The Rich Robinson Show - Season 1 - At the Speed of China
Candid and fun interviews with my amazing guests – entrepreneurs, operators, experts - that will help you unlock actionable insights around the Asia region and the entrepreneurial activity that defines it.
Season one is titled At the Speed of China, like at the speed of light. The idea is that there are both outdated and clouded views on China while there is much to be learned from China's rapid rise after opening but even more importantly the lightning quick pace of business execution, consumer adoption and scale.
The Rich Robinson Show - Season 1 - At the Speed of China
Exploring China's technological initiatives and innovation
Matt Sheehan is a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he studies the development of China's AI industry and its implications for the country's technological future.
In this episode, Matt describes how he went from being a tourist online journalist in China to working at the think tank Macropolo at the Paulson Institute, where he analyzes the economic rise of China.
Key Takeaways:
•1999 was when Palo Alto was at its peak.
•China's true speed began after the Olympics in 2008.
•China has never previously granted journalist visas to any online media publication.
•During 2016–2018, Chinese investment in Silicon Valley took off.
•Silicon Valley sees China as a copycat, a competitor, a resource, an inspiration, or a technology gone wrong.
Best Moments:
• Matt shares how the first video he shot on his smartphone went viral, resulting in negative press for Chinese Eastern Airlines.
oAnd this was literally, the first, it was 2012. I had finally given up and gotten a smartphone. This was the first video I ever took on my smartphone, was of this fight where a Chinese Eastern Airlines employee tries to throw a stool at the passengers. And I took the video. Eventually it went up on my friend's blog, and it basically like went viral in China, and became kind of like a big, like public relations scandal for Chinese Eastern Airlines.
(00:13:38.72-00:14:03.60)
• Matt shared that his boss had lied to him directly.
oBut you know, he was dutifully passing on the censorship orders. I said, why? "How can he just like lie to my face like that when we both know that he's lying?" My producer, like, he's like, "Well, if he's lying and you know that he's lying and he knows that, that he's lying. Isn't that kind of like telling the truth?" I'm just like, "Whoa." Galaxy. Brain. Like. Mind blown. And it was like, "It's a helpful thing because he is like, yeah, yeah. He's like, yeah, everybody knows what's going on. Like, "Why do you need him to state it?" Because if he states it, then it's he, he loses face and it becomes a thing.
(00:21:05.44-00:21:38.57)
- Matt shares how he was issued a compromised version of J2 Visa.
o But in our case, HuffPost through some complicated stuff, did have Goaisi pretty good Goaisi, such that they wanted to actually give us a visa. But they felt they couldn't because of this; they don't want to open the door to online media. So they compromised their version. They gave me kind of a, what's called a "J2 Visa," which is like, theoretically, only for short-term, like, you go there to cover the Olympics or something like that. But they gave it to me, and they basically said, "Treat it like a J1 Visa. Treat it like a full journalism visa. We just can't officially, give you that because we don't want to open the door."
(00:26:32.73-00:27:02.12)
- Matt shares that he’s putting his Chinese side because of social stability.
oIt's a little harder to bootstrap yourself when you have so much regulatory requirement on top of you. But I do think that, it's like we're at a period of time when I would put the Chinese side, of me like, I prize social stability above many things. If we think that issues around data collection and data gathering might have contributed to some of the social and political instability that we've had in the US over the past few years, I'd take a haircut, I'd take a slight discount on exact performance of our AI algorithms, in order to say, "long term."
(00:51:59.02-00:52:29.09)
XCD: Post-production, transcript & show notes
Matt Sheehan, welcome to the pod.
Matt Sheehan:Thank you so much for having me.
Rich Robinson:Terrific to put a face finally to the name. We were saying earlier that Kaiser Kuo, who's going to be on the podcast, wrote about your name, "Macro Polo" and was the first time that I came across you, and I've been a real fan of your writing and thinking ever since then. So, I'm glad that we have a chance to chat. I'm in Bali, Indonesia right now. You are in?
Matt Sheehan:New York City, Upper West Side.
Rich Robinson:Upper West Side Suite. How's the dynamism of New York these days? Do you feel some of it coming back?
Matt Sheehan:Oh yeah. Feel good energy in the streets. So, at this point, we're maybe two months post, kind of steady reopening, but I think people still got a lot of energy in them. So, looking forward to the rest of the summer.
Rich Robinson:Yeah, just like Mark Twain wrote, "The rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated." New York is the most resilient place on planet earth. And I'm not even talking about what lives in the sewer. So talking about energy in the streets, we're going to talk about the energy in the streets in China. But before we do, let's go back to your origin story. You told me that you were born and raised in the lovely San Francisco. Tell me about that upbringing and your path to China, please.
Matt Sheehan:Sure. Yeah. So I was born outside of Chicago, was there as a little kid, and then we moved to the Bay Area to Palo Alto when I was in, like, middle school. And so did middle school, high school, college in Palo Alto, and then Stanford.
Rich Robinson:In Palo Alto. Wow. Okay.
Matt Sheehan:So, you know, to me at the time, this is 2000... when did we arrive there? 1999, and probably, had maybe one dial-up between the five family members. And I'd say just growing up there, I really was not, you know, that now might be considered like the golden age of Silicon Valley when a lot of these giants were birthed. But that was just — didn't know anything about that growing up. I didn't know who, Steve.
Rich Robinson:That was 99. Talk about peak Palo Alto in some ways. Yeah.
Matt Sheehan:I just wasn't very plugged into it didn't know about it. My dad's a Philosophy professor, so we weren't super aware of the business trends in the area. But yeah, I went to Stanford.
Rich Robinson:Of course, you stayed at Stanford. I know that from your LinkedIn, so you were like, neighborhood. But tell me about like, high school. Were there any kids in high school whose parents were sort of in the scene? Did you get that sort of osmosis or trickle over there?
Matt Sheehan:Really, very, very little, you know, a couple of my friends' parents were software engineers. Probably if I went back and looked through my high school yearbook or something, I'd learned that, like, probably five Qualcomm VPs among the parents of, or not even Qualcomm, some company that I was totally unaware of at the time, Cisco. And it was not part of my upbringing, not something I was very aware of. Even through Stanford, I was kind of like a Luddite, I deleted my Facebook and didn't want anything to do with social media or anything like that. I very much came into the tech side of this through the back door through eventually ending up in China and then just getting interested in how it was operating there.
Rich Robinson:So you may have been a neo-Luddite, as you say, but obviously, I don't think it's easier to go from Palo Alto High School to Stanford. I think there's got to be even more of a narrow funnel. So, obviously, as you say, back in Boston, you were a wicked smart kid, but you ended up going to Stanford, I mean, amazing choice, but of course, did you live on campus or were you still at home? Were you like, what was the experience like?
