Dan Wang: belief

Transcript context

…Without even selling the best stuff to China. Without even getting nationalized by the Trump administration. Pretty good job, guys. The West Coast in America is the only region in the world that has produced several companies worth over trillions of dollars. That is a really remarkable achievement. If you are a member of the rich in America, you can pretty easily transmute your wealth into some degree of political influence, especially as we can see now in the second Trump administration. In China, it is really dangerous if you become rich. In Europe, it’s hard even to get rich. What I’m always pushing American elites is to consider that, yes, if you are a wealthy person in Manhattan, you get to live in these skinny high-rises that overlook Central Park. If you’re in California, you have a giant home in Atherton, and that feels really good. I want the subways to be less loud. I want mass transit to work better. Fine, let’s improve the suburbs. I think that what I would love is for the US to be 20% more engineering so that we can have all of this mass transit to fix all of the broken manufacturing that the US has. I would love for China to be 50% more lawyerly because the Communist Party does not respect individual rights. It strangles the creative impulses of young Chinese who are so funny. They can meme with the best American youths. They have amazing TikToks and Douyins as well. I would like for the Communist Party to just leave people alone for a change. Definitely, China should be more lawyerly, but let’s have America be slightly more engineering, too. Is being insufficiently lawyerly the actual Chinese vice? I recently recorded with Diarmaid MacCulloch, the British historian. He wrote in one of his books that every single pope of significance between 1159 and 1303 was trained as a lawyer. That’s going way back. Popes then were very important. The West and the notion of law, which comes from Roman law, and you also have British common law, they seem so inextricably intertwined in ways where the actual substance of the law and the importance of the law have co-evolved, literally for millennia, in what is mostly a good way. China doesn’t have that history. A more lawyerly China, isn’t it just worse and more oppressive, and we get the bad sides of lawyerly society? Not, say, lawyers standing up and saying, “No, you can’t stop the programmers at DeepSeek from leaving the country by seizing their passports.” What would we actually get from a more lawyerly China?…

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