The Rich Robinson Show - Season 1 - At the Speed of China

Kaiser Kuo on Creating a Wave of Innovation in Chinese Journalism and Technology

• Rich Robinson

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Kaiser Kuo is the Host and Co-Founder of the Sinica Podcast, which talks about China’s current affairs. Kaiser was a professional rock guitarist for Tang Dynasty, a Mandarin metal band before he got involved with journalism, the Internet, and related industries.

In this episode, Kaiser shares his journey from America to the Middle Kingdom, and China's innovation and the differences between the US and Chinese governments.

Key Takeaways:
•"Free Fall" was the first rock and roll band Kaiser joined.
•"ChinaNow.com" was founded in 1996.
•Beijing is the Silicon Valley of China and Asia.
•Beijingers talk like pirates.
•"Sinica," the first podcast about the current affairs in China, was founded by Jeremy Goldkorn and Kaiser Kuo.
•SLLF ("State Legislative Leadership Foundation") is an official NGO that President Xi Jinping and Barrack Obama founded that tries to bridge the connection between state legislators and provincial leaders.
•China’s innovation keeps evolving day-to-day.
•The Chinese government is always willing to take action.
•Chinese society doesn’t proselytize religion.
•Being hardworking is part of Chinese culture.
•Dao Xaoping pursued a deliberate policy wherein technocrats moved into positions of power.
•Jiujang is the most economically important province in China.

Best Moments:
•Kaiser shares that the 1957 Mafia Convention took place in their town, and they always look for money in the cornfields.
So I had a really good childhood in upstate New York, all little town called "Appalachian," where the November 1957 Mafia Convention took place.Yeah, it's a pretty cool place. We used to go by on Mick Fall Road, where the horse ranch was, where that happened. And would say that these mobsters fled into the cornfields, throwing money. And so we'd always go look for the money. [00:02:06-00:02:24]

•  Kaiser reveals that Time Magazine interviewed him in 2008.
In 2008, right on the eve of the Olympics, I think it was Time Magazine interviewed me about the city of Beijing and why there were so many people who just loved it. I said, "Look, the pollution and the traffic, it's a terrible place to live, but there's nowhere in the world I'd rather be, nowhere in the world I'd rather be." [00:08:43-00:09:00]

•  Rich talks about how he has love and hate feelings for Beijing.
Oh, that is beautiful. I missed that line. Yes, It's a terrible place to live. There's no other place I'd rather be. Absolutely. I said, "I love Beijing in the same way that my wife loves me." People from outside are like, "Really?" And then, "But my wife often doesn't like me and I often don't like Beijing." And people are like, "Oh, I totally get that." [00:09:01-00:09:19]

• Rich recalls a memory of a Lao Ai who wants to put a tape on a Chinese mouth to shut it.
And what, and there was so many things to love about it. I loved it. One time there was one lao ai who spoke Chinese really well, and he's like telling the guy like, "Why don't you just put tape over their mouth?" And they're like, "Pà kǔ yè," and they're like, "Can we do that?" And he's like, "No, you can't do that." And like I've been on the wrong side of that many times too, just like my smart ass use of Chinese. But what I've really loved about it was the Chinese people were they're like, "Oh, right, I really like you a lot." And it's like, those guys like, "Let's come over my house and we'll shoot guns and we'll have Turkey." [00:30:02-00:30:30]

•  Kaiser shares that he is a news junkie.
Because I had been reading about the coal bombing and about the Tanzania and Kenyan embassies. And we already knew this was this new group called "Alqaeda." And anyway, news junkie, right? I was dating a journalist, at that time. [00:40:39-00:40:51]

Rich Robinson:

Welcome to the Rich Robinson Show, season one at the speed of China. Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seat belts. Put your tray tables in the upright position. I have gotten a get, I have a gut today. And that's double K. Kaiser Kuo, ladies and gentlemen, give it up. Everybody, I want you to applaud. If you're on the toilet or you're driving, or whatever. Welcome.

Kaiser Kuo:

Hey Rich. How are you man? Good to see you.

Rich Robinson:

Good to see you my old friend.

Kaiser Kuo:

Yeah, and we are old friends, man. We go back a long way.

Rich Robinson:

back in the...

Kaiser Kuo:

'98, '99, something like that.

Rich Robinson:

1900s. Same era as we were like used to meet by Gaslight in log cabins up in the hinterlands of China. But, yeah, we met in Beijing way, way back in the day. And man, we have not spoken in a while, but we chatted a little bit before that we have this sort of asymmetrical intimacy because I've just been such a ginormous fan and just absorber of your awesomeness. I just can't get enough. People are like deadheads, and I'm like a Kaiser head just listening to stuff over and over.

Kaiser Kuo:

If I weren't so dusty, I'd be blushing right now.

Rich Robinson:

Awesome. Hey, so, I'd like to have you introduce yourself to our listeners out there in podcast land about who you are and your path to the Middle Kingdom into what you're doing now, please.

Kaiser Kuo:

Sure, the basics are, my name's Kaiser Kuo. I was born in the States to parents who came from China via Taiwan in the mid 1950s, they came over, and had a slew of kids through the mid sixties, through the early seventies. And I'm number two of three boys and then a girl. And I grew up in a kind of contemptuously blissful suburbia. Dad was an engineer for IBM. I had the standard ABC kind of requisite piano and violin lessons, and Chinese school on Saturday mornings. He had a lock on the television, he controlled. But they weren't"tiger parents" at all. So I had a really good childhood in upstate New York, all little town called "Appalachian," where the November 1957 Mafia Convention took place. Yeah, it's a pretty cool place. We used to go by on Mick Fall Road, where the horse ranch was, where that happened. And would say that these mobsters fled into the cornfields, throwing money. And so we'd always go look for the money.

Rich Robinson:

Wow. That's a storied place. Wow. I love it.