Matt Sheehan:Yeah, lived on campus all four years except for one year I was trying to whatever. I was trying to save money on rent somehow trying to live in the loft of some other dorm room until I got kicked out and then I had to crawl home for a quarter. But I was loving it. I love California, I love the Bay Area. And so I was just kind of fully enmeshed in that. And again, it was a situation where a lot of my friends and then classmates were kind of becoming more aware of the bubbling texting scene around, various friends go to work at Facebook and maybe early Airbnb and stuff like that. But again, it was not something I was interested in or into at all. It was China that got me basically halfway through.
Rich Robinson:And how did that happen?
Matt Sheehan:Yeah, halfway through undergrad, between my sophomore and junior year, I pretty much by chance got a job as a camp counselor at an academic camp in Beijing. And so pretty much splashed down in Beijing about six weeks before the Olympics started. No context, no knowledge of Chinese or history or anything like that I probably like my flag poles, my tent poles for China, were like there's Mao Zedong, there's Tiananmen Square, and there's like factory of the world. That's what I know of China.
Rich Robinson:That's a guy who's obviously a wicked smart kid going to Stanford, right?
Matt Sheehan:I was studying international relations too.
Rich Robinson:Yeah, and access to the innerwebs, basically, your entire teen years, right? And it's crazy that it's been 13 years since the Olympics that there's still that mindset around China. And I brought Louis CK out to perform in China back a while ago. And it was 2016, and he was like, "None of this is here. How did this all get here? This is not supposed to be here," right? It's just like people, and one of the purposes of this podcast and book is just raise awareness and let people know, right? So it's fascinating to me. And even after that coming-out moment in the Olympics, people still have misperceptions. So, what a great era. It's I think of China's pre and post Olympics. Like, I think that's like, at least modern, really what happened after '08 in this sort of speed context, that's when things really went into two more years, right? So you got a little taste pre Olympics, and then you got to be at the Olympics. Did you attend some of the events?
Matt Sheehan:I went to a soccer match in Shanghai. At some point, I was in Beijing for six plus weeks right before the Olympics, doing this kind of short-term gig. Went to Xi'an for a little bit, went to Shanghai for a little bit, and caught a little Olympic fever. But I mean, mostly I was full on China fever at that point. I remember sitting in the airport in Shanghai waiting for my flight home and just being like, "I got to get back here as soon as possible." So then, I was going into my junior year, had two years left. I basically said, "As soon as I graduate, I'm coming back." And I studied a little bit of Chinese my senior year, basically like two quarters, like a semester's worth more or less. And then the only way I knew to get to China at that point was to get a job teaching English. So I got a job in Xi'an teaching English in 2010. And started my sort of living stay.
Rich Robinson:And tell me about some of the things that stood out that were really, like, game changers for you, that captured you when you were there, or is it too many legion to?
Matt Sheehan:No, I mean, it was the energy, it was the physical energy on the streets. So I was staying in the Hukong, which is not like representative of modern China in any way. But anytime I'd wander out to the second ring row or anything like that, I'm just like, Palo Alto is just such a sort of fairy land, of just like rolling gentle hills and quiet homes. And I was in college, and growing up, I'm super into nature and philosophy, and think I'm really like thinking about the world. But China just kind of smacks you in the face when you get there. And so I just loved that feeling of stepping out into a sea of traffic, with me and a million other pedestrians fighting the way through it. I guess, what it mostly is, it just took any question that I thought had learned about or thought about it or had a take on from school, anything to do with economics, or politics, or philosophy, or psychology, or just like how people live with their families. How do you get along with your parents? I felt like China was instantly taking all those and just twisting them and turning them on their head, like, " Yeah." My relationship to my parents is great, and it's totally does not in any way involve me thinking that, like, all of their hopes for not being broke and picking up bottles when they're old reside in me getting a high-paying job. Like you know, what does that do to how you think about family and responsibility. And it took everything.
Rich Robinson:Well, that's great. Tell me about, before we dig more into your China adventures, like your dad was a philosophy professor?
Matt Sheehan:Yeah.
Rich Robinson:And, like, how did that shape your perception? Like, did you guys discuss it much? Was there, like, "Hey, this sort of Stoicism" or "This sort of modern philosopher" or German, or was there any of that?
Matt Sheehan:It's funny, we were just talking about stoicism when he drove me to the airport last time. No, I mean, I'd say the way he approaches it and the attitude that I think kind of got passed on to me was just the philosophy of living. His favorite phrase is turning the phrase from Socrates' "The unexamined life is not worth living." My dad always turned around and said,"The unlived life is not worth examining." So he was just always pro, just like,"Go out there, get in the mix, and then you'll have stuff to think about. You'll have like raw material for that." And so I think if anything, that just kind of — yeah, it was always like propelling me to go out and try to get mixed up in things.
Rich Robinson:If I may ask just one more question about stoicism, like it's become so sexy, kind of like entrepreneurship in a way, and stoicism and entrepreneurship have kind of blended together. What's his take on it? Does he feel like it's he's sort of bastardized in a way, or is he still?
Matt Sheehan:I don't think he's aware of the stoicism-entrepreneurship angle. He's 80 this year, and he's still very with it. But I don't think he's following that thread. I forget what comics we were talking about, and I think I'm reading a book about Ancient Rome, it came up somehow.
Rich Robinson:Ah, okay. Yeah. So I'm a big fan of Ryan Holiday and his trilogy about stoicism. And I love Marcus Aurelius and meditations. And I think it's one of the most profound fascinating books because the guy is the most powerful man in the world 2000 years ago. He's got the weight of the multiverse on his shoulders, and he writes this private diary just to kick his own ass. And it's very much like a very practical handbook, right? Of him, like, "Man, I sucked. I really suck. And this is hard, and I need to do this. And it's like, as an entrepreneur, that's the thing, your weaknesses and your just fear, uncertainty, and doubt are so exposed and open, and you're just like in the suck zone, so much you need, and you're like, this guy was dealing with like plagues and wars and people trying to assassinate him.
Matt Sheehan:Yeah, you want a leader to be reflective like that too.
Rich Robinson:Indeed. So let's get a little reflective on your English teacher. Was that right?
