How Dan Wang Became America’s Favorite China Expert

Summary

Podcast Summary: How I Write with David Perell — "How Dan Wang Became America’s Favorite China Expert"

Guest: Dan Wang
Host: David Perell
Date: September 24, 2025

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Overview

This episode features Dan Wang, renowned China analyst and author of Breakneck. The conversation dives deep into Wang’s distinctive annual letters about China, unpacking his writing process, inspirations, and the unique blend of personal and analytical insights in his work. Together with host David Perell, Wang explores why textured, detail-rich writing matters, the craft of observation, pitfalls of travel writing, challenges of censorship in China, the virtues of slow publishing, and the essential skills behind impactful books. The episode is dedicated to their mutual mentor, Tyler Cowen.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Unique Style and Purpose of Dan Wang’s Annual Letters

• Capturing China’s Dualities

  • Wang’s annual letters aim to bridge the contrast between China’s official, formal side (government statements, party doctrine) and its informal, everyday life.
  • Quote:
    “I really wanted to play up was a bit of the friction of simply living in a country that is fun and messy and bizarre...along with the newscast, the official Party Theory magazine’s view of China.” — Dan Wang [01:48]

• Texture and Rich Detail

  • Perell admires how Wang starts with granular observations (like soup in Kunming) to deepen understanding of bigger dynamics.
  • Quote:
    “You’ll use like a soup that you had in Kunming or something like that as entry point to talk about what’s going on there.” — David Perell [04:01]

• Comparative Lens

  • Wang challenges the “capitals only” narrative, comparing China’s regional diversity to that of the U.S.:
    “Nobody would ever really try to understand the United States purely through the lens of what’s going on in Washington D.C...yet I think that is what a lot of people do with China.” — Dan Wang [04:30]

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2. Deliberate Craft: Inspirations and Editing

• Literary and Musical Influences

  • Wang draws inspiration from 19th-century French novels (especially Stendhal) and Italian comic opera (“opera buffa”), seeking to blend seriousness with ornament and humor.
  • Quote:
    “The Italians really prize cadence. They prize pacing...there are showers of ornament...I do like to have clean lines in my own writing, but also informed by a few flourishes and cadences.” — Dan Wang [07:35]

• Revision and Flow

  • Despite limited time, Wang composes essays around standout sentences and accepts the imperfection of hasty annual deadlines.
  • He confesses a closer kinship to Beethoven than Mozart:
    “Beethoven...you can detect a note of effort in most things that Beethoven wrote...And perhaps as a writer, I am a little bit closer to Beethoven.” — Dan Wang [20:38]

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3. Process: Note-Taking, Observation, and Travel

• Year-long Note Accumulation

  • Uses Apple Notes to jot down impressions, sentences, and evolving thoughts throughout the year.
  • Assembles them in a “hasty sprint” in the last 10 days to meet his January 1st self-imposed deadline.
  • Quote:
    “If we’re able to have one great sentence, I think it is absolutely valid to try to construct everything around that.” — Dan Wang [16:16]

• Travel as a Method

  • Wang treats China as inexhaustibly interesting, traveling low-key and organizing days around food stops to fuel observation.
  • Rejects most travel writing as “not insightful” or too self-indulgent; instead, he seeks to unite the “tectonic plates” of policy and grassroots life, always seeking what his observations mean in the larger context of Beijing’s ambitions.

• Concrete Methodology

  • Organizes travel around moving through cities, eating, and extensive walking.
  • Quote:
    “Eat a ton...walk as much as you can...as you’re walking in between eateries, you’re just going to be bombarded with insights.” — Dan Wang [34:11]

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4. Zooming In and Out: Abstraction & Concreteness

• Multi-level Analysis

  • Wang advocates balancing zoomed-in, concrete experience with large-scale analytical ambition:
    “There also has to be a level of ambition for writers to also be abstract and conceptual and analytical...combine all of these sort of things.” — Dan Wang [37:01]

• Answering the Big Questions

  • Uses each annual letter to confront the key political, economic, or social issues of that year in China (e.g., tech crackdowns, Covid policy, “common prosperity”).
  • Quote:
    “Let’s get to the heart of what is animating you, what is animating the world...offer answers to those questions.” — Dan Wang [37:01]

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5. Crafting A Distinctive Voice and Path

• Academic Outsider Advantage

  • Wang attributes his distinctive style to not being deeply embedded in academic conventions; he focuses on synthesis and a blend of genres.
  • Quote:
    “My great gift was that I was not very well academically trained in college...to be a little bit more autodidactic, to really try to treasure good writing, as I understand it.” — Dan Wang [42:05]

• Book Types: Academic vs. Trade

  • Discusses the pitfalls and virtues of both academic and trade publishing; key is transcending genre conventions.

• Becoming a Better Reader

  • Writing a book heightened his sensitivity to passion vs. obligation in other authors’ works, gaining “X-ray vision” for discerning authentic engagement.
  • Quote:
    “I think becoming a writer and writing a serious, sustained work is a great way to train yourself to be a much better reader.” — Dan Wang [50:33]

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6. Writing Discipline & Pace

• Slow Publishing as an Alternative
  • Wang’s tactic of writing one public piece per year challenges the modern tempo of newsletters and social media.
  • Quote:
    “My gripe with Substack...It is encouraging people to write at a more frequent cadence or a more frequent pacing. The tragedy of a lot of modern technologies is that it is really trying to make posts and thoughts as short as possible and as frequent as possible...I was trying to bring down the average. I was trying to write one piece a year.” — Dan Wang [57:27]

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7. On AI as Tool and Threat

• AI as a Research & Consumption Tool

  • Wang distinguishes AI’s strengths (augmenting “thinking through” with music, art, food recommendation) from the irreplaceability of generating original prose.
  • Quote:
    “I will try as much as possible, and perhaps even declare it verboten, not to let AI get into my writing. I don’t want it prompted to have any sentences that I could actually just use. I want the sentences to come from within myself.” — Dan Wang [64:16]

• AI Modeled After Tyler Cowen

  • Wang finds ChatGPT sometimes channels the perspective and analysis style of his mentor, Tyler Cowen, and uses it as a sparring partner for reflection and knowledge.
  • Quote:
    “The way that I treat ChatGPT is as my friend Tyler, who I maybe see once every couple of months...but if I really wanted to have an instant Tyler-like reaction...I just ask ChatGPT.” — Dan Wang [66:39]

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8. China’s Social Media & Censorship

• Influencer Culture and Mediation by Phones

  • Notes the pervasiveness of Chinese influencer (Wanghong) culture, with urban spaces and social life increasingly optimized for photos and online sharing.
  • Quote:
    “Maybe my least favorite part of contemporary China among informal society is just absolutely how much the phones have taken over everyone’s lives.” — Dan Wang [69:49]

• State & Social Censorship

  • Describes the extensive and worsening censorship regime, the absence of independent journalism, and chilling effect on critical thought.
  • Relates personal experience of his own website being blocked in China and the complexities and arbitrariness of enforcement.
  • Quote:
    “There is extensive censorship that pervades throughout Chinese society. And it has gotten worse, a lot worse over the last 10 years.” — Dan Wang [89:40]

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9. Comparative Reflections: U.S. and China

• Infrastructure vs. Intellectual Freedom

  • Wang observes that while China’s cities often feel safer and more functional, intellectual freedom is severely constrained.
  • Quote:
    “It just feels very bizarre to me that San Francisco is just so rich and it works so poorly...But I would not defend any proposition that intellectually China could be more free, because...there is very extensive censorship from above that keeps getting worse and worse.” — Dan Wang [98:00]

• Elite Formation & Disappointments

  • Shares observations about U.S. and Chinese elites, noting his outsider sensibility and disappointment in stagnation and parochialism among American elite networks.
  • Quote:
    “A lot of my writing has been driven by disappointments. It is to try to introduce better error correction because I am in part an outsider and because I feel disappointment that things aren’t quite so good.” — Dan Wang [74:18]

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10. The Realities and Skills of Book Writing

• Three Phases of Book Writing

  • Outlines the three main phases as:
    1. Conceptualization & proposal
    2. The “long middle” of actual writing
    3. Post-production and promotion
  • Each demands different skills and disciplines, from structuring arguments to refining prose, to marketing.

• Practical Tips: Writing Retreats, Titles, Covers

  • Discusses the value of changing environments and support from his wife for sustained focus.

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11. Writing as Learning: Compounding Knowledge

• Rejection of Linear Deceleration

  • Wang advocates for continual, compounding learning rather than stagnation after formal education.
  • Quote:
    “Maybe we should take the Silicon Valley model of network effects in which growth can accelerate to some degree over time. And the more you know, the more you’re capable of knowing.” — Dan Wang [116:54]

• Influence of Tyler Cowen & Ezra Klein

  • Draws inspiration from mentors who continually reinvent themselves, advocating for constant curiosity and adaptation.

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Notable Quotes

• On texture and detail:
  “Reality has a surprising amount of detail.” — David Perell [36:21]

• On writing and editing:
  “No writer is ever very satisfied. I’ve spent quite a bit of time chatting with some really good essayists...who would tell me that, yeah, no writer would ever get above 85% [satisfaction].” — Dan Wang [16:16]

• On book writing:
  “There’s three hard parts of book writing, and it is the beginning, the middle, and the end.” — Dan Wang [101:49]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• The Duality of China: Official vs. Informal Life — [01:48–06:09]
• Sources of Writing Style: Stendhal & Opera Buffa — [07:35–11:46]
• Crafting Annual Letters: Notes and Process — [14:35–19:54]
• Travel Writing & Observational Methods — [26:12–36:21]
• Zooming In and Out in Analysis — [36:21–41:53]
• Academic Outsider & Synthesis — [42:05–44:21]
• Pitfalls of Trade/Academic Books — [44:21–49:59]
• Gaining Readerly “X-ray Vision” — [49:59–52:42]
• On Publishing Pace and Slow Writing — [56:42–60:18]
• AI as Tool and Tyler Cowen as Model — [60:18–66:39]
• China’s Influencer Culture and Censorship — [69:49–89:40]
• Infrastructure & Freedom: China vs. USA — [98:00–101:32]
• The Bundle of Skills for Writing a Book — [101:32–108:13]
• On Compounding Knowledge and Learning — [116:03–119:38]

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Memorable Moments

• Wang’s encouragement for writers to write fewer, but more considered, public works—the “anti-Substack” philosophy. [57:27]
• The dedication of the episode to Tyler Cowen, their mutual mentor and model of intellectual generosity and curiosity. [Start/end references, esp. [00:00]]
• Wang’s revelation that his distinctive, elegant prose partly owes itself to copying New Yorker articles by hand. [113:14]
• The poignant moment of Wang’s website being blocked in China, marking the personal stakes of his work. [89:40]

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Takeaways

• Dan Wang’s approach exemplifies the power of slow, richly-observed, and synthesized writing.
• True intellectual progress and distinctiveness come from blending granular observation with conceptual ambition, and refusing to be captured by speed, genre, or convention.
• The importance of mentors, deliberate process, and disciplined curiosity shines throughout both Wang’s career and the episode itself.