Kaiser Kuo:

That movie analyzed this, you remember that with Billy Crystal and Robert. The opening scene takes place in my hometown. But at the age of 12, the family picked up and moved to Tucson, Arizona. So I spent junior high and high school there, and went away to college at UC Berkeley. And I started playing in bands. I had played in a sh*tty band in high school. I'm not allowed to swear on this show?

Rich Robinson:

Let it rip.

Kaiser Kuo:

Alright, really f*ck*ng sh*tty band in high school.

Rich Robinson:

F*cking rip.

Kaiser Kuo:

I was on a really horrible band in high school, but I actually started to get decent on guitar in college, and played in a progressive rock band called "Free Fall." My roommate, and a bunch of my friends, still my best friends in the world today are guys from that band. Then, in '88 I graduated and headed to China. We had actually been invited to go to China while that band Freefall was invited to go to China through some random clancy connection of my father's. But we didn't end up being able to go, and it was sort of our fault. We couldn't get things together on our end. And so I was just sort of burning with this desire to get over there and play rock and roll. Because I was the guy who was reading the faxes and the telexes that they were sending. And I saw like the backline, just from the backline, I could tell that there was somebody over there playing music. Otherwise, they wouldn't have like "Fender Twin Reverb Amps," and they wouldn't have the right gear. And so, I figured somebody, I gotta be able to find them, it can't be that hard. So, yeah, I headed over there in August of 1988. Planning on staying for a couple of years and then going to grad school. But of course, in June of 89, I kind of went tumbling out of the country, but not before I had started a band that went on in my absence, I should emphasize to quite a bit of fame. Shortly after I left, they got signed by a label out of Taiwan and were sort of China's first famous heavy metal band. They're still kind of a household name today. And my claim to fame is that I came up with the name of the band and played with them for a while, then came back in the summers of '91, '92 when I was in graduate school. And then I came back full-time in '96. I dropped out of grad school and where I'd been working on modern Chinese intellectual history and politics, and came back to Beijing rejoined the band. We had a death in the band. Our bass player Zhang Ju, was killed in a motorcycle accident in '95. So, it was sort of incumbent on me to hurry back and try to get the band back together. So in '96, I went and ended up staying for 20 years. And in the course of that time, I did everything from playing that band for three years to being one of the first employees at in internet company in China called "chinanow.com." That's when I met you Rich back then.

Rich Robinson:

That's right. Eric, Eric Rosenblum.

Kaiser Kuo:

Yeah, Eric is doing great. I talked to him a lot. And then, in 2002, we worked together sort of briefly or...

Rich Robinson:

You handed a baton to me.

Kaiser Kuo:

That tip to at a mobile internet company. And I just f*ck*d off from that after a little while, and decided I really was more interested in writing. And for the next five or six years, I spent most of it just as a reporter. First, freelancer with a bunch of strings for mostly tech focused magazines around Asia. And then, for the Red Herring, which was a Silicon Valley-based magazine. While I was there, I got poached by Ogilvy to head,"digital strategy" for this big ad agency in Beijing. And that didn't work out for me so well. I didn't like it. And went back to internet stuff. Worked for Yoku, as their Director for International Communications. And then I got poached by Baidu. And I was there from about June of 2010, until I left in 2016. Started another band in 2001. That's called "Twin Show," and we played together until the night before I left.

Rich Robinson:

I was there. I was there. It was awesome in the Hutong. Yeah, it was so great. And you also dabbled in some cover band stuff as well too.

Kaiser Kuo:

Yeah, I did cover band stuff.

Rich Robinson:

Just like a backbone of the very, very fascinating and formidable and just rich music scene in Beijing.

Kaiser Kuo:

Boy, I missed that.

Rich Robinson:

I love how you divined through telexes that there must be a music scene there, because in the late eighties there was no way unless you were on the ground there to know, right?

Kaiser Kuo:

Went to the library, I looked at magazines, I looked through the card catalog, looked, rock in China. There wasn't an internet then, right? So I looked through the stacks, I looked through, recent magazines. I looked through China Daily, back issues to see if there's any mention of rock music.

Rich Robinson:

But even then, it was too fringe for that kind of mainstream press, right? Probably, right?

Kaiser Kuo:

I mean, of course, they reported on the Wham! Concert there. There was an occasional story about some guy who had started, you know, been playing. And I learned later that there had been bands there as early as 1983, 1984 just of ex-patriots, right? But yeah, Grammar and Shaw, for example, right? The Beijing All Stars. Yeah. Graham's a legend. Yeah, I've talked to him.

Rich Robinson:

That's a good point. Yes, indeed. He walked across China. Wow. Bitten by a radioactive Chinese heavy rock and roll spider back in the day, right?

Kaiser Kuo:

I guess I gotta caveat this. So that everyone is clear, I'm not like some shred God. I'm not like a great musician at all. But, seriously, hear me out here.

Rich Robinson:

You kind of are though, like at least everybody that's a perception.

Kaiser Kuo:

It's a wonderful. I'm not gonna... but let me just be perfectly honest here. I landed on a low gravity planet, right? That's exactly what happened.

Rich Robinson:

Totally. Well, I mean, I did comedy in Beijing, right? With Louis CK, and Jim Gaffigan, and Russell Peters, right? And like, where else on planet Earth could some schmuck from the city of Boston be like, headlining with these top stars because...

Kaiser Kuo:

Beijing, was great back then.

Rich Robinson:

Right.

Kaiser Kuo:

Low gravity, a low bar, nobody there to like nag you and remind you not to quit your day job. I mean, it was a great place for average schmucks like us to just...

Rich Robinson:

Average schmucks. Yeah. And we could be slightly above average schmucks after that, right? So, yeah, I think, that entire scene of Beijing is the Silicon Valley of not just China, but of Asia, and it's also this incredibly rich historical cultural center, but then it also like modern art and music as well too. And also the capital and just a grittier place, like, it was such an incredibly rich tapestry of locals and lao ai, and opportunity. It really was a magical era.