Matt Sheehan:Yeah, so I landed in Xi'an taught English. I mean, those jobs, at least my version of it was quite light, leaving me plenty of time to explore other stuff. So as soon as I got there, I threw myself into language study, history, just basically trying to absorb and suck up everything I could about Chinese society because I told you I was starting from basically zero. And so, very interested in especially the kind of economics, politics, nexus, this is 2010. This is real post-Olympic, post-financial crisis, stimulus, boom, build out. Everywhere I looked in Xi'an, things are getting torn down, rebuilt on the outskirts of town, are just miles and miles of just new construction, new housing towers. I got very interested in was a housing bubble, whatever. So that first year, I really look back on it finally not just because of the kind of freedom and stuff like that, but also because I hadn't yet put in my head all the things that telling me what China is and what, you know, it didn't. I wasn't on Twitter. I was reading basically books and like a handful of China blogs. But yeah, nowadays, I think I fear sometimes that people, maybe when they go to, especially young people, if you go to China, but you're immediately plugged into the whole China Twitter conversation, five different China podcasts and it's almost like there's no space in your head. Just wonder about what's going on. And then, wandering.
Rich Robinson:Except for this podcast, where I bring in very thoughtful sons of philosophers, but don't listen to them. Just keep listening to this one. But wow. But you're right. There's so much static. Especially like, I installed something called "Freedom" on my computer and phone just to be able to just, by brute force, take me out of the socials, even though I feel like I'm pretty disciplined about that. But it's just nefarious in some ways, and I go into the socials. I just give myself a very short window to do that. And yeah, for China, I mean, like, you've got to understand as much as you can, not about what's happening now or what's happened over the last 70 plus years of this ruling party, is like the dynastic parts of China. Like if you really wanna understand China, you have to understand Chinese, and they are not habits are, and what people are doing today is shaped by literally thousands of years of dynastic rule, and Confucianism, and many other things, right? So what were some of the conclusions or what were some of the things that you came out with there? Because I really feel like you're a really good thoughtful. I really enjoy your writings a lot.
Matt Sheehan:Probably, the most educational periods of time for me, or the time when I was taking on the most learning about how Chinese society is functioning is from having really good friends over there, who are born and raised Chinese and really just kind of looking back on their families and their lives and talking through that with them. Working at a Chinese company. I worked at a Chinese TV station for a year and then, very slowly and without a real agenda, just kind of letting people and institution or organizations that I was with unfold and watch how the people and them reacted. So, one like moment of learning that was a big one for me is I had a brief, like a viral moment in China when I was basically on a flight, a Chinese Eastern Airlines flight that got super delayed. Classic. Just like Chinese airport mess. And at the end of it, there was basically a fight between the airline staff and the passengers.
Rich Robinson:I've been there. I've been there.
Matt Sheehan:And this was literally, the first, it was 2012. I had finally given up and gotten a smartphone. This was the first video I ever took on my smartphone, was of this fight where a Chinese Eastern Airlines employee tries to throw a stool at the passengers. And I took the video. Eventually it went up on my friend's blog, and it basically like went viral in China, and became kind of like a big, like public relations scandal for Chinese Eastern Airlines.
Rich Robinson:Indeed. I remember. Yeah.
Matt Sheehan:And what happened was after the video went up, China Eastern reached out and got in touch with me, and they took me and my roommate, my best friend over there named John Wyn, they said, "Hey, come out to dinner and let's just talk about this. Let's just talk."
Rich Robinson:And then they took you into a windowless room. That's what people think happens in China, right?
Matt Sheehan:Right. You know, they took us to a very nice, it was probably the fanciest dinner I had all year. I was extremely broke at the time. This was after I'd quit my job. I was trying to be a journalist. Took us out this extremely nice like, five-course meal, and probably for the first two hours of the meal, not a word is said about the video, about them wanting me to take it down. Nothing at all. Finally, after a couple hours, they basically say to us, one thing, that little video, you can't understand what a blow that has been to us. And basically, you get around to very gently asking if I can take it down. Like, yeah, well, I didn't really want to, because I'd written an article, a narrative piece around it that had done very well, so I didn't want to take it down. And they sort of eventually come with an offer and they say, "Hey, you know what, we're asking you the video, but we understand, and here are for you and for John Wyn, like, $500 on China Eastern Airlines, use it whenever you want, et cetera, et cetera." And I was like, "Okay, this is great." They haven't forced me to do anything. So we're biking back from there in Xianyang somewhere. And I turned it down and I'm like, "This is awesome. I didn't have to commit to anything. They gave us all this money. And now we just get to use it." And she turns to me, she's like, " You can't use that money." And I was like, "What do you mean? They gave it to me. It's a gift card. I can use it whenever I want." Like, "No, they didn't make us take the video down, but if you use that money, you're entering into a relationship with them." Then my American mind is just like, "Whatever, fuck it. I got away with one. Now we got the money and forget." And she's like, "No." And I kept looking for what's the mechanism that they're going to use? Legally, they can't make me do anything. She's like, "It's not a legal thing. It's this relationship. Right now, we just don't want to be in a relationship with them. And if we use that money, then we have accepted their thing, da, da, da." And so it's just stories and moments like that where I could have read tons of books about Confucianism or whatever, Goaisi, and relationships. But I needed to like slowly onboard what she was saying, and in my mind, like most American minds, I think resists strongly, you know, you really don't want to take that on but eventually you kind of...
Rich Robinson:Like there, that's an excellent point, like, there's resistance. There's not just, "Oh, you know what?" First of all, people don't even necessarily are able to even cognitively process that, right? And then once they do, they're like, "Nah." Like, it's really such an upside-down, bizarre world in some ways, right? And one of my friends told me, "You can be successful in China, you don't have to understand Chinese, but you have to understand Chinese," right? And there really is something really different where you're like, "Oh." And I was married into a Chinese family for 10 years. I mean, I still have a great relationship with them. I have two boys for my first marriage, and it's amazing how dumb I was for so long it took me to be able to crack some of those cultural codes. So Wow. Thanks for sharing. And there was a peak time, I think around then, like 2012 to 2014, '15 where it was just misery on a stick getting on a domestic flight, right? You were just guaranteed but then it's actually amazing too how quickly things change in China, like, it's become so much more optimized, right? It's something where I don't think it's changed that much in domestic flights in the US in some ways right? It depends on which airline. But China somehow figures that out, right? And it's not always pretty, for sure, right? Wow. Excellent story. And yeah, life in Xi'an is like good choice. You didn't go to Beijing or Shanghai, right? Xi'an is like a major city. The terracotta Warriors. But it's also, something where it's China, right? It's really China, and there's far fewer Laoai there. So you probably had a better chance to really learn Chinese and assimilate.
Matt Sheehan:Yeah, no, I loved it. Xi'an is still my Chinese "lao jia." I just love going back there whenever I can. Some of my best friends are from there. And yeah, it was a good way to start taking on and learning China at my own pace and didn't feel compelled to maybe do all the things that one feels when they land in Beijing.
Rich Robinson:Indeed. Indeed. Yeah. It's very talk about static and social media. There's just static, the nightlife, and everything else in Beijing that can definitely be distracting. So, yeah, continue the hero's journey. What was next after that?