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For anyone interested in China, observational writing, or the craft of impactful, original prose, this episode offers both inspirational and highly practical insight—distilled from a decade of practice, travel, and hard-won wisdom.

Transcript

[David Perell]

Dan Wong came on the show, and he is one of the world's China experts, and he's just written a new book called Breakneck. But what makes Dan unlike anybody else is he writes these annual letters that are just so darn good. And so I've been wanting to have this conversation with him for years. How do you write with such voice? How do you collect notes and travel in a way that just leads to insight and great stories and communicate that in a way that's both so educational and so entertaining? So that's what this conversation is all about. We get to the end, and you'll notice the name Tyler Cowan come up a lot in the conversation. And we say, you know what? People dedicate books to people, but they don't dedicate podcast interviews. What's going on with that? Tyler, we're dedicating this podcast interview to you because we are so grateful for all of your friendship, your mentorship, your guidance over the last decade. And both Dan and I very much feel like we wouldn't be anywhere close to where we are without your guidance and your mentorship. So, Tyler, thank you very much. This episode is dedicated to you. Well, Dan, I want to start off talking about your annual letters, and there's two things that are really striking to me about them. The first is just the depth, but it's a certain kind of depth. It. Your writing style honors the smarts of the reader, but not in a way where you're using a bunch of big words and stuff like that, but it's. You're really trying to investigate what's happening in China, and it was unlike anything else I'd seen. But the other thing that was interesting is the way that you mix personal observations with these sort of deep, big insights. It made the style of the annual letters unlike anything else I'd seen. And I think that's part of the reason why I was drawn to your writing.

[Dan Wang]

I think the way that I thought about a lot of the annual letters was that I really just tried to capture what was important about China in two respects. There's an element of China which is the formal, official part of China, which exists through top leaders, Xi Jinping's speeches, party documents, everything that the party state really wants the people to know. And. And I think that part of rigid, officious, official China contrasts tremendously with the incredible informality of general society. And what I really wanted to play up was a bit of the friction of simply living in a country that is fun and messy and bizarre and just a really interesting and wonderful place to be, along with sort of the newscast, the official Party Theory magazine's view of China, in which everything is immaculate for the leader's pleasure. Everything exists for party leaders and Xi Jinping to examine these villages which are swept super clean for his personal pleasure, in which everyone around him is always sitting with him, straight backed and carefully listening. And then as soon as he departs, shortly after he departs, people get back to their normal lives in these villages in which they are not thinking so much about the party pronouncements. And I really wanted to capture both aspects of that. The formal aspect of China, which is tremendously important, a vision of Beijing that is trying to attain some degree of sovereignty, power, everything that every national government wants. But they combine that with a deadly seriousness, along with the informal aspects of life, which is hardly serious, humorous, and all sorts of wonderfulness that is not captured by the newscasts and the magazines.

[David Perell]

The word that comes to mind from your letters is texture. Texture. A lot of the writing that I read about China is big themes, these sort of giant tectonic plates of America versus China, the Euclides trap, stuff like that. And what is surprising about the way they write is that you'll use like a soup that you had in Kunming or something like that as entry point to talk about what's going on there.

[Dan Wang]

Yeah, I think that the way that I think about China is that it is not only about the wishes of people in Beijing. And China to me is just a country of a lot of different dimensions that butt up against each other, just as one would think of with the United States. I think these two countries are always going to be pretty directly comparable in the US I think nobody would ever really try to understand the United States purely through the lens of what's going on in Washington D.C. right. And yet I think that is what a lot of people do with China. I think if you wanted to write a little bit about the US you would go beyond Washington D.C. and go to, let's say, Boston as well, where there are a lot of universities, to Los Angeles with the entertainment industry, to California and San Francisco with Silicon Valley, Austin, Texas, which used to be your stomping grounds. And all of these are important places to think about. And the way that I think about China is that far beyond Beijing, we also have Shanghai, a major business center of 25 million people which used to have extra territorial concessions for the British, the Americans and the French. The French built these wonderful boulevards, leafy cafes and excellent streets. You have the north, which I think is much more windswept and deserty. And Beijing itself is an especially Stalinist city. You have the Southwest, which is.

[David Perell]

That's where you're from, right?

[Dan Wang]

My family heritage, very mountainous. People love spicy food, pungent pickles. I think it is probably the most informal element of China, which is especially far away from the imperial gaze, which is in the Northeast. And so I think you have to combine all of these different elements and not portray China as a series of cliches, as a series of great walls bumping up against grand canals and these sort of tectonic plate movements. And that is, again, one of these things that I really want to capture, that ordinary Chinese live lives. They're much like ordinary Americans. It is often mundane, frequently stressful, often very aspirational. And people manage to have fun and carve out spaces for themselves in which they really try to live their lives in the best way that they can.

[David Perell]

Yeah, well, what's cool about your writing is there's a real style. There's both. The style, the word that comes to mind, is a kind of gracefulness that it's not surprising to me that you love music. I can see the influence of music in the rhythms and the flows and the patterning of your language, but then also your style of analysis. That's sort of a right brain and then the left brain analysis. The way that you go about doing it, it is very distinctive. So how deliberate have you been about cultivating that?

[Dan Wang]

I am very deliberate about my writing style. And I wonder if I want to hear how you think about what my writing style is, because the way that I think about my own is that maybe the. I'll start by highlighting two of my favorite cultural artifacts, and the first is French novels, especially of the 19th century. My favorite writer, my favorite novelist is Stendhal, whose big works are the Red and the Black, as well as the Charterhouse of Parma. He was a French writer who was mostly active around the 1830s. I just reread the Red and the Black this summer, and it was probably my fourth time reading my favorite novel. Was wondering how well it would hold up. And I was glad that it held up really, really well. I think there is something extremely humorous about Stendhal he is writing about. I think it is one of the best love stories ever told. The love story of a French peasant boy who falls in love with two successive women, commits these extremely stupid mistakes and triggers mistakes among the women as well. And he is really good at skewering French society in the 1830s. So there's something I draw a lot of inspiration from that sort of humor and ravishing beauty and storylines of Stendhal in particular. The other influence that I think a lot about is Italian comic opera, which is my favorite genre of music. This is known as opera buffa in Italian. These are the funnies, this is the funny opera. And this is essentially the musical line that runs from Mozart, his three Italian operas, which are Don Giovanni, Cosi Fontute and the Marriage of Figaro. That goes through Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, as well as Verdi, in which the Italians really prize cadence. They prize pacing, they prize a sense of repetition. And there are showers of ornament that drench the vocal line. And there's something I think they produce and they value a sense of ornament for its own sake. You know, we're sitting here in a beautiful French rococo space. David, I think you always are able to pick the most wonderful spaces. Today I decided to wear my Austrian jacket because the Austrians have so many tie ins with the French. Marie Antoinette was an Austrian princess. And I think there is something baroque and beautiful about just ornament for its own sake. And that is something that the Italians do. And I do like to have clean lines in my own writing, but also informed by a few flourishes and cadences that really create a sense of pacing in which, if you read it, I hope that readers feel like there is a sense of variation of sentence structure, sentence length, that really tries to propel the reader along in a thrust.

[David Perell]

Even more than sentence pacing and structure, One of the things that I find is that there's an experience of reading your writing, and it's sort of like the experience of looking at a flower where you can see the flower from afar and it gives you something. But as you come closer and closer, there's actually new levels of beauty that are. That are revealed. And because of that, your writing is one that I would say, you don't want to have it summarized for you. You actually want the experience of reading it. We could talk here and we could say, oh, summarize, breakneck. Oh, there's the engineer society versus the lawyer society. But actually, I find that the more that I zoom in to your writing, the better it gets.

[Dan Wang]

Yeah. And that is, I think, one of these things that I hope is the experience of people can take away. If there's one thing I hope that people can take away after this conversation, it is to go listen to Mozart's Italian comic operas. I think those are, by my standards, the most beautiful works of Creation, which, if we can think a little bit about Mozart. These three Italian operas were all molded by an Italian librettist named Lorenzo da Ponte. Lorenzo da Ponte was a very curious figure, lived in a brothel, was excommunicated by the Catholic Church, eventually moved to Pennsylvania. And in the process of doing all of these, he was just this Italian adventurer. He wrote these librettos with Mozart that are tremendously playful, that are extremely ironic, in which almost every beautiful piece of Mozart opera you would hear now, unfortunately, mostly selling accompanying commercials for selling pasta or something. But every piece of beautiful love song that Mozart has written is almost always highly ironic. The person, usually the soprano singing it doesn't. Does not intend for the. Does not intend the love for the person that she's singing about. There's beautiful levels of irony, there's beautiful levels of structure in there. And that is a lot of also what I'm trying to achieve myself. Where I think what is most important is to have a few gags, a few little jokes in there that does not have to be serious and po faced because China itself is already super serious. I think that official China is one of the least funny entities ever envisioned by anyone. The leaders of the Communist Party are not only serious, they're self serious, they're tremendously po faced. And what I would love is for a slight element of Mozart to be carried in so that people have a little bit of a sense of irony and playfulness in everything that they do.

[David Perell]

Yeah, well, one of the things that I'm trying to square is when I think of ornament and when I think of all those little details, they always come out in the process of editing and revision, and that takes time. But it comes out in round five, round six, round seven. But you've written these annual letters pretty quickly. My understanding is you have this giant list of notes. You look at the notes, you begin to compile a narrative. Hey, what's going on here? So how were you able to get those things so quickly?

[Dan Wang]

Yeah, I think the. So my annual letters are written in a pretty simple and straightforward way. So I have an annual deadline of January 1st in which I will have written the previous year's notes. And this deadline is something I had to blow past twice. But in general, I keep in mind that January 1st is when I have to write my annual letter, in which it is usually the core part of it, the core essay part of it is something to do to reflect about what I saw that year mostly around China. But that is, I try to present a lot of analytical insight combined with some element of narrative in the core part of that essay. And then I write a little bit about the books that I read that year that are interesting to me, and maybe something else relating to perhaps food or opera or some of my other pleasures that I've undertaken. And the process of writing my annual letter is pretty straightforward. Usually, if you know that you have a product to ship on January 1st, essentially your whole year is governed by that deadline and that cadence. And so there's no mystery about what I'm going to be doing at the end of December. And the process for thinking about all of this is that I have a vast notepad, which is just the Apple Notes app, in which I am just throwing little notes.

