Mason before the Internet became a really big thing in the late ‘90s, essentially.

I was thinking about this, and I’m thinking, like, right now, I’m 33 years old. ChatGPT really blew up when I was 30. I could say that I lived half my life without AI, and I will let the super tool take over my life in the second half. So I think there is something maybe important about being 30 when ChatGPT comes out; it’s kind of the perfect age.

How old are you, David Perell?

David Perell:

I’m 30.

Dan Wang:

You still count. You’re still good. But I think what is useful is to live life without it and just go to the library.

Just check out the databases on the St. Louis FRED Economic Data Database. I love that website. I love Fred, too.

Do some spreadsheets, do some PowerPoint presentations, learn a lot of these basic skills, and learn how to read. Then this super tool comes on, and you can really turbocharge your life with it.

I fear that a lot of the Stanford undergrads, which I see as a fellow at the Hoover Institution, walk around the libraries, and it is a lot of students using ChatGPT to check through everything that they want to do, and then once they’re done with that, they’re watching some TikTok short videos. That just doesn’t feel like that’s the very best form of learning to me.

I think we should all be using AI in some way that makes sense to us. I use it now mostly for restaurant recommendations or to have a conversation about a piece of music that I’ve seen and heard.

David Perell:

It is so good for music, right? Oh, my goodness.

As someone who doesn’t know a lot about music, I will ask it about a song to break down. Hey, what should I listen to? In terms of a counterfactual of what I couldn’t get before to what I can get now, it might be the place with the biggest delta in all of the AI world.

Dan Wang :

For me, it’s really good for music, for art, for thinking through a novel. After I read Stendhal’s The Red and the Black this summer, I decided to interrogate it about the novel and understand a little bit of what literary scholars and critics have said about the novel.

That turned out to have been a really excellent experience, because I think a lot of the cultural experiences that we would get, whether that is to listen to a Beethoven string quartet or read through a novel, it is necessarily individual and it is necessarily very personal. Even if you go to a concert with your friends or anyone else, they probably will not have an identical, ecstatic, transcendent experience of the sort that you’ve just experienced, right? Not everybody gets exactly the same thing out of a novel.

I think AI is really, really good for thinking through a lot of these different sorts of things. I view it primarily as a form to enhance my consumption, whether it is to use AI to find a really good noodle shop, or to use AI to find a piece of clothing that I really like, or to really try to engage it musically.

I don’t really view it as a perfect alternative to research. I still love going through books and databases, and I think I will try as much as possible and perhaps even declare it verboten, not to let AI get into my writing. I don’t want it prompted to have any sentences that I could actually just use. I want the sentences to come from within myself.

David Perell:

It’s interesting that you use the word “thinking through”, because a lot of people, when they’re signaling caution about AI, they’re like, “Don’t ask AI for all the answers.”

But I think that what you’re saying is, “I have these theories, these hypotheses, these different rabbit holes that I can go down, and it’s almost like a sparring partner that’s really smart, that then you can work together with to collaboratively find an answer that then improves your consumption.” Is that fair?

Dan Wang:

Yeah. And I’m sorry again to bring up our joint friend and mentor, Tyler Cowan, but I sorry to implicate you, Tyler, but he’s the best.

There’s something about ChatGPT which has been very much influenced by Tyler, by his writing style and his thinking style in particular. I think this is on the record, and this is kind of established, that Tyler Cowen thought has influenced a lot of how ChatGPT communicates. The way that I treat ChatGPT is as my friend Tyler, who I maybe see once every couple of months in DC or in New York. But if I really wanted to have an instant Tyler-like reaction to a novel that I’ve just read or a piece of music that I’ve just heard, I just ask ChatGPT, and it is able to give me some really good answers. I feel like my experience sometimes with ChatGPT has actually approximated a lot of my interactions with Tyler.

Dan Wang:

When I was thinking through different questions, I keep among my notes a running list of questions that I have for Tyler for the next time I see him, whenever that might be.

David Perell:

He’s the only person I do that for.

Dan Wang:

Exactly right. I keep a running bank of questions, and I think he somehow expects that I would be bombarding him with a couple of things that I’ve been thinking about.

There’s something like a question that I come back to. One of my first really good experiences with ChatGPT was to ask why the Spanish Catholic Church developed such a virulent Inquisition, whereas the Austrian Catholics had no inquisition.

There’s something about Spanish Catholicism that feels gloomy, slightly violent, and a little bit dark. Austrian Catholicism, to me, feels actually bright, joyful, much more resplendent, and much more crimson rather than very black.

I asked why the Spanish developed such a virulent Inquisition and the Austrians did not, and ChatGPT came up with this excellent answer that felt right. This is the sort of question that I would ask Tyler. Now I have a very Tyler-like creature in my pocket that I’m able to have better conversations with. That’s the process of thinking through things.

That’s the process of trying to figure out what are the right questions, the right approach, and the right observational style that I now have much better access to. Though, I will never take any of ChatGPT’s generally super flat sentences into something that I would ever write myself.