Kaiser Kuo:

In 2008, right on the eve of the Olympics, I think it was Time Magazine interviewed me about the city of Beijing and why there were so many people who just loved it. I said, "Look, the pollution and the traffic, it's a terrible place to live, but there's nowhere in the world I'd rather be, nowhere in the world I'd rather be."

Rich Robinson:

Oh, that is beautiful. I missed that line. Yes, It's a terrible place to live. There's no other place I'd rather be. Absolutely. I said, "I love Beijing in the same way that my wife loves me." People from outside are like, "Really?" And then, "But my wife often doesn't like me and I often don't like Beijing." And people are like,"Oh, I totally get that."

Kaiser Kuo:

Yeah. I mean, it's a bit of an abusive husband, or abusive boyfriend. It's like, but you don't know Beijing . You don't know any. Beijing can be really nice to you sometimes. Beijing has great qualities. I don't wanna make lie to that. I mean, that's a serious issue, but I shouldn't be flippant about that. It's a terrific place in so many ways.

Rich Robinson:

Not definitely be abusive husband, but maybe some sort of, co-dependency where you're just like, everybody's like, "You should divorce it." And like, "Oh, and the pollution and the traffic and some sort of mafa." And the next day it's like blue skies and you have young rotar and you're like, " Hey, ni hao gah mer." and then you're like, have angry makeup sex with Beijing."I love you. I love you."

Kaiser Kuo:

Exactly."I'll never leave you again." The best conversations ever, reliably. You go out, you stumble into some watering hole, you sit down, you belly up to the bar, and you will have the most engaging conversation ever, right? Every f*ck*ng night. It's just the greatest. What I miss about the place.

Rich Robinson:

And yeah, even with like the back then the taxi driver on the way there, right?

Kaiser Kuo:

Yeah, exactly.

Rich Robinson:

Treasure. Indeed.

Kaiser Kuo:

Everything, yeah. Anyone knows about politics was all gleaned. The wisdom and the insight of these beer belly guys reek of raw garlic and talk like pirates, right?

Rich Robinson:

We had one comedian come out to perform and he's like, "Oh, I left my wallet in the taxi." And I ended up getting the phone number of the driver from the taxi company. And I called up and I got his wife, and she said, "Oh, I'm sorry, he's in the shower." And he said, "Oh, I must have the wrong number." And he hung up.

Kaiser Kuo:

Oh, that's awful.

Rich Robinson:

That was old school Beijing tact, where you see that red light of hope in the middle of February

at 1:

00 AM, and then you get inside and you're like, "Oh, my God, they've been marinating in cabbage and garlic and chili and everything else. And now I'm marinating in it," right? But that was part of the charm back then. And tell everybody out there what you've been doing these last half decade in the triangle?

Kaiser Kuo:

Yeah, actually it starts when I was in Beijing. So in 2010, shortly before I joined Baidu, actually Jeremy Goldkorn and I, he's another somebody you should talk to, right? We've been working together for a very long time now, but back then we were just having one of those conversations about podcasts."What podcasts are you listening to?""Oh, I'm listening to this American Life and this thing called Radiolab." And then, "What about you?" And then, I can't remember which one of us asked,"Why aren't there any good podcasts about China?" the other person said,"Why don't we do one?" Neither of us can remember who said "What?" But the next thing we knew, we were doing a podcast on China.

Rich Robinson:

But you guys are a magical duo. Like you guys have such a great relationship and just complimentary and

Kaiser Kuo:

viewpoints.

Rich Robinson:

great.

Kaiser Kuo:

Opposing by which you mean opposing.

Rich Robinson:

That's of the best parts about what you do, right? It's the comfort that you have with each other to be able to disagree, but also, make light of some things. It's collegiate. It's very collegiate and it's very endearing.

Kaiser Kuo:

Yeah. Well, I mean, that part is not fake, right? I mean, a lot of the podcast is scripted, but Jeremy tends to have a much more sort of cynical and more critical view that's not true across the board. There's some things that he has like sort of boundless admiration for, and we can get into that. Because it really has a lot to do with the theme of your show. But I will tend to want to introduce a little more context to sort of, he's not about that. He's not all, he's not always going to summon up historical reasons why this is so, and yeah, we're very different in our approach to that. Yeah. But it works. It works because I think when people come into long con--- I mean the shows an hour at least, usually. Long conversations like that, you want a little bit of attention somewhere. And if it's not between the host and the guest, it can be between the two hosts. So that's tended to work for us. Now Jeremy's not always on the show, in fact, very infrequently now, because he has kind of an allergy toward anything that's too academic or too deep in the woods with policy. But I know what topics he's gonna be able to contribute well to, and I'll usually invite him on for those. Anyway, long story short we were doing this thing, it got popular in China, and along came this little startup company out of New York that had big ambitions and a little money, and not a lot of like Native China talent. It started off as just a news aggregation. A newsletter and they didn't have a brand. They didn't have like a big name attached to it or anything like that. And so they did a little acquihire with us. They brought us on. Eventually, Jeremy became Editor-in-Chief of it, and I headed up the podcasts. Back then, it was only Sinica, but we quickly added a bunch of other podcasts to it. And at our peak, we were at 10 shows.

Rich Robinson:

And now?

Kaiser Kuo:

Seven really regular shows. We are about to add another one, and another was coming back into rotation soon.

Rich Robinson:

And what about that original team in New York?

Kaiser Kuo:

So the CEO, the Founder, is still very active in it. Nobody else from the original team except for Jeremy and me are still with it. But the old Editor-in-Chief who had been a New York Times editor based outta Hong Kong. He's such a good guy. I mean, he sort of recognized that, as we got a year into it that he was a little out of his depth. I mean, he wasn't a China guy. He didn't read Chinese, he didn't have sort of China instincts, so he just stepped aside, which, just a good guy, really great guy. Have nothing but love for him.