Matt Sheehan:So after that, I studied Chinese at Beihai in Beijing. So after a year in Xi'an, moved to Beijing studied at Beihai Beijing Foreign Studies University for a year. At the end of that, I got a job at a Chinese TV station and did that for a year. And that was kind of my real life, getting into a Chinese institution and seeing how that works.
Rich Robinson:Especially at TV station, right? Because that has a strong government, you know, influence and just like it's a really old school.
Matt Sheehan:Yeah. So we were basically a satellite TV station that's supposed to be, in English, broadcasting news about China, and sort of the pitch to foreign hosts and Chinese staff was like, "No, we're not like State TV. We're not like that." But after spending a little time there, you realized it absolutely is like that. And so I learned a ton, about sort of group dynamics and bosses and workers and all those type of relationship type things.
Rich Robinson:Yeah. Share an anecdote about some sort of, insight or confusion, or conflict, or struggle.
Matt Sheehan:So a lot of my friction there and what I was learning came around censored-type issues. So, I wanted to report the news as best I could. And eventually they were just like, "No, we're not going to talk about that." But what was always interesting was the way things were communicated. So there's me, I have a program, I have a producer over me, then there's kind of a middle manager, and then there's the ultimate boss. And the ultimate boss was a very sort of bicultural savvy guy. He had spent maybe 15 years in America, but he had deep connections. He was, I think if I have this correct, his grandfather was Zhang Xiaoming's teacher. So he's got deep connections on that side, which is probably why you got this license or on this TV station. But what was extremely confusing to me was the fact that it was on the operational level, it was so obvious that they were censoring. And they wouldn't let me talk about this. My producer would say it, the man, middle manager would say it. Everybody at the company's extremely clear on what they can't talk about. But the boss had said to me very directly,"No, you can record whatever you want. There's no restrictions." So I went back to him when all this was happening, like, "Hey man, you said to me that there's, no control over what I can say here, but there obviously is. And what's going on with that." And he just like, "I don't know. I don't know what's going on." I'm just shocked. And he said, "I'm going to look into this. And I'm gonna get to the bottom of this." And I was just like, "This is so weird. Because it's abundantly clear that all the orders are coming from him because everybody beneath him is on the same page, exactly. I'm just not used to having conversations where we both know that someone is lying, but we don't talk about it. But eventually I kind of put here. I went to my producer, and my producer was a good friend who I really liked. But you know, he was dutifully passing on the censorship orders. I said, "How can he just like lie to my face like that when we both know that he's lying?" My producer, like, "Well, if he's lying and you know that he's lying and he knows that he's lying. Isn't that kind of like telling the truth?" I'm just like, "Whoa." Galaxy. Brain. Mind blown. And it was like, "It's a helpful thing because he is like, everybody knows what's going on. Like, "Why do you need him to state it?" Because if he states it, then he loses face and it becomes a thing. Then we, it's like once it's been said, it can't be unsaid. And so, he can't, put that on the table sort of. But you both left the meeting knowing what the status quo is. He knows that I don't like it. I know that he's fine with it, and we should carry on. Whereas my American self is like, "No, I want you to say it. I want to argue about it." And basically I have eventually left the station over things like that. But yeah, those are the kind of things that I just like. Can't learn that in a book, and couldn't even learn that. And later I went on to be a journalist, and I couldn't have learned that from just being a journalist. You have to be, like, embedded in it and run up against it.
Rich Robinson:Yeah. And even more difficult, I had a similar experience with somebody who's a high way, right? A sea turtle, as they're called, right? You lived, 5, 10, 15, 20 years in the West and then come back to China, and right haircut and right handshake and like very western in some superficial way, but like, still very Chinese, right? So then it drops your defenses even more. And was chewing me out for not doing something, but I had told the team not to do that. And I go back to the team, and the team's being really sketchy about it. And finally one of the team members says, "We must go out to dinner. And I was like, "Hmm. Okay." Another, he's like, "We must go out to dinner tonight." And I was like, "Oh." And I couldn't say, "I didn't want to go." We went to dinner, gets out to baijiu, the rice wine, and we started drinking heavily on a Tuesday, and I don't know, and I'm like, "Oh, I don't even want to do this." And finally he gets drunk, and he just finally says, "The boss told me to do it." And the boss is chewing me out for not telling the team to do it. But he went and told the team to do it because he knew I was going to do it the right way, the Western way. I was the only foreigner in the company, and he needed to do it in a different way. And then I was, " " Alright. Okay. I'm a team player, I'll take it," right? But until you're actually in that sort of mix, you're like, "Wow, this is really where that rubber meets the road." Like where the foreigner local thing gets kind of broken down, right? Wow. So then, from there, excellent experience, in the middle of it all, and then you went into journalism from there.
Matt Sheehan:Yeah. So I quit that. I sort of ran around and freelanced for a little bit. After I quit that job, I had about six months left on my visa. I sort of hitchhiked around central China, just trying to looking for stories and stuff like that. This is where I saw the airport brawl and wrote about that. And eventually, at the end of it, I got a job as a foreign correspondent, as the first China correspondent for the Huffington Post. They were trying to expand internationally, and they hired me for that.
Rich Robinson:How did that come about?
Matt Sheehan:It came about from a recommendation to somebody. By that point in time, I had put together maybe written five stories, five things that had been published about China. Translated a few things, wrote a few articles, just barely enough to kind of trick the Huffington Post into thinking that I was a journalist.
Rich Robinson:But it was still early days for the Huff Post too, right?
Matt Sheehan:This is 2013, so I don't know when they sort of hit the peak of their powers.
Rich Robinson:I think they got acquired like a few years later, right? So they were still kind of in growth mode.
Matt Sheehan:So yeah, I had that job for the last, sort of, two plus years that I was there.
Rich Robinson:Did you ever bump up against Ariana at all? Did you meet her in person?
Matt Sheehan:I did. I met her in Huangzhou, actually. She came out for Alibaba, was hosting its first ever Alibaba Women's Conference. They have a lot of women in like senior leadership positions, and they sort of turned that into a public relations win. And they held this women's conference. So she came out to that. I went to the Alibaba headquarters with her.
Rich Robinson:Yeah. My wife works in women's leadership. We're both fans of her writing and Thrive Global. What she does now, like any anecdote you can share about her?
Matt Sheehan:Nothing too revealing.
Rich Robinson:Well, not so much revealing as just the little insight, any sort of like "Gotcha" or "Ha," but like she's a pretty inspirational person. I mean, I really like how she's vulnerable about sleep, how she passed out when she was overworking herself, and then she's like, "I have to really take care of myself." And I just think she's an immigrant and super hardworking, even though she doesn't necessarily have to be, and she's, serial entrepreneur, and I just really like her sort of vibe, right?
Matt Sheehan:Yeah. No, I think she's done a ton in that space.