David Perell:

Talk to me about China’s influencer culture. It seems like you’re going around seeing a bunch of people on their phones during meals, taking selfies in front of famous statues and whatnot. What’s going on there, and why is it such a head scratcher for you?

Dan Wang:

I think maybe my least favorite part of contemporary China among informal society is just absolutely how much the phones have taken over everyone’s lives.

David Perell:

Is it more there than here?

Dan Wang:

I think it is much more than normal Americans, much, much, much more. It is now quite common to go to a Shanghai cafe and see people barely drinking coffee, barely chatting with each other. They’re mostly taking photos of each other.

If you take a look at some of these really pretty, iconic buildings, there’s something quite like the Flatiron Building in Manhattan that also exists in Shanghai. At all points of the day, there will be people gathered there to take photos. So much of China’s cities have been transformed into photo spots.

China doesn’t really have Instagram, but it has this local alternative named Xiaohongshu, also named Red Note or Little Red Book, in which people are just really on display all the time. Parts of China have been rebuilt and remolded especially for people to take photos in front of. This is something called Wanghong architecture. Wanghong means simply famous on the internet in Chinese.

David Perell:

This is a specific architectural style?

Dan Wang:

This has become a specific architectural style in which people just really get in front of these buildings and they’re especially photogenic. This is just for the photo spots.

I don’t think this is quite unique to China. I mean, there’s a really well-known neighborhood in Miami, this art district. I forget the name of it now, but there’s just a lot of street art. And there’s Wildwood.

David Perell:

Starts with a W?

Dan Wang:

I think I know something like that. People are taking photos in places like Wynwood. That’s right. People are going to these places.

Imagine a lot of parts of China being like Wynwood in Miami, where people are just taking photos all the time. I feel like that itself doesn’t really matter. It’s fine if people want to have more beautiful street art.

I think the part that is corrosive in society is that you might have a business meeting or be chatting with friends, and people are on their phone a lot. They are listening to you, but people are texting their other friends on WeChat all the time.

When everything becomes a photo opportunity, I find myself kind of annoyed when people walk into a restaurant and are trying to film absolutely everything. You can see this even when Chinese are touring abroad.

I was in Europe for most of the last two months, and there are a lot of photogenic spots. There would be a lot of mostly Chinese people walking in already with their cameras and smartphones poised to film absolutely everything.

I find the aspect of Chinese people’s relationship with their phones is really, really terrible. I think this is probably my least favorite part of Chinese culture today, how so many people’s relationships have been mediated by their devices.

David Perell:

It seems like, if I look at the course of your writing, because I’ve been reading you now for 10 years, there’s a consistent thread: humanity has become like this, and I wish that it was a little bit different. One of the ways is with Silicon Valley.

A lot of people are building apps, but you’re saying, “Let’s go a little bit upstream and look at semiconductors and some of the technologies that actually enable that and focus on those things.”

Also, going back to definite optimism as human capital, a real understanding, as one of your early foundational pieces, of the way that we think about the future and the way that we interact with our world has major downstream implications for the kind of life that we get to live.

I’m sorry for not being more articulate here. I kind of need your help putting words to this.

Dan Wang:

I think I have thought a little bit about this, and I think the reason that I feel like the world ought to be a lot better is not only that we all need the world to be a lot better. Right now our world has so many problems, and it is so unjust in so many different ways.

But I have this perhaps perspective in particular because I have felt myself an outsider in various ways. So I’m from the city of Kunming in the southwest, and typically, if you meet a lot of Chinese Americans here, many of them have grown up in the most prosperous parts of China, whether that is Beijing or Shanghai or Shenzhen.

And so within China, I was a slight outsider because I was from the periphery rather than the prosperous coasts or the imperial core.

And also, as in the US, we moved to Canada when I was seven years old. I mostly grew up in Ottawa.

Growing up in Ottawa, the U.S. is incredible to me, but also disappointing to me because so many of the most ambitious Canadians move to the US And I feel like I went to one of the better public schools in Ottawa, Lisker Collegiate Institute, which has produced some prime ministers and stuff. I attended it only because I lived pretty close to it.

I went down this LinkedIn rabbit hole one time, probably five, ten years ago now, quite a few years ago now, and found that among pretty much all of my smartest Canadian friends from high school, all of them have ended up in New York or San Francisco.

But the issue is that when you’re in Ottawa and you think of these great American cities, whether that is San Francisco or New York or D.C. or something else, you have a pretty keen sense of the disappointments of Ottawa. And then you think, oh, if I move to one of these places, everything will be amazing. And here we are sitting in San Francisco, and this is hardly the most functioning city in the world. The Imperial center of Washington, D.C. has all sorts of problems. And New York is just in many ways not that livable of a city. It’s so dirty. The subways are so loud. There’s so many different problems.

Although I love New York, I love New York as well, but as a city experience, it is just so far behind a lot of other urban experiences. New York is amazing because of the culture and the people, not so much because of its hardware.