Rich Robinson:

That's great. So speaking of nothing but love, one of the comedy shows that I produced was with Joe Wong, and he talked about he grew up in Dōngběi, and he went to university at Texas, and became a PhD in biochemistry and 20 years in Boston. And he said he's a US citizen. And he's like, "China's my mother and America is my wife, and now my wife and my mother are having a big argument and I'm hiding in the kitchen because they both have nuclear weapons," right? And it's a little bit frightening. And I have this deep love for China. If I've spent 24 years there, you better, right? And I truly, deeply believe that US and China relations are incredibly important for the future of mankind. And the most important part of that is engagement. Like, we have to engage. There has to be deep engagement. And I think a lot of that engagement has to be commercial, as well as, academic in addition to being political. But think on the commercial side, that's something where I'm really trying to dig deep. There's a group called the"State Legislative Leadership Foundation," SLLF and I'm on the Asia board trying to bridge that subnational connection between state legislators and provincial leaders. It's an official NGO put in place by Xi and Obama. But then, the idea of this book is so people can really uncover and unravel, understand China a little bit better. And my thesis, as I said, four years outside of China is a year inside China, and I remember listening to the Gary regional podcast from Achieving Ventures that you did. And then one thing that Gary's a old school successful VC, and he's like, "Okay, China built a lot of things on chip sets from the West. And China built a lot of things on the tech stack from the West. And they built a lot of stuff from the business models from the US, right? But you can't deny that China's been successful, wildly successful across many different tech spaces, and the one thing that China really unquestionably has is the speed. And that's something that I'm trying to uncover through anecdotes and insights, both personal and some that you've observed over the years. And I'd just love to hear what you think China's speed means to you.

Kaiser Kuo:

So when I hear you talk about China's speed, what I feel like rather than deliver you sort of an on the ground anecdote, I want to sort of zoom out to speed, sort of defines the entire China experience over the last 40 years, 40 plus years. There are a couple things that when you wanna try to get inside the head of Chinese people and understand what the experience of modern or contemporary China has been, the main piece of mental furnishings you should establish right away is the compressed nature the incredibly rapid nature of development. And so, let's think about like, how that's been experienced, and what it means, and how that has influenced the way that Chinese people look out from their windows and see the world. So the first thing that I would say is that, let's remember that in 1979 on the eve of reform and opening, the pre capita GDP, if that's a meaningful measure to you, was less than $200 and it's closing on $11,000 right now. So, I mean, that's an insane, that's 5,000.

Rich Robinson:

And if I may interject there, there's a chart that shows GDP from 1980 to, to present day and, 1900 to present day and or I'm sorry, late 18 hundreds. And it's basically a four to one ratio of US versus China. And that's the basic like sort of math underneath this. But I had to attach some kind of a number to it. And so, yes.

Kaiser Kuo:

Yeah. I mean it's insane. But what you need to remember is that somebody graduating from high school, or even from junior high at that time and working their first job in 1979 is only now at retirement age. So this has all happened in a single working lifetime. So let's remember that I often think about the movie "Big" with Tom Hanks. Have you see that movie?

Rich Robinson:

Excellent.

Kaiser Kuo:

I mean, it really explains a lot of things. I mean, because we wonder why, when we look out at these forests of gleaming steel and glass skyscrapers, and we look at this high speed rail network and all these things. Why China doesn't seem to behave in so many ways, like, the grown up country that it appears to be on the outside. And why is it so thin skinned? Why is China constantly having its feelings hurt by things? And the big metaphor, it's because it went to bed last night as an 11 year old and woke up as 30 year old.

Rich Robinson:

That's beautiful.

Kaiser Kuo:

So I just urge people to keep that in mind. But what else does this do to their worldview? It means a couple things. Like, think about their relationship with technology, right? You ever wonder why you don't hear your Chinese parents, your kids' parents who are your friends from school. The Chinese ones, they don't worry about screen time. They're not obsessed about what technology is doing to their children. No, I mean, they're usually too busy scrolling through in their own f*ck*ng handsets. But if you look at the Chinese science fiction, if you look at Chinese representation, I mean the conversations that are happening popularly about AI, you don't have the most famous natural scientists. People like, Stephen Hawking, the Stephen Hawking, or the most important technologists, the equivalence of our Bill Gates or our Elon Musks, talking about unleashing the "Demon AI." No, they're actually way more comfortable with technology. In fact, I mean, I've often said, "Well, we in the West are in our Black mirror phase. China is' in its Star Trek phase, where there's an optimism about technology." But think about this life for your average Chinese person, anyone under 45 say, they do not remember a time where it hasn't improved from day-to-day in lockstep with the better improvement of the technology, the devices that they have in their hands, the network that they are able to access. Technology and life have improved in lockstep, right? So why would you be suspicious of technology? Third thing is that, and it's related to that, is that they tend to have more confidence in the ability of government to steer them into an uncertain future. Because so far they seem to have done a good job, right? So, yeah, this all comes back to the compressed nature of the modernization experience in China. So, because it's happened so quickly and because it's been pretty unidirectional that really has shaped the mindset, what else has it done? That optimism, creates a buoyancy, right? It's the thing that propels that it's the draft of upward hot air that makes these hang gliding entrepreneurs able to just soar, right? There's all these updrafts in China, and a lot of that buoyancy comes from that popular optimism, that expectation, that technology will deliver a better life. So a lot of it's related to that, and it explains speed. It explains so much of the speed. Now, it has a huge downside, and we can get into that.

Rich Robinson:

Please. I'd love to dive. I don't even want to peel back that yet, but I'd love to hear, like, I'd just like to have you keep going. I'm gripped.

Kaiser Kuo:

Yeah. So the downside is pretty obvious. I mean, to anyone it's a f*ck*ng pressure cooker, right? There is such an expectation of success that whereas in the Silicon Valley unit, it's like part of the f*ck*ng catechism gonna go, you wear your failures so proudly or whatever. It's not quite like that. I mean, ideally it is. I mean, there are entrepreneurs in China who will boast of their failures, but they're only the ones who are conspicuously successful already, right? And you know, nobody wants to hear your failure story if you're not Wong Sing something, right?