[David Perell]

So what would those notes be?

[Dan Wang]

I might think about whatever happened, a big event that happened in any particular year. So let's say in 2021, what I wrote most about was this crackdown that Xi Jinping initiated on China's tech sector, in which he decapitated the online tutoring industry. Hurt a lot of video game producers as well. And that was definitely one of the big events of 2021, along with zero Covid. And so as I was observing, a lot of these sort of things I would be thinking through, well, I don't have to be very newsy. I'll leave that for the Wall Street Journal to cover. But here are my thoughts, and I can continuously craft an evolution of my thinking about something like Zero Covid or the tech technology crackdown. And so I keep dumping these notes into just the Notes app on my iPhone. Every so often, if I am listening to Mozart or if I'm eating a dumpling, whatever it is, if a great sentence drifts into my mind, I will also put that in. And because again, I don't have a product to deliver until the end of the year, I have the space to really try to refine a particular sentence. And in some cases, I believe for some pieces of writing, it is not at all an irrational thing to construct an entire essay around a single beautiful sentence. In fact, I recommend it. If we're able to have one great sentence, I think it is absolutely valid to try to construct everything around that. And because I have the time and the space to do this, I try to refine everything as much as I can. But at the end of the year, it is always still going to be a hasty process because I had a day job in which I was writing notes for mostly financial clients, and it was only really the last 10 days of the year. In which I would have the space to really try to write my letter. And so as much as one tries to refine all of this, the last 10 days of the year are going to be this hasty sprint in which I am taking this highly disorganized pile of notes, highly disorganized piles of sentences, really trying to distill a potential structure out of all of that, and then to just write all of it in a matter of haste. And I think I accept that. Though my letters could be good in parts, I feel like there's so many imperfections still with my letters every single year that I wish it were better edited. I wish it weren't so hasty. I wish I could cut and trim quite a lot more than they currently are. But I also accept that as a writer, one is never going to be satisfied. I feel like I am perhaps 85% satisfied with my book. If I had something like another month, I would love to be able to refine the connections between the sentences, the connections between the paragraphs. I feel like I could do a much better job with that. But I also take solace in the fact that no writer is ever very satisfied. I've spent quite a bit of time chatting with some really good essayists, including people at the New Yorker, who would tell me that, yeah, no writer would ever get above 85%. So 85% is a good goal to.

[David Perell]

Actually achieve with two things. One, with the letters versus the book. It seems like there's something about the letters that kind of breaks you. When you would talk about the letters, it was never like, wow, I had so much fun. It was always like, man, this was really hard. And I kind of got it over the finish line. This was my impression. Whereas you seem to really enjoy writing the book. And I'm wondering what accounts for that difference. And maybe we can start there and then I want to hear about your method of observation. You know, travel writing is one of the most eye rolling genre that there is. It's filled with cliches. It doesn't tend to be that intellectually engaging. But you seem to have figured out how to do something there.

[Dan Wang]

I think the letters were difficult and the book was also difficult, but maybe I was just slightly more complainy in a way that I think is slightly unbecoming of someone who loves Mozart. And I think that when I think about Mozart, there is no musical question that he did not solve to perfection. He excelled at absolutely everything that he did in whether that was comic opera, whether these were masses, whether these were concertos. And Mozart furthermore made it all seem effortless. And perhaps as a writer I am a little bit closer to Beethoven, in which Beethoven obviously also made these incredible works. But you can detect a note of effort in most things that Beethoven wrote. Some parts of it often feels slightly labored. And you can tell that he had these titanic struggles as he wrote his string quartets as well as his symphonies. So I confess that I have made the letters to be slightly more difficult than they ended up being. A lot of it was because I in the last final 10 days of the year, when most people are relaxing over Christmas or New Year's or whichever holidays, they are really trying to not do very much. And I feel like that part of the letters that was challenging was that I was doing my hardest work when everybody else was in a state of perfect relaxation. But I definitely aspire to having a little bit of a perfect air of perfect ease and grace that Mozart embodied.

[David Perell]

For the book writing, it seems like you would just kind of procrastinate during the day and then at night you'd have a, ah, oh my goodness, I need to write. And then you would stammer to the keyboard and get your writing done. Is that right?

[Dan Wang]

Yeah, I think that is the normal part of my process and I think there's a million different writing process. Let me know if you agree. And I think most writers would always tell you there is no right or wrong answer. There's some people who get up super early in the morning at 4am Like Jimmy Soni, and then have their own very well protected writing time. And then there are some people like Gustave Flaubert, the French novelist who drank probably like 50 cups of coffee a day. This is a self proclaimed thing. And he would also be writing at 4am in the morning because he was staying up all night and sleeping through the day as he was trying to have this sort of writing process. So here we have the great horseshoe convergence between Jimmy Soni as well as Gustave Flaubert. And I think some people write really early. Some people are like me to procrastinate throughout the day and then actually get to writing at the night. And it seems like among writers there is no invalid approach. All approaches are valid. You just need to put sentences on a page.

[David Perell]

One thing that's funny is I would have bet my life that you were a nighttime writer. I would have bet my life that you were a nighttime writer. And I'll tell you why. Your writing has the space and the rhythm of your drinking whiskey with your friends. And time is not an object. And what. What you get there is. It's not like a license to ramble. That's the wrong interpretation of this. But there is a license for depth and long conversation. And I think this is total conjecture, but I think a morning writer tends to be more polished, more to the point, it's kind of I need to get my work done and yours kind of has a sit back in the Eames chair and let's kind of let our thoughts. Thoughts flow kind of writing.

[Dan Wang]

Yeah, well, let her thoughts flow while drinking whiskey and being highly panicked about not having done any work throughout the day. I think maybe just another writer to throw into the mix is someone who did drink a lot of whiskey and smoked a lot of cigars. Christopher Hitchens. I have not actually read a lot of Hitch, but the legend around him was that he would be drinking all night and then as he got back into his home, staggering back, nearly blind drunk, he would compose a perfect essay, and then it is in totally publishable condition the very next day when he sent it off. And so maybe that is a little bit more of my process. And I think as much as possible, I tried to be slightly more sane as I try to write my book. For me, the book writing process actually turned out to be fairly straightforward. And I did not quite shift into being a morning person, but perhaps I did successfully shift to being more of an afternoon person, at least. And the way that I tried to get this through was that every day I repeated my mantra to be a Qualcomm collected Canadian, and I managed to achieve my deadline. So long as one repeats this and actually believes in this, and then actually, you know, have a little modicum of discipline, a forkful of discipline, in order to get all of this done.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

You're right that a lot of travel writing just isn't very good. And I feel like, I wonder if it's not insightful. It's usually not insightful, and it is often very self indulgent. And I personally believe that travel is just one of the very best ways to experience the world. And I think that that would not be surprising to you, especially because you and I share a mentor in Tyler Cowan, who is one of the world's top travelers and being super analytical in thinking through absolutely everything that he sees. And contra Agnes Callard, whose work I tremendously admire, to write that travel is not a great means for Understanding the world as she did in I believe the New Yorker is an essay I quite profoundly disagree with. But I think there is something to the idea that most travel writing is not terribly worth reading. And I feel like there is an element in which a lot of travel writers are enjoying a degree of revelation that they see throughout the world, but are unable to quite convey that to the reader. You may have an ecstatic experience traveling through, let's say, something like Peru or Vietnam, but it becomes really, really difficult to actually convey your own personal ecstatic experience onto the page for the reader. The way that I tried to do this was to not write about my travel experiences as such. What I really tried to do was to combine that and marry that with some degree of analytical insight. These are the sort of tectonic plate movements that you mentioned earlier on, in which I understand China as not only the formal elements of me going into the countryside, chatting with people, cycling around, getting to know them over a bowl of noodles. I think that I am always trying to elevate that with what does this all mean for Beijing's desires over its own people as well as the world abroad? What might Xi Jinping make out of all of this? And how do we combine the conceptual with the analytical, with the observational with the pedestrian? And I think you really have to try to combine all of these sort of things. And the trouble with too much travel writing is that people are really only thinking about what is in front of them. They're thinking a little bit about too much about what they have just heard about from other people. And there is a little bit of a sense. I think this is the problem with a lot of reporterly books, which is that they're talking to an expert about a particular topic. Maybe that is the Danish pension reform system. And yes, it is really good to interview that expert and convey that expert's opinions. But perhaps you should also read the literature on Danish pension reform. Interview. Several experts look at the data as well. And a lot of travel writers aren't very good at doing all of that. They're really good at conveying the thoughts of that particular expert. But what we should really try to do is to zoom in and out throughout a piece to convey the data. The official, the unofficial, as well as the observational.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

And.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

The way that I try to do this in China is that I really firmly believe that there is not a single boring place in China. I was living in Hong Kong first and then Beijing and then Shanghai. And these are China's three of its biggest economic zones. And one could travel within Shanghai and find some great urban neighborhoods. One can travel just outside Shanghai and get into farmland. There's some mountains around Shanghai that full of these tea mountains, full of these beautiful little villages. Or one could really travel much further outside of Shanghai and get into the hinterlands and the provinces. And there's just so many interesting places in China to go. I think about China's northwest in the province of Ningxia, which has a completely Mediterranean climate. To my surprise, this is very deep inland. It has a climate very much like California's. They grow a lot of grapes for wine production there. And this is where you have a lot of Muslims who eat a lot of lamb and they are living in kind of Californian sunshine.

[David Perell]

This is the northwest of China.

[Dan Wang]

This is part of the northwest of China. You could go to other cities in northeast China, which has these beautiful landscapes, but this is absolutely China's rust belt. There is a lot of industrial decline. This used to be the site of China's biggest state owned enterprise sectors. And they're really close to Russia and they have some of the lower standards of living in China now, but they have their own distinctive culture, their own distinctive food, and they are really fun and friendly people living in a beautiful landscape. I think a lot about the southeast of China, which is more typical of the culture of Guangdong, which is the. The center of the southeast, is the city of Guangzhou, which is not very far from Hong Kong, which people eat a lot of seafood. They have a very deep mercantile sense. It is one of China's richest areas. And people there are supposed to be just really good at making a lot of money. The Southwest, where my family is from, we are mostly tea drinkers. There's a sense where people don't really like to hustle, and I think that is mostly true. If you take a look at the city where my parents are from, the city of Kunming, there's just not that much industry. It's mostly agriculture. It is an economic backwater when my parents departed from China in the year 2000, and it remains backwater today. And then there is these really mountainous places like Tibet, where the Himalayas are just out of this world, as beautiful and maybe even more beautiful than the Rockies or the Alps. Wow. And then there's Just so many regions of China that is just tremendously interesting. My method for trying to understand and explore more of China was to simply go to these places by bus, by plane, by train, by hook or by crook. To just be in these places have not much of an agenda. Just to book a hotel and simply walk around and see things and organize my day by the three or four eateries that I really want to try out. My tactic for visiting these places is.