I feel like a lot of what I have done is to try to communicate my disappointments with being from the periphery, whether that is within China or being a part of the provincial outposts in Canada, moving into the imperial center, whether that is New York, San Francisco, D.C. or Beijing or Shanghai, and then feeling very profoundly disappointed that the people here have the wrong values, they’re not functioning at such a high level and trying to indict the elites in the way that I feel and can share perspectives on and to really say that, you know, why aren’t our elites much better in some way?

To some extent I feel like a lot of my writing has been driven by disappointments. It is to try to introduce better error correction because I am in part an outsider and because I feel disappointment that things aren’t quite so good.

David Perell:

Can you get more concrete with the values and indicting the elites? Like, what is it that where are we at and where do you wish we were?

Dan Wang:

I feel like let’s just stick with American elites since I know them a little bit better. I feel like it has not only been a blessing for me to have not done super well academically because it pushed me out of school to try to live my life as best as I can in the way that I understand. I went to the University of Rochester in upstate New York, which is not a tip top school, let’s call it a second or maybe even third tier university. And I contrast myself a little bit with some of the people that I see now on different campuses.

I am now pretty familiar with three particular campuses. I wrote this book substantially at the Yale Law School and I came across these Ivy League students who went to Yale. I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I also interact with a lot of folks at the University of Michigan, where my wife teaches. And now I’m a fellow at the Hoover Institution, and I get to meet a lot of Stanford kids as well. So these are all much more elite kids.

So just thinking about the life of a typical Stanford student, I think that the gift of being a Stanford student is that as soon as you graduate, you are more or less gifted. This excellent network of people that have already treat you better because you’re a Stanford kid, that you’re already plugged into some of these parties in San Francisco. You already have a scene that is very well laid out for you.

David Perell:

It reminds me of the LeBron James tattoo on his back.

Dan Wang:

It says chosen.

David Perell:

You know, that’s how I think of a Stanford graduate. It’s like, there we go. You’ve been gifted everything.

Dan Wang:

They have a golden path kind of laid out for them. For me, graduating from a second tier university far up in upstate New York, where the name University of Rochester does not necessarily inspire some great feelings about a particular graduate, I really had to fight to build this network. I had to fight to have any sort of a recognition.

Where I’m going with this is that I feel like it is really easy. Life is almost on easy mode after you’ve gone to Stanford because you don’t necessarily have to fight so hard. I feel like among the graduates of the Yale Law School, where I was previously a Fellow, I really love that experience.

There are many distinguished graduates of the Yale Law School, especially serving in the Biden administration. The Biden administration was full of Yale Law grads who did not, let’s say, produce an amazing outcome during their four years in the Biden administration. Several cabinet secretaries went to the Yale Law School. Several of the key assistants and deputies in the White House went to the Yale Law School, and I would say that their performance has not been amazing.

This is where I want to be a little bit more critical of America’s elites. They sort of start coasting after they’ve had an excellent college education experience. They are indeed very smart. They are indeed very, very ambitious.

I do feel like they tend to have a lot of in group dynamics. They’re very protective of other people within their in group, and just by the level of performance that we can see in the United States, which has just so many problems again today, it has not been inspiring. I want American elites to do a lot better than they have.

David Perell:

How are the relationships different among Chinese elites and American elites with their relationships with writing? Because there was one year where you read all the journal entries from the magazine, I guess I’d call it, of the Chinese National Party.

I was thinking about that. I was like, is there even an equivalent of that for American elites? When I think of the people who are in power, I don’t usually think of them as being writers. So how’s it different between America and China?

Dan Wang:

David Perell, did you miss the latest Donald Trump essay in New York Magazine?

I missed it too. I think there is, while certainly it is not the case that Xi Jinping has ever written any of the articles in the main Theory magazine which I was reading.

David Perell:

What’s it called?

Dan Wang:

Qiu Shi, which means Seeking Truth.

David Perell:

Seeking Truth.

Dan Wang:

Chinese. Yes. The way I understand China, one of the core instruments of the Chinese Communist Party is the propaganda department. It is one of, I would say, the three most important instruments for Leninist rule.

It is perhaps the most important instrument because the Leninists are really interested in mobilizing the entire party state in order to modernize the country. I think that is the core essence of what Leninists understand themselves to be doing. You need a dedicated cadre of revolutionaries to lead the people into some sort of a greater paradise.

The second core element of the Communist Party is the organization department in which they are judging personnel and trying to figure out whom to promote upwards. Then the third element of a Leninist party is all the coercive elements to maintain discipline within the party and maintain security among the population. But I think the first and most primary element of the Chinese Communist Party, David Perell, is the propaganda. It is the writing. It is the newscast every night which airs at 7:00 p.m. in which they have the theme song, and then you have the anchors reading the news.

David Perell:

And people actually watch this tune in.

Dan Wang:

I think something like, it’s not like.

David Perell:

Just bread and circus. Everyone knows it’s fake.