Rich Robinson:So then, from HuffPost, how do you get a visa for, like, a journalist visa for Huff Post, is that right?
Matt Sheehan:Yeah, I mean that was a very complicated story in itself. Basically, China doesn't live to give out journalist visas and HuffPost didn't have an existing one. So they actually trying to think at what level to tell this story because it's a lot of details. Basically, they had never given out a journalist visa to an all online media publication before. Everything either had to be like broadcast TV or had of a print edition. And so, they wanted to kind of hold that line because they felt that if they sort of opened the door, then suddenly every website wants its own journalist visa. And I'm applying right at the time of the, a little bit after the New York Times One job Bow Bloomberg sheet. Yeah, they're starting to expel some of the early expulsions of foreign journalists and denial of visas. But in our case, HuffPost through some complicated stuff, did have Goaisi pretty good Goaisi, such that they wanted to actually give us a visa. But they felt they couldn't because of this, they don't want to open the door to online media. So they compromised their version. They gave me kind of a, what's called a"J2 Visa," which is like, theoretically, only for short-term, like, you go there to cover the Olympics or something like that. But they gave it to me, and they basically said, "Treat it like a J1 Visa. Treat it like a full journalism visa. We just can't officially, give you that because we don't want to open the door."
Rich Robinson:Interesting insight.
Matt Sheehan:Yeah, so in that process, I actually have to wait back in California for about seven months. It took about seven months to get to this compromised version. And during that time, I was totally in the dark as to whether or not I was going to get a visa at all. We had basically no communication from them.
Rich Robinson:Were you still writing China pieces at that time or doing something?
Matt Sheehan:Yeah, so I was a China correspondent for the Huffington Post, but I was in Palo Alto. And so basically what I started doing is looking for China stories there, which is actually how I ended up getting onto this kind of tech and innovation beat. I started interviewing Chinese engineers or entrepreneurs who were in Silicon Valley, and I kind of looked around and just realized there were tons of stories connecting China, and California Tech was the biggest one, but there's also a lot of Hollywood, China going on, a lot of real estate investment students, everything. So I basically picked up a lot of stories, published some, and then, when I finally got that visa, I sort of followed those stories back to China. So I interviewed people in the Bay Area, who then went back to China to found their own tech companies and stuff like that.
Rich Robinson:Have you been in touch with Eric Rosenblum from Tsingyuan Ventures? Do you know Eric?
Matt Sheehan:No, I don't think so.
Rich Robinson:No. So he's the guy who introduced me to Kaiser way back in the day. He's been on the pod, and he's a serial entrepreneur and executive, and he is VC firm, he's the only Laoai. He lives in Palo Alto, is their thesis is to invest only in Chinese- born entrepreneurs who live in the US. And I think, their first investment was Zoom. So I think there's a pretty good thesis around that, right? But then, yeah, every time I go back, I've been to Facebook or Google headquarters, and I always try to find a buddy there and have lunch with him or her. And you can hear so much Chinese being spoken when you're on those campuses.
Matt Sheehan:Yeah. No, I find that stuff fascinating, I was talking earlier about how my mother was a Luddite. Didn't want to have anything to do with this stuff. But I kind of backed into it because the cultural, political, economic, all that stuff was so interesting that it kind of pulled me into space in that way.
Rich Robinson:Interesting. So then, now you land back in the Middle Kingdom with your J2 visa, and what are some of the things that, you know, what's the piece that you kind of feel most proud of or the one or two that stand out with HuffPost back in that era?
Matt Sheehan:Yeah, I think, one that I'm very proud of, and that's kind of representative of how I went about things. There was the Huffington Post correspondent, but I was the only one in China. I didn't have any assistance or editors, or translators, or anything like that, so I was kind of like a one person bureau. And I also didn't have, like, high-up Goaisi or anything like that. I knew that operating totally by myself. I wasn't going to launch some deep investigation into family wealth or something like that of the CCP. But I basically tried to find some like, cultural phenomenon in China that I thought was important and wasn't understood in the West, and then just kind of throw myself into the middle of it and look for a story. And so one of these was Chinese New Year and the big migration back home, and I figured the way to cover this was to basically get in the middle of it. So I bought a hard-seat train ticket from Beijing to Guangxi. Yeah, so it was like a 39-hour train ride, did it maybe three days, four days before Chinese New Year. So, absolute peak, like sea of humanity, crush of people. And yeah, I brought a photographer, and I just kind of got on the train and was like, "I'll just document this and just see what happens."
Rich Robinson:That's what 20s are for, to do stuff.
Matt Sheehan:Yeah. So tall Laoai on the train, in the hard-seat area, people are going to talk to me. And so I ended up talking to all the people around me, just getting little bits of their life story."This guy's going home from college.""This is a migrant worker trying to get a jump on the job search.""This is a weaker trained conductor who ends up like singing songs for the car." So I wrote that and did a few stories that were something like some cultural phenomenon, something in China that I want Americans to understand, and just like, "Go out, get in the middle of it, and just try to make a story out of it."
Rich Robinson:Beautiful, beautiful. Yeah. I have to link that in the show notes. I first came to China by train through Siberia. So that was my first through Mongolia. But I love those train rides. It was something that we did with a startup every time. We had a big winner. We shipped something. We first got on a bus, we went to, you know, up the other great wall. We hiked, but then after that we went to you know, Changbaishan up near North Korea, and we went to all these Laosian, and we would get on a train and get a whole team there. And it was first. I grew up to a couple, 240 people at one point. We took over cars and trains, but that kind of communal train rides, like, I think that captures China so well. I think Chinese people are maybe, if you're on a flight and it's delayed, Chinese people at their worst or humanity at their worst, but on a train, like, there's something, the people are kind of almost at their best, like sharing stuff and talking, and like, there's this a chatter once everybody's settled in, and I just love that.
Matt Sheehan:Right. Yeah, it's great. I love train rides over there and see people are going to make it work, and it's not kind of this feeling of like, "We're all stuck in this train car together," and you can't, you know, feel like so many social phenomena or issues or whatever in China come from just when you pack so many people into so little space with so little resources or formerly so little resources, you just find ways to sort of live together and make it work. And I always felt that way about the train rides.
Rich Robinson:Yeah, that cliche on the train is interesting. Wow. Great. Thanks for sharing. And then, from HuffPost, we keep shortening.