[David Perell]

Yeah, how do you find good food?

[Dan Wang]

It's just to eat a lot. And often in these places, you don't need to find good food, because these places have extremely good food in the corner noodle shop, you know, it's almost any normal place that has people eating in them is going to be pretty good, because this has been a cuisine refined by thousands of years. And essentially the task is to eat a ton, because that is the central pleasure of life, I think, especially if you're in China, walk as much as you can so that you can get to the next eatery still reasonably hungry and eat a lot more. And then as you're walking in between the eateries, the restaurants, the noodle shops, whatever else, you're just going to be bombarded with insights. When. When you see. When you walk around a city as dramatic as Chongqing, is it as crazy.

[David Perell]

As I see in the TikTok videos these days?

[Dan Wang]

It is far crazier than that, really. You know, a city, it's gone viral. It's totally viral because you have these cliffs. You are able to enter a building on ground level, go up nine flights of stairs, and then exit ground level again. That's so crazy, these tiktoks. I mean, the especially viral moment of a subway going through the middle of a big apartment building, I think that is like. That is real. I've seen it. It is totally amazing to see as you're eating the noodles in Chongqing, which are my favorite, with minced pork as well as a side of chickpeas. And it's so spicy, it varies your auditory capacity. And then you see all of these super dramatic buildings set among cliffs, as well as two rivers, the Jialing river as well as the Yangtze River. I think it is inevitable that you'll be bombarded by insight all the time. And this is how I populate my notes of man, this is so weird. How are they doing this? This is what people are saying and they're thinking. And that is just how I build up a lot of the material that I have for an annual letter.

[David Perell]

Yeah, well, I Think one of your foundational ideas, messages, whatever you want to call it, is that the world is very textured. Reality has a surprising amount of detail. And we're seeing it here in terms of how you do your analysis of China. We see it in your repeated reminder of the importance of process knowledge in terms of what allows a culture to thrive. And I think that that's sort of a call to writers to, if you're writing about the world, how do you zoom in and just look deeper and experience things at a less abstract level and a more concrete one?

[Dan Wang]

Yeah, and I think it's not only the concrete. There also has to be a level of ambition for writers to also be abstract and conceptual and analytical. And so, again, there is an element of zooming in as well as zooming out. And I think that a lot of what I tried to do with my letters was in every single year that I was living in China, I think there's a sense that the common line about a lot of newspaper articles, a lot of reporters, is that they're writing the first draft of history, and then it is up to the historians to complete the final draft and debate their final drafts with each other. And I wasn't a daily news reporter. I wasn't doing things for Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal. I was writing, again, one essay a year for the public, and I was writing, perhaps call it draft 1.5 of my conceptualizations of the year. And I've definitely gotten a lot of things wrong. I've definitely been embarrassed three times a day before breakfast about some of the things that I've not quite gotten right. But I think that I did my best to gesture at what are the big questions about China that year? And also to also tried my best at providing, as well as I could, an answer to some of these big questions. So again, I'm thinking about one of my lengthiest letters, the 2021 letter, in which I try to address what is the difference between living in Shanghai, Beijing, as well as in Hong Kong, in which the big questions that year was what was going on with the tech crackdown that Xi Jinping had initiated? That was one big question. How is zero Covid in China going to resolve? And none of us had expected that it would result in a complete collapse the next year. And then the third big question was the big slogan of that year, what did common prosperity mean? Was the Communist Party very serious that they were going to go back into socialism? And so that was what a lot of people had been interested in about China. That Year that was what a lot of my financial clients, my clients who were working in endowments and pensions and hedge funds had been asking me with. And so I knew what the big questions about China were, and I really, really tried my best, totally imperfectly, with full of mistakes, to also offer answers to those questions. Because I think that writers should, you know, should try to get into, like, what is the most important subject that is animating them? Maybe that is some element of biotechnology, Maybe that is some element of civic reform in New York or San Francisco, you have to figure out what you're super passionate about. Or you have to figure out, like, what are some of the big. What are some of the biggest questions right now? And maybe for me, one of the biggest questions then, as well as at the present moment, and I think for the next decade, will be, how will the US and China get along with each other, if at all? And maybe some of the biggest questions right now in San Francisco, where we're recording, is what is going on with AI? And there's plenty of people thinking about that. But let's get to the heart of what is animating you, what is animating the world? And not just try to outline what the important, pertinent, tractable questions are. Let's also try to have an answer around these really big questions.

[David Perell]

Right? What strikes me with that is it's not just David White talks about the conversational nature of reality, where all of life is basically, what do you want from the world? And what does the world want from you? And if all you do is say, this is what I want from the world, you're kind of delusional and you're not going to be able to get things done. But then on the converse, if all you do is say, what does the world want from me? Then there's not a sense of intrinsic joy in that. And that true flourishing comes from the meeting of both of those things. What do I want from the world? What does the world want from me? And that's what I'm hearing in your writing, where you're saying, what are the big questions that are being asked? So I'm going to choose a big enough topic, but then also I'm going to do it my own way. You have explored China in a distinctive way, and you're writing about food and music, and you. You just don't shy away from saying, no. This is what I'm really excited and passionate about. This is my. My lens on reality, and I'm going to write in that way.

[Dan Wang]

Yeah, well, I think that I can't write any other way, David, because I am. I am who I am.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

Yeah, I think the. I mean, maybe my great gift was that I was not very well academically trained in college. I was a philosophy major, and mostly I had pretty bad grades. I spent most of my time. My favorite part of the universe is probably the basement of the library where I went to school at the University of Rochester, in which I could just go and pick out a lot of novels and I could just spend long weekends reading them. And that is probably my happiest possible experience in university. I think that it's not unique to that particular university library, because a lot of university libraries have these just the stacks, as you call them, just places where there's all of these books and you can just grab one after the other and what an intellectual feast that you get to enjoy. But I spent too much time in the library reading the books that I wanted to read rather than reading the texts assigned to me. And that was why I had bad grades. I never even considered going into grad school because I had already suffered academically as a college student. So how in the world was I going to make it in a much tougher academic environment? And so the way that I try to do this was not to write so much academically, not to write so much for a specialist audience. It is to be a little bit more autodidactic, to really try to treasure good writing, as I understand it, as inspired by Mozart, Rossini, as well as Stendhal, and to try to capture these big questions and ultimately to be synthetic. Synthetic, that's right. To have a synthesis of all of these really big ideas. You can also call it syncretic, maybe that's the better word for thinking about it. But to again, combine the big with the small, the formal with the informal, the rational, with the irrational, really trying to find what is the right sweet spot for all of these not to be captured by a genre, not to be captured by a method, but to do it in your personal distinctive way, because how else can you do it?

[David Perell]

Yeah, you're talking about captured by genre. Talk to me about the difference between trade books and academic books.

[Dan Wang]

Yeah, so I wrote a trade book. My publisher is W.W. norton in the US and Penguin in the UK. And so these are books that are meant to be read by a broader audience. These are typically the sorts of books that you find in a Barnes and Noble in your town. And I think there's, you know, before I do anything to a book these days, I take a look at whether it is written for the general audience in a trade press, or if it is written for mostly a specialist scholarly audience as published by an academic press like Yale University Press or Stanford University Press or Oxford University Press. And there's no hard rules about whether trade books or academic books are good or bad. There are some really terrible academic books, and there's some really awful trade books as well. And I think as a writer now who has written for a trade audience, I'm much more discerning about what are the pitfalls involved with both trade books as well as academic books. And I think, let me try to beat up on my own publisher just very slightly, a little bit. I think the level of derision that one could have around trade books is that all of them are written by celebrities for a really general audience. This is Salt bae, trying to capitalize on his one moment of fame to really try to have a book out of it. And all of these books are ghostwritten and tremendously unserious and not really meant for it to be read by anyone. And the derogatory term here is an airport book. This is kind of what the academics and the scholars would dismiss as a bad trade book. And I don't want to let the academics off the hook here, because academic publishing also produces all sorts of pretty terrible books, books that are published by the press. And there's about a thousand of these copies ever published, and probably not more than a few hundred are ever actually properly sold before they're given to the libraries. And I think. I think a lot about what are the structural incentives for authors in both of these categories. So I think the convention among trade books is that you want to have a bigger audience. You want to make a lot of money on the book, a lot of money through your advance or royalties. And so you're writing for. You're maybe not writing for the most sophisticated people. And I think that is a really unfair characterization among a lot of trade books. But I think there is also an unfair characterization one could make among a lot of academic books, which is that part of the reason that professors produce these academic books is that it is a requirement to achieve tenure. You have to have written at least one book, right? It doesn't really matter whether this book is any good. It doesn't really matter if no one but your mother bought this book. It doesn't really matter what exactly you say. But as a requirement for tenure, especially in the humanities, you need to have written at least one book. And this is why a lot of these books are really boring. They have no real life to them. A lot of it is just obsessed with defending one's discipline, with defending one's positions, not really trying to figure out what are the big questions out there, really trying to answer some of these big questions out there. And so I think these are the conventional pitfalls of both types of books. And I want to say that again, there is no hard rule with these books. What is important is to find the books that really transcend their own genres. There are certainly these incredible academic books, just as there are these amazing trade books. And there are plenty of scholars writing excellent trade books. I think of someone that I work with, Stephen Kotkin, who is writing a biography of Stalin. He's already written two volumes and now he's writing, working on his third, in which he, as a professor at Princeton University for the last 30 years and now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, could very easily have written a super niche scholarly specialist study of Stalin. Instead, he went with Penguin Press, which is the biggest press in the business, to really try to shed his scholarly light to a much broader audience. And I think there are a lot of academic books that really distill an academic's life's work, written in an analytical, narrative driven way that is not obsessed with the smallest questions, trying to defend one's positions against one's immediate peers. And these are obviously also some of the treasures of book writing as well. And so, again, there's definite pitfalls with every sort of writing. But I think what we should really try to do is to find the authors that manage to transcend the own problems of their own industry.