Dan Wang:

I think people genuinely watch it because you don’t have that many channels on TV in China. You don’t have cable TV in China, which you have the equivalent of an MTV or HBO offering alternatives. And at 7:00 p.m., many of the core channels are airing the same news. People genuinely do watch this when they’re eating dinner or something at night.

David Perell:

Would I be wrong as an American to just be like, “Oh, that’s just propaganda. These people are completely deceived about what’s going on. They don’t know that they’re being brainwashed.” That’s sort of where my brain goes. But that seems like a very superficial read on what’s happening.

Dan Wang:

I think you would be partially wrong, not fully wrong. I think the propaganda apparatus is extremely sophisticated about trying to establish some measure of credibility for itself. They know not to put out complete nonsense. They’re not like the North Koreans, as we understand them, in which the glorious leader is correct in every instance.

David Perell:

Yeah, he played golf, he got 18 hole in ones.

Dan Wang:

Right. It’s not absurd on that level. I think they are pretty regularly airing some challenges.

There’s a natural disaster, but then we send in the troops to rescue everyone. Oh, there is now a trade war, but we are trying our best to support our exporters. They do report the bad news, but then they immediately also follow it with what the party state is doing to make life better for people.

I think they are pretty well aware that they need to establish some degree of credibility. My view is that their credibility is pretty thin, but they are pretty conscious of this. So they have the newscasts, they have the newspapers. There’s a lot of core newspapers. The biggest one is People’s Daily.

I decided I’m not going to watch the daily news, which goes up to something like 300 to 400 million people every night. There are some good parts of having a lot of people tune in every day. When I first arrived in China, I tuned into the local newscast, and I found a seven minute segment of a giant breakthrough that China had made around quantum satellites and quantum communications. Imagine beaming that into something like 400 million households. People who might have been watching that night over dinner. You probably radicalized a few million kids to really try to understand something about quantum mechanics and satellites that they never would have come across before.

David Perell:

And dare I say that’s not such a terrible thing.

Dan Wang:

Because how do we get any science education in the US? It’s whichever influencer might be interested in something like satellites and really try to go viral with that, and that’s really difficult.

So they have the newscasts, they have the newspapers. What I was doing was mostly reading the Theory magazine, Seeking Truth, which comes out twice a month. It’s a beautiful magazine. Every magazine looks identical. It has two characters, Qiu Shi, seeking truth. It is always red and white, and it always leads with some sort of an essay or a speech from top leader Xi Jinping in a different font from the rest of the magazines.

Then the rest of the magazine is basically essays from the rest of the party state. You might be the party secretary of Guizhou Province, writing about whatever you built back here. This is mostly meant to communicate to local cadres, officials, and retired people to give a sense of what the party state is thinking at any given moment.

We can certainly be sure that Xi Jinping wrote absolutely none of these. There is a giant apparatus within the Communist Party to write his speeches and write his essays. But I think there is something meaningful about having a top leader write lengthy essays under his own name to try to organize the rest of the party state and try to have his imprimatur on different things. That is one essence of leadership. Now, in the US, Joe Biden and Donald Trump give speeches, and I think that is the alternative, but maybe we should have a few more written documents that we can read from them. I think that would be quite interesting as well.

David Perell:

What’s going on with writing and censorship there? Are there people who get censored?

How do you feel about going out and sharing all of this now that you would be a little bit more sweaty at the immigration counter next time you go back to China?

Dan Wang:

There is extensive censorship that pervades throughout Chinese society, and it has gotten a lot worse over the last 10 years.

At the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, going on three years now, I was a little bit surprised when I came across this news headline that Putin had arrested a lot of Russia’s independent bloggers, many of whom were against the war.

I was thinking, what sort of amateurish, authoritarian regime is this? They still had independent bloggers that were able to publish under their own name and relatively freely. China had squeezed out all of these people essentially about 10, 15 years ago.

I am friends with a lot of Chinese journalists, journalists who have been writing a lot on the mainland, and pretty much there is no such thing as independent media in China in any bigger, more organized way.

Pretty much every newspaper is formally owned by the Chinese state or the Communist Party, or they are very extensively censored by the propaganda department. There is no real investigative journalism that does not get filtered through afterwards to make sure that such a thing is publishable. There is no independent media.

The censorship apparatus in China is absolutely staggering. A lot of Weibo posts can be censored. This is the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, could be censored really, really fast.

They are able to censor pretty much everything. I think a lot about this single viral video called Voices from Spring, which was a video in protest of the Shanghai lockdown in 2022, in which people tried to keep sharing this video to protest the lockdown. They try to turn it upside down, they try to encode it into the blockchain, and still the censors have managed to get through a lot of this stuff.

The most important thing is that it is big, pervasive, and getting worse.

In addition to having party crafted messages in seeking truth in the newscasts in the party newspapers, they also really strangle anything like independent media, even on social media.