Matt Sheehan:Yeah. So, in 2016 I moved back to the Bay Area. The big picture goal was to write a book about China-California ties. The threads that I had first picked up when I was back there waiting for a visa, follow them back to China, and I sort of wanted to follow them home. This is about this period of time, 2013 to '16, and then '16 to '18, kind of the takeoff in Chinese investment in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley companies kind of interested in trying to get back into China, Hollywood-China ties. This is the period time when growth of Chinese students is just like 30% growth every year. And so, was starting to see the results of these phenomenon and then all the frictions that they were creating, frictions around the tech stuff frictions around, so many Chinese students at US public universities. And so I moved back with the goal of kind of writing this book, drawing up those connections, and teasing out the implications for broader US-China relations. And then to try to kind of get in the mix with any types of projects connecting China and California. So I did everything. I gave Mandarin-language tours of Stanford to wealthy Chinese tourists who were in town. I made goofy like Chinese videos about California culture and like, put them online in China. I worked with some VCs who were doing cross-border stuff worked with kind of everybody. So, I had a few years of that before kind of narrowing in on where I work now at a Think Tank MacroPolo.
Rich Robinson:Excellent. Wow. And tell me about some of the things that have changed since then. Like that was peak like, bridge between Silicon Valley and China. Of course, now, is a different sentiment, but I mean, there's the sort of federal government sentiment, which a lot of it is correct like, "Let's protect any sort of militarily sensitive things and, any sort of outright theft," right? I mean, of course, who can argue with that? But I think at the commercial level, a lot of deals are still being done. But it seems to me that China's become a lot more self-sufficient and become much more of a competitor. And maybe taking fewer cues from Silicon Valley. And now a lot of other markets are taking cues from China.
Matt Sheehan:Yeah. You know, I think that's sort of not a total flip or reversal, but basically a change in what's sort of foreground in the relationship? I get a lot of questions from policy people or business people, "How does Silicon Valley see China?""How does China see Silicon Valley?" And I always think the connections between these places are very multifaceted, and how you see the other side, it's less like China flips from good to bad as different aspects of China come to the fore. So I've sort of illustrated this a little bit just to clarify it in my own head with a chart where, you say, if there are like five threads in the way that Silicon Valley sees China, and you could say it sees it as a copycat, it sees it as a competitor, it sees it as a resource, it sees it as an inspiration, or it sees it as a warning sign about tech gone wrong. Over the last decade, one of those threads is dominant and one of them is very much sort of recessive at a period of time just changes. Go back to 2010, it's probably a copycat first, maybe resource or see it as a market is second. This is maybe prego getting kicked out and stuff like that. And it was very much not seen as like an inspiration or even like a warning sign in any way. You fast forward to 2015, '16, or '17, China's very much in some ways seen as an inspiration of sort of super apps, and everyone's getting excited about WeChat and mobile payments, and the copycat thing has fallen off. And I think probably the biggest change over the last few years is China as market has gone down substantially, especially for the big platform companies, whereas China as a competitor has kind of risen to the forefront for most. So, yeah, if you're on Facebook in 2016, you're still kind of chomping at the bit, thinking that maybe one day Xi Jinping is going to let you in. If you are nice enough to him and you read his book or whatever, fast forward five years, 2016 to 2021. And it's not that you think you're going to get in and dominate China; you're not getting in, and you're more worried about sort of fending off TikTok in Indonesia or something like that. And so, I just think these threads and what is dominant and what is, sort of recessive have really shifted around a lot to the point where, competitor is probably the dominant paradigm, at least for the big companies these days. China as market pretty has fallen off for a lot of people, except for maybe Apple. And China's inspiration is still up there, but inspiration tinged with, but we don't want that total like surveillance state, whatever. So yeah. I think it's probably never changed as fast as it's changed in the last, like, three, four years.
Rich Robinson:Well framed. Yeah, for a neo-Luddite son of a philosopher, I think you've really grabbed that, and I really like that, and I'm going to talk to you about putting that exact sort of framework in some sort of introduction attributed, of course, to the philosopher's son, but I think the one sort of vein through all of those threads is the speed. And as a matter of fact, like, I could literally see that in my mind like real-time chart about how quickly that's changing, and that shouldn't make sense in a way, right? It's maybe the oldest society and one of the oldest societies in the world, the largest society in the world by population, and by far and in a lot of ways, a very traditional society. How's that possible? Like, did you just talk about the last two generations or did you just talk about the last decade, like how quickly things are shifting, and that's really the purpose of this book. Do you have any anecdotes or anything that you can share, even if it's something personal about the speed of change in China and you liken it back to Palo Alto? And Palo Alto is, if you could argue that, there's one like non major city in the planet where innovation happens, it's Palo Alto, right? Cambridge, Massachusetts, Palo Alto, maybe there's some parallels between both with universities and tech hubs. But there is this sort of, "I don't want to stay stasis, but there is this sort of different pace and pulse, just being in that area, and even the quote-unquote Silicon Valley of Beijing, and a lot of people have never been there, don't really understand that Silicon Valley's not some hip area. In San Francisco, it's really a bunch of suburbs, mostly just south of San Francisco, right? And like in the northwest of Beijing, it's definitely more urban, although it's pretty far from the downtown of Beijing. But there's a different dynamism there. But, instead of talking about that, some sort of like, Hanjorno, it's like more what you've felt and seen in some of the personal and professional things you've done.
Matt Sheehan:Yeah. I mean, I think for me, living in Xi'an just watching that whole city basically get torn down and rebuilt, they preserve the center of it and that's cool, but it's that society-wide, economy-wide pace of change was always there ever since I first got there. And I think it arrived in the tech space, and I felt it for the first time and that kind of, 20, I'd say ' 13 to 2017, '18 was like, for me, the real tech has sort of seized the main zeitgeist of a lot of Chinese life, or at least, you know, young Chinese life. I'm not saying that, people in rural Shanghai are like building apps, in their villages or something like that. But where I was in Xi'an and Beijing, I think what was so impressive in some way was the society's wide nimbleness and willingness to just kind of drop everything and jump on the next thing. And so for me, it kind of got encapsulated in watching some of my, like, friends' career trajectories and stuff like that. One of my good friends in Xi'an, I don't know what she studied in college, but nothing technical at all. And I think she was working in like a pearl dealing shop or something like that. And then, around 2000, it was 2014. So this is Alibaba IPOs government launches "Shuāng chuàng, wànzhòng chuàngxīn, dàzhòng chuàngyè" scene. It's double innovation, mass innovation, mass entrepreneurship. So, Alibaba's IPO puts it to the biggest IPO in history. It puts a ton of fuel on the fire. Then the government is like, "Okay, yeah, we had some second thought, we had questions earlier, but now go," just like pour money into innovation. Everything society wide is becoming innovative. And innovation it's like the ultimate buzzword. And I remember this friend in Xi'an texting her, WeChatting me, I'd never heard a word from her about tech before. And she was like, "Matt, like you're in Beijing. Can you find a startup for me in Beijing? Can you introduce me to startups in Beijing?" Like, it doesn't matter what it is, it just needs to be a startup. And I was like, "I don't know what to do, but I can't just kind of pass you off to whatever startup I've just interviewed." But it was that kind of, suddenly everyone had got like the bug at the same time. All this money venture capital is pouring into it. And at the time, I thought it was kind of ridiculous that she would suddenly want to think that she could work at a startup. But two years later, she was working at Hubba Five Eight as like a online retailer. Couple years after that, she was a product manager at DD. I forget where she is now.