[David Perell]

Right. You mentioned that as you were writing Breakneck, you became a better reader. And one of the things that was striking and it relates to what you're saying, because when you're working in a genre, there's a sense of I'm supposed to do this and I'm supposed to do that. And it seems like what you became aware of was a kind of X ray vision, to know when a writer was writing about something that they were actually passionate about versus when they were writing about something out of a sense of obligation or something like that.

[Dan Wang]

I think becoming a writer and writing a serious, sustained work is a great way to train yourself to be a much better reader. Because first of all, having this insight of what is the difference in the production culture of academic books as well as trade books only really became super obvious to Me, as I understood the industries as well as the incentive systems. And the other part of writing a book is that I think in every book, you have to have to some degree a potted history of something that may not be tremendously important to you. I think for anyone who writes about modern China, they cannot but at least gesture a little bit towards some of the most important aspects of modern Chinese history. Let's call it the Cultural Revolution under Mao or reform and opening under Deng Xiaoping, in which some of the conventions of these have been rehearsed a million and one times, and it is not necessarily terribly important to get into, but you kind of still have to set the context for the stage. And I think, I suspect that one of the reasons that our friend and mentor Tyler Cowen is able to read so fast is that he does have exactly this X ray vision to know. Okay, well, here is the potted history. We don't need to get into that. Let's just try to find the key analytical phrase within each of these sentences. And he's able to zoom into these really, really quickly and get to know what is the most important part of every page. And so developing that sort of vision of knowing when the author didn't really want to get into this, but was kind of made to by his editor, knowing what are sort of the conventions of academic press and trade press, and trying to really try to figure out, you know, what is. What is actually animating the writer, what is his favorite aspect. I think that that is something that writing a book would actually really teach.

[David Perell]

You to do, as you've spent time with Stephen Kotkin and interviewed him. What would be your fundamental gripe with history books, and then what would the antidote to that be?

[Dan Wang]

That's a great question. I think the fundamental gripe with a lot of history books, more of the past, not in the conventional scholarly genre today, is that historians have been accused of writing a lot of just so stories. Oh, of course, Napoleon was fated to be defeated because he had made exactly the series of mistakes which he in fact made. Made, of course, Hitler lost World War II because of these series of mistakes. And so history has tended to become this series of just so stories that perfectly elucidate why history shook up in the way that it did. And I think there has been a reaction against a lot of that among historians, because the best historians imagine counterfactuals. They have a very strong sense of history might be contingent. Sometimes the world really was thrown probably off course by a series of unfortunate and bizarre and coincidental events. The murder of Franz Ferdinand in World War I that triggered World War I really was in part driven by his own driver taking a wrong turn and having him be exactly at the foot and steering him exactly towards the assassin who never expected to be able to murder Archduke Franz Ferdinand. And so sometimes you do have these sort of strange coincidences in history that didn't have to shake out in exactly that way. But I think a good historian would be able to synthesize a lot of these, you know, archival documents, imagine the counterfactuals, and really try to be very, very analytical. And so I think that that is the sort of history work that I love to read.

[David Perell]

Yeah. I was watching an interview with David McCullough one time, and he was talking about his book on the Brooklyn Bridge. And he was like, now you look at a Brooklyn Bridge, and you're like, yeah, it's just a bridge from Brooklyn to New York. He's like, no, no, no. At the time, people didn't know if it was possible to build a bridge like that. And you have to remember that on every single page that the future had not been written yet. We don't know what's going to be true one year from now, one month from now. We don't even know what's going to happen tomorrow. And I think my sense is that a lot of historians almost think that the future was contingent or something like that.

[Dan Wang]

Yeah, I think that there is an issue which is that every event feels kind of impossible before it takes place, and then right after it takes place, it feels obvious and necessary for something like this to have happened. And so that's something that we might think of with the collapse of the Soviet Union, say, in which, at the time, absolutely nobody expected that the Soviet Union would implode, as it did spectacularly throughout the basically the years 1989 to 1990. But rather, we have to really try to imagine at the time that nobody expected this. And afterwards, everybody sort of just assumes that, of course, this communist system full of political sclerosis with a broken economy, of course it was going to fall apart. But we have to really try to navigate between these traps to really try to think about how people at the time was conceptualizing these sort of things and to understand the contingent elements because it didn't have to shake out in the way that it did.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

I hope so.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

And this is something that I would really encourage more writers, young writers especially, to try to do. I am a big fan of Substack. I think that Substack is a excellent product and I think that Substack has really enabled, enabled a lot of writers really to make their lives and make a career out of writing itself. There's plenty of people in San Francisco now who are able to be self supporting, be able to live in San Francisco by writing out on Substack. My gripe with Substack is that it, like every other technology that comes before it is really encouraging people to write at a more frequent cadence or a more frequent pacing. The tragedy of a lot of modern technologies is that it is really trying to make posts and thoughts as short as possible and as frequent as possible. And the apotheosis of this is Twitter. But I think the Substack model is really trying to encourage people to write a piece a week, a piece a month. And I was trying to bring down the average. I was trying to write one piece a year. And I think for most writers, I can't keep up with most writers who are coming up with a post every other day. And what I would really like to do is to read most people's thoughts every quarter, perhaps every month. Every week is a bit of a stretch, but what I really want to do is to read a writer's most considered thoughts. The reflections, the well crafted sentences, looking past the immediate headlines in order to deliver a product at the end of every year. And I was doing that in conjunction with doing my day job, which involved more frequent pace of writing for financial clients, people working in hedge funds who really wanted my quick takes on stuff. But that was for my work audience and my public product was much better considered and much more personal because I'm pretty sure that my hedge fund clients would give no figs about whatever I was eating at the noodle shop in Kunming But I think I would also really love it if people were able to slow down a little bit and be a little bit more deliberate. It doesn't mean that you can't do your day job. It doesn't mean that you can't write every so often for magazines, as I was doing in the year that I wrote my 2021 letter. I'd also published in the Atlantic, as well as Foreign affairs, as well as the New York Times. And so I think that is, you know, that is the right pacing for a lot more people, and I hope many more people would write their own annual letters.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

AI is something I've only really started to use after the book was done. And that's in part because I think O3 was kind of this big breakthrough from ChatGPT that really allowed me to see how things could be really good. But for the most part, when I started playing around with ChatGPT, I guess it was GPT3. I was disappointed conventionally, like a lot of people had been, that there were too many hallucinations, everything was flat. It wasn't really connected to the Internet. And so it didn't really seem like it could be all that helpful to me. Now I think that. I think if I were writing another book, which, to be clear, I hope I do not have to do for another couple of years, I think I would be much more in conversation with the AI to try to find some pieces of research. But I also conceptualized AI as being a helpful tool that I should use after the book, mostly because I think that there's something important about delivering one last big project before letting this super tool into my life. I think a lot about Tyler's remark in which he said that the Internet sort of dropped into his lap about halfway through his life. He had already gotten his PhD. He had already taught at UC Irvine and George Mason before the Internet became a really big thing in the late 90s, essentially. And I was thinking about this, and I'm thinking, like, right now, I'm 33 years old. It was chatgpt really blew up when I was 30. And I could say that I lived half my life without AI, and I will let the super tool take over my life in the second half. And so I think there is something maybe important about maybe being 30 when ChatGPT comes out, is kind of the perfect age, because. How old are you, David?

[David Perell]

I'm 30.

[Dan Wang]

I think you still count. You're still good, David. But I think what is useful is to live life before it, without it, and just go to the library and just check out the databases on the St. Louis FRED Economic Data Database. I love that website. I love Fred, too. Do some spreadsheets, do some PowerPoint presentations, learn a lot of these basic skills, learn how to read. And then this super tool comes on and you can really turbocharge your life with it. And I fear that a lot of the Stanford undergrads, which I see as a fellow at the Hoover Institution, you walk around the libraries, and it is a lot of students using ChatGPT to check through everything that they want to do. And then once they're done with that, they're watching some TikTok short videos. And that just doesn't feel like that's the very best form of learning to me. And so I think we should all be using AI in some way that makes sense to us. And then I use it actually now mostly for restaurant recommendations or to have a conversation about a piece of music that I've seen and heard.

[David Perell]

It is so good for music, right? Oh, my goodness. As someone who doesn't know a lot about music, I will ask it about a song to break down. Hey, what should I listen to? And actually, in terms of a counterfactual of what I couldn't get before to what I can get now, it might be the place with the biggest delta in all of the AI world.

[Dan Wang]

For me, it's really good for music, for art, for thinking through a novel and thinking through. After I read Stendahl's the Red and the Black this summer, I decided to interrogate it about the novel and understand a little bit of what literary scholars and critics have said about the novel. And that turned out to have been a really excellent experience, because I think a lot of the cultural experiences that we would get, whether that is to listen to a Beethoven string quartet or read through a novel, it is necessarily individual and it is necessarily very personal. Even if you go to a concert with your friends or anyone else, they probably will not have an identical, ecstatic, transcendent experience of the sort that you've just experienced, right? Not everybody gets exactly the same thing out of a novel. And I think the AI is really, really good for thinking through a lot of these different sort of things. And so I view it primarily as a form to enhance my consumption, whether it is to use AI to find a really good noodle shop or to use AI to find a piece of clothing that I really like or to really try to engage it musically. But I don't really view it as a perfect alternative to research. I still love going through books and going through databases, and I think I will try as much as possible, and perhaps even declare it verboten, not to let AI get into my writing. I don't want it prompted to have any sentences that I could actually just use. I want the sentences to come from within myself.

[David Perell]

It's interesting that you use the word thinking through, because there's a lot of people when they're signaling caution about AI, they're like, don't ask AI for all the answers. But what I think that what you're saying is I have these theories, these hypotheses, these different rabbit holes that I can go down, and it's almost like a sparring partner that's really smart that then you can kind of work together with to collaboratively find an answer that then improves your consumption. Is that fair?

[Dan Wang]

Yeah. And I'm sorry again to bring up our joint friend and mentor, Tyler Cowan, but it's hard to implicate you. Tyler, but he's the best. I think the. There's something about the ChatGPT which has been very much influenced by Tyler, by his writing style and his thinking style in particular. And I think this is on the record, I believe, and this is kind of established, that Tyler Cowan thought has influenced a lot of how ChatGPT communicates. And the way that I treat ChatGPT is as my friend Tyler, who I maybe see once every couple of months in D.C. or in New York. But if I really wanted to have an instant Tyler, like, reaction to a novel that I've just read or a piece of music that I've just heard, I just ask ChatGPT, and it is able to give me some really good answers. And I feel like my experience sometimes with ChatGPT has actually approximated a lot of my interactions with Tyler. When I was thinking through different questions, I would keep. Among my notes is a running list of questions that I have for Tyler for the next time I see him, whenever that might be. So you do. Exactly.