I strongly suspect that some of the biggest departments, some of the most human intensive departments among China’s Internet companies like Tencent or ByteDan Wangce, probably their biggest spend is on human sensors, tracking through everything, looking at everything that’s gone viral, and trying to make a decision about whether to censor something like that before anything gets too viral and critical.

They do censor a lot of voices, including mine.

In 2022, one day I woke up to find that my personal website was blocked in China. Usually China blocks a lot of really big websites like Wikipedia or Facebook or the New York Times. I was pretty surprised that they would go on and block a rinky dink website like mine, Dan Wangwong.co.

At that point, I decided I had to go see the Canadian Consul General in Shanghai and ask whether there’s a pattern of behavior here, whether I needed to depart in a hurry, in part because two Canadians had already been taken hostage by Beijing over retaliation of Canada arresting the CFO of Huawei at the behest of the Trump administration. So there have been threats in particular of Canadians over their personal safety.

What we decided was that it’s not clear what’s going on. It’s not clear that they were really targeting me. Maybe there was some sort of an algorithmic keyword here that set someone off.

The challenging thing about censorship in China is that there’s no door that you can knock on of a censor, your local friendly censor, to ask what was going on, did I do something wrong, what happened? These people will absolutely not communicate with you.

The other part of the China discourse that is often very frustrating is that people know that a lot of things can be censored, and people know that police may be reading or social media posts and maybe asking you to come in and question you based on what sort of criticisms that you have been offering.

I think that really structures a lot of people’s lives if you’re chatting with them in China, because they are pretty reluctant to really express their core opinions because they are afraid, and they’re rightly afraid of the police coming after them if they write the wrong thing or say the wrong thing, especially to a foreigner.

I find that especially unfortunate because that is really hurting the critical thinking skills of a lot of different people.

I’ll offer just one more example of censorship, which is that because of a joke that a comedian made in the year 2023 that kind of played off of a common army slogan along with a joke about a dog, this guy was extensively fined. I believe he was detained for a couple of weeks, and pretty much all comedy clubs in Shanghai, China’s biggest city, were shut down over the course of a few months because of one joke that went slightly viral.

This had the toxic combination of a lot of online nationalists that made a big fuss out of this, especially since it involved the People’s Liberation army, which is one of the most powerful entities in China.

A lot of people felt that you absolutely cannot insult the troops. You cannot insult the troops anywhere, not in the US or not in China.

Their reaction was, we are going to close down a lot of comedy clubs in China’s biggest city, which has been a rising source of tourism for Shanghai, and we’re going to close all of that down.

This is just how insensitive the engineering state is. They don’t understand a lot of things. They really don’t want to have any jokes or mockery, and I find that totally pathetic that they are unable to treat anything with humor.

Am I afraid at borders? Yeah, I’m afraid at two borders. One is the American border right now coming in because there have been some reports, isolated, but some reports of foreign nationals being detained or intimidated based on something innocuous.

There has been, especially earlier this year during the Trump administration, border agents making an example of two German backpackers who were trying to go into Hawaii and entering on the wrong visa.

There’s a famous case of a French researcher who said that Customs and Border Patrol searched his phone for posts critical of Donald Trump and then turned him back from the border when he entered.

I do not feel like this is at all a big risk for me, but given these stories out there, I think all foreign nationals feel some hesitation to enter. We’ve seen that with some of the flight numbers coming from Europe and especially Canada.

David Perell:

When you say flight numbers, fewer people.

Dan Wang [98:57 - 100:20]:

Fewer people have dropped, especially Canadians who are no longer willing to shop in the US because of the way that Donald Trump keeps insulting Canada and threatening to make it America’s 51st state.

I am afraid of how the Chinese might react to my writing. I decided I was going to write the best book and the most honest and the most truthful books that I can. Therefore, I did not shy away from indicting Beijing over some of its biggest mistakes, like the one-child policy and for carrying zero COVID to excess. I absolutely do not want to shy away from what I think have been generational-level traumas that the Communist Party has visited upon the people.

Right now, I do not have a visa to China. I plan to apply for one in a couple of months, and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs can have a good long think about my writing and about whether they welcome me into the country.

If they give me a visa, I would be glad to visit. If they do not give me a visa, then I will have no choice, so no surprises. They can think about whether they like my work and are tolerant of my work, let’s say, and are able to welcome me into the country.

David Perell:

Wow.

So my caricatured view here would then be, wow, America is so free. China is so repressive. Thank God I live here. But in what ways is China intellectually free where America is constrained?

Dan Wang:

I would say that maybe in some ways China mostly functioned better in the creation of highly functional cities where subway stations are not very far, where the infrastructure works really well, and the logistics works really well. You’re able to get on a high-speed train, and you have public order within the cities.

To some extent, that is an element of freedom. It feels very bizarre to me that San Francisco is just so rich and works so poorly. No one, David Perell, would accuse San Francisco of being a florist.

David Perell:

Want to hear something crazy? I was talking to a friend in San Francisco, and I said, hey, it was nighttime. I said, hey, can you leave the car keys on the counter so I can just grab them easier? And he said, no, we keep them in a drawer in case somebody breaks in in the middle of the night. We don’t want them to also take the car keys.