Rich Robinson:Now she's the seventh richest woman in from her province.
Matt Sheehan:Yeah. It was like that nimbleness of society really can just turn on the jets. And I think you were talking about how this happen in a society, it's so old, maybe so much not changed over time. I think a lot of it just has to do with the mindset that got inculcated post reform and opening where, you know, if you were alive in the eighties and nineties. Basically, when a new industry opened up and was suddenly open for business, you had to rush in there, and if you rushed in there and got in there early and staked your claim, you might be a billionaire at this point. Real estate opens up in the nineties, like no one really knows, is this gonna be like a real thing or not? And then the people who just rushed in there, bought a bunch of land as soon as they could and made it their business, incredibly wealthy. And so I think it drives both the pressure of like historical poverty and historical weight of knowing you've got to take care of yourself, you got to take care of your own family, matched with basically how quickly they've seen. If you don't jump on something, that train has left the station. And I think that's what kind of drives the speed at which people are willing to just, like, grab onto new industries and flood into them.
Rich Robinson:That's great. I love that story about how the government does say, "We're going in this direction," and how it really can be a signal and spark, some sort of action by the Laoaisheng, the average person, right? How it actually really can trickle down. And also, it's interesting, one of the reasons why I'm doing this podcast is to be able to just really explore ideas. It's kind of like doing stand-up comedy, where you do 20 hours of material and then you can get, one-hour special out of it, right? And one thing that you just opened up in my mind is, "When did this really start?" Like, of course, reform and opening, like when Deng Xiaoping said, "Black cat, white cat, as long as it catches mice," right? Socialism, capitalism, we just want people to be prosperous. But, I really have to do a little work on unleashing something that's been part of Chinese society and DNA for millennia, right? Which is this kind of like natural inventiveness and entrepreneurial drive, right? And it's all this like pent up. And it was against the law, it was punishable by pretty extreme incarceration or worse, if you were an entrepreneur, for 34 years, right? So, it's there was I think a lot of that kind of explosion of like natural entrepreneurialism, and it just has gotten faster. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. And tell us about MacroPolo under the Paulson Institute. And tell us a little bit about Paulson Institute and the origin story of MacroPolo.
Matt Sheehan:Yeah. So, Paulson Institute has been around for, I think, about a decade now, founded by Hank Paulson, former Treasury secretary and someone who did a lot of business in China in the 90s bri help when he was at Goldman Sachs, helping bring the big Chinese banks and get them listed and all that stuff. Paulson Institute kind of has two sides to it. There's an environmental advocacy side, which is, his sort of passion and does a lot of work with sort of training Chinese government officials, helping them build up their conservation ecosystem, build up the national park system in China is pretty new. That's all over on that side. And the other side is the Think Tank, which is MacroPolo, which was founded in 2017, and basically do Chinese economics, politics, technology, and energy, environment. And so, I do the technology side of that, and the goal or maybe what hopefully distinguishes us, is trying to do Think Tank-level depth of work and research but make it very easily digestible and presentable. So a lot of data visualizations, shorter pieces, not just big, long reports are more on the academic side. So, most of my work there is about Chinese technology, about some of the stuff we've talked about, relationship between Silicon Valley and China, and then trying to gather data, and analyze, and visualize sort of how the Chinese AI ecosystem has grown and how it interacts with the US and the rest of the world.
Rich Robinson:Fascinating. Wow. And is Hank Paulson involved much?
Matt Sheehan:Yeah, I'd say he is much more involved on the other side of the institute, the environmental side of it. But yeah, he dips in, and we talk to him about what we're working on and stuff like that.
Rich Robinson:That's got to be fun to interact with him. He must be a fascinating guy to talk to. Tell me about, AI. Of course, I'm trying to get Kai-Fu Lee on the podcast, and he wrote that book, AI Superpowers, right? And I think, if I please correct me, but you know, roughly his kind of thesis is in the lab. US is dominating. But in the wild, China has a bit of an edge just because of all the nearly 1 billion internet users there. They can collect data from across. Of course, there's a lot more pushback now from the government and from the users around that. Like what do you think about that kind of framework, and then where do you see things, moving forward with AI?
Matt Sheehan:I think a lot of it depends on how you might evaluate the US and China comparatively. A lot of it depends on where you think the technology is going from here. I think Kai-Fu's thesis is in some ways premised on the idea that, you know, in the last 10 years we've gotten deep learning. Deep learning was a huge sort of level change in what AI can do. And we're currently at the stage where we just need to exploit and apply deep learning to almost any social problem, business opportunity, whatever, and you can get a lot of juice out of it.
Rich Robinson:And how do you define deep learning?
Matt Sheehan:So deep learning is basically a way of doing AI or machine learning that's heavily dependent on data, in which you take a bunch of training data basically examples of whatever sort of thing you're trying to do. You feed it into the neural network. And it's able to use sort of the past examples to make predictions about the future. So if you feed it a million examples of sort of what people have bought online, this person who lives in this state and we think they're male and they've previously visited these 20 websites, and you come up with a hundred different characteristics of them. Say that person when faced with this choice bought Samsung TV and this person bought some other TV brand is. And basically, you give it enough data points and sort of characteristics and match them with an outcome. Then in the future, when you feed it, Rich's data or Matt's data, it'll be able to predict with a very high degree of accuracy which TV I'm going to buy or this same technique is very generalizable. That's just kind of one of the most popular applications of it. It's what drives computer vision because it can basically predict what objects are in the world. And it's built on having very deep neural networks, where there's a lot of layers to it. You could go into that at many more layers of depth than that. But the idea that I think Kai-Fu holds and advanced in the book is that, we've achieved deep learning that gives us an ability to apply this problem to a huge number of business opportunities. We're at the stage where we just need to do that application, and therefore China has the edge business better at applying and kind of squeezing all the value out of business. There are other people out there who think, deep learning's just the beginning we're actually going to continue to level up. If you hold that perspective, then maybe America's advantage in cutting edge research is more meaningful if you think we've sort of plateaued and cutting edge research is nice to have but you don't need it. It's not where the real action is, then you could say, advantage China for various reasons. If you think there's a lot more runway with the research side of things, then you might put advantage America for a few reasons, but complicated than that. China has a lot of really great research. America has a lot of really great applications, and it's a field that's changing very quickly.