Rich Robinson:

True that. True indeed.

Kaiser Kuo:

But look at what's happening right now. The backlash against 996. The whole life flat reaction. The big buzzword of the year 2021, was "Life flat."

Rich Robinson:

Life flat, indeed. Just like kind of check out, right? In a way.

Kaiser Kuo:

Yeah, I mean, the rat race. I mean, we had to expect this, right? I mean, we've seen a generation of people just running at us a flat out sprint and it's been like that. And what I think is interesting is the effort right now underway to address some of these deep-rooted problems. I think, that they've been pretty prescient, and you look at Americans all across the political spectrum from the most conservative m*th*rf*ck*rs, like, Tucker Carlson to real lefty liberals. A lot of them are quite envious of the Chinese government's sort of willingness to confront things like the power of the big tech companies head on, the willingness of them to shut down online games for school-aged children, they're willing to take action. I would be very reserved about praising that. There's always a reason why they're able to do that. And it's some dark shit in there. I think that. We can learn quite a bit. I mean, what you start off on the topic of the compressed nature of the change that's taken place, and you can extrapolate a ton and you end up being able to say a lot of really meaningful things about what's happening in China.

Rich Robinson:

Fantastic. Yeah. What do you think are some of the things that could be extracted and learned having lived in the States now for five years? Or some things that make you feel a little bit impatient? The downside's pretty, pretty clear.

Kaiser Kuo:

Yeah. So you're asking what the United States, for example, should be able to learn from China or?

Rich Robinson:

Yeah, or any other country? Or corporation? Or startup? Or person, right? Or what the?

Kaiser Kuo:

I think the thing with China is, Chinese people themselves are very aware of the site. Americans and Chinese, and both you and me, were very well-versed in both of these cultures. So this'll certainly make sense to you. But, there's American exceptionalism, there's Chinese exceptionalism, and they're equally arrogant. And both of them have strong objections to, but American exceptionalism basically assumes that American institutions ideas, values are universally applicable that these truths that we have discovered are self evidence or whatever. The modes of governance the way that we conduct things up, we think that it should imitate us. It should be just like us, and all is fine in the world. The Chinese are equally, like I said, arrogant. Their exceptionalism says that,"China's experience has been so unique, so bound up in the Chinese national character, so bound up in our culture. That it is inimitable, that what we have arrived at is not something that you can just cut and paste in onto your society. So, part of that is that they object to the idea that American values institutions can be cut and pasted onto Chinese society. But, the good part of that is, of course, it isn't a proselytizing religion, right? It's one, it's sort of like Islam in its early days or Judaism, it doesn't seek converts, right?

Rich Robinson:

We have our team. We're not recruiting. We just want everybody to come to practice. Show for the game. Yeah.

Kaiser Kuo:

Yeah. I mean, you can admire what we've done, but don't expect you're gonna be able to just copy it. Even in developing countries around the world, there are features of it that they will cut and paste. Like one thing that has worked in China. If you look at what kickstarted so much of China's development in the 1970s was the Japanese came in and they said, "Look, you've got all these mineral resources here in Shanxi Province, and you've got no way to get them out of the country. We want that stuff, but tell you what, we'll build you a state of the art mine there. We'll build a rail line to Bei nai kuo la market or on the coast. We'll build a port there and you pay us back in the copper where we extract, or in the oil we pull out of the ground or the ore that we..."

Rich Robinson:

Settlers of Katan, Japanese version 1970. Yes.

Kaiser Kuo:

But China said,"You know what, we can do the exact same thing in Angola or in Tanzania, or in Kenya or especially in places like Zimbabwe." And that's what they've done, right? These resources for infrastructure deals. So, to some extent there is learning that they've pushed, but there's a lot I should be very clear to, I'm quick to add that I feel like some of the rest of the world is learning that they really should not be. China is very good at high tech surveillance and social control measures. Are those things that Ecuador should be learning as they've tried to is that, things that other developing countries should be learning? I tend to think not, right? But yeah, there's certainly lessons, though.

Rich Robinson:

Yeah. So I'm trying to extract lessons like, I definitely don't want to be perceived as, "a panda hugger," but being just an outright "panda slugger" as well too, right? That's not the intention of this book. And you look at like the rail lines, like,"Wow, that's amazing. China is far and away the country with the most high speed rail by order of magnitude." But, you know, of course, let's just eminent domain and like, let's blast through this, protected species. And let's throw hundreds of billions of dollars at it. Like, what's really to be learned from that? Probably, very little. Tesla builds a factory in 168 days. Like, they had a lot of air cover from the government to be able to like fast track that, right? And I think there's stuff to be learned from that because I think things are being gummed up in the West. If something is, you know, to Beijing airport was on time and on budget. And that's a manifestation of their speed, right? Just being on time and on budget is extraordinary. And the tricky part is like,"Do I even go there with the book to try to talk about that?" Or "Is it really much more at the commercial and entrepreneurial level where there are some interesting tactics because..."

Kaiser Kuo:

That's No, I think your instincts are exactly right. Your instincts are exactly right. I mean, you've got to look at what is actually practicable. I mean, if what you're proposing requires that we abandon the two party electoral system or due process, we probably aren't gonna do that, right? I think your instincts are right. And at the entrepreneurial level, at the commercial, there's still a lot of things to be learned, right? Look the truth of it is by the time I left there, it was easier to register a business and get it going in China than it was in the United States, right? The truth of it is, there were a lot of people with a huge appetite, not only for risk, but for really f*ck*ng hard work. Now, that's partially cultural. I guess. I don't know. Again, it comes at a cost, but it's the thing that I was gonna talk about that Jeremy admires so much. I mean, he came here to the United States and was railing every time I got on the phone with him about, "why the banks are closed on Sundays?""Why isn't everything 24 hours?""Why do people not want to make money?" Do you? So, yeah. So he's just sort of disgusted at the sort of sloth. I don't know if you've seen the documentary "American Factory"?