This is just a standard way of living in San Francisco, and I was like, are you serious? And he was like, yeah, that’s just how we think here.

Dan Wang:

Yeah. What?

David Perell:

For a place that’s generating as much wealth as San Francisco, that is so bizarre.

Dan Wang

It’s bizarre, and I would say terrible. So many people have had their cars broken into because they left a backpack or something in the car seat.

David Perell:

Yeah, when you pay for parking here, the app tells you, notifies you, do not leave valuables in the car. The city app has just said, hey, we’re going to tell our people because it’s such a way of life here.

Dan Wang:

We don’t need to get into too much into the dysfunctions of San Francisco. We could have three more podcasts about that. But I think when you see these things, which are real, this stuns even a lot of New Yorkers of the poor level of public order and public safety here.

When the Chinese see it, the propaganda officials have a field day, looking at this app and saying, “Oh, look at how messy America is. You have the center of wealth creation in California, and nobody feels safe leaving their car keys in the kitchen counter at night because they’re afraid of break-ins. That should be a solvable thing, such that the propaganda officials don’t have such an easy time making fun of Americans. Frankly, everybody should feel safe leaving their car keys in their own home.”

I think there are ways in which the Chinese may be freer in that, but I would not defend any proposition that intellectually China could be more free, because I feel like there is very extensive censorship from above that keeps getting worse and worse. That is in part why China is such an underperformer in the creation of cultural products, because movies and plays and comedy clubs and books are so extensively censored.

I also feel like there is a lot of nationalist energy bubbling up from below, such that cancel culture is also very real in China. There is a very strong sense that if you say the wrong thing, the mobs from Weibo will come after you. This is not even necessarily directed by anyone from above, anyone from the government. This is really just a nationalist social media really trying to take your scalp.

David Perell:

Talk to me about the bundle of skills that are needed to write a book. You’d say, “Hey, Dan Wang published a book. What’d he do? He sat down, he wrote 288 pages and that was that.” No, but what you’re saying is actually there’s a lot of things, there’s skills that are required at the beginning, in the middle, and the end. Break that down for me.

Dan Wang:

There’s three hard parts of book writing: the beginning, the middle, and the end. In the beginning, if you’re writing a trade book like mine, you need to have a pretty clear idea of what you might write. If you’re working in nonfiction, you really need a great structure over which to pin through a lot of your thoughts. Otherwise, if you don’t have a structure, a through line, a narrative, all you’re really doing is moving pieces of facts around, and that does not make a great book. The first thing to do is to be a writer, to be able to conceptualize the through line for all of this.

You need to be able to convince a literary agent for Throughline. I was really blessed to have an excellent literary agent, Toby, who was really good at helping me think through everything that it would take to write a book proposal, which consists of something like 40 to 50 pages. Some could be even longer if you have an initial chapter in there that really outlines what your project is, who you are, and what you expect the chapter outlines to look like. Then the literary agent will handle the pitching process.

It would be really good if your literary agent has worked with a variety of publishing houses. You get more than one of them interested, and if more than one publishing house is interested, then you can have an auction, and then you can have a bid. That’s the fun part.

The long middle is the actual writing process. This is where I think many people should be listening to your podcast, David Perell, to actually figure out how authors write.

David Perell:

Yeah, subscribe to how I write.

Dan Wang:

Subscribe to how I write from David Perell Perel. There’s no wrong method, but you just actually have to do what you promised the publisher to do. I did it by repeating to myself, I’m a Qualcomm Collected Canadian and I was going to meet my deadline.

I had an excellent, supportive partner. She was a writing buddy, my wife, who had written her own book before. Something that my wife did was she created some writing retreats that helped punctuate being at home. I wrote at my home in Ann Arbor, at my office at the Yale Law School. Then Sylvia made sure to bring us out to some beautiful spaces. We spent a week writing in Austin, where we wrote during the day and ate some barbecue.

David Perell:

Where in Austin?

Dan Wang:

Just south of the river. Cool. Yes. It was a wonderful neighborhood. We rented an Airbnb. I did a lot of my work in Da Nang, in Vietnam. I wrote a lot of my proposal in Barcelona. And so just varying it up slightly was a way that Sylvia was very right in actually making me write.

David Perell:

Well, I need a wife like yours. That’s a good wife.

Dan Wang:

You should get one, David Perell. I recommend it.

I think the post-production process turned out to involve a little bit more work than I had expected. Not so much the revisions. I think my revisions were a process, and I went through it, but I didn’t have the title.

It took a really long time, almost last minute, until we figured out the title of my book. Initially, we thought of titling my book, rather than Breakneck, to have the title Move Fast and Break People: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. A bit of a mouthful, and the publishers didn’t love it. Then eventually, we settled on Breakneck, which I think is wonderful, just a single word. Breakneck is this amazing English word which has mostly positive connotations. We fixed the bridge at breakneck speed. We made the vaccines at breakneck speed.