[David Perell]

He's the only person I do that for.

[Dan Wang]

Exactly. Right. And so I keep a running bank of questions, and I think he somehow expects that I would be bombarding him with a couple of things that I've been thinking, and there's something like a question that I come back to. This is one of my first really good experiences with ChatGPT was to ask why did the Spanish Catholic Church develop such a virulent Inquisition, whereas the Austrian Catholics had no Inquisition? And there's something about Spanish Catholicism to me that feels gloomy and slightly violent and a little bit dark, whereas Austrian Catholicism to me feels actually bright, joyful, and much more resplendent and much more crimson rather than very black. And I asked, why did the Spanish develop such a virulent Inquisition and the Austrians did not? And ChatGPT came up with this excellent answer that felt right. And so this is the sort of question that I would ask Tyler. And now I have a very Tyler like creature in my pocket that I'm able to have better conversations with. And that's the process of thinking through things. That's the process of trying to figure out what are the right questions and what is the right approach, what is the right observational style that I now have much better access to. Though I will never take any of ChatGPT's generally super flat sentences into something that I would ever write myself.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

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

[David Perell]

Is it more there than here?

[Dan Wang]

I think it is much more than normal Americans. I think it is much, much, much more. If you are going. It is now quite common to go to a Shanghai cafe and see people barely drinking coffee, barely chatting with each other. They're mostly taking photos of each other. If you take a look at some of these really pretty buildings, iconic buildings, there's something quite like the Flatiron Building, the sword in Manhattan that exists also in Shanghai. Just at all points of the day, there will be people gathered there to take photos. There's so much of China's cities have been transformed into photo spots. China doesn't have Instagram really, but it has this local alternative named xiaohongshu, also named RedNote or Little Red Book, in which people are just really on display all the time. And there have been parts of China that have been rebuilt and remolded especially for people to take photos in front of. And this is something called Wanghong architecture. Wanghong means simply famous on the Internet in Chinese.

[David Perell]

This is a specific architectural style.

[Dan Wang]

This has become a specific architectural style in which people just really get in front of these buildings and then they're especially photogenic. And this is just for the photo spots. I think this is not quite unique to China. I mean, there's a really well known neighborhood in Miami. There's this art district. I forget the name of it. I forget its name now, but there's just a lot of street art. And there's Wildwood.

[David Perell]

Is that what it starts with, a W?

[Dan Wang]

I think I know what you mean. Something like that. And people are just, you know, taking Winwood. Wynwood. That's right. People are just, you know, going up to these places. So imagine like, you know, a lot of parts of China are a big Miami Wynwood in which people are just taking photos all the time. And I feel like that itself doesn't really matter. I mean, it's fine if people want to have more beautiful street art. I think the part that is corrosive in society is that you would have a business meeting or you would have be chatting with friends, and people could be on their phone a lot. They are listening to you, but people are just on their phone a lot. And I find that just not very fun that people are just texting their other friends on WeChat all the time. And when everything becomes a photo opportunity, I find myself kind of annoyed when people walk into a restaurant and just kind of are trying to film absolutely everything. And you can see this even when Chinese are touristing abroad. If you're in, especially I was in Europe for most of the last two months, a lot of photogenic spots, and there would be a lot of mostly Chinese people walking in already with their cameras and smartphones poised in order to film absolutely everything. And so the aspect of Chinese people's relationship with their phones, I find is just really, really terrible. And I think this is probably my least favorite part of Chinese culture today, which so many people's relationships have been mediated by their devices.

[David Perell]

Yeah. Well, it seems like if I look at the course of your writing, because I've been reading you now for 10 years, it seems like there is a consistent thread of humanity has become like this. And I wish that is a little bit different. You know, one of the ways is with Silicon Valley, a lot of people building apps, hey, you're saying, let's go a little bit upstream and let's look at semiconductors and some of the technologies that actually enable that and focus on those things, and then also going back to definite optimism as human capital, A real understanding as one of your early foundational pieces of the way that we think about the future and the way that we interact with our world has major downstream implications for the kind of life that we get to live. I'm sorry for not being more articulate here. I kind of need your help putting words to this.

[Dan Wang]

Yeah, I think I have thought a little bit about this, and I think the reason that I feel like the world ought to be a lot better is not only that we all need the world to be a lot better right now. Our world has so many problems, and it is so unjust in so many different ways. But I have this perhaps perspective in particular because I have felt myself an outsider in various ways. So I'm from the city of Kunming in the southwest, and typically, if you meet a lot of Chinese Americans here, many of them have grown up in the most prosperous parts of China, whether that is Beijing or Shanghai or Shenzhen. And so within China, I was a slight outsider because I was from the periphery rather than the prosperous coasts or the imperial core. And also, as in the U.S. we moved to Canada when I was seven years old. I mostly grew up in Ottawa. And growing up In Ottawa, the U.S. is incredible to me, but also disappointing to me because so many of the most ambitious Canadians move to the US And I feel like I went to one of the better public schools in Ottawa, Lisker Collegiate Institute, which has produced some prime ministers and stuff. And I attended it only because I lived pretty close to it. But I went down this LinkedIn rabbit hole one time, probably five, ten years ago now, quite a few years ago now, and found that among pretty much all of my smartest Canadian friends, all of them have ended up from high school, all of them have ended up in New York or San Francisco. But the issue is that when you're in Ottawa and you think of these great American cities, whether that is San Francisco or New York or D.C. or something else, you know, you have a pretty keen sense of the disappointments of Ottawa. And then you think, oh, if I move to one of these places, everything will be amazing. Yeah. And here we are sitting in San Francisco, and this is hardly the most functioning city in the world. The imperial center of Washington, D.C. has all sorts of problems, and New York is just, in many ways, not that livable of a city. And so it's so dirty. It's so dirty. The subways are so loud. There's so many different problems. And so I think a Lot of. Although I love New York, I love New York as well. But as a city experience, it is just so far behind a lot of other urban experiences. Right. New York is amazing because of the culture and the people, not so much because of its hardware. And I feel like a lot of what I have done is to try to communicate my disappointments with being from the periphery, whether that is within China or being a part of the provincial outposts in Canada, moving into the imperial center, whether that is New York, San Francisco, D.C. or Beijing or Shanghai, and then feeling very profoundly disappointed that the people here have the wrong values. They're not functioning at such a high level and trying to indict the elites in the way that I feel and can share perspectives on and to really say that, you know, why aren't you. Why aren't our elites? Why aren't these people much better in some way? And so to some extent I feel like I have been. A lot of my writing has been driven by disappointments. It is to try to introduce better error correction because I am in part an outsider and because I feel disappointment that things aren't quite so good.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

I feel like let's just stick with American elites, since I know them a little bit better. I feel like it has not only been a blessing for me to have not done super well academically because it pushed me out of school to try to live my life as best as I can in the way that I understand. I went to the University of Rochester in upstate New York, which is not a Tip Top school. Let's call it a second or maybe even third tier university. And I contrast myself a little bit with some of the people that I see now on different campuses. I am now pretty familiar with three particular campuses. I wrote this book substantially at the Yale Law School, and I came across these Ivy League students who went to Yale. I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I also interact with a lot of folks at the University of Michigan, where my wife teaches. And now I'm a fellow at the Hoover Institution. And I get to meet a lot of Stanford kids as well. So these are all much more elite kids. So just thinking about the life of a typical Stanford student, I think that, you know, the gift of being a Stanford student is that as soon as you graduate you are more or less gifted. This excellent network of people that have already that treat you better because you're A Stanford kid that you're already plugged into some of these parties in San Francisco. You already have a scene that is very well laid out for you.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

It says chosen, Chosen.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

You know, they have a golden path kind of laid out for them. For me, graduating from a second tier university far up in upstate New York, where the name University of Rochester does not necessarily inspire some great feelings about a particular graduate, I really had to fight and to build this network, I had to fight to have any sort of a recognition. And this is the. Where I'm going with this is that I feel like it is really easy. Life is almost on easy mode after you've gone to Stanford because you don't necessarily have to fight so hard. And I feel like among the graduates of the Yale Law School, where I was previously a Fellow, I really loved that experience. But there are many distinguished graduates of the Yale Law School, especially serving in the Biden administration. Biden administration was full of Yale Law grads who did not, let's say, produce an amazing outcome during their four years in the Biden administration. Several cabinet secretaries went to the Yale Law School. Several of the key assistants and deputies in the White House went to the Yale Law School. And I would say that their performance has not been amazing. And so this is where I want to be a little bit more critical of America's elites. They sort of start coasting after they've had an excellent college education experience. They are indeed very smart. They are indeed very, very ambitious. But I do feel like they tend to have a lot of in group dynamics. They're very protective of other people within their in group. And just by the level of performance that we can see in the United States, which has just so many problems again today, it has not been inspiring. And I want American elites to do a lot better than they have.

[David Perell]

How do, how are the relationships different among Chinese elites and American elites with their relationships with writing? Because there was one year where you read all the journal entries from the, the magazine, I guess I'd call it, of the Chinese National Party. And I was thinking about that, I was like, is there even an equivalent of that for American elites? Like, when I think of the people who are in power, I don't usually think of them as being writers. So how's it different between America and China?

[Dan Wang]

Oh, David, did you miss the latest Donald Trump essay? In New York magazine. Yeah, I missed it too. I think there is. I think while certainly it is not the case that Xi Jinping has ever written any of the articles in the main Theory magazine which I was reading. So what's it called? Qiu Shi, which means seeking truth, seeking true Chinese. So, I mean, the way I understand China and the way that I understand. One of the core instruments of the Chinese Communist Party is the propaganda department. So the propaganda department is one of, I would say, the three most important instruments for Leninist rule. It is perhaps the most important instrument because the Leninists are really interested in mobilizing the entire party state and in order to modernize the country. I think that is the core essence of what Leninists understand themselves to be doing. You need a dedicated cadre of revolutionaries to lead the people into some sort of a greater paradise. And the second core element of the Communist Party is the organization department in which they are judging personnel and trying to figure out whom to promote upwards. And then the third element of a Leninist party is just all the coercive elements to maintain discipline within the party and maintain security among the population. But I think the first and most primary element of the Chinese Communist Party. You'll love this, David, is the propaganda. It is the writing, okay? It is the newscast every night which airs at 7pm in which they have the theme song and then you have the anchors reading the news.

[David Perell]

And people actually watch this tune in.

[Dan Wang]

I think something like, it's not like.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

I think people genuinely watch it because first of all, you have not that many channels on TV in China. There's something like, you know, you don't have cable TV in China, which you have the equivalent of an MTV or HBO offering alternatives. And at 7pm Many of the core channels are airing the same news. And people genuinely do watch this when they're eating dinner or something at night.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

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

[David Perell]

Yeah, he played golf, he got 18 hole at once.