Rich Robinson:

I loved it. It's so inside baseball. I really loved it. Yeah.

Kaiser Kuo:

All there. The good, the bad, the ugly is all there. Well, I mean, but that's not the only lesson to be taken away from that, right? I mean, there's also trade-offs, right?

Rich Robinson:

Tell me what you really enjoyed about it? And what you think is the most sort of impactful about that?

Kaiser Kuo:

Well, what I loved about that documentary in particular was the evenhandedness of it. Its willingness to not step back and allow the principles in that to show... I mean, it was so fair about how every both sides brought to it genuinely good intentions, and that wasn't enough. And so it's the difficult. So, I think, it was remarkably skillful storytelling by not being too on the nose, by not pointing signs that "here is the lesson to be learned here." It allowed the story to develop in a way that it felt organic even if it wasn't.

Rich Robinson:

And what, and there was so many things to love about it. I loved it. One time there was one lao ai who spoke Chinese really well, and he's like telling the guy like, "Why don't you just put tape over their mouth?" And they're like, "Pà kǔ yè," and they're like, "Can we do that?" And he's like, "No, you can't do that." And like I've been on the wrong side of that many times too, just like my smart ass use of Chinese. But what I've really loved about it was the Chinese people were they're like, "Oh, right, I really like you a lot." And it's like, those guys like, "Let's come over my house and we'll shoot guns and we'll have Turkey." And like, you're such an endearing, like just like real dude. Like you're so, hǎo nǔlì, you're so industrious, right? And you're just like a family dude. And like, those are the people that we know and love, right? And that's the part of China that's completely missing from the narrative where it's like, "Okay, there's the administrations, but there's China."

Kaiser Kuo:

There's that part of the narrative is missing in China about the United States too, though.

Rich Robinson:

Certainly. Certainly. Right? It's tough, right?

Kaiser Kuo:

Dear Americans, who probably voted for Donald Trump, but they were making just a good faith flat out effort to connect. It was kind of beautiful, right? mean, so this redneck m*th*rf*ck*r. But he was so nice.

Rich Robinson:

He was like,"Alright, I'll like you. And oh man, I really, I love you now," right? And it's just like that.

Kaiser Kuo:

Yeah, you're my brother.

Rich Robinson:

Right, and that was just the delicious, right? You really enjoyed that.

Kaiser Kuo:

It wasn't just sh*tt*ng on one side or the other. It actually allowed the beauty of both sides to kind of come shining through.

Rich Robinson:

And and on both as well too, right?

Kaiser Kuo:

Oh, I wanna sh*t on both. Yeah.

Rich Robinson:

So let me ask one thing. So I fully agree with you that like, just like it's red state, blue state, there's like, you know, The Western US ideology, and there's China ideology and it's not really going anywhere, on either side. But, I think as we were coming up in the tech scene, I think China was very open to channeling Silicon Valley and a lot of best in class practices. And then, at a certain point there was, "Okay, now we have kind of our own critical mass in the market and we have enough people on the bench to start our own stuff. And now there's some stuff being channeled from China to the rest of the world." And I think you were there during that time, and I still think there's exchanges in best in class practices and capital, and ideas, and approaches. And tell us, about your experience in that, and where it stands right now?

Kaiser Kuo:

I think that's something that Americans should really always try to remember. As we're considering kicking Chinese internet companies off of our PORs here, and hurting a couple things. First of all, if you are somebody who genuinely believes in freeing up more information for more people and broadening the information horizons, the heroes in your story really ought to be the American Venture Capitalists who went in, and the Chinese entrepreneurs often who came back from the United States who built these companies. You know, the people who brought them, who underwrote these IPOs, and allowed everyone to make money and to build, a bigger, more robust internet in China, the Ciscos of the world. Instead, they're often vilified, right? They're like held to account for having built the great firewall. I think that it's a more complicated story than that. They're also the ones who created, helped to create who were absolutely essential in creating the first and still only genuine public sphere that's ever existed in Chinese history, right? You can't count like a physical public square like democracy wall had, a few months of life in 1978. No, this was like a sustained, long, big, not entirely open, but more open than ever public sphere, right? So these early internet entrepreneurs, let's remember something about them. Most of them were either Americanized, the Jack MAs of the world, who had spent time in the United States, the Charles Johns of the world all of them, most of them, some of them were green card holders, or even citizens who came back to China. Their money came from the United States, and as soon as they could listed on American Capital Markets. Now, this is all happening in a country that always wants to dominate the commanding heights of any strategically vital sector, right? Where the state must dominate. But that's not what was happening. So it was truly remarkable. And they need to be recognized for this. I think, it was just a truly great thing. That's just not how we tell a story often enough. It's really a pity. During the time of the bidirectional flow, so many Chinese companies, because they had to meet Sarbanes Oxley requirements because they learned corporate governance really well. They're sure they're always gonna be your sh*t companies, you're gonna have, like some coffee delivery company that ends up faking its books and is absolutely terrible. Yeah. But for every one of those, there's dozens of genuine clean success stories, right? What I'm saying is that the decoupling that so many people seem now to be insisting on is gonna be bad for everybody. It's gonna put an end to this beautiful cross pollination that was happening for 30 years, or 20 years, right? And I really feel very sad about that. Now, the way I see it, there were two really big narratives that in the American mind dominated their understanding of the relationship between technology innovation on the one hand, and political authoritarianism, right? So one was the emancipatory narrative, right? We all believed for a long time, we believed very firmly that you know, freeing the internet would mean the end of authoritarian rule all over the world, right? That was like the animating idea of the Arab Spring. It was the animating idea of The Green Movement in Tehran, in Iran in 2009. We would gleefully append the name of some American social media product to every uprising in an authoritarian state. It's like, "Oh, that's the Twitter revolution in Moldova. We had a couple of Twitter revolutions actually to rear square in Egypt. That's the Facebook revolution. The YouTube revolution in Tehran in 2009. And we thought the same thing about China. We were always saying,"You can't nail the jello to the wall." As Bill Clinton said, it was like a firm belief for us. And as you'll see, we came to completely reject that narrative by about 2016. It was really in the year 2016 when so many other old narratives were going by the wayside too. We suddenly decided that authoritarianism had co-opted technology had become the hand maiden of these autocratic states, right? And why did we think that? Well, because we had the bruising experience of the failure of the Arab Spring states uprisings. Every one of them was an abject failure. We had the Snowden revelations, right? We had, I mean, probably most importantly, the whole Russian hijacking of the American presidential election in 2016, the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which emerged, a couple years later, but was taking place in 2016. So we flipped the narrative completely on its head. At the same time, the same moment, and I think for related reasons, We flipped the other big narrative, which you had alluded to earlier. We had this idea that China was only borrowing ideas from the United States, that it was incapable of genuine innovation, right? We all grew up with that joke, right? What does C to C mean in China? Copy to China, right? And I think you and me would be the first few people who admit that was true for a long time. But it wasn't true after like 2009 or 2010. There was already a lot of really interesting stuff happening, but we were very slow to realize it. And as late as 2014, 2015, we had like Carly Fiorina, who really ought to have known better going around giving these speeches, saying, "Show me one thing that the Chinese have innovated," right? Biden, who's of course who's Vice President back then he was giving graduation addresses that were themed around this saying, the Chinese will never out-innovate us because we are free, right? So he wasn't just saying that American innovative edge was made possible by innovation, or made possible by freedom, but that freedom was like a sufficient condition for us to always be innovative, which is this b*llsh*t, and I like to point to Sputnik was launched by this liberal democratic regime in Russia, right? And the V2 rocket was launched by an exemplar of f*ck*ng democracy, right? So, unfortunately, that's not the case. But we didn't just kind of come to a gentle realization. We panicked and freaked out and flipped this old narrative on its head, where suddenly 2016 comes and China is eating our lunch. They're out doing us in quantum. They're outdoing us in AI. They're out doing us in advanced robotics technologies in gene splicing or in..