David Perell:

But the literal connotations of that are brutal.

Dan Wang:

Yes. It’s this threat of violence coiled inside the word itself. I think it’s untranslatable because it’s a uniquely English, wonderful word.

I really like my title, and I really thank my editor Caroline for helping me come up with this excellent title. We spent a lot of time thinking about what the cover was going to look like. Usually, a lot of Chinese books have a lot of dragons on the cover, something like a high-speed train. There would be something red on the cover, and I wasn’t into some of these conventions of the genre.

So we took a lot of time coming up with the right cover photo, which I’m also really happy about. There’s a woman standing below a giant structure that looks a lot like the Tower of Sauron. I think that really captures something about the wonders of building an infrastructure, as well as how sometimes that is really intimidating to normal folks. This post-production process involves a lot of.

David Perell:

This is after you’re done with the work.

Dan Wang:

Yes, after you’re submitting the manuscript. A lot of that can still take a lot of time.

Then there’s a lot to do with book promotion. I’ve gone on quite a few podcasts. Here we are. Thank you, David Perell, for inviting me on this podcast and for really talking about the process of book writing.

I went on live TV. I was on Morning Joe, and afterwards, my mother was not very satisfied with how I was on live TV. My mom had to call me up and say, “Son, you look terrible. What’s going on?” I was thinking, oh no.

David Perell:

Not helpful, Mom.

Dan Wang:

Not helpful, Mom. But she knows whereof she speaks because she herself was a former TV news anchor.

David Perell:

Oh, never mind.

Dan Wang:

Okay. She has the credibility. She has standing to say something like this, even though it’s still not helpful, Mom. Come on, Mom. That was not great.

There are going to be more essays that I’ll be doing. There’s going to be more writing that I’ll be doing. But now we’re living through this book promotion process. So all of these things demand different skills. A great author would be able to at least be adequate and at least really good at one out of these three steps.

David Perell:

Tell me this. Why write a book, and under what conditions should you write a book?

Dan Wang:

Let me ask you this, David Perell. Should more people be writing books? Is that something that you’re generally encouraging people to do?

David Perell:

No, more people should not be writing books, but then there are some people who need to be writing books, and I think that we should strongly encourage those people, dare I say, shame them into writing those books. There are books that need to be written. There are people with deep domain expertise who have not written books, and we should be just doing everything we can to make sure that they publish.

So I don’t think that there should be more books, but I do think that we need more books from the right people. Absolutely.

Dan Wang:

Okay, I agree with that. I think the way to actually try to encourage the people who need to be writing books is to give broad encouragement rather than particular encouragement, because you want to be creating an atmosphere and environment in which these people would actually feel very comfortable writing their books. I want to err on more books being created rather than less.

I wrote a book in part because I felt like I needed to write a book after spending six years in China and after witnessing a lot of important things, like the first trade war, Xi’s growing repression, and zero Covid. I thought that I had a story to tell from all of this.

I also feel like there may be something to do with the case of maybe books are falling in value, but authors are gaining in value, and that is in part because of AI. I think it is really important to have some sort of perspective, especially if fewer people are writing books, to have cleared the filter, to have risen above the threshold. That means that you must be doing something very well indeed. Maybe there is also an element of if you are an author and you have a great book before the superintelligence wakes up, you want to have a book out there before the superintelligence writes all of the books for everyone.

I think for all those reasons, I still want to err more on the side of trying to encourage more book creation. This is why I think that I’ve been trying as best as I can to be helpful to my friends around me, to help them conceptualize their ideas and to really try to get these ideas out there.

David Perell:

The caveat here is I’m talking about nonfiction books, which is what I know a lot better. I was just in Ghana with Tyler Cowen, and we were talking about books, and he’s writing a book on mentorship now. He said, “Ah, it might be my last one.”

I said, “No, I think there’s a book that you’ve got to write.” So here’s my public encouragement to Tyler Cowen. I think he’s got to write a book about how to travel well. I say that because it speaks to the kinds of books that should be written, that can be written, and will continue to be very important in the age of AI: lots of personal experience and ideas from that personal experience that are not contrarian, where the consensus is somewhat wrong. If you can have all of those things, you should absolutely write that book.

What I think is a much harder book to write now, and what I’m just tired of, and these are the kinds of books that I dare say we should have less of, is the insight porn, Malcolm Gladwell-esque: start with the story, get to the main point, and just do that over and over and over again. Not to take anything away from Gladwell; that style was great in 2005, and he did a really good job with it. But now it’s just become so copied and belabored and formulaic.

That’s part of the reason why I enjoyed reading your book: it doesn’t do those things. What’s nice about AI is it actually gives people not just the liberty, but they need to reject the conventional styles in order to stand out now. There’s so much training data on convention that you need to find a way to go around it.

Dan Wang:

I agree a lot. This comes back to this point about airport books, in which a lot of it is just convention, and most of it is not that interesting. It’s a lot of hustle porn out there, and it’s not really good.