[Dan Wang]

Right. I mean, it's not absurd on that level. You know, I think they are pretty regularly airing the some challenges. You know, there's a natural disaster, but then we send in the troops to rescue everyone. Oh, there is now a trade war, but we are trying our best to support our exporters. So they do report the bad news, but then they immediately also follow it with what the party state is doing to make life better for people. And so I think they are pretty well aware that they need to establish some degree of credibility. Now my view is that their credibility is pretty thin, but they are pretty conscious of this. So they have the newscasts, they have the newspapers. There's a lot of core newspapers. The biggest one is People's Daily. And then I decided I'm not going to watch the daily news, which goes up to something like 300 to 400 million people every night. And there are some good parts of having a lot of people tune in every day. Shortly after I first arrived in China, I did tune into the local newsc and I found a seven minute segment, something like that of a giant breakthrough that China had made around quantum satellites and quantum communications. And so imagine beaming that into something like 400 million households. People who might have been watching that night over dinner, you probably radicalized a few million kids to really try to understand something about quantum mechanics and to really try to understand something about satellites that they never would have come across before.

[David Perell]

And dare I say that's not such.

[Dan Wang]

A terrible thing because how do we get any science education in the U.S. well, it is whichever influencer might be interested in something like satellites and really try to go viral with that. And that's really difficult. Right? And so they have the newscasts, they have the newspapers. What I was doing was mostly reading the theory magazine, Seeking Truth, which comes out twice a month. It's a beautiful magazine. Every magazine looks identical. It has two characters. Qiu Shi Seeking Truth. It is always red and white and it always leads with some sort of an essay or a speech from top leader Xi Jinping in a different font from the rest of the magazines. And, and then the rest of the magazine is basically essays from the rest of the party state. You might be the party secretary of Guizhou Province to write about whatever you built back here. And this is mostly meant to communicate to local cadres, officials, retired people to give a sense of what the party state is thinking at any given moment. And we can certainly be sure that Xi Jinping wrote absolutely none of these. There is a giant apparatus within the Communist Party to write his speeches and write his essays. But I think there is something meaningful about having a top leader write lengthy essays under his own name to try to organize the rest of the party state and try to have his imprimatur on different things. And that is one essence of leadership. Now in the U.S. you know, Joe Biden and Donald Trump give speeches, and I think that is the alternative. But maybe we should have a few more written documents that we can read from them. I think that would be quite interesting as well.

[David Perell]

Yeah. What's going on with writing and censorship there? I mean, are there people who get censored? And how do you feel about going out and sharing all of this now that you would, next time you go back to China, would you be a little bit more sweaty at the immigration counter? You know what I mean?

[Dan Wang]

There is extensive censorship that pervades throughout Chinese society. And it has gotten worse, a lot worse over the last 10 years. At the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, going on three years now, I was a little bit surprised when I came across this news headline that Putin had arrested a lot of Russia's independent bloggers, many of whom who were against the war. And I was thinking, what sort of amateurish authoritarian regime is this? They still had independent bloggers that were able to publish under their own name and relatively freely. China had squeezed out all of these people essentially about 10, 15 years ago. And I am friends with a lot of Chinese journalists, journalists who have been writing a lot on the mainland. And pretty much there is no such thing as independent media in China in any bigger, more organized way. Pretty much every newspaper is formally owned by the Chinese state or the Communist Party, or they are very extensively censored by the propaganda department. There is no real investigative journalism that does not get filtered through afterwards to make sure that such a thing is publishable. There is no independent media. The censorship apparatus in China is absolutely staggering. A lot of Weibo posts can be censored. This is China's equivalent of Twitter could be censored really, really fast. They are able to censor pretty much everything. There was a, I think a lot about this single viral video called Voices from Spring, which was a video in protest of the Shanghai lockdown in 2022, in which people try to keep sharing this video to protest the lockdown. They try to turn it upside down, they try to encode it into the blockchain, and still the censors have managed to get through a lot of this stuff. And so I think the most important thing, I mean, we can get into all sorts of specifics. There's a lot of organizations tracking China censorship, but the most important thing is that it is big, pervasive, and getting worse. And they, in addition to having the party crafted messages in seeking truth in the newscasts, in the party newspapers, they also really strangle anything like independent media, even on social media. A lot of these voices, I strongly suspect that some of the biggest departments, some of the most human intensive departments among China's Internet companies, like Tencent or ByteDance, probably their biggest spend is on human sensors tracking through everything, looking at everything that's gone viral, and trying to make a decision about whether to censor something like that before anything gets too viral and critical. They do censor a lot of voices, including mine. So in 2022, one day I woke up to find that my personal website was blocked in China. Usually China blocks a lot of really big websites like Wikipedia or Facebook or the New York Times. And I was pretty surprised that they would go on and block a rinky dink website like mine, just danwong co. And at that point, I decided I had to go see the Canadian Consul General in Shanghai and ask whether there's a pattern of behavior here, whether I needed to depart in a hurry, in part because two Canadians had already been taken hostage, but by Beijing over retaliation of Canada arresting the CFO of Huawei at the behest of the Trump administration. And so there have been threats in particular of Canadians over their personal safety. And what we decided was that it's not clear what's going on. It's not clear that they were really targeting me. Maybe there was some sort of an algorithmic keyword here that set someone off. The challenging thing about censorship in China is that there's no door that you can knock on of a censor, your local friendly censor, to ask what was going on, did I do something wrong? What happened? These people will absolutely not communicate with you. And I think the other part of the China discourse that is often very frustrating is that people know that a lot of things can be censored and people know that police may be reading our social media posts and maybe asking you to come in and question you based on what sort of criticisms that you have been offering. And, you know, I think that does really structure a lot of people's lives if you're chatting with them in China, because they are pretty persistent to. They're pretty reluctant to really express their core opinions because they are afraid, and they're rightly afraid of the police coming after them if they write the wrong thing or say the wrong thing, especially to a foreigner. And I find that especially unfortunate because that is really hurting the critical thinking skills of a lot of different people. I'll offer just one more example of censorship, which is that because of a joke that a comedian made in the year 2023 that kind of played off of a common army slogan along with a joke about a dog, this guy was extensively fined. I believe he was detained for a couple of weeks in pretty much all comedy clubs in Shanghai, China's biggest city, were shut down over the course of a few months because of one joke that went slightly viral. Whoa. And so this had met the toxic combination of a lot of online nationalists that made a big fuss out of this, especially since it involved the People's Liberation army, which is one of the most powerful, powerful, powerful entities in China. A lot of people felt that you absolutely cannot insult the troops. You cannot insult the troops anywhere, not in the US or not in China. But their reaction was, we are going to close down a lot of comedy clubs in China's biggest city, which has been a rising source of tourism for Shanghai, and we're going to close all of that down. And this is just how insensitive the engineering state is. They don't understand a lot of things. They really don't want to have any jokes or mockery. And I find that totally pathetic that they are unable to treat anything with humor. And I do am afraid of the how the Chinese might react to my writing. I decided I was going to write the best book and the most honest and the most truthful books that I can. And therefore I did not shy away from indicting Beijing over some of its biggest mistakes, like the one child policy and for carrying zero Covid to excess. I absolutely do not want to shy away from what I think have been generational level traumas that the Communist Party has visited among the people. Right now I do not have a visa to China. I plan to apply for one in a couple of months. And the Chinese Ministry of Foreign affairs can have a good long think about my writing and about whether they welcome me into the country. And if they give me a visa, I would be glad to visit. If they do not give me a visa, then I will have no choice and so no surprises. They can think about whether they like my work and are tolerant of my work, let's say, and are able to welcome me into the country.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

I would say that maybe in some ways China, I would say mostly functioned better in the creation of highly functional cities where subway stations are not very far, where the infrastructure works really well and the logistics works really well, and you're able to get on a high speed train. Train, and you have public order within the cities. And so to some extent that is an element of freedom that it just feels very bizarre to me that San Francisco is just so rich and it works so poorly. No one, David, would accuse San Francisco of being a florist.

[David Perell]

Would they want to hear something crazy? I was talking to a friend in San Francisco and I said, hey, it was nighttime. I said, hey, can you leave the car keys on the counter? And that way I can just grab them easier. And he said, no, we keep them in a drawer in case somebody breaks in in the middle of the night. We don't want them to also take the car keys. And this is just like a standard way of living in San Francisco. And I was like, are you serious? And he was like, yeah, that's just how we think here. Yeah.

[Dan Wang]

What for?

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

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

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

Yeah. And so we don't need to get into too much into the dysfunctions of San Francisco. We could have three more podcasts about that. But I think when you see these things, which are real and this stuns even a lot of New Yorkers of the poor level of public order and public safety here. And then when the Chinese see it, the propaganda officials have a field day and looking at this app and saying, oh, look how messy America is. You have the center of wealth creation in California and nobody feels safe leaving their car keys in the kitchen counter at night because they're afraid of break ins. And that should be a solvable thing such that the propaganda officials don't have such an easy time making fun of Americans. And frankly, everybody should feel safe leaving their car keys in their own home. And so I think there are ways in which the Chinese are. May be freer in that. But I would not defend any proposition that intellectually China could be more free, because I feel like there is very extensive censorship from above that keeps getting worse and worse. That is in part why China is such an underperformer in the creation of cultural products, because movies and plays and comedy clubs and books are so extensively censored. And I also feel like there is a lot of nationalist energy bubbling up from below, such that cancel culture is also very real in China. There is a very strong sense that if you say the wrong thing, the mobs from Weibo will come after you. And this is not even necessarily directed by anyone from above, anyone from the government. This is really just a nationalist social media really trying to take your scalp.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

There's three hard parts of book writing, and it is the beginning, the middle, and the end, the beginning. I think if you're writing a trade book like mine, you need to have a pretty clear idea of what you might write. I think, especially if you're working in nonfiction, you really need a great structure over which to pin through a lot of your thoughts. Because otherwise, if you don't have a structure, a through line, a narrative, all you're really doing is moving pieces of facts around, and that does not make a great book. And so the first thing to do is to be a writer, to be able to conceptualize the through line for all of this, you need to be able to convince a literary agent for through line. And I was really blessed to have an excellent literary agent, Toby, who was really good at helping me think through everything that it would take to write a book proposal which consists of something like 40 to 50 pages. Some could be even longer if you have an initial chapter in there that really outlines what your project is, who you are, and what you expect the chapter outlines to look like. And then the literary agent will handle the pitching process. I think what would be really good is your literary agent has worked with a variety of publishing houses. You get more than one of them interested, and if more than one Publishing house. More than one publishing house is interested, then you can have an auction and then you can have a bid. And that's the fun part, right?