Rich Robinson:

Across the board in so many ways. It's like there's like 50 sputniks that are in the sky, right?

Kaiser Kuo:

Right, right. Everything's a f*ck*ng Sputnik moment suddenly. Which is it's nonsense. Like, how do these two narratives flip? And why did it happen so suddenly? China had gotten under American skin for a very long time by subverting that big load-bearing wall narrative that said, "You weren't supposed to be able to have capitalism without democracy." So maybe we should have been primed to have some of our assumptions kind of challenged, but to have them flip so suddenly. That's weird. It says more about Americans than it does about China.

Rich Robinson:

Because it's been steadily happening. Do you think it was maybe 9/11 that kind of diverted our attention? Or why was it sort of so sudden in terms of awareness? Like, what, what were we distracted? We were just like naval gazing? Or we were just being delusional?

Kaiser Kuo:

I think, 9/11 had, yeah. By the way, you remember that you and I were together when the first plane hit the tower. Your mom called us. I remember exactly where we were, right?

Rich Robinson:

But this is another thing I remember though, which was she called me again to say that another plane had hit and then everybody else at the table was still like, You were gone. You were already, like, "That's not a fucking coincidence." You were out on your bike. Like your fēi gē. Like, off because you immediately put it together. You were out."Where's Kaiser?" He's gone. We were sitting like outside having lunch together. Yeah.

Kaiser Kuo:

Oh, it was drinks. It was like nine 9:00 PM or something.

Rich Robinson:

Oh, that's right. That's right.

Kaiser Kuo:

We were with Chris and that Norwegian dude, remember?

Rich Robinson:

Oh yeah, Was it sig? No. I can't remember.

Kaiser Kuo:

No, Chris.

Rich Robinson:

Chris Reining. Yeah. And then also maybe a few other people. Wow. So, amazing. That was...

Kaiser Kuo:

You don't remember, but that was the night when I said, "This is Osama bin Laden."

Rich Robinson:

You actually...

Kaiser Kuo:

You didn't know who he was.

Rich Robinson:

Of course, you did. Yeah. So that didn't register with me because that didn't, you know.

Kaiser Kuo:

Because I had been reading about the coal bombing and about the Tanzania and Kenyan embassies. And we already knew this was this new group called "Alqaeda." And anyway, news junkie, right? I was dating a journalist, at that time.

Rich Robinson:

Well, you're genetically engineered for what you're doing right now anyway, right? So we talked about geeky guy. So I think, for whatever reason that we're sort of like somehow caught unawares of what's happening. I think that's sort of part of like, what I'm trying to do with this book, is just to let people understand that things are happening really quickly. Like, make of it what you will, whether you wanna learn from it, what you should do, what you should not do, or ignore it, right? There's going to be, I think, a lot of global ramifications just because I think this China speed, even though it's being, there's a governor on it right now, being dialed back, it's gonna continue a pace and really inform the future and how things are done.

Kaiser Kuo:

For sure. Absolutely. No, no doubt about that. That's one thing you can absolutely count on. I mean, look, they're putting the brakes on right now. I mean, what's happening right now is there is a deliberate shift onto a very different economic footing, right? It's shifting. This is what we are hearing is the sound of gears shifting, right? So, there is a deliberate focus on quality rather than quantity of growth. It's not GDP, Uber, always now. You see what they're doing on consumer internet. It's not the be all and end all. It's not like they're gutting technology across the board. They're trying to redirect entrepreneurial energy into what they believe are the more enduring, and important spaces of technology. There's this guy named Dan Wong who you should read and he should interview as well.