I endorse Tyler, if you’re listening, you should absolutely be writing a hot book. Let’s do it! The only thing that heartens me is that I’ve heard Tyler say that this is my last book before. I endorse that he should keep going.

David Perell:

Two more questions. First, tell me about what you pulled from The New Yorker style. I guess that you were really looking at the way they constructed words and sentences. Talk to me about that.

Dan Wang:

Initially, this is part of the reason I was a bad student in college. What I really tried to do was to just understand how great writing is. I did this by copying, by porting over a method that I did from trying to understand music and composition. I was quite musical especially.

David Perell:

What instruments do you play?

Dan Wang:

I played clarinet, so I wanted to be a classically trained clarinetist, but I walked away from that path. Something that I did was I went to the music library of my school and I pulled some of these scores.

I remember pulling, I think it was a Beethoven string quartet and a Mahler symphony, and I simply just copied everything in the score. If you do an exercise like that, you really see how the harmonies fit together. You really see what instruments are doing what, and you really understand what is going on in the mind of a composer if you simply copy the notes.

David Perell:

And by that, you mean copy the sheet music.

Dan Wang:

Copy exactly the sheet music. Just take a blank piece of sheet music and recreate every note on the page. I think that is something that really gets you into the mind of the composer.

I decided to do that by copying some of the New Yorker articles that I really liked. You just take a New Yorker article in front of you and retrace and type it out again, sentence by sentence. You don’t have to do this for an entire article, but you could just do a few paragraphs.

This was sort of the chic music training that I ported over. That sounds a bit like a silly exercise, and maybe the New Yorker is not the pinnacle of writing. Maybe we should be looking through different authors instead.

If you are able to do that sort of an exercise, you really get into the mind of a writer. You start thinking about the trade-offs they make, you start thinking about the choices that they make. You start thinking, at this point, maybe I could have used a different adjective; at this other point, maybe my sentence should have flown in a different direction. Then you really start understanding their intentionality, their choices, and what exactly that they really try to do.

Once you are able to start thinking about things in that format, I think you’re really going to be able to create intentionality within yourself such that writing does not feel like a totally strange and random process in which you have no idea what you’re trying to do.

David Perell:

Yeah, it comes back to texture. I have the image in my head of wet clay. You’re touching it, you’re molding it, and you’re taking a ceramic and you’re almost making it wet again to see how at one point it actually had to be shaped in order to get to that end state.

Dan Wang:

Yes.

David Perell:

Let’s end here. You wrote, I think, in your first annual letter about how most people expect their rate of learning to decelerate over time. You graduate from college. All right, I learned what I need to know, and now I gotta go implement that.

You have a strong rejection of that, actually. What if it could compound and increase? So, I’m curious about that general idea, and then what tactically you’ve done to learn faster and faster as you’ve aged.

Dan Wang:

In economic models, you have some sort of a depreciation formula in which value gets less over time if you own, let’s say, a piece of machine tool, because it wears out.

David Perell:

I just sold the car for $20,000 less than I bought it for.

Dan Wang:

Right.

David Perell:

Not particularly happy about it, but it’s okay.

Dan Wang:

That makes sense for a lot of physical durable assets in four years.

I think that we don’t have to reason about it the same way, because I feel like maybe we should take the Silicon Valley model of network effects, in which growth can accelerate to some degree over time. The more you know, the more you’re capable of knowing.

That is something that I think is super important. This is also something that Tyler taught me early on in life, that you should try to know a lot of stuff. The more that you know, the more that you read, the faster you are able to read. The more that you know, the better you are at learning things.

That’s just the strong proposition that I want to take in life: to try to learn as much as I can, try to keep growing, and try to keep evolving. I really appreciate someone like Tyler, someone like a previous guest that you’ve had, Ezra Klein, in which both Tyler and Ezra have been able to have very strong evolutions of themselves, their brands, and doing new things.

Ezra was an early blogger. He moved into the Washington Post. He founded Box, and now he’s at the New York Times, producing one of the most listened to and one of the best podcasts out there.

Tyler was an economics professor. He wrote a textbook. He got really early on into blogging.

He is now also running, not just being a classic university professor. I feel like that is central to his identity, teaching economics, but around him have grown these great projects.

Emergent ventures, emergent ventures conversations with Tyler, fast grants, and all sorts of these wonderful things and projects that are not even very well known about him that he continues to participate in.

You and I are both part of the Marshall Revolution extended universe. I think that one of these remarkable things is just how well Tyler has identified interesting people and tried to be generous to them, try to be kind to them, try to platform them, and try to spotlight them.

These are all things that I find remarkable, and I really appreciate both Ezra and Tyler for showing that they are able to grow, able to evolve, and able to do new things. I think that, David Perell, you’re also part of the pantheon, people who have really tried a lot of different new things, and you’re really building up a lot of new things.

I am really curious to see where you take this podcast and how you grow as a person next.

David Perell:

Thank you.