Rich Robinson:Fascinating. I'm just trying to be able to grasp AI in a way that is actionable for me, as I think about business opportunities, and I work a lot with startups and entrepreneurs around the world. Even if the US continues its lead in the lab, which it's likely that it will, and I think that it's basically going to be a battle of superpowers. Like, Kai-Fu has laid out between the US and China, just because the deeper pockets, and the research institutions and the sort of captive markets, and the two largest economies. But do you think, at the end of the day, and I don't like to say "at the end of the day" that much, but I can't think of another way to put it succinctly. It's really about data being applied to whatever new algorithms are coming about. So if there's like, for instance, these days we're constantly saying, "Okay, I accept. Yes. Go ahead on every website around the world." And I think that's largely because of the European data protection laws, right? Which I can understand people want their privacy. They should get their privacy. But are those countries, societies, basically hobbling themselves? Because, okay, we're optimizing for privacy now, but we're really going to be on our back foot when it comes to competing in the future because we are local companies, are not going to be able to, build stronger AI applications because they just don't have the data around that, right? And it's like, I understand why people want their privacy, but I also see that's like, 2042, China buys Benelux or something, right? Because they're just dominating because they have access to so much data, right?
Matt Sheehan:Yeah. I think there's a lot of different directions you can take that, and there's tons of, like, complicated social questions. I think maybe I'll come at it from two angles. One of them is about data, and I think, basically, the thing needs to get added to the conversation is that data is not like this raw, natural, it's just about how much you have. And because China's a billion people and US has 300 million people there.
Rich Robinson:The Saudi Arabia of data as kahui.
Matt Sheehan:It's much more nuanced than that. If you're a business, you need very specific types of data to answer very specific questions. Each application or service that you're building needs to answer a different question with data, and it's not just a question of "Do you have a billion people or a billion users? But is that data collected and organized? Is it structured data? Is it labeled data? Is it diverse data that is going to a Chinese company trying to build a facial recognition algorithm and you train it entirely on Chinese faces, you try to export that to the Middle East or to Africa?" Good chance it might not perform so well. So data, in one piece I've written was about what I called like,"The Five Dimensions of Data." You can have quantity of data, you can have quality of data, you can have depth diversity. And I think when you add in all those dimensions, it's not really immediately clear that China has a huge advantage in that front. So that's kind of one angle I would take, is just kind of complicating how we think about quote-unquote data advantage when it comes to the big sort of social trade-offs of privacy versus data collection, it's very possible that, for example, European data protection laws are going to make it harder for European startups to get off the ground or something like that. It's a little harder to bootstrap yourself when you have so much regulatory requirement on top of you. But I do think that, it's like we're at a period of time when I would put the Chinese side, of me like, I prize social stability above many things. If we think that issues around data collection and data gathering might have contributed to some of the social and political instability that we've had in the US over the past few years, I'd take a haircut, I'd take a slight discount on exact performance of our AI algorithms, in order to say, "long term." Like if we long term want to compete with China, we need a stable, socially cohesive country to do that. And I put a little emphasis on you know. We don't need to race and compete on that specific thing. Let's put our energy in some other aspect of this competition.
Rich Robinson:Terrific. Terrific. Well said. And on that note, like one last thoughts about using this rise of China as a Sputnik moment to say, "How can we compete better?" Like, what are some of your thoughts around that? Instead of trying to necessarily just hobble the competition, but just to say, you know what? Let's keep some things in check that are beyond the pale. Like, militarily sensitive things and outright theft, and some other this unfair advantages that are, really not, in the what WTO but then, let's really up our game.
Matt Sheehan:Yeah. No, I think you're talking about cutting ties or protecting this or that piece of technology. I think, basically, the process that we're in right now, or the best parts of the US government, or the best parts of US society you're in right now are evaluating and sophisticated way when do ties and connections to benefit the US innovation ecosystem. When do they harm it? When is it neutral? When is it a public good? So, for example, a lot of my work has been on when Chinese students and researchers come to the US, do they stay and contribute? Do they, and in my field, the area that I look at of elite AI researchers, it's an overwhelming win for the US when Chinese people come and study. If you're working at sort of the cutting edge of AI research and you come to the US, very high chance you're going to stay here. That's one area where I say let's protect that. Let's keep that. We don't need to cut those ties just to cut them. Another area. It's very different. If it's VC fund, do we want to allow Chinese companies to acquire American chip startups? That one, I don't see a whole lot of upside of letting them buy American chip startups, which, and you know, let's block that. So I think that's the China connection side of it. Then I think maybe the more proactive, or sort of outward looking side of it has a lot to do with places like where you are right now in Indonesia. I think getting both American companies and investors in the US government more knowledgeable about competition in places like Southeast Asia, India, Africa, et cetera. I think that's really the next kind of like frontier. When we talked earlier about does Silicon Valley see China as a competitor? The competition is right there. The competition is outside of the US, outside of China, it's in other countries. And that's something I'm trying to learn more about the Indonesian startup ecosystem. So I might pick your brain about that some of the time.
Rich Robinson:Please do. Yeah, I mean, I really love the dynamism of what's happening, because, you know, fourth-largest nation in the world. And there's been such high adoption rates here in Indonesia. And this is a really interesting, relatively fast-moving ecosystem, right? With the go to the Gojek and Toki Edia merger and, there's some really big players here. And it seems to me in the early days they were taking money from Silicon Valley and maybe some cues, but it seems now more and more they're like, "Okay, we'll take the money from Silicon Valley, but we're taking our cues from China." Like China's really informing much more deeply these developing nations, like, exactly what the roadmap is. Because it's so much more in line with Jakarta is so different from the rest of Indonesia and like, there's such a disparity there. But, China's had the same where you're creating an app that's for first, second, third, fourth, and even 50 year cities. And you have to be able to market it and support it, and have it relevant for all these different stakeholders that I think is much more interesting. And then a lot of the new things around super apps, and mobile payments, and streaming, commerce. Like, that's something that you don't necessarily see in the US. So, yeah. And I think also, in my experience and some of the talks I've had here, Chinese companies, it's not just COVID, are taking far fewer cues from Silicon Valley. I think there was a lot of "zoo tours" where people would go to Silicon Valley and just kind of sniff around. And I think like those have dropped off even pre-Covid. Where I think China's got this kind of broke free pull of gravity and just kind of its own. The whole flywheel is just spinning inside China. So there's enough innovation there to keep things moving. But anyway, to be continued, and thanks so much for your time, Matt. And really lovely to chat with you and to get to lift up that hood and see the turbo engine underneath there with all the different disciplines. I love hearing origin stories. I have a better understanding of why I enjoy reading your writing so much.
Matt Sheehan:I really appreciate. This is a lot of fun.
Rich Robinson:Thanks so much.