Rich Robinson:

Yes. I'm a big fan. He writes very compellingly. Yeah.

Kaiser Kuo:

Yeah. Big idea of his is, it's been a mistake for America to sort of regard these social media companies whose success was based largely on the network effect, as sort of the apogee of American ingenuity. If the best and brightest, graduating from Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and Carnegie Mellon are going to work for f*ck*ng Facebook, that's sad. That's very sad. They should be going to work for companies that are still doing genuine deep tech. Yeah. Deep tech innovation, right? And that's what China's trying to do. Again, they've got a fire to their ass because of all sanctions that have been put in place.

Rich Robinson:

But I think there is something to be learned from that at the Federal Government level, which is historically there has been this ability for the government to... You look at Israel, right? The kind of tech that's come out of there, right? I mean, a lot of it is military, but you know, a lot of our stuff in the US has also historically been militarily funded. But there is a way to kind of, benighted, some sort of industries and give them the right kind of incentives and maybe subsidies and support to be able to drive and forward.

Kaiser Kuo:

We're tending instead to "benight" them without the K in the word, right? Nighted.

Rich Robinson:

Yeah.

Kaiser Kuo:

So, the weird thing is how we believe that China is so blinded by its ideology. I feel like ideology hurts us. Why don't we believe that industrial policy is a good idea? Well, we're coming round to the idea finally, but, we have had an ideological allergy to it. That's all there is to it, right?

Rich Robinson:

Indeed. Indeed. Wow.

Kaiser Kuo:

Yeah. So now, that's something we can learn, but I think we're learning it wrong. I mean, we're learning the wrong lessons. We're just throwing money at problems. There is not a real plan in place.

Rich Robinson:

It's a plan. Yes.

Kaiser Kuo:

It's not being directed. And part of it is that the wrong people are in government. I mean, China, again, there's a lot of downsides to this, but beginning in the very, very early 1980s, there was a deliberate policy that Dao Xaoping pursued of moving technocrats into positions of power. These people were all, I mean, if you, by the year 19, say 92, if you had looked at the composition of the Chinese bureaucracy, like, if you look just at, say, as Lynn White and Lee Chung did, they did this work in the early 90s. If you looked at the composition of, say, mayors or party secretaries of cities of over a million people. And there were like 260 of them. If you look at all provincial party secretaries or provincial governors, if you looked at all central committee members, probably the average percentage that were formally trained from at least four years in natural sciences or engineering, it was over 75%. I mean, that's nuts, right? Today, if you look at the composition of the pilot bureau standing committee, there's almost no engineers on it anymore. It's weird. It's all people who are economists and lawyers. But if you look at who's being promoted right now, the people shooting up in the ranks, are what they're calling the "Bei hong click." You know, the Aerospace University, right? Beijing University of Aerospace and Engineering, whatever it's called. These are not just technocrats. They're f*ck*ng rocket scientists, in like the literal sense.

Rich Robinson:

Man, man.

Kaiser Kuo:

Yeah There is a commitment to deep tech.

Rich Robinson:

And you throw that kind of talent and team against a real plan, right? There's real vision and commitment to the medium, and long-term planning. Then it's gonna be an even more competitive landscape. And we need everything that we can to be able to best. If we're going to engage, then it's really about competition. There's cooperation, but that's what I really believe in and just love and advocate.

Kaiser Kuo:

If you were to look right now at the province of Jiujang right now. The person who's just been named to be the party secretary of Jiujang, which is one of the most important provinces in China. He was a graduate of Beijing Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He joined the Ministry of Aerospace Industry. He oversaw the f*ck*ng Shenzhou Man Space Flight program. That's the guy who's running probably the most economically important province in China right now.

Rich Robinson:

Wow. That's a nugget of an insight. That's some true intentionality.

Kaiser Kuo:

Dan Wong pointed that out, but it's been pointed out by a lot of people.

Rich Robinson:

But you're channeling that insight, that's what you do, right? You basically have a gigantic funnel of information, and you're able to, you know. As advertised just drop incredible nuggets. Like, I feel like I take this whole podcast as a transcript and put most of it in the book. There's just so much to sift through there.

Kaiser Kuo:

Rev.com, man. Do you use rev.com?

Rich Robinson:

Thank you. I do now. Thank you very much. I love that you also use Riverside for your podcasting so that's incredibly validating.

Kaiser Kuo:

Hi, Riverside.

Rich Robinson:

Alexis Ohanian, Mr. Serena Williams is a big investor in the in the company I found out. And yeah, I'm a big fan. So, hey, it's been an hour. Wow. As advertised as I just said. Like, man alive, 45, like you're just wonderful to listen to. And so many pearls, nuggets, just chunks of goodness in there. Thank you so much friend. would love to, love to hug you and see in person sometimes soon. Come in, come and hang out with us in Bali. And I've never been to that area of the world that you call "home," but I know it's a really terrific place and love some time.

Kaiser Kuo:

Ah, yeah. You would love it. insane. It's so great. There's so many people from Beijing, our old gang who are moving here. Mitch President lives here now.

Rich Robinson:

What? I didn't know that. Wow.

Kaiser Kuo:

Yeah. Yeah. Mitch is here, lots of good people here. Eric Fish. You remember him? He's here. Allison Friedman, she lives here now.

Rich Robinson:

She's excellent. She left Hong Kong, huh?

Kaiser Kuo:

Yeah. Yeah. Elyse Ribbons was here until she left Xinjiaoliu.

Rich Robinson:

Oh, interesting. Wow. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. There's actually a pretty good Bali crew too, of people who have who have left Beijing at the same time zone and just 6.5 hour direct flight once things get back to abnormal. So, yeah let's create that triangle instead of the in Bali, Carolina to the Northern Capital. So, me, man. loving and good vibes, my friend. Thank you once again.

Kaiser Kuo:

Pleasure talking to you, Rich.

Rich Robinson:

Yeah.

Kaiser Kuo:

Okay. Take care, man.