[David Perell]

Yeah.

[Dan Wang]

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

[David Perell]

Yeah. Subscribe to how I write.

[Dan Wang]

Subscribe to how I write from David Perel. And I think that there's no wrong method, but I think you just actually have to do what you promised the publisher to do. And I did it by repeating to myself, I'm a Qualcomm collected Canadian and I was going to meet my deadline. I had an excellent supportive partner. She was a writing buddy, my wife, who had written her own book before. And something that my wife did was she created some writing retreats that help punctuate being at home. I wrote at my home in Ann Arbor, at my office at the Yale Law School. And then Sylvia made sure to bring us out to some beautiful spaces. We spent a week writing in Austin, actually, which we wrote during the day, ate some barbecue.

[David Perell]

Where in Austin?

[Dan Wang]

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

[David Perell]

I need a wife like yours. That's a good wife.

[Dan Wang]

You should get one, David. So I recommend it. And then I think the post production process. Process turned out to involve a little bit more work than I had expected. Not so much the revisions. I think my revisions was a process and I went through it, but I didn't have the title that I. It took a really long time, almost last minute, until we figured out the title of my book. Really. Initially we thought of titling my book rather than a breakneck, to have the title move fast and break people. China's quest to engineer the future. A bit of a mouthful. And the publishers didn't love it. And then eventually we settled on breakneck, which I think is wonderful. Just a single word. Breakneck is this amazing English word which has mostly positive connotations. We fixed the bridge at breakneck speed. We made the vaccines at breakneck speed.

[David Perell]

But the literal connotations of that are brutal.

[Dan Wang]

Yes. It's this threat of violence coiled inside the word itself. And I think it's untranslatable because it's a uniquely English, wonderful word. And I. I really like my Title. And I really thank my editor Caroline for helping me come up with this excellent title. And then we had a lot of. We spent a lot of time thinking about what the COVID was going to look like. Usually a lot of Chinese books have a lot of dragons on the COVID something like a high speed train. There would be something red on the COVID And I wasn't into some of these conventions of the genre. And so we took a lot of time coming up with the right cover photo, which I'm also really happy about. There's a woman standing below a giant structure that looks a lot like the Tower of Sauron. And I think that really captures something about the wonders of building an infrastructure, as well as how sometimes that is really intimidating to normal folks. But this post production process involves a lot of.

[David Perell]

This is after you're done with the.

[Dan Wang]

Works, after you're submitting with a manuscript. A lot of. That could still take a lot of time. And then there's a lot to do with book promotion. There's a lot of. I've gone on quite a few podcasts. Here we are. Here we are. Thank you, David, for inviting me on this podcast and for really talking about sort of the process of book writing. I went on live tv. I was on Morning Joe. And afterwards my mother was not very satisfied with how I was on live tv. And my mom had to call me up and said to say, son, you look terrible. What's going on? And I was thinking, oh, no, Wong, this is. I did the best that I could.

[David Perell]

Not helpful, Mom.

[Dan Wang]

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

[David Perell]

Oh, never mind.

[Dan Wang]

Okay.

[David Perell]

She has the credibility.

[Dan Wang]

She has, she has standing to say something like this, even though it's still not helpful, Mom. Come on, mom. That was not great. Yeah, and I think, you know, there's. There's going to be more essays that I'll be doing. There's going to be more writing that I'll be doing. But now we're living through this, you know, book promotion process. So all of these things demand different skills. And I think a great author would be able to at least be adequate and at least really good at one out of these three steps.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

Let me ask you this, David. Should more people be writing books? And is that something that you're generally encouraging people to do?

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

Okay, I agree with that. But I think that the way to actually try to encourage people, the people who actually need to be writing books, is to encourage, give broad encouragement rather than particular encouragement, because you want to be creating an atmosphere, an environment in which these people would actually feel very comfortable writing their books. And so I want to err on more books being created rather than less. I wrote a book in part because I felt like I needed to write a book after spending six years in China and after witnessing a lot of important things like the first Trade War, xi's growing repression, zero Covid. And I thought that I had a story to tell from all of this. And I also feel like there may be something to do with the case of maybe books are falling in value, but authors are gaining in value. And that is in part because of AI. I think it is really important to have some sort of a perspective, and especially if fewer people are writing books, then to have cleared the filter, to have risen above the threshold, that means that you must be doing something very well indeed. And I think maybe there is also an element of if you are an author and you have a great book before the superintelligence wakes up, you want to have a book out there before the superintelligence writes all of the books for everyone. So I think for all of those reasons, I still want to err more on the side of trying to encourage more book creation. And this is why I think that I've been trying as best as I can to be helpful to my friends around me, to help them conceptualize their ideas and to really try to get these ideas out there.

[David Perell]

Yeah, the caveat here is I'm talking about nonfiction books here, which is what I know a lot better. And I was just in Ghana with Tyler, Tyler Cowan, and we were talking about books, and he's writing a book on mentorship now. And he said, ah, it might be my last one. And I said, no, I think. I think there's a book that you got to write. And do my public encouragement to Tyler Cowen here, I think he's got to write a book about how to travel well. And I Say that because it speaks to the kinds of books that should be written, that can be written and will continue to be very important in the age of AI. Lots of personal experience, ideas from that personal experience where the consensus is somewhat wrong. And if you can have all of those things, you should absolutely write that book. What I think is a much harder book to write now that I'm just tired of. And these are the kinds of books that, dare I say we should have less of is the insight porn. Malcolm Gladwell esque. Start with the story, get to the main point and just do that over and over and over again. Not to take anything away from Gladwell. I think that that style was great in 2005 and he did a really good job with it. But now it's just become so copied and belabored and formulaic. And that's part of the reason why I enjoyed reading your book is it doesn't do those things. And I think that what's nice about AI is it actually gives people not just the liberty, but they need to reject the conventional styles in order to stand out now because there's so much training data on convention that you need to find a way to go around it, you know.

[Dan Wang]

Yeah, I agree a lot of. And this comes back to this point about airport books in which a lot of it is just convention and most of it is not that interesting. It's a lot of hustle porn out there that's not really good. And I do wish. I think you're. I endorse Tyler, if you're listening, you should absolutely be writing a hotel book. Come on, let's do it. And I think the only thing that heartens me is that I've heard. I've heard before Tyler say that this is my last book. So I've heard that before Tyler. So I think I definitely endorse. He should keep going.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

Initially, when I was. This is part of the reason I was bad student in college. But what I really tried to do was to just understand how great writing is. And I did this by copying, by porting over a method that I did from trying to understand music and composition. I was quite musical, especially when I was 18.

[David Perell]

What instruments you play?

[Dan Wang]

I played clarinet. So I wanted to be a classically trained clan atist. But I walk away from that path and something that I did was I Went to the music library of my school and I pulled some of these scores I remember pulling. I think it was a Beethoven string quartet and a Mahler symphony. And I simply just copied everything in the score. And if you do an exercise like that, you really see how the harmonies fit together. You really see what instruments are doing what, and you get to really understand what is going on in the mind of a composer if you just simply copy the notes.

[David Perell]

And by that you mean copy the sheet music?

[Dan Wang]

Copy exactly the sheet music. Just take a blank piece of sheet music and just recreate every note on the page. And I think that is something that really gets you into the mind of the composer. And I decided to do that by copying some of the New Yorker articles that I really liked. You just take a New Yorker article in front of you and just retrace and just type out again sentence by sentence. And you don't have to do this for an entire article, but you could just do a few paragraphs. And this was sort of the chic music training that I ported over. That sounds a bit like a silly exercise. And maybe the New Yorker is not the pinnacle of writing. Maybe we should be looking through different authors instead of. But if you are able to do that sort of an exercise, you really get into the mind of a writer. You start thinking about the trade offs they make. You start thinking about the choices that they make. You start thinking, at this point, maybe I could have used a different adjective at this other point. Maybe my sentence should have flown in a different direction. And then you really start understanding their intentionality, their choices, and what exactly that they really try to do. And once you start, are able to start thinking about things in that format, I think that you're really going to be able to create intentionality within yourself such that writing does not feel like a totally strange and random process in which you have no idea what you're trying to do.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

Yes.

[David Perell]

Yeah, let's end here. You wrote, I think, in your first annual letter about how most people expect their rate of learning to decelerate over time. You graduate from college, all right, I learned what I need to know, and now I got to go implement that. And you have a strong rejection of that, actually what if it could compound and increase? So I'm curious about that general idea. And then what tactically you've done to learn faster and faster as you've aged.

[Dan Wang]

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

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

Right.

[David Perell]

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

[Dan Wang]

That makes sense for a lot of physical durable assets. In four years. In four years. But I think that we don't have to reason about it the same way, because I feel like maybe we should take the Silicon Valley model of network effects in which growth can accelerate to some degree over time. And the more you know, the more you're capable of knowing. And that is something that I think is super important. And this is also something that Tyler taught me early on in life, that you should try to know a lot of stuff. And the more that you know, the more that you read, the faster you are able to read, and the more that you know, the better you are at learning things. And so that's kind of just the strong proposition that I want to take in life to just try to learn as much as I can, try to keep growing, try to keep evolving. And I really appreciate, you know, someone like, let's say, Tyler, someone like. I also think of a previous guest that you've had, Ezra Klein, in which both Tyler and Ezra have been able to have very strong evolutions of themselves, their brands and doing new things. Ezra was an early blogger. Yeah, he moved into the Washington Post. He founded Box, and now he's at the New York Times, producing one of the most listened to and one of the best podcasts out there. Tyler was an economics professor. He wrote a textbook. He got really early on into blogging. He is now also running, not just being a classic university professor. I feel like that is kind of central to his identity, teaching economics. But around him have grown these great projects, emergent ventures, Emergent ventures, conversations with Tyler, FAST grants, all sorts of these really wonderful things, and all sorts of projects that is not even very well known about him, that he continues to participate in. You and I are both part of the marginal revolution, extended universe. And I think that one of these really remarkable things is just how well Tyler has identified interesting people and try to be generous to them, try to be kind to them, try to platform them and try to spotlight them. And these are all things that I find remarkable. And I really appreciate both Ezra and Tyler for showing that they are able to grow and able to evolve and able to do new things. And I think that, David, you're also part of the pantheon, people who have really tried a lot of different new things, and you're really building up a lot of new things. And I am really curious to see where you take this podcast and how you grow as a person. Next.

[David Perell]

Thank you.